Reassurance as a Means of Analytic Technique

Probably all analysts agree that it is not possible entirely to exclude all factors of reassurance. Moreover, some analysts will make use of reassurance in a dangerous crisis, e.g. attempts at suicide. But many analysts maintain that reassurance should generally be reduced to a minimum and used as a means of technique only in the rarest cases of emergency. They might object that reassurance is a poor substitute for interpretation, and is a non-analytic procedure: soothes the anxiety instead of resolving it; furthers the repression, and is a means of suggestion; that it affords too much libidinal satisfaction, whereas the analysis should be conducted under frustration; further, that it is the analyst's own anxiety which makes him unable to stand the anxiety of the patient, and drives him to give reassurance. I want to deal with these arguments after we have discussed the problem of reassurance in its various aspects.

Reassurance may be regarded as a method of dosing anxiety, as a way of expressing the human attitude of the analyst, as a means of emphasizing the reality aspects in the analytic situation and showing the analyst's understanding of the reality situation. In practice, however, these various aspects cannot be sharply distinguished.

Reassurance should in the first place be a help to the ego. If the patient is unable to deal with his anxiety owing to lack of satisfactory defences, the analyst should temporarily lend them to him. Reassurance as a method of dosing anxiety is specially important with patients who suffer from intense anxiety from the beginning, or whose anxiety has been unduly stimulated, either through external events or through the analysis, and who are lacking in good defence mechanisms, with psychotic, borderline, asocial or character cases, some cases of hysteria, and a certain type of patient whose deep and intense anxiety had previously to the analysis been overcome by a good reality adaption and who now, when their successful defen