ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces Emmanuel Ghent's paper "Interaction in the Psychoanalytic Situation". Ghent takes pains to ensure that the reader does not conclude that he is articulating a general theory of therapeutic change, but merely intends to highlight one particular facet of therapeutic interaction. The essay presents many of the central themes of relational psychoanalysis in novel and provocative ways: the role of enactment and dyadic features of repetition in the clinical situation; a revisiting of the notion of need outside the sway of drive theory; a reworking of the concept of "gratification" as a therapeutic response to an unformulated need quite separate from the "acting out" of drive theory; and the importance and place of dissociated emotional experience. Ghent postulates the existence of another motivational system, one that acts in opposition to that which is often described in Freudian terms as the "compulsion to repeat".
