An Intention-Based Definition of Psychoanalytic Attitude: What Does it Look Like? How Does it Grow?

In two previous articles (Gorman, 1999, ), I introduced and then refined the notion of basing psychoanalytic attitude not on a set of psychoanalytic techniques but on what I called a psychoanalytic intention. It felt increasingly apparent that a technique-based definition of psychoanalytic attitude, despite its initial usefulness in orienting the analytic clinical stance, was based on a fundamental misconception of the relation between analyzing and support/suggestion in psychoanalytic treatment. This misconception and consequent equation have inadvertently caused psychoanalysis as a discipline and a form of psychotherapy no end of trouble. They have undermined the analytic rigor of the psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapies, and have created or contributed to schisms between psychoanalysis and these psychotherapies. They have similarly contributed to schisms between different psychoanalytic subtheories, between psychoanalysis and nonpsychoanalytic psychotherapies, and between psychoanalysis and systematic psychoanalytic research. It is not an exaggeration to say that they have contributed fundamentally to the general isolation in which psychoanalysis increasingly finds itself.

In the articles cited above, I suggested a provisional definition of psychoanalytic intention to develop my arguments and which came as close as I could to capturing in the most general terms what analytic therapists intend in treatment. However, in the introduction to the volume in which appeared,