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Thelma Reca: El Caso de Ricardo Mendia: Psicosis y psicologia profunda del nino. Argentina: S.R.L. Editorial Poligrafica, 1966.
You understand that the thought of going through an analysis rises in me now and then; to be sure, what I know of Freud's writings is uncongenial to me and in places hair-rising; but the matter itself, which runs away with him, has its genuine and strong sides … I rather shun this getting cleared out, and with my nature could hardly expect anything good out of it. Something like a disinfected soul results from it, a monstr sity, alive, corrected in red like the page of a school notebook (Rilke, 1947).
IT WAS THUS, that the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salome, expressed his dismal view of psychoanalysis as practiced at that time and his pessimism about the possibility of that form of engagement ever being of help to any artist in his struggle with the creative process. It is clear that Rilke was ambivalent about it: for to him psychoanalysis "has its genuine and strong sides" but that he saw it as threatening his creative sensibilities which in expression was to him
from the beginning a kind of self treatment; though, in proportion as it has developed and becoming something independent it is losing more and more of its therapeutic and considerate character and is making demands (Rilke, 1947).
This uncertainty is echoed in many quarters today. Thelma Reca's (1966) verbatim account, which is under scrutiny here, of her treatment of a six year old psychotic boy is a vivid example of