Epilogue

As the surviving member of the team that collaborated in the treatment of Harry Baker, I welcome the opportunity to reflect on the detailed report just presented. The fact that it is being published several decades after the case was conducted, in the nascent period of modern psychoanalysis, enables me to discuss it in the context of subsequent developments in the field.

Harry's therapist, Dr. T (as Leo Nagelberg is referred to in the case presentation) was greatly interested in understanding and learning how to treat severely disturbed youngsters under our borderline research and training project. I was equally interested in supervising him and other caseworkers who wanted to handle these difficult cases, and in training them in the use of techniques that I had found to be effective in my private psychoanalytic practice.

Before he met Harry, Dr. T was acquainted with my views on the basic problems and therapeutic needs of the children accepted for treatment under the project. He was initially instructed, for example, that they were hypersensitive to environmental pressures and terrified of losing control of themselves and behaving destructively. He was also instructed to try to behave somewhat like the patient to convey the message that nothing dangerously new would be injected into the relationship.

In the supervisory conferences on the case, held biweekly, Dr. T reported what had occurred since the preceding conference. After hearing his review of the material obtained from Harry and his own reactions to it, I functioned in the role of an accessory ego to increase his awareness of the totality of his emotional response to Harry and to help him deal with the problems that Harry presented.