From the Word to the Scene: An Expanded Conceptualization for Therapeutic Action

An answer to what is mutative within the psychoanalytic process has been central to any explanation of therapeutic action since Freud's early injunctions for analysts to bring to the level of consciousness that which has been unconscious, rephrased within the structural model as “Where id was, there ego shall be” (1923). The assumption underlying this understanding of the unconscious emphasized the mutative power of words and meanings. Interpretation became the razor-sharp tool of analytic healing, which Glover (1931) enshrined with his notion of the correctness in formulation and timing of interpretation that a competent analyst must attain.

Kohut's conceptualization of a two-phase process of therapeutic action consisting of understanding and explaining, undermined, in part, the centrality of interpretation by locating it within the context of a therapeutic relationship in which an empathic bond between analyst and analysand was emphasized as necessary for interpretation to be mutative. In the first phase of treatment this therapeutic bond is constructed by analyst and analysand as an “archaic selfobject tie.” This tie is experienced by the analysand as a merger with the analyst that functions to provide continuity, cohesion, and vitality to her sense of self. This tie is constructed as the analyst “simply share(s) with the patient his grasp of what the patient experience(s)” (Kohut, 1984, p. 185). In the second phase a more mature selfobject experience is achieved by “the replacement of a merger experience with the selfobject by the experience of empathic resonance from the side of the selfobject” (Kohut, p. 185). This is accomplished as the analyst offers dynamic and genetic explanations while still continuing to accept the patient's inner world. These interpretations are assumed to increase the “objective” experience of self for the patient and at the same time sustain her self-acceptance.

In recent years a number of analysts outside of as well as within self-psyc