Nonverbal Communication in Analytic Work

Henry Friedman opened the panel by noting that Freud, in outlining the essential content and form of psychoanalysis, thought that to be a psychoanalyst it was necessary to believe in the unconscious and its accessibility via interpretation of the transference. This formulation gave little quarter to countertransference except as it might affect the analyst's ability to remain neutral. Thus, technically, free association by the patient and abstinence and neutrality from the analyst were strictly required: it was this listening stance that allowed one to call oneself a psychoanalyst. However, this normative characterization did not prevent analysts from developing psychoanalysis in a variety of divergent directions.

In particular, Friedman summarized two major post-Freudian developments after 1948: the emergence of ego psychology, particular to the United States, and the adoption of the theories of Melanie Klein by a significant portion of psychoanalysts in Europe and Latin America. According to Friedman, ego psychology emphasized the ego's capacity to deal with conflict and the depression and anxiety that accompany it. In this way, psychoanalysts, having gained access to the patient's unconscious conflicts, could interpret them to the patient if and when the patient's ego was deemed capable of dealing with the interpretation.

Klein challenged Freud's limiting the patient's history to the period of retrievable memory, which begins once language and symbolization make possible the representation of experience and objects. Klein's theoretical position was based on her belief that the analyst can through intuition know the mental life of an infant. This claim expanded the scope of exploration to the very early period of the patient's life, a time both preverbal and presymbolic, and indeed privileged this period as a model for mental life from infancy on. In practical terms, according to Friedman,