ABSTRACT
To grasp the interpersonal canon, one must understand that anxiety, as an interpersonal event, is the core of the concept. That is, anxiety is viewed as primarily an empathically communicated interpersonal experience. Traditionally, psychoanalysis was based on the idea that people acted in predictable ways, playing out predictable patterns. They were driven by universal forces; and therefore, one could speculate about the larger issues; sexual drives, need for mothering, empathic failure, dependency, fear of separation and loss, or fear of death. It was the age of enlightenment, the age of categorization, and the patient's individual neurosis would be manifest as a member of some such general class of behavior. Interpersonal psychoanalytic therapy consists of a carefully framed detailed inquiry that mobilizes anxiety by looking where one is not supposed to look. The heightened level of anxiety pervades the patient/therapist field, calling out security operations from both participants and, in essence, recapitulating the material under examination.
