Goldberg's “On Understanding Understanding”

In “On understanding Understanding,” Arnold Goldberg (JAPA 62/4) states that psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy are based on different forms of scientific activity, inasmuch as the first restricts itself to interpretation while the last employs both interpretation and other therapeutic activities. Apparently, Goldberg still adheres to the “classical” view that psychoanalysis is, in the words of Merton Gill (1954), “that technique which, employed by a neutral analyst, results in the development of a regressive transference neurosis and the ultimate resolution of this neurosis by techniques of interpretation alone” (p. 775), notwithstanding Gill's own revision of his opinion in 1979, and regardless of neoclassical and postclassical developments in the last four decades. Goldberg's classical views do not do justice to actual psychoanalytic theory and practice. Consequently, in situating the status of psychodynamic psychotherapy, he seems to miss the mark: psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy do present clinically relevant differences, but the difference does not reside in interpretation alone versus interpretation plus “something more” (Stern et al. 1998).