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Donald Spence, The Rhetorical Voice of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994
THIS BOOK IS FOR STUDENTS of psychoanalysis who, as graduate students, were trained primarily in the logic and methods of established scientific inquiry. It's part of a long-standing effort to apply rules of measurement to frequency of occurrence, developed in the laboratory sciences, to recurrent elements of psychoanalytic interaction precisely because the quantitative analysis of probabilistic inference has proved so fruitful in other scientific fields of investigation. It holds interest for researchers who work from the known to the unknown, not for therapists who are caught up in the sweat, tears, and messiness of daily practice with wide varieties of patients, and whose narrative constructions of human pain and suffering fail to encompass their patients's psychic reality with adequate sense and meaning. Within the limited space here, I present some reasons for these reactions.
Recall that Freud, the creator of Spence's rhetorical voice, never became a premier therapist. He even gave up, eventually, on the possible future of psychoanalysis as therapy. He never knew what it's like to undergo the experience himself: he neither went into personal therapy nor gave patients access to his countertransference. To his lasting credit, however, he always extolled Ferenczi, whose clinical work Spence ignores, as the therapist par excellence of that first generation: he also regarded Breuer, whose innovative work Spence doesn't mention, as having made the cornerstone discovery of psychoanalysis—that is, the theory of unconscious psychic experience. We learn more about psychoanalysis as a form of psychotherapy through direct experiential inquiry into