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The charge to prepare a position statement on “The Therapeutic Dimension” is based on several assumptions. First, of course, is that one has a position that can be articulated; second, that it is distinctive enough to stand comparison with another's stated position. A third necessity is that one have some case material about which one can take a stand to define one's position.
We have been supplied with case material in which are condensed some aspects of a patient's personal, family, and therapeutic histories. Most of the account of the sessions is couched at a level so far from the actual phenomena of the analytic situation that in scale it resembles an aerial photograph rather than the portrait I would like to have. Events, or rather tendencies, in the patient's life and analysis are described in the language of generalized psychosexual conflict and in such a way that it would be difficult to distinguish this patient and her analysis from any other.
A few clinical interactions between the patient and the analyst are described more concretely, if briefly, allowing one to begin to form an opinion about what the analyst may have had in mind that led to what he did, as well as how the patient responded and how the