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ANNA O. CALLED IT THE TALKING CURE and it would be most ungracious to censure her for not elaborating. Were one to elaborate in her place, one might add that if there is to be significant movement, let alone cure, a goodly amount of thinking would need to go along with the talking.
Thinking has not always been in good repute in psychoanalysis. Every now and then a certain ambiguity in the attitude toward thinking seems to surface. Thus thinking has at times been counterposed to feeling as if the two were incompatible or mutually exclusive. This may be a matter of how one understands thinking. I would like to suggest that thinking presupposes the ability to bear feeling and that it is an indispensable part of the psychoanalytic process.
In the course of daily work one notes a wide range of differences in how people approach and carry out the task of thinking. Some take to it as a duck takes to water; for others it remains for what seems forever an alien requirement, a kind of curiosity which they are surprised that anyone might expect them to engage in. The latter can, for instance, make the analyst feel that he or she must be mad to expect them to do this strange thing. It is, of course, thinking about oneself that these people shrink from as particularly