PSYCHOANALYSIS TODAY
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whom the question is "Are they real?" and, therefore, does one as an
analyst have to behave in a real and nonmystified way.
William Phillips:
Dr. Lowenfeld?
H enry Lowenjeld:
I only want to emphasize a few things. There is no
doubt that there is tremendous change in the neurosis. We have
completely different patients, for instance, from the time ... we
came over in 1938, and at that ti me we still had more or less the same
patients as we had before. Over the years, they changed more and
more, although we still have some typical patients as in former
times, but they are rarer. You may think it is much more difficult
to
analyze the current patients who are called narcissistic. I would
call them people who never have solved the Oedipal complex
and therefore they appear more narcissistic than those in whom
the Oedipal complex is resolved, which leads to a real, more or
less normal possibility of touching one's libido to persons ansi to
issues. And the people whom we get very often are not able to do
that.
I think analysis, analytic science, has to try to give a reason why
so many young people take drugs. They never did before. Why do
they do that? I think that they have a certain inability
to
love, and
look for happiness in drugs. And I think that this is a problem that
analysts should think about; but it's a problem that they don't even
come to us because they know that we want the opposite of drugs, we
want something that is reason . And we can see that some patients
who have been on drugs for a long time are very difficult as patients,
in the sense that we have great difficulty in being successful with
them.
We might ask, why the problem of the Oedipal complex is so
difficult? The fact is, it's a complete change in the relationship of the
fath er to the child, and therefore we have an unresolved Oedipal
compl ex. Then in adolescence they cannot really resolve it again as
they used
to
do it.
One can say that there is a real change in our patients, and
to
a
certain extent even in the therapy, because if we get some of these
people, we too have to change. We have almost
to
try
to
establish
something they have never learned, an ego and a superego. Some
develop it by identification with their analysts; you can say these are
changes; we never wanted them to identify too much with the
analyst. Now it's the only thing that helps them. You can see it
particularly in young girls.
If
they have a woman analyst who
deviates a littl e bit from the original way of handling the transfer-
