Introduction to Part Two

In the four chapters in this section the themes of Joseph's work begin to emerge clearly. The fundamental theoretical position remains the same, but there is an important shift in emphasis, evidently arising from her concern to explore the factors which facilitate or impede psychic change. The first chapter is full of important ideas and observations but is very detailed and complex. The second states some of the ideas of the first chapter more simply and directly. The last two are incisively lucid — the ideas have arrived. Psychic change, psychic equilibrium, acting out in the transference, inducing the analyst to fit in — all are now in clear focus.

In the chapter on the analysis of a perversion (1971) Joseph emphasizes the necessity of analysing the way in which the perversion manifests itself in the transference, both because this allows the patient's defensive organization to be examined in detail in the to-and-fro of the session, and because Joseph believes that this is the approach most likely to lead to psychic change.

She describes a highly narcissistic man, a fetishist, who came to analysis because of unsatisfactory personal relations and various other symptoms including claustrophobia and occasional panic attacks. He was apparently uninvolved with the analysis and was indifferent about holidays and weekends. It began to emerge in his analysis that he was splitting off the dependent and aggressive aspects of himself and locating them in the various people around him, including his analyst, while simultaneously appropriating to himself qualities of power and superiority — again the combination of projective and introjective identification that Joseph was finding to be such an important defensive combination. One of the consequences of this use of his objects,

especially his wife, was claustrophobic anxiety. In phantasy he invaded her with oral and genital desires and then felt in danger of being trapped inside her. Occasionally cruelty and sadism to his wif