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.
IN OUR FIELD OF PSYCHOANALYSIS and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, there is an unwritten rule that sins of omission are preferable to sins of commission The value is placed on silence as a
mistake in technique, rather than on the mistake of articulating one's thoughts and dealing with the consequences. This is a rule for the analyst only. The rule for the patient is just the opposite. When we tell the patient to say everything which comes to mind, the message is that sins of commission are preferable to sins of omission. In other words, withholding from the analyst is worse than letting it all hang out. Sins of omission on the patient's part are called by the pejorative label of resistance. These rules are a holdover from the time when it was believed that it was possible and preferable to conceal the analyst's personality behind neutrality and abstinence, but that the patient should divulge everything which came to mind. Well, now we recognize that the analyst cannot hide his or her personality and that patients do not always say everything. When words fail them for whatever reason, patients resort to acting out in the transference, communicating nonverbally through projective identification, etc. By the same token, since neutrality is impossible, analysts also, none too rarely, find themselves acting out their countertransferences, communicating nonverbally through what has been called projective counteridentification (Grindberg, 1983), etc.
What has been lost especially, in the attempt for the analyst to be circumspect with the patient, is the role that the analyst's affective reactions have in the interplay, both conscious and unconscious, between patient and analyst. Although we as analysts are in an exciting period of theo