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Read at the First Latin-American Congress of Mental Health, São Paulo, on July 22, 1954, and published in the 1956 Psychoanalytic Review, 43: 261–271.
The analytic process has two different yet interrelated aspects: that which takes place in the analysand and that which occurs in the analyst. In studying this process we must remember that, in the words of Freud (17, p. 378), “the work of analysis consists of two quite different portions, that it involves two people, to each of whom a distinct task is assigned.” It is necessary, therefore, to take into account these two aspects, not losing sight of the fact, however, that they influence each other mutually and, in order to understand one of them, it is necessary to understand the other. Let us examine first what occurs in the analysand, and later what takes place in the analyst.
The dynamic element of the analytic process, as in each and every psycho-therapeutic process, is the phenomenon of transference. Already in his early works Freud has demonstrated the importance of this phenomenon in psychoanalysis and its role in the fight against resistances. Analytical cure was accordingly conceived to be a process of overcoming resistances by the use of transference.
A more profound knowledge of this process and how it develops within the personality of the patient was, however, only possible because of the stimulus given it by Freud’s studies on hypnosis and on the structural division of the psychic apparatus consolidated in his books Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and The Ego and the Id, which were published in 1921 and 1923, respectively. Thus it was that in the symposium on the theory
of technique and treatment that took place at the International Psycho-Analytical Congress of Salzburg in 1924, works appeared (1, 22, 23) that gave rise to new perspectives for the understanding of the cure, by focalizing on the modification of the superego and the effect wrought upon it in the transference.
Of these studies