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Fleschner writes to guide parents, and to describe dual therapy, a modification of analysis in which male and female analysts work alternately, allowing them to deal separately with maternal and paternal transferences and resolve the oedipal conflict. He also describes the triadic principle, in which parents work as a pair, forming a triad with the child. Each parent relives his own inner drama with his child, writing a part, a genetic script, for him to enact. By letting their scripts correct each other, a repetition of error from generation to generation will be prevented, and mental illness and war obviated, by minimizing oedipal difficulties.
He shows how dual therapy avoids some transference and countertransference problems in classical psychoanalysis, and enables a more reliable reconstruction of early life to be made.
He warns against the swing in education from too much to too little discipline, and the dangers of ‘good mothering’, because of the underlying valence of hatred. This latent attitude can invalidate current ideas on child rearing.
The main part of the book describes sixty patients, many of them psychotic, where the triadic principle was broken, often through assortative mating. General principles