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17th March 1966.
Dear Dr. Rosenfeld:
I am grateful to you for reacting to my remark last night at Thorner's paper. There must be many who got something valuable out of what you said.
(By way of further comment, I think the subject is not exhausted even by your statement. Incidentally I remember Clare telling me that in a supervision you said to her “the analyst must not be afraid to take the patient's projections.”) What I have in mind is that there are some cases in which the analyst is able to accept these projections without in any way endangering the total transference framework. I am referring to certain patients who, in the localised area of a short phase of analysis are very ill indeed and they cannot stand the gap between the blunt experience and the psycho-analytic interpretation. In other words for such patients at such times the analyst, in conveying through interpretations that he accepts the patient's projections, is in fact being reasonable, but not deeply enough understanding. I have a patient like this at the present time, an adolescent girl, and the phases only last about twenty minutes. In those minutes I become a worse persecutor the more reasonable I show myself to be. The patient recovers mercifully before going home.
From this it follows that I am not happy about Thorner's title Cause and Reason, and I think you were not happy either. I suppose he is talking about aetiology as compared with all the other things like the sense of responsibility.
I think what I am saying is this. I would like to hear it discussed how when a patient's mother was mad, does the patient bring this into the transference? It is not true that at some moment or other