Response

Madame Janice de Saussure begins by laying stress on the psychoanalytic concepts which are the premises of our work. I did not explicitly mention these in my paper, perhaps because I somewhat rashly assumed that they were taken for granted and shared by all analysts.

I agree with her that the search for the unconscious is what dominates the analyst's mental attitude from listening to interpretation.

This attitude is one of the defining elements of psychoanalysis and distinguishes it from all other types of psychotherapy. Both de Saussure and I have realised in our teaching of psychoanalysis that the most difficult thing to achieve with a candidate—and indeed with any patient—is for him genuinely to accept the existence of the unconscious.

In the search for the unconscious we encounter difficulties and resistances—foremost among which is its own forgetting—which are manifested in the field of the transference, apart from the fact that, as Freud pointed out, in the dialectic between the pathogenic process and the process of therapeutic recovery 'the battles are not fought in the same place'—that is to say, the repetition in the transference is always indirect, and only a part of the pathogenic history is manifested in the transference relationship.

The other premise is that the essence of the analytic procedure consists in 'making the unconscious conscious', which means that conscious understanding must give rise to changes in the patient's experience and behaviour. De Saussure emphasises the relativity of this understanding and warns us not to mistake interpretation for a magic word (we may misunderstand and forget). If the analyst fails with his verbal magic, he may become disillusioned with his specific tools and resort to various expedients and techniques which will eventually take him outside the framework of psychoanalysis. As de Saussure points out, we