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DEAR SIR,
I should like to reply briefly to Dr Rosenfeld's comments (Int. J. Psycho-Anal. Vol. 53, Pt. 4)
on my paper on Transference and Interpretation (Vol. 53, Pt. 3).
Dr Rosenfeld thinks that I am too accepting of the analyst's psychopathology and even make a virtue of it. I did not intend to make a virtue of it; in fact I put forward the idea that the analyst's self-analysis is so urgent that he has to use his interpretations to the patient for this purpose.
What I did intend to convey, however, was my belief that we tend to underrate the areas of our patients' mental life that always escape analysis; and further, that we do this in part because we overvalue the literal meaning of interpretations (and the importance of our differences of opinion about them). We do this because we ourselves value interpretation so highly—we live by it intellectually, emotionally and economically.
Regarding the necessity of interpreting preverbal states, I agree that the transference is greatly determined by them and that it is essential to interpret what we understand of them. But Dr Rosenfeld himself points to the difficulties involved (pp. 459, 460). I think that what he says supports my argument that inevitably the analyst must miss a lot. How many types of preverbal state are there, and how many can he hope to understand? Those that he does not understand will be left over as unanalysed residues.
I believe that psychoanalysis has often injured itself by over-estimating its therapeutic capacity. With this in mind, my paper was intended to look at a basic problem relevant to our controversies.
Yours faithfully,