You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The fact that the clinical practice of analysis, in its connection with theory and method, constitutes an essential and indispensable lynch-pin of psychoanalytic research, must be universally accepted as self-evident. Freud's epistemology anticipates the development of clinical practice even in 1915: it is certain that the material from Freud's treatments gives rise to the construction of his metapsychology and its reappraisals and renewals. However, it is equally certain that our understanding of this clinical material is influenced if not shaped by our understanding of Freud's models. There are therefore constant shifts between theory and clinical practice, and it is these shifts and this dialectic that allow for tension and lively dynamics to be maintained in conducting treatments and developing our ‘young science’.
This begins to explain the extent to which clinical material plays a determining role and above all how it can be used for communication and transmission (Blass, 2013, p. 1129-34). The interest of the controversy that concerns us is therefore constantly active in our work: listening, interpreting, constructing, transmitting. These components of the analytic situation are constantly present in debates between analysts but equally in our internal debates, given that the psychoanalyst's profession is primarily a solitary one.
Before going to the heart of this debate, I should like to mention the intellectual development that constitutes the anchoring of our analytic endeavours: the Freudian process that evolves through his works asserts and illustrates, with a tenacity that stands uncontested, the close connections between theory and clinical method and reveals the dynamics and effects of change in a singular way.
Let us remember the two major developments that appear in Freud's work, supported by the two paradigms constituted first by hysteria, and then by narcissism and melancholia. One pr