Archaic Character Types, Disorders Of Communication, And The Analyst-patient Relationship1

THE BROADENING SCOPE of psychoanalysis-as-treatment has of late presented clinicians with a hitherto unsolved dilemma: the further they depart from the stringent criteria of analyzability officially prevalent in the era of ego psychology, the less effective the exclusively interpretive technique they have been taught seems to become (see Gedo, 1993/1979). To add to our confusion, this loss of curative influence does not seem to be caused by any diminution in the validity of our interpretive messages as such. Indeed, large segments of the analytic community have become convinced that therapeutic change is produced not through insight, but on the basis of a type of experience unprecedented in the analysand's past—a need-satisfying object relationship characterized by empathy (Kohut, 1977), (1984).

Although recently such heterodox convictions have been most clearly articulated by certain self-psychologists (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992), the actual source of these views was Ferenczi (see Dupont, 1988), whose disciple Balint codified them while Ferenczi was fatally ill. Balint (1932) proposed the concept that appropriate therapeutic concern about the traumatic aspects of childhood should, after mastery of these traumata, permit analysands to make a "new beginning." To a greater or lesser extent, this idea has permeated the writings of many object relations theorists, both in this country and in England. Alexander and French (1946) called such treatment transactions "corrective emotional experiences." Numerous authors have endorsed the notion that treatment can supersede