Introduction To Panels: Does The Face Of Analytic Treatment Show Its Character?

By the middle of our century, psychoanalytic treatment had a public image. It was well known in caricature: each weekday the patient reclines on a couch and talks; the analyst interprets occasionally and dispassionately. Although cartoonists sometimes got a few details wrong (why was the analyst so often seated infront of the patient?), and although analysts varied in their conformity to the pattern, the public image marvelously fit both the protocol and the rationale by which orthodoxy was measured.

Within this socially anointed framework, the analyst's own attention was absorbed by intensely individual meanings. He could scarcely be blamed for taking the standard, gross format for granted: it was his natural element. Asked to explain the visible arrangement, he might brusquely have replied that daily sessions foster “regression,” that an emphasis on speech stops “acting out,” that the analyst's dispassionateness enables him to be “objective,” and that his sparse communication avoids “transference cures.” He would not get away with such brevity today.

This is not to say that there was ever a time when detailed thinking about the framework was absent. But today the carriers of the analytic tradition are scrutinizing its trademarks more critically than ever before. Interestingly, when the familiar features are magnified in debate, we find them packed with a world of subtle psychological forces, knowledge conditions, technical strategies, and treatment rationales that might otherwise be overlooked. The following five panel reports from meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association afford a glimpse of the subtle realm that dwells in the analytic setup.

Consider, for instance, the frequency of sessions. Despite a spread of opinion, our discussants (who generally agree that more is better)