David Rosenfeld

This book is based on various cases whose common factor is how the psychoanalytic setting is created: the internalization and realization inside the patient`s mind: with the feeling of fixed hours and the transferential relation with the psychoanalyst. Referring to the great masters of psychoanalysis, the author guides us step by step thr

This book develops models and hypotheses about the mechanisms of the origin of language and the self. It offers a highly original discussion of language acquisition in relation to Freud's paper on aphasia. The book is useful for psychiatrists, teachers, social workers, and parents.

The Psychotic: Aspects of the Personality presents the results of the author's many years of experience as an analyst working with deeply disturbed or psychotic patients, and demonstrates how the deeply resulting clinical and theoretical formulations may additionally be applied to less disturbed patients. Dealing with the theory and clinical treatment of the psychotic aspects of the personality, includes a review of the literature and a rich array of clinical material to illustrate the author's technical approach. A chapter devoted to the survivors of concentration camps shows how the concept of encapsulated autistic nuclei leads to new diagnostic and technical procedures, while a further paper discusses the psychotic difficulties attending heart-transplant surgery. Further essays illuminate the importance of the accurate detection and the use of the countertransference and the significance of the supervisor's supportive role in severe cases.

This book explores the author's pioneering work with severely disturbed patients, to show what it means to work and think as a psychoanalyst about transference and the internal world of a psychotic patient, with all the difficulties involved in continuing to treat and engage with even severely ill patients. As the author suggests, to be a psychoanalyst is to think about transference, the patient's internal world and projective identifications onto the therapist and onto persons in the external world. In particular, the author examines patients who express their mental state through fantasies about their body image. For example, the fantasy of an emptying of the self is discussed through the case of the patient Pierre, who asserts that he has no more blood or liquids in his body. Similarly, the fantasies of a young man who says that bats are flying out of his cheeks incarnate the anxiety of his first months of life expressed through his body. Indeed, the author's particular focus is on the importance of the first months and years in the life of these patients.

This book is based on various cases whose common factor is how the psychoanalytic setting is created: the internalization and realization inside the patient`s mind: with the feeling of fixed hours and the transferential relation with the psychoanalyst. Referring to the great masters of psychoanalysis, the author guides us step by step through the mysterious terrain of the mind, especially in its most regressive, primitive and psychotic aspects. Thomas Ogden, commenting on the papers collected here, wrote that 'they represent two of the most important contributions of the past decade to the understanding of the psychoanalytic treatment of psychotic patients'. This book is intended to be felt and thought about. The reader is asked to read between the lines, to imagine and feel beyond the words on the page. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and students.

The Psychotic: Aspects of the Personality presents the results of the author's many years of experience as an analyst working with deeply disturbed or psychotic patients, and demonstrates how the deeply resulting clinical and theoretical formulations may additionally be applied to less disturbed patients. Dealing with the theory and clinical treatment of the psychotic aspects of the personality, includes a review of the literature and a rich array of clinical material to illustrate the author's technical approach. A chapter devoted to the survivors of concentration camps shows how the concept of encapsulated autistic nuclei leads to new diagnostic and technical procedures, while a further paper discusses the psychotic difficulties attending heart-transplant surgery. Further essays illuminate the importance of the accurate detection and the use of the countertransference and the significance of the supervisor's supportive role in severe cases.