The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 22, 1953, No. 2: Max M. Stern. 'Trauma, Projective Technique, and Analytic Profile.'

The author has previously described his concept of trauma, occurring in the early infantile and oedipal periods, as a necessary part of human development stimulating the urge for mastery of reality. The traumata are accompanied by physiological shock-like reactions and neurosis results not from the traumata themselves but from a failure of the defence against them. In this paper he explains the rationale of his technique of encouraging patients to paint in analysis without goal-directed intention by means of this theory, and illustrates his method with two cases.

The shock-like reactions of the post-natal period, he says, are warded off by immediate discharges into motility. The relief yielded results in the fixation of the magic meaning of expression as a defence against trauma. It is this meaning which painting takes over. It is a means of achieving the same magic mastery through a regression to the same (mainly pre-verbal) level of adaptation as that at which the traumata occurred. This renewal of the technique of magic mastery in itself allays anxiety sufficiently for the patient 'to relinquish repression and to integrate the previously experienced traumata and the impulses connected with them'. This primitive mechanism of adaptation must then be linked through free verbal associations to the thinking of the mature ego.

Stern's technique is to analyse closely both the sequence followed by the patient in the act of completing the picture, and also, not only the choice, but the sequence of his associations to each element of it. This he calls 'a kind of micro-analysis'.

He finds that the forces revealed by the sequence of associations mirror the specific dynamics of the patient. He thus obtains an 'analytic profile' which, coupled with the data of the patient's psychic history, affords both a diagnostic tool and the possibilities of scientific control in psycho-analysis.

The pictures themselves are found to represent 'both a condensation of magic reparation o