The analyst's insights

The patient's fresh perceptions of himself come through mutative work shared with the analyst in the focused intimacy of their interaction. In finding transferential expectancies realized, the patient can experience these as yet different, providing he has the analyst's optimal participation. In this concurrence of crucial differences he can discount and discard the old perceptions that had shaped his psychic reality, and build out of them fresh insights. The analyst's regressive lapses in his best work are a liability inherent in the compromise formations comprising his work ego, built as it is out of the needs and motives of his own transferential past. The stagnation and tensions his regressive transferences contribute to the analytic work produce vivid actualization of the intrapsychic conflicts of both, now intertwined and mutually reinforcing. The analyst's self-analysis at such times can lead to resolving insights about himself that redress the impasse and restore the analytic work both must do.