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THE APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS from the point of view of its structure is a comparatively recent development. During the past ten years or so, this approach has clarified a number of clinical and systematic questions.
Nearly all the questions I will raise this morning have been considered one way or another in our committee meetings during the past year, and in sharing them with you, I will attempt to suggest their relevance—with the hope that further discussion will extend and sharpen their relevance.
But first to sketch a structure of psychoanalysis comprising the essential features of its therapeutic inquiry. It has observations and definitions, postulates or points of view and theory, and finally, perspectives on metapsychology.
At the empirical level, the major observations to be made and defined are transference, resistance, anxiety and counteranxiety, counterresistance and countertransference.
At the systematic level, the major postulates or points of view to be applied to defined observations are genesis and function, structure and dynamism, immediacy and reflection, and the controlling theory of unconscious or dissociated experience.
At the interpretive level, the major metapsychologies are pluralistic and diverse, from those of Freud, Adler, Jung, and Rank, through Reich, Anna Freud and Hartmann, Kris, and Lowenstein, to Fromm, Horney, Sullivan, and Thompson, to the many, many more individual and less publicized ones now being used in actual practice. Generally, they all tend to fall into three main types—biological, sociological, psychological—but none, of course, represents a pure type.
To turn to the questions: First, what are the constituents and conditions of therapeutic experience that make psychoanalysis possible? What features are common to all psychoanalytic therapy? And how do they distinguish it from other psychotherapies?
Second, what is a psychoanalytic fact? as distinct from a biological fact? a sociological fact? or, even, a linguistic fac