Clinical Responsiveness: Corrective or Empathic?

It was 44 years ago, in 1946, that Franz Alexander published his pivotal thoughts on the corrective emotional experience and set in motion a fiery debate within psychoanalysis. Many of his colleagues thought that Alexander was diluting psychoanalysis and squandering the gains painfully won over the decades since Freud first began his pioneering investigations. Typical of the majority view of psychoanalysts was the comment that Alexander and his group were perhaps doing good psychotherapy, but that it was not psychoanalysis. So great was the ferment aroused by Alexander as well as other analysts bent on modifying the traditional classical conceptualizations that, in 1954, an entire issue of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association was devoted to a discussion of these controversies. The majority view at that time, represented by Bibring, Gill, Rangell, and Stone, critically disagreed with Alexander. As a consequence the phrase corrective emotional experience became a symbol for a not quite psychoanalytic therapy from which reputable psychoanalysts usually tried to distance themselves.

Alexander, who had founded and led the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis in the middle 1930s and who had become the first Professor of Psychoanalysis at the University of Chicago, found himself the target of a great deal of criticism from his colleagues