Hypotheses derived from clinical material, the analyses of children, universal infantile games, and the analytic situation itself are presented. Technique based on these theoretical formulations aims to prevent the phobic patient from making the analyst a perpetual companion. The transference is managed carefully so that the ego will not feel disintegrated and confused, and the patient's anxiety will be manageable.

The author systematically analyzes the relationship between the patient and the principal, or most important, companion. This led him to see this relationship literally as an umbilical one which, just as at birth, sooner or later must be cut, and the patient freed from his attachment through fantasies of birth, assumed to be concomitant to any analytic situation.