Visions of the Future: The Analyst's Expectations and their Impact on the Analytic Process

Ever since Freud's (1912) warning of the dangers of therapeutic ambition, psychoanalysts have been reluctant to allow expectations and goals for their patients to enter into the analytic process. Sensitive to charges of unduly influencing patients with subjective and culturally contextualized values, and curing by nonanalytic interventions, psychoanalysts have tended to view expectations and goals as contaminants of an idealized conception of neutrality in which the analyst is modeled after a cool research scientist, observing the workings of the patient's mind and conveying these observations to the patient with the aim of producing insight without regard for results. Some analysts have found this cold surgeon-like view of the analyst's role to be problematic, and have attempted to temper it with constructs like “compassionate neutrality” (Greenson, 1967), “technical neutrality” (Kernberg, 1996), and “benevolent neutrality” (Stone, 1984), all of which are aimed at humanizing the analyst's relation to the patient and introducing a sense of friendliness and concern for the patient's well-being into the analytic attitude.

For all their good intentions, however, these additions to the concept of neutrality do not address the many difficulties and problems that have been raised, particularly as they pertain to the possibility of even relative neutrality as it is understood in classical technique (Renik, 1995, 1996), nor do they satisfactorily resolve the paradox inherent in a process in which the patient's goal for a more satisfying and pleasurable life is only secondary to the analyst's goal of developing insight into the workings of the patient's mind. Of course, analysts assume that these insights will produce results in the patient's life, but the neutral analyst is cautioned against personal involvement in the specifics of change both inside and outside the analytic situation.