The Analyst's Words and Wording: Do They Still Matter?

In opening this clinical and theoretical panel, organized to explore not just if words and wording still matter to psychoanalysts but also how they matter, Joseph Lichtenberg reminded panel and audience that many analysts today no longer consider language-based communication leading to interpretation and insight to be the principal agent of therapeutic change. We are working in an era in which the pendulum in analytic theorizing on therapeutic action has swung from a focus on verbalization to a focus on implicit, often ineffable, nonverbal processes like relational interconnectedness, the container function, moments of meeting, disciplined spontaneous engagements, empathic immersion, the resolution of enactments and dissociation, the repair of ruptures, and the role of “the third” as variously theorized. Perhaps, Lichtenberg thought, not enough is being said these days about how the words and wording that we choose in speaking to our patients contribute to the therapeutic action of analytic process.

Lichtenberg articulated the vast terrain encompassed by his question “Do the analyst's words and wording still matter?” by posing a series of rhetorical questions designed to explore where we are as a field today. Are some word choices better than others? Are analysts' words theory-based? Do analysts know this is so? How much importance does an analyst or his or her theory place on the mutative effects of spontaneity and affective engagement as against carefully reasoned explanations? How much of word and phrasing choice is determined by individual, culturally influenced communication style regardless of an analyst's theory and training? Are an analyst's words and wording choices co-created bidirectionally (sometimes or all the time) in each dyad and each moment? Is it possible to know if one verbal approach, for example