ABSTRACT
This chapter has emerged from thirty years of interest in and working with cancer patients. The first seven years were spent as director of a research project that investigated possible psychosomatic factors in cancer of the breast.1*2’3’4’5 This project was conducted at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and was psychoanalytically oriented. Four analysts (myself included) attempted analytic therapy with four patients who had recently been surgically and radiologically treated for cancer of the breast. Our ef forts were unsuccessful as regards cancer return. Over the subsequent twenty-three years, I have worked psychotherapeutically (not psychoanaly tically) with twenty-one other patients with active cancer of various types. I have consistently altered my methods and thinking according to the results or consequences encountered in each therapy. All patients were con comitantly being cared for by other physicians: surgeons, chemotherapists, and/or radiologists. The following is a brief account of those experiences, as regards the evolution of my psychotherapeutic methods and psycho dynamic thinking.
