Panel Reports—Criteria for Analyzability1

In her introductory remarks, Elizabeth Zetzel suggested that discussion of the Criteria for Analyzability could be facilitated by differentiating between the analytic situation and the analytic process. The analytic situation might be defined as the setting in which patient and analyst share mutual identification with a common therapeutic goal. The analytic process concerns intrapsychic changes, in the patient, which are mobilized, worked through, and resolved in a successful analysis. For purposes of illustration Zetzel selected Freud's Dora, the Rat Man, and the Wolf Man, who all showed particular problems with respect to the analytic situation and the analytic process. The case of the Wolf Man, in addition, draws attention to a fact too often forgotten. "Psycho-analytic therapy, " Freud said in 1904, "was created through and for the treatment of patients permanently unfitted for life and its greatest triumph has been that a satisfactory number of these have been rendered permanently fit for existence." However, as Freud indicated in "Analysis Terminable and Interminable, " some unanalyzed residue remains following the most successful analysis—underlining the difference between the theoretically ideal and the clinically justifiable.

These patients illustrate very dissimilar responses to the analytic situation: premature flight into health or symptomatic acting out (Dora); interminable analysis (Wolf Man), and lastly intense anxiety making adherence to the formal requirements of the analytic situation impossible at that time (Rat Man). It was the Rat Man who met, to the highest degree, the criteria integral to the analytic situation: a motivation for more than symptomatic relief; a capacity to tolerate anxiety and frustration; the ability to maintain a stable relationship and to sustain secondary-process thinking—all of which enabled him to remain in the analytic situation despite the anxieties engendered by a highly ambivalent transference neurosis.