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There has been, in recent years, an emphasis on curative factors other than interpretations in psychoanalytic treatment. Greenacre (1956) noted the tendency to divorce therapy from the consideration of the genetic basis of the neuroses and character disturbances. Zetzel (1956) stated that therapeutic results were attributed to identification with or introjection of the analyst and that the fundamental premise on which the conception of corrective emotional experience was based minimized the significance of insight and recall. Rycroft (1956) laid stress on the introjection of an unidealized "good" object in analysis and Lampl-de Groot (1956) emphasized the importance of identification with the analyst. Frosch and Ross (1964) reviewing the psychoanalytic literature for 1957, stated that papers in which insight based on the reconstruction of the infantile neurosis led to the therapeutic result were noticeable by their absence. Gitelson (1962) quoted Anna Freud's remarks that analysts expect therapeutic results to come about not as a result of interpretation but rather from the mechanisms of introjection-projection and from the corrective emotional experience. Nacht (1962) stated that it is what the analyst is rather than what he does that matters.
If the importance attributed to interpretations is diminished, the distinctions between psychoanalysis and other forms of treatment becomes somewhat blurred, since, as Bibring (1954) has stated, insight through interpretation is the supreme agent in the hierarchy of therapeutic principles which are characteristic of psychoanalysis. Eissler (1958) similarly defines classical technique as the one in which interpretation remains the exclusive or leading or prevailing tool.
It seems clear that a treatment situation which provides a corrective emotional experience and an opportunity for the patient to identify with his therapist need not be psychoanalysis. Whether a psychoanalyst is a better person to identify with than one