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The authors take up themes from their earlier collaborative work on dreams and the countertransference, to discuss what they call the fetishization of the patient by the analyst. The analyst sometimes delivers an interpretation with the pretense that it is an ideal interpretation. The effect is to induce a depression in the patient,
rather than mourning with all its possibilities of libidinal realignment. The result may be a blockage of communication between the patient and analyst, the result of an unconscious collusion between them. The authors theorize that the mourning of oedipal objects induces in the individual, under pressure from the superego, a personal elaboration of the oedipus complex. There is in each individual a potential opposition between such oedipal mourning and the depressive state which is induced when the child participates in the active incestuous fantasy of the mother. In analysis such "ideal" interpretations function as if the patient had become the object of an active incestuous fantasy on the part of the oedipal object. If the child is used to represent the latent thoughts of the mother, that is, if the child is used to take the place of the incestuous object, the mental development of the child is altered by a modification of the intent of the maternal message of the danger of castration. To the extent that the parents, especially the mother, refuse to carry out their own oedipal mourning, the unconscious message to the infant is a denial of all threat of loss of what he represents as a replacement of the incestuous object. He is idealized and fetishized at the expense of the formation of his own ego ideal.