It comes as no surprise then if, when we meet the parents of a psychotic person, they communicate to us a deep chill even in the middle of summer, panic, escape fantasies, the feeling of having failed in everything, of being hopeless and incompetent, the pointlessness of any initiative, and the belief that everything that they do and have done is useless. These are the beliefs of their ill child, who is unable to see a way out of his own illness, which he does not manage to manifest, as we have seen above, because of anaesthesia of feeling.
Through the phenomenon of psychotic induction, these aspects are particularly transmitted to to parent of the opposite sex, to the other-sex parent; the same-sex parent seems to be immune from psychotic induction, at least from the ill child. When in the context there are other psychotic members of the family in addition to the one for whom help is being sought, this must also be taken into consideration through comprehensive action, using a number of operators at the same time, since inductions from various sources interact, and complicate the overall picture. Sane members of the family, and especially the other-sex parent, as already said, also in turn take on the pathological traits induced in them by the ill person, and they enact them as if they were their own desires and their own requirements; they transmit moreover from the shore as it were, the states of mind censored by the ill person, to all the surrounding human environment, and hence also to psycho-analysts, both those who directly meet and those who don't directly meet the ill person.
Families with psychotics appear to be highly fragmented. Indeed psychotic manifestations are often interpreted as the effect of diabolic intervention. But what does the word devil mean? It is a term which derives from the Greek diaballo, which means "to divide", (opposite of symbol, the Latinate version of the Greek verb sunballo which means "to unite").
Nothing is more appropriate than the definition of diabolical attributed to psychosis, since the effect produced by lack of feeling is above all that of making any relations other than squalid economic relations impossible, and therefore of dividing. Any family which finds itself interacting on these bases, in the absence of feeling, would have serious problems staying united.
The first checkpoint, before taking on a psychotic patient, regards therefore the awareness of the parents as to the destructive influence which the psychotic induction from the illness of their child have on their relationship. Often it is a matter of going back years, during which the furrow between the two has become more and more like an abyss. Only love for the ill child can give them the strength to collaborate, to hold out their hands mutually even when they are separated and support each other because without the support of both and in particular without being able to access all the elements transmitted by the ill child to the other-sex parent, it is difficult to move towards healing.
From the analysis of these elements, both those enacted by the other-sex parent and those induced in us, it is possible to identify with scientific certainty what happens in the ill person, and to his reality. These elements, which are so devastating for those who have no tools of empathy, become precious items for the psychoanalyst, the indispensable base on which to build the treatment for recovery.
If parents are not trained to recognize these elements as unconnected to them, these states of mind (which are the fruit of psychotic inductions) are considered by the parents as their own, with negative effects on their life as a couple and their working life. Just imagine what the appearance of anaesthesia of feeling can have on a couple's relationship, or the fear of being abandoned, or excessive eroticism, or the paranoid conviction that the other doesn't want you and that everything is lost.
To this is added the phenomenon by which memories are deformed, to be adapted to new states of mind, a phenomenon which is also helped by the presence of amnesia in psychotic induction. We saw in fact above how Marguérite Séchéhaye speaks of the difficulty of rational perceptions being "fixed in mnemonic traces".