Review of “the Metapsychology of the analyst,” by Robert Fliess

Of all the changes that have taken place in psychoanalysis in the past three decades, arguably the greatest has been the radical shift that has occurred in our view of the contribution that the analyst's psychology makes to the psychoanalytic process. Few endeavors more emphatically underscore both the enormous advances that have been made in this area, and the tendency of contemporary views of the analyst's role to ignore the insights of our predecessors, than rereading Robert Fliess's classic 1942 paper, “The Metapsychology of the Analyst.”

Perhaps nothing better illustrates the gulf that separates modern thinking from that of Fliess and his contemporaries than the opening sentences of Fliess's paper, which make clear that the analyst's psychology, while interesting to study, was not considered a source of difficulty: “Of the two persons involved in the analytic situation,” he writes, “one, customarily not considered a problem, is the object of this brief metapsychologic study.” He then follows this with the statement that “while [in analysis] … the patient … moves towards becoming truly an individual, the analyst remains from beginning to end what he always is while at work: essentially a ‘categorical person'” (p. 679).1 By categorical, Fliess means, essentially,