The Corrective Emotional Experience: Is Reconsideration Due?

The “Corrective Emotional Experience” was one of the major innovative psychoanalytic concepts introduced and given wide currency in the 1940s and 1950s. This concept and related technical precepts were spelled out in the book Psychoanalytic Therapy (Alexander, French et al., 1946) and achieved great popularity in the rapidly expanding and heady psychoanalytic world of the first post-World War II decade in America. Indeed, the ferment these new ideas aroused, and the prospect that they might actually split the American psychoanalytic world of that time into two rival camps gave rise to a series of panel discussions and conferences,1 the contents of which were brought together in one issue of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (Vol 2, #4, pp. 565-797). Alexander appeared and propounded his views on each of the two panels of the American, and his views were generally supported, albeit with their own specific nuances by panelists Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Edith Weigert. Arrayed in the opposition, and speaking for the majority