Some Notes on Psychoanalytic Theory and its Consequences for Technique

While I agree with much of the Richards' appraisal of Kohut, I believe they carry it to excess when they claim that Kohutian interpretation only “relabels manifest content” (p. 13). There is a difference between indoctrination, which is suggested by the Richards' critique, and the inevitable theory ladenness of interpretation. The Richards themselves amply demonstrate their own appreciation of this substantive issue in the paper they have written. But consider the dream material used by the Richards to argue that Kohutian analysis only “relabels” (p. 436) manifest content. Granted that a theory laden, free associational technique to dream content details is not evident. Granted that the analysand's own interpretative comments relate to a self as a “superordinate structure of the mind” (p. 436). But still, how does one get from the “character in me … with the hard hat [who] goes around freely,” and the “image of a structure that could be rebuilt” (p. 438), to the analysand's later comments that he still continues to need the analyst's valuation in order to value himself? Is this not a bona fide interpretation from manifest dream content to transference experience? Inasmuch as Kohut's (1977) theory of pathogenesis conceives of psychosexual and aggressive drive material as “fragmentation” phenomena which are the result of self disturbance, one would not expect a Kohutian analyst to want to gather free associations to dream elements such as the “hard hat.” What free associations would occur to a “hard hat” would, of course, be of great interest to analysts such as the Richards, or myself, who practice with some type of classical psychoanalysis. Consequently, I believe the Richards are right to say that, in such a more classical practice,