Diversity without Fanfare: Some Reflections on Contemporary Psychoanalytic Technique

Taking the clinical material offered by Dr. Helmut Thomä as a starting point for discussion, this article notes that the author's understanding of his patient's distress is broad-based and includes the interplay of reality, drives, object relations, and fantasies. His technique is centered upon helping the patient achieve ego freedom through interpretation and transference resolution. However, it incorporates a broad range of interventions that include (a) acknowledging the inherent awkwardness of the psychoanalytic situation and assuring the formation of a helping alliance, (b) titrating the asymmetry gradient to suit the specific needs of a patient, (c) providing corrective information when the patient's reality testing is getting compromised, (d) demystifying the analytic process by judiciously sharing the conceptual context of the analyst's interventions, (e) restraining the desire to interpret and maintaining faith that some things take care of themselves and others become more interpretable as time goes on, and (f) cultivating an attitude of informed naturalness both within the analytic office and during extra analytic chance encounters. Such an approach synthesizes the Strachey-Loewald divergence regarding technique and brings the “classic” and “romantic” visions of psychoanalysis together. The fact that this unabashedly therapeutic approach exists within a classical theoretical frame and does not invoke the notions of relationalism and intersubjectivity is intriguing.