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Little has been said over the years about optimism in psychoanalytic treatment. For the most part, the psychoanalytic literature has primarily dealt with excessive optimism as a pathological character trait (e.g., Akhtar 1996). Is there anything new we can say about optimism? In this brief communication, I will share some observations I have made about optimistic turns in psychoanalytic treatment and a method of working with it.
It is my impression that there is frequently a moment or a series of moments in which patients not known for their sunny demeanor express a feeling of moving forward in the treatment. This feeling is frequently expressed via a series of associations or a dream, the meaning of which is not immediately available to the patient. This lends a certain authenticity to the feeling, in contrast to what we see when a patient tells us about his or her optimistic feeling, a statement that can be offered for multiple purposes. Further, the authentically optimistic feeling is most often expressed in a conflicted manner, as one might expect.
It seems likely that important consequences for the analysis ensue from how the analyst handles this clinical moment when a conflicted, preconsciously expressed optimistic feeling about the patient's capacity to move forward in treatment is expressed. I find little in the psychoanalytic literature specifically about how to deal technically with such a moment, even though I assume we have all observed these signs of conflicted optimism about the move forward.1