Discussion of Dr. Michael Varga's Paper “Integrating Classical and Relational Psychoanalysis”

The center of gravity of Varga's wonderfully rich paper lies, formerly, in the following remarkable sentences in which, towards the end of the major theoretical section, he says: “As I now see it, therapeutically the analyst does not operate as any kind of object, but rather as the patient's alter ego. The therapeutic action or lack thereof lies in the analyst's handling of the unconscious transferential identifications of analyst and patient with one another” (p. 531). You could say that he summarizes the entire paper here. So I thought it would be interesting to deconstruct these highly condensed sentences as a way of discussing the major themes and arguments of the paper.

To begin with the first sentence: “As I now see it, therapeutically the analyst does not operate as any kind of object, but rather as the patient's alter ego.” This is actually quite a radical departure from the point of view of many schools of thought in contemporary psychoanalysis and, importantly, from Varga's own previous position. It is, first, a reference to his work on the transformation of enactment, of which this paper is a continuation. In his earlier papers (Varga, 2006, ), he traces analytic thinking on therapeutic action from Strachey's 1934 mediation on mutative interpretations to Loewald's 1960 opus “On the Nature of Therapeutic Action.” One of the things Varga is interested in is that although a consensus has more or less emerged among the different psychoanalytic schools on the idea of the analyst functioning as a new object, nevertheless serious disagreement as to what type of object that is remains. Varga argued that the inevitability of enactment precludes the analyst from being a new object