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"DESCRIBE HOW IT IS THAT no object has its limitations in the mirror but in the eye which sees it in the mirror. For if you look at your face in the mirror, the part resembles the whole inasmuch as the part is everywhere in the mirror, and the whole is in every part of the same mirror; and, the same is true of the whole image of any object placed opposite to this mirror." (Leonardo Da Vinci, quoted by Richter, 1970.
To the psychoanalyst, the phenomenon of change is as mysterious and elusive as the unicorn. Difficult to describe or define, unpredictable in its moments and forms of appearance, almost impossible to quantify in the hard data style dear to the hearts of statistical research psychologists it is nevertheless an article of faith, the very essence and purpose of psychoanalytic effort.2 Psychoanalysis, after all, was a treatment modality before it became a theory. The complex metapsychological elaborations grew partly out of a necessity to explain the paradoxes of therapy as they emerged; and, partly out of a quite natural need to establish a sound and respectable theoretical basis for the new psychoanalytic therapy. Man, the theory-making animal, does need a language in which to talk with his colleagues. Freud, in his later years, disillusioned by the endlessly ramifying complexities of the therapy situation, tended to see psychoanalysis more as a grand theory of human nature than as a therapy. It was, in his words, only primus inter pares.
Over the past 70 years, there has been a remarkable proliferation of psychoanalytic institutes, theoretical positions and interpretive