ABSTRACT
In speaking of a psychoanalytic perspective on the curative, it is natural to start from the very concept of “analysis”. The hysterical patients “largely suffer from reminiscences”. Traumatic and painful childhood memories had to be brought back and relived in order for the patient to get well. Remembering and discharge of affect were the curative factors in the original model. The chapter discusses psychoanalytic therapy, insight is an overarching curative factor which is implicit in all the partial factors. Historically, psychoanalysis has had a tendency to search for a unified explanation of the curative. Key articles on therapeutic change bear titles that speak of “the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis” in the singular, as if it were a matter of one single principle. The specificity of the psychoanalytic therapy process is such that moments of subjective experience occur which have a quality of change in them.
