On “The Metapsychology of the Analyst,” by Robert Fliess

In this essay of 1942, Robert Fliess takes an early, historically significant step toward defining the part played in the psychoanalytic process by the analyst's personality. In his key move, Fliess deconstructs the concept empathy: he proposes that the ego enters into the analysand's subjective experience through trial identification, achieved and processed in a series of steps, and that this identification is effected by the analyst's work ego. That transformed ego is the product of modified ego—superego relations that involve the superego's transfer to the ego of the cathexes reserved for critical self-evaluation; this transfer allows the ego to develop and regulate trial identifications with analysands' passions and conflicts.

The superego's collaboration with the ego is its permissive response to the ego's having set aside its other narcissistically cathected interests so that it can fulfill its professional and scientific responsibilities. Fliess assiduously situates and articulates his main concepts within the three established metapsychological perspectives: the dynamic, the structural, and the psychoeconomic.

Equally noteworthy is Fliess's bold favoring of individualized accounts of analysts at work. These accounts recognize differences in aptitude and application. The usual “categorical” accounts, although useful in setting forth general principles, cannot adequately render the personal element in the psychoanalytic process. In this regard, Fliess discusses how the analyst's trial identification