Author's Response

I find on re-reading this paper, for the first time since submitting it three years ago for publication, that it is still fully consonant with my theoretical views, with one exception: it omits mention of the dimension of the patient's, and the therapist's, suicidal proclivities. If I were writing this paper over again today, I would make at least brief mention of the fact that just as suicide can be a defense against murder, so can murder be a defense against suicide; as Mrs. Glaser, for example, is quoted as saying to me, “I still had bad thoughts toward the baby or myself—either one.” In a similar vein, I would suggest today that the therapist's anxiety lest the patient murder him is likely to be based not only upon his reality-based awareness of the patient's murderousness, and upon the therapist's projection (as I have mentioned) of his own unconscious murderous feelings upon the already murderous patient, but also upon some increment of an unconscious longing on the therapist's part to be murdered by the patient. At any rate, I believe the opening paragraph of my paper makes clear that I was not setting out to cover nor even touch upon every major dimension of so broad a subject.

The version of this paper which was read by the discussants did not contain the second of the opening paragraphs I have included here, in which I make clear that I wrote this paper alone; I had thought that this was clearly enough implied, and I regret that I had not made it unmistakably clear to the discussants. It would be most unwarranted for Bisco, Coutu,

and Scibetta, whose role in this paper is limited to their having most generously permitted me to include the material from their patients, to be held at all responsible for my own therapeutic techniques and theoretical formulations.

A word employed by Little, “prodigious,” nicely describes my task in responding to the thoughtful comments of the nine discussants, all of them persons of wide experience in working with schizophreni