RESEARCH ON AUTISM, PSYCHOSIS, AND ADDICTION

Our study strategy

In the 70s, in our group of Parisian psychotherapists working with psychotic, alcoholic, and bulimic-anorexic clients in a private setting, came to the idea that the therapy of this type of disorders could only progress when care was taken to reconstruct the obviously defective object relation. Therefore, we started devising schemes to meet this objective by working carefully this point on the transference stage, aided by group techniques (group dynamics, psychodrama and gestalt) and by bodytherapy techniques (such as bioenergetics, emotional regression, "rebirth", and vegetotherapy). We soon learned, especially during the group-body techniques sessions where individuals were spontaneously reliving with full body sensations and reactions their archaic lives and early traumas, that the locus of the traumas which gave origin to the disorders were in fact defects at the instinctual level, were very specific disturbances of the normal course of the ethological imprints and deterioration of the basics of life: vitality, attachment, and meaning. This was of course far below the primary features and the object relation level which we have incriminated at first, far more archaic in time, and far deeper than the usual functions we used to access in normal therapy and analysis. Observed features and attitudes in the consulting room or private life, poor object relations, dissatisfaction, narcissistic problems and depression, were but the straightaway consequences of these more basic troubles and not their root. We found also that the environment of the individual, at conception and during womb life, but especially at birth and during the first weeks of life was instrumental in producing these defects. We took every measure at that time to ensure that the spontaneous reliving of the infancy was as little biased and void of extraneous induction as possible.

At the same period, I was in contact with persons from the Institut Piera Aulagnier in Paris, who were also coming to similar conclusions from the attentive scrutiny of psychotic children, analysis of psychotic adults, and the features displayed in delirium, that psychosis stemmed from archaic recorded real events which were so horrible and destructive to the psyche that a distortion of the mind has had to take place to accommodate for both "normal" life and inhuman early recordings.

Today, working with more and more individuals with surface depressive, addictive or adjustment problems, but underlying autistic and psychotic troubles, we have been able to make a picture of the instinctual procedures which are regularly the aim of destructive practices at the beginning of life.

We have also devised a global strategy for the reconstruction of the missing essential imprints, the recovery of the root instincts, and the subsequent development through the five indispensable imprints which are the core of our psychic system.

Psychiatrisation

We also found at the same period that the psychotic clients working in this context, although initially similar to the patients received in psychiatry, were faring on a very different line than those interned in institutional precincts. Even in the first months of work, their attitudes and ways to talk and behave were at great variance with the inpatients we have worked with formerly in government institutions. Thus we came to the conclusion that the description of psychotic inpatients in the literature was not to be confused with the psychotics we were working with, or those we met in the city life, and that we should not rely on the observations of clinical staff and interpretation to produce a standard of what a real psychotic is. We found in fact individuals very different from the pavilion psychotics, distorted by treatment such as internment, impact of dehumanising diagnosis, revolving staff, indifference of the physicians, and chemical deterioration of the brain functions. Now, we take into account the iatrogenic factor of psychiatrisation to account for these discrepancies.

Table of the following pages

The Structural Theory of Autism, Psychosis, Paranoia and other Severe Disorders

Bulimia-Anorexia and Alcoholism, Drug Abuse and Other Addictions

Depression, Violence and Delirium

Therapy of Structural Disorders

The Myths of Psychosis