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Attempts to offer psychoanalytic treatment to patients previously considered unsuitable make Freud's aphorism of the opening of a chess game no longer applicable. This collection of papers offers a varied and current assessment of the issues and problems of beginning an analysis. They emphasize the discrepancy between "what candidate analysts are taught (and/or wish to believe) and what
experienced graduate analysts actually do in their practices. This discrepancy derives in part from an exclusive emphasis on interpretation and insight in conceptions of analytic process and mode of therapeutic action, as well as corollary aversion for considering what else, in addition to interpretation, takes place in well conducted analyses. The seemingly interminable search for the good analysand with whom the candidate analyst can employ an uncontaminated analytic model contributes to an inhibition to many colleagues' efforts to begin analyses and develop analytic practices" (p. 273).
In Part I, Henry Bachrach summarizes research studies on analyzability. Analyzability and ultimate outcome are extremely difficult to predict at the beginning. Although most patients for whom analysis appears indicated will derive therapeutic benefit, only half will undergo a full analytic process. Only after termination can the analysand be effectively evaluated as to whether he or she was analyzable.
Morton and Estelle Shane emphasize a developmental approach to analyzability and the initiation of an analytic process. The analyst seeks to meet the patient at the arrested level of function and anticipates that the new experience with the analyst will stimulate and protect development of previously arrested capacities. They present a patient for whom it was necessary for the analyst to spend four months serving as a selfobject for the patient's capacity to strengthen her own sense of identity and selfhood. They maintain that this phase of analytic experience was necessary to enable the pa