Reflections on the Psychoanalytic Process and its Therapeutic Potential

AS A SPECIAL FORM OF PSYCHOTHERAPY, PSYCHOANALYSIS CONSTItutes a unique mode of personal relationship. It shares certain aspects with other kinds of psychotherapy and personal relationships, for instance, with those between child and parent, patient and physician, student and teacher, between friends and between lovers. But the relationship between analysand and analyst is quite different from all of them. There appears to be something inherently unnatural and contradictory about it. In an important sense it is engaged in for the purpose of a deeper understanding of human relationships and of their impact on the organization of the individual's inner life in time—although this purpose often is but vaguely, if at all, grasped by the analysand when he enters treatment. While there is this engagement, there is at the same time, and from the beginning, a countermovement of disengagement. I am not speaking here of resistance, at least not in the usual sense, but of the fact that the dissolution and abnegation of whatever factual reality the relationship tends to assume are part and parcel of the analytic method from the start. The reason is that individuation and what we consider mature object relations, while originating and culminating in intimacy, involve and are