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This paper was read at the 33rd International Psychoanalytical Congress, Madrid, July 1983, and the present version was published in 1983 by the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 64: 1–15.
The ‘talking cure’, named by Anna O. and discovered by Freud, has been widely expanded and diversified throughout our century. Our objective in the following paper is not to summarize the vast literature on the subject but to underline several points that seem to define the analytic process. We believe that progress in psychoanalysis must arise from the study of clinical experience at its frontiers, at its topmost limits, in its failures. For this reason, we have concentrated our search on the analytic non-process, in the very places where the process stumbles or halts. This has led us to propose the introduction of several terms: ‘field’, ‘bastion’, ‘second look’. When the process stumbles or halts, the analyst can only question himself about the obstacle, by encircling himself and his analy-sand, Oedipus and the Sphinx, in a second look, in a total view: this is the field. The obstacle involves the analysand’s transference and the analyst’s countertransference, and poses rather confusing problems. The arrest of the process introduces us fully to the nature of its movement, its inherent temporality. If the process is to continue, then by what main-spring can we accomplish it? Finally, we can only resort to the word, which may lead to an ‘insight’. This in turn enables us to describe this particular dialectic of process and non-process as a task of overcoming the obstacles that determine its success or failure.