Discussion of Christine Hill's Paper

Dr Hill has performed an important task for the analytic community in reporting psychoanalysis from the perspective of the analysand. There are a variety of brief reports in the literature and an occasional book from some outstanding mavericks like Irving Yalom, about the perspective of psychoanalytic treatment from a point of view of the patient. This work represents a post hoc view of the analysand's conception of an analytic process that in the main had been already finished.

The population of these patients is somewhat older, averaging 40-55 years of age. Typically, such patients would be considered by Freud to be a little rigid in their character structure, but more and more such patients these days have reached the end of unsuccessful therapies of various sorts, before they seek psychoanalysis.

The patients in Dr Hill's survey seemed to have had analysts like many of us, who either speak very little or speak a lot. I would say that I speak in favor of more rather than less speaking. Analysands who have been analyzed by people that say little, generally spend too much time being angry at the lack of response of the analyst to get very far. Greenberg suggested that an analyst who remains an old object will have an analysis that never ends. In contrast an analyst that never becomes a new object will have an analysis that never begins. When one looks at these cases, I think that the analysts who were not seen as responsive to the patient were from Greenberg's point of view, never new objects, but simply repeated the old patterns. The analyst that seemed to do better with patients were those that added something new to the process. The question then really becomes, is the analyst sufficiently focused on what is new about what they do? Or are they still somehow trapped in the older paradigm that deems it sufficient to acquaint the patient with the way in which early life experiences influenced current patterns (which is in essence an unrealized counter-transference).

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