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Jonathan Slavin, a psychoanalyst and clinical instructor in psychology, Harvard Medical School, has written a provocative paper that questions the primacy of the ‘analytic self’ (as opposed to the ‘personal self’) as being the primary catalyst in helping the patient to experience real change and growth. In support of this view, he cites Anna Freud (1954, p. 618):
With due respect for the necessary strictest handling and interpretation of the transference, I still feel that somewhere we should leave room for the realization that the analyst and patient are also two real people, of equal adult status, in a real personal relationship to each other. I wonder whether our - at times complete - neglect of this side of the matter is not responsible for some of the hostile reactions which we get from our patients and which we are apt to ascribe only to ‘true transference’. But these are technically subversive thoughts and ought to be ‘handled with care’.
Slavin suggests that several Freudian recommendations are clinically questionable. For example, the idea of neutrality, that is, a mental position from which the analyst would work to reduce or eliminate analytic influence on the patient's mind, he sees as unrealistic. Further, he states that the ‘transference cure’ is really not a cure but rather a substitution for the voice of the original parental authority with the voice of the analyst's authority in the patient's mind. And yet, one could say that the ‘transference cure’ is a stage in the process of the patient's working through to his own voice.
Further subversive thoughts from the author include questioning the idea of the analyst as an ‘analyzing instrument’ which is alleged to be separate from the analyst's personal mind. Another such thought is the metaphor of analyst as surgeon, which idealizes coldness or absence of personal feeling or involvement. David Lynn's review of Freud's analysis of Edith Jackson-someone for whom he was teacher and mentor and to whom he freel