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Really, a good story was a film scenario—not the action but the contours of the action, and something left to the imagination.
HARRY STACK SULLIVAN once said that the last thing that happens to you just before you go crazy is that everything becomes clear! Well, I had an epiphany about a year ago, when it occurred to me that the detailed inquiry, particularly the deconstructed detailed inquiry, is really visual, not, as one might reasonably expect, verbal, and that, indeed, the entire psychoanalytic praxis, although annotated in words, actually takes place in a visual-spatial modality. I limn out recent developments in neuroscience that may provide a rationale for this apparent logical inversion. Finally, focusing on visual imagery, I elaborate a primer of psychoanalytic technique that is form—not content—oriented and that I am convinced captures the absolute essence of the psychoanalytic praxis.
It may have been a signal contribution of interpersonal psychoanalysis to posit a disconnect between metapsychology and technique, that is, to suggest that successful therapy may depend more on what one does than what one says about it. I have long claimed that psychoanalysis works as a therapeutic instrument, not because of the correctness of its meta-psycholog(ies), but because of its praxis, that is, what we do when we are plying our trade, rather than how we then proceed to explain what we have done (Levenson, 1972). It seems likely that the inquiry is the therapeutic act; that as Marshall Mcluhan put it, the medium is indeed the message.
I would now suggest that our praxis is organized more around pictures