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It is a great pleasure and privilege to chair a panel composed of such distinguished members of the American Psychoanalytic Association—a panel, moreover, on a subject of such fascinating interest and importance as the one we shall discuss today.
The psychoanalytic process reflects the pre-existing neurotic process, inasmuch as it forms a continuation of it and achieves in favorable cases to modify its outcome. Everything that happens to the patient in analysis is under the simultaneous sway of two apparently opposite forces. One moves him to communicate the data relevant to his neurosis, while the other compels him to resist such communication. Both are constantly operative, but mixed in varying proportions. It is only in some extreme, exceptional moments that one or the other force alone seems to be at work. Indeed, even when the patient's resistance appears maximized, when he refuses to communicate or even is ready to interrupt his treatment, the very motives of his resistance reveal the nature of his neurotic conflict and thus must be understood as a communication—by repetition—of the warded-off conflict. And even in moments when the resistance seems at a minimum, when insight is being gained during what Kris (2) called "the good psychoanalytic hour, " this insight actually integrates the interplay between drives and defenses. Indeed, without resistance the psychoanalytic process is not possible.
While the analytic process thus consists in an interaction between