Working Through the Past—Working Toward the Future

WHY DOES ANALYSIS TAKE SO LONG? Why do patients not get well as soon as we convey our dynamic understanding to them? Why does "insight" not necessarily lead to change, and what is it that the analyst or the patient must do to bring about desired change? These are the questions which Freud was trying to answer in writing of working through. Freud considered the working through process to be the therapeutic factor effecting the greatest changes in the patient, and he believed that it was working through which distinguished psychoanalysis from treatment by suggestion. Nevertheless, Freud was vague in defining what was meant by the term "working through," and while it has been considered an essential element of psychoanalytic technique, it has remained a misunderstood and confusing term. As psychoanalysis has evolved from a quasi-biological drive theory, through the development of ego-psychology, to the state of theoretical pluralism which characterizes contemporary psychoanalysis, the use of the term working through has been modified reflecting these theoretical revisions.

I propose the term "working toward" to capture the sense of the work of both patient and analyst as "coparticipants" (Wolstein, 1983) in the analytic process. Patient and analyst not only work toward a new and "corrective" relationship, but work toward making the nuances of that relationship explicit. Further, they work toward modifications, coordinations and integrations of the