You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychoanalysis, by necessity, has had as its baseline, in fact as its principal armamentorium, words. To permit other than highly symbolic communication within the psychoanalytic situation is to defeat the purpose and often to arouse a degree of anxiety in the patient that precludes further work. Anna Freud (1946) in describing the analytic situation and the purpose of free association stated,
The ego is … requested to be silent and the id is invited to speak and promised that its derivatives shall not encounter the usual difficulties if they emerge into consciousness. … The warrant is valid only for their translation into ideas of words: it does not entitle them to take control of the motor apparatus, … we have to play a double game with the patient's instinctual impulses. … (pp. 12–13).
She concludes that this arrangement may evoke many of the technical difficulties which we encounter.
Dr Southwood (this issue) in his analytic model would suggest that he hopes to bypass some of these difficulties. Dr Southwood, in presenting a model for the psychoanalytic process, states: 'what goes on in psychoanalysis can be more adequately as well as more simply understood by taking a two-person experiential model than by using the structural theory'. He concludes that, 'once I used to regard the transference as a sort of guiding star that I had to keep in sight, whereas now I tend to follow the shared experiencing 'whole person' relating, as it is constantly disturbed by the transferences and identifications'. Dr Southwood, by this description, would appear to be expressing the dissatisfaction of many investigators and therapists who have chosen to focus more closely on the transactions that occur between patient and therapist, the nature of this relationship, the motivations behind the therapist's interventions and confrontations. He appears to have joined the movement which is drawing further away from interpretations which rely on interactions of ego, superego and id