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In this chapter I want to consider the significance of the analyst’s sense of conviction or lack of conviction about what is going on in the patient and in the session, and the degree of conviction with which the analyst’s interpretation is invested. I am going to raise questions about the origins of such feelings of conviction or doubt – to what extent they reflect processes within the analyst, to what extent they derive from the patient’s pressures or projections, how these elements interact, and their possible effects on the movement in the session.
It is essential for analysts to have a degree of confidence in themselves, in their work, and in the analytic process. This derives from their experience, their interaction with colleagues, and, most importantly, from a relatively benign relationship with their internal objects. It is, of course, also necessary for analysts to be open to, and to be able to tolerate, a degree of uncertainty, doubt and confusion. Ideally, they are able to sustain a dynamic relationship between these different states of mind, on which creative work depends.
What I want to consider, however, is the situation in which various internal and external pressures interfere with this dynamic balance. This arises when analysts invest their understanding, their ideas or their interpretations with an inappropriate degree of conviction, on the one hand, or when they are filled with doubt and confusion, on the other. Analysts may respond to their state of doubt and confusion by seizing upon it in turn, and investing their formulations about it with conviction. Such states of mind interfere with the analyst’s flexibility, and the development of the session. Yet when the analyst is able to recognize the nature of such inevitable and necessary transient states, they can become the basis for further understanding of the analytic interaction.
Britton and Steiner (1994) addressed some of the issues that I am raising in their valuable paper ‘Interpretation: