ABSTRACT
The Boston psychiatrist, David Mann, has worked and written extensively about psychosis and contends that psychotic patients have an “impulse to identify". Gradually, the patient assembles a network that is admiring, not critical. These networks help him or her “acknowledge, bear, and put into perspective” previously intolerable emotions. The counter transference serves as information about the patient’s emotional state. Sometimes, the emotions are dramatized in the countertransference in the clinician’s thought, fantasy, or dream forms. The first contact between Dr. Tony Potter and Arnie Davis established a therapeutic alliance around associations to the clinician’s name and the patient’s need for cats in his life. Mr. Arnie Davis was already on the road to recovery when he recruited Dr. Potter. In contrast to Dr. Potter’s work with Amy Mills, an intense set of counter transference phenomena did not mark the acknowledging phase of treatment with Davis but rather, the bearing and putting into perspective phases.
