You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This paper will try to apply some of our knowledge and theory about sleep and the dream to an understanding of the analytic situation, which is here defined, empirically, as the familiar standard hour, or loosely, as 'what happens on the couch'; and sometimes the word 'couch' will be used metaphorically as synonymous with 'analytic situation'. Included in the idea of analytic situation are the phenomena of free association, resistance, transference, repetition, and others well known and generally admitted as working concepts.
Genetically, the analytic situation is an altered hypnotic situation, as the analytic hour is an altered hypnotic session. The analytic patient takes his origin from the hypnotic patient, for originally Freud's patients were attracted to therapy by their knowledge of cures due to hypnosis. The development of analysis from hypnosis has been studied and told with much detail and perspicacity by Ernest Jones (1953). It seems that some patients could not be hypnotized, or they 'countersuggested' too vigorously; that is, they had a resistance to being hypnotized or, more likely, a fear of being put to sleep. The refractory patient made the following as if proposal that the treatment be modified: 'Although I cannot, for reasons of my own, let myself be put to sleep,1 or into a state resembling sleep, nevertheless, I promise to relax as if I were in bed and to tell everything that comes to me in this quasi-hypnotic or