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That I place psychotherapy alongside and on the same level as psychoanalysis does not mean, however, that I regard them as being part of one and the same vague ensemble. So as not to create any misunderstanding, let me repeat that for me psychoanalysis remains the model; the psychotherapies result essentially from the impossibility of creating a situation which respects the requirements of this model. Psychoanalysis remains in any case the reference. Let us begin, then, with the psychoanalytic treatment. It is perhaps as well to acknowledge right away, though, that the plural is more apposite. The model is the abstraction to which diverse realizations refer.
I do not intend in this chapter to give a detailed description of the process of what, in France, used to be called la cure type (classical treatment on the couch), but which is no longer often referred to thus. First, because no description, however precise it may be, can have the ambition of summing up the essential characteristics of a treatment, such is the variety of the polymorphism of the manifestations that can be observed in it; and, above all, because what is expressed there is first and foremost the singularity of an experience specific to a unique subject. Second, because, as Freud pointed out, psychoanalytic treatment is like a game of chess; only the opening and closing moves can be described. As for the rest of the game, that is to say, the main body of the exchanges, no generalization is possible owing to the complexity and the multiplicity of configurations possible. In the 1970s, Viderman subjected the postulates and axioms of the treatment to a close critique, challenging the basic principles of
the theory of Freud’s technique. Though his ideas made a lot of noise at the time when his principal work, La construction de l’espace analytique,1 was published, it is to be regretted that it did so much to whet our appetite only to leave us unsatisfied when it came to deciding whi