Otto Isakower and the Analyzing Instrument

Otto Isakower's reserve in publishing his views on the analyzing instrument may be related to the reasons his entire published oeuvre is so small. Some of the reasons may be personal, and we know nothing of these. However, even the minutes' indirect rendition of Isakower's remarks convey some characteristic abrasiveness in the presentation of his ideas and in his responses to the questions and challenges of others; while, at the same time, they convey tentativeness regarding his formulation of the analyzing instrument. It may be that he wished to perfect the notion before presenting it to the psychoanalytic public and to potential critics to whom he could not respond directly. Perhaps he wanted the faculty of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute first to confirm the value of his idea, and perhaps he felt such confirmation was not forthcoming or not forthcoming enough. Isakower was particularly sensitive to this sort of intellectual friction. In our personal contact with him, we knew first-hand his reactive irritation when, after well-considered exposition of an idea, he still encountered misunderstanding and the need for further clarification. In this regard, his hostility toward journal editors as a species cannot be completely irrelevant. At any rate, Isakower did not leave us any published formal presentation of his views on a subject which he felt to be of the greatest importance to psychoanalytic method.

This absence in the literature may in part explain why the concept of the analyzing instrument has not been widely discussed, why there has been no commonly accepted definition of the concept, and why