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In this wholly delightful paper we have a fascinating picture of a therapist who possesses a remarkable capacity to appreciate the individuality, intelligence and creativity of a very psychotic woman. Mrs. Sandford goes to lengths of therapeutic devotion which put most of us, her colleagues, to shame.
The importance of the cats in the patient's life parallels that of pets in the lives of schizophrenic patients whom former colleagues at Chestnut Lodge and I have treated. Of particular interest to me was Mrs. Sandford's discovery that she had come to possess the transference meaning to her patient, of the letter's beloved cat. My monograph on the non-human environment reports many clinical examples of this variety.
I presume Mrs. Sandford is correct in her belief that the cats served as transitional objects for the patient—as objects midway, in their significance for this woman's primitive ego-functioning, between “me” and “not-me.” But I would emphasize that the cats may often have not merely given vicarious expression to this woman's unconscious needs, but may have had a genuine impact upon her as separate and real initiators of various “interpersonal” processes. My monograph quotes Louis Linn as observing, regarding dogs, that:
“… Clearly, the dog is no inanimate repository of symbolic meaning, but a living being that eats and bites and destroys and urinates and defecates and can lavish affection and has a sex life and, finally, is subject to illness and death … In short, dogs are capable of entering into human emotional relationships which seem almost as complicated bilaterally.”
One of the few basic lessons I have learned
about schizophrenic patients is the extremely significant degree of positive feeling between the patient and the mother—even in those instances, as in Mrs. Sandford's case-description, where it appears to us that the mother was unrelievedly hostile to the child. My surmise is that Elsie's mother was the first “cat” for whom the real cats later ca