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Psychoanalysis is not psychoanalysis just because two people are talking on a regular basis or one is lying on a couch and the other behind. To be psychoanalysis there has to be a setting, a frame. This necessarily implies a theoretical structure defining it, which comes from outside. In other words, as Dana Birksted-Breen wrote in her introductory foreword, the two-person situation has a theory as its ‘third object’. This is why the theories underlying how the analyst listens, thinks about the patient and intervenes, which may vary with practitioners but must always be there in at least implicit form, are an inherently necessary feature: defining, so to speak, the model with which the practitioner works.
In the late 1980s, Wallerstein (1988, 1990), after about two decades of what had become known in the United States as theoretical pluralism, began to inquire into the common ground in psychoanalytic practice. He emphasized transference and resistance, only to spark an immediate response that they were understood very differently in different places (Schafer, 1990; see also Abrams, 1989).
In a sense the project described in this book began from Wallerstein’s question, but we have attempted to explore the matter more empirically. We also wished to mobilize the psychoanalytic community not only to become more interested in clarifying what each psychoanalyst was doing but also to try to understand and communicate better with each other about it. In Chapter 1, I outlined the many negative consequences for the creative development of psychoanalysis
as a credible and specific discipline; if we are unable to define what psychoanalysis is even among ourselves in a world of ever increasing psychotherapeutic approaches and a blurring of boundaries between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
The project started in Europe, where psychoanalysis is practised in more than twenty languages and with very different traditions. The method we have described in this book to explore and co