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The method developed by Freud for working with neurotic conditions is fairly straightforward. In a neutral setting, the analyst allows conflicts to be transferred into the clinical relationship. The disappointments and dissatisfactions of the patient's life become a part of that relationship and are put into language. Interpretations are offered to explain how the present is connected with the past, and treatment is concluded when enough has been said so that analyst and patient can part company with predominately positive feelings and the patient has improved his ability to communicate. However, many patients did not respond well to this early psychoanalytic approach.
Since Freud's dismissal of narcissism as untreatable and his portrait of the personality as entrenched “behind the stone wall of narcissism,” analysts have tried to breach that wall in order to make a connection with patients who are withdrawn from the world and detached from their feeling states. Current journal literature records these attempts to make contact with those who live in isolation. Conference titles such as—On Becoming the Patient—are a result of our earnest desire to comprehend how therapeutic influence can occur when regression is to the preobject, or self-object states.