5 ideas
Kirk Allen was a brilliant physicist on a secret government project who believed he also lived, at will, as a lord on a distant planet in the future. He had filled thousands of pages with maps, histories and technical records of that world. As a boy he found novels whose hero shared his name, and his fantasy grew from them into a full parallel existence that ran alongside a competent professional career.
Lindner tried to dislodge Kirk Allen's fantasy by accepting it as real and working inside it, checking its details and correcting its inconsistencies. He became so absorbed that he began to crave the fantasy himself. Allen then confessed he had stopped believing some time earlier and had kept up the pretense so as not to let Lindner down. The helper's own unmet needs can make him a participant in the pathology he is treating.
In the case of Mac, a committed communist, Lindner treats political zeal as serving private emotional conflicts rather than resting only on its stated reasoning. The lens asks what psychological job a belief is doing for the believer, not only whether its arguments hold.
Each patient's symptom works as a coded attempt to solve a hidden problem. Examples are a woman's eating binges during loneliness, a man's violent blackouts, and a scientist's escape into another world. Treatment consists of decoding what the symptom stands for, so that the need it serves can be met some other way. Suppressing the behavior alone does not do this.
Lindner tells each case as a story in which he is a character, with his guesses, blind spots and emotional reactions left in view. He does not present himself as a detached clinical recorder. This makes therapy look like two people working on each other, and it shows readers the analyst's inference process along with his conclusions.