Psychodiagnostic Follow-Up of a Juvenile Sex Murderer: Robert Lindner's ‘Charles’ Thirteen Years Later

Follow-up studies of cases previously reported in the psychoanalytic literature are lamentably scarce. The vast majority of patients are not reported in the literature to begin with; as for those who are, the chances of their falling into the hands subsequently of a practitioner who will publish a follow-up are very slim. The rare instance, when we are privileged to learn what has happened to a patient whose case we have previously read, usually concerns a patient of some exceptional interest deriving from the fame of the analyst who originally wrote about him.

The following study is a follow-up of one of Robert Lindner's cases, which Lindner treated in 1944 and reported in 1955 in The Fifty-Minute Hour. Despite its having been quite intentionally a popularization, The Fifty-Minute Hour managed to achieve, by virtue of a certain unsinkable integrity of its author, a place in the archives of the psychoanalytic movement. Like Theodor Reik's earlier (and more enduring) Listening With The Third Ear, Lindner's book humanized the person of the therapist in the treatment process. It was also frank in describing variations of psychoanalytic procedure; but at the same time it remained close to one of the scriptural positions of psychoanalysis, namely that a case may culminate in deep understanding of the patient but without necessarily self-regulation for the patient. Lindner conveyed this idea at least in the case of “Charles,” which the following study brings up to date. Charles was a prisoner serving a