Introduction: New Currents

From time to time it behooves us, as scientific investigators and clinicians, to take stock of the instruments we develop to repair the emotional disorders that individuals may incur during the course of their lives.

Throughout the history of man as many forms of psychotherapy have evolved as ills to inspire them. In our time—apart from direct physical intervention—psychoanalysis has exercised the most decisive influence on mental healing, and it is hard to conceive a “talking cure” that has not absorbed, in some fashion or another, aspects of Freudian theory and technique. But just as the development of increasingly powerful antibiotics has given rise to more virulent infectious agents, so the resistance of Western man to the restrictive aspects of civilization—fortified in part by the insights of psychoanalysis—has produced new forms of psychological infection which do not readily yield to classical psychoanalytic intervention.

With two exceptions the papers in this issue are concerned with clinical innovations and new theoretical orientations. Those which are not, by Dr. George Zavitzianos and Drs. L. Rosenberger and M. Woolf, respectively, touch on matters of relevance to the general theme. Dr. Zavitzianos' essay, “Technique in Psychoanalytically-oriented Psychotherapy,” surveys the similarities and differences between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, the chief one being that in psychoanalysis the patient is taught to reject the therapist as object, while in psychotherapy, because the transference is not analyzed, both patient and therapist retain one another as objects, (p. 11)

Much of the conflict reflected in the literature on treatment centers about the problem of whether to broaden the concept of psychoanalysis to include various interactive parameters between therapist and patient that do not specifically fall under die heading of interpretation and free association, or whether to designate all therapy in which parameters are introduced as psychotherapy, not