[Psychoanalysis--a procedure or a process?]

The author discusses two schools of thought on psychoanalysis, one regarding it as a scientific procedure requiring correct application, the other as a process initiated by the patient in an unconscious quest for what he/she is in need of. With reference to a case history, Casement illustrates how the analyst can be drawn by the patient into the experience of not being able to understand what the latter is trying to tell him. In the case in point, this inability to understand corresponds to an experience undergone by the patient in infancy when due to undiagnosed severe myopia he was forced to live in a state of near-blindness. In analysis he attempted via projective identification to give expression to the traumatic experience of not being able to see and understand.