Rosenfeld, Herbert. Impasse and Interpretation. Therapeutic and anti-therapeutic factors in the psychoanalytic treatment of psychotic, borderline and neurotic patients.: London and New York,  Tavistock, The New Library of Psychoanalysis, Vol.  1, 1987. Pp.  vii + 324. Paperback, £13.95.

In this posthumous publication of Herbert Rosenfeld (1910-1986) are contained his vivid and illuminating ideas, developed over a period of some forty years, on the psychoanalytic treatment of psychotic and borderline patients. His own analysis with Melanie Klein opened many doors for him, and his first paper, ‘Analysis of a schizophrenic state with depersonalisation’, written in 1947, was profoundly influenced by Klein's work on schizoid mechanisms . He became a pioneer in working with different types of psychotic patients. While he included neurotic patients in the title of his book, there is no doubt that it was the psychotic area of the mind in which he was most interested. It is, moreover, one that we encounter in varying degrees in many of our patients, and Fordham, Edwards, Redfearn and Jackson have also made substantial contributions to this field.

Rosenfeld has developed his view that in analysing schizophrenic and manic depressive states it is important to pay close attention to the processes of projective identification. In contrast with Freud's view, Rosenfeld emphasises that in spite of apparent indifference or deadness, psychotic patients form very powerful transferences. In phantasy they show omnipotent attitudes to others and make insatiable demands, confusing the self and the other; indeed the boundary between the self and others is not felt to exist. Rosenfeld makes clear the differences between those patients who have a phantasy of living inside the analyst's mind and body and others who have symbiotic needs for fusion. A large portion of the book is given to discussion of projective identification and its containment, a very real and sometimes problematic experience which analysts of all persuasions may encounter, and one which it is essential to understand when working in these primitive areas of the mind.

In 1971 Rosenfeld published a paper which discriminated more than formerly between several groups of patients with what he termed narcissistic o