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TACT IS A FUNCTION OF THE ANALYST THAT SERVES TO MAINTAIN THE collaboration between the analyst and the analysand for the task of the analysis (Loewenstein, 1982). The analyst's tact serves to minimize defensiveness while directing the patient's attention to that which has been avoided (Freud, 1910); (Ferenczi, 1928). It involves considerable judgment and acumen, permitting analysis to go forward when the conditions are not entirely optimal, for example, when the patient's defensiveness or psychopathology threatens to disrupt the analysis. A more careful conceptualization of tact may make it possible for a wider range of patients to be treated with psychoanalysis without modification of the basic psychoanalytic process (Whisnant Reiser).
Poland (1975) presents the idea that tact is a technical function of the psychoanalyst's work ego that relates to how an intervention is made. He differentiates tact in the analytic situation from manners and politeness in ordinary social intercourse, and indicates that tact does not involve an avoidance of issues but is mainly a matter of timing and dosage so as to minimize unnecessary defensive reactions from the patient. Viewing the capacity for tact as stemming from the analyst's development of a sense of shame, he suggests elements in the decision to use tact as having to do with the analyst's capacity to perceive shame and defensiveness in the patients' responses. In his formulation, tact functions to keep the relationship between analyst and analysand a collaborative one.
Tact refers to touching (and the sense of touch) and a sense of what is proper and fitting. In the service of the analysis of a regressive transference