Comment On Waska's “Is it Psychoanalytic?”

If it was the intention of Dr. Waska to demonstrate that psychoanalysis—four times a week on the couch, less-frequent single-patient psychoanalytic psychotherapy—perhaps twice weekly on the couch or sitting up, and psychoanalytically oriented couples and group psychotherapy, all manifest examples of what the author calls “psychoanalytic contact” and hence are all psychoanalytic as opposed to cognitive behaviour therapy or other therapeutic modalities, then his case is proved prima facie. Educated parents might also employ psychoanalytic techniques in helping their children with developmental conflicts, and men and women of the cloth might similarly engage in psychoanalytic contact in their congregational counselling. There is something tautological in suggesting as the author does, “The procedure can be defined as psychoanalytic when analytic contact is said to have occurred in a consistent and meaningful manner over time, creating a mutative psychoanalytic process.” In other words, when a psychoanalytic process occurs …, it is a psychoanalytic process. A psychoanalytic approach is a psychoanalytic approach. But a psychoanalytic approach to literary criticism is not psychoanalysis, even though they share a common “psychoanalytic approach.”

Attempting to avoid the ongoing theoretical debates about what constitutes psychoanalysis conducted between meta-psychological schools and clinical approaches, the author asks us to return to Freud's original emphasis: “helping those mentally ill individuals find freedom from their psychological confinement.” But this attempt is impossible, since our freedom can be grasped only from within psychological confinement. It is the human condition to be “confined” by body and mind. Psychoanalysis