The Art in Analysis: The Analyst's Art

The psychoanalytic literature may largely be divided into theoretical formulations and discussions of technique. These words, theory and technique, have always struck me as preemptive terms, excluding anything in the universe of analysis that smacks of aesthetic form. “Theory” and “technique” appear as often in the enterprise of physics, where theory can be applied in technology and engineering, and technique refers to the means by which machines process materials and energy. Perhaps psychoanalysis, suffering from physics envy as much or more than other biological sciences, needs these hard-edged words to bolster our verbal work and keep it a part of medical science — which itself, when our psychoanalytic pioneers first spoke of theory and technique, was nowhere near so high-tech as it is now. Grinstein's Index is practically devoid of references to analysis either as an art or artistic.

But it is no less, and perhaps even more, scientific to consider how the concept of an art describes certain aspects of what we do as analysts. The word “art” can have a technological sense, as in patent applications and in the expression “state of the art,” applied to computers and other industrial products; and the Greek root techne did refer to all manner of skills and art. But it is with the more usual sense of the word “art” that I propose to proceed here. And I shall be moving back and forth between references to art as a metaphor for what we do and as a reality. Art itself has