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Hill gives a composite description of a special group of neurotic patients who chose him as their analyst because they anticipated that he would behave in the overprotective manner which had characterized their parents. These patients came to analysis without any presenting symptoms and with the appearance of health and success. During therapy, however, they became aware of a lack of warmth, spontaneity and self-confidence. They were ill mainly because of their intense need for intimacy, unachievable because of fear. They had built up in childhood defenses of indifference toward, tolerance for, or causal avoidance of, a possessing, devouring parent. Later they sought relationships with persons who resembled their parents and experimentally undertook to devise ways whereby intimacy could be experienced safely. It was on this basis that they chose Hill as their analyst. They sensed that he was intensely oral and warm in feeling, like themselves, but unlike them he was not afraid to give of himself. However, the fear of being exploited by him, a transference from the traumatogenic parent, produced specific resistances aimed at warding off the desired intimacy.
These patients require a preparatory phase of treatment to ready them for actual analysis which has to meet their special precautionary measures against intimacy and at the same time permit an informal, increasingly personal friendship. The preparatory phase must be promptly interrupted when the patients feel understood and accepted—they are then ready for a stricter adherence to analytic rules. Failure to seize the proper moment for a switch in technique may lead to acting out both with the analyst and elsewhere. With the institution of free association, the patients bring material having to do with the need to be loved and to love, and then begin to experience transference emotions of suspicion, fear, guilt and hostility, along with which they no longer anticipate their own rejection but fear that the