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The panel ‘Changing Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy into Psychoanalysis’ was not well attended and there was a question at the beginning about whether the panel should go ahead with so few people in attendance. The panel Chair, Dr Hermann Beland, made the decision to go ahead, and while seemingly dealing with a rather straightforward question, the panel in fact touched on profound issues in our field connected to the question of what defines psychoanalysis.
The first paper, read by Dr Ted Jacobs from New York for the author, who unfortunately was absent due to illness, presented a straightforward optimistic approach to the problem of converting psychoanalytic psychotherapy to psychoanalysis. Dr Rothstein expressed his deeply felt conviction that psychoanalysis is the treatment of choice and that it is the task of psychoanalysts to demonstrate this to their patients: in a phase preparatory to treatment, the analyst should show the patient how psychoanalysis works. In the relatively rare cases where this preparatory phase does not lead to an analytic situation, Dr Rothstein prefers to refer the patient to a different analyst for psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Dr Rothstein assumes that people are analysable. He is less interested in diagnosis than in the attitude of the analyst and asserts that the analyst's attitude defines the analysis. He feels that the analyst needs to be tolerant; if the analysis does not work out, it is not the patient who fails, but the analyst. Dr Rothstein suggests that analysts should regard their pessimism as countertransference.
In the discussion of Dr Rothstein's paper, the point was made that there are disagreements about the difference between analysis and therapy. For example, three times a week is not considered analysis in London but is accepted as analysis in some analytic institutes in the United States. Ted Jacobs turned our focus to the analytic process by asserting that where there is not process, there is not analysis. The patient mig