ABSTRACT
The analyst’s transformations employ the vehicle of speech just as the musician’s transformations are musical and the painter’s pictorial. Patients show that the resolution of a problem appears to present less difficulty if it can be regarded as belonging to a moral domain; causation, responsibility and therefore a controlling force provide a framework within which omnipotence reigns. The proposed chain of causation can then be seen as a rationalization of the sense of persecution. Patients can be observed to change their attitude to an object by changes in view-point which may be perverse or analogous to changes of position that a surveyor, terrestrial or astronomical, uses to estimate the range of a distant object. A patient with the characteristics postulated will be likely to suffer disturbances of thought either way, for acceptance of the ‘no-breast’ confronts him with the problem of what to do with the attendant ‘thoughts’.
