ABSTRACT
The aspects of the “art” of psychoanalytic clinicians have merely received no explicit attention in the literature on the technique of treatment, or they have been described as exceptional measures, reluctantly employed in particularly difficult cases as “parameters”. Every psychoanalytic encounter presents episodes of overstimulation, with temporary disruptions of a cohesive sense of self, and with a multiplicity of behaviors based on a variety of illusions. The theory of psychopathology developed by Freud was applicable to the “transference neuroses”; individuals suffering from these conditions have managed to traverse the earliest developmental phases of psychic life in a more or less expectable fashion.
