Changing Aims in Psychoanalysis

It is probably not so difficult to answer the question of what aims one has upon entering therapy; or what aims we ourselves have when we are patients - it is more difficult with the therapists. I would like to elucidate the subject from this perspective, and ask what are the aims of psychoanalysts. Spontaneously, one could answer: analysts, like other people, too, want to earn money and live happily. And although I am, in this paper, mainly dealing with those specific aims which analysts have when they practise their profession - that is, when they analyse patients - I shall nonetheless devote later on just a little time to the topics of happiness and money.

In the last decade, there has been a growing demand worldwide that the effectiveness of our analytic method be proven. Whoever - psychotherapists or outcome researchers - defines treatment aims, and then wishes to determine whether these aims have been met, is forced to name the respective criteria. For psychotherapy research, which today is mainly quantitative-empirical research, it would of course be desirable to have criteria which are easy to measure. But measuring is a difficult task in psychoanalysis. Its subject matter is too resistive, the influencing variables are too manifold and, what is more, we are talking about changes of the inner world, with particular emphasis on its unconscious components.

When formulating these criteria for treatment aims (such as the modification of the superego), reference is of course made to psychoanalytic concepts, like transference, the depressive position or the superego. Concepts are immensely important; they constitute our view of the world, and they provide us with categories by which we organize the phenomena that interest us. In psychoanalysis - which, in Freud's words, is ‘feeling its way forwards on an empirical basis’ (Freud 1919, p. 210) - a lot of knowledge has been condensed in our concepts, and these concepts in turn have