Prologue

In keeping with the spirit of this journal as epitomized by its name, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, we present in this issue responses to an inquiry of our own. What, we asked the participating authors, from your work within the psychoanalytic process or experience leads to cure, or more modestly stated, what fosters psychic growth and improvement? It is important to note this is but one of a cluster of related questions. We have not addressed the issue of whether psychoanalysis cures and what the data are, a not insignificant issue in the current political economic climate. Nor have we addressed the nature of “cure” or the nature of change in the psychoanalytic encounter. Our aim is a better understanding of the therapeutic action of the psychoanalytic process.

At a different level of inquiry, we wonder why it is that the question of the curative element in psychoanalysis has been repeatedly raised. As analysts, our preoccupation with this line of inquiry goes back over 100 years to Freud's Preliminary Communications (1893). The conference at Marienbad in 1936 and the series of panels at the scientific meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association and at the International Psychoanalytical Association are a small, but representative, sample of the ongoing discourse related to this topic. In 1989, Psychoanalytic Inquiry devoted an issue to “Change and Therapeutic Effectiveness in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy,” edited by Pietro Castelnuovo-Tedesco. The focus there was similar to the one now being considered. The literature examining the nature of the psychoanalytic process and studying the essential and curative elements in the analytic endeavor is extraordinarily rich and diverse. A review of it is tantamount to surveying 100 years of psychoanalytic thinking. (Cooper's 1989 historical survey is a good starting point for such an overview.) The attention this subject has received over the years attests to the priority it has taken in our thinking. Inde