Discussion of the Smolar Paper: Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique

Dear Dr. Smolar,

Our editors enjoyed reading your excellent paper, and all were particularly impressed by your refreshing candor in reporting the clinical problems which you encountered “in the crucible.”

However, we found that the title is somewhat inaccurate as a representation of the focus of the paper, which is about the difficulty in maintaining an analytic or neutral stance in the presence of severely regressive transference pressure. The patients may or may not have had incestuous experiences (this is surmised but not proven in the paper) and their transferences varied from the intensely negative to the intensely positive. The difficulty to our mind lay in the patients' severe regressions, faulty reality testing, primitivity, pressure to enact, and so forth. These transferences induced you, as you were honest enough to describe, to depart very widely from our usual techniques in an effort to respond to and control the transferences. That these departures tended to backfire and induce further regression would not surprise the analytically trained reader. What is valuable, however, is your candor in describing what happened.

So we would suggest that you consider recasting the paper, moving away from a focus on incest, toward a focus on technical variations, remaining all the while in the crucible. You might consider including a detailed discussion of your technical maneuvers and the consequences of these maneuvers, against the background of current controversies about active techniques.