ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has from its inception been biased toward theory, metapsychology, presumably the font of the mutative therapeutic action. Far less emphasis has been put on the phenomenology of therapeutic action; that is, how people change. The valorization of metapsychology is coming increasingly under scrutiny as the erstwhile sharp-edged doctrinaire distinctions between positions blur and attention shifts to an emergent neuropsychological paradigm—to be sure, at this stage of knowledge, more a metaphor than a genuine model. A conception of psychoanalytic learning qua changes the matching of interpretation to transference. The therapist and the patient engage in a verbal inquiry that may be free-associative or a more detailed inquiry. Inevitably this leads, not to greater clarity, but to a deconstructed inquiry: coherence is lost, tangential associative threads emerge. Dreams, leaps of association occur. Menninger and Holzman called this direction of flow the "therapeutic cycle"; that is, when the process was proceeding correctly, the material cycled from the present; through the transference.
