Psychosis as Auto-Cannibalism

This paper takes as its starting point a series of interviews with psychotherapists about their experiences of working with psychotic patients. Frequent references were made to the body as indefinable container for experience.... [ view full abstract ]

This paper takes as its starting point a series of interviews with psychotherapists about their experiences of working with psychotic patients. Frequent references were made to the body as indefinable container for experience. Therapists often described experiencing the patient’s psychotic regression as located in the body of both patient and therapist, rather than in the mind. The consequent challenges for metabolizing psychotic experiences were apparent. This paper focuses on the cannibalistic nature of this dynamic. Although psychosis is often psychoanalytically understood as a regressive return to a pre-symbolic and bodily state, and the importance of cannibalism of the mother’s body is widely acknowledged as an important aspect of infancy, the link between cannibalism and psychosis has not yet been explored. This paper suggests that psychotic patients feed not on the mother, as does the infant, but on themselves. The infant feeds on the mother both in utero and during infancy, and Winnicott’s concept of primary maternal preoccupation reminds us that the mother participates in a psychotic way in this form of cannibalism. In contrast, the psychotic patient rejects what the world proffers for consumption, producing instead an alternate reality for themselves. Hallucinations produce what is to be heard, felt, or seen, and delusions create an alternate view of the world with which to engage. Thus psychotic patients consume themselves in an auto-cannibalistic manner. In this paper I argue that in the intertwining of the therapist and psychotic patient’s digestive processes lies an invitation for the therapist to return to a deeply disturbing origin of existence, to the self as a healthy cannibal, as reliant on the other, and that a visceral understanding of cannibalism – both in the therapist and in the patient – can help the therapist to obtain a deeper understanding of the patient’s pathology.