Notes NPAP Scientific Workshop

February 7, 1986.

“A First Interview: Scanning the Unconscious and Its Effects.” Jorge de Gregorio, M.D. (Graciela Abelin, M.D., translator.)

Dr. de Gregorio focused on the first interview in a psychoanalytic treatment as part of his current work on a different psychoanalytic method called psychoscanning (his term), which he said he would describe more fully at another time. In present-day psychoanalytic practice the initial interview is usually devoted to assessments, while analysis proper is postponed, Dr. de Gregorio said. This leaves the function of the analyst ambiguous in terms of how he listens and when and how he decides on a psychoanalytic treatment. Further, the use of such interventions as interpretation or dream analysis in the first interview is precluded, as traditional psychoanalytic thinking reserves these until the transference has been established or when it is considered that the psychoanalytic process has truly begun. Freud's idea that psychoanalysis is a natural process, growing of itself like an animal or plant, at times creates in the analyst the feeling that he must wait until he is diagnostically certain before he can say very much. Also, the notion that an analysis must necessarily take a long time is frequently shared by both patient and analyst. (If the patient says he wants a short, more superficial treatment, the analyst is, in a sense, faced with his own death, said Dr. de Gregorio, while the voice of the unconscious goes unheard.)

Speaking in Spanish from notes and with Dr. Abelin translating, Dr. de Gregorio proposed that we rethink what we do in the first interview, centering on listening with “evenly hovering attention” and allowing the analysis to start from the moment the patient enters the office. The result of this, he said, is a scanning of the unconscious, an unconscious that emerges as logical and determined, not historical and not based on fantasy. In this framework, symptoms can be understood as rebellion against repetition,