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As Harry Stack Sullivan implied, we are what we do. If you want to know someone's philosophy, watch his behavior. What one does tells more about basic attitudes than what one claims to believe. In psychoanalytic work, emphasis on the here and now of the transference highlights how the patient is being with the analyst. This is often more revealing than what the person says, i.e., the verbal content. Bergmann's (1976) observations reflect this point for the analyst. He views an analyst's “way of working” (I prefer this to “technique”) as more characteristic of his theoretical position than any exposition of that theoretical position. If we know how someone participates in the analytic dyad, then we know his philosophy, though this may differ from the publicly stated theoretical position.
Sandler (1983), in a recent article, discusses this very distinction between what he calls private and public theories. He