The Demise of the Person in the Psychoanalytic Process

The demise of the person in the psychoanalytic process may seem like a strange choice of subject matter when you consider that the words “person” and “personal” are not technical terms in standard psychoanalytic nomenclature. Both terms are typically invoked, if at all, in an offhand way when referring to non-transferential and non-technical behavior or experience in the context of the psychoanalytic treatment relationship. For the majority of analysts, so-called personal aspects of the treatment have little if any role in the psychoanalytic process, as it is typically conceived. For many, it is the absence of a personal engagement with patients that distinguishes psychoanalysis from its user-friendlier cousin, psychodynamic psychotherapy. It has become increasingly commonplace that contemporary psychoanalysts of virtually all persuasions reduce the psychoanalytic process to the analysis of transference, resistance, and more recently, enactments. This view has resulted in the assumption that all of a patient's reactions to the person of the analyst should be treated as transference manifestations. Similarly, most significant interventions by the analyst in response to transference phenomena are informed by whichever technical principles a given analyst elects to follow. This is a view held, for example, by Kleinian, classical Freudian (i.e., American ego psychology), and most contemporary relational analysts, all of whom tend to deconstruct the very notion of a person-to-person engagement out of the psychoanalytic process. Such analysts often concede that interactions of a personal nature invariably occur during every analysis, but such occurrences are usually deemed irrelevant or impediments to the analytic process and are scrupulously avoided or systematically analyzed.

As a topical example of just how far this attitude has evolved, I cite a recent article in Psychoanalytic Psychology (Maroda, 2007), which was subseque