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What is Meant by the term “basic change”? It is difficult to know precisely. “Change” is clear enough in its meaning with reference to what may happen to the personality as a result of psychoanalytic therapy. “Basic” adds to this a quantitative concept and refers to how much or what degree of change. It might be fairly easy to determine whether personality change has occurred in any given case in which psychoanalytic therapy has been terminated, but it might not be easy to reach agreement upon the quantitative aspect of this. Since it would be difficult to reach a consensus on what is meant by “basic change,” perhaps it would be more profitable to avoid the attempt to define the term “basic” and instead devote our efforts toward determining what in psychoanalytic therapy leads to “change.”
In May of 1960, 1 read a paper on this topic before the Academy of Psychoanalysis. The broad conclusion of that paper (subsequently published in Volume IV of Science and Psycho analysisa)1 was that personality change occurs in psychoanalytic therapy as a result of two factors: 1) the production of insight; 2) the life experience which evolves from the impact of the personality of the patient with that of the therapist.
The production of insight may best be understood with reference to the concept of what neurotic illness is and how it occurs. In the paper referred to, the view presented of the genesis and nature of neurotic illness was that constitutional factors (i.e., heredity), may well play a role in this, but our knowledge of these at present is so sparse and nebulous that we are constrained to concentrate our thinking upon environmental factors and their effects upon the development of personality.
Traumatic experiences of the child-mainly prior to the ages of 5, 6, or 7— are apt to lead to speculation by the child as to why they have occurred. Such speculative conclusions, while at first conscious and held merely tentatively, may as time goes on become unconscious for a variet