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The two papers that follow—one by Thomas Ogden and Glen Gabbard, the other by Lena Ehrlich—suggest adaptations of psychoanalytic technique to current challenges faced by our profession. Ogden and Gabbard observe that “there is currently intense pressure within contemporary Western culture for rapid, efficient, inexpensive, and painless solutions to … psychological problems” (p. 534). They add that “the contemporary therapeutic culture … places a premium on symptomatic ‘cure,’” and that “analysts are vulnerable to succumbing to… pressures for the achievement of symptomatic improvement” (p. 533).
Ehrlich responds to another set of contemporary pressures, those brought on by the current financial crisis. Today, she writes, “patients are facing real and/or imagined financial adversities that lead them to rationalize or justify their fears about beginning or continuing analysis” (p. 515).
Cassius-like, the authors of both papers counsel that the fault may be “not in our stars, but in ourselves.” If we find that insufficient symptomatic improvement has become a central issue in an analysis, it is wise to reflect on the possible ways this issue may be functioning within ourselves—that is, in the countertransference. And if, citing financial exigencies or worries, a patient insists on changes to the analytic frame (fee, frequency of sessions, termination), our impulse toward ready agreement in the light of the financial crisis ought to evoke our analytic curiosity, especially about our own experience of this analysis—that is, about the countertransference.
Each of these papers identifies a contemporary cultural pressure that may militate against analysis as it is usually practiced—that is, without our primary attention being riveted on the relief of symptoms and with a certain frequency, continuity, and fee. These authors propose we not forget that our emotions are entangled in the treatment along with our patients'. Each paper cautions that our assent to the demands of contem