ABSTRACT
In working with the addicted patient, Richard Ulman and H. Paul took advantage of the selfobject transference as a means of therapeutically absorbing the psychological functioning of the symptoms of addiction. Ulman and Zimmermann view psychoanalysis as concerned primarily with how the unconscious meaning of fantasy serves as a cause with effects in the form of symptoms and psychopathology. Sigmund Freud viewed fantasy primarily in terms of psychosexual and aggressive drives in conflict with other psychic forces. Essentially, we conceive of fantasy in terms of archaic narcissistic illusions. In psychopathological disorders like panic and OCD, these magical illusions either have failed to undergo sufficient developmental transformation or have remained in various states of developmental arrest. Few of the critics of psychoanalysis have seriously entertained the possibility that the supposed dichotomy between cause-and-effect and meaning is false.
