Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

October 17, 1960. THE ROMANTIC IRONY. Otto E. Sperling, M.D.

Dr. Sperling presents a clinical study of the phenomenon of 'exaggeration', with particular reference to its use as an ego mechanism. The title derives from a literary device in which a poet (Heinrich Heine), after expressing an emotion with great passion, surprises the reader at the end of the poem with a prosaic or cynical line. This same sequence of exaggerated passion and sudden sobriety is observed

in psychoanalysis. Several cases are presented in which the patients were aware that their feelings were not genuine and accused themselves of hypocrisy, but the author notes that the content of the 'hypocrisy' was as revealing as it was concealing. These patients, primarily of an obsessional type, would experience an emotion but before the feeling could be perceived and properly evaluated, it would be distorted to the grotesque. In this caricatured form the feeling appeared strange to them and its expression could be taken for hypocrisy. From the psychoanalytic point of view, this was only the exaggerated expression of a real emotion; it was a way of dealing with superego and drive derivatives, a substitute for repression. Thus, one patient overtly expressed hostility to her father in exaggerated form, privately believing the hatred to be faked. In this way she was able not to perceive her actual hatred of him. Another person might have repressed recognition of this hatred, turned the hatred against another object or against her own self, or overcompensated by solicitude.

Exaggeration as a means of devaluating the analyst's interpretations is an everyday experience. It would be expected that a mechanism which plays so important a part in the symptomatology of compulsion neurosis would manifest itself also in the acting out of the patient. Many patients accept interpretations only in a 'hypocritical' way until after the analysis of resistances and of the transference neurosis, when the interpre