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In order to derive fresh generalizations from what has thus been established with regard to the mechanisms and instincts, it would be essential to have at one's disposal numerous cases as thoroughly and deeply analyzed as the present one. But they are not easily to be had, and each one of them requires years of labour. So that advances in these spheres of knowledge must necessarily be slow.
He's not thinking; he's just doing it.
Psychoanalysts, like tennis players, do what they do by instinct. Unlike athletes, who have a strategy, psychoanalysts are unconsciously guided by something else. A significant body of research and labor has been added recently that contributes to the slow advance of the field and understanding of what that unconscious influence is. For the past 20 years, the Comparative Clinical Methods (CCM) Working Party created by the European Psychoanalytic Federation (EPF) has been addressing two questions: What do psychoanalysts do? And how do they do it? The result is the publication Knowing What Psychoanalysts Do and Doing What Psychoanalysts Know,2 authored by David Tuckett and a group of
TV commentator John McEnroe on the performance of Carlos Alcaraz during the men's singles final at Wimbledon.
I attended a conference in London of the same name in June 2024.
colleagues.3
The group, led by David Tuckett, a prominent British psychoanalyst who has written previously about their efforts (Tuckett et al., 2008), focused on the intersection of theory and practice. They painstakingly analyzed sessions gathered from over 300 psychoanalysts in many countries. In addition, they studied sessions from seminal figures in the field, including Bion, Kernberg, and Green. The group presents an overarching principle: “All psychoanalytic sessions in some way or another contain and potentially reveal what we can call an unconscious script from the past driving a patient's lived experience” (p. 51).
The group