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In this paper I wish to draw attention to some of the many ways in which needs from childhood recur in the course of analysis or therapy. A patient's re-presentation of need is, I believe, unconsciously in the service of a continuing search for attention to needs that have remained unmet.
First, however, I wish to remind the reader of a distinction that I regard as diagnostically essential in relation to the issue under discussion: that between “libidinal demands,” which cannot be gratified in any analytic psychotherapy without risking a serious disturbance of the analytic process, and “needs,” which cannot be frustrated without preventing growth. Winnicott (1960) has called these latter “ego-needs.” In relation to later development, I have found it useful to think of them as “growth-needs” (1985, pp. 170-172).
Superficially, it might seem that I am here advocating some form of “corrective emotional experience.” I wish to make it clear that this is not so, but I shall be linking what I am saying to the reexamination of that concept.
Views on the concept of corrective emotional experience have been very polarized, so it is timely that this concept should now be