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The title of this book refers to the ubiquitous clinical phenomenon whereby an individual, by the use of a mental mechanism which the Novick's call ‘externalization’, strives in every way to bring about a relationship in which devalued aspects of the self can be attributed to, and elicited in, the object. The Novick's show, in careful detail, how this defence is used both to avoid narcissistic pain and to deny the object's separate existence, that is, as a means of maintaining the phantasy of an omnipotent self. They also demonstrate the serious pathological effects of an extreme or persistent use of this defence at any period of life, including the effects on children of its use by parents, delineate the course of its development from infancy onwards and discuss the technical implications of their findings. A brief anecdote illustrates the way their title strikes a chord of familiarity. By some error I was sent two copies of the book, which I placed side by side on a high shelf in my book case. The next day, in a session well into the analysis of a patient with whose treatment I have received considerable help from my earlier reading of the Novicks’ papers, I made an interpretation about how much she wished that I should experience her feelings in exactly the same helpless way that she did. She did not reply directly but scanned the bookcase, focused on the remote top shelf and asked: ‘Why do you have two copies of Fearful Symmetry?
The Novicks are child and adult psychoanalysts working in Michigan who received analytic training in England and worked for some years at the Hampstead clinic (now Anna Freud Centre) before returning to the US. The book contains both previously published papers (not necessarily in chronological order) and new writing and reflects work done