"Classical" Versus "Contemporary" Theory—The Differences That Matter Clinically1

THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY heads an infamous list of alleged dichotomies haunting the psychoanalytic literature, a list that also includes relational versus intrapsychic, drive versus nondrive, and Freudian versus non-Freudian. What we think of as the "classical" theory of technique is the ego psychology developed by Anna Freud and first elaborated by European psychoanalysts, who emigrated to the United States (mostly to New York City) prior to World War II. It came to have among its central features treatment of transference as distortion, interpretation of surface content (in part, to avoid contaminating the transference and in part to avoid any hint of suggestion), "a relatively restricted and neutral way of dealing with patients" (Abend, 1990, p. 539), and an emphasis on "the development and ultimate resolution of resistance" (Boesky, 1990, p. 561).

Classical ego psychology has continued to evolve, into what Apfelbaum and Gill (1989) name "ego analysis, " as authors such as Arlow and Brenner (1964) and Gray (1982) have updated it through rereadings of The Ego and the Id(Freud, 1923) and Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety(Freud, 1926). Such contemporary classical analysts generally argue that these monographs constitute a revolutionary rather than an evolutionary shift from the topographic to the structural model, the technical implications of which are still being realized. So far, these new technical implications appear to revolve around increased attention to defense and resistance. For Arlow and Brenner, this led to an emphasis on the interpretation of unconscious compromise formations. For Gray, it has led to an almost exclusive emphasis on the interpretation of resistance. For Apfelbaum