The Ethic of Honesty: The Fundamental Rule of Psychoanalysis By M. Guy Thompson,  Amsterdam-New York, Rodopi, 2004.  169 pp.

Which analytic theory drives us obscures how theory-driven we are in the first place. M. Guy Thompson's The Ethic of Honesty intends first to take us from the label and babel of “which” theory to the procrustean couch of “all” theories that curtail patients’ experience. Thus inclined, our theories become more and more doctrinaire when we interpret what we do not see (A. J. Liebling [1961] dryly defines “an expert” as one “who writes what he construes to be the meaning of what he hasn't seen” [p. 225]), and when seeing-is-believing has tumbled into believing what we want to see. By penetrating these familiar thickets of theory, The Ethic of Honesty hopes to clear a path to Thompson's vision of a natural coincidence of ends and means in psychoanalytic process: the exercise of candor and honesty through the witness of a collaborative relationship. Especially in the patient's agreement to free-associate under the care of Freud's fundamental rule, truthful self-disclosure reveals itself as a primary human intention, not merely secondary to insight, interpretation, regression, or conscience. Our classical analytic theories, relying heavily on the analyst's management of the patient's resistances, are unhelpful in respecting and protecting the patient's existential instinct for the safe disclosure and acknowledgment of concealed experience. Thompson pursues this important experience-near project in this, his second scholarly analysis, following his earlier 1994 volume, The Truth about Freud's Technique: The Encounter with the Real, in which he gives high marks to Freud's engagement with Dora and the Rat Man just because Freud knew that it is not the strictures of classical method that help self-disclosure but the confiding partnership of patient and analyst.

This second work slices through the classical method still more, adding to the works of Lohser & Newton, Lipton, Haynal, Roazen, and others who