The Analyst's Privacy and the Patient's Curiosity

Analysts currently disagree over a number of technical issues, among them whether to disclose personal attitudes to patients. Some contend that disclosure minimizes idealization. Others continue to advocate adherence to the traditional rule of abstinence to avoid personal influence. Dichotomies of this nature, however, unnecessarily reduce the very complex psychoanalytic process and tend to minimize the role of the unconscious. They also invite a polemical taking of sides. There is a danger in a too absolute endorsement of any set of technical rules. Technical rules are easily idealized and are probably best understood not as rules at all, but as guidelines. When technical rules become commandments, of whatever nature, for or against abstinence, for or against interpreting from the surface only, for or against self-disclosure, rules cease being used in the service of the relative neutrality necessary to help the patient understand his or her unconscious conflicts. They become, instead, the stuff of analysts' conflicts over submission and authoritarianism.

Anything more absolute than relative neutrality would seem impossible for us humans to achieve. In any given clinical moment, we attempt to find a point of balance from which we can reflect on what our patients are telling us and observe to and with them some feature that opens new vistas of awareness of self and other. That point of reflection is less an island of tranquillity in a sea of calm than a raft riding the conflicts engendered in us by the demands of our patients'