ABSTRACT
Eissler's intrepid work with adolescent delinquents and schizophrenics seems to have kept much on his mind that analytic technique, in any of its then usual ego psychological forms, might not be suitable for them. Apparently, his clinical work with them led him to conclude that at times it is necessary to make major departures from interpretation only. Eissler's animistic way of putting it would seem to correspond to the unconscious paranoid like fantasies about the workings of one's mind that the peoples actually do encounter in our clinical work and that the Kleinian object relations analysts have always highlighted usefully in their clinical approach to the analysis of defense. The modern temper in the conduct of analytic work and the modern understanding of theory in relation to practice would support an analytic attitude that avoids excessively meticulous circumspection, for that mode introduces its own disruptive artifacts.
