Paul Gray received the APsaA award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychoanalytic Education. Here are excerpts from his remarks upon accepting the honor at the Annual Meeting in Chicago last May.
In my fifty years of clinical practice, supervision, and teaching of psychoanalysis, my aim has always been not only to further the alleviation of symptoms and distress, but to foster patients' autonomy that comes from their understanding of how their minds work.
Fifty years ago, I was successfully using our traditional, mainstream Freudian methodology. Thirty years ago, I began to evolve in my work and in my contributions to our literature a modification in technique of the analysis of conflict and defense. Simply put, in my subsequent teaching and series of papers I encouraged the adoption of Anna Freud's description of a change of focus of attention in analytic listening to one of close attention to the patient's ongoing processing of defensive solutions to manifest conflicts. I de-emphasized, among other things, traditional interpretative activities and stressed the avoidance of making comments based on contexts outside the observable material of the mind as it is actually functioning in the analytic situation. Such comments may be useful in familiar varieties of psychotherapy, but in analytic situations they provide the patient with unnecessary defensive opportunities.
What I have encouraged is the analyst's making it possible for the patient to experience in consciousness the mind's analytically motivated defensive processes. This contrasts with the intentions of traditional interpretations to create an unconscious “disequilibrium,” followed by fresh compromise formations. I have favored a sharing with and demonstrating to the patient my observations of the mind's immediate defensive solutions to the conscious manifestations of conflict over the drive derivatives, which never give up trying to intrude into awareness.
There is a fable explaining why so few good teachers ever get into heaven. Because St. Peter is permanently stationed outside the gates, he is always a potential captive audience. Because it may be the last time they get a chance to try to influence someone, these teachers form a motley line competing to get to proselytize him with their favorite idea or selection from the literature. I plead guilty to this type of compulsion, and since for only a few minutes more I have you as a captive audience, I want to indulge in a teaching moment.
Photo by Mervin Stewart
Over the years, I have continued to accumulate evidence that close process attention analysis provides an especially useful degree of experiential access to the drive derivatives of aggression. Analysis of conflicted derivatives of aggression not only reduces defensive tendencies to turn on the self; it also reduces fear of frustration aggression and thereby permits analysands to risk greater degrees of transferred libidinal longings and their inevitable disappointments. For analysts, the importance of analysis of their own conflicted aggression reduces their need to carry aggressive countertransference manifestations or defenses against them into the analytic situation.
As is true for all of us who try to bend or modify traditional paradigms, we don't always know the degree of acceptance, rejection, or even interest stimulated by what we are venturing. So I hope you will appreciate how much gratification you are giving me through this award, which allows me to feel the conviction that my practice and teaching of the technique of close attention to affect processing in defense analysis has been confirmed as accepted into the contemporary Freudian psychoanalytic corpus.