Written more than fifty years ago and now a classic in the psychoanalysis of psychosis, this book pulls you in from the first page and refuses to let go. It is the moving account of work carried out by a Swiss nurse and psychoanalyst in the early years of her career, among psychotic women in the "agitated ward" of the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Vienna.
Its power lies in the rare combination of correct professional technique and a profoundly human personality marked by extraordinary sensitivity.
The author's insight was that psychoanalytic therapy was possible even with patients so gravely ill and apparently so resistant to any human connection. But this only became true from the moment they experienced love—and at their stage of infantile regression, the one thing they needed most was maternal love. It was the love they had never received, that maternal tenderness of which Dr. Federn, Schwing's supervisor, spoke when he said: "the other person's destiny becomes more important to us than our own, and their needs become an object of intuitive and immediate knowledge."
What stands out in the experience she describes is that the patients felt loved, understood, and protected. Few words were needed. Often a small gesture sufficed—a moment of listening, or simply the silent presence of the therapist. She moved from bed to bed, or rather from cage to cage, as was the practice then, lowering the bars, sitting beside the patients, straightening a sheet, caressing a forehead damp with sweat. Her manner was such that it seemed as if a current passed between her and the women; and then "the agitated grew calm, the catatonic began to move again, the manic wept."
Slowly, a relationship took shape, and those who were broken inside began to perceive their own identity.
What strikes you in this book is the superabundance of love that can live in one person, and the possibility that this—held in balance by constant inner work—can bring genuine good to those who receive it.
The author's insights are now the common knowledge of those who work in this field, and theoretically they have been absorbed into practice. Yet I do not think I am alone in believing that her story must be meditated on again, taken as a model, and lived out in concrete reality by all of us, to ensure justice in that world of "sick care" of which so much is said.
- Natalia Livi, 1992