ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces some of Morgenthaler’s key convictions regarding psychoanalytic technique. Most prominently, it emphasizes that the analytic encounter between analysand and analyst is shaped by two partners who are both conflict-filled, thereby contrasting clinical approaches that conceptualize the analyst as a nonneurotic person. Based on this fundamental insight, according to Morgenthaler, the analyst can apply the psychoanalytic method successfully when certain preconditions are fulfilled. First, the analyst should not aspire to “heal” the analysand so that s/he can conform to society’s normative standards but instead adhere to the dialectical thinking that characterizes psychoanalysis and thus aim at a reformulation of inner conflicts that allow for a more relaxed attitude toward these conflicts rather than the removal of contradictions. Second, the analyst should employ the concepts of metapsychology in order to make sense of his/her clinical observations. Importantly, however, in so doing, the analyst must recognize clinical experience as limiting metapsychological theory, meaning that s/he should not rush to premature theoretically informed suppositions, e.g. presuming specific transference-roles linked to the nuclear family. These false suppositions, according to Morgenthaler, result from the analyst’s evasion of the looming transference-conflict, which is suppressed with the rationalization that refers the analysand to his/her childhood.
