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As Dr. Boyer emphasized, his report is an interim one. As experience with analyzing psychotic patients accumulates, some details of his current views may change. What seems to me important to emphasize at present is that many patients who could be helped by analysis are denied the opportunity because of the mistaken idea that a patient who is psychotic is ipso facto unanalyzable. In my opinion, some are analyzable and some are not, as is the case with neurotic patients.
My own experience in analyzing psychotic patients has been less extensive than Dr. Boyer's. Moreover, the ones whom I have treated were less disturbed than were the sickest of his when their analyses began. Perhaps for these reasons I have been less impressed than has Dr. Boyer by evidences of prompt and considerable improvement.
The only patient. I recall who had begun to hallucinate (auditorily) just before starting analysis did in fact enjoy a prompt cessation of his hallucinations after treatment began and was able to resume his university studies after the first year of analysis. Other patients, with less ominous initial symptoms, showed much less in the way of rapid improvement. Indeed, I have come to expect considerably slower progress in the analyses of psychotic patients than in those of neurotic ones.
I am in agreement with Dr. Boyer's main points as outlined in his summary. My experience with treating psychotic patients in an office setting has convinced me, too, that they may be successfully treated by psychoanalysis. Arlow and I have suggested on the basis of our pooled experience with the psychoanalytic treatment of psychotic patients that the psychopathology of the psychoses is more like that of the neuroses than has been generally believed by analytic authors until now (Arlow and Brenner, 1965). The differences, we believe, are of degree rather than of kind.