The Analyst's Task—To Help the Patient Carry out his Plan

IN PARTS OF HIS LATE WORKS FREUD WROTE about the patient's unconscious wish to solve his problems, and he endowed the patient with the capacity to work unconsciously with the analyst at the task of solving them. Subsequently other analysts have developed these concepts. In this paper the author applies the concepts clinically. He attempts to show that the patient works unconsciously by planful testing of the analyst and that the analyst may help the patient by passing his tests. These concepts are illustrated by clinical examples, and evidence for them from formal research is briefly summarized.

Clinical thinking over the last thirty or more years has reflected an increasing emphasis on the patient's relationship to the analyst, and, in particular, on the patient's efforts to work unconsciously with the analyst at the task of solving his problems. The concepts about the patient's unconscious efforts to solve his problems stem ultimately from certain of Freud's late works. In these he wrote directly about the patient's unconscious motivation to master his traumas (1920, pp. 32, 35) and to work with the analyst to gain control of the instincts (1937, p. 235). In addition Freud endowed the patient with a capacity to do this work. He wrote that the patient unconsciously controls his repressions by the criteria of danger and safety (1940, p. 199) and he introduced the idea that a person may unconsciously make use of trial actions to test his environment in preparation for carrying out an unconscious plan of action (1940, p. 199).

Freud's contributions have been subsequently elaborated by many authors. Freud's concept, that the patient unconsciously controls his repressions by the criteria of danger and safety has been applied clinically by Bemfeld (1941) who wrote that part of the analyst's task is to help the patient to feel safe. Freud's concepts