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Family Structure and Psychosis

Sunday 19 January 2020

All the versions of this article: [English] [français]

Aubier, Paris, 1977, 1983
Flammarion, coll. « Champs », 2004

This writing was translated to:
Spanish: Estructura familiar y psicosis, Paidos, Buenos Aires, 1979
Italian: Struttura Familale e psicosi, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1979
German: Familienstruktur und Psychose, Ullstein Materialien, Berlin, 1984

Mrs Gisela Pankow, a graduate in Neuro-Psychiatry from Tübingen Faculty of Medicine and former assistant of Professor E. Kretschmer, was one of the first German medical doctors authorised to work at a University department, after World War II, in Paris.

She is to be credited for building a bridge between German and French medical science, firstly with regards to the fields of Anthropology and Endocrinology, later and more importantly, in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis.

The international level of Gisela Pankow’s writings – six books and eighty scientific publications – highlight the quality of the training she held as of 1971 at the University of Paris VI – Medicine Faculty of Saint Antoine.
Between 1960 and 1970 she was Chair at Bonn’s Medicine Faculty. She was also guest professor in the USA, Australia, Canada and Tunisia, and gave conferences in most European countries.
From 1958 she supervised a Seminar in Paris entitled “The analytical therapy of psychosis”.

As in her book “Man and his Psychosis”, the analytical technique shown here represents a broadening of the classic psychoanalytical scope. In psychosis, we would rather have access to what is psychically “non-represented”, the interpretation of repressed content being of lesser importance. This is why Gisela Pankow approaches the “non-represented” content through space-structure dialectic. This dialectic embodies the “non-represented” content giving it a tangible form.
Whereas object-relations and libido-processing are fundamental to understanding neurosis, in the analytical treatment of psychosis, the main axis lies in the security principle.