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The theory of psychoanalytic technique has been given more attention than the psychological process produced by those techniques, while the techniques themselves have not been sufficiently detailed. The psychoanalytic process (although spoken about widely as if there is general agreement about what it constitutes) is not very frequently clearly defined. Freud's economic view that the analysis of resistance redirects and makes energy available for other purposes is a theoretical reconstruction of the therapeutic process which falls short of providing us with a model of therapy, just as do the many clinical descriptions of it.
In 'The facts of observation in psychoanalysis', Siegfried Bernfeld (1941) makes use of ordinary conversation as the paradigm for the analytic process; and in doing so he provides a clear and useful conceptual definition and model of that process. It is striking that at a time when there is so much interest in the analytic process, Bernfeld's clear, concise, and classical contribution is referred to so rarely and seems to be so little known to contemporary psychoanalysts. We believe that if this unfamiliarity is real, it represents a lacuna which warrants filling.
The analytic situation, Bernfeld believes, is a special variant of the usual dialogue between people, specifically modified in order to make certain observations. Simply stated, Bernfeld charted the 'conversation' of analysis as proceeding in a recognizable form from 'usual behaviour' to the 'state of hiding a secret' (resistance, or the obstacle to communication) to the 'confession of the secret' and then to the return to the 'usual behaviour'. Between 'hiding the secret' and the 'confession', Bernfeld interposed 'intervention' (the process of interpretation).
We would add that Bernfeld, in presenting us with this model and its schematic sequence, also focuses on the essentially dialectic nature of the psychoanalytic process and (at least inadvertently) points to its inherent 'inte