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The aim of modern psychoanalysis is not to provide a corrective emotional experience, to offer insight, to reconstruct the past, to afford catharsis, or to repair the ego, although all these things may occur. The purpose of treatment is for the analyst to resolve the patient's resistance to feeling, thinking and remembering everything—and putting it all into words.
What Spotnitz and his colleagues call Modern Psychoanalysis is an expansion of classical technique that evolved in response to the impasses that tended to develop in the treatment of preoedipal conditions. Finding that interpretation was not usually effective with such patients, modern psychoanalysts extended the range of their interventions. They regard a most significant contribution to technique as being the emphasis on the role of emotional communication, especially in the analyst's interventions.
Freud's writings have provided the source for two lines of development of psychoanalytic technique. In one, described by Sterba in 1934, the analyst helps the patient to dissociate the reasonable part of the ego from the drives and defenses that arise in the transference. The analyst and patient, together examine the events of the transference in a state of affective detachment. This procedure is reminiscent of Wordsworth's definition of poetry as emotion recollected in