You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Continuing the series of major themes in psychoanalysis, this issue of the Journal is dedicated to the impasse.
The dictionary definition of impasse is “a road or way having no outlet; a blind alley” (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). It is a good metaphor for an analytic situation that cannot evolve due to the “blindness” of both parties who are stuck in the one way of thinking, thereby threatening the life of the analysis.
When Freud discusses impasse in his women patients as being a wish for the male organ as the only solution, and calls this a biological bedrock (Freud, 1937, p. 250), it seems that both parties have become entrenched in a one-dimensional way of thinking. Both resort at this point to a single and concrete idea and away from further thinking about what this “refusal of femininity” could be defending against, which would turn the bedrock into being psychological rather than biological (Gibeault 1992). Concrete thinking, I would say, is the psychological rock psychoanalysis hits against. Freud's paper is written in the context of a discussion of the repetition compulsion and the death drive, and as Begoin (, p. 1052) points out, further analysis is only possible if “a fundamental despair about being unable to develop” can be borne over time by the analyst without expectation. This, in fact, requires of the analyst a “feminine” position of waiting (“evenly suspended attention”, reverie). Deadlock can only be avoided if activity is sufficiently balanced by this more passive receptive