The Role of Learning in the Psychoanalytic Relationship

I believe that learning plays a central role in psychoanalytic treatment. The psychoanalyst-patient relationship is essentially a teaching-learning alliance similar to the parent-child relationship. For the psychoanalytic treatment to succeed, it is crucial that the psychoanalytic relationship produce throughout all the stages of the analysis a “corrective emotional experience” (Alexander 1946). Although Alexander's concept has been controversial, I believe it is a very valid and useful concept. “There is no doubt that the analyst provides the matrix for a ‘corrective emotional experience’ by being (rather than acting) different from the parent, by simply doing the work of the analyst, by being committed to the patient and by trying to understand” (Shapiro, 1983). The learning process in analysis takes place within the context of the psychoanalytic relationship and is experiential in nature. It is the corrective emotional experience of the patient together with the caring and interpretive work of the analyst that promotes therapeutic learning. This learning has a healing effect on the patient's mental illness and re-organizes and re-integrates his personality and his behavior.

Freud (1957) recognized this quality of psychoanalytic treatment, for in 1920 he wrote in the Encyclopedia Britanica: “Thus psychoanalytic treatment acts as a second education of the adult, as a correction to his education, as a child” (p. 18). And shortly before his death, in his last work, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud (1949) again returned to the concept of education in the parent-child relationship on one hand and analyst-patient relationship on the other. He wrote, “The new super ego (the analyst) now has an opportunity for a sort of after-education