Reversible perspective [1]

The study of acting out, the negative therapeutic reaction and reversible perspective allows analysts to understand and roughly locate the behaviour of patients during the analytic process. There are those who develop their analysis using acting out as a principal instrument of adaptation or, better still, maladaptation; others employ the negative therapeutic reaction; still others use reversible perspective. Bion discovers reversible perspective in studying the psychotic part of the personality, alongside attacks on linking, transformations in hallucinosis and other phenomena. The psychotic part of the personality makes destructive attacks upon everything it feels has the function of joining one object with another, and which in principle are the emotions. Bion affirms that the gap between the neurotic and the psychotic personality is not great initially; but as the individual develops, and as a result of various circumstances this gap can widen.