Meaning in Clinical Analysis: Created or Discovered?

In his introductory remarks, Robert Glick pointed out that the title of the panel, “Meaning in Clinical Analysis: Created or Discovered?” touches on central questions about the nature and goals of psychoanalysis: What is the analyst's job? What knowledge or authority is required to do that job? And to what end? He commented that for most of the history of psychoanalysis these questions would have been viewed as either meaningless or subversive. Freud believed he was discovering what was in the patient's mind and was uncovering the patient's unconscious history and mental contents. For Freud, the possibility of the analyst's creating something in the patient would smack of suggestion and would jeopardize the positivist scientific structure of psychoanalysis. Glick pointed out that in contrast to Freud, Ferenczi believed that psychoanalysis created new meanings. For Ferenczi, it was the meaningfulness of the here and now, of lived analytic experience, that corrected the past. Ferenczi viewed analyst and patient as creating something together that changed the patient and allowed for insight, rather than viewing change as following insight. Glick raised the possibility that the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis may lie in the shared process of negotiating meanings and pursuing meaningfulness.

Glick suggested that the history of clinical psychoanalysis and its theoretical assumptions may be viewed as a series of answers to the questions posed to the panelists. These questions have been asked before. At the 1994 winter meetings in Philadelphia, Warren Poland, Arnold Goldberg, Charles Hanly, and Henry Smith addressed them in a panel titled “Meaning in the Clinical Moment.” Those who remember