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To the Editors: I was pleased to read Ian Alger's article [“The Clinical Handling of the Analyst's Responses,” The Psychoanalytic Forum, Vol. 1, No. 3]. I look forward to more communiques in the growing battle between “classical” psychoanalysts and “interpersonal” theorists.
Much as I subscribe to Dr. Alger's theoretical viewpoint and hope to see it circulated, I have to take issue with his practical recommendation. There are many times when one would do just the opposite of what he suggests, within the selfsame theoretical framework.
He correctly points out that double bind situations (simultaneous contradictory messages unacknowledged) can be pernicious in psychotherapy. But they can also be desirable. Jay Haley (in Dr. Alger's reference 12) has dealt with this at great length and has come to the convincing conclusion that double bind communications are not only inevitable in psychoanalysis (and psychoanalytically-based psychotherapy), but that they are the essence of what is potentially curative in the method. Haley's thesis is that the analyst sets up communication paradoxes which he does not acknowledge and which the patient is forbidden to comment upon—“benevolent double binds.” It is the patient reacting to these that is responsible for the phenomena of transference. Transference phenomena are basically behavior patterns drawn by the patient out of his personal armamentarium in an attempt to deal with the analyst's paradoxical behavior. (See also Don D. Jackson and Jay Haley: “Transference Revisited.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Vol. 137, 1963.)
It is when the patient finally gives up on these past ways of mastering the situation and tries some new way of relating to the analyst that therapeutic change occurs. The analyst, unlike the patient's relatives, has no overriding investment in the patient's remaining unchanged. He accepts the patient's changed behavior (and changes his own).
So I think there are times when we should maintain the classical anal