You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is a collection of essays, originally published in German, French, and English in a variety of journals and books. The essays are loosely tied together as clinical examples of the author's way of working with psychotically organized patients.
David Rosenfeld, the 1996 recipient of the American Psychoanalytic Association's Mary S. Sigourney Award, practices in Buenos Aires, in a setting that may
not be duplicated in the United States. He takes on both outpatients and inpatients who present with a variety of psychotic symptoms, and he is able to arrange quickly to see these patients as often as 5 days a week, sometimes even more frequently. He works with a team of clinicians, including family therapists, psychiatrists and psychologists, and others—all of them analytically trained. The ease with which families accept his authority to determine the framework of an analytic treatment is apparent, and I doubt that most of us working in the United States would be so able to find families so cooperative or inpatient settings so tolerant of the longer stays that his patients seem to require at times.
Rosenfeld is unabashedly Kleinian in his orientation. Thus, in his case presentations diagnosis is not an important factor; that the patient is thinking, feeling, and behaving psychotically is sufficient information to begin treatment. The cases he presents in these essays include children of parents who disappeared during political repression, drug abusing patients, a patient apparently addicted to video games, patients experiencing psychotic episodes after organ transplantation, and a patient with an eating disorder. For Rosenfeld, these patients express psychotic fears—of loss of identity, psychic and physical integrity, homosexual impulses, and disintegration—through their bodies and enact these fears in their psychoses.
His interpretations are direct and deep, in a manner that this reviewer, trained in an interpersonal analytic orientation would find difficult both