III. the Essentials of Psychotherapy as Viewed by the Psychoanalyst

Adelaide Johnson presented a paper summarizing the opinion of the panel members on the differences involved in dynamic psychotherapy and classical psychoanalysis. She expressed the panel's agreement on a principal put forth by Bernard Bandler that, "dynamic psychotherapy involves a different terrain from classical psychoanalysis, a terrain to be explored and mapped out in its own right, using the wealth of psychoanalytic concepts as a sort of compass to facilitate exploration and evolution of a rational, predictable and communicable conceptual frame of reference for treatment of masses of cases not suitable for classical psychoanalysis. Cases lie along a total spectrum with no sharp divisions in the continuum, the most superficially supported cases at one end and classical psychoanalytic cases in their special setting."

As she correlated the material gathered by the panel members for this paper Johnson noted that there was a strong tendency to focus on the countertransference problem of the analyst doing psychotherapy. "You will see this arising in the paper, over and over, intruding on all thinking about essentials in psychotherapy."

Many cases have been given in which some recent or immediate current life situation disturbed the patient's adjustment, Johnson continued, and treatment was conducted around a fairly well-encapsulated constellation of conflicts, so that with partial resolution of this conflict the patients became stabilized again. Such positive indications need much greater clarification, however, from the standpoint of the dynamics of the cases themselves and from the position of who is doing the treatment. As Chassel says,

We keep assuming that psychotherapy is a watered down procedure or is bound to be pure psychoanalysis alloyed with the baser metals of suggestion, and so on. My present thesis is that really psychodynamic psychotherapy is an approach as