Active Intervention, Psychic Structure, and the Analysis of Transference: Commentary on Frank's “Action, Insight, and Working Through”

Freud, it is well known, viewed psychoanalysis as not one thing but three—a theory of human behavior and experience, a method of therapy based on that theory, and an avenue for research. The issues raised by considering the relation between traditional psychoanalytic methods and those developed by therapists operating from other orientations bear not just on therapeutic practice but on all three dimensions. The implications of the clinical perspective that Frank articulates so helpfully are perhaps ultimately even more significant for psychoanalytic theory than for how we approach daily practice, for they bear on the very nature of psychic structures and how they should be conceived. The stakes are thus very high, and the matters Frank addresses are in fact not exotic frills at the fringes of psychoanalytic concern but matters that potentially reach to the heart of the psychoanalytic enterprise.

For this reason I begin my discussion of Frank's excellent and stimulating contribution by addressing a point that he makes almost incidentally but that I believe bears rather centrally on the issues his paper is addressing. In a presentation of my own views that is in most ways both accurate and highly sympathetic and for which I am grateful on both counts, Frank says that my work “has played down the role of inner