You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
THE PROGRESS OF THE DISCIPLINE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS is expressed perhaps most obviously in its theory of transference and the therapeutic effects of the interpretation of transference. The theory of transference rests on assumptions concerning repetition and regression or the influence of the past on the present; the roles of activity, passivity, and defensive measures; and the content of unconscious fantasy and conflict. The theory of the therapeutic effects of interpretation rests on these same assumptions and on others concerning the nature of insight, the role of the therapeutic relationship, the accessibility of unconscious fantasy and conflict to conscious influence, and the balance in the psychoanalytic process between, on the one hand, reliving and re-experiencing of the past and, on the other, new experience.
Clearly, the topic is vast, and one cannot hope to do justice in any single discussion to all the valuable contributions to the extensive literature on it; nor can one cover all that is widely understood and accepted in ordinary good practice. In this paper I shall limit myself to re-examining some of the assumptions I just mentioned, doing so from the standpoint of the revised mode of psychoanalytic conceptualization I call action language. Insofar as I have presented the premises and rules of this "new language for psychoanalysis" elsewhere at some length (Schafer, 1976), I shall not dwell on them here.