ABSTRACT
The authors are much concerned in psychoanalysis with efforts to approach truth and with difficulties in those approaches, the problems of evidence inherent in knowing. Reading likely can never produce the depth of psychic change possible in clinical analysis, but analysts’ sometimes proprietary sense of exclusivity for the power to effect change must yield to broad experience. Psychoanalysis was born in Freud’s revolutionary self-analysis. A clinician, Freud naturally turned most of his energies to extending what he learned into the therapeutic setting. The past tilt in the investment of psychoanalytic energy away from applied analysis has corrected a bit as public support for analysis as a formal therapy has diminished. In recent decades, clinical psychoanalytic attention has focused more fully on the intersubjectivity of the engagement between analyst and patient. Psychoanalysis like “reading works only in the manner of an incitement”, one offered “in the midst of solitude.”
