Letter to the Editor

In his latest paper published in the IJP, Thomas Ogden explores the vital necessity of inventing psychoanalysis with every new patient. This is, of course, not a new idea. As early as 1979, Lacan had already declared: “it’s really annoying that every psychoanalyst should be forced – because they have to – to reinvent psychoanalysis”. Indeed, this classic issue lays bare a deep, fundamental question, regarding the very foundations of our practice – and its potential collapse.

According to me, however, Ogden’s views on this issue represent a mortal danger for psychoanalysis.

He begins with a number of valid and compelling points. For example, although this opens up significant problems, he rightly observes that “there is no ‘standard technique’” (5) in psychoanalysis. One can also agree with his assertion that “becoming a psychoanalyst is not a distinction conferred by a psychoanalytic training program”, or with his claim that “a graduate of a psychoanalytic institute has successfully completed the requirements of that training program, but a psychoanalytic institute does not hold the power to confer to the graduate the identity of a psychoanalyst” (1). On this basis, we can agree with him that the specificity of psychoanalysis (“What does it mean to invent psychoanalysis with each patient?”) leads to a number of essential questions.

Despite the relevance of these questions, Ogden’s argument strikes me as problematic. In my view, the notion of a “psychoanalytic identity” – which I see as the cornerstone of his argument – risks undermining the very principles that psychoanalysis is built upon. He writes: “I am practising psychoanalysis because I am a psychoanalyst: that is who I am, how I think, what I do. I am incapable of doing anything else when working with a patient. It would not be me” (3). To my mind, this central assertion is both theoretically and clinically troubling.

Theoretically speaking, the identity of the analyst as analyst cannot serve as a safeguard again