On Keeping Thought Erotic: Some Problems in Contemporary Theory and Practice

What follows is not a standard psychoanalytic paper. It is an essay about problems that we think psychoanalysis faces from within. It is not based on any empirical studies, but rather on our long experience as analysts, teachers, supervisors, and participants in professional meetings. These experiences have led us to certain opinions about what has gone wrong in psychoanalysis.

We are concerned with the same questions that dominate the profession: How is psychoanalysis to deal with its increasing marginalization? Is it ever to regain the therapeutic and intellectual impact it once had? There have been many attempts to demonstrate the efficacy and even cost-effectiveness of analytically oriented treatment. These are laudable, and serve an important public function. But such studies take basic theory and technique for granted. They do not examine the question of what gave psychoanalysis such clinical and cultural import at one time. We believe that the answer is simple: psychoanalysis had the most complex and innovative theory of mind extant. It was a theory that deliberately challenged many commonsense assumptions. It produced a novel form of treatment that not only offered the possibility of relief from suffering, but did so based on the premise that the relief could only come from the encounter with everything within oneself that common sense could not encompass. It is our opinion that contemporary psychoanalysis is losing that stance.

We begin with a clinical example. It is chosen to illustrate the analyst coming up against the limits of commonsense thinking, even the common sense of received psychoanalytic knowledge.

The patient is a 35-year-old man, whose professional successes have won him international acclaim. He is in the second year of his analysis, initiated by his doubts regarding his own capacity to love and, more generally, his capacity for anything good. He feels his acclaim and the apparent affection of family and friends are the products of fraud, easy