You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this short book, Brody takes a direct look at 'Direct Analysis'. He comes well equipped for his task since he is a staff member of Temple University, director of resident training and a training analyst at the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute. He is also the leader (since 1957) of a seminar conducted at the Institute for Direct Analysis (Dr. English is the director) where he has observed John Rosen at work. Brody's book is a masterful example of the methodology and technique of analytic observation and its use as a tool in the investigation of psychotherapeutic techniques. It also gives an excellent description of an interesting technique, reporting it briefly and precisely. It is a pioneer work in an attempt to explain the essentials of the psychotherapeutic process. In this respect Brody's work is much more than an excellent report about Rosen's treatment of psychotics.
Brody summarizes his interpretation of Rosen's technique thus: Psychosis in its manifest content is a nightmare in which forbidden wishes are so well disguised that the psychotic does not awaken. Unmask the latent meaning of the illness, and the patient will (or may) emerge from his sickness. A picture of Rosen's 'frontal assault' is then presented. The therapeutic task is to help the patient feel less fear and guilt about unconscious forbidden impulses, and to displace this guilt and shame upon the fact of being sick. Past observers have found it difficult to explain 'direct analysis' because the importance of moving the sense of guilt from the unconscious impulses to the fact of being psychotically sick was not recognized. It is designed to modify the patient's superego so as to break his previous identification and to establish new introjects. Previous commentators were not aware of Rosen's single-mindedness of purpose when he treats a