The Chemistry of a Psychoanalysis

This paper will present the case of a patient who remained in treatment for four years in a schizophrenic, preobject state. His case is of interest because of the extraordinary tenacity of his resistance to experiencing feelings and of the fear that was induced in the analyst by the nature of the patient's work combined with his severe pathology.

This narcissistic man was able to block out those perceptions of the environment that might undermine his defense and release the inner forces of rage that he kept so closely controlled. The detached, affectless state in which he functioned should have precluded the possibility of his remaining in treatment. It was his ability to remain and mature that challenges our understanding. This study is an attempt to relate the analyst's overt behaviors and feeling states to the patient's symbolically expressed experience of the transference, which occurred while the patient remained in an apparently pre-object state throughout.

Mr. S. was, at the outset, a man who functioned with no apparent psychic awareness of other people. His obsessional defenses were holding in work and marriage, protecting him both from worldly awareness and from his unconscious. For example, the larger implications of his work, creating chemical products capable of irreperably harming the earth's ecology, had no apparent