Analyzability

Is analyzability a viable concept? I believe it is. In the past the focus was on the patient, the analysand. In this paper my focus will be on the analyst—the notion being that psychoanalysis is a concept that exists in the mind of the analyst, so that who the analyst is and what he or she brings to the analytic situation is crucial in any discussion of analyzability. The shift from a focus on the capacities of the patient to those of the analyst highlights the importance of psychoanalytic training in theories of mind; clinically supervised experience, particularly analytic experience; and the analyst's own personal or training analysis. However, a caveat is appropriate here: Psychoanalysis is a two-person enterprise, after all, so that to exclude the patient can lead to the same oversights that occurred in the past when the analyst was more or less left out of consideration. Therefore, one question that needs to be asked at the outset is whether or not analyzability is contingent on certain capacities in the patient, specifically, the capacity to symbolize?

Norbert Freedman (1998), for one, answers this question in the affirmative: “The quality of thought we call symbolic, in both patient and analyst, is an indispensable part of analytic work” (p. 82). I use the term “symbolization” herein to refer to a process whereby we can meaningfully understand that an event can be looked at from many different perspectives. It is a process where we can view our thoughts as an object of our thoughts. We selfreflect. Furthermore, it is a term that always includes its counterpart: desymbolization, where things are as they appear to be.