Quality of Object Relations: The Psychoanalytic Value System

Psychoanalysis is both a motivated psychology and a treatment process based on that psychology. The theory and practice are only partially separable. The theory is based on the practice; without that basis the theory becomes mere speculation. The practice is informed by the theory; without that information the practice becomes wild analysis. At the most abstract metapsychological level of the theory, psychoanalysis is value-free; or, put more precisly, the reality principle is its only value orientation. At the most practical, clinical level, psychoanalysis is a treatment for illness and inevitably has an intrinsic health value system. There is a danger of countertransference distortions, whenever the analyst allows his personal values to intrude into the analytic process, consequently the traditional psychoanalytic position has been that the practice should be as value-neutral as the metapsychology. Because this is impossible, the problem of the role of values in psychoanalysis has remained unresolved.

Freud clearly expressed his disavowal of a psychoanalytic value system. He stated that psychoanalysis has no concern whatever with judgments of value and is quite unable to construct a Weltanschauung of its own: “in must accept the scientific one” (Freud, 1938, p. 158). Freud recognized that the analyst's motives, his value system, could easily distort the study of the patient's motives. Hence his recommendations that the analyst not intrude his own goals or values into the analytic process. For example, he stated (1912) that the analyst should “be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him” (p. 118) and (1919)