Introduction: The Loewaldian Legacy

Probably every American analyst has read, in training and many times since, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis” (Loewald 1960). This groundbreaking paper, certainly one of the most important papers of the second half of the twentieth century, is part of the oeuvre of an analyst who contributed original writings on almost every topic of psychoanalytic theory, metapsychology, and epistemology, on the clinical relationship, on therapeutic action and its failures, and on development. In this paper Loewald gives us the evocative image of analysis as the project of turning ghosts into ancestors. He holds onto a radically challenging vision of transference, in which transference is “pathological insofar as the unconscious is a crowd of ghosts” (p. 249) but in which reality is pathological insofar as it doesn't include transference. As Loewald puts it: “Without such transference—of the intensity of the unconscious, of the infantile ways of experiencing life that have no language and little organization, but the indestructibility and power of the origins of life—to the preconscious and to present-day life and contemporary objects, human life becomes sterile and an empty shell…. our present, current experiences have intensity and depth to the extent to which they are in communication (interplay) with the unconscious, infantile, experiences representing the indestructible matrix of all subsequent experiences” (pp. 250-251).

The paper argues for the interactional basis of analytic investigation and the analytic relationship—for the analyst as new object and as “co-actor on the analytic stage.” It deals with “the central problem of the relationship between the development of psychic structures and interaction with other structures … the connection between ego formation and object relations” (p. 221). The analyst, then, is not simply a “reflecting mirror characterized by scrupulous neutrality” (p. 223); indeed, seeing the analyst as a neutral mirror would be, Loewald imp