A Structuralist Approach in Psychiatry: Uncanny and Desire in Psychosis

A Structuralist Approach in Psychiatry presents an alternative view of the psychiatric patient and highlights a connection with continental post-structuralist thinking to provide a new approach to psychiatry. After outlining the problems facing psychiatry, and the historical development of the field, this book outlines a structuralist model of the subject that does greater justice to the complexity involved while avoiding physicalist reductionism.It draws heavily on French structuralism, in which language plays a central structuring role that also influences the subject.The author draws on the works of Foucault, Lacan, and Bergson, as well as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Žižek.The structuralist model proposed engages with the intricate relationships between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic in relation to the subject, particularly in the marginality of psychosis.Three clinical examples are provided to illustrate this: the syndromes of Cotard, Capgras, and negative hallucination.Th