Discussion

I would like to begin my discussion by picking up one of the statements in Dr. Nelson's epilogue. There he speaks of the fact that he knows of no culture in history where public reality and private reality have been synonymous. Furthermore, where such dichotomy has existed, there have always been reparative or conciliatory procedures of one kind or another created to deal with outgrowths of this dichotomy. These procedures (or institutions) have enjoyed varying degrees of self-definition and effectiveness. One should consider such effectiveness in three ways. First, such an institution should be effective for society's aims. Secondly, it should be simultaneously effective for the individual sufferer who is using it. Finally, in some way it must also be effective for its own practitioners.

Psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are modern techniques and institutions set up (among many other more traditional institutions) to handle discrepancies developing between the reality of the individual (in this instance called a patient) and the reality of his society. For our purposes today, we can place the contemporary psychotherapist as serving his patient in this general, professional capacity—that is to say, as some kind of a socially approved agent who is authorized and sustained to deal with the internal and external conflicts of an individual sufferer.

In the traditional view, the analyst functions primarily and ideally as an agent of his patient. This means that even in a complex, organized society, the therapist conducts a process designed to attend uninhibitedly to the perceptions, conceptions and anxieties of his