The Grid (1963). Taming Wild Thoughts [I]

This paper is to introduce a method I have found useful in thinking about problems that arise in the course of psychoanalytic practice.

We are familiar with anxieties arising in the course of treating patients and of the need to deal with these anxieties by being ourselves analysed. Today I am concerned with an aspect of this that seems to have received little or no attention, namely, what might be called reasonable anxiety that arises when it is clearly important to solve a problem that is by virtue of its complexity very difficult to solve. Because of our work, there is a tendency to regard such anxiety as counter-transference and to forget that it may also be proper to the search for an adequate response to a danger. My approach must not be regarded as implying that there is any less need for the analyst's personal analysis. What I shall say should in fact contribute to the approach through personal analysis.

My subject does not belong directly to the sphere of work done in analytic situations or throw much light on how to record sessions. Yet it has a bearing on the work of the session because the procedures I am about to advocate do help to keep the analyst's intuition in training, so to speak, and do help in impressing the work of the sessions on the memory. Later perhaps it might help in developing a method of written recording analogous to that enjoyed by the mathematician who can record his findings and use the record for communication and further work on his findings even in the absence of the object.

The instrument that I have elaborated for this task is the Grid (see p. vii).

It will be seen that there are two axes, one vertical marked A–H, the other horizontal, which is numbered 1, 2, 3, …, to n. The vertical axis is genetic and is divided roughly into phases of sophistication.

The meaning is broadly indicated by the terms I have used. They are borrowed from philosophy and elsewhere but must not be taken to have the meaning with which they are already in