The work of transformation. Changes in technique since Anna Freud's Normality and pathology in childhood

Psychoanalysis aims to restore the artist in the patient, the part of the person that makes interest despite, or whatever, the early environment. At its most extreme, for the artist her own life, it is not so much a question of what she has been given (no one chooses their parents, but everyone invents them, makes what they can of them). The psychoanalytic model here is the dream, or the child's infantile sexual theory, in which so-called reality functions more like a hint than an instruction, setting the dreamer and child off on the work of transformation (Phillips, 1998, pp. 4-4).