ABSTRACT
Psychiatric patients, and above all schizophrenic patients, cause one to doubt one's capacity to love, and to feel that one's devotion is meaningless or, worse, malevolent. The therapist's functioning in the spirit of dedication that is the norm among physicians in other branches of medicine, represents in the practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis an unconscious defense against his seeing clearly many crucial aspects of both the patient and himself - for example, his sadism. an intensely pressuring, dedicated therapeutic zeal denotes an unconscious determination, on the part of the therapist, to protect and preserve, for reasons of his own psychic economy, the patient's present level of psychotic or neurotic ego-functioning, because of various narcissistic and infantile gratifications that the therapist is receiving from the patient, who represents at one level a transference-mother who is feeding him, and because the patient's illness serves to shield the therapist from seeing clearly his own illness.
