ABSTRACT
Psycho-analysis today is facing a crisis from within: a crisis of stasis. There is an irrefutable disparity between its theories and its clinical practice. Freud had taken for granted with his patients a coherent, ongoing, familial environment and organized social values that could be internalized. The urgent need of the patients that Freud was dealing with was to be able to speak of what was pressing upon them from within. This chapter presents a case-history of a boy of twelve to show how an intrusive, pathogenic maternal relationship and a very disturbed familial environment became organized in the child’s ego and personality as a manic state. It outlines the route the clinical process had to take to arrive at the discovery of that which the patient in himself was utterly unable to communicate in a symbolic way in terms of transference, language, or play.
