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Freud's major contribution to the understanding of human behavior has been the revolutionary discovery that we perceive the world through a screen of private and often unconscious meanings. Psychoanalytic therapy endeavors to make these unconscious meanings conscious so that analysands can experience the world more appropriately, thereby improving their relationship to the world around them.
Because of its interpretative nature the analytic process has often been called “uncovering” or “insight providing.” Its major instrumentality is the interpretation of the unconscious meaning of transference and resistance phenomena. Input from the realistic environment, including visual feedback from the analyst, is reduced in the treatment situation, often by placing the patient on the couch, to encourage the emergence and facilitate the recognition of unconscious phenomena. A special way of listening—which Reik (1948) poetically called “listening with the third ear”—focuses on hidden unconscious meanings in the patient's production, on repressed material, and on repressing and otherwise distorting influences.
Psychoanalytic arrangements and techniques are thus designed to diminish the influence and the significance of reality in the analytic situation. Later developments, especially the introduction of the adaptational point of view in ego psychology, restored some of the importance of environmental circumstances. But in the training of future analysts, aiming at the enhancement of the student's perception of unconscious events, the significance of realistic aspects of the treatment situation has been intentionally underplayed and their influence on the analytic relationship has been underrated.