ABSTRACT
Robert Caper cites Money-Kyrle's view that psychopathology is due to fixed unconscious delusions that may become amenable to reality through psychoanalysis. Caper states that the activity represented the patient's manner of taking in food, including food for thought—he shat on it whilst exciting himself by his envious triumphs. Caper states that the patient was enacting triumphantly a masturbation fantasy that made him feel that he possessed the mother's breast and the analyst's penis, whilst covering the analyst in shit. Howard H. Covitz found himself concerned with Caper's statement: 'whether psychological illness in the adult can be regarded as a regression or a fixation to a primitive mental state'. Covitz remained in a quandary about aspects of fixation and regression and questions of normal and pathological primitive mental states in childhood and/or infancy. Covitz added that a person's capacity or regressive incapacity to juggle multiple levels of functioning, e.g. silliness and sobriety, was crucial.
