Insight and the analytic dyad

Insight reflects the unitary nature of psychic activity in contrast to the fragmentation created in abstracting categories for the purpose of study and discussion. The unique analytic clinical dyad offers a structure in which intrapsychic fragments can be actualized and integrated. As a result, the analyst's contribution is more crucially one of exploration than of revelation. Whatever the area of examination, past or present, the link to analytic immediacy offers the opportunity to make meanings meaningful, to convert known facts to psychic truths. The analyst's clinical task requires his private self-analysis as part of the collaborative exploration of how the patient's mind works. Higher level ego functioning, including acutely active remembering, is at times transiently loosened in order for the analyst to share in the clinical work of discovery. The words the analyst uses to communicate his understanding convey only approximate manifest meanings, though they structurally reveal deeper messages of importance to the patient. These verbal approximations help stimulate self-reflection in the analysand as a step in the process of gaining insight.     

On the analyst's neutrality

It is by the application of the principle of neutrality, born of his respect for the essential otherness of the patient, that the analyst focuses the dyadic analytic work in the service of the patient's growing self-analytic capacity. Thus, the general principle of neutrality is distinguished from the technical tactic of abstinence, the latter being a specific function utilized to facilitate and foster analytic regression. Neutrality can be defined as it applies to the major subfunctions of the analyst's work ego. Perception of the patient's intrapsychic processes (both empathically and cognitively) requires a neutrality of appearance on the analyst's part in order to minimize the distortion of the unfolding transference neurosis. Integration and understanding of the patient's communications require mastery and neutralization of the analyst's own internal processes in order to minimize countertransferential distortions. Appropriate interpretive intervention requires neutrality of action, i.e., mastery of impulses related to power, neutralizing them into the service of the analytic work; tact is defined as a specific psychoanalytic function in this regard. Collaborative ignorance is examined as a specific instance of false neutrality. In this an analytic guise serves to mask a countertransferential conflict. Neutrality serves as an overriding technical principle, not an imperative for perfectionism . Factors intrinsic to the analytic process also influence the application of this principle.     

Reading fiction and the psychoanalytic experience: Proust on reading and on reading Proust

Reading can at times engage one emotionally and entail inner psychological experiences in ways akin to those in clinical psychoanalysis. In that light, after a general introduction regarding the import of reading, attention is turned to Proust, Freud's literary complement, as an exemplary instance to illustrate those similarities. Ideas of Proust on reading are followed by thoughts on reading Proust, with the ending of Proust's masterpiece used to illustrate a parallel to termination in clinical psychoanalytic experience.     

Commentary on Paper by Michael Parsons

A range of clinical psychoanalytic approaches in the United States is considered as they may parallel Parsons's presentation of an “independent” orientation in Britain.

Attention is paid in particular to the analyst's sense of outsiderness and concern for otherness, along with their moral implications for clinical work. In addition, the limitations of theory and defensive misuse of theory are also addressed.