Activity in Analysis

The very nature of psychoanalysis, it seems to me, is fundamentally that of an active rôle on the part of the analyst instead of a passive one. But this activity must be wisely restrained and, like an analysis of any situation in social or political life or of physical processes for scientific demonstration or discovery, it must be a process of selection. The purely passive rôle certainly can not produce completely successful results, as the history of psychoanalytic development has shown, because a wealth of material that is confusing, enormously time consuming, and without constructive direction, may be dumped upon the analyst without having the process lead to a rounded and full insight into the unconscious methods of the patient.

The object of an analysis is the correction of psychological trends that have led to undesirable and uncomfortable mental states or that have found their outlet in disturbed functions at the physiological level. The removal of symptoms at the physiological level that arise in faulty unconscious strivings, the cure of the psycho—neuroses, of the perversions, compulsions and so on, it is acknowledged, takes place ultimately through a thorough conviction on the part of the patient that he has been unconsciously following false emotional leads. This conviction can become thorough only through a complete understanding of the compensatory mechanisms that have produced in the patient a distressing situation in which he is squandering psychic or physiological energy without attaining the biological purpose that he longs to fulfil. It is a conviction, then, of the utter futility of his compulsive strivings, with the consequent disappointment and misery that follows from continually searching for what is unattainable, that finally causes the patient to recoil from this useless chase that has no end and that leaves him more and more desperate.

The nature of the neurotic compulsion is a repeated claim for some primitive satisfaction that is substitut