ABSTRACT
The author reports three impressions: Emphasis on increasingly complex theorizing is often misused to protect the therapist against the threatening intensity of the clinical encounter, to the detriment of the latter; an analyst’s theory has much less to do with her actual clinical work than we think; and the analytic literature is inadvertently encouraging a false ideal of clinical detachment, while rarely conveying the passions and terrors of genuine clinical engagement. He describes how he talks to patients about analytic therapy. He lays out his agenda: to reconsider diagnosis; to look at what the analyst does during therapy; to look at what the analyst experiences by revisiting empathy and countertransference; to look at the complementary capacities of immersion in the action and critical reflection; and to look at analytic writing and some of its problems.
