A psychoanalytic look at repetitive outbreaks of brief psychosis.

This article aims to take a psychoanalytic look at brief psychoses at risk of repetition. By this we are referring to very florid psychotic symptomatology that first appears in adults with no significant history of psychopathology. This is almost completely reversed with pharmacological treatment; however, the threat of repetition persists.

A development of Freudian metapsychology for schizophrenia.

The author states that psychoanalysis has much to contribute to schizophrenia. Beginning with a development of Freudian metapsychology, he addresses the in-depth psychopathological study of a session (the first on the couch) with a schizophrenic patient who hears voices and feels that he is being watched. Since the symptoms appear at the level of the heard word and the visual image - key to Freudian metapsychology - he delineates a circuit for the word and one for the image, describing a blockage in both and the consequences of these.

Negative signs and symptoms secondary to antipsychotics: a double-blind, randomized trial of a single dose of placebo, haloperidol, and risperidone in healthy volunteers.

Objective: Despite the clinical observation that antipsychotics can produce negative symptoms, no previous controlled study, to our knowledge, has evaluated this action in healthy subjects. The present study assessed observer-rated and self-rated negative symptoms produced by conventional and second-generation antipsychotics in healthy volunteers.

Method: The authors used a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of single doses of haloperidol (5 mg) and risperidone (2.

Anatomical and functional brain variables associated with clozapine response in treatment-resistant schizophrenia.

Clozapine alleviates the symptoms of a significant proportion of treatment-resistant schizophrenic patients. Previous studies suggest that the response to clozapine may be associated with prefrontal and temporal anatomy as well as with prefrontal, basal ganglia and thalamic metabolism. A sample of 25 treatment-resistant (TR) schizophrenic patients underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and 18F-deoxyglucose positron emission tomography (PET) before and after treatment with clozapine.