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Beginning with the very title of her book, What Do Patients Want? Psychoanalytic Perspectives from the Couch (with its reference to Freud's question, “What do women want?”), Christine Hill signals her intent to validate the perspective of the patient and to have us look at psychoanalysis through the eyes of the patient on the couch. Like the feminists who answered Freud's question about women by first challenging the phallocentricity of classical psychoanalysis, Hill challenges the analyst-centered perspective of psychoanalysis and its process and outcome research. After reviewing the relevant research literature, as well as published accounts of personal and training analyses, she proceeds to describe the treatment experiences of eighteen former analysands whom she interviewed for her study. Alongside her very sensitive telling of those experiences, she thoughtfully juxtaposes the theoretical and technical issues raised by their reports, providing analysts a close-up view of themselves and their work.
Hill conducted her qualitative study in Australia, where she interviewed eleven men and seven women, thirteen of whom were psychotherapists relatively familiar with the workings of psychoanalysis. Her method was, in a sense, the method of psychoanalysis itself: listening. Her aim was to determine which factors facilitated or impeded psychoanalysis and which led to success or failure from the patient's point of view. She organized their experiences around themes that emerged again and again in the interviews, much as a psychoanalyst organizes his data around repetitive themes. Hill's training as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist helped her listen in this way, but she does so here with a focus—not on the patient, but on the patient's experience of psychoanalysis.
In her introductory chapter, she reviews a number of concepts central to psychoanalysis (transference, countertransference, interpretation, neutrality) and nicely sets the foundation for her later chapters, especi