Prologue

Ultimately, everything in psychoanalysis can be reduced to interaction. Our major concepts, formulations, models, and strategies are derived from the interaction between the analyst and the patient in the analytic relationship. The profound psychic experiences of the analyst and the patient are a result of their mutual interaction. Both the Random House Unabridged and Webster's Second Edition define interaction as reciprocal action or influence. The humanistic core of psychoanalysis rests upon this definition.

Yet the meaning of interaction used in psychoanalytic discourse has been highly ambiguous. The term does not even appear in any of Freud's works. Transference and countertransference do, yes, but always in terms of a one-person model, either the patient—mostly the patient—or the analyst. During the forties and fifties the term interaction gradually began to appear in the analytic literature, but only in reference to the extrapsychic interpersonal dimension. Interaction was relegated to the descriptive, the behavioral. It was nonanalytic and frequently used pejoratively in connection with the Sullivanian interpersonal model. We have since come a long way.

Until the 1960s, we faced a paradoxical situation: Although interaction was fundamental to psychoanalysis, the word was not in our lexicon, and the concept was alien to our theory. It was not, however, alien to our practice. Psychoanalysts trained prior to the seventies have been frustrated and dissatisfied with discrepancies between what they were experiencing clinically and what they were being taught. They found themselves reacting strongly to their patients, in discouragingly sharp contrast to descriptions in the literature and what was publically expressed, which were devoid of any interactive depth. The analysts in these descriptions were cool, distant, uninvolved; they calmly offered interpretations that explained the workings of their patients' minds.