Frontline: Who is the Psychoanalyst?

When Odysseus visited Hades in Book XI of the Odyssey, the shades of the dead gathered around him but remained frozen in silence. Tiresias directed Odysseus to make them an offering of blood, whereupon the shades began to tell him their stories. Hans Loewald (1960) suggested that the psychoanalyst offers his own flesh and blood to the ghosts that haunt his patients, enabling them to express their ancient grievances through the medium of the analyst's person. The aim of an analysis, Loewald said, was to turn these frightening ghosts into helpful ancestors.

This description of the analyst's role has always seemed more accurate to me than the image of a blank screen passively intercepting the patient's projections. Fantasies about the important people in a patient's life are not only externalized in the course of an analysis, but, through the interaction with the analyst, brought to life. Otherwise they can have no emotional resonance for the patient. This creates a serious responsibility for the analyst, who must accept his role as a medium but at the same time maintain a clear distance from the various personages being conjured by the patient.

The blank screen advocates believe that to maintain this distance the analyst must remain incognito. Any indication that the analyst leads a normal human life, according to this viewpoint, is an invitation for the ghosts to take possession of him. Complying with this doctrine requires the analyst to suppress his individual taste in furnishing his office, to remain neutral whenever differences of opinion are at issue, and to withhold expressions of feeling. The assumption is that the patient knows that the analyst is an empathic and competent professional person without any actual demonstration of these qualities.

I doubt that any patient can believe his analyst is everything the analyst is supposed to be without evidence. Why should he? Usually, a reasonable facsimile of such belief is offered by patients whose analysis is part of