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THIS SUBJECT, TO WHICH I WAS ASKED TO address myself, highlights what I have thought of frequently and ruefully as my middle-age identity crisis. I cherish a reputation as an authority in psychoanalytic therapy with schizophrenic patients, and yet by far the majority of my time in private practice is spent in analyzing neurotic individuals, most of whom are themselves psychiatrists. Although there is of course a degree of overlap of these two clinical fields, for the most part they call for modes of participation on the analyst's part which are appreciably, and often strikingly, different. Many times, for example, I have spent an hour in highly vocal, vehement interaction with a schizophrenic patient who was sitting opposite me, followed immediately by a session of my sitting silently behind the couch while a training analysand was reporting, uninterruptedly throughout the hour, his free associational material.
In 1949, intending to go into the full time private practice of psychoanalysis within a couple of years or so, and feeling anxiously in need of sufficient experience with schizophrenic patients to be able to cope with the at least occasional such patient I knew one would encounter in such a practice, I became a psychiatric resident at Chestnut Lodge. I found the work with such patients there to be so absorbing that I remained on that staff nearly fifteen years, although spending throughout those years at least a few hours each day in analyzing non-Lodge neurotic patients. During the ten years since I left there, I have spent a great many hours in working as a