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Psychoanalytic treatment aims not simply at removal of symptoms but at basic characterologic improvement. Although change in psychoanalytic treatment is traditionally attributed primarily to insight, the author asserts that insight, although valuable, is not essential to the achievement of such change. Other elements basic to the therapeutic efficacy of all psychoanalytic techniques regardless of their theoretical orientation are discussed. Among additional factors, the implications of warmth and activity on the part of the analyst, and of setting a termination-date, are specifically elaborated on.
What do we mean by change in psychoanalytic treatment? I believe we would all agree that basically one of the things which distinguishes the goal of psychoanalytic treatment from that of most other therapies is that it aims not simply at removal of symptoms but at basic characterologic change. Whether these changes are subsumed under the concept of genitality, as in libido theory, or under such concepts as self-realization or the full development of the self, I believe it is clear that they are concerned with basically similar goals of improving the ego-adaptive