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I have been asked to write a critical response to the eight essays written especially for this monograph of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, comparing the authors' ideas on therapeutic action, seeking overlaps, syntheses, and incompatibilities. I shall therefore comment on each paper separately.
I shall begin by paraphrasing Sander M. Abend's two preliminary assumptions. He reminds us that in the psychoanalytic literature, the theory of therapeutic action is rarely explained without ambiguity, regardless of the psychoanalytic school being referred to. Consequently, a theory of therapeutic action must be attained by inference from the technical recommendations that every analytic theory promotes in clinical practice.
Personally, I would add another premise: it is reasonable to think that the situation with therapeutic action is not very different from that which characterizes other various concepts that we use in psychoanalysis. The definition of what therapeutic action means to a psychoanalyst will be closely connected to and will depend on the overall theory preferred by that analyst. Every time a concept is examined, the analytic critic must above all ascertain whether it is coherent with the overall theory being taken into consideration. Subsequently, if the analyst wants to test or verify the concept or