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Dr. Toft's subject is how the language that analysand and analyst use to conceptualize problems influences the outcome of the treatment. In particular, he writes about the fallacy of concreteness, emphasizing the transient, contextual, intangible, relativistic, subjective nature of our minds as we construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct our selves and the world in which we live. Dr. Toft's contention that the validity of psychoanalytic propositions and practices depends upon their philosophical underpinning and on the data used to support them is one to which all thoughtful psychoanalysts can subscribe. His paper is not clinical; he turns to philosophy to support his argument. While the reader might conclude that, like so many of us, Dr. Toft is arguing from the currently popular postmodern paradigm, his evidentiary base is not postmodern philosophy but ancient Buddhist writings that he believes are relevant to contemporary psychoanalytic problems.
Buddhism teaches about illusion as a major source of human suffering, and Toft writes about how analyst and analysand may unwittingly collude to reify self and mind as concrete entities that have physical mass, occupy space, have temporal duration, and possess such properties as movement and force. In this collusive scenario, the patient typically experiences him- or herself as the passive, hopeless victim of an immutable thing, inside or outside, past or present. The analyst, in turn, unwittingly fosters the patient's illusion by viewing psychoanalytic concepts as though they were concrete entities or inner homunculi. The result is a displacement of agency away from the two of them, and a consequent lack of power in the analysis over the analsand's life. The task of the analyst, in Dr. Toft's opinion, is to identify and interpret the fallacy of concreteness wherever, whenever, and however it may arise, and to guide the analytic process back onto the track that involves mental states, attitudes and beliefs, thoughts and fe