The Problem of Analyzability and the Autonomous Ego1

Our knowledge concerning the indications and contraindications for psychoanalytic therapy and the problem of analysability is fragmentary and contradictory. This has been complicated by the widening application of the method because this widening does not often correspond to technical and theoretical advances (A. Freud, 1954). This factor has resulted in the paradoxical conditions that prevail today: that in spite of considerable advances in theory, the skill of psychoanalysts is being applied clinically in a more unsystematic and indiscriminate fashion than ever before. This has necessitated a careful redefinition of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method, with particular characteristics, within the broad, generally uncharted area of psychotherapy (see Fenichel, 1941); (Bibring, 1954); (Rangell, 1954). This redefinition has been made both possible and necessary because of advances in ego psychology. Similarly, investigation and theoretical formulations of the psychoanalytic situation and the psychoanalytic process are particularly valuable when they integrate the recent advances in technique, while retaining the essentials of Freud's method (Eissler, 1953); (Stone, 1961).

Freud's traditional criteria of indications in terms of his classification of transference neuroses and narcissistic neuroses reflected his most fundamental principle of the theory of psychoanalytic technique: only those who are capable of developing a transference can be successfully analysed, because, the analysis of the transference is the ultimate curative factor of the therapy. While Freud expressed hope regarding the possible future extension of the application of the psychoanalytic method to the psychoses and to other conditions, in his latest published paper (1939) he referred to this in terms of a different technique (see Stone, 1954). The transference neuroses therefore always represented his fundamental criteria on indications. There is general agreement that patients other tha