Psychosis usually begins in childhood with the withdrawal of the child into a world of sensory fantasies. The psychotic crisis itself, the so-called breakdown, with delirium and hallucinations, is nothing more than the manifestation of this pathology. The delusional experience, once affirmed, is difficult to transform; It is a new reality of a very different nature from dreams or daydreams, which develops progressively. It is a morbid transforming state of consciousness whose nature and danger the patient ignores.

The psychoanalyst, who works in direct contact with the patient's interiority, has a field of observation rich in heuristic potentialities, as no other clinician can have: he can see how psychosis is constructed from within. Therefore, a psychoanalytic approach to the treatment of psychosis can offer a long-term alternative to drug therapy and also an explanation of the origins of the disorder.

Franco de Masi draws on the psychoanalytic tradition that Freud started - and which came to fruition throughout the 20th century in the hands of such authors as Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion - to offer a rigorous theoretical approach to psychosis, which illustrates, in turn, with the in-depth description of a clinical case in which its hypotheses and procedures are put into play.