“The Analyst's Notepad” is a regular feature of the Journal. Here the editors solicit contributions of brief clinical vignettes demonstrating nascent ideas that may not be ready for more formal, full-length presentation.

Adam was driving his parents crazy with his obsessive insistence on owning two of everything, when, at age 9, for this among other reasons, he became the first child I undertook to treat. Despite his rationalization that, should he lose one, he needed a “backup,” it seemed likely that his requirement arose from some unconscious fantasy. So, it was a coincidence, surely fortunate both for him and for me, that Dr. Arlow's paper, “Conflict, Regression and Symptom Formation” (1963), was published just as our work commenced—work which, in elaborately creative play and symptom formation, proceeded to demonstrate vividly, amply, and compellingly the clinical power of the conceptualization of the structure and functions of unconscious