You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
PSYCHOANALYSIS IS, IN VERY LARGE measure, the sustained and disciplined effort to overcome or to remove the obstacles that stand in the way of open, direct communication with the people and the world around us.1 The capacity to communicate is, of course, one of the greatest traditional themes of literature. Dostoievsky's Prince Mishkin and his Alyosha Karamazov, for example, had an almost uncanny ability to establish immediate and intimate contact with people. Communication in this sense is a readiness to respond to whatever is best and strongest in a person. It occurs whenever a true encounter between two human beings takes place, and whenever it is established the ordinary barriers between people are simply swept aside and their innermost selves are, so to speak, in touch. True encounter and communication arouse and energize the soul.
While some individuals are endowed with heightened empathy and the capacity for direct and meaningful communication to an exceptional degree—and they can trust it as much as a person with perfect pitch can trust his ear—everyone, of course, has the capacity for communication to at least some extent.
In persons who seek psychoanalysis this capacity for communication is frequently disturbed. They want and expect the analyst to help them improve their ability to communicate with others as well as with themselves. Yet they only rarely mention this as one of their reasons for seeking therapy in the first place. That is really quite striking. For they do so often exhibit disturbed communication. Indeed, people who are not effectively in touch with their feelings are rarely capable of establishing stable relations with others; people who do not trust their feelings cannot trust others; people who have not resolved their childhood notions of what life owes