The Anti-Analysand

The concept of anti-analysand was suggested by Joyce McDougall in 1972. She describes patients who seem to accept and respect scrupulously the formal aspects of analysis, but with whom the analytic process does not get underway. The anti-analysand is punctual and assiduous; he never misses a session, but remains at the level of factual narrative. Gradually, a hatred for thinking and an indifference to the internal world and to psychic life is revealed, accompanied by a denial of affects which seem frozen, except for constant mute feelings of anger towards his entourage, which is held responsible for everything that is wrong. Anti-analysands reject links, associations, and the transference relationship. In this picture we can recognise certain characteristics of narcissistic problems in which unconscious rage and destructiveness predominate. They have extracted the tangible, living nucleus of their conflict with the other; all that remains is the outer surface which is impenetrable to pain. This mode of functioning is thus akin to the “operational” mode of thinking (pensée opératoire) described by Pierre Marty and Michel de M'Uzan in psychosomatic patients. Like the patient, the analyst ends up withdrawing too, losing curiosity, no longer investing in the analysis.

Is such a patient really an anti-analysand? The analyst always has the tendency to ask himself when feeling boredom or the desire to withdraw if it is not he who is at certain moments, and/or with certain patients, an anti-analyst? Perhaps this is how one recognises in the countertransference the anti-analysands that McDougall speaks about.

Be that as it may, the patient I am referring to here respected scrupulously the analytic protocol: he was assiduous, punctual, regular, etc. He never missed a session. The detailed factual narrative was not disagreeable to listen to because he put all his talent for narrating into it in order to keep the auditor spellbound, but he was often conventional and cold in an im