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Offered by the analyst to help free a patient, analytic interpretation instead frequently forecloses and imprisons. This is Patrick Casement's thesis in this new collection of papers, a follow-up to the work published in the U.S. in 1991 as Learning from the Patient. The unwitting authoritarianism of the analyst is Casement's principal target of criticism. His greatest concern is the risk of creating compliant and conforming patients through analysis.
With the exception of Freud, whose authoritarianism in technique Casement clearly documents, the authorities whose authoritarianism is so to be avoided are unnamed. They haunt his concerns, however, in the fashion of ghosts, or those “dead generations” whose history, Marx (1852) wrote, “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (p. 15). Implicitly, Casement's suggestions conjure certain modern Kleinians who tend to make statements of interpretations, in a way that does not appear to express uncertainty or admit the possibility of error. These analysts speak most often in intonations of solid certitude; they appear neither to ask questions in sessions nor to utter speculations in the presence of patients. (Puzzlingly, Casement twice suggests in this new book that analysts who need to speak with certainty may be less objectionable as analysts conducting training analyses than as analysts for patients who are not pursuing analytic training.)
To my mind, the ghosts of the analyst's authority, and of the negative potential of authoritarianism, are bothersome ghosts with which American analysts, too, have been struggling for some time. I believe, in fact, that a number of Americans have made more headway here than has Casement. The influence of Gill, Hoffman, Mitchell, Greenberg,