Live Wires: When is the Analyst at Work?

The present edition of ‘The Analyst at Work’ elicited a brief if potentially fundamental discussion within the editorship of the IJP as to what constitutes a proper form of case report for this section. As associate editor in charge of these pages, I am often brought to suggest to our authors that they should try to report case material in a way that reflects as closely as possible what actually happened in the analysis. It seems to go without saying that if you want to see the analyst ‘at work’, then you should expect of her an accurate account of what actually took place between analyst and analysand. But what is, in our field, an ‘accurate account’? To what should the author remain faithful? There is, as we know, a long tradition of criticism towards psychoanalysis about matters such as this and there is no consensus among psychoanalysts themselves. In what follows, I wish to put forward a few personal ideas on the subject, with the hope of eliciting a wider discussion on this important and difficult issue.

For one thing, short of providing audio or video recordings, case reports are indeed reports, that is, accounts given by just one of the participants, usually without corroboration by the other party. The reader has to trust the reporter about what happened in the reported session or, for that matter, during the whole analysis. Secondly, there is the question of the ‘rawness’ of the material reported, as opposed to its being theory-laden. I leave out, for the sake of brevity, other familiar issues such as confidentiality, anonymity, criteria for assessing outcome, etc. as these are not directly at stake in the present discussion. Our two first questions - regarding accuracy and independence from theory - provide matter enough for my present purpose.

While it seems to make good sense that we should report material from a session with as much accuracy as possible, we know how such faithfulness is hampered by a series of conditions that are specific to the