Psychoanalysts View Conjoint Therapy (Apple Valley Symposium): Response to Discussion

To the Editors: Our understanding of interminable analysis is deepened by studying Dr. Rogawski's material. He describes patients who were unable to separate from the analyst—whom they perceived as an idealized source of all happiness in life—while devaluating and denigrating their spouses. Dr. Rogawski

focuses on the use of conjoint therapy for ending the analyses of patients whose transference reactions were characterized by this primitive kind of splitting of the ego and the objects.

Dr. Rogawski says this split could not be resolved by interpretation within the transference. If we were to contend that these transference reactions could have been resolved by interpretation, our discussion would lead to polemics, or could proceed only on the basis of different data than that which Dr. Rogawski presents.1

So, for purposes of discussion it is important that we accept Dr. Rogawski's observation that the transference reactions could not be resolved by interpretation. It now becomes appropriate for us to wonder why this was true and to turn to the rest of Dr. Rogawski's data for an answer.

When we do this, we find that the question must be considered from a broader standpoint than is implied in the choice of individual or conjoint therapy for the ending of the analysis: we need to consider the formation of the transference in the first place.

Usually, when we offer a setting designed to provide the greatest possible opportunity for the spontaneous development of the transference, there is a continuity between the positive loving transference and whatever loved and loving objects the patient has been able to incorporate, maintain, or create in the past. To the degree that the patient can perceive that the transference is his own creation, the feelings it includes can enrich his relations with others rather than keep him defensively attached to the person of the analyst.

Dr. Rogawski, on the other hand, describes many ways in which he takes one side or another in the confl