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The past fifty years of psychoanalytic inquiry into the subject of therapeutic action, particularly that thinking stimulated by our interest in enlarging the range of patients that might be suitable for psychoanalytic treatment, has led us today to the question of whether the term “analyzability” still has a meaningful place in our contemporary theoretical thinking. This widening scope of our psychoanalytic work has generated a proliferation of theories and part-theories designed to accommodate the broadened range of patients now seen in our consultation rooms and has vastly complicated any attempt to define unambiguously criteria universally acceptable for selecting patients for analysis. Once a simple matter, defined, as Freud (1905) suggested, by a “reasonable degree of education and a fairly reliable character” (p. 268), or later, as Zetzel (1966) suggested, by a capacity to develop transference and a therapeutic alliance, the concept of analyzability has today, like all of psychoanalysis, become much more complex, hinging upon what Laurence Friedman (1997) has called the “demand character” of the particular theory of therapeutic action that we embrace. By this I mean that my conceptualization of analyzability rests upon the articulation of those mental functions that are important for our patients in order to be able to engage whatever process our particular theory of therapeutic action demands.
From this perspective a comprehensive approach to the issue of analyzability would require a comparative study of the