The Adverb Effect

After a first promising interview, a female patient tried to block the resumption of the associative process. Indeed, in the second meeting, using speech as a form of acting, she announced abruptly: “In fact, I don't really have any big problems; I don't really need analysis. I'm just stagnating, but it's not so serious!” Taking up the adverb “really”, the psychoanalyst signalled that there existed “in fact”, concerning the formulation that imposed itself on the patient, a real inner debate. The adverb introduced a nuance, even a contradiction, between what was said and what was trying to express itself. While this intervention denounced a resistance against the transference, it simultaneously renounced the immediate search for its meaning. Instead, it attracted the patient's attention to the psychic processes at work rather than to their contents. Faced with the abruptness of such an enunciation by a patient, any interpretative response that directly sought the meaning would amount to counteracting because its purpose would be to convince. The result would be to reinforce the resistance that we are trying to overcome. In the opposite situation, for example, of the seductive impatience of a patient to begin the treatment, the analyst should proceed in the same way, namely, he/she should go around the resistance, here via the transference, without seeking to interpret it.

In both situations, the psychoanalyst must, therefore, make a side-step, shifting the focus of the too positive or too negative cathexis of which he/she is directly the object, thereby directing the patient's attention towards psychic processes and not to contents and meaning. To achieve this, adverbs constitute a tool of choice, a practical means. Indeed, it seems possible to extend to them what Freud (1925) said about negation: thanks to them “thinking frees itself from the restrictions of repression and enriches itself with material that is indispensable for its proper functioning” (p. 236).

There