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This work, written in a lively colloquial style, deals with the analyst's daily work in the consulting room, with particular attention to details that have been almost ignored
in the psychoanalytic literature. The author tells us that she has developed a kind of musical ear while supervising young candidates: listening to their reports, which are often enriched by private comments that usually supply the most profound meaning of what is happening, she hears a dissonance, a false note, when it seems that the two participants have lost contact with each other, when each is going off on his or her own.
The author says that she tends to identify with the patient and very often finds herself agreeing with the patient's follow-up, which can be considered a response, a comment on the analyst's intervention. This experience has led to a way of considering the reciprocity in the here and now of the session as a "spiral dialogue" in which every communication of the two parties contains both a conscious and an unconscious response, within the reality relationship, to the preceding communication and determines the follow-up.
The specific objects of this study are: 1) the analytic exchange in the here and now of the session, with its characteristic spiral dialogue; 2) communication between people and the difficulties attendant on it; 3) the impact of the analyst's personality on the development of the analysis; 4) the analyst's resistances; 5) the need to learn the patient's language; 6) the problem of social and cultural differences between analyst and patient, with particular attention to problems arising from different genders; 7) collusions between analyst and patient.
All these points are examined with particular reference to the analyst. The red thread that runs through all these themes is the conviction that the analyst's anxiety and relative defenses and resistances can be just as great an obstacle to the development of the analysis as any of the better known and stu