Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

Sir:

I am grateful to Wallerstein for his thoughtful and detailed reply to my criticism. I believe it is much clearer now where we agree and where we disagree.

I am glad that he accepts the centrality of the interpersonal aspect of the psychoanalytic situation and that he considers that an insistence on this point might be more important than he had at first thought.

He has clarified that his view of my relationship to Alexander has a number of facets, with some of which he agrees and others he disagrees. He sees that my understanding of the 'corrective emotional experience' (Wallerstein, 1990) does indeed differ from Alexander's in that I do not advocate the manipulation of the relationship which Alexander proposed. He still feels however that I am like Alexander in what he considers to be a blurring of the relationship between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

It is here that we disagree. My opinion is that I am sharpening the distinction and that it is he (and Rangell) who is blurring it. He says it is sometimes difficult to tell whether a therapy is psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. I believe it is always possible to tell. If the therapist is attempting to deal with the analysis of the transference as completely and thoroughly as he can, the therapy is analysis. If he is not it is psychotherapy. That it may be hard to tell from an isolated segment of the therapy what his intent is I agree, but the therapy as a whole should tell the story. Of course there is a matter of definition here. He might say that if it is not possible to analyze the transference thoroughly the treatment is a psychotherapy. I prefer a definition in terms of aim rather than achievement. I have argued this view in a recent concluding chapter to Oremland's monograph entitled Interpretation and Interaction: Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (in press).

As another matter of definition I have suggested that if psychoanalytic technique, by which I do indeed mean the centrality of the analy