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Personally I welcome this trend in psychoanalysis. I have said that in psychotherapy nothing happens until two people “bump up against” each other. In psychoanalysis we strive to maintain an orderly procedure towards these situations in the transference
where the “bumps” can be interpreted significantly, or mutatively.
It is not possible for me to criticize frankly because I am at one with Dr. Alger. However, there are three problems:
It is necessary for students of psychoanalysis to proceed cautiously until they acquire the ability to include the analyst's feelings and behavior. Much that the young or inexperienced analyst feels will have more to do with his own state than that of the patient. The patient must not be involved in the analyst's personal state if it can be avoided. The beginning analyst must first learn in terms of the patient's inner conflicts and the projection of aspects of these on to the objects around, including the analyst. I think psychoanalysis will always have to be learned that way.
I think Ian Alger has not gone as far as he will one day in his study of what the analyst may do by recognizing and pointing out his own feelings and behavior. But the beginning is the important thing.
There is the matter of diagnosis; some patients have been distorted in their development by continuing pathologic environmental factors. It is these patients who force us to repeat the environmental factors and to hurt again. The most painful is when we must fail, repeating early failure on the mother's (or father's) part. In such cases it is only when we fail that we succeed—the patient having made us fail when we could have succeeded and when we only wished to do well.
There are many psychoneurotic and depressive patients whose troubles arise inside themselves and for whom a comment or interpretation relative to our own feelings and reactions must be inapposite or actually intrusive.
With these brief warnings I repeat that I wish to see the study to which Dr. Alge