ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses psychoanalysis a cathartic form of psychoanalytic treatment. Illness state of affairs viewed as the consequence of active psychic functioning, through which the conscious area of the mind protected itself against forces. The concept of the ego represented consciousness and the agent of defensive operations. Conscious is the form of remembering central curative factor in psychoanalysis from the beginning. The theories of empathy and counter-transference on the one hand and half a century of psychoanalytic research into developmental psychology on the concept of the developmental object introduced into the psychoanalytic method of treatment. An optimal or prototypal form of such a developmental response is the verbalized understanding of a developmental need in the patient. This makes it possible for the patient to find and experience in the analyst an activated complementary object.
