ABSTRACT
The problem concerns the nature of speech as purposeful action and the experience of responsibility for, or conviction in, what one says and does. Psychoanalytic method, from its beginnings with Freud, has of course distinguished itself by its extraordinary close and sensitive attention to what the patient relates in this way, to his stories, to the inner feelings he reports, even to the patient’s particular words. The problem of intellectual insight, if it is that, without real change was not unknown even in the comparatively early days of psychoanalytic treatment. It was the stimulus and the main target of the major therapeutic and theoretical contribution in the 1920s and 1930s by Wilhelm Reich. Otto Fenichel’s conception is of the conscious individual as a passive or, transparent conduit for those “tensions and impulses,” at least to the extent, and it is surely assumed to be possible to a considerable extent, that he can exclude the conceptual goals of the ego.
