Psychoanalytic Theory and the Psychoanalytic Process

I have looked at psychoanalysis mainly from the point of view of its being a scientific endeavor. It is far more than that, as is shown in the pervasive influence that psychoanalysis has had on many facets of modern Western civilization. And psychoanalysts should be the last to ignore or disregard this fact. Psychoanalysis, as practiced by some of its best, though often unknown representatives, is an art even more than a science. But here I have looked mainly at its scientific and theoretical face. I have emphasized that as a scientific theory it cannot be content to model itself after the traditional scientific theories constructed by such sciences as physics, chemistry or biology. Their subject matter, as viewed and investigated by these sciences, implies and presupposes a subject-object dichotomy, which is, so to speak, what puts them in business.

Although psychoanalysis took those theories as its model, it soon had to depart from them in essential ways, without being able or willing to make this explicit. The phenomena of transference and resistance as inherent and necessary ingredients of a psychoanalytic investigation do not conform to such a model. Hence, there was a tendency to relegate them to the lower echelon of "clinical theory" and not to admit them to the high plane of "metapsychology," even though Freud spoke of transference, for instance, in Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams, in what would now clearly be considered a metapsychological context. The new structural theory, based on the conceptions of narcissism, "primary masochism," identification, introjection, and the formation of the superego, implied and expressed a new awareness of the fundamental importance of object ties for the formation of psychic structure. Although these ideas led further away from the old model, psychoanalysis nevertheless continued to cling to its theoretical premises. In many quarters