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For some years now, it has seemed to me that important aspects of my way of practising psychoanalysis are better described as an analytic style than as an analytic technique. Though style and technique are inseparable, for the purposes of the present discussion, I will use the term analytic technique to refer to a way of practising analysis that has been, to a large extent, developed by a branch or group of branches of one’s analytic ancestry, as opposed to being a creation of one’s own. By contrast, analytic style is not a set of principles of practice, but a living process that has its origins in the personality and experience of the analyst.
The term analytic style, as I am using it, puts equal emphasis on the word analytic as on the word style. Not every style that an analyst may adopt is analytic, and not every way of practising psychoanalysis bears the unique mark (the “style”) of the analyst. The idea of analytic style places greater emphasis than does the concept of analytic technique on the role of (1) the analyst’s use of, and capacity to speak from, the unique qualities of his personality; (2) the analyst’s making use of his own experience as analyst, analysand, parent, child, spouse, teacher, student, friend and so on; (3) the analyst’s ability to think in a way that draws on, but is independent of, the analytic theory and clinical technique of his analyst, supervisors, analytic colleagues and analytic ancestors; the analyst must learn analytic theory and technique so thoroughly that one day he will be able to forget them (Ogden, 2005a); and (4) the responsibility of the analyst to invent psychoanalysis freshly with each patient (Ogden, 2004a).