Challenges that Probe our Premises

No one will blame an analyst for feeling harassed by today's onslaught of controversies and theories. The profession has never been so multifariously unsettled. An unhappy state of affairs? On the contrary. These challenges are dragging every hidden assumption into the light, every taken-for-granted term, every unworked-out reference. Jostled by argument, routinely abbreviated formulas disgorge their full meaning, old promissory notes are discovered. We must spell out what we meant, recognize past choices, and judge new options. I think it's fair to say that contemporary psychoanalysis has unprecedented opportunities both to improve what needs improving and to understand better those aspects that endure.

Taking advantage of the opportunity, and hoping to use new ideas as a probe, JAPA will occasionally select a contribution that provokes special scrutiny of fundamental issues, and ask a few commentators not so much for a critique as for their own reflections on those issues.

What follows is a paper that may lead readers to think again about psychic causality and the determinateness of unconscious conflicts, or question their confidence that they control their spoken meanings, or weigh whether it is possible to bring psychodynamics and neurophysiology into harmony (the mind-body problem, again), or come to a new understanding of the “working alliance,” or reexamine the role of nonverbal treatment effects in the light of infant observation. Questions like these may come alive for the reader.

As for me, I start the paper marveling at how psychoanalysis capitalizes on the extraordinary creative power of ordinary speech. But then I find myself noting how the psychoanalytic situation complicates that ordinary phenomenon. And I finish by wondering exactly how that extra, analytic wrinkle manages to turn the everyday miracle of ordinary communication into something specifically therapeutic. With that question I sense that I have left the domain of the target paper, but not wit