Alexander's Corrective Emotional Experience: An Objectivist Turn in Psychoanalytic Authority and Technique

Franz Alexander's notorious introduction of the term corrective emotional experience carried with it directions to psychoanalysts to explicitly manipulate the transference. In one fell swoop, Alexander proposed a radical revision of the concept of the neutral analyst. The first psychoanalytic candidate at the Berlin Institute and the first person to be named “Professor of Psychoanalysis” in the United States, Alexander aimed to provide a briefer and more efficient form of analytic treatment. Perhaps more than any other writer in the analytic literature, he believed in the analyst's rational and conscious capacities to conquer countertransference obstruction and to “know” in advance what would most facilitate a workable level of transference intensity.

In the light of contemporary developments in psychoanalytic theory, Alexander is seen as a most complex theorist and practitioner. While his work has sometimes been associated with largely nonspecific factors of therapeutic action—especially expressions of support related to growth in the analytic situation—in fact, the corrective emotional experience, as Alexander introduced the