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I am grateful to the editors of Psychoanalytic Inquiry for including me in their project to reconsider Franz Alexander's corrective emotional experience, since I believe the disrepute into which his idea has fallen is not entirely warranted. I contend that the main proposition it implies — that the significant therapeutic factor in psychoanalysis is an experiential one in the relationship between the patient and the analyst — is valid, although I disagree to some extent with the nature of the experience and the explanations for its validity.
In the first part of this paper, I discuss Alexander's views as well as those profferred by a number of other prominent psychoanalysts who also questioned the therapeutic exclusiveness of insight and studied the effectiveness of experiential factors in the analytic relationship. Following this, I elaborate my own perspective, which I have up to now outlined in previous publications (Bacal, 1985, 1988a, b; Bacal & Newman, 1990).
The term corrective emotional experience was introduced by Alexander and French (1946) and further elaborated by Alexander himself (1950, 1956, 1961) to account for the therapeutic effect of psychoanalytic treatment, whether this was classical analysis or its application in other forms of analytically oriented psychotherapy. In coining this term, they were asserting what they believe all