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If a psychoanalyst's understanding and analytic work with either children or adults is guided by a developmental point of view, it is essential that the analyst be empathically in touch with the child in the grown-up, as well as the adult-to-be in the child. Having been trained in both child and adult analysis is of the greatest help in that regard. It is felicitous that Jack Novick and Kerry Kelly Novick spent almost fifteen years at the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic (now known as the Anna Freud Centre), originally as students and subsequently as researchers and staff members. Strongly influenced by Anna Freud, they assimilated a developmental point of view within the orientation and traditions of that setting. Fearful Symmetry reflects that ambiance, and it is appropriate that they have dedicated this volume to Anna Freud on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of her birth.
The volume brings together articles the Novicks have written over a period of twenty-five years, some of which have never been published. Peripheral to the main topic of sadomasochism, and grouped under the heading “Mechanisms,” are chapters titled “Varieties of Transference in the Analysis of an Adolescent” and “Externalization as a Pathological Form of Relating.” In “Projection and Externalization,” the authors call attention to the prevalent confusion between the two terms, and various of their connotations that fail to take into account Freud's references to this subject (e.g., Freud 1911, 1915). From an ego developmental frame of reference the Novicks underscore the “controversial issue” of whether “projection can occur prior to structure formation, especially minimal differentiation of self and external world” (p. 104). Freud (1915) wrote of a general disposition to “attribute to everyone else our own constitution and therefore our consciousness as well” (p. 169). Their main point seems to be that externalization is an inherent part of the process of early development.