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I may make mistakes but I am never wrong.
— Sam Goldwyn (apocryphal)
IT HAS BEEN A LONG AND BUMPY path from Freud's 1914 statement that "Analysis presupposes the consent of the analysed: the situation of analysis involves a superior and a subordinate" to Racker's statement in 1968 that, "The first distortion of truth in the 'myth of the analytic situation' is that analysis is an interaction between a sick person and a healthy one. The truth is that it is an interaction between two personalities … and each of these two personalities—that of the analyst and that of the patient—responds to every event of the analytic situation" (Freud, 1914); (Racker, 1968). The most ubiquitous and subversive mistake—the "Basic Fault" of psychoanalytic therapy—is to fail to grasp the implications of this shift, which I will take even farther than Racker ever intended. I will spell out for you some of the implications of the shift, as I see them, and illustrate with clinical material.
Psychoanalysis, based on a nineteenth century medical model and having its roots in the hypnotic phenomena of submission and suggestion has always carried a thinly masked disdain for the "patient, " defined etymologically as "the suffering one." Freud is reported to have said to Ferenczi, "Die Patienten sind ein Gesindel" (patients are a rabble), and in 1932 Ferenczi, in a highly controversial paper, bluntly criticized, to quote Grosskurth, "the superiority or hypocrisy of analysts who acted as though their patients were inferior to them. As a result, they did not really listen to what their patients were telling them, particularly in cases of actual abuse. It ended dramatically with a plea to therapists to