This book offers a practitioner's guide to evidence-based practice in working with psychotic patients in an outpatient setting by clinicians and scholars who are internationally recognized for their work in treating severe psychopathology. Topics cover conceptual, technical, and practical considerations in the parameters of working with adult and adolescent populations that exhibit thought disorder, delusions, hallucinations, borderline organizations, trauma, and schizoid phenomena. Different theoretical models are presented from psychoanalytic traditions that introduce the student and practitioner to eclectic ways of conceptualizing and treating these challenging clinical groups. Concrete approaches to establishing a proper treatment environment, working alliance, symptom management, managing countertransference, and facilitating a therapeutic framework are provided. Various psychodynamic techniques are demonstrated by master clinicians through the extensive use of clinical case material culled from outpatient settings that illustrate how psychoanalytic perspectives enrich our understanding of the psychotic spectrum and lead to therapeutic efficacy.

Introduction , Conceptual Considerations , A proposed model for the outpatient treatment of psychosis in private practice settings , Outpatient psychodynamic psychotherapy with psychotics: managing isolation and creating safety , The Clinical Encounter , Working with psychosis: contextualising and integrating fragments of meaning , Rethinking psychosis: attachment, developmental trauma, and the psychotic spectrum , Soaking in madness: a Modern Psychoanalytic approach to treating psychosis , Treatment Populations and Contrasting Theoretical Models , The endless hunt and the edge of psychosis: the persecutory search for identity , An archetypal approach to treating combat post-traumatic stress disorder , Finding and being a self: schizoid phenomena in the psychoanalytic treatment of a transgendered adolescent , A Jungian approach to the interpretation and treatment of delusions in adolescence