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Dear Editors,
In her excellent clinical example The analyst at work: Boys only! No mothers allowed (IJP 90:1-11), Dr. Smolen uses a phrase in passing that brought us
up short: “… I interpreted his rage in the transference …’ (p. 3). Although we must have passed over similar phrases in the writings of hundreds of other analysts, on this occasion we noticed that we had no idea what she meant, i.e. what the analyst actually said to the patient. It is a tribute to the clarity of the rest of Dr. Smolen's contribution that this time the phrase stood out. Did she tell Géorgie he was raging at her? Did she tell him he was worried about how angry he was? Did she tell him what he did to avoid feeling his rage? Did she tell him where his rage came from? Did she tell him from whom the rage was transferred? Or did she mean she told him he was trying to make her feel like a nobody, and if so, did she tell him how or why?
There are many other possible meanings to Dr. Smolen's phrase that we haven't listed, and many more that we haven't thought of. The larger question is about the state of our field and our literature, especially our case reports: how is it that we have come to accept, or not even to notice, that our technical language conceals more than it reveals about our work?
We are aware that it is not really fair to use Dr. Smolen's report to make this point, as she is otherwise very explicit about how she works. We expect that she would join us in hoping that the trend in our clinical reports should continue to be to say what we do, rather than what name we ascribe to what we do.