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Since Freud and others saw repeatedly that psychotic patients were incapable of forming the necessary transference attachments, he concluded that any analyst who undertakes to treat such cases “has committed a practical error; he has been responsible for wasted expenditure and has discredited his method of treatment. He cannot fulfill his promise of cure.” Freud's clinical experience had convinced him that psychoses were psychologically irreversible disorders.
Today schizophrenia and psychosis are still considered untreata-ble through psychoanalysis, although more recently a less pessimistic view about the psychoanalytic treatment of these mental disorders has been emerging (Searles, 1965; ). However, the majority of published clinical reports continue to agree with Freud: it is an impossible task and beyond the therapeutic scope of psychoanalysis.
As contrary evidence, I offer this study of the first four years of treatment of a schizophrenic woman who was helped to become an effective, cooperative, well-functioning analytic patient. This patient proved capable of transference attachments, albeit narcissistic rather than object (oedipal) tranferences.
In addition, I suggest here that psychosis, regardless of culture and etiology, may have a specific meaning; that its symptoms, ideas