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International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Volume 74, Part 4, 1993
Otto F. Kernberg
A broad survey of the psychoanalytic field reveals both convergences and divergences in technique. The major convergences include earlier interpretation of the transference, increased focus on transference analysis, as well as growing attention to countertransference analysis and increasing concern with the risks of ‘indoctrinating’ patients. Greater emphasis is found on character defences and the unconscious meanings of the ‘here-and-now’. Also noted are trends toward translating unconscious conflicts into object-relations terminology, as well as toward considering a multiplicity of royal roads to the unconscious.
Regarding divergencies, significant controversies continue about the importance of the ‘real’ relationship and the therapeutic versus the resistance aspect of regression. Divergences also continue regarding reconstruction and recovery of preverbal experience, drawing the lines between psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, the role of empathy, and the relation of historical to narrative truth.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Volume 74, Part 4, 1993
Judith L. Mitrani
This paper examines some aspects of an unconscious process developing within the mind of the analyst; a process affecting both the way in which the analyst listens to the patient's material and the interpretations subsequently formulated. The paper highlights the problem of the analyst's ‘mis-use’ of theory as a protection against unbearable feelings of psychic pain, evoked by what is perhaps the most essential tool of psychoanalysis: the analyst's emotional contact with the patient's early experiences in infancy.
Both the ‘deficiency theory’ and the concept of ‘primary envy’ are called into question during this enquiry. Some of the most r