need to be acknowledged to move on. In the defense hierarchy Vaillant divided defense mechanisms into a hierarchy of defenses ranging from immature through neurotic to healthy defenses, and placed intellectualization – imagining an act of violence without feeling the accompanying emotions, for example – in the mid-range, neurotic defenses. Like rationalisation, intellectualization can thus provide a bridge between immature and mature mechanisms both in the process of growing up and in adult life. Winnicott, however, considered that erratic childhood care could lead to over-dependence on intellectuality as a substitute for mothering; and saw over-preoccupation with knowledge as an emotional impoverishment aimed at self-mothering via the mind. Julia Kristeva similarly described a process whereby "symbolicity itself is cathected...Since it is not sex-oriented, it denies the question of sexual difference". One answer to such over-intellectualization may be the sense of humour, what Richard Hofstadter called the necessary quality of playfulness – Freud himself saying that "Humour can be regarded as the highest of these defensive processes"! During therapy Among the intellectual defenses against analysis are a refusal to accept the logic of emotions, attempts to refute the theory of psychoanalysis, or speculating about one's own problems rather than experiencing them and attempting to change. Such intellectualizations of therapy may form part of wider manic defenses against emotional reality. A further difficulty may be that of assimilating new and unfamiliar feelings once the defense of intellectualization begins to crack open. Alternatively the therapist may unwittingly deflect the patient away from feeling to mere talking of feelings, producing not emotional but merely intellectual insight<ref>Patrick Casement, On Learning from the Patient' (London 1990) p. 178-9</ref> an obsessional attempt to control through thinking the lost feelings parts of the self. As Jung put it, "the intellectual still suffers from a neurosis if feeling is undeveloped". Psychoanalytic controversy Freud's theory of psychoanalysis may be a formidable intellectual construct, but it has certainly been criticised for revealing intellectual grandiosity. Jacques Lacan however would defend it on the very ground of its intellectuality, arguing that you could "recognize bad psychoanalysts...by the word they use to deprecate all technical or theoretical research...intellectualization''". Lacan himself was of course exposed to exactly the same criticism: "My own conception of the dynamics of the unconscious has been called an intellectualization – on the grounds that I based the function of the signifier in the forefront". Freud himself accepted that he had a