Two Quibbles: Commentary on Kenneth A. Frank's Paper

Frank presents a well-reasoned exploration of the inevitability of the analyst's continual inadvertent self-revelations throughout the analytic process and well-argued position in favor of the analyst's conscientious self-scrutiny of his or her participation and openness to discuss that participation with the patient. In so doing, he is, as he suggests, expanding on some of the implications of the more general shift from a one-person to a two-person framework that has dominated postclassical psychoanalysis in recent decades. On the whole, I am persuaded by his argument and find little to quibble with. But finding little to quibble with is different from finding nothing to quibble with, and the quibbles seem worth noting.

First, there is a big difference between the inevitability of the analyst's deeply personal participation in the process, on one hand, and the therapeutic utility of that participation being talked about and made explicit, on the other. Of course, one can collapse these two issues by arguing, as do some interpersonalists, that the very goal of psychoanalysis is the clarification of the patient's interpersonal relations. If that is the case, then it would be hard to imagine any good reason for not making the analyst's experience of his or her own participation explicit. But I would not define the goal of psychoanalysis in those singular terms. There are patients who come into treatment searching for personal meaning, looking for a personal voice they have never had the opportunity to develop, tortured by their past, or their dreams, and so on. I share Frank's view that the process itself is inherently dyadic and what happens between analyst and analysand will be crucial to that