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Certain patients ask, some more openly than others, to be accepted by the analyst - “irrespective of words” - as a man first and then as a psychoanalyst (Di Chiara 1985). It seems to me that in this way they appeal to an area of the relationship which, according to Klauber (1981) is fundamental to therapeutic progress, but which is “neglected, because it has more to do with the normal ways in which people understand each other than with the revolutionary discoveries that characterise psychoanalysis”.
This area is usually referred to as the “real relationship” between analyst and patient, by which we broadly mean something that is not wholly limited to the work of interpretation, but which is nevertheless part of the psychoanalytic situation. With the help of the current theory of the affects, I would like to try to explain this concept a little more clearly, so that it will be of greater use.
There is one way of portraying this problem which I find banal and at the same time harmful to certain patients.
It is the tendency to set up a potentially ideal analyst, who sits motionless