ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how psychoanalysis came to a point that ultimately resulted in the denial of certain truths of human experience and a misunderstanding of the necessary ingredients for change and cure. Moreover, the very personal engagement with the unique, individual mind of the therapist is absolutely critical to the change that the patient seeks in psychoanalytic treatment. Freud's original view, the very origin of psychoanalytic theory, was that bad things really happened to people; viz. the sexual abuse of children. At the same time that Freud was revising his thinking about the role of reality in the psyche, he was also revising his thinking about the influence of the analyst's personality on the patient's mind from another perspective. An enduring truth in psychoanalysis has been that the core struggles that patients have experienced are in some inevitable way repeated in the treatment relationship.
