Reply to Karen J. Maroda

October 9, 1988

In her interesting letter, Dr. Maroda makes a number of statements which call for comment. First: "Most people are much better at talking about psychoanalysis than they are about doing it. Everyone knows this" (my italics). I assume "most people" applies to psychoanalytic practitioners. Is it true? And does "everyone" know it? I, for one, do not. I have listened to clinical reports for many years, as a supervisor of candidates in training and as a participant with colleagues in group discussions at CAPS (Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies) and at Aspen, and I find it difficult to support such a blanket statement.

Then: "… the average practitioner is often unsure of what a good intervention is. To some extent we are all winging it." It is difficult to be sure of what the "average practitioner" is sure of. And the term "winging it" presents a misleading idea of what we do most of the time. It gives the impression of loose guesswork, which is something we try at all costs to avoid. It is true that we work in a field of ambiguities and limited certainties. Our interventions often consist of tentative hypotheses, to be confirmed or disputed by subsequent events. We are, at our best, investigators, rather than prescribers, and we accept the inevitability of a number of false starts, for the sake of achieving a productive one. "Winging it" is hardly an adequate description of what we do most of the time.

Dr. Maroda makes much of the discouraging impact of the fear of being criticized for deviations from "classical analysis," being accused of not doing "real analysis" or of doing "wild analysis." While such criticisms are made, I have not heard them very often in the recent past. She glosses over the fact that some work is presented as psychoanalytic, which departs from the most fundamental principles of the field, e.g., interpretations based on little or no evidence, exhortation, warning, literal acceptance of surface phenomena witho