ABSTRACT

When Sigmund Freud engaged in his own self analysis, he embarked on a procedure for exploring the internal world of the self. At the same time he developed the creation of a capacity, namely that ability to receive news from the self. The discovery of psychoanalysis added a new dimension to the capacity to receive news from within the self. In the ordinary course of psychoanalysis the analyst is receptive to the analy-sand's free associations. A condition for the self-analytic function is the maintenance of a receptive space for the arrival of news from within the self. The transfer of the self-analytic element amounts to the unconscious inclusion of the analyst in the patient's intrapsychic life, in which the analyst may fulfil important and varying psychic functions. Self-analytic activity within the analyst's counter-transference is empathic when the analyst provides an internal mental space for the patient's expressions – not verbally representable, they can only be discovered in the analyst.