Response to Commentaries

In preparing my remarks to present as the 56^th Annual Freud Lecture, it seemed appropriate to me to choose a subject that would celebrate Freud's work, and in “Freud, Transference, and Therapeutic Action,” I combined this goal with addressing my own long-standing concentration on questions of psychoanalytic technique, and on my more recent preoccupation with the question of what constitutes the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. In my preparatory research for this endeavor, I carefully reread all that Freud had to say on the subjects of transference and on therapeutic action. I am therefore confident that my citations are accurate, though, as any student of psychoanalysis in general, and of Freud in particular, must know, interpretations of what was on his mind, and of what was influential in determining what he thought and wrote at any particular juncture in his career, are necessarily always subject to speculative interpretation. I have presented my own best guesses, with full awareness that others may differ with my choices.

Under these circumstances, I am extremely gratified to see that a group of distinguished scholars, all of whom I know and respect, have been persuaded to write commentaries on my work; each of them assuredly adds something to the ideas I have chosen to highlight. In some cases, these additions reflect the differences that exist between the dominant theories that influence my thinking about psychoanalysis and those that underlie the positions of each of the discussants. It is not my intention to pursue these differences in detail, but merely to note where and how I think they enter the picture.

Dr. Aisenstein, for example, who writes from a point of view that reflects her immersion in the French psychoanalytic milieu, disagrees with my understanding of what constitutes transference interpretation, since her school of thought includes not only the explicit verbal interpretation of the transference; in addition, she thinks there exists a separa