Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

Sir:

Wallerstein's (1989) assessment in this Journal of my views on the relationship between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, however well intentioned, is a serious misrepresentation. In my 1984 paper in which I stated my revised views, I anticipated such misunderstanding and attempted to prevent it. If Wallerstein's paper is a criterion, that effort has failed.

This becomes clearest when Wallerstein compares my view with Alexander's. There is an important similarity and an important difference between my position and Alexander's, but Wallerstein does not present either correctly.

The similarity is one which is not often referred to in discussing Alexander. It is that he took a two-person view of the analytic situation, but he did not realize how important a difference this is from the classical analytic position, nor did he systematically follow through on this new position. He wrote in 1956: 'In the actual interpersonal—patient–therapist—equation the therapist does not figure as a constant factor, a pure intellect or a blank screen, but as a distinct individual. The contrast between the transference experience and the past in each case is also determined by the analyst's countertransference and his total personality' (p. 280). But in the same place he also wrote: 'no radically new principles have been proposed applying either to the theory or the technique of psychoanalysis' (p. 279).

So the similarity is that Alexander took a two-body (person) view of the analytic situation, a view I have espoused for some time. The difference between Alexander and myself is that Alexander not only did not advocate the analysis of this interpersonal interaction but rather, he explicitly proposed manipulating the interaction by employing 'planfully selected interpersonal climates' (1956, p. 281) as a central therapeutic technique.

I, on the contrary, am describing a therapy which, although it does not conform to the usual extrinsic analytic criteria of frequency and position