Five Papers on Beginning Psychoanalysis

Following Freud (1913) who wrote that the opening moves of an analysis were like those of a chess game—definable and finite, permitting “exhaustive systematic presentation” (p. 123), in contrast to the infinite variety of forms that a psychoanalysis itself, like the chess play, might take—to a large extent, the literature on initiating analysis has focused on initial interviews. Freud’s emphasis in “On Beginning the Treatment” is that the analyst “sets in motion a process,” and then must “supervise this process, further it, remove obstacles in its way” (p. 130). Over the years, in keeping with developments within the field and its social context, including perhaps most significantly the growing convergence to a two-person psychology, an interest in the idea of patient-analyst match (Kantrowitz 1986), and a growing concern about the decline in popularity of analysis, the emphasis in this literature has shifted away from the assessment of the patient’s analyzability (with an assumption of a universal analyst) and the process of inducting the patient into a universal treatment. In the US, scholarly interest has focused more on the analyst’s task in establishing an analytic environment and frame, in making sense of the prospective patient’s response to this offer, and on the encounter with resistances in both parties (e.g., Jacobs and Rothstein 1990; Rothstein 1995; Ehrlich 2004, 2013).

Two important volumes (Reith et al. 2012, ) have emerged from the Working Party on Initiating Psychoanalysis of the European Psychoanalytic Federation, formed in 2004 as part of an effort to address contemporary challenges, both external and internal to the profession, to psychoanalytic practice. The papers and case studies collected in these volumes constitute a compendium of wisdom mainly focused on early sessions, and “how to convey to a patient something of the experience of psychoanalytic treatment and the specific opportunity it can offer, as

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