ABSTRACT
I now want to describe a certain experience in my clinical work during 1948 that I can now see contained the seeds of later developments far more than I realized at the time. It was an experience in the very long analysis of the patient I later called Susan (see Chapter 3), whose analysis had begun in 1943, after she had been given ECT. All this time I had been trying to use the techniques I had learnt in my training for the analysis of the neuroses. However, owing to the extreme slowness of our progress, I gradually decided that it might be possible to use a somewhat different approach. As I was to describe this change in the book which I eventually wrote about Susan’s analysis in the 1960s, I think I can best indicate what happened by quoting a bit of what I wrote there.1
