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From the earliest years of the psychoanalytic movement analysts have inclined to be either healers or exorcists. Jung, Ferençzi, Rank and Reich seem to speak with the characteristic voice of the healer. There is an implicit trust in the healing power of relationship, an emphasis on the patient's creative potential, a readiness to engage. Whereas those analysts, like Karl Abraham, who followed Freud's advocacy of analytic detachment, maintain a greater distance between themselves and their patient while focussing on the negative aspects of the infantile psyche. This tradition set the style of the classical analytic approach rigorously maintained by Melanie Klein and her followers. The Kleinian school actively challenges resistance, manipulation, seduction and all the carefully hidden expressions of negative transference. In their determination to ‘name the devils’ and their readiness to confront them, they, like Davanloo, take the characteristic stance of the exorcist.
While healing and exorcism are very different modes of functioning, it would be a false simplification to see them as mutually exclusive. The shaman, in reclaiming the lost soul, must at the same time do battle with the devils that hold it captive. The exorcist, even as he drives out the demons, prays earnestly for the soul of the sinner. An object relations analyst must be capable of controntation when the occasion warrants; equally the classical analyst heals through sensitive understanding and the maintenance of safe analytic boundaries. Healing alone will fail where no attempt is made to purge the patient of his bad inner objects. But, more fundamentally, the whole therapeutic enterprise is meaningful only to the degree that a truly human connection has been established. The difficulty is to move freely between the two modes and to see them as complementary aspects of a single process.