Stumbling Along and Hanging In: If This Be Technique, Make the Most of It!

Certain tasks, including many that involve an interaction with another person, require individual mastery of some technical skill and require that this skill be incorporated within relational spontaneity—a fact that has provided psychoanalytic support for the classical concept of technique because it is well understood that technique alone is not enough and that the human relationship matters equally. I offer an Interpersonal/Relational viewpoint that in the psychoanalytic relationship, the skill that an analyst must bring to it is not acquired through learned technique, nor is it applied. The process of self growth in psychoanalysis is inherently relational and not brought about through the relationship between patient and analyst; rather, it embodies the relationship and takes place within it. I describe a treatment context in which the analyst's professional role is subsumed within a shared personal field, and that what is meant by “a royal road to the unconscious” is the joint creation of a relational unconscious that is mediated by state-sharing—a process in which analyst and patient gradually are able to invite increased permeability between their respective self-state boundaries. I submit that to continue labeling what we do as technique slows the natural evolution of psychoanalysis, both clinically and as a body of theory.