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In recent years analytic writing, presenting, and clinical discussion almost universally accord attention to the analytic dyad. My reflections here propose two kinds of reservation about this ubiquitous focus. On the one hand, it leads us away from the richness and complexity of the patient's intrapsychic life—her clinical individuality—which psychoanalysis alone among the therapies works to expand. On the other hand, we err in thinking that the dyad is isolated, when in fact it is always situated beyond itself. My subject brings together my identity and personal passions as a psychoanalyst and my origins in sociology and anthropology.
We can trace the history of this global march toward the dyad. First, our understanding of therapeutic action changed. Freud had discovered transference and argued that it was inevitable and indeed a resource: remembering requires repeating, and you cannot destroy someone in effigy (Freud 1912, 1914). Over time, anchored by Strachey (1934), analysts extended Freud to think that unless you were analyzing the transference in the here and now, real change could not happen. Working in the transference became a sine qua non of analytic action and the real work of analysis.
This view noticed the patient's mind alone. In the world of classical ego psychology, in which many American psychoanalysts grew up, clinical theory and the theory of technique taught that the analyst was an objective interpreter of the patient's psyche, through reconstruction, dream interpretation, pointing to conflict, resistances, and defenses, and especially through observing and interpreting the transference, which the patient brought from the there and then to the here and now. Attending to