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How the analyst thinks about technical decisions in the moment-to-moment of the clinical situation is his (or her) way of implementing his theoretical understanding and is the most telling manifestation of his
integration of that understanding. Ultimately, technique can be both an indispensible tool and an insurmountable constraint in the testing of theory against the data of the real world. Yet, as Fred Busch notes in his introduction to Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind, the development of analytic technique has often lagged behind the development of the theory that should drive it; there is consequently often a disconnect between the technical precepts that analysts learn and adhere to in clinical work and their evolving understanding of analytic theory. Busch, I think, embarks on his work with an important understanding, one with which I wholeheartedly agree: in an age of theoretical pluralism in psychoanalysis, the careful rethinking of technique brings theory closer to clinical experience and provides a testing ground for theory; this rethinking of technique is our best crucible for the work of integrating the various psychoanalytic theories we are faced with, together with the many realms of psychic experience those theories address. Ultimately, each analyst must make his own personal integration, as Busch inevitably does. To take the matter further, though, I believe that the ensuing dialogue among analysts, rather than any one person's integration, is where the greatest progress can be made toward integration in our field, and where individual learning can be expanded.
Busch's rethinking of technique is based on an assumption that the development in the patient of a “psychoanalytic mind” is a key element of the “curative process” (which I might more cautiously term the “therapeutic action”) of psychoanalysis. Though Busch does not abandon the idea of making the unconscious conscious, he believes that a patient learning a method of knowing his own mind is as