Chapter 10. Learning from Experience

1 Thanks to the beta-screen the psychotic patient has a capacity for evoking emotions in the analyst; his associations are the elements of the beta-screen intended to evoke interpretations or other responses which are less related to his need for psychoanalytic interpretation than to his need to produce an emotional involvement. [This suggests a capacity for intuition that seems incompatible with ordinary ideas of insanity. In so far as it is purposive conduct the purpose must be controlled and dictated by the non-psychotic part of the personality. The evocation peculiar to the beta-screen, if successful, means that the patient is starved of genuine therapeutic material, namely truth, and therefore those of his impulses that are directed to survival are overworked attempting to extract cure from therapeutically poor material.]1

The theory of counter-transferences offers only partly satisfactory explanation because it is concerned with the manifestation as a symptom of the analyst's unconscious motives and therefore leaves the patient's contribution unexplained. First the patient for which these theories are intended is not employing articulate speech; he is demonstrating with evident sincerity an inability to understand his own state of mind even when it is pointed out to him. His use of words is much closer to action intended to “unburden the psyche of accretions of stimuli” than to speech. Second, he does not set to work to manipulate the analyst in the same way as the neurotic. There is a consistency in the characteristics of beta-elements. The language

I must use to describe a dynamic situation produces a distortion because it is the language of a scientific method designed for the study of the inanimate. This distortion affects my claim that certain