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In a short book with the same title as Heinz Kohut's classic How Does Analysis Cure?—but with no other mention of Kohut in the text—Fred Busch set himself to answer, from the ego psychological perspective, the most important question of the psychoanalytic theory of action: What is essential to a psychoanalytic curative process, and what are the methods of working that can bring this about?
His answer does not seem to be unproblematic. Busch argues that there are two main reasons that bring patients to therapy: the first is the inefficiency of representation and the second is the tendency toward action. The essential aim of psychoanalytic cure, for Busch, is to build representation and change the invertibility of action into the possibility of reflection through interpretations. The reason why analysts fail to cure is apparently their inability to interpret properly. In one sense, the book is a manual of interpretations.
For a cure in psychoanalysis, the weak ego should be strengthened through building representation and changing the language of action into thoughts and feelings. It is curious that, as a part of his own psychoanalytic transformation, Busch is now using neuroscience, paying attention to the increase in the number of neural pathways. On the covers of his previous two books are pictures of a brain that the analyst is supposedly either building or strengthening. This speaks to Busch's conception of the psychoanalytic mind as equivalent to the psychoanalytic brain. One is reminded of Edgar Levenson's (2001) proposition that the brain is individual, but the mind is a field phenomenon, a network, a web of relationships: “There is no such thing as a mind. It takes others to extend that network, and the extension may be itself restorative” (p. 250).