ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the orientation in which Michael Parsons own identity as an analyst has taken shape: the Independent tradition of the British Society. The word 'Independent' with a capital 'I' entered the psychoanalytic vocabulary around 1950, when certain members of the British Psychoanalytical Society agreed to constitute themselves formally as the Group of Independent Psychoanalysts. In Sandor Ferenczi's paper, 'The Elasticity of Psycho-Analytic Technique', he introduces the idea of 'tact', as an essential quality in the analyst's relation to the patient. Ferenczi's emphasis on restraint in interpretation recurs in Michael Balint's work, notably in the chapter in The Basic Fault entitled 'The Unobtrusive Analyst'. Herbert Rosenfeld in his last book, Impasse and Interpretation, emphasised the need to attend fully to the subjective experience of patients, and not inflict on them an interpretative stance that might feel like an attack on their sense of themselves.
