Transference as a Device for Facilitating Attention

In the continuing debate between the two groups designated roughly as classical and relational analysts on the merits of one-person versus two-person assumptions about psychoanalysis and the implications these assumptions might have for psychoanalytic (and psychotherapeutic) technique, there is a major determinant of technical theory and practice that is rarely taken into account: to wit, that the rationale for the analyst's behavior with patients arises chiefly from the peculiar circumstances common to all analytic/therapeutic situations, circumstances that cut across psychoanalytic theoretical orientations and apply as well to nonanalytic approaches to psychotherapy. The circumstances to which I refer consist of the behaviors expected of the person called the therapist as opposed to the one called the patient, by the position and role of each (cf. Newton, 1971). Despite the sometimes bewildering range within which such behaviors may vary, it is nevertheless accurate to assert that all therapies attempt either an explicit or implicit definition of the roles of therapist and patient. A central element of this definition is the expectation that the patient will do most of the talking and the therapist most of the listening. As Altschul (1977) pointed out, by asking the patient to talk about himself or herself while restricting himself or herself to listening, the latter creates a contingency that in an ordinary (nontherapeutic) conversation would lead to boredom: for there exists, unwritten, a rule of social discourse that requires each participant to listen to the other in approximate proportion to the other's having listened to him or her. When this implicit balance is upset, as occurs when a person violates the rule by talking at length but refusing to listen, we experience the person as boring. This might not