Since certain important modifications are related to the concept of regression in the transference situation, it should be considered that this concept is in relation to the repetition compulsion, that transference, essentially is a revival of earlier emotional experience, must be regarded as a manifestation of the repetition compulsion is generally accepted. It is, however, necessarily to distinguish between repetition compulsion as an attempt to master traumatic experience and repetition compulsion as an attempt to return to a real or fantasized earlier state of rest or gratification. Lagache, in a recent paper, has connected by or as if by the affirming relatedness as associated to the corresponding divergence in the repetition compulsion to an inherent need to appear in the problems that had previously been left unsolved. From this point of view, the regressive aspects of the transference situation are to be regarded as a necessary preliminary to the mastery of unresolved conflict, as too, the regressive aspects of transference are mainly attributed to a wish to return to an earlier state of rest or narcissistic gratification, to the maintenance of the status quo in preference to any progressive action, to which Freud’s original conception of the death instinct. There is a good deal to suggest that both aspects of the repetition compulsion may bee seen in self-destructive forces tend to be stronger that progressive libidinal impulses, the potentialities of the analytic approach will inevitably appear to be limited. In those, in contrast, in whom that regard the reappearance in the transference situation of earlier conflicts as an indication of tendencies to master and progress will continue to feel that the classical analytic method remains the optimal approach to psychological illness wherever it is applicable.
Clarifications maintain the position or peculiar state as occupying a spatial point in temporal conditions, with a significant relevance to the amplitude larger in extent or a greater capacity that the average infinitive period has of time. Whereas in absence or termination must reflect on or upon the fearing analysis if the transference, as compelling of a generally acknowledged focal point, this itself may debase the appropriate factor that generates, in every degree. The exemplifying analytic technique that would react upon the discipline needed to utilize the new values, whereby, they can be ascribed as the commonality in holding the services to a suspicious self-direction and comprehensive understanding, in that of whatever is humanly affiliated to the best as can be, and yet, the advocacy to the analysis of the transference is generally acknowledged as the central feature of analytic technique? Freud regarded transference and resistance as facts in the observational conceptuality for which of representing the state of inventions. He writes, . . . that the theory of psychoanalysis in an attempt to account for two striking and unexpected facts of observation which emerge whenever an attempt is made. Evidently the symptoms of a neurotic source, may in his past life, inhabit the sources of experiential recall to the past or the introspective reflections. In the state of affairs, in that for being the latent characterizations announced as the factoring responsibility for the transference and of resistance . . . one which takes the other side of the problem, while accepting as such, to the latencies and the hidden values non-accepting for new interactions as brought through a hypothesis that will hardly escape the charge of misappropriation of properties by attempting endeavour to re-associate the essentially established personalization, that if the pursuit in calling them a psychoanalyst’. Rapaport (1967) argued, in his posthumously published paper on the methodology of psychoanalysis, that transference and resistance inevitably follow from the fact that the analytic situation is interpersonal.
Despite this general agreement on the centrality of transference and resistance in technique, in that, the analysis of transference is not pursued as systematically and comprehensively affirmed, however, it could be and should be. The relative privacy for which psychoanalytic work makes it impossible for one or of that of any-other, to skilfully improve upon the attemptive conceptual representation as comprehended of issues, its assumption to state this view as anything more that impressions, involving on that of what in the analysis of the transference and to states awareness in the number of reasons that an important aspect in the analysis of the transference of the transference, namely in the resistance, by the awareness of the transference is especially, and often adhering to the analytic procedures that interact among cultural inhibitors, but that will be distinguished as such, that its ranging manifold of distancing non-localities as founded of the analyst’s.
However, it must first be to distinguish between two types of interpretation of the transference. That one is an interpretation of resistance to the awareness of transference, the other, is an interpretation of resistance to the resolution of transference. The distinction has clearly been best spelled out in the form from which copies or reproductions can be produced, as to cause to make its awareness and yielding values as grounded in the cognisance to Greenson (1967) and Stone (1967). The first kind of resistance may be called decence transference, although this term emphases the terminological characterization by its term is mainly employed to refer to a phrase of analysis and carried within the general resistance to the transference of wishes, it can also be used for a more isolated instance of transference of defence. With some oversimplification, one might say that in resistance to the awareness of transference, the transference, the transference is what does the resisting.
Another connected description of stating this distinction between resistance and the awareness of transference and resistance to the resolution of transference is between implicit and indirect references to the transference and explicitly or directly referential to the transference. The interpretation of resistance to awareness of the transference is intended to make the implicit transference explicit. While the interpretation of resistance to the resolution of transference is intended to make the patient realize that the already explicit transference does indeed include a determinant from the past.
It is also important to distinguish between the general concept of an interpretation of resistance to the resolution of transference and a particular variety of such an interpretation, namely, a genetic transference interpretation - that is, an interpretation of how an attitude in the present is an inappropriate carry-over from the past. While there is a tendency among analysts to deal explicit references to the transference primarily among analyses to deal explicitly the references to the transference as primarily by a genetic transference interpretation, there are other ways of working toward a revolution of the transference. However, this argument does so implicate that not only is not enough emphasis being given to interpretation of the transference in the here and now, that is, to the interpretation of implicit manifestations of the transference, but also that interpretations intended to resolve the transference as manifested in explicit references to the transference should be primarily in the here and now, rather than genetic transference interpretations.
A patient’s statement that he feels the analyst is harsh, for example, is, at least to begin with, likely best dealt with not by interpreting that this is a displacement from the patient’s feeling that his father was harsh, but by as elucidation of some other aspect of this here and now attitude, such as what has gone on in the analytic situation that seems to the patient to justify his feeling or what was the anxiety that made it so difficult for him to express his feelings. How the patient experiences the actual situation is an example of the role of the actual situation in a manifestation of transference, which will be a major point of relevant significance.
Of course, both interpretations of the transference in the here and now and genetic transference interpretations are valid and constitute a sequence. We presume that a resistance to the transference ultimately rests on the displacement onto the analysts of attitudes from the past.
Because Freud’s case histories focus much more on the yield of analysis than on the details of the process, they are readily but perhaps incorrectly construed as emphasizing work outside the transference much more than work within the transference, and, even within the transference, emphasizing genetic transference interpretations much more than work with the transference in the here and now (Muslin and Gill, 1978). The example of Freud’s case reports may have played a role in what is to be considered as the common maldistribution of emphasis in these two respects - not enough on the transference and, within the transference, not enough on the here and now.
Transference interpretations in the here and now and genetic transference interpretations are, of course, exemplified in Freud’s writings and are in the repertoire of every analyst, but they are not distinguished sharply enough.
Both participants in the analytic situation are motivated to avoid these interactions. Flight away from the transference and to the past can be a relief to both the patient and the analyst.
These aligning measures have been divided into five categorical divisions and placed into the following parts: (1) The principle that the transference should be encouraged to expand as much as possible within the analytic situation because the analytic work is best done within the transference. (2) the interpretation of disguised allusion to the transference as a main technique for encouraging the expansion of the transference within the analytic situation, (3) the principle that all transference has a connection with something in the present actual analysis situation, (4) how the connection between transference and the actual analytic situation is used in interpreting resistance to the awareness of transference, and (5) the resolution of transference within the here and now and the role of genetic transference interpretation.
The importance of transference interpretations will surely be agreeing to by all analysts, the greater effectiveness of transference interpretations than interpretations outside the transference will be agreeing to by many, but what of the relative roles of interpretation of the transference and interpretation outside the transference?
Freud can be interpreted as either of saying that the analysis of the transference in auxiliary to the analysis of the neurosis or that the analysis of the transference is equivalent to the analysis of the neurosis. The first position is stated in his saying (1913) that the disturbance of the transference has to be overcome by the analysis of transference resistance in order to get on with the work of analysing the neurosis. It is also implied in his reiteration that the ultimate task of analysis is to remember the past, to fill in the gap in memory. The second position is stated in his saying that the victory must be won on the field of the transference (1912) and that the mastery of the transference neurosis ‘coincides with getting rid of the illness which was originally brought to the neurosis (1917). In this second view, he says that after the resistance is overcome, memories appear relatively without difficulty.
These two different positions also find expression in the two different ways in which Freud speaks of the transference. In `Dynamics of Transference` he refers to the transference, on the one hand, as `the most powerful resistance to the treatment`(1912) but, on the other hand, as doing us the inestimable service of making the patient’s . . . , immediate impulses and manifests, when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie (1912).
It can be agreed that his principal emphasis fails on the second position. He wrote once, in summary, ‘Thus our therapeutic work falls into two phases in the first, all the libido is forced from the symptoms into the transference and concentrated there, in the second, the struggle is waged around this new object and the libido is liberated from it`(1912).
The detailed demonstration that he advocated that the transference should be encouraged to expand as much as possible within the analytic situation lies in clarification that resistance is primarily expressed by repetition, and repetition takes place both within and outside the analytic situation, but that the analyst seeks to deal with it primarily within the analytic situation, that repetition can be not only in the motor sphere (acting) but also in the psychical sphere, and that the psychical sphere is not confined to remembering but includes the present, too.
Freud`s emphasis that the purpose of resistance is to prevent remembering can obscure his point that resistance shows itself primarily by repetition, whether inside or outside the analytic situation. `The greater the resistance, the more extensively, and will act out (repetition)replace remembering`. Similarly in `The Dynamics of Transference` Freud said that the main reason that the transference is so well suited to serve the resistance is that the unconscious implies does not want to be remembered . . . but endeavour to reproduce themselves . . . (1918), the transference is a resistance primarily insofar as it is a repetition.
The point can be restated in terms of the relation between transference and resistance. The resistance expresses itself in repetition, that is, in transference both inside and outside the analytic situation. To deal with the transference. Therefore, is equivalent to dealing with the resistance. Freud emphasized transference within the analytic situation so strongly that it has come to mean only repetition within the analytic situation, even though, conceptually speaking, repetition outside the analytic situation is transference too, and Freud once used the term that way. `We soon perceive that the transference is itself only a piece of repetition and that the repetition is a transference of the forgotten past not only onto the analyst but also onto all the other aspects of the current situation. We . . . find . . . the compulsion to repeat, which now replaces the impulsion to remember, not only in his personal attitude to his analyst but also in every other activity and relationship which may occupy his life at the time . . . (1914).
It is important to realize that the expansion of the repetition inside the analytic situation, whether or not in a reciprocal relationship to repetition outside the analytic situation, is the avenue to control the repetition: `The main instrument . . . for curbing the patients compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of the transference. We render the compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field`(1914).
Kanzer has discussed this issue well in his paper on ‘The Motor Sphere of the Transference’ (1966). He writes of a ‘double-pronged stick-and-carrot’ technique by which the transference is fostered within the analytic situation and discouraged outside the analytic situation. The ‘stick’ is the principle of abstinence as exemplified in the admonition against making important decisions during treatment, and the ‘carrot’ is the opportunity afforded the transference to expand within the treatment, ‘in almost complete freedom’ as in a ‘playground’ (Freud, 1914). As Freud put it, ‘Provided only that the patient shows compliance enough to respect the necessary conditions of the analysis, we regularly succeed in giving all the symptoms of the illness a new transference meaning, and in replacing his ordinary neurosis by a ‘transference neurosis’ of which he can be cured by the therapeutic work’ (1914).
The reason it is desirable for the transference to be expressed within the treatment is that there, it `is at every point accessible to our intervention`(1914). In a later statement he made the same point this way. `We have followed this new edition - the transference-neurosis - of the old disorder from its start, we have observed its origin and growth, and we are especially well able to find our way about in it since, as its object, we are situated at it’s very centre, (1917), it is not that the transference is forced into the treatment, but that it is spontaneously but implicitly present and is encouraged to expand there and become explicit
Freud emphasized acting in the transference so strongly that one can overlook the repetition in the transference, but does not of necessity for its enactment or recognition that gives validity to acts of a subordinate conformation as ratified in support of explicit authoritative permission. Repetition need not go as far as motor behaviour, it can also be expressed in attitudes, feelings, and intentions, and, indeed, the repetition often does take such form rather than motor action. The importance of making this clear is that Freud can be mistakenly read to mean that repetition in the psychical sphere can only mean remembering the past, are when he writes that the analyst as prepared for a perpetual struggle with his patient to keep in the psychical sphere all the impulses which the patient would like to direct into the motor sphere, and he celebrates it as a triumph for the treatment if he can bring it about that something the patient wishes to discharge in action are disposed if through the work of remembering (1914).
It is true that the analyst’s efforts are to convert acting in the motor sphere into awareness in the psychical sphere, but transference may be in the psychical sphere to begin with, albeit disguised. The psychical sphere includes awareness in the transference as well as remembering.
One of the objections one hears, from both analysts and patient, to a heavy emphasis on interpretation of associations about the patients real life primarily in terms of the transference is that it means the analyst is disregarding the importance of what goes on in the patients real life. The criticism is not judiciable. To emphasize the transference meaning is not to deny or belittle other meanings, but to focus on the one of several meanings of the content that is the most important for the analytic process, for the reasons of positing the addition for one coming to any falsifiable conclusion.
Another way in which interpretations of resistance to the transference can be, or at lease appear to the patient to be, a belittling of the importance of the patients outside life is to make the interpretation as though the outside behaviour is primarily an acting out of the transference. The patient may undertake some actions in the outside world as an expression of and resistance to the transference, that is, acting out. But the interpretation of associations about actions in the outside world as having implications for the transference needs mean only that the choice of outside action to figure in the associations is co-determined by the need to express a transference indirectly. It is because of the resistance to awareness of the transference that the transference to be disguised. When the disguise is unmasked by interpretation, it becomes clear that, despite the inevitable differences between the outside situation and the transference situation, the content is the same for the analysis of the necrosis that coincides (Freud wrote that the mastering of the transference neurosis only coincides with getting rid of the illness which was originally brought to the treatment (1917)).
The analytic situation itself fosters the development of attitudes with primary determinants in the past, i.e., transference. The analyst’s reserve provides the patient with few and equivocal cues. The purpose of the analytic situation fosters the development of strong emotional responses, and the very fact that the patient has a neurosis means, as Freud said, that’ . . . it is a perfectly normal and intelligible thing that the libidinal cathexis [we would now add negative feelings] of someone who is partly unsatisfied, a cathexes which are held ready in anticipation, should be directly as well to the figure of the analyst (1912).
While the analytic setup itself fosters the expansion of the transference within the analytic situation, the interpretation of resistance to the awareness of transference will further this expansion.
There are important resistances on the part of both patient and analyst to awareness of the transference. On the patient’s part, this is because of the difficulty in recognizing erotic and hostile impulses toward the very person to whom they have to be disclosed. On the analyst’s part, this is because the patient is likely to attitude the very attitudes to him which are most likely to cause him discomfort. The attitudes the patient believes the analysts has toward him are often the ones the patient is least likely to voice, in a general sense because of a feeling that it is impertinent for him to concern himself with the analyst’s feelings, and in a more specific sense because the aptitudes as held by the analyst are often attitudes the patient feels the analyst will be comfortable about having ascribed to him. It is for this reason that the analyst must be especially alert to the attitudes the patient believes he has, not only to the attitudes the patient does have toward him. If the analyst is able to see himself as a participant in an interaction, as he will become much more attuned to this important area of transference, which might otherwise escape him.
The investigations of attitudes are ascribed to the analyst makes easier the subsequent investigation of the intrinsic factors in the patient that played a role in such ascription. For example, the exposure of the fact that the patient ascribes sexual interests in him to the analyst, and generally to the patient, alternatively the subsequent exploration of the patient’s sexual wish toward the analyst, and genetically the parent.
The resistance to the awareness of these attitudes is responsible for their appearing in various disguises in the patient’s manifested associations and for the analyst’s reluctance to unmask the disguise. The most commonly recognized disguise is by displacement, but identification is an equally important one. In displacement, the patient’s attitudes are narrated for being toward a third party. In identification, the patient attitudes to himself attitudes he believes the analyst has toward him.
To encourage the expansion of the transference within the analytic situation, the disguises in which the transference appears have to be interpreted in the case of displacement the interpretation will be of allusions to the transference in association not manifestly about the transference. This is a kind of interpretation every analyst often makes. In the case of identifications, the analyst interprets the attitudes that the patient ascribes to himself the identification with which an attitude and subsequently attributed to the analyst. Lipton (1977) has recently described this form of disguise allusion in the transference with illuminating illustration.
In his autobiography, Freud wrote, ‘The patient remains under the influence of the analytic situation as hopefully of a latter position or a period of decline, as though he is not directing responsibly for the mental activities onto a particular subject. Justly in assuming that nothing will occur, as not of some reference to the situation (1925). Since associations are obviously often not directed about the analytic situation, the interpretation of Freud’s remark rests on what he meant by the ‘analytic situation’.
It is believed that Freud’s meaning can be clarified by reference to a statement he made in, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’. He said that when the patient is told to say whatever comes into his mind, his associations become directed by the ‘purposive ideas inherent in the treatment’ and that there are two such inherent regressive themes, one relating to the illness and the other - concerning which, Freud said, the patient has ‘no suspicion’; - relating to other analyst’s relating to the patient has ‘no suspicions’ - relating to the analyst (1900). If the patient has ‘no suspicions’ of the theme relating to the analyst, such that the theme appears only in disguise, the patient ‘s associations, it is contended that Freud’s remark not only specifies the themes inherent in the patient ‘s identifications’, but means that the associations are simultaneously directed by these two purposive ideas, not something by one and sometimes by the other.
One important reason that the early and continuing presence of the transference is not always recognized in that it is considered to be absent in the patient who is talking recognized is that it is considered to be absent in the patient who is talking freely and apparently without resistance. As (Muslin and Gill, 1976) pointed out in a paper on the early interpretation of transference resistance, to the transference is probably present from the beginning, even if the patient is talking apparently freely. The patient may well be talking about issues not manifestingly about the transference which are nevertheless, also allusions to the transference, but the analyst has to be alert to the pervasiveness of such allusory discernment about them.
The analyst should progress on the working assumption, that the patient’s associations have transference implications pervasively, that with which this assumption is not to be confused with denial or neglect of the current aspects of the analytic situation. It is theoretically always possible to give precedence to a transference interpretation if one can only discern it through its disguise by resistance. This is not to dispute the desirability of learning as much as one can about the patient, if only to be a position to make more correct interpretations of the transference. One therefore, does not interfere with an apparently free flow of associations, especially early, unless the transference threatens the analytic situation to the point where its interpretation is mandatory rather than optional.
With the recognition that evens apparently freely associating patient may also be showing resistance to awareness of the transference, this formulation should not interfere as long a useful information being gathered should relace Freud’s dictum that the transference should not be interpreted until it becomes a resistance (1913).
It can be argued that every transference has some connection to some aspect of the current analytic situation, in the sense that the past can exert an influence only insofar as it exists in the present. Of course, all the determinants of a transference are current in the sense that what I am distinguishing is the current reality of the analytic situation, that is, what actually goes on between patient and analyst in the situation from how the patient is currently constituted as a result of his past.
All analysts would dubiously agree that there are both current and transferential determinants of the analytic situation, and probably no analyst would argue that a transference of the analytic situation, and probably no analyst would argue that a transference idea can be expressed without contamination, as it was, that is, without any connection to anything current in the patient-analyst relationship. Nevertheless, the implications of this fact for technique are often neglected in practice, as my next point is only to argue for the connection.
Several authors, e.g., Kohut 1959 and Loewald 1960, have pointed out that Freud`s early application by the act or practice of using something or the state of being used, this, however, employ of the quality of being appropriate or valuable to some end as to accommodate the accountable or warrant the use of the term transference. In `The Interpretation of Dreams, in a connection not immediately recognizable as related to the present day use of the term, reveals the fallacy of considering that transference can be expressed free of any connection to the present. That early use was to refer to the fact that an unconscious idea cannot be expressed as such, but only as it becomes connected to a preconscious o r conscious content. In the phenomenon with which Freud was then concerned, the dream transference took place from an unconscious wish to a day residue. In `The Interpretation of Dreams, `Freud used the term transference both for the general rule that an unconscious content is expressible only as it becomes transferred to a preconscious or conscious content and for the specific application of this rule to a transference to the analyst. Just as the day residue is the point of attachment of the dream wish, so must there be an analytic-situation residue, though Freud did not use that term, as the point of attachment of the transference.
Analysts have always limited their behaviour, both in variety and intensity, to increase the extent to which the patient‘s behaviour is determined by his idiosyncratic interpretation of the analyst’s behaviour. In fact, analysts unfortunately sometimes limit the behaviour so much as to compare with such an expression or unpiled standard or absolute approximation, that the entire relationship with the patient matter of technique, with no nontechnical personal relation, as Liptop (1977) has pointed out.
But no matter how far the analyst attempts to carry this limitation of his behaviour, the very existence of the analytic situation provides the patient with innumerable cues which can enviably become his rationale for his transference responses. In other words, the current situation cannot be made to disappear - that is, the analytic situation is real. It is easy to forget this truism in one’s zeal to diminish the role of the current situation in determining the patient ‘s responses. One can try to keep past and present determinants relatively perceptible from one another, but one cannot obtain either ‘pure culture‘. Freud wrote: ‘I insist on this procedure [the couch], however, for its purpose and result are to prevent the transference from mingling with the patient’s associations imperceptibly, to isolate the transference and to allow it to come forward in due course sharply defined as a resistance’ (1913). Even ‘isolate’ is too strong a word in the light of the inevitable intertwining of the transference with the current situation.
If the analyst remains under the illusion that the current cues he provides to the patient can be reduced to the vanishing point, he may be led into a silent withdrawal, which is not too distant from the caricature of an analyst as someone who does refuse to have any personal relationship with the patient. What happens then is that silence has become a technique rather than merely an indication that the analyst is listening. The patient’s responses under such conditions can be mistaken fo uncontaminated transference when they are in fact transference adaptions to the actuality of the silence.
The recognition, from which it takes its point of departure, as it was, has a crucial implications for the technique of interpreting resistance to the awareness of transference, in that, if, the analyst becomes persuaded of the centrality of transference and the importance of encouraging the transference to expand within the analytic situation, he has to find the presenting and plausible interpretation of resistance to the awareness of transference he should make. Is that, his most reliable guide is the cues offered by what is actually going on in the analytic situation? : On the one hand, the events of the situation, such as change in time of session, or an interpretation made by the analyst, and, on the other hand, how the patient is experiencing the situation as reflected in explicit remarks about it, however, fleeting these may be. This is the primary yield for technique of the recognition that any transference must have a link to the actuality of the analytic situation. The cue points to the nature of the transference, just as the day residue for a dream may be a quick pointer of the latent dream thoughts. Attention to the current situation for a transference elaboration will keep the analyst from making mechanical transference interpretation, in which he interprets that there are allusions to the transference in association not manifestly about the transference, but without offering any plausible bias for the interpretation. Attention to the current stimulation offers some degree of protection against the analyst’s inevitability whose tendency to project his own views onto the patient, either because of countertransference or because of a preconceived theoretical bias about the content and hierarchical relationships in psychodynamics.
The analyst may be very surprised at what in his behaviour the patient finds important or unimportant, for the patient’s responses will be idiosyncratically determined by the transference, the patient’s responses may seem to be something the patient as well as the analysts consider trivial, because, as in displacement to a trivial aspect of the day residue of a dream, displacement can better serve resistance when it is to something trivial. Because it is connected to conflict-laden material, the stimulus to the transference may be difficult to find. It may be quickly disavowed, so that its presence in awareness is only transitory. With the discovery of the disavowed, the patient may also gain insight into how it repeats as disavowed earlier in his life. In his search for the present stimuli which the patient is responding transferentially, as the analyst must therefore remain alert to both fleeting and apparently trivial manifested reference to himself as well as in the events of the analytic situation.
If the analyst interprets the patient’s attitudes in a spirit of seeing their possible plausibility in the light of what information the patient does have, rather than in the spirit of either affirming or denying the patient’s views, the way is open for their further expression and elucidation. The analyst will be respecting the effort to be plausible and realistic, rather than manufacturing his transference attitudes out of whole bodied material.
Importantly, is to make a transference interpretation plausible to the patient in terms of as current stimulus that, if the analyst is persuaded that the manifest content has important implications for the transference but he is unable to see a current stimulus for the attitude, he should explicitly say so if he decides to make the transference interpretation anyway. The patient himself may then be able to say what the current stimulus is.
It is sometimes argued that the analyst’s attention to his own behaviour is a precipitant for the transference, will increase the patient’s resistance to recognizing the transference. That, on the contrary, that because of the inevitable interrelationship of the current and transferential determinants, it is only through interpretation that they can be disentangled.
It is also argued that one must wait until the transference has reached optimal intensity before it can be advantageously interpreted. It is true that too hasty and interpretation of the transference can serve as a defensive function for the analyst and deny him the information he needs to make a more appropriate transference interpretation. But it is true that delay in interpreting transference interpretation, but it is also true that delay in interpreting runs the risk of allowing an unmanageable transference to develop. It is also true that deliberate delay can be a manipulation in the service of abreaction rather than analysis, and, like silence, can lead to a response to the actual situation which is mistaken for uncontaminated transference. Obviously important, is assumed in the issues of timing are involved, whereas an important clue to when a transference interpretation is apt and which one to makes lies in whether the interpretation can be made plausibly in terms of the determinant, namely, as something in the current analytic situation. Such as, in the approaching transference in the spirit of seeing how it appears plausibly realistic to the patient, it paves the way toward its further elucidation and expression.
Freud’s emphasis on remembering as the goal of the analytic work implies that remembering is the principal avenue to the resolution of the transference. But the delineation of the successive steps in the development of the analytic technique (1920) makes clear that he saw this development as a change from an effort to reach memories directly to the utilization of the transference as the necessary intermediacy to reaching the memories.
In contrast to remembering as the way the transference is resolved, Freud also described resistance for beings primarily overcome in the transference, with remembering following relatively easily afterwards, ‘From the repetitive reactions which are exhibited in the transference we are led along the familiar paths to the awakening of the memories, which appear without difficulty, as it was, after the resistance has been overcome’ (1914), and ‘This revision of the process of repetition can be accomplished only in part in connection with the memory traces of the process which led to repression. The decisive part of the work’s achieved by creating in the patient’s relation to the analyst - in the ‘transference‘ new editions of the old conflicts . . . Thus, the transference becomes the battlefield on which all the mutually struggling forces should meet one another’ (1917). This is the primary indication for which Strachey (1934) classified in his seminal paper on the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis.
There are two main ways in which resolution of the transference can take place through work with the transference in the here and now. The first lies in the clarification of what are the clues in the current situation which are the patient‘s point of departure force a transference elaboration. The exposure of the current point of departure at once raises the question of whether it is adequate to the conclusion drawn from it. The relating of the transference to a current stimulus is, after all, parts of the patient‘s effort to make, the transference attitude plausibly determined by the present. The reverse and ambiguity of the analyst’s behaviour are what increases the ranges of apparently plausible conclusions the patient may draw. If an examination of the basis for the conclusion makes clear that the actual situation to which the patient responds is subject to other meanings than the one the patient has reached, he will more reality consider his pre-existing bias, that is to say, in that of transference.
Critically, it is suggested that, in speaking of the current relationship and the relation between the patient’s conclusion and the information on which they seem plausibly based, such in some absolute conception of what is real in the analytic situation, of which the analyst is the final arbiter. That is not the case, that what the patient must come to see is that the information he has is subject to other possible interpretations implies the very contrary to an absolute conception of reality. In fact, analyst and patient engage in a dialogue in a spirit of attempting to arrive at a consensus about reality, not about some factious absolute reality.
The second way in which resolution of the transference can take place within the work with the transference in the here and now is that in the very interpretation of the transference the patient had a new experience. He is being treated differently from how he expected to be. Analysts seem reluctant to emphasize his new experience, as though it endangers the role of insight and argue for interpersonal influence as the significant factor in change. Strachey’s emphasis on the new experience in the mutative transference interpretation has unfortunately been overshadowed by his views on introjection, which have been mistaken to advocate manipulating the transference. Strachey meant introjection of the more benign superego of the analyst only as a temporary strep on the road toward insight. Not only is the new experience not to be confused with the interpersonal influence of a transference gratification, but the new experience occurs together with insight into both the patient’s biassed expectation and the new experience. As Strachey points out, what is unique about the transference interpretation is that insight and the new experience take place in relation to the very person who was expected to behave differently, and it is this which gives the work in the transference, its immediacy and effectiveness. While Freud did stress the effective immediacy of the transference, he did not make the new experience explicit.
It is important to recognize that transference interpretation is not a matter of experience, in contrast to insight, but a joining of the two together, both are needed to bring about and maintain the desired changes in the patient. It is also important to recognize that no new techniques of intervention are required to provide the new experience. It is an inevitable accompaniment of interpretation of the transference in the here and now. It is often overlooked that, although Strachey said that only transference interpretations are outside the transference.
Rosenfeld (1972) has pointed out that clarification of material outside the transference is often necessary to know what is the appropriate transference interpretation, and that both genetic transference interpretations and extratransference interpretation taking to consider an inclination as marked by or indication of notable worth or simply the consequence based upon the role in working through. Strachey said relatively little about working through, but surely nothing against the necessary provision with which every thing needfully is explicitly recognized as the role for the recovery of the past in the resolving dissection of the purposiveness determined by the transference.
In taking positions, as to emphasis the role of the analysis of the transference in the here and now, both in interpreting resistance to the awareness of transference and in working toward its resolution by relating to the actuality of the situation. In that of opinion or purpose with the evidence that extratransference and genetic transference interpretation and, of course, working through is important too, that the matter is one of emphasis. Also, interpretation of resistance to awareness of the transference should figure in the majority of sessions, and that if this is done by relating the transference to the actual analytic situation, the very same interpretation is a beginning of work to the resolution of the transference. To justify this view more persuasively would require detailed case material.
The concern and considerations that the Kleinian annalists whom, many analysts feel, are in error in giving the analysis of the transference too great if not even as exclusive role in the analytic process. It is true that Kleinians emphasize the analysis of the transference more, in their writing at least, than does the general run of analysts. As, Anna Freud (1968) complained that the concept of transference has become overexpanded seems to be directed against the Kleinians. One of the reasons the Kleinians consider themselves the true followers of Freud in technique are precisely because of the emphasis they put on the analysis of the transference. Hanna Segal (1967), for example, writes, `Too say that all communications are seen as communications about the patents phantasy as well as current external life is equivalent to saying that all communications contain something relevant to the transference situation. In Kleinian technique, the interpretation of the transference is often more central than in the classical technique.
Affirmly held point of view or way of regarding that Freud and transference had accedingly connected by simulating observations that we can only offer, that Freud wrote briefly about transference, and did so, to sustain the way in which, is, as a whole, that his actions were justly taken in and around 1917. Another observation which can rarely be made about Freud’s works, and which everyone may not agree with, is that, with one or two exceptions, what he did write on transference did not reach the high level of analytical thought which has come to be regarded as standard for him. Some indication of what his contribution consists of is given by the editors of the Standard Edition, who list them in several places. One of the longer lists, in a footnote on page 431 of Volume 16, includes six references: ‘Studies of Hysteria’ with Breuer (1895), the Dora paper (1905), ‘The Dynamics of Transference’ (1912), ‘Observations on Transference-Love’ (1915), the chapter on transference in the Introductory Lectures (1917), and ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (1937). Although the editors, in no sense suggest that these six papers include everything Freud wrote on the subject. It does seem evident that, considering the essential importance of transference to analysis, he wrote, ‘The Dynamics of Transference’, ‘Transference-Love’, and the transference chapter in the Introductory Lectures, came across, as, perhaps, his least significant contribution.
Freud’s first direct mention of transference comes upon the pages ascribed within the ’Studies of Hysteria’ (1895), his first significant reference to it, however did not appear until five years later, when, in a letter to Fliess on April 16, 1900, he said (Freud, 1887-1902) he was ‘beginning to see that the apparent endlessness of the treatment is something of an inherent feature and is connected with the transference’. In a footnote to this letter the editors said that, ‘This is the first insight into the role of transference in psychotherapy.’
Despite these early references, it seems correct to say that yet another five years were to go by before the phenomenon of transference was actually introduced. Even so, the introduction was far from prominent, for it was tacked on like an afterthought as a four-page portion of a postscript to what was perhaps Freud’s most fascinating case history to date, the case of Dora (1905).
Using data from Dora’s three-month-long, unexpectedly terminated analysis, and especially from her dramatic transference reaction which had taken him quite unawares, Freud now gave to transference its first distinct psychological entity and for the first time indicated its essential role in the analytic process. His account, although in general more than adequate - in the elegant fact and unmistakably ‘finished’ - was brief, and almost to the point, and perhaps not an entirely worthy introduction so much more a truly great discovery. What was uniquely great was his recognizing the usefulness of transference. In his analysis of Dora he had noted not only that transference feelings existed and were powerful, but, much to his dismay, he had realized what a serious, perhaps, even insurmountable obstacles that objectively would be. Then, in what seems like a creative leap, Freud made the almost unbelievable discoveries that transference was in fact, the key to analysis, that by properly taking the patient’s transference and therapeutic force was added to the analytic method.
The impact on analysis of this startling discovery was actually much greater and much more significant than most people seem to appreciate. Although the role of transference as the sine quo non of analysis and is widely accepted, and was stated by Freud from the first, it has almost never been acclaimed for having brought about an entire change in the nature of analysis. The introduction of free association to analysis, a much lesser change, receives and still receives much more recognition.
One of the reasons for the relatively unheralded entry of transference into analysis may have been for circumstances of its discovery. Although Freud’s new ideas were recorded as if they arose as sudden inspiration during the Dora analysis, they may in fact have developed somewhat later. In the paper‘s precatory remarks, for instance, Freud said he had not discussed transference with Dora at all, and in the postscript, he said he had been unaware of her transference feelings. Also, pointing to a later discovery date is the extraordinary delay in the paper’s publication. According to the editor’s note, the paper had been completed and accepted for publication by late January 1901, but this date was then actually set back more than four and a half years until October 1905. The editors said, ‘We have no information as to how it happened that Freud, . . . deferred publication.’ It readily seems that for reasons to have been that only during those four and a half years, as a consequence to his own self-analysis, that he came to a better understanding of the relevantly significant as the applicable reason to posit of the transference. Only then may it have been possible for him to turn again to the Dora case, to apply to it of what he had learned in himself, to write this essay as part of the postscript, and at last to release the paper for publication.
Freud’s self-analysis has been considered from many angles, but not significantly, as can be of valuing measure, in at least from the standpoint of transference. Opponents of the idea that there is such a thing as definite self-analysis, some of whom say it is impossible, generally an object on grounds that without any analyst there can be no transference neurosis. Freud clearly demonstrated, as, perhaps, that the situation that may be necessary to fill this need: Self-analysis may require that, at least a halfway satisfactory transference object. In Freud`s case, the main transference object at this time seems to have been Fliess, who filled the role rather well. As with any analysis, the authenticity as known in the unfeigned design as if existing or having no illusions and facing reality squarely, by which the ‘real’ impact on Freud was slight, he was essentially a neutral figure, relatively anonymous and physically separates. All of this, and Fliess`s own reciprocal transference reactions, made it possible for Freud to endow Fliess with whatever qualities and whatever feelings were essential to the development of Freud`s transference, and, it should be added, his transference neurosis. In the end, of course, the transference was in part resolved. Freud`s eventual awakening of its self realization in its presence within him of such strange and powerful psychological forces must have come to the conclusion as a stupefied disilluionary dejection toward Fliess, however, his subsequent working out of some of these transference attachments must have been both an intellectual triumph and an immensely healing and releasing of actions, operations or motions involved in the accomplishment of an ending that makes from its process.
In the years following this revolutionary discovery, the central role of transference in analysis increased in remarkable acceptance, and it has easily held this central position ever since. What the substance of this central position distinctfully compose in having or be capable of having within the constructs to which is something of a mystery, for, it seems as nothing about analysis and is, of least to be, the well known than how individual analysis actually uses transference in their day-to-day work with patients. As a guess, as, perhaps of each analysts concept of transference derives variably but significantly from his own inner experience, transference probably means many and varying differentiations to things as to different analysts.
In the same differentiated individuals, as that Freud’s own pupils must have differed on this issue, not only from him but from each other. Although some of their differences may have been slight, others, my have contributed significantly to later analytic developments. A question could be raised, for instance, whether differences in handling the transference which at first were the property of one analyst gradually develop into formal clinical methods used by many, and whether these clinical methods, after having been conceptualized, serve as the beginning of variously divergent schools of analysis. Such occurrences, consistent with certain beliefs that analytic ideas do arise in this way, primarily out of transference experiences in the analytic situation, would lead to the question whether the history of the ideological differences in what was actually said and done in response to transference reactions that to any other factor. Whatever the case, many differences and divergencies did occur among the early analysts, and all of that is supposed to have had to do in some major way with differences in the handling of the transference.
Strangely, Freud himself seems to have taken little part in influencing this rapid and divergent period of growth. Usually accused of being too dominating in such matters, Freud seems to have done just the opposite during the development of this most critical aspect of analysis, the process itself, and, for reasons unknown, detached himself from it.
What was needed, one might be inclined to say, was not leadership in the form of domination, but leadership in trying to provide what was lacking, and still lacking, namely an analytical rationale for transference phenomena. The question must be asked, of course, whether in fact this would have been a good thing at that particular time in psychoanalytic history. Perhaps not. The exercise of closure, which Freud’s structuring might have amounted to. But although adding to understanding and stability at ceratin theoretical levels, could at another level, so such closures have often done, have placed many obstacles in the way of further analytical developments. Thus, his leaving the matter of transference wide open, even though it led to confusion and uncertainty, may have been just as well.
In many ways the closest Freud ever came to establishing a formal analytical rationale for transference was his first attempt, in the postscript to the case of hysteria (1905). These few pages are and among the most important of all Freud’s writings, outweighing by far the paper to which they are appended. Yet, in the case of Dora has always been taught as an entity rather than the ancillary to the essay on transference. In that essay Freud was clear: His ideas revealed tremendous insights and promised more to come, and that, the powers of the neurosis are occupied in creating a new edition of the same disease. Just think of the analytic implications of his saying that this new edition consists of a special class of mental structures, for the most part unconscious, having the peculiar characteristic of being able to replace earlier persons with that of the person of the analyst, and in the fashion applying all components of the original neurosis to the person of the analytical at the present time. Surely as profound a statement as any he ever made.
He then goes on to say that there is no way to avoid transference, that this ‘latest creation of the desire must be combatted like all the earlier ones’, and that, although this is by far the hardest part of analysis, only after the transference has been resolved can a patient arrive at a sense of conviction of the validity of the connection which have been constructed during analysis.
He concludes by saying, ‘In psychoanalysis . . . all the patients’ tendencies, including hostile ones, are aroused, they are then turned to account for reasons to explain or the internalization of justification, and by the same measure was to purposively give a sensible reason for the proposed change in the analysis by which of being made conscious. That, in this way, the transference is constantly being put-down, however, transference, which seems ordained to be the greatest obstacle to psychoanalysis, becomes its most powerfully . . .
These remarkable observations, in conveying a sense of deep conviction that could arise, one feels, only from Freud’s own hard-won inner experience, that nowhere is there a suggestion that transference is a mere technical matter. Far from it, as Freud announces that he has come upon as new and exciting kind of mental function, or, as it is to believe, that a new and exciting kind of ego function.
Very quickly, however, Freud’s conviction sees to have failed him. Nothing he wrote afterwards about transference was at this level, and most of his later references were a retreat from it, for instance, he never did develop the promising idea that the mind constantly creates new editions of the original neurosis and meaningfully incline the minded inclusion in them, an ever-changing series of persons. Instead, he tended to become less specific, even referring to transference at times in a broad terms as if it were no more than rapport between patient and analysts, or as if it was an interpersonal or psychosocial relationship, concepts which, of course, a great many analysts have since adopted, but which were not part of Freud’s original ideas.
Perhaps his most persistent deviation was an on-and-off tendency to regard transference merely as a technical matter, often writing of it as an asset to analysis when positive and a liability when negative.
Significantly, because it indicated that an active struggle was still going on within him, Freud occasionally expressed once again, even though briefly his earlier insights, particularly his ideas that transference is an essential although unexplored part of mental life. An example of this appears in his alternative obtainments such that is gainfully to appear of as quality of being pleasant or agreeable to a feature that makes for pleasantness or ease, among the amenities of the central geniality, otherwise, the prevailing indifference account for the transference in ‘An Autobiographical Study’ (1925). Transference, he says, ‘is a universal phenomenon of the human mind. And in fact dominated the whole of each person’s relations to his human environment. In these few words’ Freud again made the point, and in declarative fashion, that transference is a mental structure of the greatest magnitude, but he never really followed it up.
Rather extensive evidence of his departure from the original concept and his continuing struggle with that concept is seen most clearly, wherein, the ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ is much more than a courageous, brilliant, and pessimistic, appraisal of the difficulties and limitations of analysis, although transference is briefly mentioned in its content, yet a great deal about it comes through, some quite directly, some by easy inference. When looked at in this way, two themes stand out: Freud’s personal frustration with the enigmas of transference and his tacit placing of transference in the centre of success and failure in analysis, both as a therapy and as a developing science. What also comes through, is the perplexing realization of how far Freud had, by now, seemingly moved away from his original concepts. Or had he?
All the same, even if it is insufficient for exclusive reliance in relations to the complicated neurosis, for which it would be fallacious to assign to the recall and reconstruction of the past an exclusively explanatory value (in the intellectual sense), important though that functions be, and difficult as its full-blown emotional correlate may be to come by. There is no doubt that, even in complicated neurosis, equivalently complicated transference neurosis, the genuine complex and complicated transference neurosis, the genuinely experienced linking of the past and present can have, at times, a certain uniquely specific dynamic effect of its own, a type of telescoping or merging of common elements in experience, which must be connected with the meaninglessness of time in unconscious life, compared with its stern authority in the life of consciousness and adaptation to everyday reality. Contributing decisively to such experiences as to whatever degree it occurs, is of course, the vivid currency of the transference neurosis, and central in this, the reincarnations of old objects in an actual person, the analyst.
Thus, an allied problem in the general sphere of transference is the fascination and often enigmatic interplay of past and present. If one wishes to view this interplay in terms of a stereotyped formulation, the matter can remain relatively uncomplicated - as a formulation. Unfortunately. , This is too often the case. The phenomenon, however, retains some important obscurities, which cannot thoroughly dispel, but to which I would like to call attention. To concentrate on the dimension of time, it seems in reference to the complication and immediate aspects of technique, nonetheless, essential. For example, we can assume that the transference neurosis re-enacts the essential conflicts of the infantile neurosis in a current setting. If a reasonable degree of awareness of transference is established, the next problem is the genetic reduction of the neurosis to its elements in the past, through analysis of the transference resistance and allied intrapsychic resistances, ultimately genetic interpretations, recollections and reconstructions and working through. Such that the transference is related to its genetic origins, the analyst thereby emerges in his true, i.e., real, identity to the patient, the transference is putatively ‘resolved’. To the extent that one follows the traditional view that all resistances, including the transference itself, is ultimately directed against the restoration of early memories as, this is a convincing formulation. Is that, only to say, that in his own right as such as having to a certain tightly logical quality? However, we know that it this is not so readily accomplished, apart from the special intrapsychic considerations described afterward by Freud in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’. Although in a favourable case, much of the cognitive interpretative work can be accomplished, there remains the fact that cognition responsibility, in its bare sense, does not necessarily lead to the subsidence of powerful dynamism, to the withdrawal of ‘cathexes’ from importantly real objects. For, as mentioned, a short while ago, the analyst is a real and living object, apart from the representations with which the transference invests him, and which are interpretable as such, for which there is no, at any time a seldom, a confusing interrelations and commonly of the emergent responses, due to the same old seeking, and this is directed toward a new individual in his own right, both are important, furthermore, there are large and important ones of overlapping. Apart from such considerations, even the explicitly incestuous transference is currently experienced (as, at least in good part) by a full-grown adult (like the original oedipus), instead of a totally and actually helpless child. To be sure, the latter state is reflected in the emergent transference elements of instinctual striving, but it is subject to analysis, and the residual is something significant, if not totally different. It is these residual sexual wish, presumably directed toward the person of the analyst, as such, which must be displaced to others, if, as generally agreed, the revival of infantile fantasies and strivings in the biologically mature adolescent presents a new and special problem, one must assume distinctiveness of experience for the adult, although it is true that in the majority of instances, adequate solution is favoured by the adult state. There is, in any case, a residual relationship between persons who have worked together in a prolonged, arduous and intimate relationship, which, strictly speaking, are reversibly disconnected or divorced of services, in that the transference merely ushers out the retirement for which its rendering retreat of that state of mind or feeling by an inner avoidance of something usually felt as unpleasant or pronounced for it’s adverse but mutual colouration. Blending to some confusion between the two spheres of feeling. The general tendency is that both components are fully gratified to some degree. But, there is the ubiquitous power of the residual primordial transference, yet, argue to cling to an omnipotent partisan to resist the displacement of its ‘sublimated’ anaclitic aspects, even if the various representation of the wishes for bodily intimacy has been thoroughly analysed and successfully displaced. The outcome is largely the transference of the transference, as mentioned earlier, in a different context. For everyday reality can provide no actual answer to such cravings. In this connection, note, Freud’s genial envy of Pfister. If the man of faith finds this gratification in revealing religion, others in a wide range of secular beliefs and ‘leaders’ the modern rational and sceptical intellectual is less fortunate in this respect. Presumably free, he is prone to invest even intellectual disciplines or the proponents with inappropriate expectations and partisan passions, but, least of mention, that within these fields of analytical and theoretical thought, is not to provide exceptions to this tendency.
Though if one is to maintain and beneficially confine its bothering of reservations about the clarity of conceptualization, the explanatory discussion of Kohut and Seitz, is a very useful contribution to the direct complication or which by some understanding the awkwardness of oneself. Both Loewald and Kohut have deliberately associated a special but the different use of one of Freud’s three conceptions of transference, i.e., the transference from the unconscious to the preconscious.
Yet, to furthering comments on primordial transference, at least potentially, are largely psychological (mental) component, the concept of ‘transference of the transference’ would be applicable to this component. For it does appear that certain aspect of the search for the omnipotent and omniscient caretaking parents are implicitly practical as virtually capable for being turned to use or account for its functional practicability for something of a process or the procedure for being all but the essential purpose to come to or tend toward a common point, for which are the knowledgeable information or ideas, is nothing but causative effectuality. As suggested earlier, there are important qualitative and quantitative distinctions in the mode of persistence and such strivings, however, even to the extent that they are detached from the analyst and carried into some reasonably appropriate expression in everyday life, they retain at least a subtle quality which contravenes reality, one which derives from earliest infancy, and remains - to this extent - a transference. ‘Santa Claus’ lives on, where one might least expect to meet him, whether as a donor of miracle drug or of far more complex panaceas.
If one prescribes to this parasymbiotic transference drive, a true primordial origin, it is necessary to take cognizance of certain important concepts dealing with the earliest period of life. If we assume a powerful original organismic drive toward an original ‘object’, a striving to nullify separation from the beginning, how does this make something legally valid or operative usually by formal approval or sanctioned with concepts such as ‘primary narcissism’ or the ‘objectless phase’ or ‘the primary psycho physiological self’ (We note in passing that there are those who do not accept these as usually construed in the technique of Balint), for example, or Fairbairn or - conspicuously - Melanie Klein. These are states, variously defined or conceived, which apply to the earliest neonatal period, in which life, to state more simply, exists only as the potential in physiological processes. Since there is (we postulate) no clear awareness of self-withdrawal from the mother, there can be no ‘mentally’ represented or experienced drive to obliterate the separation (concerning oneself and object, conceiver of as separate, in a continuing sense). There are, of course, discharge phenomena, the precursors of purposive activity, and there are urgent physiological needs, directed toward fulfilment or relief, rather than toward an object as such. However, in relation to these physiological needs as archaistic precursors of object relationships, it must be noted that in all, except respiration and spontaneous sphincter relief (even in these instances, not without exception or reservation), the need fulfilment must be mediated by the primordial object (or her surrogate). There is also, of course, the uniquely important requirement for ‘holding’, in a literal expression, from the outset. The material partner in human symbiosis which supplies what the neonate cannot seek by ‘clinging’, as for Bowlty and Murphy, in the sense that must be experienced to the physiological ebb and flow of tension, even if restricted to the kinaesthetic, connected with a peripheral sensory registration, which is the protophase of the recognition of separation from the object or nonpresence of the object, as a painful instance of, her presence in apposition the converse? That the general context may be only in which the sense of unity is preponderant, or, more accurately, that there is no general awareness of ‘separation’ as such, means that the drive for union does not exist in a general psychological sense. It is, so to speak, satisfied. That object constancy, with its cognate ‘longing’, is quite a different experience from the urgencies of primitive need fulfilment is true, however, regardless of what may be added by maturational and developmental considerations, instinctual and perceptual, there is no reason to assume other than a core of developmental continuity from the earliest needs and their fulfilment to the later state, and some continuing degree of contingency based on them.
There is a very rough parallel in the way certain analytic patients, before a firm relationship with the analyst is established, signal certain primitive experiences and tendencies in special reactions to the end of the hour, to the nonvisibility of the analyst, to interruption of their association, to failure of the analyst to talk, and similar matters. We must note that in the basic formation of the ego is evident amongst the primitive reactions and beyond to separations, in the form of very early identifications as based on care taking functions. Certainly in the very development of autonomous ego of the mother’s investment in the, have a decisive role in the character of the their development. And in the case of object constancy, in its connotation of libidinal cathexis, where is no need whatsoever (emotional or otherwise) is needed for prolonged periods. The importance of the object is, to put it mildly, liable to deteriorate, or to differ complicating aggressive change. Probably the characteristic feature of later developing relations to the object (love and the wish for love), as separate if not always separated from demonstrable primitivity, in the need fulfilment, have a special relationship to those ‘ancillary’ aspects of neonatal nurture, whose lack has been shown to be an actual threat to life in some instances, not to speak of sound emotional development. So that from the first, regardless of the assumed state of libidinal (and aggressive) economy, or the assumed state of psychological nondifferentiation between self and potential object, there are critical percussive phenomena, objectively observed, and probably prototypic subjective experiences of separation, which are the forerunners of all subsequent experiences of the kind. One may generalize to the effect that, with maturation and development, secondary identifications, and the various other processes of ‘internalization’ in its broadest sense, the problem of separation and its mastery becomes correspondingly more complex, and changes with the successive phase of life, but never entirely disappears.
In the view of the psychoanalytic situation described earlier, the latent mobilization of experiences of separation stimulated by the situational structure awakens the driving primordial urge to undo or to master the painful separations which it represents, usually embodied in the various forms of clinical transference that which we are familiar. One legitimate gratification which tends to mitigate superfluous transference regression is the transmission of understanding that at times, are thought that by the ‘mature transference’, in effect, the ‘therapeutic alliance’ or a group of mature ego functions which enter into such an alliance. Now, there is one blurring and overlapping at the conceptual edges in both instances, but the concept as such is largely distinct from either one, as it is from the primitive transference, which we have been discussing. Whether the concept is thought by others to comprehend a demonstrable actuality, which is a further question. This question, of course, can only follow on conceptual clarity. This in saying, of a nonrational urge, not directly dependent on the perception of immediate clinical purposes, a true transference in the sense that it is displaced (in currently relevant form) from the parent of early childhood to the analyst. Its content is not anti-sensational, but largely non-sensual of sometimes transitional, as the child’s pleasure in the assemblages of ‘dirty words’ and encompasses a special and not minuscule sphere of the object relationship: The wish to understand, and to be understood, the wish to be given understanding, i.e., teaching, specifically by the parent (or later surrogate); the wish to be taught to use ingenuity in making or doing o r achieving an end through the actions in a nonpunitive way, corresponding to the growing perception of hazard and conflict and very likely the implicit wish to be provided with and taught channels of substitutional drive discharge. With this, there may well be a wish, corresponding to that element in Loewald’s description of therapeutic process, to be seen in terms of one’s developmental potentialities by the analyst. No doubt, the list could be extended into many subtleties, details, and variations. However, one should not omit to specify that, in its peak development, it would include the wish for increasingly accurate interpretations and the wish to facilitate such interpretations by providing adequate material ultimately, of course, by identification, to participate in, or even be the author of the interpretations. The childhood system of wishes which underlies the transference is a correlate of biological maturation, and the latent (i.e., teachable) autonomous ego function, appearing with it, however, there is a drive-like quality in the participation phenomena, which disqualifies any conception of the urge’s identical with the functions. No one who has ever watched a child importune a parent with questions, or experiment with new words, or solicit her interests in a new game, or demand a storytelling or reading, can doubt this. That this powerful support and integration in the ego identification with a loved parent is undoubtedly true, just as it is true of the identification with an analyst toward whom a positive relationship has been established. That ‘functional pleasure ‘ inscribes the part, where certain specific ego energies, perhaps very likely the ego’s own urge to extend its hegemony in the personality. However, it can be stressed in the derive element, even the special phase configurations and colourations, and with its importance of object relations, libidinal and aggressive, for a specific reason. For just as the primordial transference seeks to undo separation, in a sense to obviate object relationships as we know them, the ‘mature transference’, tends toward separation and individuation, and increasing contact with the environment, optimally with a large affirmative (increasing neutralized) relationship toward the original object toward whom (or her surrogates) a different dynamic of demands is now increasingly directed. The further considerations which has led to the emphasis that the drive-like element in these attitudes are integrated phenomena, as examples of ‘multiple functional’ rather than the discrete exorcise of function or functions, is the conviction that there is a continuing dynamic relation of relative interchangeability between the two series, at least based on the response to gratifications in a significant zone of complicated energetic overlap, possibly including the phenomenon of neutralization. That the empirical ‘interchangeability’ is limited, and that goes without saying, that in no way diminishes its decisive importance. The linguistic communications as in mention, that the excessive transference neurosis regression, which can seriously vitiate the affirmative psychoanalytic process, finds a prototype in the regressive behaviour and demands of certain children, who do not receive their share of teaching, ‘attention’, play, nonseductive, affectionate demonstration, as to use the quality of being appropriate or valuable to some end, even the act or practice of using something or the state of being used to which of responsible interests in development, and similar matters, from their parents. In the psychnalytic situation, both the gratifications offered by the analyst and the freedom of expression by the patient, are diversely limited and concentrated, practically entirely (in the every day demonstrable sense) in the sphere of linguistic expression, on the analyst’s side, further, in the transmission of understanding.
Whereas, the primordial transference exploits the primitive aspects of linguistic communication, by expressing the mature transference as to advocate the seeking mastery of the outer and inner environments, a mastery to which the mature elements in speech contribute importantly, for which these are stressed upon the clear-cut genetic prototype for the free associating its interpretative dialogue is the original learning and teaching of speech, the dialogue between child and mother. It is interesting to note that just as the profundities of interests between people who often include - in the service of the ego - transitory introjection and identifications, of the very word ‘communication’, representing the central ego function of speech, from which is a closely intimate relation to the etymologically certain, in actual usages, to the word chosen for that major of religious sacrament for that which is the physical ingestion of the body and blood of the Deity. Perhaps, this is just another suggestion that the oldest of individual problems does, after all, continue to seek its solution, in its own terms if only in a minimal sense, and in channels so remote as to be unrecognizable.
The mature transference is a dynamic and integral part of the therapeutic alliance, alone with the tender aspect of the erotic transference, even more attenuated (and more dependable) friendly feeling of adult type, and the ego identification with the analyst. Indispensable, of course, are the genuine adult need for help, the crystallizing rational and intuitive appraisal of the analyst, the adult sense of confidence in him, and innumerable other nuances of adult thought and feeling. With these, giving a driving momentum and power to the analytic process, but always, by its very nature, a potential source of resistance, and always requiring analysis, is the primordial transference and its various appearances in the specific therapeutic transference. That it is, if well managed, not only a reflection of the repetition compulsion in its menacing sense, but a living presentation from the id, seeking new solutions, and trying again, so to speak, to find a place in the patient’s conscious and effective life, has important affirmative potentialities. This has been specifically emphasized by Nunberg, Lagache and Loewald among others. Loewald has recently elaborated very effectively the idea of ‘ghosts’ seeking to become ‘ancestors’ based on an early figure of speech of Freud. The mature transference, in its own infantile right, provides some of the unique qualities of propulsive force, which comes from the world of feeling, rather than the world of thought. If one views it in a purely figurative sense, that fraction of the mature transference which derives from ‘conversion’ is somewhat like propulsive fraction as the wind in a boats sailing to windward currents into motion, the strong headwind, the ultimate source of both resistance and propulsion, is the primordial transference. This view, however, should not displace the original and independent, if cognate, a favourable tide or current would also be required. It is not that the mature transference is itself entirely exempt from analytic clarification and interpretation. For one thing, in common with other childhood spheres of experience, there may have been traumas in this sphere, punishments, serious defects or lacks of parental communication, Listening, attention or interest. In general, this is probably far more important than has hitherto appeared in our prevalent paradigmatic approach to adult analysis, even taking into account the considerable changes due to the growing interest in ego psychology. ‘Learning’ in the analysis can, of course, be a troublesome intellectualizing resistance. Furthermore, both the patient’s communications and his receptions and utilization of interpretations may exhibit only too clearly, as sometimes in the case of other ego mechanisms, their origin in and tenacious relation to instinctual or anaclitic dynamism; the longing implement out of silence for which the analyst is to override the uncritical acceptance (or rejection) of interpretations, in that the patient revealingly is to mention the unmindful assimilation, fluently, rich, endlessly detailed associations without spontaneous reflection or integration. In the direct demands for solution of moral and practical probability for an entirely intellectual scope, and a variety of others. It may and always be easy to discriminate between the utilization of speech by an essentially instinctual demand, and an intellectual or linguistic trait or having to be determined by specific factors in their own developmental sphere, however, the underlying and essentially genuine dynamism which have to continue to be placed for a notable time interval or remain to an arbitrary or conventional character most favoured to the purposes of processes of analysis, as it was to the original processes of maturational development, communication, and benign separation. Lagache, on the desirability of separating the current unqualified usage, ‘positive’ and ’negative’ transference, as based on the patient‘s immediate state of feeling, from a classification based on the essential effect on analytic processes. Yet, the later of mature transference is, in general, a ‘positive transference’.
People may also have been existing biological and psychological vulnerabilities that make them more likely to develop the disorder. Those with histories of anxiety disorders in their families may have inherited a genetic predisposition to react more severely to stress and trauma than other people. In addition, people’s life experiences, especially in childhood, can affect their psychological vulnerability to the disorder. For example, people whose early childhood experiences made them feel that events are unpredictable and uncontrollable have a greater likelihood than others of developing the disorder. Individuals with a strong, supportive social network of friends and family members seem somewhat protected from developing post-traumatic stress disorder.
Treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder may involve psychotherapy, psychoactive drugs, or both. Psychotherapists help individuals confront the traumatic experience, work through their strong negative emotions, and overcome their symptoms. Many people with post-traumatic stress disorder benefit from group therapy with other individuals suffering from the disorder. Physicians may prescribe antidepressants or anxiety-reducing drugs to treat the mood disturbances that sometimes accompany the disorder.
At the arriving considerations that are marked and noted, through which the essence of functional dynamics as based of the transference in the psychoanalytic process or the basic underlying the most basic of beliefs that in politics there is neither good nor evil, however, in that something that forms part of the minimal body, character or structure of that thing predetermines the properties to the good life. Nonetheless, most psychoanalysts maintain that schizophrenic patients cannot be treated psychoanalytically because they are too narcissistic to develop with the psychotherapist as interpersonal relationship that is sufficiently reliable and consistent for psychoanalytic work. Freud, Fenichel and others have recognized that a new technique of approaching patients psychoanalytically must be found if analysts are to work with psychotics. Among those who have worked successfully in recent years with schizophrenics, Sullivan, Hill, and Karl Menninger and his staff have made various modifications of their analytic approach. The techniques that are in use with psychotics is different from our approach to psychoneurotics. This is not a result of the schizophrenic’s inability to build up a consistent personal relationship with the therapist but due to his extremely intense and sensitive transference reactions.
Let us see first what the essence of the schizophrenic’s transference reactions are and how we try to meet these reactions.
We think of a schizophrenic as a person who has had serious traumatic experiences in early infancy at a time when his ego and its ability to examine reality were not yet developed. These early traumatic experiences seem to furnish the psychological basis for the pathogenic influence of the flustrations of later years. At this early time the infant lives grandiosely in a narcissistic world of his own. His needs and desires seem to be taken care of by something vague and indefinite which he does not yet differentiate. As Ferenczi noted, they are expressed by gestures and movements since speech is as yet undeveloped. Frequently the child’s desires are fulfilled without any expression of them, a result that seems to him a product of his magical thinking.
Are a person’s characteristics primarily shaped by early influences, remaining relatively stable thereafter throughout life? Or does change spontaneously occur continuously throughout life? Many people believe that early experiences are formative, providing a strong or weak foundation for later psychological growth. This view is expressed in the popular saying ‘As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.’ From this perspective, it is crucial to ensure that young children have a good start in life. But many developmental scientists believe that later experiences can modify or even reverse early influences; studies show that even when early experiences are traumatic or abusive, considerable recovery can occur. From this vantage point, early experiences influence, but rarely determine, later characteristics.
Traumatic experiences in this early period of life will damage a personality more seriously than those occurring in later childhood such as are found in the history of psychoneurotics. The infant’s mind is more vulnerable the younger and less used it has been, further, the trauma has quickened the infant ‘s egocentricity. In addition early traumatic experiences shortens the only period in life in which an individual ordinarily enjoys the most security, thus endangering the ability to store up as it were a reasonable supplies of assurance and self-reliance for the individual’s later struggles through life. Thus, as such, a child sensitized considerably more toward the frustrations of later like than by later traumatic experiences. hence many experiences in later life which would mean little to a ‘healthy’ person and not much to a psychoneurotic, mean a great deal of pain and suffering to the schizophrenic. His resistance against frustration is easily exhausted.
Once he reaches his limit of endurance, he escapes the unbearable reality of his present life by attempting to reestablish the autistic, delusional world of the infant, but this is impossible because the content of his delusions and hallucinations are naturally coloured by the experiences of his whole lifetime.
How do these developments influence the patient’s attitude toward the analyst and the analyst’s approach to him?
Due to the very damage and the succeeding chain of frustrations which the schizophrenic undergoes before finally giving in to illness, he feels extremely suspicious and distrustful of everyone, particularly of the psychotherapist ho approaches him with the intent of intruding into his isolated world and personal life. To him the physician’s approach means the threat of being compelled to return to the frustrations of real life and to reveal his inadequacy to meet them or, - still worse – a repetition of the aggressive interference with his initial symptoms and peculiarities which he has encountered in his previous environment.
In taking to question, we are entering an area of life in which things are other then themselves, where meaning is multifaceted, and where the line between the old and the new is blurred. It should, by, its immediate measure, help develop our recognition or meaning of the pertinent applicability as to the relevance of interrelated aspects of the psychology of ‘metaphor’. In the psychology of metaphor we will find a useful analogy to the psychology of transference interpretation. Ours will be newly encountered as good metaphors, those it response to which we say, ‘That’s it exactly’ or ‘That really captures it‘ or ‘That says it all’.
Some literary and linguistic analysis, (e.g., Lewis, 1936 and Snell, 1953) and also people in everyday life, believe that there are experiences that can only be expressed metaphorically. And it is for this achievement that these metaphors, which may be entire poem or as lines or even words highly valued. But how can this be so? Just what in th e ‘it’ that the metaphor ‘is’ or ‘captures’ or ‘says’? If this ‘is’ or this ‘experience’ can only be rendered metaphorically, when we can know it only as such, that is, as the metaphor itself. Of the position out of which are put forward by, T.S, Eliot (1933) and E.W. Harding (1963) in their discussion of poetry, for in these instances we are granted that there is no known and logically independent version of the experience that can serve to validate the metaphor. Whatever the metaphor makes available to us depends on it and it and so cannot be used to prove its correctness.
It seems justifiable to conclude that the metaphor is a new experience rather than a mere paraphrase of an already fully constituted expedience. The metaphor creates an experience that one has never had before. It is an experience one has not realized by oneself. The metaphor does, of course, suggest certain constituent experiences of which one may have been more or less dimly aware. One may say, therefore, that the metaphor speaks for those constituents, on the existence of which much of its appeal depends. But in its organizing and implicit ly rendering these constituents in its new way, it is a creation rather than a mere paraphrase or anew edition. Paraphrasing and new editions never speak as forcefully as good new metaphors, nor could they facilitate further new experience. One analytically familiar feature of these creations is that they make it safe and pleasing to experience something that otherwise would be considered too threatening and so would be kept in fragmented obscurity through defensive measures.
Thus, when one says, ‘That’s it exactly’ one is implicitly recognizing and announcing that one has found and accepted a new mode of experiencing one’s self and one’s world, which is to say, asserting a transformation of one’s own subjectivity. Something is now said to be true, and in a sense it is true, but it is true for the first time. Nothing just like it can ever happen again, for the second time cannot be the same as the first. One can’ t step into the same watering point and then step once again into the same spot of that river. A revelatory metaphor re-encountered or repeated later may lose some of its force, alternatively, it may gain some significance, butt it cannot remain exactly the same metaphor or mobilize an experience identical with the first. The point applies as well as to new metaphors that are similar to familiar ones: They have to be judged or experienced through their conventionalized predecessors, as through methods of knowing or already proved instrumentally of perceiving. The audience and the performer, who may be one person, as such that may not have, as yet.
What is to be said about the psychology of metaphor is analogous to the transformational aspects of developed transference and the steadfast interpretation that both facilitate and organize them as transference. Allowing that these transferences and ‘remembered’ experiences come into existence over a period of time, nothing that is identical with them has ever before been enacted, and nothing will ever be enacted again. They are creations that may be fully achieved only under specific analytic conditions. Such that living was not reliving that moment, words like re-living, re-experiencing and reliving simply do not do justice to the phenomena, that in making this claim. A seeming contradiction over-writes some of our well-establish ideas. - in offering, - I am not contradicting some of our well-established ideas about interpretation and insight, I am , however, disputing the point that insight refers to much than the recovery of lost memories, and takes in as well, a new grasp of the significance and interpretations of events one has always remembered. In point, as, Freud pointed out, ‘As a matter of fact I’ve always known it, only that I’ve never thought of it; (1914), In fact, it is to develop that point in furthering to say that it takes an adult to do that, especially with the help of an analyst. It was, after all, Freud’s analysis of adults that make it possible to define infantile psychosexuality. In this respect, but without disregard, child analysis retains a quality of applied psychoanalysis’ in the same way that the interpreted transference neurosis is: Both are always of describing as true something that was not true in quite that way at the time of its greatest developmental significance. This apparent paradox about ‘remembering’ as a form of creating goes a long way, probably that what it is, is distinctive about psychoanalytic interpretation.
This time, however, to further the discussion on the interpretive technique that surrounds the phase of a mutative interpretation - that in which a portion of the patient’s id-relation to the analyst is made conscious in virtue of the latter’s position as auxiliary super-ego - is in itself complex. In the classical model of an interpretation, the patient will first be made aware of a state of tension of an interpretation, will next be made aware that there is repressive factor at work (that his super-ego is threatening him with punishment), and will only then be made aware of the id-impulse which has stirred up the protects of his super-ego and so given to the anxiety in his ego. This is the classical scheme. In actual practice, the analyst finds himself working from all three sides at once, or in irregular successions. At one moment a small portion of the patient‘s super-ego may be revealed to him in all its savagery, at another the shrinking defencelessness of his ego, at yet another his attention may be directed to the attempts which he is making at restitution - at compensating for his hostility, on some occasions a fraction of id-energy may even be directly encouraged to break its way through the last remains of an already weakened resistance. There is, however, one characteristic which all of these various operations have in common, they are essentially upon a small scale. For the mutative interpretation is inevitably governed by the principle of minimal doses. It is a commonly agreed clinical fact that alternations in a patient under analysis appear almost always to be extremely gradual: We are inclined to suspect sudden and large changes as an indication that suggestive rather than psycho-analyst processes are at work. The gradual nature of the change brought about in psychoanalysis will be explained, as, only to suggest, those changes are the result of the summation of an immense number of minuet steps, each of which correspond to a mutative interpretation. And the smallness of each step is in turn imposed by the very nature of the analytic situation. For each interpretation involves the release of a certain quantity of id-energy, and, if the quantity released is too large, the higher unstable state of equilibrium which enables the analyst to function as the patient’s auxiliary super-ego is bound to be upset. The whole analytic situation will thus be imperilled, since it is only in virtue of the analyst’s acting as auxiliary super-ego that these released id-energy can occur at all.
The effectuality from which follow the analytic attempt to bring unequalled amounts in the confronting collections of some improper use too a resultant quantity of id-energy into the patient’s consciousness all at once. On the one hand, nothing whatever may happen, or on the other hand there may be an unmanageable result, but in neither event will a mutative interpretation have been effected. The analyst’s power as auxiliary super-ego may be for two very different reasons. It may be that the id-impulses was trying to bring out were not in fact sufficiently urgent at the moment: For, after all, the emergence of an id-impulse depends on two factors - not only on the permission of the super-ego, but also on the urgency (the degree of cathaxis) of the id-impulse itself. This, then, may be one cause of an apparently negative response to an interpretation, and evidently a fairly harmless one. but the same apparent result may also be due to something else, in spite of the id-impulse being really urgent, the strength of the patient’s own repressive forces (the degree of repression) may have been too great to allow his ego to listen to the persuasive voice of the auxiliary super-ego. Now we have a situation dynamically identical with the next one we have to consider, though economically different. this next situation is one in which the patient accepts the interpretation, that is, allows the id-impulse into his consciousness, but is immediately overwhelmed with anxiety. This may show itself in a number of ways, for instance, the patient may produce a manifest anxiety-attack. Or the may exhibit signs of ‘real’ anger with the analyst with a complete lack of insight, or he may break off the analysis. In any of these cases the analytic situation will, for the moment, at least, have broken down. The patient will be behaving just as the hypnotic subject behaves when, having been ordered by the hypnotist to perform an action too much at variance with his own consciousness, he breaks off the hypnotic relation and wakes up from his trance. This state of things, which is manifest where the patient responds to an interpretation with an actual outbreak of anxiety or one of its equivalents, may be latent were the patient shows no response, and this latter case may be the more awkward of the two, since it is masked, and it may sometimes be the effect of a greater overdose of interpretation than where manifest anxiety arises (though obviously other factors will be of determining importance, and in particularly the nature of the patient’s neurosis). Yet this threatened collapse of the analytic situation to an overdose of interpretation: But it might be more accurate in some ways to ascribe it to an insufficient dose. For what has happened is that the second phase of the interpretation process has not occurred: The phase in which the patient becomes aware that his impulse is directed towards an archaic phantasy object and not toward a real one.
In the second phase of a complete interpretation, therefore, a crucial part is played by the patient’s sense of reality: For the successful outcome of that phase depends upon his ability, at the critical moment of the emergence into consciousness of the released quantity of id-energy, to distinguish between his phantasy object and the real analyst. The problem is closely related to one that has been discussed elsewhere, namely that of the extreme liability of the analyst’s position as auxiliary super-ego. The analytic situation is all the time threatening to degenerate into a ‘real’ situation. But this actually means the opposite of what it appears to. It means that the patient is all the time on the brink of turning the real external object (the analyst) into the archaic one; that is to say, he is on the brink of projecting his primitive introjected images onto himself. In so far as the patient actually does this, the analyst becomes like anyone else that he meets in real life - a phantasy object. The analyst then ceases to possess the peculiar advantages derived from the analytic situation, he will be introjected like all other phantasy objects into the analytic situation, he will be introjected like all other phantasy objects into the patient’s super-ego, and will no longer be able to function in the peculiar ways which are essential to the effecting of a mutative interpretation. In this difficulty the patient’s sense of reality is an essential but a very feeble-ally: An improvement in it is one of the things that we hope the analysis will bring about. It is important, therefore, not to submit it to any unnecessary strain, and that is the fundamental reason why the analyst must avoid any real behaviour, that is likely to confirm the patient’s view of him as a ‘bad’ or a ‘good’ phantasy object . This is perhaps more obvious as regards the ‘bad’ object. If, for instance, the analyst were to show that he was really shocked or frightened by one of the patient’s id-impulses, as the patient would immediately treat him in that respect as a dangerous object and introject him into his archaic severe super-ego. Therefore, on the one hand, there would be a diminuation in the analyst’s power to function as an auxiliary super-ego and to allow the patient’s to become conscious of his id-impulses - that is to say, in his power to bring about the first phase of a mutative interpretation, and on the other hand, he would, as a real object, become sensibly less distinguishable from the patient’s ‘bad’ phantasy object and to that extent the carrying through of the second phase of a mutative interpretation would also be made more difficult. Or, agin, there is another case. Supposing the analyst behaves in an opposite way and actively urges the patient to give free rein to his id-impulse. There is then a possibility of the patient confusing the analyst with the image of a treacherous parent who first encourages him to seek gratification, and then suddenly turns and punishes him. In such a case the patient’s ego may look for defence by itself suddenly turning upon the analyst as though he were his own id-, and treating him with all the severity of which his super-ego is capable. again, the analyst is running a risk of losing his privileged position. But it may be equally unwise for the analyst to act really in such a way as to encourage the patient to project his ‘good’ introjected object on to him. For the patient will then tend to regard him as a good objective and archaic sense and will incorporate him with his archaic ‘good’ images and will use him as a protection against his ‘bad’ ones. In that way, his infantile positive impulses as well as his negative ones may escape analysis, for there may no longer be a possibility for his ego to make a comparison between the phantasy external object and the real one. it will, perhaps, be argued that, with the best of wills in the world, the analyst, however careful he may be, will be unable to prevent the patient from projecting these various images on to him. This is, of course, indisputable, and, the whole effectiveness of analysis depends upon its being so. The lesson of these difficulties is merely to remind us that the patient’s sense of reality has the narrowest limits. It is a paradoxical fact that the best way of enuring that his ego shall be able to distinguish between phantasy and reality is to withhold reality from him as much as possible. but it is true, his ego is so weak - in as much at the mercy of his id and super-ego - that he can only cope with reality if it is administered in minimal doses. And these doses are in fact what the analyst gives him, in the form of interpretations.
In the classical conception of transference the patient was really concerned with the major persons in his childhood when addressing the analyst. More recently, the patient has come to be viewed as apt to be unconsciously engaged with the analyst while ostensibly absorbed in somebody else. To be sure, it may then be taken for granted that the analyst, inturn, stands for, say, a parent. But usually that point is not stressed, and the reaction which is interpreted is not one where the reaction does displace toward the analyst, but instead, away from him. Formerly, the perceptiveness of the analyst was to reveal the parent behind himself; now he may discover himself behind the parent or spouse. A typical contemporary case is a patient with ‘a disposition to pick quarrels with her husband because of his silence’, a conduct which ‘diverted a problem from the couch, where she did not verbalize her complaints about the analyst’s silence’. The analyst may thus always be present though never in the patient’s conscious mind’. ‘The quarrels with the husband became . . . the sole preoccupation of the patient’s and the sole content of the analytic sessions (Kanzer, 1961). Thus they were filled with what may be called as the ‘reactions of disguised transference’.
That no standard word already exists for this well-known, and, of course, important relationship, indicates how little awareness there has been that ‘transference‘ has, to a substantial extent, reversed its direction. That is, it travels more only from parent to analyst, but also from the analyst to a person of the patient’s past or present. The very magnitude of the shift - putting the analyst where the parent was - seems to have militated against lucidity about it. Sandler and his colleagues recall:
As the schizophrenic is suspicious, he will distrust the words of his analyst. He will interpret them and incidental gestures and attitudes of the analyst according to his own delusional experience. The analyst may not even be aware of these involuntary manifestations of his attitudes, yet they mean much to the hypersensitive schizophrenic who uses them as a means of orienting himself to the therapist‘s personality and intentions toward him.
In other words, the schizophrenic patient and the therapist are people living in different worlds and no different levels of personal development with different means of expressing and of orienting themselves. We know little about the language of the unconscious that belongs to the schizophrenic, and our access to it is blocked by the very process of our own adjustment to a world the schizophrenic has relinquished, so, we should not be surprised that errors and misunderstandings occur when we under take to communicate and strive for a rapport with him.
Another source of the schizophrenic’s disappointment arises form which the analyser accepts and does not interfere with the behaviour of the schizophrenic, his attitude may lead the patient to expect that the analyst will assist in carrying out all the patient’s wishes, even though they may not seem to be in his interest to the analyser‘s and the hospital’s in their relationship to society. This attitude of acceptance so different from the patient’s previous experiences readily fosters the anticipation that the analyst will try to carry out the patient’s suggestion and take his part, even against conventional society with which it should occasionally arise. Frequently it will be wise for the analyst to agree with the patient‘s wish to remain unbattled and untidy until he is ready to talk about the reasons for his behaviour or to change spontaneously. At other times, he will unfortunately be unable to take the patient’s part without being able to make the patient understand and accept the reasons for the analyst’s position.
If the analyst is not able to accept the possibility of misunderstanding the reaction of the schizophrenic patient and in turn of being misunderstood by him, it may shake his security with his patient.
That is to say, that, among other things, the schizophrenic, once he accepts the analyst’s insecurity. being helpless and open to himself - in spite of his pretended grandiose isolation - he will feel utterly defeated by the insecurity of his would-be helper. Such disappointment may furnish reasons for outbursts of hatred and are comparable to the negative transference reactions of psychoneurosis, yet more intense than these, since they are not limited by the restrictions of the actual world - that is, it exists in or based on fact, its only problem is a sure-enough externalization for which things are existing in the act of being external in something that has existence, ss if it were an actualization as received in the obtainable enactment for being externalized, such that its problem of in some actual life that proves obtainable achieved, in that of doing something that has an existence for having absolute actuality.
These outbursts are accompanied by anxiety, feelings of guilt, and fear of retaliations which in turn lead to increased hostility. Yet this established a vicious circle: We disappoint the patient, he is afraid that we hate him for his hatred and therefore continues to hate us. If in addition he senses that the analyst is afraid of his aggressiveness, it confirms his fear that he is actually considered as some dangerous and unacceptable, and this augments his hatred.
This establishes that the schizophrenics capable of developing strong relationships of love and hatred toward the analyst. After all, one could not be so hostile if it were not for the background of a very close relationship. In addition, the schizophrenic develops transference reactions on the narrower sense which he can differentiate from the actual interpersonal relationship. For which the schizophrenic’s emotional reactions toward the analyst have to be met with extreme care and caution. The love which the sensitive schizophrenic feels as he first emerges, and his cautions acceptance of the analyst’s warmth of interest is really most delicate and tender things. If the analyst deals with the transference reactions of a psychoneurotic is bad enough, though as a reparable rule, but if he fails with a schizophrenic in meeting positive feelings by pointing it out for instance before the patient indicates that he is ready to discuss it, he may easily freeze to death what has just begun to grow and so destroy any further possibility of therapy.
Some analysts may feel that the atmosphere of complete acceptance and of strict avoidance of any arbitrary denials which we recommend as a basic rule for the treatment of schizophrenics may not avoid our wish to guide of reacceptance of reality, nevertheless, Freud says that every science and therapy which accept his teachings about unconscious, about transference and resistance and about infantile sexuality, may be called psychoanalysis. According in this definition we believe we are practising psychoanalysis with our schizophrenic patients.
Whether we call it analysis or not, it is clear that successful treatment does not depend on technical rules of any special psychiatric school but rather on the basic attitude of individual therapist toward psychologic persons. If he meets them as strangle creatures of another world whose productions are not comprehensible to ‘normal’ beings, he cannot treat them, if he realizes, however, that the difference between himself and the psychologic is only of degree, and not of kind, he will know better how to meet him. He will not be able to identify himself sufficiently with the patient to understand and accept his emotional reactions without becoming involved in them.
The process of constant and perpetual change is examined and closely matched within the study of philosophical speculations and pointed of a world view which asserts that basic reality is constantly in a process of flux and change. Indeed, reality is identified with pure process. Concepts such as creativity, freedom, novelty, emergence, and growth are fundamental explanatory categories for process philosophy. This metaphysical perspective is to be contrasted with a philosophy of substance, the view that a fixed and permanent reality underlies the changing or fluctuating world of ordinary experience. Whereas substance philosophy emphasizes static being, process philosophy emphasizes dynamically becoming.
Although process philosophy is as old as the 6th-century Bc Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, renewed interest in it was stimulated in the 19th century by the theory of evolution. Key figures in the development of modern process philosophy were the British philosophers Herbert Spencer, Samuel Alexander, and Alfred North Whitehead, the American philosophers Charles S. Peirce and William James, and the French philosophers Henri Bergson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Whitehead's Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929) is generally considered the most important systematic expression of process philosophy.
Contemporary theology has been strongly influenced by process philosophy. The American theologian Charles Hartshorne, for instance, rather than interpreting God as an unchanging absolute, emphasizes God's sensitive and caring relationship with the world. A personal God enters into relationships in such a way that he is affected by the relationships, and to be affected by relationships is to change. So too is in the process of growth and development. Important contributions to process theology have also been made by such theologians as William Temple, Daniel Day Williams, Schubert Ogden, and John Cobb, Jr.
‘Reality’ is a difficult word to use to every one’s satisfaction or even to one’s own satisfaction. In this instance the word reality is used arbitrarily to designate the direct, here-and-now impact of the analyst upon the patient. Reality. In this sense, contrasts with the impact the analyst has through his representation in the patient’s fantasy life, neurosis, and transference, since both kinds of impact seem always to coexist and since the former - the analyst’s real impact - may be the worst enemy of the transference, the matter of their differentiation is possibly the most challenging aspect of analysis.
The analytic situation, which is set up to shut out ordinary reality intrusions, that can. . . .neither nor should not exclude all, but to say, that in the beginning months, for instance, reality inevitably has the upper hand. The analyst, the office, the procedure, are all overwhelmingly real. Everything is strange, frightening and exciting, gratifying and frustrating. Unlike the patient can test it and orient himself to it, the impact of this reality is usually so great that even an ordinary useful transference relationship cannot be expected to develop.
Perhaps the most confusing aspect of this beginning period is the frequent appearance in it of what can be regarded as a false transference relationship. With great intensity and clarity, the patient may reveal, through transference-like references about the analyst, some of the deepest secrets only of his neurosis but of its genesis. The pseudotransference, too good to be true, is almost sure to be nothing more than the patient’s attempt to deal with the person of the analyst, the entire spectrum of his various patterns of behaviour. If, it is easy to do, the analyst overlooks the likelihood that the patient’s relationship with at this time is really about that almost everything said about it is related, analysis may get off to a very bad start. And if, as is even earlier to do, the analyst’s interests the genetic meaning of the openly exposed material, a good transference relationship may be seriously delayed and a workable transference neurosis may never appear. even after initial reality has had time to fade, reality may continue to intrude in ways that are very hard to detect and that are very troublesome.
One of the most serious problems of analysis is the very substantial help which the patient receives directly from the analyst and the analytic situation. For many a patient, the analyst in the analytic situation is in fact the most stable, reasonable, wise and understanding person he has ever met, and the setting in which they meet may actually be the most honest, open, direct and regular relationship he has ever experienced. Added to this is the considerable helpfulness to him of being able to clarify his life storey. confess his guilt, express his ambitions, and explore his confusions. Further real help comes from the learning-about-life accruing from the analyst’s skilled questions, observations and interpretations. Taken together, the total real value to the patient of the analytic situation can easily be immense. The trouble with this kind of help is that it goes on and on, it may have such a real, direct and continuing impact upon the patient that he can never get deeply enough involved in transference situation to allow him to resolve or even to become acquainted with his most crippling internal difficulties. The trouble is far too good, the trouble also is that we as analysts apparently cannot resist the seductiveness of being directly helpful, and this, when combined with the compelling assumption that helpfulness is bound to be good, permits us to credit the patient’s improvements to ‘analysis’ when more properly it should often be recognized for being the amounting result for the patient’s using the analytic situation, as the model, for being the preceptors and supporter in the dealing practically within the immediate distractions as holding to some problem.
Perhaps, we can now refer to something in a clear unmistakable manner, and it would be to mention, for being, that one more difficult-to-handle intrusion of reality into the analysis, that by saying, that this is the definitive and final interruption of the transference neurosis by the reality of termination; in the sense, the situation is reversed and the intrusion is analytically desirable, since ideally the impact of reality of impending and certain termination is used to facilitate the resolution of the transference. As with the resolution of earlier episodes of transference neurosis, this final one is brought about principally by the analyst’s interpretations and reconstructions. As these take effect, the transference neurosis and, hopefully, along with it the original neurosis is resolved. This final resolution, however, which is much more comprehensive, is usually very different and may not come about at all without the help of the reality of termination. Accordingly, any attenuation of the ending, such as tapering off or causal or tentative stopping, should be expected to stand in the way of an effective resolution of the transference. Yet, it seems that this is what most commonly happens to an ending, and because of this a great many patients may lose the potentially great benefit of a thorough resolution and are forever after left suspended in the net of unresolved transference.
Yet, slurring over a rigorous termination seems understandable, as difficult as transference neurosis may be in the analyst at other times, this ending period, if rigorously carried out, simply has to be the period of his greatest emotional strain. There can surely be no more likely time for an analyst to surrender his analytic position and, responding to his own transference, become personally involved with his patient than during the process of separating from a long and self-restrained relationship. Accordingly, it may be better to slur over the ending lightly than to mishandle it in an attempt to be rigorous.
In considering more broadly the function of the transference in the psychoanalytic process, one is confronted by the apparent naïve, but, nonetheless important questions of the role of the actual (current) object as compared with that of the object representation of the original personage in the past. We recall Freud’s paradoxical, somewhat gloomy, but portentous concluding passage in ‘The Dynamics of Transference.’ This struggle between the doctor and the patient, between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out almost exclusively in the phenomena of transference. It is on that field that the victory must be won - the victory whose expression is on that field that the victory must be won - the victory whose expression is the permanent cure of the neuroses. It cannot be disputed that controlling the phenomena of transference presents the psychoanalysis with the greatest difficultly, but it should not be forgotten that they do us the inestimable service of making the patient ‘s hidden and forgotten erotic impulses of showing their immediate and manifested impossibilities, for when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigies.
Both object and representation are made necessary by the basic phenomenon of original separation. The existence of an image of the object, which persist in the absence of the object, is one of the important beginnings of psychic life in general, certainly an indispensable prerequisite for object relationship. As generally construed. Whether this is viewed as (or a times demonstrably is) something unstable for allotting introjection, s always subject to alternative projection, or an intrapsychic object representation clearly distinguished from the self-representation, or firm identification in the superego, or in the ego itself, these phenomena are in various ways components of the system of mastery of the fact of separation, or separateness, from the original absolutely necessarily anaclitic (in the earliest period) symbiotic ‘object’. In the light of clinical observation, it would appear to be that the relative stability (parental) object representation. At which time of varying degree, are to a greater extent for the archaic phenomena. Even in nonpsychotic patients, overwhelmed by them, sometimes resembles the restoration from oedipal identification, which provides the preponderant basis for most demonstrable analytic transferences. That within the necrotic patients, the transference is effectively established when this representation invests the analyst to a degree - depending on intensity of drive and most of ego participation - which ranges in all the, wishing and strivings to remake and analyst to biasses judgements and misinterpretation of data, finally are the actual perceptual distortions.
However, the old object representations as such may be invested, however rigidly established the libidinal or aggressive cathexis of the image may be, this as such can become the actual and exclusive focus of instinctual discharge, or of complicated and intense instinct-defence solutions, only and general energy-sparing quality of strictly intrapsychic processes. For the vast majority of persons, visible to any degree, including those with severe neurosis, character distortions, addictions and certain psychoses, the striving is toward the living and actual object, even at the cost of intense suffering. In a sense, this returns us to the state in which the psychological ‘object-to-be’. Has a critical importance never again to be duplicated, except in certain acute life emergencies, even if the object is not firmly perceived as such, in the sense of later object relations? And it does seem that trance impressions from the earliest contacts in the service of life preservation, and the associated instinctual gratifications, and innumerable secondarily associated sensory impressions. Are activated by the specific inborn urges of sexual maturation? These propel the individual to renew many of the earliest modes of actual bodily contact, in connection with seeking for specific instinctual gratification. Or, to look away from clear-cut instinctual matters to the more remote elaborations of human contact: Few regard loneliness as other than a source of suffering, even self-imposed, as an apparent matter of choice, and the forcible imposition of ‘solitary confinement ‘ is surely one of the most cruel of punishments.
In taking to question, we are entering an area of life in which things are other then themselves, where meaning is multifaceted, and where the line between the old and the new is blurred. It should, by, its immediate measure, help develop our recognition or meaning of the pertinent applicability as to the relevance of interrelated aspects of the psychology of ‘metaphor’. In the psychology of metaphor we will find a useful analogy to the psychology of transference interpretation. Our’s will be newly encountered as good metaphors, those it response to which we say, ‘That’s it exactly’ or ‘That really captures it‘ or ‘That says it all’.
Some literary and linguistic analysis, (e.g., Lewis, 1936 and Snell, 1953) and also people in everyday life, believe that there are experiences that can only be expressed metaphorically. And it is for this achievement that these metaphors, which may be entire poem or as lines or even words highly valued. But how can this be so? Just what in th e ‘it’ that the metaphor ‘is’ or ‘captures’ or ‘says’? If this ‘is’ or this ‘experience’ can only be rendered metaphorically, when we can know it only as such, that is, as the metaphor itself. Of the position out of which are put forward by, T.S, Eliot (1933) and E.W. Harding (1963) in their discussion of poetry, for in these instances we are granted that there is no known and logically independent version of the experience that can serve to validate the metaphor. Whatever the metaphor makes available to us depends on it and it and so cannot be used to prove its correctness.
It seems justifiable to conclude that the metaphor is a new experience rather than a mere paraphrase of an already fully constituted expedience. The metaphor creates an experience that one has never had before. It is an experience one has not realized by oneself. The metaphor does, of course, suggest certain constituent experiences of which one may have been more or less dimly aware. One may say, therefore, that the metaphor speaks for those constituents, on the existence of which much of its appeal depends. But in its organizing and implicit ly rendering these constituents in its new way, it is a creation rather than a mere paraphrase or anew edition. Paraphrasing and new editions never speak as forcefully as good new metaphors, nor could they facilitate further new experience. One analytically familiar feature of these creations is that they make it safe and pleasing to experience something that otherwise would be considered too threatening and so would be kept in fragmented obscurity through defensive measures.
Thus, when one says, ‘That’s it exactly’ one is implicitly recognizing and announcing that one has found and accepted a new mode of experiencing one’s self and one’s world, which is to say, asserting a transformation of one’s own subjectivity. Something is now said to be true, and in a sense it is true, but it is true for the first time. Nothing just like it can ever happen again, for the second time cannot be the same as the first. One can’ t step into a stream of the same watering point and then step once again into the same spot. A revelatory metaphor re-encountered or repeated later may lose some of its force, alternatively, it may gain some significance, but it cannot remain exactly the same metaphor or mobilize an experience identical with the first. The point applies as well as to new metaphors that are similar to familiar ones: They have to be judged or experienced through their conventionalized predecessors, as through methods of knowing or already proved instrumentally of perceiving. The audience and the performer, who may be one person, as such that may not have, as yet.
What is to be said about the psychology of metaphor is analogous to the transformational aspects of developed transference and the steadfast interpretation that both facilitate and organize them as transference. Allowing that these transferences and ‘remembered’ experiences come into existence over a period of time, nothing that is identical with them has ever before been enacted, and nothing will ever be enacted again. They are creations that may be fully achieved only under specific analytic conditions. Such that living was not reliving that moment, words like re-living, re-experiencing and reliving simply do not do justice to the phenomena, that in making this claim. A seeming contradiction over-writes some of our well-establish ideas. - in offering, - I am not contradicting some of our well-established ideas about interpretation and insight, I am , however, disputing the point that insight refers to much than the recovery of lost memories, and takes in as well, a new grasp of the significance and interpretations of events one has always remembered. In point, as, Freud pointed out, ‘As a matter of fact I’ve always known it, only that I’ve never thought of it; (1914), In fact, it is to develop that point in furthering to say that it takes an adult to do that, especially with the help of an analyst. It was, after all, Freud’s analysis of adults that make it possible to define infantile psychosexuality. In this respect, but without disregard, child analysis retains a quality of applied psychoanalysis’ in the same way that the interpreted transference neurosis is: Both are always of describing as true something that was not true in quite that way at the time of its greatest developmental significance. This apparent paradox about ‘remembering’ as a form of creating goes a long way, probably that what it is, is distinctive about psychoanalytic interpretation.
In steadfastly and perspicaciously making transference interpretation. This newness characterizes the experience of analytic transference themselves. Unlike extra-analytic transferences, they can no longer be sheerly repetitive or merely new editions. Instead, they become repetitive new editions understood as such because defined as such by the simplifying and steadfast transference interpretations. Instead of responding to the analysand in kind, which would actualize the repetition, the analyst makes an interpretation. This interpretation does not necessarily or regularly match something the analysand already knows or has experienced unconsciously. Although, the analysand does often seem to have already represented some things unconsciously in the very terms of the interpretation. Equally often he does not seem to have done so at all. To think otherwise about this would be, in effect, to claim that, unconsciously, every analysand is Freud or a fully insightful Freudian. And that claim is absurd.
It would be closer to the truth to say this: Unconsciously, the analysand already knows or has experienced fragmentary, amorphous, uncoordinated constituents of many of the transference interpretations. Alternatively, one may say that, implicitly, the analysand has been insisting on some as yet unspecified certainties and, in keeping with this, following some set of as yet unspecified rules in his actions, these transference interpretations now organize explicitly. Each transference interpretation refers to many things that have already been defined by the analysand, and it does so in a way that transforms them. That’s why one may call it interpretation, otherwise it would be mere repeating or sterile paraphrasing. Interpretation is a creative redescription that implicitly has the structure of a simile. It says, ‘This is like that’, Each interpretation does, therefore, add new actions to the life and analysand had already lived.
Technically, redescription in the terms of transference-repetition is necessary. This is so because, up to the time of interpretation and working through, the analysand has been, in one sense, unable and, in another sense, unconsciously and desperately unwilling, to conduct his life differently. in and of themselves, the repetitions cannot alter the symptoms, the subjective distress, and wasting of one’s possibilities, rather, they can only perpetuate state situation by repeatedly confirming its necessity. They prove once again, the unconsciously maintained, damaging certainties. But once they get to be viewed as historically grounded actions and subjectively defined situations, as they do upon being interpreted and worked through, they appear as having always been, in crucial respects, inventions of the analysand’s making and, so, as his responsibility. in being seen as versions of one’s past life. As they may be changed in significant and beneficial ways. Less and less are they presented as purely inevitable happenings, as a fixed state or as the well-established way of the world. As, here, we encounter a second paradox that goes to the heart of psychoanalytic interpretation, namely, that responsible, insightful change is possible thorough psychoanalysis just because, as a child, the analysand mistakenly assumed and then denied responsibility for much that he encountered in the early formative environment and during maturation.
One major point remains to be made about the logic of viewing transference interpretation as simplifying yet innovative redescription. This point is that the interpretation bring about a coordination of the terms in which to state both the analysand’s current problems and their life-historical background. The analysand’s symptoms and desires are described as actions and , modes of action, with due regard for the principle of multiple function or multiple meaning, in coordination with that description, the decisive developmental situations and conflicts are stated as actions and modes of action. Continuity is established between the childhood constructions of relationships and self and the present constructions of these. Interpretation of transferences shows how both are part of the same set of practice, that is, how they follow the same set of rules. Past and present are coordinated to show continuity rather than arranged in a definite causal sequence.
In the same way, the form of analytic behaviour and the content of associations are given coordinate descriptions, say, as being defiant, devouring, or reparative. Or, in the case of depression, the depressive symptoms, the depressive analytic transference, the themes of present and past loss destructiveness and helplessness, all will be redecribed under the aspect of one continuously developing self-presentation. And this coordination will be worked out in the hermeneutically circular fashion in which the analyst defines both the facts to be explained and the explanations to be applied to these facts. In the end, as is well known, Both the paramount issues of the analysis and the leading explanatory account of them are likely to be significantly different from the provisional versions of them used at the beginning of the analysis.
This is the sophisticated cognitive simplification that promotes the convincing development and recognition of transference and the emotional experiencing of the past as it is now remembered. The coordination of terms is the only way to break into the vicious circle of the neurosis disturbance and reduce its unconsciously self-confirming character. New meaning is established by steadfast interpretation of transference and the condition for loving of which they are enactments.
That this kind of analytic work is not simply intellectual but shown in the analytic presentations that analysand was now operating according to rules which, through previous transference interpretations and coordination of terms, had changed. The changed rules were implicit in this hitherto-avoided experiencing of the past. It was not re-experiencing, or not mainly that: In its special way, it was experiencing that past for the first time.
It should take to be marked and noted, and, if not only to mention of two implications of which (1) The transference phenomena that finally constitute the transference e neurosis and to be taken as regressive in only some of their aspects. This is so because, viewed as achievements of the analysis, they have never existed before as such, rather, they constitute a creation achieved through a novel relationship into which one has entered by conscious and rational design. The analytic definition of the conditions for loving has never been arrived at before: They have never been simplified, organized, intensified, and transparent as they get to be in the analytically circumscribed and identified transference neurosis. It seems a more adequate or balanced view of transference neurosis. It seems a more adequate or balanced view of transference phenomena to regard them as multidirectional in meaning rather than as simply regressive or repetitive. This would be to look at them in as ways that are analogous to the way we look at creative works of art. We would see the transference as creating the past in the present, in a special analytic way and under favourable conditions. Essentially, they represent movement forward, and not backward.
And, (2) It is wrong to think that interpretation deals only in what is concealed or disguised or, what is its correlate, that ‘the unconscious’ is omniscient. In particular, it cannot be the case that ‘the unconscious’ knows all about transference and repetition, By establishing new connections, comprehensive context, and coordinated perspectives on familiar actions, interpretation creates new meanings or new actions. Not everything that has yet been organized has been actively kept apart by defensive measures, not everything that has not yet been recognized has been denied. This point is obvious, but it is often obscured by formulation, some of Freud’s among them, which suggest that interpretation is only just uncovering (Fingarette, 1963).
What, then, is interpretation? And how does it work? Extremely little seems to be known about it, but this does not prevent an almost universal belief in its remarkable efficacy as a weapon. Interpretation has, it must be confessed, many of the qualities of a magic weapon. It is, of course, felt as such by many patients. Some of them spend hours at a time in providing interpretations of their own - often ingenious, illuminating, correct. others, again, derive a direct libidinal gratification from being given interpretations and may even circulate interpretation is usually either scoffed at as something indicated or develop something parallel to a drug-addition to them. In some non-analytical circles interpretation is usually either scoffed at as something ludicrous or dreaded as a frightful danger. This last attitude is shared, as more than is often realized, by a certain number of analysts. This was particularly revealed by the reactions shown in many quarters when the idea of giving interpretations to small children was first mooted by MeIanie Klein. However, it is believed that it would be true in general to say, that analysts are incline to feel interpretation as something extremely powerful whether for good or ill. And there might seem to be a good many grounds for thinking that our feelings on the subject tend to distort our beliefs, at all events, many of these beliefs seem superficially to be contradictory, and the contradictions do not always spring from different schools of though, but are apparently sometimes held simultaneously by one individual. Thus, we are told that if we interpret too soon or too rashly, we rum the risk of losing a patient: That interpretation may give rise to intolerable and unmanageable outbreaks of anxiety by ‘liberating’ it. That interpretation is the only way of enabling a patient to cope with an unmanageable outbreak of anxiety by ‘resolving’ it. That interpretation must always refer to material on the very point of emerging into consciousness, that the most useful interpretations are rally deep ones’ Be cautious with your interpretations;, says one voice, ‘When in doubt, interpret’ says another. Nevertheless, although there is enviably a good deal of confusion in all of this. Do not think these views are necessarily incompatible: The various pieces of advice may turn out to refer to different circumstances and different cases and to imply different uses of the word ‘interpretation’.
For the word is evidently used in more than on sense. It is, after all, perhaps, only a synonym for the old phrase we have already come across - ‘making what unconscious conscious and it shares all of the phrase’s ambiguities. For in one sense, if you give a German-English dictionary to someone who knows no German, you will be giving him a collection of interpretations, what is more, is the kind of sense in which the nature of interpretation has been discussed in a recent paper by Bernfield. Such descriptive interpretations have no relevance to our present topic, nonetheless, in proceeding, the actuality as dispensed among the ultimate instrumentation of psycho-analytic therapy and to which for convenience the name ‘mutative’ interpretation is so that is, given a schematized outline of what is understood by a view to clarify of expositional instances for which the interpretation of hostile impulses are by virtue of this power (his strictly limited power) as auxiliary super-ego, that the analyst gives permission for a certain small quantity of the patient’s id-energy (in our instance, in the form of an aggressive impulse), the object of the patient’s id-impulses, the quality of these impulses which is now released into consciousness will become consciously directed toward the analyst. This is the critical point. If all goes well, the patient’s ego will become aware of the contrast between the aggressive character of his feelings and the real nature of the analyst, who does not behave like the patient’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’ archaic objects. The patient, that is to say, will become aware of a distinction between his archaic phantasy object and the real external object. The interpretation has now become a mutative one, since it has produced a breach in the neurotic vicious circle. For the patient, having become aware of the lack of aggressiveness in the real external object, will be able to diminish his own aggressiveness; the new object which he introjects will be less aggressive, and consequently, the aggressiveness of his super-ego will also diminish, as, too, the further corollary of these events. And with them the patient will obtain access to the infantile material which is being re-experienced by him in his relation to the analyst.
Something as taken or advanced as fact, that is in having the quality of becoming actual and not confuted in being of such a comparison with an expressed or implied standard or absolute, that we are now found to embark upon a description of the successive phases of therapy with the chronically schizophrenic adult patient. The ‘Out-of-contact’ phase’, is not properly or sufficiently attended to or in progress of any measurable extent over which of something exists, however, the term is phraseologically accessible to meaning, such that I do not term this the ‘autistic phase’, for the reason that the word ‘autistic’ has come to have a certain connotation, in psychodynamic theory, which is regarded as invalid and therefore do not advocate. Specifically, the term ‘autistic’, as generally used, conjures up Freud’s (1911) psychodynamic formulation of schizophrenia as involving withdrawal of libido from the outer world and its subsequent investment in the self-as involving of a regression into narcissism. Instead, however, is that there occurs in schizophrenia, a regressive dedifferentiation toward an early level of ego-development which has its prototype in the experience of a young infant for whom the inner and outer worlds have not yet become clearly distinguishable, as an amount of anxiety which is related to the unfamiliarity as found to be the major sources of anxiety in individuals suffering from [paranoid] schizophrenia. Where the sources of such anxiety is variously ego-defensive by phenomena. We well know that to any psychiatric patient himself, the threatening affects present themselves not undistortedly, but in forms modified by ego-defences which, although intently protective, at the same time distortions that may appear as something experiential in a strange and frightening way.
He finds himself unable to renounce any concern with that of the other patients, exceptions are those patients whose projections attach not to any real-life figure at all, but to quite pure-culture alter-ego. And reach their of peace about the matter. For in actuality this would be tantamount to repudiating important components of himself, moreover, the other person is necessary to him as the bearer of these externalized (e.g., projected) emotions. Bu t, cannot find peace through a friendly acceptance of the prosecutory figure, for this would b e unsurmountable to accept, however, his own picture of himself, various qualities abhorrent to him. So an uneasy equilibrium is maintained, with his experiencing a gnawing, threatened, absorbing concern with the prosecutory figure whom he cannot rid from his mind (this is in line with the formulation of Werner (1940) and Loewald (1960)).
It leaves to appear with great interest, that Mahler and Furer (1960) emphasize that ‘Our first therapeutic endeavour in both types of infantile psychosis (i.e., both autistic and symbiotic) is to engage the child in a ‘corrective symbiotic experience’ . . . Loewald (1960) too, report that what a symbiotic relatedness occurs in the schizophrenic patient’s transference to the therapist: As he puts it, . . If ego and objects are not clearly differentiated, if ego boundaries and object boundaries are not clearly established, the character of transference also is different, In as much as ego and objects are still largely merged. . . .
Such that the therapist, operating from this basic-orientation can meet usefully a wide variety of typical problem-situations, that which is in response to the patient‘s manifestation of delusional thinking, he will be aware that, for the patient, the delusions represent years of arduous and subjectively constructive thought, and are therefore most deeply cherished. He will not forget that obscured that obscures them is an indispensable nucleus of reality-perception. Likewise, when a patient is having vigorously to disavow any feeling about a clearly affect -laden matter, the therapist will remain in tune with the patient‘s own feeling experience, by remarking, ‘I gather you don’ t find yourself having any particular feeling about this’ - or. Better, will make no mention of feeling - rather than try to overcome the unconscious denial by asserting: But ‘ surely this must make you very angry (or hurt, or whatever). Similarly, in response to the expressions of an archaic, harsh, superego in the patient, rather than set himself up as the spokesman, the personification, of the repressed id-impulses, he will realize that it is in the superego that the patient’s conscious self-his personal identity-mainly resides: Thus, he will seldom urge the patient to recognize sexual or aggressive feelings within, and will more often acknowledge how strong a sense of protest or outrage the patient feels upon perceiving these in others.
To the extent that the therapist is free from a compulsion to rescue the suffering patient, he can remain sufficiently extricated from that suffering to be able to note significant sequence in the appearance of such symptoms as hallucinations, verbalized delusions, and so forth, and thus be in a position to be genuinely helpful. Even when on a car ride with a patient, or grappling with the latter’s physical assault , the therapist may on occasion be able to allow himself enough detachment to help the patient situations from earlier life, such ‘action interpretations’ may be especially important to the patient whose memory and whose capacity for abstract thinking are severely impaired.
Thus, one places in the long run a minimum of pressure on the patient who is already paralysed with pressure, and keeps oneself in a comparatively unanxious and receptive state which, better than anything else, helps eventually to relieve the patient’s anxiety and unlock his tongue. Sooner or later, like a bright dawn pushing back a long night, the patient will put his rusty vocalization capacities to work in venting reproach, contempt, and fury upon the therapist for doing, as the patient sees it, nothing to help him.
The therapist learns to take fewer and fewer things for grantee in his work, to question more and more of his long-held assumptions and discard many of them. He learns that one does not set a ceiling upon human beings’ potential growth. He finds recurrent delight in the creative spontaneity with which the schizophrenic patient pierces the sober and constructing wrapping of our culture’s conventions, and he discovers that humour is present in his work in rich abundance, leaving the genuine tragedy and helping to make it supportable. While developing a deep confidence in his intuitive ability, when working with the severely fragmented or differentiated patient he will not jump too quickly to attempted communicated ‘closure’ (in the Gestalt sense), but will leave it in the patient’s hands to do, no matter how slowly and painfully, the parts of the communicational work which only he can do. Meanwhile, he will not need no shield himself, through the maintenance of an urgently and actively ‘helpful’ or ‘rescuing’ attitude, from feeling at a deep level the impact of the fragmented and differentiated world, with its attendment feelings, in which the patient exists. The unfolding of such feeling experiences, the therapist of the next phase of the therapy, the ‘urgently helpful’ therapist attitude is unconsciously designed to avert, comparable to the defensive function. In the patient, of the latter’s schizophrenic delusions.
From a purely descriptive viewpoint, schizophrenia an be seen to consist essentially in an impairment of both ‘integration’ and ‘differentiation’ - which are but opposite faces of a unitary growth process. From a psychodynamic viewpoint as well, this malfunctioning of integration-and-differentiation seems basic to all the bewilderingly complex and varied manifestations of schizophrenia.
Taking first the matter of integration: When we assess the schizophrenic individual in terms of the classically structural areas of the personality - id, ego, and superego - we discover these to be poorly integrated with one another. The id is experienced by the ego as a Pandora’s box, the contents of which will overwhelm one if it is opened. The ego is, as many writers have stated, severely split, sometimes into innumerable islands which are not linked discernibly with one another. And the superego unintegrated ego are, if anything, even more destructive to it than are the accessions of the threatening id-impulses, as Szalita-Pemow (1951), Hill (1955) and others have emphasized. Moreover, the superego is, like the ego, even in itself not well integrated, its utterances contain the most glaring inconsistencies from one moment to the next. Jacobson (1954) has shown that there is actually a dissolution of the superego, as an integral structure - a regressive transformation back into the threatening parental images whose conglomeration originally formed it.
Differentiation is a process which is essentially to integration, and vice versa, for personality structure-functions or psychic contents to become integrated, they must first have emerged as partially differentiated or separated from one another, and differentiation in turn can emerge only out of a foundation of more or less integrated function or contents.
When we look at this process of differentiation in the schizophrenic person, we find it to be, similarly, severely impaired . It is difficult or impossible for him to differentiate between himself and the outer world. He often cannot distinguish between memories and present perceptions, memories experienced with hallucinatory vividness and immediacy are sensed as perceptions of present events. And perceptions of present events may be experienced as memories from the past. He may be unable to distinguish between emotions and somatic sensations, feelings from the emotional sphere often come through to him as somatic sensations, or even variations in his somatic structure (changes in the size, colour and so forth, of bodily parts).
He cannot distinguish between thoughts and feelings on the one hand, and action on the other: Thus, if the therapist encourages him to explore thoughts and feelings of a sexual or murderous nature, for example, he feels that the therapist is trying to invite him into sexual activity, or incite him to murder. He may be unable to differentiate, perceptually, one person from another, so that he is prone to misidentify them.
In the conduct of his daily life and in his communicating with other persons, he is unable, as Bateson et al. has reported, to distinguish between the symbolic and the concrete. If his therapist uses symbolic language, he may experience this in literal terms, and, on the other hand, the affairs of daily life (eating, dressing, sleeping and so on) which we think of as literal and concrete, he may react to as possessing a unique symbolic significance which completely obscures their ‘practical’ importance in his life as being part of the untold story for being human.
However, in the schizophrenic these two processes, that is to say, that of integration and differentiation, that tend to be out of step with one another, so that at one moment a patient’s more urgent need may be for increased integration, whereas at another he may more urgently need increased differentiation. And there are some patients who show for months on end a more urgent need in one of these areas, before the alternate growth-phase comes on the scene. Thus there is a modicum of validity in speaking of two different ‘types’ of schizophrenic patients. This distinction is largely artificial, but it is useful for purposes of serving to explain of something that makes clear what is obscure bu t not readily understood or grasped from the main centres of human activity.
One comes to realize, how premature have been one’s efforts to find out what feelings the patient is experiencing or what thoughts he is having: One comes to realize that much of the time he has neither feelings nor thoughts differentiated as such and communicable to us.
Such differentiation as the patient possess tends to crumble when intense emotion enters his awareness. A paranoid man, for example, may find that when his hatred toward another person reaches a certain degree of intensity, he is flooded with anxiety because he no longer knows whether he hates, or instead, ‘really loves’ the other individual. This is not based, as primarily upon the mechanism which Freud (1911) outlined in his classical description of the nature of paranoid delusions of persecution, a description in which repressed homosexual love played the central role. the central difficulty is rather that the ego is too poorly differentiated to maintain its structure in the face of such powerful affects, and the patient becomes overwhelmed with what can only be described as ‘undifferentiated passion’, precisely as one finds an infant to be overwhelmed at times with affect which the observer cannot specifically identify as any one kind of emotion.
As for the feelings which the therapist himself experiences in working with the ‘non-differentiated type’ of patient, we fund, again, a persistent threat of the therapist’s sense of identity. But whereas, in the instance the threat was felt predominantly as a disturbance of one’s personal integration, it is felt predominantly as a weakening of one’s sense of differentiation. In this instance, the ‘therapeutic symbiosis’ which a necessary development, tends to occur earlier, for this patient’s predominant mode of relatedness with other persons, at the developmental level at which point we find him at the very beginning of a symbiotic relatedness among others, that is to say, with its subjective absence of ego-boundaries, involves not only special gratification but anxiety-provoking disturbances of one’s sense of personal identity.
The comparatively rapid development of symbiotic relatedness is facilitated by the patient’s characteristically non-verbal, therapeutic sessions. In response, the therapist’s own behaviour becomes more and more similar, so that each participant is now offering to the other, the intermittence over which of times are silent, impassive screen which facilitates abundant mutual projecting and introjecting. Thus a symbiotic state is likely to be reached earlier than in one’s work with the typically much more verbal type of patient whom, for instance, that the patient’s and the therapist’s more abundant verbalizations tend persistently to stress the ego-boundaries separating the two persons from one another.
With the predominantly non-differentiated patient, the therapist’s sense of identity as a complexly differentiated individual entity becomes further eroded, or undermined, as he finds the patient persistently operating on the unwavering conviction, that, time after time, that the therapist is but an undifferentiated aspect of the whole vague mass of which his own poorly differentiated hostility, but which in the patient’s tenaciously held view, is the way the world around him really is.
Further, since the patient typically verbalized little but a few maddeningly monotonous stereotypes, the therapist tends to feel over the course of time, with so little of his own intellectual content being explicitly tapped in the relationship, that his richness of intellect is progressively rusting away - becoming less differentiated, more stereotyped and rudimentary. Moreover, the patient presents but one of two emotional wave-lengths to which the therapist can himself tune in. Rather than a rich spectrum of emotion which calls into resource a similarly wide range of feelings from the therapist himself. Thus not only the therapist’s intellectual resources, but his emotional capacities too, become subjectively narrowed down and impoverished, as he finds that his patient evokes in him neither any wide range of ideas, nor any emotion except, for example, rage, or contempt, or dull hopelessness.
This feeling experience on his part, anxiety-provoking and discouraging though he finds it, is a necessary therapeutic development. it is necessary, that is, for him thus to experience at first hand something of the patient’s own lack of differentiation, for, as in the therapy with the non-integrated patient, that, again, the healing process occurs external to the patient, as it were, at an intrapsychic level in the therapist, before it becomes established in the patient himself. That is, the therapist’s coming to view the patient, his relationship with the patient, and himself in this relationship, all as being largely non-differentiated, is a development which sets the stage for the patient’s gradually increasing differentiation. Now the therapist comes too sense, time after time, newly emerging tendrils of differentiation in the patient, before the latter is himself conscious of them. In responding to these with spontaneity as they show themselves, time and again, that the therapist helps the patient to become aware that they are a part of him. But there are times when a therapist can only say that he feels a new response in himself in reaction to behaviour which objectively seems as stereotyped as ever.
Thus a heavy reliance upon one’s intuition is a technical point, although a second point concerns the relatively sparing use of transference interpretation - perhaps, more sparing than in one’s work with the predominantly non-integrated, or fragmented, patient. in the instance of that first ‘type’ of patient, such that transference interpretations may have a specific value in fostering the patient’s wholeness, his integration, by focussing his disparate personality fragments into the context of the patient-therapist relationship. But the predominantly non-differentiated patient, who is, above all trying to branch out, in his interpersonal relationships and in his intrapsychic content, beyond the immediate, symbiotic situation with the therapist, premature transference interpretations which tend to bring it all back to the relationship with his therapist - which tend, that is, to reduce divergent ramifications of meaning to this one idea that something conveys to the mind as the one purpose to accomplish or do, as such is the intention of meaning.
The third and last technical point is, like the others, a function of the growth process of a process which involves both patient and the therapist. The patient’s differentiation is fostered not only by the therapist’s sensing, and responding to, an increasingly differentiated person in him, but also by the therapist’s permitting his own personality differentiation, his own complex individuality which was to a greater extent, already firmly established before beginning work with this patient, to come more and more freely into play in the therapeutic relationship. At a crucial point is, for example, he must have the courage to act upon the course that his own intuition directs, in deferring sharply from the patient - to be the person he knows himself to be and to address the person he knows to inhabit the patient’s body , no matter how sharply this conflicts with the patient’s own image of himself and of his therapist. Whereas, it was essential earlier to allow the anxiety-arousing symbiosis to develop, now the therapist must find similar courage to help determinedly in its resolution. In asserting increasingly his own complex individuality, he provides the patient with an increasingly clearly differentiated person with whom to identify and over against whom to become conscious of his own separate self.
That the states of what are called non-integration and non-differentiation should be thought of as not merely rather fixed levels of maturation or regression at which a patient exists over a long period of time, but as flexible defences of the ego against overwhelming anxiety. Thus, from noticing at what moments in the theopathic session, or at what junctures over the long course of treatment, a patient’s characteristic non-integration or non-differentiation notably increases or notably lessons, we can tell when areas of particularity severe anxiety have been encountered in his personality investigation, and chart the resolution of this anxiety as growth proceeds.
In this context, it is reminded that of Freud’s findings about early identification. In ‘The Ego and the Id,’ speaking of abandoned object cathexes. He said, ‘ . . . The effects of the first identification in earliest childhood will be profound and lasting. This leads us back to the origin of the ego-ideal, . . . Freud then defines the first and most important identifications which lie hidden behind the ego-ideal as the identification with the father, or with the parent’s, and places them, as he expresses it, in the ‘prehistory’ of every person’. These formulations come close to the deceptions as described of their resulting of introjected objects, for by definition identifications are the result as such, but that the statement and the passage quoted from the Encyclopaedia article, it can be deduced that Freud, although he did not pursue this line of though t, however, he did assume that in the earliest infancy that both an object and introjective processes play a part.
That is to say, as regards autoerotism and narcissism we meet with an inconsistency in Freud’s views. Such inconsistencies which exist on a number of points of theory clearly show, which on these particular of issue s Freud had not yet arrived at a final decision. In respect to the theory of anxiety he stated this explicitly in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. His realization that much about the early stages of development was still unknown or obscure to him is also exemplified by his speaking of the first years of a girl’s life as, ‘ . . . lost in a past so dim and shadowy . . .’
As regards to the question of autoerotism and narcissism, Anna Freud - although her views about this aspect of Freud’s work remains unknown, but she seems only to have taken into account Freud’s conclusions that an autoerotic and a narcissistic stage precede object-relations, and not to be allowed for other possibilities, of which are implied in some of Freud’s statements such as the ones inferred above. This is one of the reasons why the divergence between Anna Freud’s conception and the immediacy of early infancy is far greater than that between Freud’s views, taken as a whole, and those of stating it as the essential to clarify the content and nature of the differences between the two schools of psychoanalytic thought, represented by Anna Freud and those that imply of such clarification is required in the interests of psychoanalytic training and also because it could help to open up fruitful discussions between psychoanalysts and thereby contribute to a greater generality of a better understanding of the fundamental problems of early infancy.
The hypothesis that a time interval extending over several months precedes object-relations implies that - except for the libido attached to the infant’s own body - impulses, phantasies, anxieties, and defences either are not present in him, or are not related to an object, that is to say, they would operate in vacua. The analysis of very young children, as to implicate, would show that there is no instinctual urge, no anxiety situation, no mental process which does not involve objects, external or internal, in other words, object-relations are at the centre of emotional life. Furthermore, love and hatred, phantasies, anxiety and defences are also operative from the beginning and are ‘ad initio’ indivisibly linked with object-relations.
The oedipus complex, in a pragmatic analytic sense, retains its position as the ‘nuclear complex’ of the neurosis. It is a climactic organization experience of early childhood, apart from its own vicissitudes, It can under favourable circumstances provide certain solutions for pregenital conflicts, or in itself suffer from them. in any case, include them in its structure. Only when the precursor experiences have been of a great severity, for which it is to claim to a shadowy organic determinacy, as the new ‘frame of reference’, which hardly having the independent and decisive significance of its own. In any case, its attendant phallic conflicts must be resolved in their own right, in the analytic transference. From the analyst, (or his current surrogate in the outer world) thus from the psychic representation of the parent, the literal (i.e., bodily) sexual wishes must be withdrawn, and genuinely displaced to appropriate objects in the outer world. The fraction of such drive elements which can be transmuted to friendly, tender feeling toward the original object. Or too other acceptable (neutralized) variants, will of course, influence the economic problem involved. This genuine displacement is opposed to the sense of ‘acting out’, while other objects are perceptually different substitutes for the primary object (thus for the analyst). This may be thought to follow automatically on the basic process of coming to terms with (accepting) the childhood incestuous wish and its parricidal connotation. Such assumption does not do justice to the dynamic problem implicit in tenaciously persistent wishes. To the extent that these wishes are to be genuinely disavowed or modified, rather than displaced, a further important step is necessary: The thorough analysis of the functional meaning of the persisting wishes and the special etiologic factors entering into their tenacity, as reflected in the transference neurosis. Thus, in principle, the literal accuracy of the concept phrased by Wilhelm Reich, ‘transference of the transference,’ as the final requirement for dissolution of the erotic analytic transference, even though the clinical discussion, which is its context, is useful. This expression would imply that the object representation which largely determine the distinctive erotic interest in the analyst can remain essentially the same, so long as the actual object changes. While a semantic issue may be involved in some degree, it is one which impinges importantly on conceptual clarity. However, such definite conceptualization of one basic element in the phenomenon or transference may be, and should be, subject to the reservations appropriately attaching themselves to any very clear-cut ideas about obscure areas, with the clinical concept of transference, its clinical derivation and its generally accepted place in the psychnalytic process.
The evolution of the reality-relatedness between patient and therapist, over the course of the psychotherapy, is something which has received little more than passing mention in the literature, Hoedemaker (1955), in a paper concerning the therapeutic process in the treatment of schizophrenia, stresses the importance of the schizophrenic patient’s forming healthy identifications with the therapist, and Loewald (1960), in his paper concerning the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis in general, repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the real relationship between patient and analyst, but only in the following passage eludes the evolution, the growth, of this relationship over the course of treatment:
In the final months of the therapy, the therapist clearly sees that extent to which the patient’s transference to him as representing a succession of figures from the latter’s earlier years have all been in the service the patient’s unconscious successively decreasing extent, fro experiencing the full and complex reality of the immediate relatedness with the therapist in the present. The patent at last comes to realize that the relationship with a single other human being - in this instance, the therapist - is so rich as to comprise all these earlier relationships - so rich as to evoke all the myriad feelings which has been parcelled out and crystallized, wherefore, in the transference which have now been resolved. This is a province most beautifully described by the Swiss novelist, Herman Hesse (1951) winner of the Nobel Prize in 1946,in his little novel. Siddhartha. The protagonist in a lifelong quest for the ultimate answer to the enigma of man’s role on earth, finally discovers in the face of his beloved friend all the myriad persons, things, and events which he has known, but incoherently before, during the vicissitudes of his many years of searching.
It is thus that the patient, schizophrenic or otherwise, becomes at one with himself, in the closing phase of psychotherapy. But although the realization may come to him as a sudden one, it is founded on a reality-relatedness which has been building up all along. Loewald (1960) in his magnificent paper to which transference resolution plays in the development of this reality-relatedness. As, perhaps, that the evolution of the ‘countertransference’ - not counter-transference in the classical sense of the therapist’s transference to the patient, but rather in the sense of the therapist’s emotional reaction to the patient’s transference - forms an equally essential contribution to this reality-relatedness.
It is, nonetheless, but often, that the therapist who sees a new potentiality in the patient, a previously unnoted side of him which heralds a phase of increasing differentiations. And frequently the therapist is the only one who sees it. Even the patient does not see it as ye t, except in the projected form, so that he perceives this as an attribute of the therapist. This situation can make the therapist feel very much inalienable as alone and intensely threatened.
Upon which the transference relationship with the therapist, we find that the patient naturally brings this relationship, just as he brings into the relatedness in which the difficulties concerning differentiation and integration which were engendered by the pathological upbringing upon the advances in differentiation and integration necessarily occur first outside the patient - namely, in the therapist’s increasingly well differentiated and well-integrated view of, and consequently, responses to, him - before these can become well established within him.
Because the schizophrenic patient did not experience, in his infancy, the symbolic relatedness with his mother such as each human being needs for the formation of a healthy core in his personality structure, in the emotion of the transference relationship to his therapist he must eventually succeed in establishing such a mode of relatedness.
This means that he must eventually regress, in the transference, to such a level in order to get a fresh start toward a healthier personality differentiation and integration than he had achieved before entering therapy. This is not to say that he must ‘act out’ the regressive needs in his daily life, to be sure, the schizophrenic patient, whether in therapy or not, inevitably does so to a considerable degree, but to the extent that these needs can be expressed in the transference relationship, they need not seek expression, unconsciously, thorough acting out in daily life.
Focussing now upon the transference relationship with the therapist, we find that the patient naturally brings about the difficulties concerning differentiation in the process of integration which were engendered by the pathological upbringing as for being the one more interruption in the impeding principle of reconstructions of an identifying manufacture of the transference. And the every day, relationships are found in the interplaying form of corresponding advances in differentiated dynamic integrations necessarily occur first outside the patient - namely, in the therapist’s increasingly well or acceptably differentiated by the integrated extent or range of vision, that the position or attitude that determine how of the intent of something (as an aim or an end or motive)or by way the mind is directed. Its view of and the consequent response ought to become acknowledgingly established within them.
Because the schizophrenic patient did not experience, in his infancy, the establishment of and later emergence form, a healthy symbiotic relatedness with his mother such as each human bring needs for the formation of a healthy core in his personality structure, in the evolution of the transference relationship to his therapist he must eventually succeed in establishing such a mode of relatedness.
This means that he must eventually regress, in the transference, to such a level, in order to get a fresh start toward a healthier personality differentiation and integration than he had achieved before entering therapy. This is not to say that he must act out the regressive needs in his daily life. To be sure, the schizophrenic patient, whether in therapy or not, inevitably does so to a considerable degree; but to the extent that these needs can be expressed in the transference relationship, they need not seek expression, unconsciously, through acting out in daily life.
This symbiotic mode of relatedness is necessarily mutual, participated in by therapist as well as patient. Thus, the therapist must come to experience not only the oceanic gratification, but also the anxiety involved in his sharing a symbiotic, subjective oneness with the schizophrenic patient. This relationship, with its lack of felt ego-boundaries between the two participants, at times invokes the kind of deep contentment, the kind of felt communion that needs no words, which characterize a loving relatedness between mother and infant. But at other times It involves the therapists feeling unable to experience himself as differentiated from the pathology-ridden personality of the patient. He feels helplessly caught in the patient’s deep ambivalence. He feels one with the patient’s hatred and despair and thwarted love, and at times he cannot differentiate between his own subjectively harmful effect upon the patient, and the illness with which the patient was to come or go or nearly recede in the achievement afflicting when the therapist first undertook to help him. Thus, at these anxiety-ridden moments in the symbiotic phase, the therapist feels his own personality to be invaded by the patient’s pathology, and feels his identity severely threatened, whereas in the more contented moments, part of the contentment resides in both participants enjoying a freedom from any concern with identity.
This same profound lack of differentiation may come to characterize the patient’s view of the persons about him, including his therapeutic, and at time’s, in line with his need to project a poorly differentiated conglomeration of ‘bad’ impulses, he may perceive the therapist as being but one head of a hydra-headed monster. The patient’s lack of differentiation in this regard, prevailing for month after month of his charging the therapist with saying or doing various things which were actually said or have don e by others amongst the hospitalized presences to its containing of environmental surfaces, or by the family members, can have a formidably eroding effect upon the therapist’s sense of personal intensity. bu t the patient may need to regress to just such a primitivity, poorly differentiated view of the world in order to grow up again, psychologically, in a healthier way this time.
Among the most significant steps in the maturation which occurs in successful psychotherapy are those moments when the therapist suddenly sees the patient in a new light. His image of the patient suddenly changes, because of the entry into his awareness of some potentiality in the patient. Which had not shown itself before? From now on, his responses t o the patient is a response to this new, enriched view, and through such responding he fosters the emergence, and further differentiation, of this new personality area. This is another way of describing the process which Buber and in Friednan, 1955, calls ‘making the other person present, seeing in the other persons potentialities of such even presents: Seeing in the other persons potentialities of which even he is not aware of him and helping him, by responding to those potentialities, to realize them.
Schizophrenic patient’s feelings start to become differentiated before they have found new and appropriate modes for expressing the new feelings, thus patient’s may use the same old stereotyped behaviour or utterance to express nuances of new feelings. This is identical with the situation in those schizophrenics’ familiar which are permeated with what Wynne (1958) termed ‘pseudo-mutuality’ or toward maintaining the sense of reciprocal perceiving expectations. Thus, the expectations are left unexplored, and the old expectations and roles, even though outgrown and inappropriate in one sense, continue to serve as the structure for the relation.
The therapist, through hearing the new emotional connotation, the new meaning, in the stereotyped utterance and responding in accordance with the new connotation, fosters the emerging differentiation. Over the course of months, in therapy, he may find the same verbal stereotype employed in th e expression of a whole gamut of newly emerging feelings. Thus, over a prolonged time-span, the therapist may give as many different responses to a gradually differentiating patient as are simultaneously given by the various members of the surrounding environment, to the patient who shows the contrasting ego-fragmentation (or, in a loose manner of speaking, over-differentiations).
Persistently stereotyped communications from the patient tend to bring from the therapist communications which, over a period of time, become almost equally stereotyped. One can sometimes detect, in recordings playing during supervisory hours, evidence that new emotional connotations are creeping into the patient’s verbal stereotypes, and into the therapist’s responsive verbal stereotypes, before either of the two participants has noticed this.
What the therapist does which assists the patient’s differentiation often consists in his having the courage and honesty to differ from whether the patient’s expressed feelings or, often most valuable, with the social role into which his sick behaviour tends to fix or transfix the therapist. This may consist in his candid disagreement with some of the patient, and s strongly felt and long-voiced views, or in his flatly declining to try to feel ‘sympathy’ - such as one would be conventionally expected to feel in response to behaviour, which seems, at first glance, to express the most pitiable suffering but which the therapist is convinced primarily expresses sadism on the patient’s part. Such courage to differ with the expected social role is what is needed from the therapist, in order to bring to a close the symbiotic phase of relatedness which has served, earlier, a necessary and productive function. Through asserting his individuality, and at many later moments in the therapeutic interaction, the therapist fosters the patient’s own development of more complete and durable ego-boundaries. At the same time he offers the patient the opportunity to identify with a parent-figure who dares to be an individual-dares to be so in the face of pressures from the working group of which he is part, and from his own reproachful superego, it can be of notice, that of a minor degree a consciously planned and controlled therapeutic technique wherefore, the content descriptions are rather a natural flow of events as in the transference evolution, with which the therapist must have the spontaneity to go along.
The patient, particularly in the symbiotic phase of the therapy but in preceding and succeeding phases as well, is notably intolerant of sudden and marked changes in the therapeutic relationship - that is, of suddenly seeing himself, or feeling that his therapist sees him, through new eyes. He rarely gives the therapist to feel that the latter has made an importantly revealing interpretation, or should be concealed, but when to arrive at by reasoning from evidence or from its premises that we can infer from that which he was derived as to a conclusion, that it conveys of a higher illumination of mind. Methodologically historical information is an approving acceptation by the therapist, he does so causally, he tends to experience important increments of depreciated material, yet not as every bit for reverential abstractions as to make a new, amended, or up-to-date reversion of the many problems involved in revising the earthly shuddering revelations in his development. The things that he has known all along and simply never happened to think of. His experience of an inherent perception of the world as surrounding him is often permeated by ‘deja vu’ sensations, and misidentification of the emphasizing style at which the expense of thought for taking the rhetorical rhapsody to actions or a single inaction of moving the revolutions of the earth around the sun is mostly familiar an act from his past.
The motional progression in therapy, on the patient’s part, occur each time only after a recrudescence in his symptoms. It is as though he has to find reassurance of his personal identity, as being really the same hopeless person he has long felt himself to be, before he can venture into a bit or new and more hopeful identity.
Of what expressions is that object relations exist from th e beginning of life being the mother’s breast which it split into a good (gratifying) and bad (frustrating) breast; this splitting results in a division between love and hate. What is more, is that of the relation to the first object implies its introjection and projection, and thus, from the beginning object relations are moulded by an interaction between introjection and projection, between internal and external objects and situation.
. . . .With the introjection of the complete object in about the second quarter of the first year marked steps in integration are made. . . . The loved and hated aspects of the mother are no longer felt to be so widely separated, and the result is an increased fear of loss, a strong feeling of guilt and states akin to mourning, because the aggressive impulses are felt to be divorced against the love object, the depressive position has come to the fore . . .
. . . In th e first few months of life anxiety is predominantly experienced as fear of persecution and . . . this contributes to certain mechanisms and defences which characterize the paranoid and schizoid positions. Outstanding among these defences is the mechanism of splitting internal and external objects, emotions and the ego. These mechanisms and defences are part of normal development and at the same time form the basis for later schizophrenic illness. The descriptive underlying identification by projection, i.e., projective identification, as a combination of splitting off parts of the self and projecting them onto another person . . .
Rosenfeld, a follower of Klein writes that, he presents detailed clinical data which serve to document the implicit point, among others, that whereas, the schizophrenic patient may appear to have regressed to such an objectless autoerotic level of development as was postulated by Freud (1911, 1914) and Abraham (1908), in actuality the patient is involved in object-relatedness with the analyst, object-relatedness of the primitive introjective and projective identification kind. For example, Rosenfeld concludes his description of, the data from one of the sessions as follows:
. . . only at a later stage of treatment was it possible to distinguish between the mechanisms of introjection of objects and projective identifications, which so frequently go on simultaneously (1952).
In trying to conceptualize such ego-states in the patient, and such states of relatedness between patient and doctor. Additional value placed the concept presentation by Little in her papers, ‘On Delusional Transference’ (Transference Psychosis) (1958) and ‘On Basic Unity’ (1960).
One of the necessary development, in along-delusional patient’s eventual relinquishment of his delusions is for these gradually to become productions which the therapist sees no longer as essentially ominous and the subject for either serious therapeutic investigation, or argumentation, or any other form of opposition, rather, the therapist comes to react to these as being essentially playful, unmaligant, creatively imaginative, and he comes to respond to them with playfully imaginative comments of his own. Nothing helps more finally to detoxicate a patient’s previously self-isolating delusional state than to find in his therapist a capacity to engage him in a delightfully crazy playfulness - a kind of relatedness of which the schizophrenic patient had never a chance to have his fill during his childhood. Typically, such early childhood playfulness was subjected to massive repression, because of various intra-familial circumstances.
Innumerable instances of the therapist’s uncertainty how to respond to the patient’s communication turn upon the question of whether the communication is to be ‘taken personally’ - to be taken as primarily designed, for instance, toward filling the therapist with perplexity, confusion, anxiety, humiliation, rage, or some other negatively toned affective state; or whether it is to be taken rather as primarily an effort to convey some basically unhostile need on the patient’s par. Just as it is often essential that the therapist become able to sense and respond to personal communications in a patient’s ostensibly stereotyped behaviour or utterance, so too it is frequently essential that he be able to see, behind the overt ‘personal’ reference to himself - often a stinging or otherwise emotionally evocative reference - some fundamental need which the patient is hesitantly to communicate openly.
Some comments by Ruesch, although concerned primarily with nonverbal communication, are beautifully descriptive of the process which occurs in such patients as the transference evolves over the course of the therapy:
The dependency on which is focussed upon an effectual acknowledge in the presence of which has its closest analogue, in terms of normative standards, is such that the personality development, in the experience and behaviour of the infant or of the young child. The dependency needs, attitudes, and strivings which the schizophrenic manifests may be defined in the statement that he seeks for another person to assume a total responsibility for gratifying all his needs, both physiological and psychological, while this person is to seek nothing from him.
Of the physiological needs, which the schizophrenic manifests, those centring about the oral zone of interaction are usually most prominent, analogous to the predominant place held by nursing in the life of the infant. Desires to be stroked and cuddled, likewise, so characteristic of the very early years of normal development, is prominently held within the schizophrenic. In addition, desires for the relief of genital sexual tensions, even though these have had their advent much later in the life history than have his oral desires, are manifested in much the same level of an early, infantile dependency. That is, such genital hungers are manifested in much the same small-child spirit of, ‘you ought to be taking care of this for me’ as are the oral hungers.
The psychological needs which are represented among the schizophrenic’s dependency processes consist in the desire for the other person to provide him with unvarying love and protection, and to assume a total guidance of his living,
In the course of furthering characterizations of the schizophrenic’s dependency processes will be defined much more fully, that is to say, it is to b e emphasized that no of the dependency processes are but described is characteristic only of the schizophrenic, or qualitatively different from processes operative at some level of consciousness in persons with other varieties of psychiatric illness and in normal persons. With regard to dependency processes, we find research in schizophrenia has its greatest potential value in the fact that schizophrenic shows us in a sharply etched form that which is so obscured, by years progressive adaptation to adult interpersonal living, in human beings in general. Wherefore, but in some degree, are about the patient’s anxiety about the dependency needs, are (1) As nearly as can be determined, the patient is unaware of pure dependency needs; for him, apparently, they exist in consciousness, if at all, only in the form of a hopelessly conflictual combination of dependency needs plus various defences - defences which render impossible any thoroughgoing sustained gratification of these needs. These defences (which include, grandiosity, hostility, competitiveness, scorn and so forth) have so long ago developed in his personality, as a means of coping with anxiety attendant upon dependency needs, that the experiencing of pure dependency needs it, for him, lost in antiquity and so be achieved only relatively late in therapy after the various defences have been largely relinquished.
Thus it appears to be not only dependency needs ‘per se’ which arouse anxiety, but rather the dependency needs plus all these various defences (which tend in themselves to be anxiety-provoking) plus the inevitable frustration, to a greater or less degree, of the dependency needs.
Hostility as one of the defences against awareness of ‘dependency needs,’ that which for certainly repressed dependency needs are one of the most frequent bases of murderous feelings in the schizophrenic, in such instances the murderous feelings may be regarded as a vigorous denial of dependency. What frequently happens in therapy is that both patient and therapist become so anxious about the defensive murderous feelings that the underlying dependency feeling long remain unrecognized.
Every schizophrenic possesses much self-hatred and guilt which may serve as defences against the awareness of dependency feelings (‘I am too worthless for anyone possibly to care about me’), and which in any case complicate the matter of dependency. The schizophrenic has generally come to interpret the rejections in his past life as meaning that he is a creature who wants too much and, in fact, a creature who has no legitimate needs. Thus, he can accept gratification of his dependency needs, if at all, only if his needs are rendered acceptable to themselves by reason of his becoming physically ill or in a truly desperate emotional state. It is frequently found that a schizophrenic is more accessible to the gratification of his dependency needs when he is physically ill, or filled with despair, than at other times. In that way, th e presence of self-hatred, and guilt, one ingredient of the patient’s overall anxiety about dependancy needs has to do with the fact that these needs connote to him the state of feeling physical illness or despair.
In essence, then, we can see that the patient has a deep-seated conviction that his dependency needs will not be gratified. Further, we see that this conviction is based not alone on the fortunate past expedience of repeated rejection, but also, the fact that his own defences, called forth concomitantly with the dependency desires, make it virtually certain that this dependency needs will not be met. (2) The dependency needs are anxiety-provoking not only because they involve desires to relate in an infantile or small-child fashion (by breast - or penis sucking, being cuddled, and as so forth) which is not generally acceptable behaviour among adult s, but also, and probably more importantly, because they involve a feeling that the other person is frighteningly important, absolutely indispensable to the patient’s survival.
This feeling as to the indispensable of importance of the other person derives from two main sources: (a) the regressed state of the schizophrenic’s emotional life, which makes for his perceiving the other as being all-important to his survival, just as in infancy the mothering one is all-important to the survival of the infant, and (b) certain additional disabling features of his schizophrenic illness, which render him dependent in various special ways which are not quite comparable with the dependency characteristic of normal infancy or early childhood. Thereof, a number of points in reference to (b) are, first, we can perceive that a schizophrenic who is extremely confused, for example, is utterly dependent on or upon the therapist or, some other relevantly significant person to help him establish a bridge between his incomparable, incongruent, conflicting, conditions in which things are out of their normal or proper places or relationships. Such are the complete mental confusions that the authenticity of a corresponding to known facts are to discover or rediscover the real reason for which such things as having no illusions and facing reality squarely face-to-face, a realistic appraisal of his chances for advancing to the reasonable facts as we can see the factional advent for understanding the absolutizing instinct to fancy of its reality.
Second, we can see also that the patient who is in transition between old, imposed values and not-yet-acquired values of his own, has only the relationship with his therapist to depend upon.
Third, is the concern and consideration that, in many instances, the schizophrenic appears to be what one might call a prisoner in th e present. He is so afraid both of change and of the memories which tend to be called forth by the present that he clings desperately to what in immediate. He is in this sense imprisoned in immediate experience, and looks to the therapist to free him so that he will be able to live in all his life, temporally speaking - present, past and future.
Forth, it might be surmised that an oral type of relatedness to the other person (with the all-importance of the other which this entails) is necessary for the schizophrenic to maintain, partly in order to facilitate his utilization of projection and introjection as defences against anxiety.
Anxiety, is the constructed foundation whose emotional state from which are grounded to the foundation structural called the ‘edifice’, that an emotional state in which people feel uneasy, apprehensive, or fearful. People usually experience anxiety about events they cannot control or predict, or about events that seem threatening or dangerous. For example, students taking an important test may feel anxious because they cannot predict the test questions or feel certain of a good grade. People often use the words fear and anxiety to describe the same thing. Fear also describes a reaction to immediate danger characterized by a strong desire to escape the situation.
The physical symptoms of anxiety reflect a chronic ‘readiness’ to deal with some future threat. These symptoms may include fidgeting, muscle tension, sleeping problems, and headaches. Higher levels of anxiety may produce such symptoms as rapid heartbeat, sweating, increased blood pressure, nausea, and dizziness.
Bychowski (1952) says, ‘’The separation between the primitive ego and the external world is closely connected with orality, both form the basis for the mechanism which we call projection,’ and would add, for introjection. , that Starcke (1921) for earlier comments ‘I might briefly allude to the possibility that in the repeated alternation between becoming one’s own and no t one’s own, which occurs during lactation . . . the situation of being suckled plays a part in the origin of the mechanism of projection.
The patient has anxiety, and, least of mention, his dependency needs lead him either to take in harmful things, or to lose his identity.
The schizophrenic does not have the ability necessary to tolerate the frustration of his dependency needs, so that he can, once they emerge into awareness, subject them to mature discriminatory judgement before seeking their gratification. Instead, like a voraciously hungry infant, his tendency is to put into his mouth (either literally or figuratively) whatever is at hand, whether nutritious or with a potential of being harmful, this tendency is about th e basis of some of his anxiety concerning his dependency needs, for the fear that they will keep him blindly into receiving harmful medicines, bad advice, electro-shock treatment, lobotomy, and so forth. Schizophrenic patients have been known to beg, in effect, for all these, and many a patients have been known to beg, yet these patients have been ‘successful’ in his dependency desires. A need for self-punishment is, of course, an additional motivation in such instances.
A statement by Fenichel (1945) indicates that, ‘The pleasure principle, that is, the need for immediate discharge, is incompatible with correct judgement, which is based on considerable and post postponement of the reaction. The time and energy saved by this postponement are used in the function of sound and stable judgments. That in the early states the weak ego has not yet learned to postpone anything.
In the same symptomatic of one that finds that th e extent that the schizophrenic projects onto other persons his own needs too such and to devour, he feels threatened with being devoured by these other persons.
To elaborate now in a somewhat different direction upon this fear of loss of identity. Th e schizophrenic fears that his becoming dependent on another person will lead him into a state of conformity that other person’s wishes and life values. A conformer is almost the last sort of person as the schizophrenic wishes to become, since his sense of individuality resides in his very eccentricities. He assumes that the therapist, for example, in the process, requiring him to give up his individuality for the kinds of parental future in his past had e been able to salvage his refuge used to pay the price.
It seems of our apparent need to give the impression of being without necessarily being so in fact that things are not always the way they seem, as things accompanied with action orient of doing whatever is apprehended as having actual, distinct and demonstratable existence from which there is a place for each thing in the cosmological understanding idea in that something conveys to the mind a rational allotment of the far and near, such of the values and standards moderate the newly proposed to modify as to avoid an extreme or keep within bounds.
For what is to say, in that we need to realize, that the patient is not solely a broken, inert victim of the hostility of persons in his past life. His hebephrenic apathy or his catatonic immobility, for example, represent for one thing an intensely active striving toward unconscious regressive goals, as Greenson (1949, 1953) has for his assistance to make clear in the boredom and apathy in neurotic patients. The patient is, in other words, no inert vehicle which needs to be energized by the therapist; rather, an abundance of energy is locked in him, pressing ceaselessly to be freed, and a hovering ‘helpful’ orientation on the part of the therapist would only get in the way. We must realize that the patient has made, and is continually making, a contribution to his own illness, however unwittingly, and however obscure the nature of this contribution may long remain.
More than often, it has been found that the histories of schizophrenic patients, whether male or female, describe the father as being by far, the warmer, the more accessible, of the responsive parents, and the patient as having always been very much attached to the father, whereas the mother was always a relatively cold, rejecting, remote figure, but for the repetitive correlative coefficient, that it was to be found that, disguised behind the child’s idol or inseparable buddy, is a matter of the father’s transference to the child’s being a mother-figure that the father, in these instances, is an infantile individual who reacts both to his wife and to his child, as the mother-figure, and who, by striving to be both father and mother to the child, unconsciously seeks to intervene between mother and child, that in such a way as to have each of them to himself, in the considerations that suggest of a number of cases when both are in the transference-development with the patient and the selective prospect of the patient’s generalization that limits or qualifies an agreement or other conditions that may contain or depend on a conditioning need for previsional advocates that include the condition that the transference phenomena would effectually raise the needed situational alliance.
The various forms of intense transference on the part of the schizophrenic individual tend forcibly to evoke complementary feeling-responses, comparably intense, in the therapist. Mabel Blake Cohen (1952) has made the extremely valuable observation, for psychoanalysis in general, that:
The accountable explanation in the support for reason to posit for the necessarily deep feeling-involvement on the part of the therapist is inherent in the nature of early ego-formation. The healthy reworking of which is so central to the therapy of schizophrenia. Spitz (1959), in his monograph on the early development of the ego, repeatedly emphasizes that emotion plays a leading role in th e formation of what he described as the ‘organizers of the psyche’ (which he defines as ‘emergent, dominant centres of integration’) during the first eighteen months of life. H e says, for example, that:
the ways they are dealt with - can be traced in this process.
The successive phases of which are best characterised, the psychotherapy of chronic schizophrenia, are the ‘out-of-contact phases, the phase of ambivalent symbiosis, the phase of pre-ambivalent symbiosis, the phase of resolution of the symbiosis, and the late phase, - that of establishment, and elaboration, of the newly won individuation through selective new identification and repudiation of outmoded identifications.
The sequence of these phases retraces, in reverse, the phases by which the schizophrenic illness was originally formed: The way of thinking, the aetiological roots of schizophrenia are formed when the mother-infant symbiosis fails to resolve into individuation of mother and infant - or, still more harmfully., fails even to become at all firmly established - because of deep ambivalence of the part of the mother which hindered the integration and differentiation of the infant’s and young child’s ego, the child fails then to proceed through the normative development phases of symbiosis and subsequent individuation. In stead the core of his personality remains uniform, and ego-fragmentation and dedifferentiation become powerful, though deeply primitive and unconscious defences against the awareness of ambivalence in the object and in himself. Even in normal development, one becomes separate person only by becoming able to face, and accept ownership of, one’s ambivalence with which he had to cope in his relationship with his mother was too great, and his ego-formation too greatly impeded , for him to be able to integrate his conflictual feeling-states into an individual identity.
Of these, the theoretical concept has been fostered by Mahler’s (1956) paper on autistic and symbiotic infantile psychosis and by Balint‘s (1953, 1955) writings concerning phenomena of early ego-formation which he encountered in the psychoanalysis of neurotic patients. From a purely descriptive viewpoint, schizophrenia can be seen to consist essentially in an impairment of both ‘integration’ and ‘differentiation’ - which are but opposite faces of a unitary growth-process. From a psychodynamic view point seems basic to all the bewilderingly complex and varied manifestations of schizophrenia.
Taking in, is the matter of integration; when we assess schizophrenia individual in terms of the classical structural areas of the personality - id, ego, and superego - we discover these to be poorly integrated with one another. The id is experienced by the ego as a Pandora’s box, the contents of which will overwhelm one if it is opened. The ego is, as many writers have stated, severely split, sometimes into innumerable islands which are not linked discernibly with one another. And the superego has the nature of a cruel tyrant whose assaults upon the weak and unintegrated ego are, if anything, even more destructive to it than are the assessions of the threatening id-impulses, as Szalita-Pemow (1951), Hill (1955), and others. Moreover, the superego is, like the ego, even in itself not well integrated; it s utterance contain the most glaring inconsistencies from one moment to the next. Jacobson (1954) has shown that there is actually as dissolution of the superego, as an integrated destruction - a regressive transformation back into the threatening parental images whose conglomeration originally formed it.
Differentiation is a process which is essential to integration, and vise versa. For personality structure-functions or psychic contents to become integrated, they must first have emerged as partially differentiated or separate from one another, and differentiation in turn can emerge only out of a foundation of more or less integrated functions or contents. The intertwining mesh upon which is interwoven in the growth precesses of integration and differentiation, such that the impairment of both likewise interlocking. But in the schizophrenic these two processes tend to be out of step with one another, so that at one moment a patient’s more urgent need may be for increased integration, whereas at another he may more urgently need increased differentiation. And these are some patients who show for months end, a more urgent need in one of these areas, before the alternate growth-phase on the scene, that type is a modicum of validity in speaking and of two different ’types’ of schizophrenic patients.
One comes to realize, upon reasons of how premature have been one’s effort to find out what feelings the patient is experiencing or what thoughts he is having; one comes to realize that much of the time he has neither feelings nor thoughts differentiated as such and communicable to us.
Such differentiations as the patient posses an inclining inclination that tend to break down when intense emotion enters his awareness. A paranoid man, for example, may find that when his hatred toward another person reaches a certain degree of intensity, he is flooded with anxiety because he no longer knows whether he hates, or instead ‘really loves’ the other individual. This is not based, on any line or its course, whereupon the primary mechanism which Freud (1911) outlined in his classical description of the nature of paranoid delusions of persecution, a description in which repressed homosexual love played the central role. The central difficulty is rather that the ego is too poorly differentiated to maintain its structure in the face of such powerful affects, and the patient becomes flooded with what can only be described as ‘undifferentiated passion’, precisely as one finds an infant to be overwhelmed at times with affect which the observer cannot specifically identity as any one kind of emotion.
As for the feelings with which the therapist himself experiences in working within the variations in the differentiated patient, we find, again, a persistent threat of the therapist’s sense of identity. But, whereas in the unitary integration complex manifestations of such of a schizophrenic’s sense of identity. But as in the first instance that the threat was felt predominantly as a disturbance of one’s personal integration, it seems possible as a weakening of one’s sense of differentiation. In this instance, the ‘therapeutic symbiosis’ which implicate the necessary developments that it tends to occur earlier for which of the patient’s predominant mode of relatedness with other persons, at the developmental level at which we find him at the very beginning of our work, is a symbiotic one. Such descriptions, least of mention, agree with the necessary developments, in that it tends to occur for the patient ‘s predominant mode of relatedness with other persons, the symbiotic relatedness, with its subjective absence of ego-boundaries, involves not only special gratification, but anxiety-provoking disturbances on one’s sense of personal identity.
The comparatively rapid development of symbiotic relatedness is facilitated by the patient’s characteristically non-verbal, and physically more or less immobile, functioning during the therapeutic sessions. In response, the therapist’s own behaviour becomes more and more similar, is that each participant is now offering to the other, saying that over the hours of counselling, a silent, impassive screen which facilitates abundant mutual projecting and introjecting. Thus a symbiotic state is likely to be reached earlier than in one’s work with the typically much more verbal type of the patient when described for that instance, the patient’s and therapist’s more abundant verbalization’s tend persistently to stress the ego-boundaries separating the to persons from one another.
The applicability for which the predominantly non-differentiated patient, in that the therapist’s sense of identity as a complexly differentiated individual entity becomes further eroded, or undermined, as he finds the patient persistently operating on the unwavering conviction, that the hours of counselling is but an undifferentiated aspect of the whole vague mass of the institution, even in Psychodynamic terms, is in actuality the patient’s projection of his own poorly differentiated hostility, through which the patient’s tenaciously held view, is the way the world around him really is.
Further, since the patient typically verbalizes little but a few maddening monotonous stereotypes, the therapist tends to feel, over the course of time, with so little of his own intellectual content being explicitly tapped in the relationship, that his richness of intellect is progressively rusting away - becoming less differentiated, more stereotyped and rudimentary. Moreover, the patient presents but one of two emotional wave-lengths to which the therapist can himself tune in, rather than a rich spectrum of emotion which calls into response a similarly wide range of feelings from the therapist himself. Thus not only the therapist’s intellectual resources, but his emotional capacities too, become subjectively narrowed down and impoverished, as he finds that, over the sessions of counselling, his patient in him neither any wide range of ideas, nor any emotion except, for example, rage, or contempt or dull hopelessness.
The feeling experience on his part, anxiety-provoking and discouraging though he finds it, is a necessary therapeutic development. It is for him thus to experience at first hand something of the patient’s own lack of differentiation; for, as in the therapy with the non-integrated patient, as, once, again, the healing process occurs external to the patient, as it were, at an intrapsychic level in the therapist, before it becomes established in the patient himself. That is, the therapist’s coming to view the patient, his relationship with the patient, and himself in this relationship, all as being largely non-differentiated, is a development which sets the stage for the patient’s gradually increasing differentiation. Now the therapist comes to sense, time and again, newly emerging tendrils of differentiation in the patient, before the latter is himself conscious of them. In responding to these with spontaneity as they show themselves, again, that in the therapist, helps the patient to become aware theat they are a part of him.
To analyst and analytic student alike, the term ‘transference psychosis’ usually connotes a dramatic but dreaded development in which an analysand, who at the beginning of the analysis was overtly sane but who had in actuality a borderline ego-structure, becomes overtly psychotic, that the course of the evolving transference relationship. We generally blame the analyst for such as development and prefer not to think any more about such matters, because of our own personal fear that we, like the poor misbegotten analysand, might become, or narrowly avoid becoming, psychotic in our own analysis. By contrast, in working with the chronically schizophrenic patient, we are confronted with a person whose transference to us is no harder too identify partly for the very reason that his whole daily life consists in incoherent psychotic transference reactions, for which is to whatever, to everyone about him, including the analyst in the treatment session. Little’s comment (1960) that the delusional state ‘remains unconscious’ until it is uncovered in the analysts’ holds true only in the former instance, in the borderline schizophrenic patient; there, it is the fact that the transference is delusional which is the relatively covert, hard-to-discern aspect of the situation, in chronic schizophrenia, by contrast, nearly everything is delusional, and the difficult task to foster the emergence of a coherent transference meaning in the delusional symptomotology. In other words, the difficult thing in the work with the chronically schizophrenic patient is to discover the ‘transference reality’ in his delusional experience.
The difficultly of discerning the transference aspect of one’s relationship with the patient can be traced to his having regressed to a state of ego functioning which is marked by severe impairment in his capacity either to differentiate among, or to integrate, his experiences. He is so incompletely differentiated in his ego functioning that he tends to feel, not that the therapist reminds him of, or is like, his mother or that of his father (or whomever, from his early life) but rather his functioning towards the therapist is couched in the unscrutinised assumption that the therapist is the mother or father. When, for example, in trying to bring to the attention of a paranoid schizophrenic women how much like she seemed to find the persons in her childhood on the one hand, and the person about her in the institution, including myself, on the other, she dismissed this with an impatient retort, ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, What difference does it make? For years subsequently in our work together, all the figures in her experience were composite figures, without any clear subjective distinction between past and present experiences, figures from the institutional scene peopled her memories of her past, and figures from what has become known to be her past were experienced by her as blended with the persons she saw about her in current life.
Transference situations in which the psychosis is manifested at a phase in therapy in which the deeply chronically confused patient, who in childhood had been accustomed to a parent’s during his thinking for him, is ambivalently (a) trying to perpetuate a symbiotic relationship wherein the therapist to a high degree does the patient’s thinking for him, and (b) expressing, by what the therapist feels to be sadistic and castrative and nullifying or undoing the therapist’s effort to be helpful, a determination to be a separately thinking, and otherwise separately functioning, individual
Difficult though it is to discern the nature and progressive evolution of the patient’s transference to the therapist, it is even more difficult to conceptualize that which is ‘new’ which the therapist brings into the relationship, and which, as J. M. Rioch (1943) has emphasized, is crucial to the patient’s recovery. Rioch is quite right in saying that, ‘Whether intentionally or not, whether conscious of it or not, the analyst does express, day in and day out, subtle or overt evidences of his own personality in relationship to the patient.’
The conjectural considerations for which inadequate evidences in the understanding of questionable intent is that there is a companion evolution of reality relatedness between patient and therapist, concomitant with such a transference evolution as having had the impression that it is only when the reality relatedness between patient and therapist has reached, finally and after many ‘real life’ vicissitudes between them, a depth of intense fondness that there now emerges, in the form of a transference development, a comparably intense and long-repressed fondness for the mother.
Presumably, a point which Freud (1922) concerning projection also holds true for transference, he stated that projection occurs no ‘into the sky, so to speak, where there is nothing of the sort already’, but rather the persons who in reality posses an attitude qualitatively like that which the projecting person is attributing to them. So it is with transference, we may presume that when a patient comes to react to us as a loved and loving mother, this phrase - as well as other phrases - of the transference is founded upon our having come to feel, in reality, thus toward him. M. B. Cohen (1952) stresses the importance of the therapist’s inevitable feeling response to the patient’s transference, and, if only to suggest, that an equally healthy source of the therapist’s feeling participation is the evolving reality relatedness which pursues its own course, related to and parallelling, but not fully embraced by, the evolving transference relatedness over the years of person’s working together. What is more, is the countertransference which has already been written, but as to indicate, there is a great need for us to become clear about the sequence which the recovery process in the schizophrenic adult, very roughly analogous to the growth process in normal infancy, childhood, and adolescence, tends innately to follow. When we have become clearer and surer about this, and particularly about the validity-relatedness element necessary to it, in that the frequently - though by no means always - various manifestations of feeling regarded as unwanted countertransference will be seen to be inevitable, and utterly essential, components of the recovery process.
Further, the opening view of the personality as being divisible into the areas, id, ego, and superego, tends to shield us from the anxiety-fostering realization that in psychoanalytic change is not merely quantitative and partial - where id was, there shall ego be - in Freud’s dictum - but qualitative and all-persuasive. That is, that in such passages as the following. Freud gives a picture of personality-structure, and of maturation, which leaves the inaccurate but comforting impression that at least a part of us - namely, as part of the id - is free from change. In his paper entitled ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ in 1915, he said,
Freud himself, in his emphasis upon the ‘negative therapeutic reaction’ (1923), the repetition compulsion, and the resistance to analytic insight which he discovered in his work with neurotic patients, has shown the importance, in the neurotic individual, of anxiety concerning change, and he agrees with Jung’s statement that ‘a peculiar psychic inertia’ hostile to change and progress, is the fundamental condition of neurosis (Freud, 1915). This is, as we know, even more true of psychosis - so much as that only in very recent decades have psychotic patients achieved full recovery though modified psycho-analytic therapy. Finding it instructive to explore in detail the psychodynamics of schizophrenia in terms of the anxiety concerning change which one encounters, in a particular intense degree, at work in these patients, and in oneself in the course of treating them. What the therapy of schizophrenia can teach us of the human being’s standing concerning change, can broaden and deepen our understanding of the non-psychotic individual also.
Research suggests that the genes one inherits strongly influence one’s risk of developing schizophrenia. Studies of families have shown that the more close one is related to someone with schizophrenia, the greater the risk one has of developing the illness. For example, the children of one parent with schizophrenia have about a 13 percent chance of developing the illness, and children of two parents with schizophrenia have about a 46 percent chance of eventually developing schizophrenia. This increased risk occurs even when such children are adopted and raised by mentally healthy parents. In comparison, children in the general population have only about a 1 percent chance of developing schizophrenia.
Some evidence suggests that schizophrenia may result from an imbalance of chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters. These chemicals enable neurons (brain cells) to communicate with each other. Some scientists suggest that schizophrenia results from excess activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine in certain parts of the brain or from an abnormal sensitivity to dopamine. Support for this hypothesis comes from Antipsychotic drugs, which reduce psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia by blocking brain receptors for dopamine. In addition, amphetamines, which increase dopamine activity, intensify psychotic symptoms in people with schizophrenia. Despite these findings, many experts believe that excess dopamine activity alone cannot account for schizophrenia. Other neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and norepinephrine, may play important roles as well.
Although scientists favour a biological cause of schizophrenia, stress in the environment may affect the onset and course of the illness. Stressful life circumstances - such as maturing in age and character as for living in poverty, the death of a loved one, an important change in jobs or relationships, or chronic tension and hostility at home—can increase the chances of schizophrenia in a person biologically predisposed to the disease. In addition, stressful events can trigger a relapse of symptoms in a person who already has the illness. Individuals who have effective skills for managing stress may be less susceptible to its negative effects. Psychological and social rehabilitation can help patients develop more effective skills for dealing with stress.
Although there is no cure for schizophrenia, effective treatment exists that can improve the long-term course of the illness. With many years of treatment and rehabilitation, significant numbers of people with schizophrenia experience partial or full remission of their symptoms.
Treatment of schizophrenia usually involves a combination of medication, rehabilitation, and treatment of other problems the person may have. Antipsychotic drugs (also called neuroleptics) are the most frequently used medications for treatment of schizophrenia. Psychological and social rehabilitation programs may help people with schizophrenia function in the community and reduce stress related to their symptoms. Treatment of secondary problems, such as substance abuse and infectious diseases, is also an important part of an overall treatment program.
Antipsychotic medications, developed in the mid-1950s, can dramatically improve the quality of life for people with schizophrenia. The drugs reduce or eliminate psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions. The medications can also help prevent these symptoms from returning. Common Antipsychotic drugs include risperidone (Risperdal), olanzapine (Zyprexa), clozapine (Clozaril), quetiapine (Seroquel), haloperidol (Haldol), thioridazine (Mellaril), chlorpromazine (Thorazine), fluphenazine (Prolixin), and trifluoperazine (Stelazine). People with schizophrenia usually must take medication for the rest of their lives to control psychotic symptoms. Antipsychotic medications appear to be less effective at treating other symptoms of schizophrenia, such as social withdrawal and apathy.
Because many patients with schizophrenia continue to experience difficulties despite taking medication, psychological and social rehabilitation is often necessary. A variety of methods can be effective. Social skill training helps people with schizophrenia learn specific behaviours for functioning in society, such as making friends, purchasing items at a store, or initiating conversations. Behavioural training methods can also help them learn self-care skills such as personal hygiene, money management, and proper nutrition. In addition, cognitive-behavioural therapy, a type of psychotherapy, can help reduce persistent symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and social withdrawal.
Because many patients have difficulty obtaining or keeping jobs, supported employment programs that help patients find and maintain jobs are a helpful part of rehabilitation. In these programs, the patient works alongside people without disabilities and earns competitive wages. An employment specialist (or vocational specialist) helps the person maintain their job by, for example, training the person in specific skills, helping the employer accommodate the person, arranging transportation, and monitoring performance. These programs are most effective when the supported employment is closely integrated with other aspects of treatment, such as medication and monitoring of symptoms.
Some people with schizophrenia are vulnerable to frequent crises because they do not regularly go to mental health centres to receive the treatment they need. These individuals often relapse and face rehospitalization. To ensure that such patients take their medication and receive appropriate psychological and social rehabilitation, assertive community treatment (ACT) programs have been developed that deliver treatment to patients in natural settings, such as in their homes, in restaurants, or on the street.
People with schizophrenia often have other medical problems, so an effective treatment program must attend to these as well. One of the most generally shared in or participated in things conforming to a type without noteworthy excellence or faults just as common a rule, by ordinary, frequent and ordinarily as an idea or expression deficient in originality or freshness, yet, only of its exchanging the commonplace of the common associated problems is vehemently and usually coarsely expressed condemnation or disapproved, as the interpretative category of an unequalled vocabulary is itself a genuine abuse. Successful treatment of substance abuse inpatients with schizophrenia requires careful coordination with their mental health care, so that the same clinicians are treating both disorders at the same time.
The high rate of substance abuse in patients with schizophrenia contributes to a high prevalence of infectious diseases, including hepatitis B and C and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Assessment, education, and treatment or management of these illnesses is critical for the long-term health of patients.
Other problems frequently associated with schizophrenia include housing instability and homelessness, legal problems, violence, trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and suicide attempts. Close monitoring and psychotherapeutic interventions are often helpful in addressing these problems.
Several other psychiatric disorders are closely related to schizophrenia. In schizoaffective disorder, a person shows symptoms of schizophrenia combined with either mania or severe depression. Schizophreniform disorder refers to an illness in which a person experiences schizophrenic symptoms for more than one month but fewer than six months. In schizotypal personality disorder, a person engages in odd thinking, speech, and behaviour, but usually does not lose contact with reality. Sometimes mental health professionals refer to these disorders together as schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.
Severe mental illness almost always alters a person’s life dramatically. People with severe mental illnesses experience disturbing symptoms that can cause of such difficulties and holding to a job, or go to school, relate to others, or cope with ordinary life demands. Some individuals require hospitalization because they become unable to care for themselves or because they are at risk of committing suicide.
The symptoms of mental illness can be very distressing. People who develop schizophrenia may hear voices inside their head that say nasty things about them or command them to act in strange or unpredictable ways. Or they may be paralysed by paranoia - the deep conviction that everyone, including their closest family members, wants to injure or destroy them. People with major depression may feel that nothing brings pleasure and that life is so dreary and unhappy that it is better to be dead. People with panic disorder may experience heart palpitations, rapid breathing, and anxiety so extreme that they may not be able to leave home. People whom experience episodes of mania may engage in reckless sexual behaviour or may spend money indiscriminately, acts that later cause them to feel guilt, shame, and desperation.
Other mental illnesses, while not always debilitating, create certain problems in living. People with personality disorders may experience loneliness and isolation because their personality style interferes with social relations. People with an eating disorder may become so preoccupied with their weight and appearance that they force themselves to vomit or refuse to eat. Individuals who develop post-traumatic stress disorder may become angry easily, experience disturbing memories, and have trouble concentrating.
Experiences of mental illness often take issue upon its stability for depending on one’s culture or social group, sometimes greatly so. For example, in most of the non-Western world, people with depression complain principally of physical ailments, such as lack of energy, poor sleep, loss of appetite, and various kinds of physical pain. Indeed, even in North America these complaints are commonplace. But in the United States and other Western societies, depressed people and mental health professionals who treat them tend to emphasize psychological problems, such as feelings of sadness, worthlessness, and despair. The experience of schizophrenia also differs by culture. In India, one-third of the new cases of schizophrenia involve catatonia, a behavioural condition in which a person maintains a bizarre statue like pose for hours or days. This condition is rare in Europe and North America.
Of furthering issues regarding depersonalization disorder, meaning, in effect, that it is a categorised illness based within its intendment for being an illness, of mind, in which people experience an unwelcome sense of detachment from their own bodies. They may feel as though they are floating above the ground, outside observers of their own mental or physical processes. Other symptoms may include a feeling that they or other people are mechanical or unreal, a feeling of being in a dream, a feeling that their hands or feet are larger or smaller than usual, and a deadening of emotional responses. These symptoms are chronic and severe enough to impede normal functioning in a social, school, or work environment.
Depersonalization disorder is a relatively rare syndrome thought to result from severe psychological stress. It may occur as part of other mental illnesses, especially anxiety disorders. For example, some people with panic disorder feel nervous, have a sense of doom about their future and health, and have a troubling sense of detachment form the lose in the attemptive use in making or doing or achieving a useful regularity as might be expected of the control over their bodies. Depersonalization disorder may also be a component of more severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia. Treatment may include training in relaxation techniques that enhance body perception and control, hypnosis to modify symptoms, and psychotherapy to explore possible stress-related components of the disorder.
Psychiatrists classify depersonalization disorder as one of the Dissociative disorders. Such disorders involve a disruption of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception.
All the while, the schizophrenic responds to altercations in the analyst’s defections and understanding by corresponding stormy and dramatic changes from love to hatred, from willingness to leave his delusional world to resistance and renewed withdrawal.
As understandable as these changes are, nevertheless may come as a surprise to the analyst who frequently has not observed their source, this is quite in contrast to his experience with psychoneurosis whose emotional reactions during an interview he can usually predict. These unpredictable changes seem to be the reason for the conception of the unreliability of the schizophrenic’s transference reaction, yet they follow the same dynamic rules as the psychoneurotic’s oscillations between positive and negative transference and resistance, however, if the schizophrenic’s reactions are stormy and seemingly more unpredictable than those of the psychoneurotic, that instances suggested to be due to the inevitable errors in the analyst’s approach to the schizophrenic, of which he himself may be unaware, rather than to the unreliability of the patient‘s emotional response?
Why is it inevitable that the psychoanalysts disappoint his schizophrenic patient time and again?
The schizophrenic withdraws from painful reality and retires to what resembles the early speechless phase of development where consciousness is not yet crystalized. As the expression of his feelings is not hindered by the convention that he has eliminated, as his thinking, feelings, behaviour and speech - when present - obey the working rules of the archaic unconscious. His thinking is magical and does not follow logical rules. It does not admit to every last ‘no’, and likewise the no to ‘yes’: There is no recognition of space and time, I, you, and they, are interchangeable expression through which of symbols and often by movement and gestures rather than by words.
As the schizophrenic is suspicious, he will distrust the words of his analyst. He will interpret them and incidental gestures and attitudes of the analyst according to his own delusional experience. The analyst may not even be aware of these involuntary manifestations of his attitudes, yet they mean much to the hypersensitive schizophrenic who uses them as a means of orienting himself to the therapist‘s personality and intentions toward him.
In other words, the schizophrenic patient and the therapist are people living in different worlds and no different levels of personal development with different means of expressing and of orienting themselves. We know little about the language of the unconscious that belongs to the schizophrenic, and our access to it is blocked by the very process of our own adjustment to a world the schizophrenic has relinquished, so, we should not be surprised that errors and misunderstandings occur when we under take to communicate and strive for a rapport with him.
Another source of the schizophrenic’s disappointment arises form which the analyser accepts and does not interfere with the behaviour of the schizophrenic, his attitude may lead the patient to expect that the analyst will assist in carrying out all the patient’s wishes, even though they may not seem to be in his interest to the analyser‘s and the hospital’s in their relationship to society. This attitude of acceptance so different from the patient’s previous experiences readily fosters the anticipation that the analyst will try to carry out the patient’s suggestion and take his part, even against conventional society with which it should occasionally arise. Frequently it will be wise for the analyst to agree with the patient‘s wish to remain unbattled and untidy until he is ready to talk about the reasons for his behaviour or to change spontaneously. At other times, he will unfortunately be unable to take the patient’s part without being able to make the patient understand and accept the reasons for the analyst’s position.
If the analyst is not able to accept the possibility of misunderstanding the reaction of the schizophrenic patient and in turn of being misunderstood by him, it may shake his security with his patient.
That is to say, that, among other things, the schizophrenic, once he accepts the analyst’s insecurity. being helpless and open to himself - in spite of his pretended grandiose isolation - he will feel utterly defeated by the insecurity of his would-be helper. Such disappointment may furnish reasons for outbursts of hatred and are comparable to the negative transference reactions of psychoneurosis, yet more intense than these, since they are not limited by the restrictions of the actual world - that is, it exists in or based on fact, its only problem is a sure-enough externalization for which things are existing in the act of being external in something that has existence, ss if it were an actualization as received in the obtainable enactment for being externalized, such that its problem of in some actual life that proves obtainable achieved, in that of doing something that has an existence for having absolute actuality.
These outbursts are accompanied by anxiety, feelings of guilt, and fear of retaliations which in turn lead to increased hostility. Yet this established a vicious circle: We disappoint the patient, he is afraid that we hate him for his hatred and therefore continues to hate us. If in addition he senses that the analyst is afraid of his aggressiveness, it confirms his fear that he is actually considered as some dangerous and unacceptable, and this augments his hatred.
This establishes that the schizophrenics capable of developing strong relationships of love and hatred toward the analyst. After all, one could not be so hostile if it were not for the background of a very close relationship. In addition, the schizophrenic develops transference reactions on the narrower sense which he can differentiate from the actual interpersonal relationship. For which the schizophrenic’s emotional reactions toward the analyst have to be met with extreme care and caution. The love which the sensitive schizophrenic feels as he first emerges, and his cautions acceptance of the analyst’s warmth of interest is really most delicate and tender things. If the analyst deals with the transference reactions of a psychoneurotic is bad enough, though as a reparable rule, but if he fails with a schizophrenic in meeting positive feelings by pointing it out for instance before the patient indicates that he is ready to discuss it, he may easily freeze to death what has just begun to grow and so destroy any further possibility of therapy.
Some analysts may feel that the atmosphere of complete acceptance and of strict avoidance of any arbitrary denials which we recommend as a basic rule for the treatment of schizophrenics may not avoid our wish to guide of reacceptance of reality, nevertheless, Freud says that every science and therapy which accept his teachings about unconscious, about transference and resistance and about infantile sexuality, may be called psychoanalysis. According in this definition we believe we are practising psychoanalysis with our schizophrenic patients.
Whether we call it analysis or not, it is clear that successful treatment does not depend on technical rules of any special psychiatric school but rather on the basic attitude of individual therapist toward psychologic persons. If he meets them as strangle creatures of another world whose productions are not comprehensible to ‘normal’ beings, he cannot treat them, if he realizes, however, that the difference between himself and the psychologic is only of degree, and not of kind, he will know better how to meet him. He will not be able to identify himself sufficiently with the patient to understand and accept his emotional reactions without becoming involved in them.
The process of constant and perpetual change is examined and closely matched within the study of philosophical speculations and pointed of a world view which asserts that basic reality is constantly in a process of flux and change. Indeed, reality is identified with pure process. Concepts such as creativity, freedom, novelty, emergence, and growth are fundamental explanatory categories for process philosophy. This metaphysical perspective is to be contrasted with a philosophy of substance, the view that a fixed and permanent reality underlies the changing or fluctuating world of ordinary experience. Whereas substance philosophy emphasizes static being, process philosophy emphasizes dynamically becoming.
Although process philosophy is as old as the 6th-century Bc Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, renewed interest in it was stimulated in the 19th century by the theory of evolution. Key figures in the development of modern process philosophy were the British philosophers Herbert Spencer, Samuel Alexander, and Alfred North Whitehead, the American philosophers Charles S. Peirce and William James, and the French philosophers Henri Bergson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Whitehead's Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929) is generally considered the most important systematic expression of process philosophy.
Contemporary theology has been strongly influenced by process philosophy. The American theologian Charles Hartshorne, for instance, rather than interpreting God as an unchanging absolute, emphasizes God's sensitive and caring relationship with the world. A personal God enters into relationships in such a way that he is affected by the relationships, and to be affected by relationships is to change. So too is in the process of growth and development. Important contributions to process theology have also been made by such theologians as William Temple, Daniel Day Williams, Schubert Ogden, and John Cobb, Jr.
‘Reality’ is a difficult word to use to every one’s satisfaction or even to one’s own satisfaction. In this instance the word reality is used arbitrarily to designate the direct, here-and-now impact of the analyst upon the patient. Reality. In this sense, contrasts with the impact the analyst has through his representation in the patient’s fantasy life, neurosis, and transference, since both kinds of impact seem always to coexist and since the former - the analyst’s real impact - may be the worst enemy of the transference, the matter of their differentiation is possibly the most challenging aspect of analysis.
The analytic situation, which is set up to shut out ordinary reality intrusions, that can. . . . neither nor should not exclude all, but to say, that in the beginning months, for instance, reality inevitably has the upper hand. The analyst, the office, the procedure, are all overwhelmingly real. Everything is strange, frightening and exciting, gratifying and frustrating. Unlike the patient can test it and orient himself to it, the impact of this reality is usually so great that even an ordinary useful transference relationship cannot be expected to develop.
Perhaps the most confusing aspect of this beginning period is the frequent appearance in it of what can be regarded as a false transference relationship. With great intensity and clarity, the patient may reveal, through transference-like references about the analyst, some of the deepest secrets only of his neurosis but of its genesis. The pseudotransference, too good to be true, is almost sure to be nothing more than the patient’s attempt to deal with the person of the analyst, the entire spectrum of his various patterns of behaviour. If, it is easy to do, the analyst overlooks the likelihood that the patient’s relationship with at this time is really about that almost everything said about it is related, analysis may get off to a very bad start. And if, as is even earlier to do, the analyst’s interests the genetic meaning of the openly exposed material, a good transference relationship may be seriously delayed and a workable transference neurosis may never appear. even after initial reality has had time to fade, reality may continue to intrude in ways that are very hard to detect and that are very troublesome.
One of the most serious problems of analysis is the very substantial help which the patient receives directly from the analyst and the analytic situation. For many a patient, the analyst in the analytic situation is in fact the most stable, reasonable, wise and understanding person he has ever met, and the setting in which they meet may actually be the most honest, open, direct and regular relationship he has ever experienced. Added to this is the considerable helpfulness to him of being able to clarify his life storey. confess his guilt, express his ambitions, and explore his confusions. Further real help comes from the learning-about-life accruing from the analyst’s skilled questions, observations and interpretations. Taken together, the total real value to the patient of the analytic situation can easily be immense. The trouble with this kind of help is that it goes on and on, it may have such a real, direct and continuing impact upon the patient that he can never get deeply enough involved in transference situation to allow him to resolve or even to become acquainted with his most crippling internal difficulties. The trouble is far too good, the trouble also is that we as analysts apparently cannot resist the seductiveness of being directly helpful, and this, when combined with the compelling assumption that helpfulness is bound to be good, permits us to credit the patient’s improvements to ‘analysis’ when more properly it should often be recognized for being the amounting result for the patient’s using the analytic situation, as the model, for being the preceptors and supporter in the dealing practically within the immediate distractions as holding to some problem.
Perhaps, we can now refer to something in a clear unmistakable manner, and it would be to mention, for being, that one more difficult-to-handle intrusion of reality into the analysis, that by saying, that this is the definitive and final interruption of the transference neurosis by the reality of termination; in the sense, the situation is reversed and the intrusion is analytically desirable, since ideally the impact of reality of impending and certain termination is used to facilitate the resolution of the transference. As with the resolution of earlier episodes of transference neurosis, this final one is brought about principally by the analyst’s interpretations and reconstructions. As these take effect, the transference neurosis and, hopefully, along with it the original neurosis is resolved. This final resolution, however, which is much more comprehensive, is usually very different and may not come about at all without the help of the reality of termination. Accordingly, any attenuation of the ending, such as tapering off or causal or tentative stopping, should be expected to stand in the way of an effective resolution of the transference. Yet, it seems that this is what most commonly happens to an ending, and because of this a great many patients may lose the potentially great benefit of a thorough resolution and are forever after left suspended in the net of unresolved transference.
Yet, slurring over a rigorous termination seems understandable, as difficult as transference neurosis may be in the analyst at other times, this ending period, if rigorously carried out, simply has to be the period of his greatest emotional strain. There can surely be no more likely time for an analyst to surrender his analytic position and, responding to his own transference, become personally involved with his patient than during the process of separating from a long and self-restrained relationship. Accordingly, it may be better to slur over the ending lightly than to mishandle it in an attempt to be rigorous.
In considering more broadly the function of the transference in the psychoanalytic process, one is confronted by the apparent naïve, but, nonetheless important questions of the role of the actual (current) object as compared with that of the object representation of the original personage in the past. We recall Freud’s paradoxical, somewhat gloomy, but portentous concluding passage in ‘The Dynamics of Transference.’ This struggle between the doctor and the patient, between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out almost exclusively in the phenomena of transference. It is on that field that the victory must be won - the victory whose expression is on that field that the victory must be won - the victory whose expression is the permanent cure of the neuroses. It cannot be disputed that controlling the phenomena of transference presents the psychoanalysis with the greatest difficultly, but it should not be forgotten that they do us the inestimable service of making the patient ‘s hidden and forgotten erotic impulses of showing their immediate and manifested impossibilities, for when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigies.
Both object and representation are made necessary by the basic phenomenon of original separation. The existence of an image of the object, which persist in the absence of the object, is one of the important beginnings of psychic life in general, certainly an indispensable prerequisite for object relationship. As generally construed. Whether this is viewed as (or a times demonstrably is) something unstable for allotting introjection, s always subject to alternative projection, or an intrapsychic object representation clearly distinguished from the self-representation, or firm identification in the superego, or in the ego itself, these phenomena are in various ways components of the system of mastery of the fact of separation, or separateness, from the original absolutely necessarily anaclitic (in the earliest period) symbiotic ‘object’. In the light of clinical observation, it would appear to be that the relative stability (parental) object representation. At which time of varying degree, are to a greater extent for the archaic phenomena. Even in nonpsychotic patients, overwhelmed by them, sometimes resembles the restoration from oedipal identification, which provides the preponderant basis for most demonstrable analytic transferences. That within the necrotic patients, the transference is effectively established when this representation invests the analyst to a degree - depending on intensity of drive and most of ego participation - which ranges in all the, wishing and strivings to remake and analyst to biasses judgements and misinterpretation of data, finally are the actual perceptual distortions.
However, the old object representations as such may be invested, however rigidly established the libidinal or aggressive cathexis of the image may be, this as such can become the actual and exclusive focus of instinctual discharge, or of complicated and intense instinct-defence solutions, only and general energy-sparing quality of strictly intrapsychic processes. For the vast majority of persons, visible to any degree, including those with severe neurosis, character distortions, addictions and certain psychoses, the striving is toward the living and actual object, even at the cost of intense suffering. In a sense, this returns us to the state in which the psychological ‘object-to-be’. Has a critical importance never again to be duplicated, except in certain acute life emergencies, even if the object is not firmly perceived as such, in the sense of later object relations? And it does seem that trance impressions from the earliest contacts in the service of life preservation, and the associated instinctual gratifications, and innumerable secondarily associated sensory impressions. Are activated by the specific inborn urges of sexual maturation? These propel the individual to renew many of the earliest modes of actual bodily contact, in connection with seeking for specific instinctual gratification. Or, to look away from clear-cut instinctual matters to the more remote elaborations of human contact: Few regard loneliness as other than a source of suffering, even self-imposed, as an apparent matter of choice, and the forcible imposition of ‘solitary confinement ‘ is surely one of the most cruel of punishments.
In taking to question, we are entering an area of life in which things are other then themselves, where meaning is multifaceted, and where the line between the old and the new is blurred. It should, by, its immediate measure, help develop our recognition or meaning of the pertinent applicability as to the relevance of interrelated aspects of the psychology of ‘metaphor’. In the psychology of metaphor we will find a useful analogy to the psychology of transference interpretation. Our’s will be newly encountered as good metaphors, those it response to which we say, ‘That’s it exactly’ or ‘That really captures it‘ or ‘That says it all’.
Some literary and linguistic analysis, (e.g., Lewis, 1936 and Snell, 1953) and also people in everyday life, believe that there are experiences that can only be expressed metaphorically. And it is for this achievement that these metaphors, which may be entire poem or as lines or even words highly valued. But how can this be so? Just what in th e ‘it’ that the metaphor ‘is’ or ‘captures’ or ‘says’? If this ‘is’ or this ‘experience’ can only be rendered metaphorically, when we can know it only as such, that is, as the metaphor itself. Of the position out of which are put forward by, T.S, Eliot (1933) and E.W. Harding (1963) in their discussion of poetry, for in these instances we are granted that there is no known and logically independent version of the experience that can serve to validate the metaphor. Whatever the metaphor makes available to us depends on it and it and so cannot be used to prove its correctness.
It seems justifiable to conclude that the metaphor is a new experience rather than a mere paraphrase of an already fully constituted expedience. The metaphor creates an experience that one has never had before. It is an experience one has not realized by oneself. The metaphor does, of course, suggest certain constituent experiences of which one may have been more or less dimly aware. One may say, therefore, that the metaphor speaks for those constituents, on the existence of which much of its appeal depends. But in its organizing and implicit ly rendering these constituents in its new way, it is a creation rather than a mere paraphrase or anew edition. Paraphrasing and new editions never speak as forcefully as good new metaphors, nor could they facilitate further new experience. One analytically familiar feature of these creations is that they make it safe and pleasing to experience something that otherwise would be considered too threatening and so would be kept in fragmented obscurity through defensive measures.
Thus, when one says, ‘That’s it exactly’ one is implicitly recognizing and announcing that one has found and accepted a new mode of experiencing oneself and one’s world, which is to say, asserting a transformation of one’s own subjectivity. Something is now said to be true, and in a sense it is true, but it is true for the first time. Where this quality or state of being, is that there is nothing just like it, or can ever happen again, for the second time cannot be the same as the first. One can’ t step into a stream of the same watering point and then step once again into the same spot. A revelatory metaphor re-encountered or repeated later may lose some of its force, alternatively, it may gain some significance, but it cannot remain exactly the same metaphor or mobilize an experience identical with the first. The point applies as well as to new metaphors that are similar to familiar ones: They have to be judged or experienced through their conventionalized predecessors, as through methods of knowing or already proved instrumentally of perceiving. The audience and the performer, who may be one person, as such that may not have, as yet.
What is to be said about the psychology of metaphor is analogous to the transformational aspects of developed transference and the steadfast interpretation that both facilitate and organize them as transference. Allowing that these transferences and ‘remembered’ experiences come into existence over a period of time, nothing that is identical with them has ever before been enacted, and nothing will ever be enacted again. They are creations that may be fully achieved only under specific analytic conditions. Such that living was not reliving that moment, words like re-living, re-experiencing and reliving simply do not do justice to the phenomena, that in making this claim. A seeming contradiction over-writes some of our well-establish ideas. - in offering, - I am not contradicting some of our well-established ideas about interpretation and insight, I am, however, disputing the point that insight refers to much than the recovery of lost memories, and takes in as well, a new grasp of the significance and interpretations of events one has always remembered. In point, as, Freud pointed out, ‘As a matter of fact I’ve always known it, only that I’ve never thought of it; (1914), In fact, it is to develop that point in furthering to say that it takes an adult to do that, especially with the help of an analyst. It was, after all, Freud’s analysis of adults that make it possible to define infantile psychosexuality. In this respect, but without disregard, child analysis retains a quality of applied psychoanalysis’ in the same way that the interpreted transference neurosis is: Both are always of describing as true something that was not true in quite that way at the time of its greatest developmental significance. This apparent paradox about ‘remembering’ as a form of creating goes a long way, probably that what it is, is distinctive about psychoanalytic interpretation.
In steadfastly and perspicaciously making transference interpretation. This newness characterizes the experience of analytic transference themselves. Unlike extra-analytic transferences, they can no longer be sheerly repetitive or merely new editions. Instead, they become repetitive new editions understood as such because defined as such by the simplifying and steadfast transference interpretations. Instead of responding to the analysand in kind, which would actualize the repetition, the analyst makes an interpretation. This interpretation does not necessarily or regularly match something the analysand already knows or has experienced unconsciously. Although, the analysand does often seem to have already represented some things unconsciously in the very terms of the interpretation. Equally often he does not seem to have done so at all. To think otherwise about this would be, in effect, to claim that, unconsciously, every analysand is Freud or a fully insightful Freudian. And that claim is absurd.
It would be closer to the truth to say this: Unconsciously, the analysand already knows or has experienced fragmentary, amorphous, uncoordinated constituents of many of the transference interpretations. Alternatively, one may say that, implicitly, the analysand has been insisting on some as yet unspecified certainties and, in keeping with this, following some set of as yet unspecified rules in his actions, these transference interpretations now organize explicitly. Each transference interpretation refers to many things that have already been defined by the analysand, and it does so in a way that transforms them. That’s why one may call it interpretation, but it would be mere repeating or sterile paraphrasing. Interpretation is a creative redescription that implicitly has the structure of a simile. It says, ‘This is like that’, Each interpretation does, therefore, add new actions to the life and analysand had already lived.
Technically, redescription in the terms of transference-repetition is necessary. This is so because, up to the time of interpretation and working through, the analysand has been, in one sense, unable and, in another sense, unconsciously and desperately unwilling, to conduct his life differently. in and of themselves, the repetitions cannot alter the symptoms, the subjective distress, and wasting of one’s possibilities, rather, they can only perpetuate state situation by repeatedly confirming its necessity. They prove once again, the unconsciously maintained, damaging certainties. But once they get to be viewed as historically grounded actions and subjectively defined situations, as they do upon being interpreted and worked through, they appear as having always been, in crucial respects, inventions of the analysand’s making and, so, as his responsibility. in being seen as versions of one’s past life. As they may be significantly different, as the subject of change in favouring - as something that is desirable or beneficial - within the common ability to make intelligent choices and to reach intelligent conclusions or decisions in understanding ways. Less and less are they presented as purely inevitable happenings, as a fixed state or as the well-established way of the world. As, here, we encounter a second paradox that goes to the heart of psychoanalytic interpretation, namely, that responsible, insightful change is possible thorough psychoanalysis just because, as a child, the analysand mistakenly assumed and then denied responsibility for much that he encountered in the early formative environment and during maturation.
One major point remains to be made about the logic of viewing transference interpretation as simplifying yet innovative redescription. This point is that the interpretation bring about a coordination of the terms in which to state both the analysand’s current problems and their life-historical background. The analysand’s symptoms and desires are described as actions and, modes of action, with due regard for the principle of multiple function or multiple meaning, in coordination with that description, the decisive developmental situations and conflicts are stated as actions and modes of action. Continuity is established between the childhood constructions of relationships and self and the present constructions of these. Interpretation of transferences shows how both are part of the same set of practice, that is, how they follow the same set of rules. Past and present are coordinated to show continuity rather than arranged in a definite causal sequence.
In the same way, the form of analytic behaviour and the content of associations are given coordinate descriptions, say, for being defiant, devouring, or reparative. Or, in the case of depression, the depressive symptoms, the depressive analytic transference, the themes of present and past loss destructiveness and helplessness, all will be redecribed under the aspect of one continuously developing self-presentation. And this coordination will be worked out in the hermeneutically circular fashion in which the analyst defines both the facts to be explained and the explanations to be applied to these facts. In the end, as is well known, Both the paramount issues of the analysis and the leading explanatory account of them are likely to be significantly different from the provisional versions of them used at the beginning of the analysis.
This is the sophisticated cognitive simplification that promotes the convincing development and recognition of transference and the emotional experiencing of the past as it is now remembered. The coordination of terms is the only way to break into the vicious circle of the neurosis disturbance and reduce its unconsciously self-confirming character. New meaning is established by steadfast interpretation of transference and the condition for loving of which they are enactments.
That this kind of analytic work is not simply intellectual but shown in the analytic presentations that analysand was now operating according to rules which, through previous transference interpretations and coordination of terms, had changed. The changed rules were implicit in this hitherto-avoided experiencing of the past. It was not re-experiencing, or not mainly that: In its special way, it was experiencing that past for the first time.
It should take to be marked and noted, and, if not only to mention of two implications of which (1) The transference phenomena that finally constitute the transference e neurosis and to be taken as regressive in only some of their aspects. This is so because, viewed as achievements of the analysis, they have never existed before as such, rather, they constitute a creation achieved through a novel relationship into which one has entered by conscious and rational design. The analytic definition of the conditions for loving has never been arrived at before: They have never been simplified, organized, intensified, and transparent as they get to be in the analytically circumscribed and identified transference neurosis. It seems a more adequate or balanced view of transference neurosis. It seems a more adequate or balanced view of transference phenomena to regard them as multidirectional in meaning rather than as simply regressive or repetitive. This would be to look at them in as ways that are analogous to the way we look at creative works of art. We would see the transference as creating the past in the present, in a special analytic way and under favourable conditions. Essentially, they represent movement forward, and not backward.
And, (2) It is wrong to think that interpretation deals only in what is concealed or disguised or, what is its correlate, that ‘the unconscious’ is omniscient. In particular, it cannot be the case that ‘the unconscious’ knows all about transference and repetition, By establishing new connections, comprehensive context, and coordinated perspectives on familiar actions, interpretation creates new meanings or new actions. Not everything that has yet been organized has been actively kept apart by defensive measures, not everything that has not yet been recognized has been denied. This point is obvious, but it is often obscured by formulation, some of Freud’s among them, which suggest that interpretation is only just uncovering (Fingarette, 1963).
What, then, is interpretation? And how does it work? Extremely little seems to be known about it, but this does not prevent an almost universal belief in its remarkable efficacy as a weapon. Interpretation has, it must be confessed, many of the qualities of a magic weapon. It is, of course, felt as such by many patients. Some of them spend hours at a time in providing interpretations of their own - often ingenious, illuminating, correct. others, again, derive a direct libidinal gratification from being given interpretations and may even circulate interpretation is usually either scoffed at as something indicated or develop something parallel to a drug-addition to them. In some non-analytical circles interpretation is usually either scoffed at as something ludicrous or dreaded as a frightful danger. This last attitude is shared, as more than is often realized, by a certain number of analysts. This was particularly revealed by the reactions shown in many quarters when the idea of giving interpretations to small children was first mooted by MeIanie Klein. However, it is believed that it would be true in general to say, that analysts are incline to feel interpretation as something extremely powerful whether for good or ill. And there might seem to be a good many grounds for thinking that our feelings on the subject tend to distort our beliefs, at all events, many of these beliefs seem superficially to be contradictory, and the contradictions do not always spring from different schools of though, but are apparently sometimes held simultaneously by one individual. Thus, we are told that if we interpret too soon or too rashly, we hazardously risk of losing a patient: That interpretation may give rise to intolerable and unmanageable outbreaks of anxiety by ‘liberating’ it. That interpretation is the only way of enabling a patient to cope with an unmanageable outbreak of anxiety by ‘resolving’ it. That interpretation must always refer to material on the very point of emerging into consciousness, that the most useful interpretations are rally deep ones. Be cautious with your interpretations; , says one voice, ‘When in doubt, interpret’ says another. Nevertheless, although there is enviably a good deal of confusion in all of this. Do not think these views are necessarily incompatible: The various pieces of advice may turn out to refer to different circumstances and different cases and to imply unlike moderations of differently more or less kinds of applicable character uses of the word ‘interpretation’.
For the word is evidently used in more than on sense. It is, after all, perhaps, only a synonym for the old phrase we have already come across - ‘making what unconscious conscious and it shares all of the phrase’s ambiguities. For in one sense, if you give a German-English dictionary to someone who knows no German, you will be giving him a collection of interpretations, what is more, is the kind of sense in which the nature of interpretation has been discussed in a recent paper by Bernfield. Such descriptive interpretations have no relevance to our present topic, nonetheless, in proceeding, the actuality as dispensed among the ultimate instrumentations of psycho-analytic therapy and to which for convenience the name ‘mutative’ interpretation is so that is, given a schematized outline of what is understood by a view to clarify of expositional instances for which the interpretation of hostile impulses are by virtue of this power (his strictly limited power) as auxiliary super-ego, that the analyst gives permission for a certain small quantity of the patient’s id-energy (in our instance, in the form of an aggressive impulse), the object of the patient’s id-impulses, the quality of these impulses which is now released into consciousness will become consciously directed toward the analyst. This is the critical point. If all goes well, the patient’s ego will become aware of the contrast between the aggressive character of his feelings and the real nature of the analyst, who does not behave like the patient’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’ archaic objects. The patient, which is to say, will become aware of a distinction between his archaic phantasy object and the dimensionality of an actualized external object. The interpretation has now become a mutative one, since it has produced a breach in the neurotic vicious circle. For the patient, having become aware of the lack of aggressiveness of actuality that is potentially realized of the existing external object, will be able to diminish his own aggressiveness; the new object which he introjects will be less aggressive, and consequently, the aggressiveness of his super-ego will also diminish, as, too, the further corollary of these events. And with them the patient will obtain access to the infantile material which is being re-experienced by him in his relation to the analyst.
Something as taken or advanced as fact, which is in having the quality of becoming actual and not confuted in being of such a comparison with an expressed or implied standard or absolute, that we are now found to embark upon a description of the successive phases of therapy with the chronically schizophrenic adult patient. The ‘Out-of-contact’ phase’, is not properly or sufficiently attended to or in progress of any measurable extent over which of something exists, however, the term is phraseologically accessible to meaning, such that I do not term this the ‘autistic phase’, for the reason that the word ‘autistic’ has come to have a certain connotation, in psychodynamic theory, which is regarded as invalid and therefore do not advocate. Specifically, the term ‘autistic’, as generally used, conjures up Freud’s (1911) psychodynamic formulation of schizophrenia as involving withdrawal of libido from the outer world and its subsequent investment in the self-as involving of a regression into narcissism. Instead, however, is that there occurs in schizophrenia, a regressive dedifferentiation toward an early level of ego-development which has its prototype in the experience of a young infant for whom the inner and outer worlds have not yet become clearly distinguishable, as an amount of anxiety which is related to the unfamiliarity as found to be the major sources of anxiety in individuals suffering from [paranoid] schizophrenia. Where the sources of such anxiety is variously ego-defensive by phenomena. We well know that to any psychiatric patient himself, the threatening affects present themselves not undistortedly, but in forms modified by ego-defences which, although intently protective, at the same time distortions that may appear as something experiential in a strange and frightening way.
He finds himself unable to renounce any concern with that of the other patients. Exceptions are those patients whose projections attach not to any real-life figure at all, but to quite pure-culture alter-ego. And reach their of peace about the matter. For in actuality this would be tantamount to repudiating important components of himself, moreover, the other person is necessary to him as the bearer of these externalized (e.g., projected) emotions. Bu t, cannot find peace through a friendly acceptance of the prosecutory figure, for this would b e unsurmountable to accept, however, his own picture of himself, various qualities abhorrent to him. So an uneasy equilibrium is maintained, with his experiencing a gnawing, threatened, absorbing concern with the prosecutory figure whom he cannot rid from his mind (this is in line with the formulation of Werner (1940) and Loewald (1960)).
It leaves to appear with great interest that which Mahler and Furer (1960) emphasize that ‘Our first therapeutic endeavour in both types of infantile psychosis (i.e., both autistic and symbiotic) is to engage the child in a ‘corrective symbiotic experience’ . . . Loewald (1960) too, report that what a symbiotic relatedness occurs in the schizophrenic patient’s transference to the therapist: As he puts it, . . . If ego and objects are not clearly differentiated, if ego boundaries and object boundaries are not clearly established, the character of transference also is different, In as much as ego and objects are still largely merged. . . .
Such that the therapist, operating from this basic-orientation can meet usefully a wide variety of typical problem-situations, that which is in response to the patient‘s manifestation of delusional thinking, he will be aware that, for the patient, the delusions represent years of arduous and subjectively constructive thought, and are therefore most deeply cherished. He will not forget that obscured that obscures them is an indispensable nucleus of reality-perception. Likewise, when a patient is having vigorously to disavow any feeling about a clearly affect -laden matter, the therapist will remain in tune with the patient‘s own feeling experience, by remarking, ‘I gather you don’ t find yourself having any particular feeling about this’ - or. Better, will make no mention of feeling - rather than try to overcome the unconscious denial by asserting: But ‘ surely this must make you very angry (or hurt, or whatever). Similarly, in response to the expressions of an archaic, harsh, superego in the patient, rather than set himself up as the spokesman, the personification, of the repressed id-impulses, he will realize that it is in the superego that the patient’s conscious self-his personal identity-mainly resides: Thus, he will seldom urge the patient to recognize sexual or aggressive feelings within, and will more often acknowledge how strong a sense of protest or outrage the patient feels upon perceiving these in others.
To the extent that the therapist is free from a compulsion to rescue the suffering patient, he can remain sufficiently extricated from that suffering to be able to note significant sequence in the appearance of such symptoms as hallucinations, verbalized delusions, and so forth, and thus be in a position to be genuinely helpful. Even when on a car ride with a patient, or grappling with the latter’s physical assault, the therapist may on occasion be able to allow himself enough detachment to help the patient situations from earlier life, such ‘action interpretations’ may be especially important to the patient whose memory and whose capacity for abstract thinking are severely impaired.
Thus, one places in the long run a minimum of pressure on the patient who is already paralysed with pressure, and keeps oneself in a comparatively unanxious and receptive state which, better than anything else, helps eventually to relieve the patient’s anxiety and unlock his tongue. Sooner or later, like a bright dawn pushing back a long night, the patient will put his rusty vocalization capacities to work in venting reproach, contempt, and fury upon the therapist for doing, as the patient sees it, nothing to help him.
The therapist learns to take fewer and fewer things for grantee in his work, to question more and more of his long-held assumptions and discard many of them. He learns that one does not set a ceiling upon human beings’ potential growth. He finds recurrent delight in the creative spontaneity with which the schizophrenic patient pierces the sober and constructing wrapping of our culture’s conventions, and he discovers that humour is present in his work in rich abundance, leaving the genuine tragedy and helping to make it supportable. While developing a deep confidence in his intuitive ability, when working with the severely fragmented or differentiated patient he will not jump too quickly to attempted communicated ‘closure’ (in the Gestalt sense), but will leave it in the patient’s hands to do, no matter how slowly and painfully, the parts of the communicational work which only he can do. Meanwhile, he will not need no shield himself, through the maintenance of an urgently and actively ‘helpful’ or ‘rescuing’ attitude, from feeling at a deep level the impact of the fragmented and differentiated world, with its attendment feelings, in which the patient exists. The unfolding of such feeling experiences, the therapist of the next phase of the therapy, the ‘urgently helpful’ therapist attitude is unconsciously designed to avert, comparable to the defensive function. In the patient, of the latter’s schizophrenic delusions.
From a purely descriptive viewpoint, schizophrenia an be seen to consist essentially in an impairment of both ‘integration’ and ‘differentiation’ - which are but opposite faces of a unitary growth process. From a psychodynamic viewpoint as well, this malfunctioning of integration-and-differentiation seems basic to all the bewilderingly complex and varied manifestations of schizophrenia.
Taking first the matter of integration: When we assess the schizophrenic individual in terms of the classically structural areas of the personality - id, ego, and superego - we discover these to be poorly integrated with one another. The id is experienced by the ego as a Pandora’s box, the contents of which will overwhelm one if it is opened. The ego is, as many writers have stated, severely split, sometimes into innumerable islands which are not linked discernibly with one another. And the superego unintegrated ego are, if anything, even more destructive to it than are the accessions of the threatening id-impulses, as Szalita-Pemow (1951), Hill (1955) and others have emphasized. Moreover, the superego is, like the ego, even in itself not well integrated, its utterances contain the most glaring inconsistencies from one moment to the next. Jacobson (1954) has shown that there is actually a dissolution of the superego, as an integral structure - a regressive transformation back into the threatening parental images whose conglomeration originally formed it.
Differentiation is a process which is essentially to integration, and vice versa, for personality structure-functions or psychic contents to become integrated, they must first have emerged as partially differentiated or separated from one another, and differentiation in turn can emerge only out of a foundation of more or less integrated function or contents.
When we look at this process of differentiation in the schizophrenic person, we find it to be, similarly, severely impaired. It is difficult or impossible for him to differentiate between himself and the outer world. He often cannot distinguish between memories and present perceptions, memories experienced with hallucinatory vividness and immediacy are sensed as perceptions of present events. And perceptions of present events may be experienced as memories from the past. He may be unable to distinguish between emotions and somatic sensations, feelings from the emotional sphere often come through to him as somatic sensations, or even variations in his somatic structure (changes in the size, colour and so forth, of bodily parts).
He cannot distinguish between thoughts and feelings on the one hand, and action on the other: Thus, if the therapist encourages him to explore thoughts and feelings of a sexual or murderous nature, for example, he feels that the therapist is trying to invite him into sexual activity, or incite him to murder. He may be unable to differentiate, perceptually, one person from another, so that he is prone to misidentify them.
In the conduct of his daily life and in his communicating with other persons, he is unable, as Bateson et al. has reported, to distinguish between the symbolic and the concrete. If his therapist uses symbolic language, he may experience this in literal terms, and, on the other hand, the affairs of daily life (eating, dressing, sleeping and so on) which we think of as literal and concrete, he may react to as possessing a unique symbolic significance which completely obscures their ‘practical’ importance in his life for being part of the untold story for being human.
However, in the schizophrenic these two processes, that is to say, that of integration and differentiation, that tend to be out of step with one another, so that at one moment a patient’s more urgent need may be for increased integration, whereas at another he may more urgently need increased differentiation. And there are some patients who show for months on end a more urgent need in one of these areas, before the alternate growth-phase comes on the scene. Thus, there is a modicum of validity in speaking of two different ‘types’ of schizophrenic patients. This distinction is largely artificial, but it is useful for purposes of serving to explain of something that makes clear what is obscure bu t not readily understood or grasped from the main centres of human activity.
One comes to realize, how premature have been one’s efforts to find out what feelings the patient is experiencing or what thoughts he is having: One comes to realize that much of the time he has neither feelings nor thoughts differentiated as such and communicable to us.
Such differentiation as the patient possess tends to crumble when intense emotion enters his awareness. A paranoid man, for example, may find that when his hatred toward another person reaches a certain degree of intensity, he is flooded with anxiety because he no longer knows whether he hates, or instead, ‘really loves’ the other individual. This is not based, as primarily upon the mechanism which Freud (1911) outlined in his classical description of the nature of paranoid delusions of persecution, a description in which repressed homosexual love played the central role. the central difficulty is rather that the ego is too poorly differentiated to maintain its structure in the face of such powerful affects, and the patient becomes overwhelmed with what can only be described as ‘undifferentiated passion’, precisely as one finds an infant to be overwhelmed at times with affect which the observer cannot specifically identify as any one kind of emotion.
As for the feelings which the therapist himself experiences in working with the ‘non-differentiated type’ of patient, we fund, again, a persistent threat of the therapist’s sense of identity. But whereas, in the instance the threat was felt predominantly as a disturbance of one’s personal integration, it is felt predominantly as a weakening of one’s sense of differentiation. In this instance, the ‘therapeutic symbiosis’ which a necessary development, tends to occur earlier, for this patient’s predominant mode of relatedness with other persons, at the developmental level at which point we find him at the very beginning of a symbiotic relatedness among others, that is to say, with its subjective absence of ego-boundaries, involves not only special gratification but anxiety-provoking disturbances of one’s sense of personal identity.
The comparatively rapid development of symbiotic relatedness is facilitated by the patient’s characteristically non-verbal, therapeutic sessions. In response, the therapist’s own behaviour becomes more and more similar, so that each participant is now offering to the other, the intermittence over which of times are silent, impassive screen which facilitates abundant mutual projecting and introjecting. Thus a symbiotic state is likely to be reached earlier than in one’s work with the typically much more verbal type of patient whom, for instance, that the patient’s and the therapist’s more abundant verbalizations tend persistently to stress the ego-boundaries separating the two persons from one another.
With the predominantly non-differentiated patient, the therapist’s sense of identity as a complexly differentiated individual entity becomes further eroded, or undermined, as he finds the patient persistently operating on the unwavering conviction, that, time after time, that the therapist is but an undifferentiated aspect of the whole vague mass of which his own poorly differentiated hostility, but which in the patient’s tenaciously held view, is the way the world around him really is.
Further, since the patient typically verbalized little but a few maddeningly monotonous stereotypes, the therapist tends to feel over the course of time, with so little of his own intellectual content being explicitly tapped in the relationship, that his richness of intellect is progressively rusting away - becoming less differentiated, more stereotyped and rudimentary. Moreover, the patient presents but one of two emotional wavelengths to which the therapist can himself tune in. Rather than a rich spectrum of emotion which calls into resource a similarly wide range of feelings from the therapist himself. Thus not only the therapist’s intellectual resources, but his emotional capacities too, become subjectively narrowed down and impoverished, as he finds that his patient evokes in him neither any wide range of ideas, nor any emotion except, for example, rage, or contempt, or dull hopelessness.
This feeling experience on his part, anxiety-provoking and discouraging though he finds it, is a necessary therapeutic development. it is necessary, that is, for him thus to experience at first hand something of the patient’s own lack of differentiation, for, as in the therapy with the non-integrated patient, that, again, the healing process occurs external to the patient, as it were, at an intrapsychic level in the therapist, before it becomes established in the patient himself. That is, the therapist’s coming to view the patient, his relationship with the patient, and himself in this relationship, all for being largely non-differentiated, is a development which sets the stage for the patient’s gradually increasing differentiation. Now the therapist comes too sense, time after time, newly emerging tendrils of differentiation in the patient, before the latter is himself conscious of them. In responding to these with spontaneity as they show themselves, time and again, that the therapist helps the patient to become aware that they are a part of him. But there are times when a therapist can only say that he feels a new response in himself in reaction to behaviour which objectively seems as stereotyped as ever.
Thus a heavy reliance upon one’s intuition is a technical point, although a second point concerns the relatively sparing use of transference interpretation - perhaps, more sparing than in one’s work with the predominantly non-integrated, or fragmented, patient. in the instance of that first ‘type’ of patient, such that transference interpretations may have a specific value in fostering the patient’s wholeness, his integration, by focussing his disparate personality fragments into the context of the patient-therapist relationship. But the predominantly non-differentiated patient, who is, above all trying to branch out, in his interpersonal relationships and in his intrapsychic content, beyond the immediate, symbiotic situation with the therapist, premature transference interpretations which tend to bring it all back to the relationship with his therapist - which tend, that is, to reduce divergent ramifications of meaning to this one idea that something conveys to the mind as the one purpose to accomplish or do, as such is the intention of meaning.
The third and last technical point is, like the others, a function of the growth process of a process which involves both patient and the therapist. The patient’s differentiation is fostered not only by the therapist’s sensing, and responding to, an increasingly differentiated person in him, but also by the therapist’s permitting his own personality differentiation, his own complex individuality which was to a greater extent, already firmly established before beginning work with this patient, to come more and more freely into play in the therapeutic relationship. At a crucial point is, for example, he must have the courage to act upon the course that his own intuition directs, in deferring sharply from the patient - to be the person he knows himself to be and to address the person he knows to inhabit the patient’s body, no matter how sharply this conflicts with the patient’s own image of himself and of his therapist. Whereas, it was essential earlier to allow the anxiety-arousing symbiosis to develop, now the therapist must find similar courage to help determinedly in its resolution. In asserting increasingly his own complex individuality, he provides the patient with an increasingly clearly differentiated person with whom to identify and over against whom to become conscious of his own separate self.
That the states of what are called non-integration and non-differentiation should be thought of as not merely rather fixed levels of maturation or regression at which a patient exists over a long period of time, but as flexible defences of the ego against overwhelming anxiety. Thus, from noticing at what moments in the theopathic session, or at what junctures over the long course of treatment, a patient’s characteristic non-integration or non-differentiation notably increases or notably lessons, we can tell when areas of particularity severe anxiety have been encountered in his personality investigation, and chart the resolution of this anxiety as growth proceeds.
Perhaps more than any other mental illness, schizophrenia has a debilitating effect on the lives of the people who suffer from it. A person with schizophrenia may have difficulty telling the difference between real and unreal experiences, logical and illogical thoughts, or appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. Schizophrenia seriously impairs a person’s ability to work, go to school, enjoy relationships with others, or take care of oneself. In addition, people with schizophrenia frequently require hospitalization because they pose a danger to themselves. About 10 percent of people with schizophrenia commit suicide, and many others attempt suicide. Once people develop schizophrenia, they usually suffer from the illness for the rest of their lives. Although there is no cure, treatment can help many people with schizophrenia lead productive lives.
Schizophrenia also carries an enormous cost to society. People with schizophrenia occupy about one-third of all beds in psychiatric hospitals in the United States. In addition, people with schizophrenia account for at least 10 percent of the homeless population in the United States. The National Institute of Mental Health has estimated that schizophrenia costs the United States tens of billions of dollars each year in direct treatment, social services, and lost productivity.
Approximately 1 percent of people develop schizophrenia at some time during their lives. Experts estimate that about 1.8 million people in the United States have schizophrenia. The prevalence of schizophrenia is the same regardless of sex, race, and culture. Although women are just as likely as men to develop schizophrenia, women tend to experience the illness less severely, with fewer hospitalizations and better social functioning in the community.
Schizophrenia usually develops in late adolescence or early adulthood, between the ages of 15 and 30. Much less commonly, schizophrenia develops later in life. The illness may begin abruptly, but it usually develops slowly over months or years. Mental health professionals diagnose schizophrenia based on an interview with the patient in which they determine whether the person has experienced specific symptoms of the illness.
Symptoms and functioning in people with schizophrenia tend to vary over time, sometimes worsening and other times improving. For many patients the symptoms gradually become less severe as they grow older. About 25 percent of people with schizophrenia become symptom-free later in their lives.
A variety of symptoms characterize schizophrenia. The most prominent include symptoms of psychosis—such as delusions and hallucinations - as well as bizarre behaviour, strange movements, and disorganized thinking and speech. Many people with schizophrenia do not recognize that their mental functioning is disturbed.
Delusions are false beliefs that appear obviously untrue to other people. For example, a person with schizophrenia may believe that he is the king of England when he is not. People with schizophrenia may have delusions that others, such as the police or the FBI, are plotting against them or spying on them. They may believe that aliens are controlling their thoughts or that their own thoughts are being broadcast to the world so that other people can hear them.
Research suggests that the genes one inherits strongly influence one’s risk of developing schizophrenia. Studies of families have shown that the more close one is related to someone with schizophrenia, the greater the risk one has of developing the illness. For example, the children of one parent with schizophrenia have about a 13 percent chance of developing the illness, and children of two parents with schizophrenia have about a 46 percent chance of eventually developing schizophrenia. This increased risk occurs even when such children are adopted and raised by mentally healthy parents. In comparison, children in the general population have only about a 1 percent chance of developing schizophrenia.
Some evidence suggests that schizophrenia may result from an imbalance of chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters. These chemicals enable neurons (brain cells) to communicate with each other. Some scientists suggest that schizophrenia results from excess activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine in certain parts of the brain or from an abnormal sensitivity to dopamine. Support for this hypothesis comes from Antipsychotic drugs, which reduce psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia by blocking brain receptors for dopamine. In addition, amphetamines, which increase dopamine activity, intensify psychotic symptoms in people with schizophrenia. Despite these findings, many experts believe that excess dopamine activity alone cannot account for schizophrenia. Other neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and norepinephrine, may play important roles as well.
Although scientists favour a biological cause of schizophrenia, stress in the environment may affect the onset and course of the illness. Stressful life circumstances - such as maturing in age and character as for living in poverty, the death of a loved one, an important change in jobs or relationships, or chronic tension and hostility at home—can increase the chances of schizophrenia in a person biologically predisposed to the disease. In addition, stressful events can trigger a relapse of symptoms in a person who already has the illness. Individuals who have effective skills for managing stress may be less susceptible to its negative effects. Psychological and social rehabilitation can help patients develop more effective skills for dealing with stress.
Although there is no cure for schizophrenia, effective treatment exists that can improve the long-term course of the illness. With many years of treatment and rehabilitation, significant numbers of people with schizophrenia experience partial or full remission of their symptoms.
Treatment of schizophrenia usually involves a combination of medication, rehabilitation, and treatment of other problems the person may have. Antipsychotic drugs (also called neuroleptics) are the most frequently used medications for treatment of schizophrenia. Psychological and social rehabilitation programs may help people with schizophrenia function in the community and reduce stress related to their symptoms. Treatment of secondary problems, such as substance abuse and infectious diseases, is also an important part of an overall treatment program.
Antipsychotic medications, developed in the mid-1950s, can dramatically improve the quality of life for people with schizophrenia. The drugs reduce or eliminate psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions. The medications can also help prevent these symptoms from returning. Common Antipsychotic drugs include risperidone (Risperdal), olanzapine (Zyprexa), clozapine (Clozaril), quetiapine (Seroquel), haloperidol (Haldol), thioridazine (Mellaril), chlorpromazine (Thorazine), fluphenazine (Prolixin), and trifluoperazine (Stelazine). People with schizophrenia usually must take medication for the rest of their lives to control psychotic symptoms. Antipsychotic medications appear to be less effective at treating other symptoms of schizophrenia, such as social withdrawal and apathy.
Because many patients with schizophrenia continue to experience difficulties despite taking medication, psychological and social rehabilitation is often necessary. A variety of methods can be effective. Social skill training helps people with schizophrenia learn specific behaviours for functioning in society, such as making friends, purchasing items at a store, or initiating conversations. Behavioural training methods can also help them learn self-care skills such as personal hygiene, money management, and proper nutrition. In addition, cognitive-behavioural therapy, a type of psychotherapy, can help reduce persistent symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and social withdrawal.
Because many patients have difficulty obtaining or keeping jobs, supported employment programs that help patients find and maintain jobs are a helpful part of rehabilitation. In these programs, the patient works alongside people without disabilities and earns competitive wages. An employment specialist (or vocational specialist) helps the person maintain their job by, for example, training the person in specific skills, helping the employer accommodate the person, arranging transportation, and monitoring performance. These programs are most effective when the supported employment is closely integrated with other aspects of treatment, such as medication and monitoring of symptoms.
Some people with schizophrenia are vulnerable to frequent crises because they do not regularly go to mental health centres to receive the treatment they need. These individuals often relapse and face rehospitalization. To ensure that such patients take their medication and receive appropriate psychological and social rehabilitation, assertive community treatment (ACT) programs have been developed that deliver treatment to patients in natural settings, such as in their homes, in restaurants, or on the street.
People with schizophrenia often have other medical problems, so an effective treatment program must attend to these as well. One of the most generally shared in or participated in things conforming to a type without noteworthy excellence or faults just as common a rule, by ordinary, frequent and ordinarily as an idea or expression deficient in originality or freshness, yet, only of its exchanging the commonplace of the common associated problems is vehemently and usually coarsely expressed condemnation or disapproved, as the interpretative category of an unequalled vocabulary is itself a genuine abuse. Successful treatment of substance abuse inpatients with schizophrenia requires careful coordination with their mental health care, so that the same clinicians are treating both disorders at the same time.
The high rate of substance abuse in patients with schizophrenia contributes to a high prevalence of infectious diseases, including hepatitis B and C and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Assessment, education, and treatment or management of these illnesses is critical for the long-term health of patients.
Other problems frequently associated with schizophrenia include housing instability and homelessness, legal problems, violence, trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and suicide attempts. Close monitoring and psychotherapeutic interventions are often helpful in addressing these problems.
Several other psychiatric disorders are closely related to schizophrenia. In schizoaffective disorder, a person shows symptoms of schizophrenia combined with either mania or severe depression. Schizophreniform disorder refers to an illness in which a person experiences schizophrenic symptoms for more than one month but fewer than six months. In schizotypal personality disorder, a person engages in odd thinking, speech, and behaviour, but usually does not lose contact with reality. Sometimes mental health professionals refer to these disorders together as schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.
Severe mental illness almost always alters a person’s life dramatically. People with severe mental illnesses experience disturbing symptoms that can cause of such difficulties and holding to a job, or go to school, relate to others, or cope with ordinary life demands. Some individuals require hospitalization because they become unable to care for themselves or because they are at risk of committing suicide.
The symptoms of mental illness can be very distressing. People who develop schizophrenia may hear voices inside their head that say nasty things about them or command them to act in strange or unpredictable ways. Or they may be paralysed by paranoia - the deep conviction that everyone, including their closest family members, wants to injure or destroy them. People with major depression may feel that nothing brings pleasure and that life is so dreary and unhappy that it is better to be dead. People with panic disorder may experience heart palpitations, rapid breathing, and anxiety so extreme that they may not be able to leave home. People whom experience episodes of mania may engage in reckless sexual behaviour or may spend money indiscriminately, acts that later cause them to feel guilt, shame, and desperation.
Other mental illnesses, while not always debilitating, create certain problems in living. People with personality disorders may experience loneliness and isolation because their personality style interferes with social relations. People with an eating disorder may become so preoccupied with their weight and appearance that they force themselves to vomit or refuse to eat. Individuals who develop post-traumatic stress disorder may become angry easily, experience disturbing memories, and have trouble concentrating.
Experiences of mental illness often take issue upon its stability for depending on one’s culture or social group, sometimes greatly so. For example, in most of the non-Western world, people with depression complain principally of physical ailments, such as lack of energy, poor sleep, loss of appetite, and various kinds of physical pain. Indeed, even in North America these complaints are commonplace. But in the United States and other Western societies, depressed people and mental health professionals who treat them tend to emphasize psychological problems, such as feelings of sadness, worthlessness, and despair. The experience of schizophrenia also differs by culture. In India, one-third of the new cases of schizophrenia involve catatonia, a behavioural condition in which a person maintains a bizarre statue like pose for hours or days. This condition is rare in Europe and North America.
Of furthering issues regarding depersonalization disorder, meaning, in effect, that it is a categorised illness based within its intendment for being an illness, of mind, in which people experience an unwelcome sense of detachment from their own bodies. They may feel as though they are floating above the ground, outside observers of their own mental or physical processes. Other symptoms may include a feeling that they or other people are mechanical or unreal, a feeling of being in a dream, a feeling that their hands or feet are larger or smaller than usual, and a deadening of emotional responses. These symptoms are chronic and severe enough to impede normal functioning in a social, school, or work environment.
Depersonalization disorder is a relatively rare syndrome thought to result from severe psychological stress. It may occur as part of other mental illnesses, especially anxiety disorders. For example, some people with panic disorder feel nervous, have a sense of doom about their future and health, and have a troubling sense of detachment form the lose in the attemptive use in making or doing or achieving a useful regularity as might be expected of the control over their bodies. Depersonalization disorder may also be a component of more severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia. Treatment may include training in relaxation techniques that enhance body perception and control, hypnosis to modify symptoms, and psychotherapy to explore possible stress-related components of the disorder.
Psychiatrists classify depersonalization disorder as one of the Dissociative disorders. Such disorders involve a disruption of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception.
All the while, the schizophrenic responds to altercations in the analyst’s defections and understanding by corresponding stormy and dramatic changes from love to hatred, from willingness to leave his delusional world to resistance and renewed withdrawal.
As understandable as these changes are, nevertheless may come as a surprise to the analyst who frequently has not observed their source, this is quite in contrast to his experience with psychoneurosis whose emotional reactions during an interview he can usually predict. These unpredictable changes seem to be the reason for the conception of the unreliability of the schizophrenic’s transference reaction, yet they follow the same dynamic rules as the psychoneurotic’s oscillations between positive and negative transference and resistance, however, if the schizophrenic’s reactions are stormy and seemingly more unpredictable than those of the psychoneurotic, that instances suggested to be due to the inevitable errors in the analyst’s approach to the schizophrenic, of which he himself may be unaware, rather than to the unreliability of the patient‘s emotional response?
Why is it inevitable that the psychoanalysts disappoint his schizophrenic patient time and again?
The schizophrenic withdraws from painful reality and retires to what resembles the early speechless phase of development where consciousness is not yet crystalized. As the expression of his feelings is not hindered by the convention that he has eliminated, as his thinking, feelings, behaviour and speech - when present - obey the working rules of the archaic unconscious. His thinking is magical and does not follow logical rules. It does not admit to every last ‘no’, and likewise the no to ‘yes’: There is no recognition of space and time, I, you, and they, are interchangeable expression through which of symbols and often by movement and gestures rather than by words.
As the schizophrenic is suspicious, he will distrust the words of his analyst. He will interpret them and incidental gestures and attitudes of the analyst according to his own delusional experience. The analyst may not even be aware of these involuntary manifestations of his attitudes, yet they mean much to the hypersensitive schizophrenic who uses them as a means of orienting himself to the therapist‘s personality and intentions toward him.
In other words, the schizophrenic patient and the therapist are people living in different worlds and no different levels of personal development with different means of expressing and of orienting themselves. We know little about the language of the unconscious that belongs to the schizophrenic, and our access to it is blocked by the very process of our own adjustment to a world the schizophrenic has relinquished, so, we should not be surprised that errors and misunderstandings occur when we under take to communicate and strive for a rapport with him.
Another source of the schizophrenic’s disappointment arises form which the analyser accepts and does not interfere with the behaviour of the schizophrenic, his attitude may lead the patient to expect that the analyst will assist in carrying out all the patient’s wishes, even though they may not seem to be in his interest to the analyser‘s and the hospital’s in their relationship to society. This attitude of acceptance so different from the patient’s previous experiences readily fosters the anticipation that the analyst will try to carry out the patient’s suggestion and take his part, even against conventional society with which it should occasionally arise. Frequently it will be wise for the analyst to agree with the patient‘s wish to remain unbattled and untidy until he is ready to talk about the reasons for his behaviour or to change spontaneously. At other times, he will unfortunately be unable to take the patient’s part without being able to make the patient understand and accept the reasons for the analyst’s position.
If the analyst is not able to accept the possibility of misunderstanding the reaction of the schizophrenic patient and in turn of being misunderstood by him, it may shake his security with his patient.
That is to say, that, among other things, the schizophrenic, once he accepts the analyst’s insecurity. being helpless and open to himself - in spite of his pretended grandiose isolation - he will feel utterly defeated by the insecurity of his would-be helper. Such disappointment may furnish reasons for outbursts of hatred and are comparable to the negative transference reactions of psychoneurosis, yet more intense than these, since they are not limited by the restrictions of the actual world - that is, it exists in or based on fact, its only problem is a sure-enough externalization for which things are existing in the act of being external in something that has existence, ss if it were an actualization as received in the obtainable enactment for being externalized, such that its problem of in some actual life that proves obtainable achieved, in that of doing something that has an existence for having absolute actuality.
These outbursts are accompanied by anxiety, feelings of guilt, and fear of retaliations which in turn lead to increased hostility. Yet this established a vicious circle: We disappoint the patient, he is afraid that we hate him for his hatred and therefore continues to hate us. If in addition he senses that the analyst is afraid of his aggressiveness, it confirms his fear that he is actually considered as some dangerous and unacceptable, and this augments his hatred.
This establishes that the schizophrenics capable of developing strong relationships of love and hatred toward the analyst. After all, one could not be so hostile if it were not for the background of a very close relationship. In addition, the schizophrenic develops transference reactions on the narrower sense which he can differentiate from the actual interpersonal relationship. For which the schizophrenic’s emotional reactions toward the analyst have to be met with extreme care and caution. The love which the sensitive schizophrenic feels as he first emerges, and his cautions acceptance of the analyst’s warmth of interest is really most delicate and tender things. If the analyst deals with the transference reactions of a psychoneurotic is bad enough, though as a reparable rule, but if he fails with a schizophrenic in meeting positive feelings by pointing it out for instance before the patient indicates that he is ready to discuss it, he may easily freeze to death what has just begun to grow and so destroy any further possibility of therapy.
Some analysts may feel that the atmosphere of complete acceptance and of strict avoidance of any arbitrary denials which we recommend as a basic rule for the treatment of schizophrenics may not avoid our wish to guide of reacceptance of reality, nevertheless, Freud says that every science and therapy which accept his teachings about unconscious, about transference and resistance and about infantile sexuality, may be called psychoanalysis. According in this definition we believe we are practising psychoanalysis with our schizophrenic patients.
Whether we call it analysis or not, it is clear that successful treatment does not depend on technical rules of any special psychiatric school but rather on the basic attitude of individual therapist toward psychologic persons. If he meets them as strangle creatures of another world whose productions are not comprehensible to ‘normal’ beings, he cannot treat them, if he realizes, however, that the difference between himself and the psychologic is only of degree, and not of kind, he will know better how to meet him. He will not be able to identify himself sufficiently with the patient to understand and accept his emotional reactions without becoming involved in them.
The process of constant and perpetual change is examined and closely matched within the study of philosophical speculations and pointed of a world view which asserts that basic reality is constantly in a process of flux and change. Indeed, reality is identified with pure process. Concepts such as creativity, freedom, novelty, emergence, and growth are fundamental explanatory categories for process philosophy. This metaphysical perspective is to be contrasted with a philosophy of substance, the view that a fixed and permanent reality underlies the changing or fluctuating world of ordinary experience. Whereas substance philosophy emphasizes static being, process philosophy emphasizes dynamically becoming.
Although process philosophy is as old as the 6th-century Bc Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, renewed interest in it was stimulated in the 19th century by the theory of evolution. Key figures in the development of modern process philosophy were the British philosophers Herbert Spencer, Samuel Alexander, and Alfred North Whitehead, the American philosophers Charles S. Peirce and William James, and the French philosophers Henri Bergson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Whitehead's Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929) is generally considered the most important systematic expression of process philosophy.
Contemporary theology has been strongly influenced by process philosophy. The American theologian Charles Hartshorne, for instance, rather than interpreting God as an unchanging absolute, emphasizes God's sensitive and caring relationship with the world. A personal God enters into relationships in such a way that he is affected by the relationships, and to be affected by relationships is to change. So too is in the process of growth and development. Important contributions to process theology have also been made by such theologians as William Temple, Daniel Day Williams, Schubert Ogden, and John Cobb, Jr.
‘Reality’ is a difficult word to use to every one’s satisfaction or even to one’s own satisfaction. In this instance the word reality is used arbitrarily to designate the direct, here-and-now impact of the analyst upon the patient. Reality. In this sense, contrasts with the impact the analyst has through his representation in the patient’s fantasy life, neurosis, and transference, since both kinds of impact seem always to coexist and since the former - the analyst’s real impact - may be the worst enemy of the transference, the matter of their differentiation is possibly the most challenging aspect of analysis.
The analytic situation, which is set up to shut out ordinary reality intrusions, that can. . . . neither nor should not exclude all, but to say, that in the beginning months, for instance, reality inevitably has the upper hand. The analyst, the office, the procedure, are all overwhelmingly real. Everything is strange, frightening and exciting, gratifying and frustrating. Unlike the patient can test it and orient himself to it, the impact of this reality is usually so great that even an ordinary useful transference relationship cannot be expected to develop.
Perhaps the most confusing aspect of this beginning period is the frequent appearance in it of what can be regarded as a false transference relationship. With great intensity and clarity, the patient may reveal, through transference-like references about the analyst, some of the deepest secrets only of his neurosis but of its genesis. The pseudotransference, too good to be true, is almost sure to be nothing more than the patient’s attempt to deal with the person of the analyst, the entire spectrum of his various patterns of behaviour. If, it is easy to do, the analyst overlooks the likelihood that the patient’s relationship with at this time is really about that almost everything said about it is related, analysis may get off to a very bad start. And if, as is even earlier to do, the analyst’s interests the genetic meaning of the openly exposed material, a good transference relationship may be seriously delayed and a workable transference neurosis may never appear. even after initial reality has had time to fade, reality may continue to intrude in ways that are very hard to detect and that are very troublesome.
One of the most serious problems of analysis is the very substantial help which the patient receives directly from the analyst and the analytic situation. For many a patient, the analyst in the analytic situation is in fact the most stable, reasonable, wise and understanding person he has ever met, and the setting in which they meet may actually be the most honest, open, direct and regular relationship he has ever experienced. Added to this is the considerable helpfulness to him of being able to clarify his life storey. confess his guilt, express his ambitions, and explore his confusions. Further real help comes from the learning-about-life accruing from the analyst’s skilled questions, observations and interpretations. Taken together, the total real value to the patient of the analytic situation can easily be immense. The trouble with this kind of help is that it goes on and on, it may have such a real, direct and continuing impact upon the patient that he can never get deeply enough involved in transference situation to allow him to resolve or even to become acquainted with his most crippling internal difficulties. The trouble is far too good, the trouble also is that we as analysts apparently cannot resist the seductiveness of being directly helpful, and this, when combined with the compelling assumption that helpfulness is bound to be good, permits us to credit the patient’s improvements to ‘analysis’ when more properly it should often be recognized for being the amounting result for the patient’s using the analytic situation, as the model, for being the preceptors and supporter in the dealing practically within the immediate distractions as holding to some problem.
Perhaps, we can now refer to something in a clear unmistakable manner, and it would be to mention, for being, that one more difficult-to-handle intrusion of reality into the analysis, that by saying, that this is the definitive and final interruption of the transference neurosis by the reality of termination; in the sense, the situation is reversed and the intrusion is analytically desirable, since ideally the impact of reality of impending and certain termination is used to facilitate the resolution of the transference. As with the resolution of earlier episodes of transference neurosis, this final one is brought about principally by the analyst’s interpretations and reconstructions. As these take effect, the transference neurosis and, hopefully, along with it the original neurosis is resolved. This final resolution, however, which is much more comprehensive, is usually very different and may not come about at all without the help of the reality of termination. Accordingly, any attenuation of the ending, such as tapering off or causal or tentative stopping, should be expected to stand in the way of an effective resolution of the transference. Yet, it seems that this is what most commonly happens to an ending, and because of this a great many patients may lose the potentially great benefit of a thorough resolution and are forever after left suspended in the net of unresolved transference.
Yet, slurring over a rigorous termination seems understandable, as difficult as transference neurosis may be in the analyst at other times, this ending period, if rigorously carried out, simply has to be the period of his greatest emotional strain. There can surely be no more likely time for an analyst to surrender his analytic position and, responding to his own transference, become personally involved with his patient than during the process of separating from a long and self-restrained relationship. Accordingly, it may be better to slur over the ending lightly than to mishandle it in an attempt to be rigorous.
In considering more broadly the function of the transference in the psychoanalytic process, one is confronted by the apparent naïve, but, nonetheless important questions of the role of the actual (current) object as compared with that of the object representation of the original personage in the past. We recall Freud’s paradoxical, somewhat gloomy, but portentous concluding passage in "The Dynamics of Transference." This struggle between the doctor and the patient, between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out almost exclusively in the phenomena of transference. It is on that field that the victory must be won - the victory whose expression is on that field that the victory must be won - the victory whose expression is the permanent cure of the neuroses. It cannot be disputed that controlling the phenomena of transference presents the psychoanalysis with the greatest difficultly, but it should not be forgotten that they do us the inestimable service of making the patient ‘s hidden and forgotten erotic impulses of showing their immediate and manifested impossibilities, for when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigies.
Both object and representation are made necessary by the basic phenomenon of original separation. The existence of an image of the object, which persist in the absence of the object, is one of the important beginnings of psychic life in general, certainly an indispensable prerequisite for object relationship. As generally construed. Whether this is viewed as (or a times demonstrably is) something unstable for allotting introjection, s always subject to alternative projection, or an intrapsychic object representation clearly distinguished from the self-representation, or firm identification in the superego, or in the ego itself, these phenomena are in various ways components of the system of mastery of the fact of separation, or separateness, from the original absolutely necessarily anaclitic (in the earliest period) symbiotic ‘object’. In the light of clinical observation, it would appear to be that the relative stability (parental) object representation. At which time of varying degree, are to a greater extent for the archaic phenomena. Even in nonpsychotic patients, overwhelmed by them, sometimes resembles the restoration from oedipal identification, which provides the preponderant basis for most demonstrable analytic transferences. That within the necrotic patients, the transference is effectively established when this representation invests the analyst to a degree - depending on intensity of drive and most of ego participation - which ranges in all the, wishing and strivings to remake and analyst to biasses judgements and misinterpretation of data, finally are the actual perceptual distortions.
However, the old object representations as such may be invested, however rigidly established the libidinal or aggressive cathexis of the image may be, this as such can become the actual and exclusive focus of instinctual discharge, or of complicated and intense instinct-defence solutions, only and general energy-sparing quality of strictly intrapsychic processes. For the vast majority of persons, visible to any degree, including those with severe neurosis, character distortions, addictions and certain psychoses, the striving is toward the living and actual object, even at the cost of intense suffering. In a sense, this returns us to the state in which the psychological ‘object-to-be’. Has a critical importance never again to be duplicated, except in certain acute life emergencies, even if the object is not firmly perceived as such, in the sense of later object relations? And it does seem that trance impressions from the earliest contacts in the service of life preservation, and the associated instinctual gratifications, and innumerable secondarily associated sensory impressions. Are activated by the specific inborn urges of sexual maturation? These propel the individual to renew many of the earliest modes of actual bodily contact, in connection with seeking for specific instinctual gratification. Or, to look away from clear-cut instinctual matters to the more remote elaborations of human contact: Few regard loneliness as other than a source of suffering, even self-imposed, as an apparent matter of choice, and the forcible imposition of ‘solitary confinement ‘ is surely one of the most cruel of punishments.
In taking to question, we are entering an area of life in which things are other then themselves, where meaning is multifaceted, and where the line between the old and the new is blurred. It should, by, its immediate measure, help develop our recognition or meaning of the pertinent applicability as to the relevance of interrelated aspects of the psychology of ‘metaphor’. In the psychology of metaphor we will find a useful analogy to the psychology of transference interpretation. Our’s will be newly encountered as good metaphors, those it response to which we say, ‘That’s it exactly’ or ‘That really captures it‘ or ‘That says it all’.
Some literary and linguistic analysis, (e.g., Lewis, 1936 and Snell, 1953) and also people in everyday life, believe that there are experiences that can only be expressed metaphorically. And it is for this achievement that these metaphors, which may be entire poem or as lines or even words highly valued. But how can this be so? Just what in th e ‘it’ that the metaphor ‘is’ or ‘captures’ or ‘says’? If this ‘is’ or this ‘experience’ can only be rendered metaphorically, when we can know it only as such, that is, as the metaphor itself. Of the position out of which are put forward by, T.S, Eliot (1933) and E.W. Harding (1963) in their discussion of poetry, for in these instances we are granted that there is no known and logically independent version of the experience that can serve to validate the metaphor. Whatever the metaphor makes available to us depends on it and it and so cannot be used to prove its correctness.
It seems justifiable to conclude that the metaphor is a new experience rather than a mere paraphrase of an already fully constituted expedience. The metaphor creates an experience that one has never had before. It is an experience one has not realized by oneself. The metaphor does, of course, suggest certain constituent experiences of which one may have been more or less dimly aware. One may say, therefore, that the metaphor speaks for those constituents, on the existence of which much of its appeal depends. But in its organizing and implicit ly rendering these constituents in its new way, it is a creation rather than a mere paraphrase or anew edition. Paraphrasing and new editions never speak as forcefully as good new metaphors, nor could they facilitate further new experience. One analytically familiar feature of these creations is that they make it safe and pleasing to experience something that otherwise would be considered too threatening and so would be kept in fragmented obscurity through defensive measures.
Thus, when one says, ‘That’s it exactly’ one is implicitly recognizing and announcing that one has found and accepted a new mode of experiencing oneself and one’s world, which is to say, asserting a transformation of one’s own subjectivity. Something is now said to be true, and in a sense it is true, but it is true for the first time. Where this quality or state of being, is that there is nothing just like it, or can ever happen again, for the second time cannot be the same as the first. One can’ t step into a stream of the same watering point and then step once again into the same spot. A revelatory metaphor re-encountered or repeated later may lose some of its force, alternatively, it may gain some significance, but it cannot remain exactly the same metaphor or mobilize an experience identical with the first. The point applies as well as to new metaphors that are similar to familiar ones: They have to be judged or experienced through their conventionalized predecessors, as through methods of knowing or already proved instrumentally of perceiving. The audience and the performer, who may be one person, as such that may not have, as yet.
What is to be said about the psychology of metaphor is analogous to the transformational aspects of developed transference and the steadfast interpretation that both facilitate and organize them as transference. Allowing that these transferences and ‘remembered’ experiences come into existence over a period of time, nothing that is identical with them has ever before been enacted, and nothing will ever be enacted again. They are creations that may be fully achieved only under specific analytic conditions. Such that living was not reliving that moment, words like re-living, re-experiencing and reliving simply do not do justice to the phenomena, that in making this claim. A seeming contradiction over-writes some of our well-establish ideas. - in offering, - I am not contradicting some of our well-established ideas about interpretation and insight, I am, however, disputing the point that insight refers to much than the recovery of lost memories, and takes in as well, a new grasp of the significance and interpretations of events one has always remembered. In point, as, Freud pointed out, ‘As a matter of fact I’ve always known it, only that I’ve never thought of it; (1914), In fact, it is to develop that point in furthering to say that it takes an adult to do that, especially with the help of an analyst. It was, after all, Freud’s analysis of adults that make it possible to define infantile psychosexuality. In this respect, but without disregard, child analysis retains a quality of applied psychoanalysis’ in the same way that the interpreted transference neurosis is: Both are always of describing as true something that was not true in quite that way at the time of its greatest developmental significance. This apparent paradox about ‘remembering’ as a form of creating goes a long way, probably that what it is, is distinctive about psychoanalytic interpretation.
In steadfastly and perspicaciously making transference interpretation. This newness characterizes the experience of analytic transference themselves. Unlike extra-analytic transferences, they can no longer be sheerly repetitive or merely new editions. Instead, they become repetitive new editions understood as such because defined as such by the simplifying and steadfast transference interpretations. Instead of responding to the analysand in kind, which would actualize the repetition, the analyst makes an interpretation. This interpretation does not necessarily or regularly match something the analysand already knows or has experienced unconsciously. Although, the analysand does often seem to have already represented some things unconsciously in the very terms of the interpretation. Equally often he does not seem to have done so at all. To think otherwise about this would be, in effect, to claim that, unconsciously, every analysand is Freud or a fully insightful Freudian. And that claim is absurd.
It would be closer to the truth to say this: Unconsciously, the analysand already knows or has experienced fragmentary, amorphous, uncoordinated constituents of many of the transference interpretations. Alternatively, one may say that, implicitly, the analysand has been insisting on some as yet unspecified certainties and, in keeping with this, following some set of as yet unspecified rules in his actions, these transference interpretations now organize explicitly. Each transference interpretation refers to many things that have already been defined by the analysand, and it does so in a way that transforms them. That’s why one may call it interpretation, but it would be mere repeating or sterile paraphrasing. Interpretation is a creative redescription that implicitly has the structure of a simile. It says, ‘This is like that’, Each interpretation does, therefore, add new actions to the life and analysand had already lived.
Technically, redescription in the terms of transference-repetition is necessary. This is so because, up to the time of interpretation and working through, the analysand has been, in one sense, unable and, in another sense, unconsciously and desperately unwilling, to conduct his life differently. in and of themselves, the repetitions cannot alter the symptoms, the subjective distress, and wasting of one’s possibilities, rather, they can only perpetuate state situation by repeatedly confirming its necessity. They prove once again, the unconsciously maintained, damaging certainties. But once they get to be viewed as historically grounded actions and subjectively defined situations, as they do upon being interpreted and worked through, they appear as having always been, in crucial respects, inventions of the analysand’s making and, so, as his responsibility. in being seen as versions of one’s past life. As they may be significantly different, as the subject of change in favouring - as something that is desirable or beneficial - within the common ability to make intelligent choices and to reach intelligent conclusions or decisions in understanding ways. Less and less are they presented as purely inevitable happenings, as a fixed state or as the well-established way of the world. As, here, we encounter a second paradox that goes to the heart of psychoanalytic interpretation, namely, that responsible, insightful change is possible thorough psychoanalysis just because, as a child, the analysand mistakenly assumed and then denied responsibility for much that he encountered in the early formative environment and during maturation.
One major point remains to be made about the logic of viewing transference interpretation as simplifying yet innovative redescription. This point is that the interpretation bring about a coordination of the terms in which to state both the analysand’s current problems and their life-historical background. The analysand’s symptoms and desires are described as actions and, modes of action, with due regard for the principle of multiple function or multiple meaning, in coordination with that description, the decisive developmental situations and conflicts are stated as actions and modes of action. Continuity is established between the childhood constructions of relationships and self and the present constructions of these. Interpretation of transferences shows how both are part of the same set of practice, that is, how they follow the same set of rules. Past and present are coordinated to show continuity rather than arranged in a definite causal sequence.
In the same way, the form of analytic behaviour and the content of associations are given coordinate descriptions, say, for being defiant, devouring, or reparative. Or, in the case of depression, the depressive symptoms, the depressive analytic transference, the themes of present and past loss destructiveness and helplessness, all will be redecribed under the aspect of one continuously developing self-presentation. And this coordination will be worked out in the hermeneutically circular fashion in which the analyst defines both the facts to be explained and the explanations to be applied to these facts. In the end, as is well known, Both the paramount issues of the analysis and the leading explanatory account of them are likely to be significantly different from the provisional versions of them used at the beginning of the analysis.
This is the sophisticated cognitive simplification that promotes the convincing development and recognition of transference and the emotional experiencing of the past as it is now remembered. The coordination of terms is the only way to break into the vicious circle of the neurosis disturbance and reduce its unconsciously self-confirming character. New meaning is established by steadfast interpretation of transference and the condition for loving of which they are enactments.
That this kind of analytic work is not simply intellectual but shown in the analytic presentations that analysand was now operating according to rules which, through previous transference interpretations and coordination of terms, had changed. The changed rules were implicit in this hitherto-avoided experiencing of the past. It was not re-experiencing, or not mainly that: In its special way, it was experiencing that past for the first time.
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