Chapter 1
Theory of technique and analytic process
When I tell an aspiring analyst who is putting his first analysand on the couch, “Sit down and wait for what the patient tells you,” I have told him something that may be correct – but it might be of no use to him because the relationship of the one person with the other, of the analysand with his analyst, is different in each particular case. It is a very specific, individual, unique relationship determined simultaneously by what is going on within the analysand and what is going on within the analyst.1
There are analysands who act in a relaxed way and freely recount what is going on inside them. Others feel inhibited and develop anxieties that are linked to the expectations analysis prompts in them. Curiously, however, one and the same analysand may, with a specific analyst, speak openly and freely about himself from the very beginning of the analysis while with a different analyst, as the result of inhibitions and anxieties, he has difficulty saying anything at all. In such situations and similar ones, questions arise that everyone answers in his own way. For example, in French psychoanalytic circles for a while the question played a certain role whether a certain analysand ought better to be analyzed by a woman or a man. A young man who feels so inhibited toward women that he wants to go into analysis would, according to one side, be sent to a male analyst as a matter of course, whereas from the vantage of others, a female analyst would be much more suitable precisely because of this inhibition.
It becomes clear here that such points of view are not binding criteria at all. We will never see the end of it if we try to clarify and fix what, in a situation within the analytic process which a specific analyst has entered into with a specific analysand, is to be, may be, or ought to be interpreted or not interpreted, what must be avoided, what is correct, what is orthodox, what is right or wrong, in short, what works.
Because what is going on within the analyst facing an analysand differs from person to person, each and every one will behave in such a situation as befits him. This can be neither predicted nor codified. In other words: the use of the psychoanalytic method cannot be grasped in mere concepts. That is also why it cannot be taught. But there is, nonetheless, a foundation for the use of the psychoanalytic method. It is: the theory of technique.
We can trace over the course of the development of the science of psychoanalysis a tendency to bring out generally valid laws and to reify particular concepts. Starting from clinical experience – the experience, that is, that analysts have gained in applying the psychoanalytic method – two large areas have, in the decades since the emergence of psychoanalysis, been theoretically charted: on the one hand metapsychology and on the other the theory of psychoanalytic technique.2
Metapsychology and theory of technique are two systems for theoretically conceiving and consolidating psychoanalytic knowledge, and they stand in a dialectical relationship with each other. This means that the contradictoriness which is inevitably inherent in every theory about life-processes is here once again reflected, and this time in a more precisely graspable way, in the concepts of the two theoretical systems. On the one hand, the two theories are inseparably connected with, depend on, and supplement each other. On the other hand, they diametrically oppose each other. Metapsychology as it develops tends toward an ever more complete clarification and transparency of human psychic life. It aims for an all-encompassing, cohesive whole. The theory of technique as it develops, in turn, tends more toward locating and conceptually grasping specific positions or vantages in a way that comes as close as possible to how human beings actually relate to and engage with one another. Its concepts are related to each other but only very loosely, since uniformity would destroy the possibility of using them. They can be applied only in the context of specific situations. They are aids to orientation – signposts in the flow of the emotional movement that characterizes the development of transference.
We might compare the analytic process of interpretation with a phenomenon of spherical optics and consider the conditions that apply in the emergence of a virtual image, an image I cannot see and whose distorted projection becomes comprehensible only when I reconstruct it abstractly using physics and mathematics. Metapsychology and a theory of technique trigger in our thinking wholly different ways of cognitively grasping connections, as if these were rays with different refraction angles that nonetheless, taken together, compose an image. Only, this image is a virtual image, in complete analogy with the invisible virtual image in spherical optics. As an analyst, I can abstractly articulate this virtual image of a psychic process for myself if I know the metapsychological theorems and am familiar with the theory of technique. Only then will it be possible for me to reconstruct and rearticulate in a new way the distorted picture that my and my analysand’s consciousness reflect of that which is invisible and unconscious. The derivation of a practicably implementable interpretational step is only ever possible for me after this rearticulation. It is these circumstances that make learning the psychoanalytic method so especially difficult.
The preconditions for being able to apply the psychoanalytic method of course depend on numerous factors. One of the most important of these is the prospective analyst’s own analysis. This personal analysis, however, is certainly not a precondition in the sense that the analyst will then, as a nonneurotic personality, be able to help a neurotically ill person. Such a way of looking at things, which has, after all, been advocated in the past, contains the unspoken idea that only a person relatively free of conflicts would be in a position, in an (as it were) elitist attitude, to help a psychically troubled person, full of conflict, resolve the problems he confronts. This conception has actually been put forward in some phases of the historical psychoanalytic movement, but it was never advocated by the pioneers of psychoanalytic science.
At the time of the great discoveries of psychoanalysis, the initial researchers were violently attacked for their conviction that human psychic life is determined not by consciousness but by the unconscious. Because they were able in the course of time to prevail and psychoanalysis became a science to be taken seriously, psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts achieved great social prestige. This prestige was often illusorily interpreted to mean that those who know the way to the unconscious were above being conflicted in their own psychic life. The expansion of one’s own experiential range obtained in an analytic process was understood as having refined and purified one’s own person. In reality, matters are entirely different. The role the analyst assumes in the society in which he lives forces him to more or less meet the demands society addresses to him. At least he is inclined to take such societal expectations into consideration when he treats an analysand who finds himself in grave conflict and who, from the point of view of the society, is restricted in his ability to work, enjoy, and love. The analyst then easily feels called to lead his analysand, with the help of the analytic process, toward the goal of becoming able to work, enjoy, and love again. In adopting such an attitude, he consciously or unconsciously follows the performance principle that in our society is considered to show the way to success, psychic health, and nonneurotic behavior.
Such a model of thought suffices for positivistic thinking, but it contradicts analytic thinking, which is dialectical.3 A dialectical model of thought includes contradictions within itself and recognizes that the task is not to remove or resolve contradictions in any form in the realm of experiencing or in social relations. All people, psychoanalysts too, are shot through with inclinations toward conflictedness that reactivate each time a relationship really deepens. All people can influence other people. This certainly is not the quintessence of the analyst’s function. The task, rather, is an expansion of the experiential domain both in the analyst and in the analysand, which leads to flexibility and elasticity in assessing one’s own conflictuality. Only with this newly gained flexibility is it then also possible to find rearticulations of the conflictual inclinations that put things into perspective, expand ways of looking at things, and allow for a different understanding of what has previously been fixed. The experience of one’s own analysis is primarily the experience of limits, of how restricted the scope is of what can be changed. Most things are what they are, the way they have always been.
When I take someone into analysis who obviously seems unable to work, enjoy, and love, my goal will not be to in some way make him able to work, enjoy, and love. Rather, in my relationship with him, I will adjust myself in such a way that precisely this conception of what the goal is can be put into perspective and that the largely socially conditioned structuration of experiences he has had with himself and his environment can, through the uncovering of the life-historical background, find a rearticulation that lets the disturbances of which he is conscious appear in a fresh light. Then it might, with time, happen that the analysand is capable of taking a different attitude toward his conflicts. Possibly, thanks to the newly gained flexibility in assessing his conflicts, he will then also be able to confront the contradictions he encounters in the social milieu in which he lives in a different way than before.
The question that poses itself, then, is less how the personal analysis puts the future analyst in a position to perform with his analysands a socially efficacious analytic activity but rather what preconditions must be met for him to become able to initiate, maintain, and shape the analytic process with another person.
Insofar as his own analysis was a real analysis, the future analyst has had an important experience in himself. This experience is in no way one of passing a test, even if in most training institutes everything, it seems, is being done to give candidates that impression. Nor is the experience at issue restricted to greater awareness of what is going on in one’s self and a better understanding of one’s conflictual tendencies. The real experience the personal analysis brings is due to a process that has produced revolutionary, intrapsychic turbulence. Thereby the conflicts in which everyone finds himself and which everyone recognizes or feels in his own life have, in a particular, individually specific way, received a new articulation. I would like to emphasize especially that the rearticulation of conflicts in the course of the analytic process does not consist in the disappearance of these conflicts. Nor does it mean that they can henceforth be effortlessly resolved when they do appear. Rather, the conflicts everyone carries with them in their lives are given a new significance within the interaction with objects and the relations with the environment. If the personal analysis is a training analysis, it creates the precondition for the analyst later to be able to encounter the analysands who come to him – and expect him to initiate an analytic process with them – as partners in a deepening relationship, partners in whom he, as in other personal relationships, experiences the rearticulation of his own conflictual inclinations. The analyst does not just observe the analytic process into which his analysand is drawn but uses it in order to understand his own unconscious reactions.
The second precondition for being able to apply the psychoanalytic method is based not so much on the emotional experience of one’s own analysis but on knowledge. In that respect, the analyst’s profession in no way differs from other professions that are also founded on knowledge and experience in dealing with the instrument of their specific activity. One of the psychoanalyst’s instruments is metapsychology, that is, the theory that contains all those concepts that give us a picture of how the psychic development of the human being is to be understood. Within this metapsychology, we can make out different systems: the theory of the development of the drives, that is, of the development of libido; the theory of the development of the ego and of narcissism; and the theories about aggression. We could add a series of other concepts. What I am after here, however, is the following: for me, the entire scientific system of metapsychology, viewed from the theory of technique, is always justified only insofar as, on the one hand, it comes from the clinical experience we gain in working with analysands and, on the other, it serves to articulate the laws of the theory of technique and thereby to develop the foundations for the practical application of psychoanalysis.
After all, it was through experiences that psychoanalysts were forced to learn that there is no easier path, or that we as yet do not know any easier path, to develop the theoretical formulations that belong to psychoanalytic technique. In that endeavor I, at least, have to rely on metapsychology. I could also say, inversely, that for me, metapsychological concepts prove to be untenable or improbable whenever I see that they cannot be reconciled with concepts of technique. New technical aspects or guidelines are always based on untenable theoretical suppositions wherever the interpretive technique derived from them proves to be insufficient or wrong. The literature contains many examples. Indeed, we could say that such false suppositions pervade the psychoanalytic literature. That is one important source of the difficulty in orienting themselves that students and analysts experience as they try to find their way through the psychoanalytic literature.
Concepts like that can only be recognized as misleading when adverse experiences are repeated with different analysts. I’d like to mention as an example the notion, quite generally promoted in the 1920s, of activating aggressions in obsessional neurotics. People thought that outbursts of aggression during the analytic session could effect a kind of catharsis. There were analysts back then who believed that it would help a patient who was displaying coprophiliac tendencies to gain insight into his unconscious impulses if they asked him to sit in a bathtub and play with his feces. Those analysts who prided themselves on flower vases and other objects frequently flying through the room because their analysands developed such violent outbursts of rage belong to this group as well. This misunderstood concept of aggressive impulses has a certain meaning in the theory of libido. For, undoubtedly, as people develop, instinctual impulses fall prey to repression because aggressive impulses could find no expressions in the social relations of the child with its parents and its wider surroundings; fury, hatred, and intolerance of frustrations had to be repressed. Here is a likely situation for the formation of symptoms. Every time a patient ought to, for example, feel anger, he might instead scratch himself behind the ear or feel an itch. In that case, we may very well say that lying behind these symptoms are the repressed aggressions that now express themselves in a kind of conversion. In most cases, however, we are dealing with substitute activities, in other words with reaction-formations such as, for example, constantly re-counting money or compulsive washing. As long as metapsychology was still entirely built on the theory of libido it was in a way understandable and obvious to suppose that all that mattered was to give the analysand in the analytic relationship the freedom of expressing what was going on in him. Accordingly, in this view, if the analysand suddenly has the courage to insult the analyst with swear-words as he once would have wanted to scream at his father, then conditions are met that make the analytic process progress. These conditions, of course, are met only if, in the development of transference, relationships have indeed evolved in which the analysand repeats attitudes and emotions that once existed toward his father. That is why, first and above all, it is decisive to consider more closely the p...
