Book
The Child of the Id: Psychoanalysis of an Interview: Blank Psychosis
L'Enfant de ça: Psychanalyse d'un entretien: la psychose blanche
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.
Main ideas
- A single recorded psychoanalytic consultation can be studied as closely as a case: its transcript is read line by line, its implied history reconstructed, and its enigma decoded.
- The analysts' reconstruction is shaped by hindsight, and must not erase the unease the patient caused his listener; that unease is itself material for theory.
- The patient's tangled generations, an alliance overlapping a primal scene, raise questions about incest, the real and madness.
- Blank psychosis names a psychotic core without delusion or hallucination, marked by blanks and blocking in thought.
- The concept rests on a sketch of a theory of psychic spaces and of the relation between drive, thought, body and desire.
What it shows
- 1973
André Green collaborated with Jean-Luc Donnet
Green and Donnet co-wrote L'Enfant de ça (1973), a joint reading of the transcript of a single consultation with a psychotic patient.
- 1973
André Green introduced Blank psychosis
Green and Jean-Luc Donnet put forward blank psychosis in L'Enfant de ça (1973): a psychotic core without delusion or hallucination, marked by blankness and paralysis of thought.
- 1973
Jean-Luc Donnet introduced Blank psychosis
Donnet put forward blank psychosis jointly with André Green in their co-written L'Enfant de ça (1973).