The Effect of Interpretation in Psychoanalytic Treatment in the Light of an Integrated Model of Internal Objects

The problem of therapeutic change in psychoanalysis continues to attract the attention of analysts in spite of the many papers written on this subject. Freud (1937) expresses some resentment towards the analysts who deal with it. He writes: 'In this field the interest of analysts seems to me to be quite wrongly directed. Instead of inquiry into how a cure by analysis comes about (a matter which I think has been sufficiently elucidated) the question should be asked of what are the obstacles that stand in the way of such a cure' (p. 221). Freud thought this subject more or less solved by what he had written many years before. In fact he dealt with the problem of the curative factors from the very beginning when he developed the psychoanalytic technique of treatment from its origins in the method of catharsis during hypnosis. In one of his earliest papers Freud (1904) mentions the two curative factors in the cathartic method, namely the recovery of memories during hypnosis which were inaccessible in the waking state and the strong expression of affect which these memories were loaded with. With the psychoanalytic treatment Freud discovered a method to reach these inaccessible memories and—as he later realized—also fantasies, without hypnosis, through the analyst's interpretation of the patient's free associations. The explanation of the curative effect by abreaction of 'strangulated' affects attached to unconscious memories seemed now far too simple and inadequate for the complicated processes that occurred in the psychoanalytic treatment. But the two factors in the cathartic method: the intrusion of unconscious ideation into the cognitive field and, simultaneously, a change in the realm of affects and emotions remained the two poles in the theory of the curative factors in psychoanalytic treatment. The link between these poles in the process of psychoanalytic treatment became a controversial issue in the psychoanalytic literature. Interpretation as the '