Discussions

This paper is important because it has grown out of the author's very personal and psychoanalytical experience. It helps us to reevaluate radically some of our assumptions about psychoanalytic therapy, its goals, its methods and its effectiveness.

An enforced detachment caused by a sudden hospitalization deprives me at present of many satisfactions, for example, of being here with you tonight, but it also proved helpful to me. Having temporarily the experience of being a detached person myself, brought me closer to the feelings and problems involved in your paper.

I still like to distinguish “detachment” as referring mainly to the individual's emotional distance from others and the world, and “alienation” as “the remoteness from one's own feelings, wishes, beliefs and energies.”1

There exists among psychoanalysts a kind of professional neurosis which has two main aspects: The first causes them to look primarily for the morbid and the pathological in the person, be it a patient or a candidate-in-training of a psychoanalytic institute. The second causes them to look at the patient, and particularly the detached patient, with some narrow, preconceived notions of libido or libido-withdrawal, archetypes or neurotic claims. The patient, however, is a suffering human being who, due to early lack of genuine love and acceptance, was forced to build up, for emotional survival, a defensive character structure. Behind the protective wall is an extremely sensitive self, which he will not expose to a world he experiences as threatening and hostile. He has withdrawn from others and from the world.

He has not only withdrawn, he is filled with basic distrust. He is convinced, as your patient was, that nobody cares, nobody understands him and that communicating his deep suffering to anybody, including the analyst, is sheer waste. He feels as the poet Moerike expressed it: “World, let me be! Do not entice me with gifts of love, let my heart keep its joy and its pain to itself.”

“Shoulds” r