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Many analysts will have battled with the problem of analysing patients committed to Marxism. Hence they will welcome v. Oertzen's interesting and thoughtful reflections on the treatment of militant Marxist students with a bourgeois background. Such patients attribute all problems of human relationships to capitalism and expect bliss once Marxism is established. Initially the patient is hostile as he sees the therapist as a bourgeois institution yet he develops a clinging transference. He blames society for experiencing life as meaningless and bleak, yet claims that society owes him a cure. But he only wants to be rid of his symptoms, which usually are impotence, frigidity and examination panics.
By experiencing rage and helplessness in the countertransference v. Oertzen recognised the patient's paranoid view of the world. He then links his patients’ malaise with narcissistic disorder. v. Oertzen describes a dream he had about his first Marxist patient: in it the patient was a little fragile boy, behind him was a huge mother stone colossus. This led the author to the recognition that the patient suffered from a narcissistic disorder with his eros turned to stone. He told his dream to the patient who responded with dreams that expressed unhealthy overemphasis of the intellect and severance from his instinctual life.
However, I missed any indication that v. Oertzen uses his or his patients’ dreams in transference and reductive interpretations. He sees the patient's disorder in archetypal terms: the patient sits on the treasure chest of the Marxist healing myth in splendid isolation but is in danger of being devoured by the dragon symptom (hero myth). The author applies Jung's idea of the need to heal the split between knowledge and faith ( Coll. wks., 10, p. 285), the Perseus myth and the poet Heine's idea that healing is brought about by creative impulse. Some borderline patients give up therapy in the early stages but the author feels that he can frequently help Marxist