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This book offers even more than its engaging title promises. It addresses a central feature of what is therapeutic about psychoanalysis, and how the process may work. Questions about therapeutic action have generated considerable discourse, yet consensus remains elusive. Insight theory is challenged by reference to the power of the analytic object relationship. Interpretation competes as explanation with interactional experience. In a recent contribution, Gabbard and Westen (2003) propose a systematic view that postulates therapeutic actions rather than a singular action.
Laura Heims Tessman, in a work both ambitious and modest, addresses several questions related to therapeutic action. Her ambition is demonstrated by a research model appropriate both to the complexity of psychoanalytic process and to its essential subjectivity. Her modesty is shown by explicit acknowledgment of the limitations of subjectivity, especially of the particular subjects of this study, as well as by her goal of raising illuminating questions rather than trying, prematurely, to test hypotheses.
Tessman studied a specific facet of psychoanalytic action: the internalized effect of analyst on analysand following termination of treatment. Her subject “participants” were themselves analysts, who had of course been analysands. An open-ended interview format focused on participants' structured and free reflections. Tessman's aim, as her title suggests, was to understand how the analyst's own analyst continues to function within the mind of that analyst.
The author's basic assumption is that conscious and unconscious memories of the analyst have important effects in the posttermination life of any former analysand—that is, that the internalized therapeutic