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Norman discusses the origin, meaning, and role in therapy of the visual images an adult patient may sometimes evoke in the analyst. He presents several examples of how these images can make analysts aware of certain processes in the patient they might not otherwise have perceived. In child analysis this does not occur, because the child patient makes constant demands upon the therapist; free-floating attention is therefore impossible, and the usual images are not formed. In their place, moods are evoked in the child analyst. They are re-awakenings of moods the analyst experienced as a child, and they can help the analyst know how to proceed with the child. An example is given.
This paper contains one incidental but memorable paragraph: it is a remarkable statement of how a writer (Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is cited) provides slight references, mere hints of, for example, the setting of a story. From these the reader, as in the formation of the visual images that are discussed in the paper, constructs, with the help of his or her unconscious, the setting—the landscape, the people—of the story. "The talented writer reaches the unconscious of the reader with only a few signs, thereby making the readers create an inner scenery, the author managing to take the reader with him in this mental work."