You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dr. Boyer has independently arrived at many of the conclusions which I reached, and began to publish, during the 1940's. For instance, he, too, has concluded that psychosis reflects the individual's early familial relationships; that the ego, and especially the superego, are inadequately developed; that analytic treatment can be used to redevelop them; more specifically, that aspects of the analyst himself can be introjected; that psychotic transference permits
these therapeutic introjections; that further regression may be necessary in the course of treatment; that recovery is possible, without institutional procedures, in many cases; and that proper treatment extends into the postpsychotic phase, which I have designated as the “neo-neurosis.”
Indeed, most of Dr. Boyer's discoveries are so familiar to me that I can only encourage him to go further along these lines and to move beyond the limits of our current knowledge. Surely it is no longer necessary to “suggest that the psychotic process is reversible in some patients” as if that were news.
The question of interest now, in 1966, is what constitutes the optimal way of achieving these results—taking into account such considerations as the huge number of people who need to be treated, the small number of psychotherapists who are prepared to treat them, the insistent clamor from the pharmaceutical lobby, and so on.
The real novelty in Dr. Boyer's paper is his claim of strict adherence to so-called “classical” procedures in the treatment of psychotics. “In seminar groups” he says, “colleagues have remarked that I was more strictly and consistently analytical while treating psychotics than they were with neurotics.” As far as I am aware, this is news.
Freud and many of his followers have stated flatly that classical psychoanalysis does not work with psychotics. In my own experience—originally with the “chronically regressed, withdrawn patients” whom Dr. Boyer does not treat—it has been necessary to introduce a number o