ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic “technique” is to be understood as a method of research, a method for clarifying those parts of the human personality which escape the methods belonging to general academic psychology. The fact that psychoanalytic exploration was able to provide therapeutic results was more of a fringe benefit to Sigmund Freud. In one of his technical writings, Freud compares the process of psychoanalytic therapy with a game of chess. Within the different groupings there are varieties, partially geographically based, partially based on which elements in the therapy process that are assigned particular importance. Yet O. F. Kernberg discovers initial signs of a shared psychoanalytic technique. If psychoanalytic understanding shall not limit itself to a subjectivist narrative discipline, but is also to encompass the human personality in a broader perspective, one cannot escape also seeing the patient-therapist relation through a prism of objectivizing characteristics.
