You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Norman Kelman described the analyst as “the proprietor of a time and
space called the analytic hour” within which particular events take place. Beyond talking and listening, such hours incorporate the opportunity for two people “to be together in a dimension which transcends the historical and relational. … It also includes another dimension, a kind of place in which the analyst knows something that the patient comes to know.” He emphasized the importance, for both parties, of the analyst's awareness of his own personal unimportance in the analytic work, as well as the significance of his role in facilitation.
According to Kelman, the analyst “must not only offer his voice but also his interest…. which must have the nature of a passionate disinterest…. a disinterested kindness,” keeping always in mind the nurturing aspects of psychoanalysis. He views interpretation not as a science but as a hermeneutic process, and stresses that the analyst should not perceive himself as dealing with problems or enigmas but with pain and suffering, and that “we must have within us nurturing, healing” characteristics, without which analysis becomes an intellectual pursuit limited by the nature of the paradigm employed.
The discussant, Saul Tuttman, initially expressed concern “about people who politicize psychoanalytic theory without any idea of its [historical] progression.” He went on to praise Kelman's acceptance of uncertainty, a trait he felt to be a prerequisite for being a competent analyst.
For Tuttman, the psychoanalyst must “be ‘good enough’ … in the sense of being able to tolerate the patient's symptoms, machinations, and demands, to provide a holding environment.” In this context he emphasized the need for analysts to have their own pathology, which has been, to some extent, resolved, asserting that without such, the analyst may “lack the empathic recognition of what the patient is experiencing.” He ended by underlining the need for greater understanding of the evolution o