ABSTRACT
D. W. Winnicott introduced a new paradigm for thinking about psychopathology and healing, with his concepts of the True Self and False Self. The theories that try to account for the positive evolution of many psychoanalytic treatments are quite varied. Each of them seems to have focused on some aspect of the analytic relation and process, and excluded others. In any case, Winnicott's observation about the analyst's mirroring function holds as a valuable contribution to our understanding of the therapeutic process. There are as many explanations of the therapeutic effect of psychoanalysis as psychoanalytic theories of the mind and its malfunctions. A search in the PEP-Web database, with the keywords "therapeutic action psychoanalysis" gave forty references as a result, thirty-two of them from 1980 and fifteen after 2000. The inception of a new level and function of language is a true revolution in the patient's life, which determines a major part of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis.
