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Analysts learn about the value of boundaries and ethics in psychoanalysis through hard-won experience. Blunders, oversights, and lapses may test boundaries and generate ethical concerns. At the same time, they can also be opportunities for growth when the clinician recognizes what has happened and integrates the new knowledge into his or her professional identity. This evening's scientific meeting, presented as a roundtable discussion, illuminated some of the many difficulties, challenges, and eventualities about “mistakes” that invariably plague the work of analysis.
Joyce Lerner, the evening's chairperson, introduced her own theoretical perspective before turning the floor over to the presiding panelists. Asserting the inherent problems in labeling something as a “mistake,” Lerner cited McLaughlin's concepts of “dumb spots,” “hard spots,” and “blind spots” to emphasize how the inevitable limitations of the analyst's awareness, along with the analyst's theoretical biases and intrapsychic conflicts, have the potential to create problems of differing magnitudes in treatment.
Giselle Galdi's presentation illustrated how a countertransference enactment can create an emotional climate that interferes with the patient's capacity to explore and reflect. Galdi indicated how it is a common error to assume the therapeutic alliance can withstand misunderstandings between analyst and patient. She demonstrated the dangers of what Ferenczi called “confusion of tongues”—when the analyst virtually ignores the patient's experiences and, in turn, projects his/her own experience into the patient. Galdi's clinical material emphasized the necessity of analyzing and acknowledging the analyst's contributions to the therapeutic rupture.
Robin Goldberg directed the audience's attention to the importance of the analytic frame, most specifically to the notions of abstinence and neutrality. While emphasizing the impossibility that either quality can be absolute, Goldberg stressed how treatment c