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(2009). Freud’s Technique: More from Experience than Theory. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly: Vol. 78, No. 3, pp. 913-924.

The analyst depicted in Freud's Papers on Technique (1911-1915) struggles to split the patient's stubborn desire by reframing it as memory. In contrast, after the structural theory was adopted, analysts could picture themselves as liberating rather than struggling with patients, since their design was to show that the patient's fears are unrealistic. But North American analysts have come to doubt their ability to rule on what is and isn't realistic. They thus find themselves again struggling with stubborn desires, not just easing fears. Their solution has been to emphasize--and thus detach from--enactments. These analysts would seem to be even more in need of the old ideals of procedure than were "classical" analysts, who thought they could use "reality" as a standard.

(2007). Who Needs Theory of Therapeutic Action? The Psychoanalytic Quarterly: Vol. 76, No. sup1, pp. 1635-1662.

One might say that the analyst counts on the patient's unconscious work, while conscious work is, to some extent, just one more thing to be deconstructed (analyzed). Analyst and patient, however, cannot avoid thinking that they are working on a common project, partly because the image of a mutual work distracts from the painfully uncertain illusion that the analyst is really offering a lasting, familial sort of bond, and partly because the sense of being involved in a joint project actually fosters the specific unconscious psychoanalytic work, provided that it is delicately balanced against the necessary illusion of the relationship. If, however, we choose to tilt the balance one way or the other, we must be prepared to make some sacrifices.

Although we are now less inclined to argue about whose treatment is entitled to be called psychoanalysis, we will understand current debates better if we revisualize what originally made psychoanalysis different from other treatments. At its birth, psychoanalysis twisted the common-sense treatments it grew out of into very peculiar shapes. In reaction to that extreme peculiarity, a process of normalizing began almost immediately and continues to this day. This process is illustrated by tracing the rise and fall of peculiarities in four aspects: medical procedure, the analyst's vision, the analyst's role, and the sense of time.

One way to evaluate a psychoanalytic theory is to picture a therapist with that theory in his mind and imagine what happens when we fold him into the basic soup of psychoanalytic procedure. Because the background forces of analytic treatment are so influential, the practical outcome cannot be predicted from the details or the validity of the theory alone. Thus, we should not assume that newly discovered items of neurophysiology and infant observation are ever what is actually being dealt with in psychoanalysis. To illustrate this principle, I select two recent theories derived from observational studies, and explore the likely effects that a therapist's belief in them would have on seven dimensions of the psychoanalytic situation. Theories set the therapist's attitude, the attitude affects the background forces, and the total effect of all of that constitutes the significance of the theories for psychoanalytic treatment.

Contemporary hermeneutics tries to integrate our unique, local sense of things with overarching nature, often by celebrating the concrete phenomenology of the moment at the expense of scientific abstractions. But abstractions are unavoidable. Hermeneuticists point out that we are constantly making new abstractions. But the more optional and variable views, which we call subjective, depend on the old, reliable abstractions, such as time, space, substance, and causality, that constitute our fixed reality. Hermeneutics usefully challenges psychoanalysis to justify its way of slicing up the mind and treatment process.

What Richard Sterba described in his influential paper was not, as some have thought, a lasting alliance between patient and analyst but a momentary dissociative state, accompanying the analysis of transference resistance, in which the patient detaches himself from his strivings and views himself objectively before lapsing back into normal coherence. We also find in the paper a hinted answer to the vexing question of what motivates patients to engage in characteristically psychoanalytic self-scrutiny. Sterba implicitly proposes a problem-solving incentive activated by transference. A comparison with Strachey leads us to ask whether patients progress only by disinhibition of particular strivings through particular resolutions of particular fears, or whether patients also experience a more general liberation that fosters their own, deliberate search for integration.

Freud considered understanding, attachment, and integration to be important factors in achieving treatment benefits. Subsequent discussions have not always embraced all three factors. It has been especially difficult to conceptualize the part played by the personal attachment of the patient to the analyst. A new, narrower focus on common, structure-building processes promises to show how all three factors are involved with each other in the treatment process.

Hartmann's monograph is an argument for the problem-solving value of all aspects of the mind and for the subordination of intelligence to the organism's larger, primarily social purposes. Hartmann proposed that, in psychoanalytic treatment, intelligent reflection serves one's largest purposes by taking respectful account of non-rational but adaptive ways of appraising reality, with a view toward making the best use of non-rational as well as rational propensities. He regarded it as the kind of thinking that the sociologist, Karl Mannheim, had recommended to government planners faced with immensely complicated, incompletely masterable forces. Hartmann's view of the role of the intellect in analytic treatment suggests that therapists should maintain both their demand for intelligent reflection and their hopefulness about other kinds of work that may be going on sub rosa.

An analyst often needs to feel that the integration he anticipates and provokes was already observed, fully present, in the patient. He can feel that way by cultivating an empathic sense that the patient's aspects and movements are inevitable and not chosen. A full theory of the mind, however, describes other possibilities. For that reason, it is sometimes useful to work with incomplete theories that omit descriptions of potentiality. These holistic revisions of psychoanalysis increase the variety of passively perceived treatment-relevant configurations and lessen the analyst's descriptive authority.

A major concern of nineteenth century scientists was to delineate the objective units or entities with which science deals. While some philosophers of science abandoned the search as futile and tried to redefine science, investigators in the biological sciences and the sciences of man attempted to discover new entities upon which to base their disciplines. A new understanding of hypnotism gave Freud the opportunity to isolate objective entities within the mind and to found a psychology on that basis.

(1980). The Barren Prospect of a Representational World. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly: Vol. 49, No. 2, pp. 215-233.

Roy Schafer and Merton Gill evoke two historically distinguished images of psychoanalytic treatment, one showing analysis elaborating life histories, and the other picturing the analyst as stirring transference embers into flame. A close examination of their implied theories of therapeutic action suggests that they mainly differ on whether allusions to the analyst are often localized in certain gestures or are always uniformly distributed throughout the patient's presentation. Because of this theoretical difference, these authors use different means to invite new experience, and they weigh differently the advantage of having a firm guide to turning-points in behavior against the advantage of maintaining an unconfinable curiosity.