Memory and the Psychoanalytic Cure

An investigation of the process of psychoanalytic cure inevitably begins as a dialogue or debate with Freud. His papers on technique and the transference still remain fundamental even though Freud later claimed that he had lost interest in the therapeutic process as such Although his concept of the transference neurosis has come under increasing question, Freud's basic concepts regarding transference and the therapeutic cure are widely recognized as still correct that the psychoanalytic cure is facilitated by means of a transference repetition in which the patient's illness is recreated not as an event in the past but as a present-day force. Freud said further in an often quoted statement that “when all is said and done it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigy” (1912). Freud therefore emphasized the necessity for affective aliveness and immediacy in the therapeutic process This idea was later developed by Strachey in his classic paper (1934) to the effect that transference interpretations were mutative when they were delivered at the point of affective urgency.

Some post-Freudian additions in our theory of cure do not refute Freud's concepts of the therapeutic cure but rather can be seen as opening up an area that Freud had neglected. Freud underestimated the significance of the psychoanalytic setting, what Leo Stone (1961) called the “psychoanalytic situation” — the so-called “real” relationship, in the “here and now” — that develops between analyst and analysand as a consequence of what the analyst actually does as an analyst. The actuality of the psychoanalytic setting in real time must also include the analyst's feelings towards the analysand — feelings that are communicated either consciously or unconsciously. What the analyst actually does, as part of customary technique, includes the analyst's constancy and reliability, that he or she is there primarily but not exclusively for the patient's needs, that the analyst is