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This book has succeeded in its task of offering a representative picture of questions studied by Finnish psychoanalysts. The essays introduce various ways of approaching the central areas of mental life. The articles reflect the personal interests of their writers.
In his article, “On the development of value structures of the human mind”, Veikko Tähkä discusses the formation of mental structures, and, reflecting on it, the various grades of disturbances in this development. His point of departure is the statement that it is possible to repair basic structures only through new developmental interaction. Tähkä explains in detail how the experience of the self becomes individuated from the experience of the external world, the leap where the child comes into being as a person with subjective experiences.
Whilst discussing the separation-individuation process, Tähkä also discusses the basic pre-conditions and difficulties of loving. He maintains that “it is not possible to love another until he or she is experienced as a person with his or her own motivations and internal world, and who, for this reason, is beyond one's immediate possession and control”.
Täkhä defines in detail the individuation of the Oedipal development as a pre-condition for love towards a separate other. According to him, personal values and one's way of valuing depend on the development of the personality, and the fixations and distortions in this development. For this reason, the character of an individual's system of values is a very important diagnostic indicator of the developmental level of his or her mind. Therefore, the changes in the system of values of an analysand in the course of a psychoanalysis are a sensitive indicator for estimating the progress of treatment.
In his article “Transference as history and present-day”, Eero Rechardt pays attention to the fact that one's image of the world becomes formed through illusion and misunderstanding. Understanding springs from misunderstanding. Fre