ABSTRACT

Psychoanalysis has always been concerned to delineate its dimensions, its therapeutic reach and limitations, and the arc of the psychopathological spectrum amenable to its deployment. By implication—and in contrast—psychoanalysts had little or nothing to offer to patients not suited to the classical analytic method, beyond the same varieties of suggestive and hypnotic techniques that their non-analytically informed confrères employed. Sigmund Freud and his continuing closest adherents sought to ensure the enduring capacity and loyalty to their reigning conceptions of all those who carried the psychoanalytic imprimatur. Veikko Tahka clearly distinguished the psychotherapeutic from the psychoanalytic process: "prestructural disturbances in object relations may be treatable but it is very questionable whether they are analyzable". The therapeutic alliance becomes a developmentally higher form, that, as a consequence of proper psychoanalytic work, has evolved out of the working alliance—again, Tahka's signature developmental emphasis that is so remindful of the profoundly influential thrust of Hans Loewald's contributions.