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.
The main instrument, however, for curbing the patient's compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of the transference. We render the compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field. We admit it into the transference as a playground in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom … Freud (1914) Remembering, repeating and working through.
PSYCHOANALYSTS CAN BE ROUGHLY DIVIDED into two categories: those who believe that the essence of psychoanalysis is the detoxification of fantasy and those who believe that the essence is the demystification of experience. Dr. Dewald is clearly of the first persuasion and I, as will become evident, am of the second, so some difference of opinion is inevitable. The first category, detoxification of fantasy, requires that the therapist believe that people are made ill by their fantasies, by the symbolic distortions of a reality which is either innocuous or, even when deleterious, no more than a trigger for the fantasy systems which are energy-driven (libido) and universal—that is, built into the deep structure of people. So everyone has an Oedipus complex with its primal fantasies. The function of the therapist is to permit a controlled regression so that the patient comes into conscious touch with the primary process fantasies. Daylight chases away the bogey-man. Countertransference in this view is a troublesome artifact and must be carefully