Analysis of a Schizophrenic State with Depersonalization

Rosenfeld's first paper, drawn from his first training case at the British Psycho-Analytical Society, reports the analysis of an adult schizophrenic patient suffering from depersonalization, treated by interpretation alone, without changing the analytic setting. It is often described as the first adult psychotic case treated successfully by a purely interpretative psychoanalytic method. Drawing on Melanie Klein's newly published account of schizoid mechanisms, it was the first clinical paper to use her concept of projective identification. Rosenfeld traces the fragmentation of the patient's ego and the feeling of depersonalization to excessive splitting and to the projection of parts of the self into objects, and he describes the patient's psychotic transference to the analyst. The paper was reprinted in Psychotic States (1965) and again in Rosenfeld in Retrospect (2008).