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After our last Round Table on “Goals of Therapy,” I suggested a panel on tonight's topic because I believe that the great scientific progress which psychoanalysis and psychotherapy have made in the last half century is not accompanied by a corresponding increase of therapeutic effectiveness. I also thought of the fact that some
psychotherapists in the so-called “prescientific” era were highly effective in helping mentally ill patients, a phenomenon we have become accustomed to label somewhat condescendingly as “transference cures.”
Why do we have this gap between scientific progress and therapeutic effectiveness? Psychoanalysis was born when medicine was most deeply affected by that split against which Hippocrates already had warned, the split between soma and psyche, between organs and organism. Paradoxically, the split had widened precisely as a result of the great scientific discoveries of the last century. The patient was in danger of getting lost in a maze of graphs, tables and figures. It was psychoanalysis which began to heal this split.
Today I feel we are again in danger of losing the patient, the suffering human being who expects help from us. I see this danger caused by a second split which at present is threatening mankind as a whole: the split between science and humanism. In our field, psychotherapy, the unique individual personality of the patient all too often now gets caught in the underbrush of conflicting theories and systems.
“In a young science, in a state of development such as psychoanalysis was,” Sandor Ferenczi wrote in 1923, “the analytic practitioner was able to combine the two tasks of healing and research, as Freud himself did in such an exemplary way.” But “the theoretic analyst always runs the danger of looking for arguments to prove the correctness of a new statement while he thinks that he is promoting the process of curing a neurosis. Important proofs for certain theories could be found in this way, but the process of healing the abno