ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches the problem afresh by seeking an answer to the following question: considering any psycho-analytical session as an emotional experience, what elements in it must be selected to make it clear that the experience had been a psycho-analysis and could have been nothing else? Many features of a psycho-analysis may be regarded as typical but they are not exclusively so. Departures from the common rule of meetings between two people may seem insignificant, but the number of such apparently insignificant departures taken together ultimately amounts to a difference that decides the need for a special term. The dictum that an analysis must be conducted in an atmosphere of deprivation is usually understood to mean that the analyst must resist any impulse in himself to gratify the desires of his analysands or to crave gratification for his own.
