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The psychoanalytic situation is not an assembly line production. Psychoanalysts are not interchangeable parts. In focusing on the initial engagement in an analytic process, Dennis Shelby's presentation beautifully and evocatively illustrates this point of view. I believe that many otherwise highly competent analysts would not have been able to engage this man so quickly and so effectively. In reaching for an explanation, it is tempting to call on some mystical alchemy of intuitive knowing and communicating. But perhaps we can do better than that.
Shelby's therapeutic work, sampled here near the beginning of his analytic career, stands in stark contrast to the prevalent attitude at the beginning of my analytic career a generation earlier. Before I was exposed to Heinz Kohut's work, Leo Stone's landmark monograph, The Psychoanalytic Situation (1961), came as a welcome revelation. It affirmed my own discomfort with what I perceived as the role of the classical analyst. Stone proclaimed that the analyst's arbitrary authoritarianism and devotion to the principle of deprivation were often carried too far. Rather, he said, the analyst should “provide a palpably human context for the transmission of understanding” (p. 108). He also challenged an older colleague's assertion that his patient would have developed the same vivid transference to him if he had been a brass monkey. Stone declared that this was just not true.
Now, 40 years later, having benefited from advances in self psychology, from the transference-countertransference emphasis of the contemporary British school, and from the relational and intersubjective perspectives, I believe that I have almost caught up with the starting point of our young colleagues today. As a supervisor of analytic candidates, I am struck by the progress that has been made in what we teach and what can be didactically learned. I also believe that there are aspects of analytic engagement that cannot be taught. Over and above talent and skill