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In the first chapter I said that the development of psychoanalytic practice was hindered through lack of work on the elements of psychoanalysis and gave examples of what might be objects of a search for such elements. In the second chapter I discussed criteria by which objects proposed as elements might be judged, stressing observability in practice as one essential. In the last chapter I laid down that all elements must be functions of the personality and that they should be conceived of as having dimensions which, in the mind of the analyst, would be sense-impressions, myth and passion.
In this chapter I propose to approach the problem afresh by seeking an answer to the following question considering any psychoanalytic session as an emotional experience, what elements in it must be selected to make it clear that the experience had been a psychoanalysis and could have been nothing else?
Many features of a psychoanalysis may be regarded as typical but they are not exclusively so. Departures from the common rule of meetings between two people may seem insignificant, but the number of such apparently insignificant departures taken together ultimately amounts to a difference that decides the need for a special term. A catalogue of such difference is likely to establish what constitutes an imitation of psychoanalysis rather than what is genuine, unless the difference can be stated in elements.
It would seem to avoid the disadvantages of cataloguing differences in detail by trying to focus on the emotional peculiarities of the experience, but difficulty arises because it is common for patients to feel that analysis is coldly unemotional and yet provokes effects appropriate to an intense series of emotions. The surest guide is
experience and to this I shall resort in the hope that it can be described in terms that enable others to compare their experience with it.
The dictum that an analysis must be conducted in an atmosphere of deprivation is usually understood to mean tha