Gisela Pankow (1914-1998): Towards a psychoanalytic treatment of the psychoses

Gisela Pankow devoted her life to finding ways to overturn Freud's statement on the impossibility of treating the psychoses psychoanalytically. Without ever straying from Freudian metapsychology, yet mending certain technical aspects (e.g. by introducing clay modelling into the session), she developed an approach in the area of psychosis thanks to which the difficulty encountered by psychotic subjects when attempting to communicate their experience of the world can be bypassed. She referred to this approach as dynamic structuring. Her views on the "lived body" and the "symbolising functions of the body" stem from her clinical experience and offer a unique synthesis of psychoanalysis and phenomenology.