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The journal Modern Psychoanalysis published a special issue (2005) on selected papers of Leslie Rosenthal. Leslie Rosenthal is a distinguished group therapist and teacher of modern psychoanalysis. Modern psychoanalysis is one of a number of schools of psychoanalysis that has modified classical Freudian theory and technique to work with preoedipal and previously unanalyzable patients. Collectively, these schools have transformed psychoanalysis and significantly influenced me as an analyst and as group analyst.
When I was a young graduate student in the early 1970s, I worked at a community mental health clinic. I was assigned a teenager who had refused to attend school. The only information I was given was that her mother had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and that this girl, who had been attending school regularly, had now been absent for the past three months.
The withdrawal was not just from school-the girl did not talk. No matter what attempts I made, I failed to engage her. During one of the sessions, I had the terrifying thought that I was going crazy. This driving thought would not leave my mind, generating more and more anxiety with each repetition. Suddenly, a new idea came to me; this could be the patient's thought. This was a surprising notion, but it gave me relief and some confidence. I said to her, "You are afraid of going crazy!" She had an instant response. She began to cry and said. "My mother talks to light bulbs and I am afraid of being like her." So we began to talk.
I date my interest in primitive emotional communication to that experience. I wanted to understand how I was able to have the patient's experience and how I was affecting her. At that time, my graduate school education was dominated by ego psychoanalytic theory. There were brilliant contributions made by these theorists/clinicians, but I found them insufficient in helping me to understand and work with the kinds of patients I was encountering at the community mental health clinic. Countertransference was still largely held in suspicion, viewed as an outgrowth of the analyst's pathology, and interpretation was the primary, if not the exclusive, technique to be used. Emotional communications, like projective identification of which I had an intuitive sense with this...