The Child of the Id: Psychoanalysis of an Interview: Blank Psychosis

A book by Jean-Luc Donnet and André Green built on the transcript of a single interview with a young patient, Z, held during a psychoanalytic consultation in a general psychiatric department while a second analyst listened. Z summed up his origin and his trouble in the claim that his mother had slept with her son-in-law and that he was the child of that union. The authors examine the consultation as a setting, reconstruct the history the interview implies, read it word by word, and propose a key to its enigma, while questioning the interpretation they built after the fact and the unease Z caused his listener. The questions it raises about incest, the real and madness lead to a new concept, blank psychosis: a psychotic core marked not by delusion or hallucination but by blanks and blocking in thought. A closing section introduces the concept, with a sketch of a theory of psychic spaces and of the link between drive and thought. It was published by Éditions de Minuit in 1973.