"The Talking Cure": The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

2017

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2019

has gifted us with an exciting new book, Freud's Papers on Technique and Contemporary Clinical Practice. The book is primarily a collection of Friedman's previously published papers, with the addition of a helpful introduction, three orienting prefaces, and a short end section. We have the privilege of following Friedman as he thinks through, with great rigour, depth, and insight, issues inherent to what Friedman sees as Freud's empirical discovery of the "strange" experience that is "the psychoanalytic experience … a novel state of unusual mental freedom" (1; all quotes in this review are from Friedman). The papers-now chapters-are beautifully written in prose that is non-technical, clear, and suffused with wit. However, they are not always easy reading. They require concentration and thought, as Friedman takes us into a question, leading us as he thinks it through, always considering and evaluating different alternatives that would challenge or modify his main point. Friedman tends to begin with a thesis, based on an aspect of the analytic stance. He develops it, and then moves to questioning it, often based on post-Freudian challenges. He then challenges the challenges, and ends with a conclusion that reaffirms the initial thesis (and Freud's thinking). The papers are masterful contributions, one after the other. Friedman's focus throughout is on how the analyst's "attitudes" (170) allow the psychoanalytic experience to unfold. He sees Freud's technical recommendations-abstinence, neutrality, and anonymity-as default positions for the analyst, "beacons" (142) within which he can establish and maintain the psychoanalytic phenomena that Freud discovered, and tolerate the necessary ambiguity and paradox that psychoanalysis demands. Friedman writes: "It bears repeating that most of those anti-analytic attitudes (the 'don't's) that Freud's Papers on Technique cautions against are normal social attitudes. It is the task of training to make what is perfectly normal feel inappropriate to analysts while they are at work" (224). Friedman stresses that Freud's technique papers are best understood as a whole. I will review Friedman's book in a similar way, looking at the whole book and his central argument as it develops through the various chapters. I will quote him frequently, so that the reader gets a feel for his writing. Friedman's first point is that Freud's Papers on Technique, as a whole, are a record of Freud's experience. "The technique is not deduced from a model of the mind" (4). Freud's recommendations of anonymity, abstinence, neutrality, etc. are not derived from his drive theory. Rather, Freud's book records "an experiment in the evocation of a certain state of mind; specifically, to see what brings about that particular state and what interferes with it" (3, original emphasis). Psychoanalysis was Freud's "discovery" (3) and the Papers on Technique record Freud's process of discovery. This is important because it allows us to think about Freud's technical recommendations empirically, as ideal positions that affect the unfolding of a psychoanalytic process. We can think, for example, of these recommendations as facilitating or interfering with a patient's capacity to "flirt" with a "virtual reality" (Chapter 9). We can also look at how different analysts balance or collapse the always ambiguous interplay of illusion and "reality," as a way of differentiating between analytic approaches, as Friedman does (150-151, 172-174, for example). Friedman uses Freud's Papers on Technique as the base of his discussion of the analytic stance, and the cornerstone of this base is Friedman's understanding of Freud's concept of working through. Friedman asserts, in three chapters offering close readings of Freud's papers, that Freud concluded that working through is the major mutative agent of psychoanalysis. Working through occurs "in a patient's private experience" (51). Working through is the

Psychotherapy in Australia, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2010

The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2020

This paper assesses the history of psychoanalysis in the United States in order to inform a "professional memoir" of the author's experience of analytic training in the 21 st Century. The mix of historical and personal landscapes supports a contention that there is something missing or lost in American psychoanalysis, that psychoanalysis has lost sight of the radical and subversive nature of unconscious processes. I argue that only by returning to a study of rigorous and comprehensive theory, seated in Freud's work, can this absence be addressed.

Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 2006

Trends in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, 2013

Determining the indications and contraindications for psychoanalytic treatment seems crucial to achieve therapeutic success and improve treatment effectiveness. In reviewing the classic literature on the topic, aspects such as age, diagnosis, motivation for treatment, present moment in life, ability to gain insight, psychic suffering when seeking treatment, defensive behaviors, and frustration tolerance are clearly analyzed by therapists/ analysts when indicating psychoanalytic treatments. However, traditionally, most criteria underlying such indications date back to a time when the therapeutic relationship was viewed merely as a therapist treating a patient, with no regard to the therapeutic relationship itself. The goal of this article was to critically review the relevance and current adequacy of indications for psychoanalytic treatment, in view of advancements in knowledge on the analytic field. Considering cases that do not evolve as expected according to the indications, patients who are better suited to certain therapists, and therapist-patient pairs that modify their interaction over the course of treatment, the main question remains on how to identify the necessary elements in evaluating a candidate patient for psychoanalytic treatment, as well as the significant elements of therapeutic action.

2009

Such is reason that leads me to briefly outline the conditions which make the “transmission of the psychoanalytical teaching” possible. The bradawl called “style”, which the Ancients used to write with on polished boards, makes reference to the eventuality of a writing founded on the transmission of a teaching. The idea of style -whose definition lies in the writing of the unconscious-, indicates the very matter of the psychoanalytical field; its pertinence was introduced by Lacan. Style is not conceived in the register of the expression, in this sense, it neither expresses nor reveals to man anything; it is not a sign of him. Lacan says: “The style is the man himself [Buffon quotes], people repeat without seeing any harm in it, and also without worrying about the fact that man is no longer so sure a reference point –writes indeed LacanStyle is man, and we should adhere to the formula, by only extending it: It is man, though... the one man we address”. 1 That is to say, the idea of ...

Psychoanalysis and History, 1999