Authority in the Analytic Relationship

Gemma Jappe introduced the meeting by stating that psychoanalysis has undergone vast changes in the past century, but its core concern with individual freedom and attention to subjectivity has remained constant. Questions concerning authority are therefore crucial, and this panel planned to explore the theme through three presentations.

Ellen Rees then presented her paper, ‘The analyst's authority: an epistemological perspective’. In this she asked: Is the analyst's authority to interpret grounded in a body of knowledge that can be critically assessed, validated or potentially tested? In other words, does the content of an interpretation describe something real in the psyche or is it part of a narrative construction? Further, how do we decide if one hypothesis is better than another and on what basis do we change our minds about an idea or model we use? Psychoanalysis has used two traditions for the provision of methodologies for epistemological efforts: the philosophical (latterly herme-neutic) and the empirical. The former is characterised by attention to coherence and consistency, the latter by attention to truth and falsity. In addition, both traditions have had to face the problematic nature of psychoanalytic data—the inferences we make about unconscious content and processes. Edelson, for example, has argued that the procedures and methods of reasoning that characterise scientific activity are independent of subject matter. We can study mental phenomena in an interpersonal context provided we define rigorously the domains and entities that concern us. We need certain minimal standards for making case studies, for example, clear hypotheses, an alternative hypothesis, use of our hypothesis to account for observations, a noting of contradictions affecting the hypothesis, an account of the influence of subjective factors affecting observations and the provision of a method of generalisation to other cases. These are the tools of enquiry that give the analyst author