Corrective Emotional Experience Revisited1

André Haynal's paper, Corrective emotional experience revisited, examines Alexander as a biographical figure and, in particular, explores his relationship with Sándor Ferenczi in order to understand the sources of Alexander's analytic thought and innovations.

Haynal reminds us that Alexander arrived in Berlin in 1920 from Budapest and joined the Berlin Institute, where analysts were exploring variations in analytic technique, including session length, session frequency, and the absence of fees, in order to better identify and distill how analytic change occurs. Alexander adopted several analytic ideas from Ferenczi, including the desire to make analysis as efficient as possible, the relative unimportance of neutrality in the analyst, the importance of flexible analytic technique and of countertransference as an instrument to understand the patient, and the conveyance of such reactions in an emotional message to the patient. Alexander believed that the curative components in analysis are comprised not just of insights, but also of emotional experiences in the relationship between analyst and analysand.

Haynal reminds us that neither Ferenczi nor Alexander was an “exclusively relational analyst,” but that Alexander believed that analysts should “be able to adapt to the psychotherapeutic requests and to the modifications of attitude they imply.” Haynal notes that Alexander's idea of a corrective emotional experience is similar to the concept of Balint's new beginning, of building a new object in therapy, different from the old object, which has been introjected on the basis of painful past relationships. Haynal dates the origins of the idea of corrective emotional experience to Alexander's oft-cited paper, The therapeutic factors in analytic treatment , in which Alexander discusses inadvertently revealing his irritation to a patient, thereby participating in an enactment. Haynal notes that Alexander generally favored