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How do we know when what is happening between two people should be called psychoanalysis?
What is a psychoanalytic process?
How do we know when one is taking place?
Recognizing difference provides scope for thought. Comparison aids reflection. Difference, differentiation and comparison allow articulated thought and are at the heart of much creative development in many fields. But difference is also a potential fault line at the heart of the human psyche - and one along which prejudice, stigma, projection and xenocidal impulses can flow.
This book is about developing ways to describe and compare different methods of practising as a psychoanalyst. The aspiration behind the project is to develop ways of learning from each other, and to provide tools for individual practitioners to examine and improve their own approach. As we will be describing, this task has led us to some surprising experiences and has raised fundamental questions about the way clinical discussion and supervision are conducted in psychoanalysis.
This chapter will describe the background to the project’s inception, the early enthusiasm, the somewhat unexpected emotional and conceptual difficulties we encountered, and the outlines of the way we came to approach them. Each of the subsequent chapters will add details and further reflection, with a final chapter looking at wider
uses of the method of clinical discussion that eventually evolved. We will argue that although psychoanalysis is unique and, therefore, incomparable, methods of practising can usefully be compared.
Different conceptions of the psychoanalytic project have existed since its beginning (see, for example, Bergmann, 2004). Before now, however, these differences have not provided the basis for a creative and sustained process of elaboration, in which the common ground of psychoanalysis has become deeper, more secure or consensual.
In Freud’s lifetime, differences over technique and practice were larg