The Decline and Fall of Neutrality in Psychoanalytic Discourse

It has been over eighty-five years since Anna Freud published her widelyregarded definition of neutrality (1936), which at the time was a cornerstone of psychoanalytic technique. She conceived of it as a position in which the analyst remained equidistant from the psychic agencies id (desires and wishes), ego (the demands of reality), and superego (the demands of society's morality) and from external reality factors. When I was a candidate learning to speak the jargon of fully trained analysts in the past century, I read this definition and thought to myself, “How am I going to keep track of all these competing forces?” As I went on in my training, I began to recognize that the constructs of id, ego, and superego are not that easily identified. They are simply metaphors for aspects of our internal world that may or may not be reliably present.

The concept of superego, for example, can be difficult to pin down. Jacob Arlow (1982) once critiqued the superego, with tongue firmly in cheek, as follows: “The superego is by no means a uniform, coherent, integrated harmonious structure. It is a mass of contradictions, fraught with internal inconsistency, or, as we say in our technical language, intrasystemic conflicts. Its functioning is neither uniform nor reliable. It is in this respect that the idea that the superego represents the policeman of the

psyche holds up best. Like the policeman in real life, the superego is hardly ever around when needed most” (p. 234).

Analysts today must accept that the id, the ego, and the superego, as well as neutrality itself, are hard to pin down. They are constructs likely to become elusive in the midst of an intense analytic session. Perhaps even more important, they