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10th January 1969.
Dear Dr. Rodman,
I have now had time to read your paper on Accidental Technical Lapses as Therapy. I find these notes very interesting and I hope that you will continue your attempt to bring these views together in the form of a contribution for publication.
It is quite a difficult subject in the sense that one can so easily be misunderstood, and obviously it is much easier to pretend that there is some kind of perfection of technique which can be taught and acquired than to acknowledge the mistakes one makes and then to go further and to see whether sometimes these mistakes have value. I fully agree with this last idea and I think you know that various examples, sometimes rather terrible ones, are scattered throughout my later writings. Certainly I have been guilty of startling senior students by telling them about technical mistakes, some of which turn out to be valuable, and offering them for discussion. Actually students do not like this sort of thing, because, as you describe, they are trying to organize themselves on the basis of choosing identifications, and they are not ready yet to deal with personal idiosyncrasies. What I feel that you leave out in your paper is a clear statement that diagnosis matters. For instance, I think that mistakes may be dangerous in the analysis of psychoneurosis while at the same time they may be useful when the patient is more psychotic or what we call borderline. I think