ABSTRACT
If a psychoanalysis allowed an analytic process to get under way, the patient’s affective life would surely come alive again. Not with standing the differences between the persons’ histories, they had one thing in common. All of them involved the coexistence of opposing aspects, one mature and one archaic: on the one hand, they used psychic mechanisms proper to the secondary process, and on the other, primitive ones such as disavowal, projection and excessive projective identification, as well as splitting. Furthermore, the fact of even contemplating the possibility of such analyses seemed to be a sign of madness owing to the irreversibility of the reality-level consequences of these patients’ psychological difficulties. There is, of course, no shortage of caricatures of psychoanalytic treatment, which provoke laughter by declaring the fantasies aroused by the appearance of the situation to be real.
