Introduction: Focusing on the Psychoanalyst's Intentions in Theory of Technique

In view of our therapeutic discipline's more evolved yet pluralistic perspectives, contemporaneous recognition that the extent of deliberate control which is possible over what we do is less than certain, and omnipresent individual differences concerning overall style and manner of working, can a unifying body of teaching and practice, still to be elaborated, aim effectively to give a full and flexible account of how analysts function?1

The trend in the current literature on psychoanalytic treatment and technique emphasizes idiosyncratic, personal, and subjective factors that contribute to clinical analytic choices; nevertheless, the co-existing need for consensus on more general, objective and impersonal considerations as counterbalancing forces is also highlighted (e.g., Aron, 1999). Along these lines, for example, analysts of different persuasions are reporting a technical consensus on the efficacy of giving prior attention to patients' earliest developmental issues within the transference (Gedo, 1999). Those studying the conundrums of technique seem also to agree that in helping patients do the work of analysis, the analyst's effort, and the intentions expressed in that effort, may be ultimately more pertinent to psychoanalytic technique that what is actually done (Friedman, 1997, 2002; Gorman, 1999, 2002; Greenberg, 2002; Mitchell, 1997). “What analysts are seen to be trying to do is … terribly important [not only clinical procedure per se], since it shows patients the