Introduction

This chapter examines the relationship between psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Given that the extrinsic criteria are relatively unsatisfactory, it might be helpful to define the intrinsic criteria that correspond to the aims of psychoanalytic work. These thoughts and images correlative with the analyst's evenly suspended attention corroborate that, underpinning mutative interpretations in the work of analysis, there lies a paradoxical countertransference. It is for this reason that regression in analysis has to be thought of in terms of all three aspects topographical, formal and temporal as offering the individual the possibility of integrating the necessary passivity or receptiveness of human experience, corresponding to active mental work. From that point of view, psychoanalysis has more to do with semiotics in Peirce's sens that is, a science of signs that open on to a heterogeneous variety of signs, as opposed to semiology in de Saussure's sense, which is based to a greater extent on linguistic signs.