ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on transference psychosis—that is, how psychotic symptoms are reconverted during psychoanalytic treatment to achieve within it their mode of expression. From the 1930s onwards, the study of psychosis and of the possibility of its psychoanalytic treatment developed concurrently in London (Melanie Klein), in the United States. While Mahler deepened her rigorous and lucid investigation of child development, the psychosis of childhood and the process of separation—individuation, Harold F. Searles—who is not only a great analyst but also a sagacious observer and a creative and careful theoretician—worked at Chestnut Lodge, in the tradition of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. The intensity of the transference dependence, Stern goes on, forces the therapist to be constantly occupied with it and does not leave room for historic and genetic interpretations, a characteristic to which Kernberg returns later.
