Article
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).
Main ideas
- An adult schizophrenic patient can be analysed by a purely interpretative method, without changing the classical analytic setting.
- Excessive splitting, and the projective identification of parts of the self into objects, underlie the fragmentation of the ego and the experience of depersonalization.
- The paper was the first clinical application of Klein's newly named concept of projective identification.
- The psychotic patient forms a transference in which the analyst is experienced as the bearer of the patient's projected parts, and this transference can be interpreted.
What it shows
Melanie Klein influenced Herbert Rosenfeld
Rosenfeld built his work on psychosis on Klein's account of the paranoid-schizoid position: his first paper (1947) read depersonalization through her newly published notes on schizoid mechanisms, splitting and projective identification, and he went on to extend her theory of envy to narcissism.
Herbert Rosenfeld developed Psychotic transference
Against the view that psychotic patients form no transference, Rosenfeld analysed schizophrenic patients without changing the classical setting and showed that they form an intense transference, in which the analyst is treated as the bearer of the patient's projected parts; he called it the transference psychosis and made its interpretation the core of his technique.
- 1947
Herbert Rosenfeld developed Projective identification
Rosenfeld's 1947 case was the first clinical paper to use Klein's newly named projective identification, and he later sorted its forms by motive: communicative projections the analyst can contain, as against evacuative and controlling ones aimed at denying separateness and dependence.
Psychotic transference derives from Projective identification
In Rosenfeld's account the psychotic transference is carried by projective identification: the patient puts split-off parts of the self into the analyst, who is then experienced as those parts rather than as a separate person.