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Over a 150 years ago, before the birth of Freud, a professional writer (Hawthorne, 1850) described what, today, we would consider the essence of the analytic process.
So Roger Chillingworth—the man of skill—the kind and friendly physician—strove to go deep into his patient's bosom, delving among his principles, prying into his recollections, and probing everything with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker in a dark cavern.
If [a physician] possess native sagacity, and a nameless something more, let us call it intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeably prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power, which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if such revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so often by our uttered sympathy, as by silence, an inarticulate breath, and here and there a word, to indicate that all is understood; if, to these qualifications of a confidant be joined the advantages afforded by his recognized character as a physician;—then, at some inevitable moment, will the soul of the sufferer be dissolved, and flow forth in a dark but transparent stream, bringing all its mysteries into the daylight. [p. 124]
The task of the analytic writer describing the treatment situation is to bring this process to life, to bring the reader into the consultation room, and to depict in rich detail what has transpired there; and, it is his task both to portray and to help his reader understand the sweep, the movement of analytic work. His job, in other words, is to render the analytic experience so fully, in such vivid colors, that the reader enters into, and, for a time, lives, that experience; knows it, and, understands