Commentary 11

The psychoanalytic culture to which Miss A's analyst belongs is undoubtedly very different from that of the majority of analysts trained in France: the style of the interventions and their frequency are a long way removed from ‘the French way of analysing’. In the majority of cases, the French analysts who are members of the IPA have adopted a technical approach that seeks to avoid a large number of lengthy and explanatory interpretations. In writing this commentary, I even found myself feeling envious of a patient who received 16 interpretations in one session—that is to say, more than I received myself in over 10 years of personal analysis.

However, aside from what are essentially customs relating to technique, it is likely that the session reported by Miss A's analyst is a key session and that the number of interpretations made by the analyst is linked to the emergence of a productive moment in the analysis, from which the analyst is seeking to draw out all the valuable possibilities. It is likely that other sessions from this patient's analysis have taken a very different course and that the analyst has intervened less in these. Furthermore, he indicates this in his introduction, by telling us that he was afraid of imposing his mode of understanding on Miss A in a way that would repeat the domination exercised by her father.

In the session that is reported to us, the first interpretation, relating to two periods of time, opens a chink in the patient's usual defensive armour. Given what he knows about his patient, the analyst is justifiably concerned to prevent this chink closing up and it seems to me that it is this concern that induces a greater interpretive activity on the part of the analyst during the remainder of the session.

In my view, the first interpretation is an ideal one that any analyst would be pleased to have made. It illustrates the analyst's use of countertransferential impressions and associative memory and his capacities for identifying with his