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Editorial.
(1995)
Foreword.
(2003)
Afterword.
(2003)
The psychoanalytic situation provides many opportunities for people to observe their analysts closely. These observations are inevitably woven into the fabric of patients’ transference experience. Because the observations can be uncomfortable for the analyst, there is a constant temptation to ignore or deny the plausibility of patients’ perceptions. They can be, and often are, quickly reinterpreted as derivatives of sexual or aggressive urges. Psychoanalytic drive theory, with its emphasis on impulse rather than observation as the force behind transference experience, can encourage counter-transferential disclaimers and lead to blind spots. Some technical suggestions are offered to avoid this tendency and are based on a relational understanding of the nature of transference.
Models of the psychoanalytic situation can usefully be thought of as fictions. Viewed this way, the models can be understood as narrative structures that shape what we are able to see and how we are able to think about what happens between us and our analysands. Theories of therapeutic action are elements of what can be called a >controlling fiction<, mediating between these theories and our very real responsibilities, both to our preferred method and to a suffering patient. This venture into comparative psychoanalysis is illustrated by a discussion of published case material.