Change in Psychoanalytic Treatment (Marmor, 1979)

It was an exciting time in American psychiatry. In 1973, past-president of the Academy Judd Marmor (1965-1966) was instrumental in the successful crusade to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) at the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The following year, Marmor was to be elected president of the APA. The chain of events that ensued changed the way the gay community was regarded in all segments of society, culminating with the legalization of same-sex marriage.

The son of a Yiddish scholar, Judd Marmor immigrated at a very young age from England with his family. I wonder if this helped him develop his knack for questioning orthodoxy, since Judd Marmor had a second major achievement that is seldomly recognized: He questioned the mainstream treatment provided by the psychoanalysts of the 1970s. As a result, he endorsed the kind of treatment that most of us psychoanalysts are providing today. Based on his own inquiry, Judd Marmor advocated for interventions centered on emotional resonance with the patient. He supported upholding findings of psychotherapy research over theoretical principles, and in the process Marmor developed the precursor of what we now call psychodynamic psychiatry. This is where the historical importance of this paper enters this narrative.

Judd Marmor presented “Change in Psychoanalytic Treatment” at our 1978 annual meeting and published it a year later in our journal. We now know that his ultimately successful grand plan was to make the case that the relational components and the emotional availability of the analyst were more important than technique and theory. In this paper, Marmor made no secret of his admiration and close collaboration with Franz Alexander, who was known for his “corrective emotional experience” proposition, in which an empathically attuned psychotherapist is

seen as capable of correcti