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Freud believed analysis the best treatment for transference psychoneuroses and the related character disturbances. Abraham, Simmel, Jones, Anna Freud, Aichhorn, and the Eisslers would apply analysis to perversions, schizophrenia, psychosomatic disorders, and 'borderline' cases. Stone warns against the overenthusiastic and unrealistic expectations of some doctors and laymen who recommend analysis for unsuitable cases. Psychoanalysis is better reserved for potentially strong persons with serious chronic illnesses than for those with trivial, incipient, or reactive illnesses, or those with feeble resources.
Psychoanalysis is differentiated from other interpretative psychotherapies by its mobilization and ultimate dissolution of transference and its method of interpretation. To Freud's original definition of psychoanalysis as any procedure that utilizes principles of transference and resistance, Stone adds the following elements as indispensable: the unconscious, the libido theory, the power of infantile sexuality, and the genetic principle. How far can the classical psychoanalytic method be modified for treatment of 'borderline' patients and still be regarded as psychoanalysis? Eissler's 'parameters' are within the definition as long as they are directed toward the aim of psychoanalysis.
Stone discusses the amenability to analysis of various kinds of patient, from the frank severe psychotic to the mildly psychotic (whose symptoms seem ego-alien), the 'borderline' cases, addicts, and perverts. 'Borderline' patients seem to present classical psychoneurotic symptoms behind which lie grave illness with psychotic fragments, suspiciously narcissistic phenomena, severe character distortions, quasi addictions, or severe disturbances in personal relations. These patients, like psychotics, are strongly narcissistic. Stone describes 'transference psychoses' with narcissistic transference phenomena, including extreme detachment caused by fear that the transference will eng