Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

Part IV: The Impact of Daseinsanalysis on

Psychoanalytic Doctrine or the Neuroses

Part III: Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the

Psychoanalytic Therapy ana Theory

Part I: The Daseinsanalytic View or Man

Introduction 2

1. A Patient Who Taught the Author to See and Think Differently 5

2. Outline of Analysis of Dasein 28

3. The Most Common Misunderstandings about Analysis of Dasein 49

Part II: Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of

Introduction 58

4. The Intrinsic Harmony of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Daseinsanalysis 61

5. Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of the Basic Conceptions of Psychoanalytic Theory 75

Introduction 131

6. "Conversion Hysteria" and "Organ Neurosis" 133

7. A Patient Who Suffered Alternately from Cdlitis and Migraine 147

8. A Patient with Functional and Structural "Psychosomatic" Disturbances 155

9. "Anxiety Hysteria" 178

10. Obsessional Neurosis 182

11. The Case History of a Sadistic Pervert 186

12. The "Narcissistic" Neuroses 209

Introduction 230

11 The Daseinsanalyst's Attitude Toward His Patients 233

vii

viti Contents

14. Daseinsanalytic Handling of "Transference" and "Acting Out" 237

15. The Psychoanalytic "Why?" and the Daseinsanalytic "Why Not?" 248

16. Frustration and Permissiveness in the Light of Daseinsanalysis 252

17. Daseinsanalytic Handling of "Countertransference" 255

18. The Therapeutic Use of Daseinsanalytic Dream Interpretation 261

19. Further Daseinsanalytic Corrections in Therapy: The Analysis

of "Guilt Feelings" and the Goal of Psychotherapy 269

20. Daseinsanalytically Modified Treatment of a Modern Neurosis

of Dullness and the Patient's Comments on the Modifications 273

Conclusion 284

Index

PART I

THE DASEINSANALYTIC

I he similarity between the terms psycho- Ш analysis [Psychoanalyse] and Daseinsanal-ysis [Daseinsanalyse]* has led to the widespread impression that they refer to competing psychiatric-psychotherapeutic schools. Both, it is said, pattern their procedures on certain chemical analyses, in that they aim to dissolve man into his component parts. It is even claimed that the only other difference between psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis is that the former calls its point of departure the "psyche" while the latter calls the same thing "Dasein" or "existence." However, the fact that the procedures sound as if they were re­lated is not a reliable guarantee that psychoanalysis and Daseins­analysis are even concerned with the same things. Thus there is all the more reason to determine—through careful investigation of

* Translator's note: Daseinsanalysis, meaning "analysis of Dasein," is the Angli­cized version of the German term Daseinsanalyse. Boss uses this term to designate his transformation of psychoanalytic theory and practice, basing his approach on the philosopher Martin Heidegger's Daseinsanalytik (which also means 'analysis of Dasein") as set forth in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Halle, 1927; Being and Time, New York, 1962) and subsequent works.

Dasein is a key term in the work of Heidegger and his followers. Its literal trans­lation is "to be (sein) there (da)" and its popular translation is "existence." Heidegger uses the word in its literal sense, which differs from ordinary German usage. As Heidegger uses it Dasein is, in all truth, a new word in the German lan­guage. For this reason, and because the only accurate translation—"to be there"— would be too clumsy, I have decided to use the word Dasein untranslated in the present book. Daseinsanalytik, the term Heidegger uses for his fundamental-onto-logical analyses of human being, I translate "analysis of Dasein."

2

VIEW OF MAN

their origins, their essences, and their respective practical impacts on psychiatry and psychotherapy—whether there is any connection at all between the two.

At the same time we can also hope to bring some clarification to the shocking intellectual confusion which has come to prevail under the blanket term "existentialism." Representatives of numer­ous and ever more different, even opposing, conceptions of man's existence have usurped this latest fashionable label of "existential­ism" and are now marching, as it were, under this banner. Because the term has become practically meaningless, I have called the present book Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis.

We can only hope to find a path out of the hopelessly tangled growth of contemporary "existentialist" thought if we start again

The term Daseinsanalyse was originally introduced by Ludwig Binswanger to
:'" iricterize his method for investigating psychopathological phenomena and to dis-
' r^ish this method from Heidegger's ontological analyses, Daseinsanalytik. (Al-
:_jousq Heidegger provided the starting point for Binswanger's work, the latter has
recently stated that he misunderstood Heidegger, adding that he hopes the mis-
: -ading will be a fruitful one. See L. Binswanger, "Daseinsanalyse uad Psy-
.__ Scrapie," in Acta Psychotherapeutica et Psychosomatica, Vol. 8, No. 4, i960, p.

F:r clarity I have decided to use ' Daseinsanalysis" and its derivative forms _;einsanalytic" and "Daseinsanalyst" to designate Boss's approach exclusively. ~; decision has been facilitated by the fact that Binswanger's method has already: 7. referred to in American publications as "existential analysis." See, for example, 1 ~ence, edited by Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger (New loot, 1958), which contains two case histories of Binswanger.

4 The Daseinsanalytic View of Man

from the clear and unambiguous source of modern "existentialism," i.e., from the fundamental insights of Martin Heidegger's "analysis of Dasein" [ Daseinsanalytik].

We shall begin with a case history, in order to demonstrate that it was a patient's needs and not just a personal whim which led me to study analysis of Dasein. Many uncommon and favorable circum­stances came together in this particular case. The patient was an unusually intelligent and highly cultured woman of English origin. She not only was capable of most accurate psychological introspec­tion but also was highly articulate verbally. She was a physician, a specialist in psychiatry with a great deal of knowledge about European and American psychiatry and psychotherapy. Thanks to her remarkable psychological and psychopathological knowledge as well as her intellectual integrity, her therapist had to summon all his psychotherapeutic skill. He tried every psychotherapeutic ap­proach then at his disposal. Eventually it was she who first succeeded in opening up her psychiatrist's mind for the completely new approach to man called "analysis of Dasein."

A Patient Wno Taugnt tne Autkor to bee ana Tnink Dirrerently

The Clinical Picture

The patient, whom we shall call Dr. Cobling, grew up in the rigorously ascetic atmosphere of a sectarian community, character­ized by its inordinate zeal for mortification of the flesh and all that ar rrtains thereto. An inexorable self-image, drilled into her since childhood, demanded unremitting self-denial and sacrifice to duty. Under its harsh dictates and by virtue of her exceptional intelli­gence, a positively indomitable will, and resolute self-discipline, she had managed to work her way up to the medical directorship of an important psychiatric sanitarium. This she had achieved in the face of very considerable external difficulties. For years she had sacrificed herself unstintingly to the service of this institution, the benefits of which were richly enjoyed by others. In the process, however, she bad so worn herself down that she was now, at the age of thirty-six —shortly before the beginning of the analysis—on the brink of total collapse. She had, to be sure, suffered since youth from repeated depressive episodes of several months' duration, which had been ascribed, medically, to endogenous disorders. Nevertheless, up to this juncture, she had somehow managed to surmount these without benefit of outside assistance. One year before the beginning of the analvsis she had lost her aged father. From this point on she had obviously gone downhill. She withered away still further inwardly, became incapable of any sort of feeling, underwent a sort of spiritual petrifaction, could no longer think, was unable either to retain or to grasp what she read; she lost all initiative and all capacity to concentrate, and could sit for hours, staring into space, empty of thought and losing all sense of time. She suffered from sleeplessness

Translated by Elsa Lehman, M.D.

6 The Daseinsanalytic View of Man

and tension. Only with a prodigious effort of will and under the support of powerful sedatives could she manage to half-way struggle through her routine duties. A marked, fine, rapid tremor of the hands and maximal dilatation of the pupils were tell-tale witness to a very high level of anxiety. The patient herself, to be sure, was loath to admit any of this. A strange compulsion toward suicide held her in sway, well-nigh irresistible in its insistence. She was unquestionably in a highly precarious pre-psychotic state. When the analysis started, the sheer effort required to ward off the self-destructive impulses had so exhausted her physical strength that she was barely able to drag one foot before the other.

To begin with, the therapist urged the patient to stop carrying her pride and this violation of herself to such extremes, to acknowl­edge her inability to work, and to allow herself for once the luxury of inactivity.

On this advice, no sooner had the patient given up her profes­sional activities, thereby relinquishing the last sick vestige of a hold on her erstwhile mode of life, than, as might be expected, the first manifest psychotic symptoms made their appearance. In broad day­light, faces and a welter of grimacing "electric masks" began to whirl past her eyes. At first they bore the features of the sour old welfare ladies who had surrounded her in her youth and to whose company her mother belonged (Figures 1 and 2). Then sinister apparitions of the sectarian preachers she had known so well con­jured themselves to torment her (Figure 3). The dance of the grimacing masks grew even more frenzied and chaotic. Figure 4 captures a moment in these wild dervish dances. (Illustrations ap­pear after p. 16.)

However, not only had something very strange and uncanny broken into this patient's seeing, but her hearing, too, was no longer as before. She made it clear to her psychiatrist that every single sound had taken on an uncanny meaning: the drone of a distant aircraft, the clatter of a motorcycle staccattoing in the streets, the falling of raindrops on the roof, the creaking of the chair as the psychiatrist moved. She kept hearing portents of im­pending disaster, of some ghastly imminent catastrophe. She would feel the world going into dissolution.

"I can't do anything else but hang on to every sound until it has died away. They consume me, utterly, these sounds. My whole being is concentrated in my ears. I'm so compressed into them that

A Patient Who Taught the Author to See and Think Differently 7

mv ears literally hurt and the temporal and chewing muscles and

mv neck are tensed as hard as stone." Such was her own description.

Some weeks later the patient complained that there was a whisper-

J3.tr of church women in the air. "They are saying," the patient

lontinued, "that I'm bad, that I'm a streetwalker and a whore." The

ent tried very hard to defend herself against these severe

?es, to the point where she put wax in her ears. But the voices

.: the church ladies kept the upper hand. Soon she also complained

at being persecuted by men.

One night there was a phone call from the patient. She dared

whisper into the mouthpiece. She couldn't speak louder, she

. ained, because the church ladies had tapped the wires and

.1 listen in. She preferred to write down what was going to

oen exactly at midnight, and would put what she had written

loectlv into the analyst's mailbox. The following protocol, bearing

ie beading "Important Highly Secret Documents," was what he

iacmd.

The invasion will be at twelve midnight. And I am prepared. I will stay up. I saw some of their disguised foretroops this after­noon on motorcycles. They were wearing big orange-red glasses like masks.

Who are they? I think they belong to the reds, at least of that category, but coming from out of space. They can make themselves tinv like little lice, to sneak in through cracks in the walls; but I am alert and looking out for them, especially in the corners and under the table. I have already heard some knockings and sounds diat are their secret signs. Thus prepared, I looked quite a while into the mirror. My face is dead. That is good. They can believe I am dead, until I get time to see what they are like. Maybe I will join them later. I combed and brushed my hair well. It is a good preparation. Hair protects the head—the brain. When I Ъ: >hed my hair, I had a faint notion of other faces behind this dead mask of mine.

Now you and the other psychiatrists are trying to prevent me from living out this invasion. You are telling me that it is only my r-: ressed unconscious forces; the others tell me to control my imagination, or ask who I think I am with my megalomaniac ideas.

You stupid fools. It is only that you lack the inner sensitivity to::ce their Geiger and Radar systems, or the inner sight (= in-5 _'.-.t*, vision, to see their disguised forms. It requires a certain n___iing. It is like noticing the scorpions immediately you enter a room.

I might join them to draw further out into the world to pro-

8

The Daseinsanalytic View of Мая

claim the power: a power which will invade us, stronger than any usual human brain can even dream of, a billion times stronger than atomic energy.

The short sleep was black compared with this new reality, which, however, has not yet fully developed in all details and to its full extent: the power to penetrate the deepest and hidden secrets of the universe. It makes for a power greater than God's. This is a question for theologians, but they might get some hints. God has started something he no longer has control over. Theologians build up systems of thoughts to save his face; he has voluntarily limited his power by giving man free will; he is in war with Satan, and one day will slay him down in complete destruction, on the day of victory.

But I know something far more important and far-reaching in its consequences. After the completion of the invasion, when the power of the universe can freely be used, then one shall be even greater than God, because one is beyond good and evil. When it invades every inch of us, then we will be powerful and mighty as God—or stronger. The chain reaction will fill us with an energy which up to now has been unknown to human scientists. There will be no necessity for sleep or food.

Is not the power of the invaders dangerous? They are destruc­tive, indeed, and you get destroyed by fighting them. But they are not intelligent. Therefore you make friends with them and learn their secrets. That strips them of their ruling power. What this power then can be used for is not yet revealed.

Boss will be told about this, because, although his insight is limited, he has a certain understanding and a willingness to learn and I feel we have certain things in common.

There are still some anemic theologians and church ladies around, trying to find out what this is all about. Therefore I can­not tell so much over the phone. They are tapping the line. It is unnecessary to get into open fight wim them at present, as they are already doomed to die'.

The Patient's Challenge

At first the psychiatrist had hoped that he could talk reasonably to this very intelligent patient and colleague even in her psychosis, using Dubois's "persuasion" method. He would try to make the patient gain distance from the ugly visual and auditory phenomena by calling them mere hallucinations without any reality. He even went a step further with his rational endeavor and labeled the hallucinations expressions and results of a disturbed metabolism in

A Febtnt Who Taught the Author to See and Think Differently 9

-} r brain tissues. He added that if the patient wanted to see proof of;__i explanation she had only to examine the very agitated curves cЈ her electroencephalogram.

The patient, much to the amazement of the doctor, simply 1;;bed at all these naturalistic explanations and scornfully i: ged her shoulders. As though, she remarked contemptuously, i;le human perception or thought—be it usual or unusual— cl-^o. ever be intelligibly derived from the physiological processes «I the bodily metaboHsm, from any nerve functions, or from the «Mailed higher nervous activities which take place concomitantly. }[: w did the doctor, she went on, picture such a transformation of ~ sical processes into mental, immaterial phenomena? Perhaps as «ome kind of magic evaporation?

Not exactly that, the physician retorted, in order to save face. r^dier, the physiological metaboHsm in the central nervous system xrA the mental phenomena might be regarded as two different i -ects of one and the same thing. Whereas physiology approaches -_ r functions of the central nervous system in terms of space and z e. psychology approaches them in terms of various subjective

- ■ ~: mena, which are, however, only the subjective reflections of
:, iiological processes. In order to strengthen his position, he went
: to compare this subjective reflection with the reflection of the
_ :':Л waves of an external object creating a picture on a photo-
: _:c plate.

The psychiatrist was rather proud of his scientific explanation, i be had only recently read it in one of the most modern and nding textbooks on psychosomatic medicine. Very soon, -_ -gh, he had to capitulate again because the patient continued, as i.jows: Of which nature, she asked, would the cerebral cortex have to be in order that—as a material, organic tissue—it could enter _- ■:> an understanding, meaning-disclosing relationship with the т -ernal world? Furthermore, into what should the physiological: >ses reflect themselves subjectively? Into the consciousness of

- ubject, perhaps? But what would the nature of such a subject
1 e to be in order to be able to possess a consciousness? And
■*:uld the doctor be kind enough to explain to her what conscious­
ness is and where he thinks the human consciousness would be
: _nd? Somewhere within the head, perhaps, or somewhere else?
" ii it perhaps this consciousness which he had just compared with
ж photographic plate? However, has a photographic plate ever been

10 The Daseinsanalytic View of Man

capable of perceiving that which was reflected on it as the thing which it was?

After this failure of his physiological interpretations, the psy­chiatrist withdrew completely into pure psychology. He conceded that his patient's hallucinations were not simply nothing, naturally. They did not, however, correspond to an external reality, but repre­sented only an internal, purely psychic reality, consisting of hidden emotions and tendencies of the patient herself. These internal psychic realities were being projected out of the deep unconscious layers of her psyche and on to external objects.

Unfortunately, the doctor's psychology was treated even worse than his physiological explanation of her psychosis. Furiously she flung at him: "Don't you come with that psychological nonsense again, trying to make fictions of these spies and motorcyclists, to dispose of them as mere hallucinations and projections of my un­conscious or some other psychic reality. What do you psychiatrists know of reality anyway? Nothing, absolutely nothing! And then you go ahead and make tidy subdivisions of something about which you haven't the faintest inkling. You prattle about subjective and ob­jective, about an inner, psychic reality and a real reality attaching to the external world, presuming to play one against the other, as though the one were real and the other purely fictitious and hallucinatory. But, what can you actually mean by the very word hallucination when you completely ignore what the so-called non-hallucinatory reality is? Words, nothing but words—and behind them nothing, precisely nothing, no real understanding whatsoever!"

How could the doctor's traditional psychology, in all its frailty, withstand such a frontal attack, consisting of completely incon­testable objections, despite the fighter's schizophrenia? For better or worse, the psychiatrist saw himself obliged to undertake a re­appraisal of his whole thinking.

First he tried very hard to find some help by studying the many modern European psychologies which center around the concep­tions of a subject or a person. However, nowhere could he find a description or elucidation of the nature of such a "subject" or "person" which would have enabled him to understand the simple fact that his patient could perceive and experience something at all, and this something as something meaningful, whether the experience was hallucinatory in character or not. In other words, the psy­chiatrist remained as ignorant as before in regard to any real insight

Л Patiemt Who Taught the Author to See and Think Differently 11

-: the possibility of a meaning-disclosing meeting of a subject
ih an object, or of a person with a thing or with another human

. _.lously, the physician had to leave all traditional psychologies,

*_ f^bjectivism and personalism, behind and look at the patient

ker: To be sure, he never would have had the courage to do such

:Ie, seemingly "unscientific," thing if he had not come across

-chings of analysis of Dasein just in time and had not been

;л- impressed by the fundamental insights into the very essence

лап existence contained therein. Now the patient's drawings

iii._jed first place in his thinking. How extraordinarily they had

саше about! As if without her agency, masks had appeared on a

::e of white paper, ugly and diabolic. "They come," the patient

i £ said, "out of nowhere, just suddenly appear, emerge from some-

• tre behind the drawing paper, and all of a sudden they are

-. looking at me. The drawings always start from the mid-point

aen the eyebrows. After that, at first only the eyes appear.

r metimes there is no contour of a head delimiting these first

features from the surrounding universe, or perhaps from the noth-

.-•ess from which they come."

ixL, the doctor recalled the first appearance of her so-called

ry hallucinations. Here too lay promise of a deeper insight

rr psychotic condition. She had to key herself to listen intently

erv slightest sound, as though a message lay in readiness for her,

. *je air, foretelling an unnamed horror, something pregnant with

: Liter. This unutterably dreadful something thronged in upon her,

г in ever-mounting surge, impinging exquisitely upon her ear, until

: she consisted of nothing else but ear: The bodily ear and its

^nding area grew painful and became spastically contracted.

.-v it was not any particular something, it was a nondescript

;r_iing ghastliness and an impending vanishing away of every-

~.1? into nothingness which finally set free the whisper of raindrops

- _rtmg her with insinuations of her harlotry.

Iz all these immediate experiences of the patient, provided we

bonest, we encounter not the slightest evidence which would

is the right to assume the actual presence of primary, in-

«:■;- ill representations within the deeper levels of a psyche and to

T^.i^j^te their projection from a sort of intrapsychic container,

-jck we call the "unconscious," outward on to objects in the ex-

пм1 world. If we do not, a priori and in lieu of observation, make

12 The Daseinsanalytic View of Man

an assumption of psychic entities in the patient about which (by our own admission) we neither have nor ever can have any knowledge (otherwise we would not be constrained to use the term "uncon­scious" in referring to them—"unconscious representations," for ex­ample, or "the individual and the collective unconscious"), then the reality of the patient indicates something quite other than what psychiatry and psychology would have us believe up until now.

We see that something approaches the patient, addresses her from nowhere and from everywhere, but not out of the inwardness of an individual psyche. This something communicates from beyond the drawing paper, from the high distance of a night aircraft, from the street noises, and from the creaking chair on which the analyst was sitting. Something is sent to her, seeks admission to her aware­ness and appearance therein. It is something of her future that approaches her, comes to meet her, seeks to be included in her present. This "something" for this patient is pre-eminently the realm of phenomena that reveals itself in the bodily-erotic ways of human relating to the world. True, the prohibiting sectarian church women and the ascetic preachers had claimed admission into the patient's awareness first of all, albeit as so-called hallucinations only. However, precisely because they prohibit, they refer to the very thing which they prohibit, i.e., to the bodily-erotic sphere of human life. As yet the patient had never been able to appropriate these erotic possibilities of loving, to accept them as actually belonging to her own responsible self. Therefore a free relatedness to all those phenomena of our world, most especially to a man as a beloved sexual partner, had remained unattainable to her. From early child­hood she had been rigorously trained to alienate herself from these possibilities of relating, which nevertheless constituted part of her existence. They had been designated as unworthy of human dignity, as sinful and dangerous. She had always been called upon to be the sensible, detached, objective one, the dispassionate being wholly engaged in the competent pursuit of goals to be achieved by an ordered exercise of thought. Inevitably the result had been ex­orbitant overtaxing of her intellectual faculties.

To be sure, our open and free encounter with certain realms of the human world can be obstructed to a great extent by the pre-emptory dicta of our own obstinate egotism, or by the blind, extrinsic, alien pressure imposed by an inadequate atmosphere in our early environment. But no human being can ever completely

Who Taught the Author to See and Think Differently 13

■In r the challenge of all that is destined to appear and to come

em 2 in the light of a given existence. Accordingly, the bodily,

Л realms of the human world which had not been freely ad-

-:-*i by out patient only importuned her hearing and sight and

г "1ПИГЧ OCX awareness all the more insistently, albeit in an extremely

way. Everything the patient had shrunk from looking at

mam gaped and ogled at her as hallucinatory" masks or spied her

a "paranoid" manner in the innermost recesses of her life.

- zed by the insights he had gained by these observations,
rrapist was able to hazard a fresh approach to the floridly

: --matin g and angry patient. He admitted quite candidly to her:

" -уш are perfectly right. There is no sense in granting one reality г.- олег another. It would be quite futile for us to maintain >Js table before us is more real than your motorcycling spies

: because they elude my perception and are perceptible only

i. Whv don't we let both of them stand as the phenomena

reveal themselves to be? Then there is only one thing worth

- retention. That is to consider the full meaning-content of that

i discloses itself to us. If you keep meeting spies at every turn,

. £ ж psychiatrist were to attempt to reduce these perceptions to:-js hallucinations or figments of your imagination, to impute

- psychic reality to them as projections out of your unconscious,
'. would have to agree with you completely that he would be

- in quite meaningless terms which are not promoting our
- endin g of your experiences in the least. For who is able to

-nine what 'psychic' means basically, and what imagination

:er all? Of what nature are these images of the so-called

_ nations or delusions, and where might-one expect to find them

z a 'psyche'? But perhaps you will agree with me when I say

_c I see the reality of your spies primarily in what they do. And

-.> what they do spying? But spying occurs only as a form of

_ -ration for war; therefore it occurs only where two enemies

isL mutually barred against each other and consequently antago-

to one another, and where one party wants to annihilate the

- or at least to conquer it and bring it under its own dominion.
-*:w would it be if you were to allow everything there is a right

je. and to hold yourself open to all that wants to come to you, -"- though the erstwhile structure of your existence were to turn: be too small and have to be broken asunder and to die? Why x try giving up all this fighting and defending of yourself? Let

14 The Daseinsanalytic View of Man

the spies come and give them full power to do as they wish, and just see what happens."

The Therapist's Discovery

Thereupon it was quite astonishing to see how completely the patient felt herself understood to the very depths of her inmost being, and what unshatterable confidence she placed in the ther­apist. Because of this she followed his advice with uncommon energy and perseverance. The church women with their taunts "You street hussy, you whore!" and the spies with their secret weapons—she endured them all with a pious, accepting openness. They tortured her, shot her body through with high voltage electric currents, and sawed off her legs at the knee. She put up with it all out of faith in her therapist.

The psychoanalyst on his part was rewarded by a completely new discovery. First the patient could dream one night that she had to take over the neurological division of a hospital. There she met a little girl who had meningitis. The dreamer was immediately con­vinced that the only hope of helping the child would be through prolonged drainage of the cerebro-spinal fluid. On waking, the patient, of her own accord, saw a parallel between this dream-drainage and the analytic tap which she was undergoing. Two other points in this dream claimed the analyst's attention. He noted that the one in the dream who was so sick and so in need of treatment was a girl and that, moreover, the sickness was in her head—she was suffering from a meningitis. For the time being he made no comment. However, it was not long before faces of girls began to mingle with the optical perceptions of her waking life, and then they were joined by much younger children with thoroughly healthy faces (Figures 5 and 6).

This offered the therapist a welcome signal to point out the tremendous difference between the distorted, malicious masks of the grownups and the healthy little children's faces, radiating trust and confidence. Cautiously he asked the patient if these small chil­dren, who were a joy to see, did not in a way appertain to that part of her world which had remained healthy and happy. Since she was open to perceive such normal small children now, could we not assume that, fundamentally, she would be able to live also in the

¹ Who Taught the Author to See and Think Differently 15

::" a normal, happy little child herself? Since this way of be-

: would perhaps correspond best to her own authentic, un-

.ed selfhood, how would it be if, in the analysis, she let herself

r little child, completely, without restraint, regardless of every-

- If in so doing, she abided by the basic analytic rule to say

iing, then the necessary drainage of the sick child in her

: us dream could begin and the inflammation of her brain—

: •>. probably due to her intellectual overexertion—might disap-

: it. too.

Гэ be allowed to be a little child for once, this was the "open

«soe* that flung wide the flood-gates which had so long stemmed

her own true potentialities from expression. It was as if she

: been waiting her whole life long for precisely this permission.

7 ire facade of her former mode of life—the excessively

i^icnaous, work-addicted, goal-striving patterns hammered into

; - • - long—burst asunder, and with the full force of her prodigious

_: • there broke through all the small-child urges to suck thumbs

- i to kick and squeal. At home she began to play with her own

- irement, painting enormous sheets of sketch paper with it which

rd themselves from afar by their smell (Figure 7).
ilso smeared her whole body with feces in the bathtub. Quite
npted she brought with her to the analytic session a baby's
: -_i, filled with warm sweetened milk. At her request, the analyst
"!■ ~i to feed her with this while she lay curled up like an infant on J
marvtic couch. ■—'

7 ж the further course of the therapy, it was vital to allow her rtelv untrammeled scope in her small-child "acting-out" and

- accept her fully and unreservedly, precisely as she showed her-
Jtic All would have been lost had the analyst, through the slightest

or gesture, permitted any intimation of distaste on his part to

-ear. or had he smiled perhaps a little indulgently over the feed-

:tle. Had he done so, he would inevitably have taken over

:e role of those ascetic parents and have deprived her forever

>sibility of finding her way to her own inherent self.

⁴ jc Јad a sure feeling that the smearing with feces was, in some

7- wav, extraordinarily beneficial for the universe. She only

i. the menses would come so she could smear with her blood

I That, she felt, would be the atom-splitting liberation.

L: not indeed to the universe in general, this permission to be a

e child was of incredible benefit to the patient herself. Hitherto

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