Three Papers on the Concept of Neutrality: Editor's Introduction1

What do we mean by neutrality? Looking back at Freud’s introduction of the term, we find Strachey’s translation of indifferenz (Freud 1914, p. 163), an attitude that the analyst must maintain in order to resist the pull of transference love. Following Friedman , what is at stake when we speak of neutrality is the existence of the psychoanalytic phenomenon—the state of mental freedom that emerges in a radically undirected mode of discourse. For the patient, what is set in motion in this state are the activities that we have come to know as transference, resistance, defense, and working through. The analyst’s free-floating attention—his lack of preconceptions as to what will be said—parallel the patient’s free association and, together with the analyst’s abstinence, protect the undirected nature of the patient’s thought. Synergistically, the attitude of nondirectedness on both sides leads to the emergence of material closer to the logic of the unconscious than to everyday discourse (Simpson, 2022).

Linked in its origin to the fundamental properties of psychoanalysis, the concept of neutrality has inevitably been threatened by challenges to classical notions of the analytic situation. As one of our panelists, Colombo, points out, there is a definition of neutrality associated with each evolutionary turn of psychoanalysis, with each school and theoretical model. Neutrality becomes a subject for debate at times of dislocation, when psychoanalysis itself is in a state of profound disturbance.

The shift from a one-person to a two-person framework for the understanding of the analytic situation, now alm