13 September 1959. Cogitations

The contact with a psychotic patient is an emotional experience, presenting some precise features that differentiate it from the experience of contact of a more usual kind; the analyst does not meet a personality, but a hastily organized improvisation of a personality, or perhaps of a mood. It is an improvisation of fragments; if the impression is predominantly of friendliness, there will nevertheless be easily discernible fragments of hostility embedded in the conglomerate that has been assembled to do service, for the occasion, as a personality. If the impression is predominantly of depression, the mosaic of fragments will reveal incongruous bits of a smile without context other than a kind of contiguity with surrounding fragments; tears without depth, jocosity without friendliness, bits of hate – all these and many more fragmentary emotions or ideas jostle each other to present a labile façade.

But at once the question arises: is it a façade? If so, what lies behind it? Or, if it means that this improvised personality is all, or nearly all, there is, who or what is responsible for the improvisation? If it is a façade, what does it conceal, and to what end?

The encounter is not unlike the more everyday event of a face-to-face conversation with someone who has a marked squint: at which eye does one look? For the analyst the problem is central, not peripheral. He must decide whether he is speaking to the apparently improvised personality, to the improviser who has had the improvisation forced upon him so as to effect a meeting with the analyst, or to an improviser whose improvisation is one behind which he wishes to remain concealed.

Suppose the patient to be, or to have been, capable of normality: the conglomerate of fragments of personality which serves the patient for a personality can only be regarded as evidence of a disaster. The discussion of such a case is difficult because we are concerned not with the ordinary structures of

the human personality for which t