Chapter 12. Elements of Psycho-Analysis

The model of reversible perspective, when applied to the analysis, reveals a complex situation. The patient detects a note of satisfaction in the analyst's voice and responds in a tone conveying dejection. (What was said is irrelevant to our immediate concern.) The patient detects a moral supposition in an interpretation: his response is significant for its silent rejection of the moral supposition. That which makes one person see two faces and another a vase remains insensible, but in the domain of sense impressions there is agreement. The interpretation is accepted, but the premises have been rejected and other silently substituted.

In any interpretation there is a significant assumption, one being that the analyst is the analyst: this assumption may be denied silently by the patient. Although he appears to accept the interpretation he denies its force by having substituted another assumption. Further associations may show what his assumption is.

The debate between analysand and analyst is therefore unspoken1; what the analyst says is shown to be agreed by both parties to the analysis, but – it is insignificant. The conflict is therefore kept out of discussion because it is confined to a domain which is not regarded as an issue between the analyst and analysand. The supposition that the analyst is the analyst and the analysand the analysand is but one of these domains of disagreement that is passed by silently. Suppose it is brought into the analysis: the patient and the analyst are at once in agreement, for what proposition could be more obvious, or one

more loyally accepted by the patient? But the mode of acceptance will indicate that the significance, in the patient's opinion, of the analyst's interpretation lay in the analyst's premises – his false premises