Accessibility To Awareness And The Transference Of Authority

THE CONSCIOUS BELIEFS and convictions that people entertain in regard to their own psychological functioning may be significantly influenced by their relationship to others, by how others view their own psychological functioning. Psychoanalysts have long been concerned about the nature of the analytic relationship, in which the patient’s conscious beliefs and convictions about the nature of her own unconscious processes evolve. Since the beginning of psychoanalysis, there has been a concern that when the patient’s conscious beliefs about her own psychological functioning have evolved in the context of an unanalyzed transference of authority, these beliefs may reflect a sort of false consciousness, based upon unconscious compliance to the analyst’s presumed wishes and expectations. As psychoanalysis evolved from the pressure techniques of hypnosis into the method of free association, with the analysis of resistance and transference, it was hoped that a method was evolving that would analyze, rather than exploit, the patient’s transference of authority to the analyst. The transference of authority was to be dissolved through its analysis; thus the results of psychoanalysis could not be attributed to the patient’s suggestibility to the analyst’s interpretations.

With the evolution from a one-person to a two-person psychology, it became apparent that a one-person psychology tends to de-emphasize the influence of the analyst’s participation in the analytic situation. It was assumed that an essentially neutral and abstinent analyst will minimally influence the natural unfolding of the patient’s free associations, transferences, and resistances. A two-person psychology will recognize that the analyst’s personality, countertransference, theoretical beliefs, nonverbal communication, and verbal interpretations will all crucially shape the free associations, resistances, and transferences that emerge in the course of the treatment. To the extent that a one-person psychology min