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Particularly hard for the therapist to grasp are those instances in which the patient is manifesting an introject traceable to something in the therapist, some aspect of the therapist of which the latter is himself only poorly aware, and the recognition of which, as a part of himself, he finds distinctly unwelcome.

I have found, time and again, that some bit of particularly annoying and intractable behavior on the part of a patient rests, in the final analysis, on this basis ; ;

and only when I can acknowledge this, to myself, as being indeed an aspect of my personality, does it cease to be a prominently troublesome aspect of the patient's behavior.

For example, one hebephrenic man used to annoy me, month after month, by saying, whenever I got up to leave and made my fairly steoreotyped comment that I would be seeing him on the following day, or whenever, `` You're welcome '', in a notably condescending fashion -- as though it were his due for me to thank him for the privilege of spending the hour with him, and he were thus pointing up my failure to utter a humbly grateful, `` thank you '' to him at the end of each session.

Eventually it became clear to me, partly with the aid of another schizophrenic patient who could point out my condescension to me somewhat more directly, that this man, with his condescending, `` You're welcome '', was very accurately personifying an element of obnoxious condescension which had been present in my own demeanor, over these months, on each of these occasions when I had bid him good-bye with the consoling note, each time, that the healing Christ would be stooping to dispense this succor to the poor sufferer again on the morrow.