You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is a series of papers on psychic development and psychoanalytic technique that take off from Robert Caper's previous book, Immaterial Facts , in which he
described Freud's discovery of psychic reality and Klein's extension of Freud's discovery. The papers in this book are on a more disparate number of themes than the earlier book, but share some central concerns and are further unified by their close reference to Caper's theoretical framework, which is the work of Freud, Klein and Bion. He does a great deal to clarify, as well as to connect, the contributions of all three.
The papers can be broadly divided into two main groups, with a few additional papers that fall into neither group. In both the main groups of papers the author addresses the theoretical question of how analysis works, and derives implications for technique from the answers. In the first group he asks how analysis heals, and what distinguishes it from suggestion. This leads him to discuss the use of the transference in analysis.
He begins this selection of papers by exploring Freud's and Bion's work on groups. In analysis, as in a group, the patient projects his omnipotence into the analyst. This can be flattering, and can be concordant with the analyst's wish or need to be a powerful healer, but it leaves the analyst, and therefore the patient, at the mercy of the patient's delusional transference. This situation led Freud into studying the transference, and Caper has a special appreciation, which I share, of Strachey's 1934 paper on the subject. The value of the transference neurosis is that it is the current, active version of the unconscious processes that are troubling the patient. When an analysis is going well, the analyst crucially does not accept the invitation to play the part of the patient's archaic superego. Instead, he or she acts as an auxiliary ego (a characteristically perceptive reformulation of Strachey's ‘auxiliary superego’), and interprets the patient's pressure rath