Keeping the Analysis Alive and Creative—Introduction

ERICH FROMM (1970), DESCRIBING psychoanalysis, said that it was intended to be "… radical, penetrating, liberating …" At that time he was speaking of psychoanalysis as a theory. Unquestionably Fromm also felt that each individual psychoanalysis should be a radical, penetrating and liberating experience. Yet, as analysts, we know that at times our work can be less than this and that an analysis may come to lack the qualities of which Fromm spoke. Similarly, Arnold Cooper (1986) has written:

In gloomy moments it has sometimes seemed to me that the life course of too many analysts begins with an excess of curative zeal and proceeds in the latter part of their careers toward excessive therapeutic nihilism. … Since an analysis is not always rewarding, either immediately or in the long run, the dangers of therapeutic discouragement or disillusionment are great and occur with considerable frequency. The analyst who no longer believes in the efficacy of his methods, who is bored with his patient, who no longer listens carefully or puzzles over his patient's communications, cannot provide the basic elements of the therapeutic situation which are required for optimal treatment (pp. 577–578).

Leaving aside the personality of the analyst many factors contribute to the state of affairs which Cooper has addressed. First, there is the current therapeutic environment, one in which there appears to be, in both psychological and psychiatric circles, a return to a behavioral-organicist paradigm. New therapies, new medications, are continuously promulgated via the media. Whether these are merely the manifestations of the latest swing of the pendulum, part of an evolutionary process, or whether they in fact represent real, valid advances remains to be seen. Secondly, within psychoanalysis, there is the paradox that as our knowledge