One Psychoanalysis or Many?

Dear Dr Hayley,

Dr Wallerstein in his paper 'One psychoanalysis or many?' (Int. J. Psychoanal., 69:1) cited a paper of mine (1984) as containing evidence that Jung's psychology may well not be a psychoanalytic psychology because it demonstrated 'how Jung avoided seeing the interactional dynamic, the evidence of psychic conflict, seeking out instead a mechanical … explanatory framework of autonomous psychic productions'.

The terms 'interactional dynamic' and 'evidence of psychic conflict' and 'autonomous psychic productions' each have quite specific separate universes of reference that may or may not overlap. Tracing out of their distinguishing characteristics might clarify further the boundaries between not only Jung's and Freud's explanatory frameworks, but other schools that psychoanalysis must weigh to determine if they are 'truly a psychoanalytic psychology or not'.

In my paper I investigated microscopically the unconscious communications embedded in the interactional processes occurring between a young girl, Miss S W, age fifteen and a half, and Jung, four years older, who was studying the girl's 'unconscious processes' in a course of seance sessions. As might be expected the entire situation between these two adolescents was dripping with unconscious sexual issues for both partners, and Miss S W produced narrative and fantasy images that revealed that she unconsciously possessed an awareness of not only the erotic nature of her investment in this enterprise but also of Jung's. She disguised this information within her manifest communications by using the classic manouvers of displacement, condensation, symbolization, and secondary elaboration.

Actually Miss S W was communicating to Jung very much in the same way that Anna O communicated to Breuer, and Jung was in somewhat the same situation in which Breuer found himself with Anna O. For example, when Anna O in the throes of hysterical pelvic pains announced to Breuer that she was giving birth to his child, sh