Chapter 15 The Analyst's Vocabulary

Time and again it is claimed that formal empirical research in psychoanalysis has no consequence for practice, and vice-versa. This is true as long as clinicians and researchers do not communicate with each other. For more than two decades, a few analysts have been actively involved in the empirical study of their clinical practice based on tape-recorded sessions, which has presented them with both intellectual and emotional challenges. The long struggle to obtain official recognition of tape recording as a valid research tool—initiated many years ago by Shakow, Gill and others—may not yet be over. However, the opportunities offered by the tape recording of psychoanalytic treatments for training and practice were appreciated by James McLaughlin at the International Psychoanalytic Association Congress held in Helsinki in 1982 (see Thomä and Kächele 1992:24).

One advantage of tape recording is that it makes it feasible to study in great detail the analyst’s actual use of psychoanalytic theories. Psychoanalytic technique involves a number of parameters that stress the importance of language as its central tool. Freud’s (1916) famous dictum in the ‘Introductory lectures’—‘there is only an exchange of words in the analytic situation’ (17)—specifies from a didactic perspective the focus of the psychoanalytic method. In general, language consists of rules and symbolic representations that are primarily conceptual tools. This understanding of its symbolic function, which goes back to the work of Cassier (1953), has been brought to the attention of the analytic community in particular by the work of Susanne Langer (1942).

Since Freud developed his own rather idiosyncratic way of understanding symbols, some conceptual work with the different usage of the term ‘symbol’ had to be done. Victor Rosen, in his paper on ‘Sign phenomena and their relationship to unconscious meaning’ (1969), demonstrated that the work of the psychoanalyst can be conceptualized as a process of differenti