Commentary: Psychoanalysis as a Personal Relationship

I'm honored to be asked to discuss Kenneth Frank's thorough, thoughtful, and overall, superb paper. I pleaded with the editors to “comment,” rather than “discuss,” because the latter requires a longer essay, and I am in such basic agreement with the author, that I have little to argue, and not a great deal to add. The impact of the analytic relationship on the outcome of the psychoanalytic enterprise is about as important a subject as one can address, and Frank traces the history of this subject in careful detail. As history evolves, we can see psychoanalysis being written about less and less as a purely technical encounter, and increasingly as a deeply personal engagement in the context of an asymmetrical professional relationship. Frank rightly agrees with many of his predecessors who argued that although there is both a technical/professional and a personal element in all psychoanalytic engagement, there is no way to clearly parse out one from the other, and designate one as, for example, transference, and the other as “real.” I would say, and I think Frank might agree, that there is also no way to separate the technical or “ritual” elements of the analytic relationship from the personal. Both elements are always present, both are inherent to the process, and they are inextricably intertwined. The term, “personal” is better than “real,” because the latter implies that the analyst can distinguish objectively which is which. When one speaks of the analytic dyad as personal, I see no need to even begin to identify which elements are personal and which are technical—we just know that each analyst engages in both dimensions, whether or not he/she even sets out to