This post could be of interest to some of the analysts who also follow another professional blog in one of the countries that show interest in my blog. The comment in this published note is my opinion regarding the possibility of a law- in that country -that requires the psychotherapist to give the patients- beforehand -a tentative estimate of the process of his psychotherapy (time-duration-cost,etc.). I am posting it in my blog because it did not have a place in the other professional blog.

In the old times (fifty or sixty years ago) when psychoanalysis was still starting and forming it was not possible to have a decent idea of how long psychoanalytic therapy could take. We did have a way to foresee the patient’s resistance and his potential benefit from our work. After seeing so many patients (thousands amongst us) and gaining deeper knowledge of both psychopathology and the therapeutic process I think we could assess both the difficulties, the potentials, and the acceptable level of change and have a decent idea of how long and how many sessions needed, to change. That clinical skill is difficult to transmit to a candidate in training!?

Therefore, a law that requires an “effort” to be made to assess our responsibility in the therapeutic process is particularly good for us, the patient, let alone the process of therapy itself.

 Suggestions oF RESOURCEFUL Works

List of Textbooks-like in Psychoanalysis

Those sources came to my mind after a while because in my age memory does not obey it owner’s wishes as

when he wishes.

They are reliable sources to use to teach some aspects of theory and practice too, but they are textbooks as such.

            Ricoeur, P. Freud’s Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation.

            Foucault, M. The Order of Things.

Matte-Blanco, E. The Unconscious as Infinite Sets: An Essay in Bi-logic

Erickson, E. Identity and Life Cycle

Freud, Inhibition symptom and Anxiety (teaches the psychoanalytic way of looking at the link between cause and effect and how it could be reversed to learn more about the subject.

Idealization and Psychoanalysis

The Underlying Basis of Our Bewilderment

            Are we bewildered! Yes, we are. The proof to that is lacking a textbook (s) on psychoanalysis. No profession could teach and train its new generations without a textbook (s) to make those youngsters pay their attention to the subject matter of their profession and not to the individuals involved-in their apprenticeship and training- whether they and their teachers, their analysts, or their patients. You cannot teach and train a physician without textbooks in the branches of medicine he uses (anatomy, physiology, etc. etc.). Textbooks are the legitimate bridge between the profession and the professionals. There could be some distinguished practitioners and professors in the field, but they will not be idealized as the only source of knowledge if there is a solid textbook in the subject. Idealization is when a quality, characteristic, a feature, etc., stands for the real subject (human or material). To turn someone like Freud or your analyst into an idea, and idealize him, changes the relationship between the you and that someone into mini enslavement. Idealizing a person or any other thing blocks one from realizing that he is not relating to the idealized issue but to an idea about the issue, which is his creation.

I dare to say that we -psychoanalysts-do not have ordinary people in our professional life, but leaders and mentors who are only different in the degree of their idealization. This issue is a basic dilemma in psychoanalysis. Because we do not have textbooks in psychoanalysis, we only have degrees of idealizations of old or new people and think only in terms on pro-anti.

[I happened to know one book entitled ‘Textbook of Psychoanalysis’ edited by G.Gabbard . It is not a textbook that has chapters on psychoanalytic topics like interpreting and reconstructing, analytic diagnosis and deciding the frequency of sessions, or dealing with acting out some implicit meanings in interpretations, I mean issues of psychoanalytic work that we should be teaching and making sure candidates ‘learn the psychoanalysis’ we believe that we train them to practice. 

The ridiculous thing is that after more than a century of psychoanalysis we are still unable to have textbooks on the subject. The rare occasions I spoke to colleagues about that issue they were all against it and raised the flag of ‘free association (which does not exist in the first place) and regulating psychoanalysis which is against its basics. Some even commended the life of idealization instead. I personally believe that we defy, refuse, even sometimes resist giving up idealizing [ Dr. so-so] and direct our efforts instead to build textbooks based on his ideology (Bion, Laplanche, Bouvet, Arlow and Brenner, etc.). People like those are not the only source of Textbooks of psychoanalysis. In Europe, thinkers, philosophers, academicians, and people from other but related fields joined the psychoanalytic movement and made contributions that were of terrific value. After some inquiries and direct knowledge (I am still living in Canada) I found out that the psychoanalytic institutions were actively against none- trained psychoanalysts- participating or contributing to the psychoanalytic movement.  I think it is as it was a reciprocal stand from each other.

The nonexistence of textbooks of psychoanalysis says something about psychoanalysis itself. Psychoanalysis-in the Americas- has not taken its normal course of evolution to become an academic subject. In my opinion. It remained captive of being a psychotherapy and not a new and unique venture in exploring our nature (humans). The analytic psychotherapists are standing lately on very shaky grounds. Whatever they do to improve the reputation of psychotherapy will fail, because the issue is in psychoanalysis that gives psychotherapy its suture. 

 A Personal Experience with Lacanizm

In 1953/1954 I was a second-year student in a new department of psychology, headed by a French trained psychoanalyst. The teaching staff was varied in their specializations and their original places of training. A new member joined that staff and happened to be a psychoanalyst and a close student of Lacan (Safwan). He came with a good translation and study of Lacan’s paper on the “Mirror Stage”. He did not mention -and none of us realized- that this fascinating and pioneering paper related to Freud’s concept of Narcissism. I distinctly remember considering it a paper in child psychology because I had no idea of Freud’s paper on narcissism (at that time we did not have in Egypt a copy of the Standard Edition).

Shortly after Lacan published that paper on the duality of the subject as a foundational element in his identity he introduced the three orders of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. The paper of the duality of the Moi (me) and the Je(I) entered a new very complex system of “orders” and was lost in a typical Lacnian style of de-mystifications. He was inclined to ‘explain’ his wonderful ideas in a manner that keeps them mystified and no one could claim that they know what the master really meant. He always had something more to say about even what he said.

When I mentioned the origin of narcissism in the Myth of Narcissus (I think around the time of the interest in the idea of OTHERNESS) a very experiences senior analyst (did not take her permission to mention her name) raise a very interesting issue: how different psychoanalysis would have been if the central myth in the psychoanalytic theory was Narcissus and not Oedipus!  The answer as I have been envisioning since (more than a year ago) is no Anna Freud and ego psychology but Melanie Klein and the intrapsychic (instead of object relations). The main issue of interfamily psychodynamics would have changed to serious consideration of the stages of development and the evolution of the sense of identity (the crux of change in real psychoanalysis and less so in psychotherapy).  

The other difference the myth of narcissus could have created is a dependable ability for self-analysis (auto-analysis). The reason is that the duality of I/me is confusion that could be discerned and the analyst as well as the patient have a gap from which the it will be possible to ask and answer too: is it Me that feels…sees… thinks, etc. or is I ? A good analytic work will reveal to the patient that difference which is taken over at the beginning by transference.

  

             B. What is Therapeutic in a Psychoanalytic Interpretation? 

                                 Interpreting the link between the intrapsychic and the interpersonal 

    In a previous part on this subject two issues were highlighted: Interpretation and Reconstruction. It was also emphasized that the unconscious- which is the analysts' main subject of interpretation- is there to hear and listen to within the patient's conscious speech. In a way, we are supposed to accept the patients rhetoric as the conscious\unconscious expression of their psychic condition. This way the act of psychoanalysis is definable, identifiable, and has to be done with the fixed idea that we analysts should not interfere with the free associations of the patient. However, this could also mean that we should not interfere with the patient's resistances. For that reason, it is recommended not to think that there is a structure in the work of psychoanalysis with patients [except the conditions we discuss with the patient before we start the work, like number of sessions, etc.]. The patient's rhetoric contains the unconscious material we need to interpret but we are also trained not to interpret prematurely, yet there is no guidelines to what and how to identify a mature moment to interpret.

    There is though a guiding principle in that aspect. The patient's rhetoric-directly or indirectly- is about himself. That self is the impact of  what was created in the early upbringing of his life and persisted since childhood. The intrapsychic, or the character formation that the patient is living is his basic Self. The patient’s interpersonal relationships, which is the reason (cause) for getting into therapy are basically products of that intrapsychic formations. However, the intrapsychic in psychoanalysis is not the regular relationships the patient has with other. The invitation to the patient to say whatever comes to his mind is not as it was thought before as free association. It is acting out in analysis what is named by Freud transference. Transference is bringing back moments of the process of forming the basic interpersonal relationships of childhood. The very early interpersonal is transferred to the process of psychoanalyzing in the form of “transference”.  Therefor, the issue of when to interpret is not a mater of timing but a matter of what to interpret to connect the present (transference) with the past of that transference. Amazingly, Freud (1912) recognized the phantasmic nature of transference, transference resistance, transference as an obstacle the analyst has to bypass without encouraging it or discouraging it, all that long before having a clear and guiding model of the stages of development (the distinct types of intrapsychic\interpersonal relationship of each stage of building a stable identity). It is amazing because we know now -in supervision- how important to show the candidate what type of intrapsychic inadequacy he deals with in the patient's transference, to know even what best words to you use in his interpretations. A transference of anal aggressive conflicts requires using terminology of anger and explosivity. 

        We come to the point now to say with the confidence of clarity  psychoanalysis is the act on INTERPRETING the patient’s interpersonal relationships by his intrapsychic formation, which we could (with some patience and skill) hear  it entwined in the patient transference and expressed in his conscious rhetoric. As mentioned above: Psychoanalysis is the act of  interpreting the interpersonal with the material we get from transference and reconstructing the intrapsychic from the conscious material the patient uses to talk about himself.

        The issue of timing the interpretation, the words to use to articulate that interpretation in a way that relates specifically to this patient’s rhetoric, making the patient’s  give the discovery of the interpreted intrapsychic a curative  potential, and most of all keeping the patient unaffected by the skill of the analyst, is an important aspect of good psychoanalysis. This note came to my mind just now because I was going to say that the basic and main idea in this post is my understanding of J. Lacn’s seminaire on “L’act Psychoanalytiques” (1967\1968). I did not finish attending that seminar (fifty five years ago) because I did not digest his way mixing in his ‘actually’ brilliant psychoanalytic mind with his personal brillience.         

 

A. What is Therapeutic in a Psychoanalytic Interpretation?

          I think the answer to this question could lead to addressing several problems that we encounter in our practices, and our accountability to the patients we treat. Psychoanalysts have the obligation to show that their act of psychotherapy is based on a clear link between interpretation- as the core of psychoanalyzing- and cure. If the analyst takes a different approach in therapy, he still has the responsibility to explain his work. What is professionally disturbing, and alarming is the faint notion that  we initiate cure by bring the unconscious to consciousness via the work of interpretation. Although this formula is the most acceptable among analysts of all walks of practice, it is not the main focus of psychoanalysing-as analysts like to claim.

The basis for saying that is the absence of agreement among analysts on the meaning of  “unconscious”. The unconscious means- in the Freudian vocabulary- something that was once conscious and was rendered sub-conscious, thus it gained a certain new function. After modern thinkers, of whom some analysts were pioneers and worked on that imperfect Freudian notion, the unconscious was regard as a structural system, or a special form of thought that is embedded in every spoked idea (the unconscious is not sub-conscious psychical material). Although analysts agree that the old unconscious is not ‘the repressed’ they still have the notion that the unconscious is something we should get rid of by exposing it within consciousness.  The other challenging issues are agreeing on the meaning of interpretation and what to interpret and from what do get the interpretation. In less words, we have more vague and difficult issues  to deal with than the expression of making the unconscious conscious suggests.   

What this post is emphasizing is that we should know consciously what we do and call ‘interpretation’, which is supposed to be what instigate the change the patient’s come to us to initiate.

A Moral Obligation:

As in all professions a professional is accountable to the person who requests his service. The psychoanalyst is accountable to the patients, the colleagues, and the field of epistemology as a whole and is not just free to practice with just the certification of a private training institute. The analyst should  know what he does to what.  The early analysts were exploring a newly discovered field and it was acceptable to give this  tentative answer of making the unconscious conscious. After Freud and his disciples gave birth to psychoanalysis as a professional discipline, in the nineteen thirties, the few decades that followed  were spent in theorising the substance of therapy and the analytic notions about the psyche. Aa a  new field of knowledge it needed two things that were not yet achieved: validating its claims to being a successful base for psychotherapy, and the prospects of developing it into a human science ( psychotherapy was and  still is considered an off shoot of a medical act). In spite of the absence of both those two conditions since and till now, psychoanalysis thrived without them. There was no proof or evidence provided to support the psychoanalysts claims regarding their descriptions of the  psychical processes or to confirm the effectiveness of psychoanalysis as therapy.

The expanding interest in psychoanalysis required  Freud and his disciples to start  creating a new vocabulary for their new findings. The vocabulary of psychoanalysis came from the common spoken language-like repression and projection- but the words acquired additional and more in-depth meanings. Developing the psychoanalytic vocabulary and its expansion to cover more ordinary issues like love\and hate, sadism, and masochism, etc., made it looked like  a theory. The theory of psychoanalysis was  actually a new and in-depth vocabulary of  certain psychical operations and phenomena, but it lacked a ‘subject-matter’. We can presume  that the human subject was its subject matter, but in this case, we would be reversing the cause/effect relation needed  in theorising. A search to understand the human subject should have created psychoanalysis and not that discovering psychoanalysis led us to discovering the subject. This mistaken start still delays reaching a comfortable answer to the question: what is psychoanalysis? Because it is expected that we will get more than one answer one answer we should just decide on some parameter  for the answers: no hypotheticals to qualify the answers.

  Freud looks as if he discovered psychoanalysis for us to find it. His text (the Standard Edition) is never old to ignore and replace. It is not what he discovered that is  essential in the formation of the analyst; it  his style of  discovering it that counts. As an example of this idea is his work on dreams. Finding out that a dream is a wish fulfilled is not a great break-through in the field of exploring the psyche. But, interpreting the dream- scene as fulfilling a wish, and realising that many important unconscious wishes could be found in the patients’ dreams bring to focus the nature of our work: interpreting in order to affect change- ‘new knowledge is cure’? I would not be surprised if most contemporary psychoanalysts would answer my query by saying that the dream brings the unconscious wish to consciousness. This is not true or satisfactory. The importance of interpreting dreams in analysis is to show the dreamer the workings of the dream-work. Interpreting the dream reverses the process of dreaming  which separates the wish from the dreamwork. It should catch our attention that a reputable physician in the eighteen centuries started a unique career of discoveries in a nonmedical field, by finding a respectable way of understanding dreams.            

Freud’s Gradual Discovery of Psychoanalysis:^[1]

To begin with, I find it very useful to make an early distinction between ‘psychoanalytic discoveries or finds’ like the dream as a wish fulfillment and ‘psychoanalytic thinking’ like the ‘ego’ is negation. Soon after finding that dreams are wish fulfilment Freud demonstrated a new way of thinking without which “dream-work” would not have become our way of listening to patients’ associations regardless of the topic. Freud 'intuitively' realised that the unconscious dream-work (S.E., 6\277-278) has its own structure and is not 'bad thinking'. Freud’s theory of dreams is a discovery of the psychology of dreaming and fantasizing, but it also detailed how a wish could be turned into a dream, a conflict, or a symptom, a childhood experience creating a character formation. Dream- work is a product of  the linguistic facilities of metaphor and metonymy, and a  dream is a statement expressed pictorially as  metaphor and metonymy, thus the wish of the dreamer could find its way to the world of expression, disregarding social conventions. It is not correct to considers an insight just a moment of enlightenment, because as I will show, Freud had an analytic mind that made insights a natural way of making discoveries in simple and common observations.

Freud’s brief experiences with Bernheim, Charcot, and Breuer directed him to something those three pioneers practiced but did not notice or understand: the hysterical patients (later all patients) ‘have two psychological lives’ separated by psychodynamic resistances. This notion came from his observation that consciousness and unconsciousness are only separate when to fit the situation.  In other words, the physician using hypnotism in treating a hysteric has been given a chance to look at the two psychical lives next to each other. But as the history of the splitting of consciousness [the French School] shows, it was a specific Freudian insight that made the whole difference. Freud looked at the outcome of hypnosis to realize that in terms of its content it was psychological material that the patient is rejecting it to be his (the basis of repression). The other finding that Freud realized was that what remains in consciousness is rational (causes and effect) while what split from consciousness is of a different nature and has its own system of functioning. The repressed is not another conscious content that is objectionable; it is consciousness because of its different mental structure. To consider the repressed different and not just objectionable-matters meant that something else or additional was required in order to  move beyond the simple repression of the unacceptable.

Without being aware -at the time- he started psychoanalytic thinking by saying “the hysterics suffer from reminiscences” (1895). He discovered that the split of consciousness into consciousness and sub-consciousness was not caused by something outside that same split psyche. He came to a new way of thinking in regard to psychopathology (and eventually to the human subject) by making the cause of the neurosis part of  the symptom [the patient is hysterical not because her symptoms say so, but  because her hysterical symptoms are her way of trying to get by with her impediment!]. Thus, Freud moved to a new horizon: understand the symptom as an unconscious message. This insight went in the opposite direction of  medical tradition. In the fields of medicine or objective endeavours causes and effects are separated by a ‘process’ not by differences in   their nature. I am emphasizing this difference because Freud’s gifted insight in regard to causes and effects (results) were uncommon and were only part of the dialectics of the Hegelian thinking. This is a point that deserve the attention because  Freud's intuitions have their roots in Western philosophy and are not merely strokes of genius luck.

There is another much more important source of his intuition that got its definition thirty years or more after his stating work . Psychoanalysis, as it was discovered and administered by Freud,  was fundamentally a theory of structures and not a theory of functions. That difference was highlighted in the thirties of last century the advancements in the field of linguistics (F.de-Saussure). De-Saussure made a distinction between functional thinking and structural thinking, or between explaining and interpreting (explaining pertains to motives, while interpreting pertains to structures).The example of Freud’s distinction between explaining and interpreting is obvious in his dream-work formulation that interprets the dream as a wish fulfillment (a structure that is latent in every and any dream) instead of looking for the specifics of each dream to explain its function.  and the old methods that were meant to explain the dream.

Freud’s theory of dreams is a discovery of the psychology of dreaming and fantasizing, but it also detailed what turns a wish into a dream, a conflict into a symptom, and a childhood experience into a character formation. Dream- work is a product of the linguistic facilities of metaphor and metonymy. Thus, a dream is a statement expressed metaphorically and metonymically thus the wish of the dreamer could find its way to the world of expression and disregarding social conventions. It is not correct to considers an insight just a moment of enlightenment, because Freud had an analytic mind that made insights a natural way of making discoveries in simple and common observations.

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1.       The discovery of psychoanalysis is an event created by Freud’s endeavor to follow up on his intuitions regarding hypnotism. There are various ways to choose an approach to that subject which would be based on the most valued findings like the unconscious, identification, projection, etc. My approach in that regard is to underline some of Freud’s insights about common things, which built his way of thinking and created the ‘psychoanalytic way of explaining the new ‘findings’, like repetition compulsion and somatization. The most remarkable thing in that venture is Freud’s natural leaning to to simplicity instead of the appeal of complexity.

  

Freud’s insight was noticing that ordinary speech is made of interwoven conscious and unconscious meanings. This new feature in the functions of the mind opened him to a new mode of thinking: in psychical life it is not the causes and their effect that count but the nature of the link between them. Desiring something strongly could become painful enough to scare the person from attaining it. He was comfortable to live with the notion that the human mind is capable of reversing the link between causes and their results without much consternation, because the conscious and the unconscious coexist in the subject’s mind as a natural feature of our specie’s verbal thinking. Freud continued from that insight to practice thinking, instead of applying it. He accepted the existence of another thinking process alongside regular thinking, which has different means of expression. He also realized that with good attention to the patient’s conscious speech  the unconscious issues revealed themselves, but indirectly.  I believe that Freud was unconsciously searching for the unconscious. His discovery of psychoanalysis- as a new and distinct field of knowledge- started when he established the coexistence of consciousness and unconsciousness and that there was no use for hypnotism to dealing with each separately. This point emphasizes the fact that whatever is said still requires interpretation. 

If we accept those preliminary discoveries (insights) as basics in psychoanalysis we- old generation psychoanalysts and our candidates- should face the fact that psychoanalysis is not going to continue being that unspecific type of work. In more direct ways: psychoanalysis should shed off the old adage of free association, the open ended process of sessions, the rituals that are part of  the exchanges between analyst and patient and be more focused on the two issue that bring a patient to psychoanalyst: the impact of the intrapsychic on the interpersonal (the character formation that was created in the early upbringing and persists in adulthood), and limiting the analytic relation with the analyst to interpretations and reconstruction.

Those three last lines-if accepted- would have a noticeable impact on the -sometimes- distorted process of psychoanalysing.  

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1.       The discovery of psychoanalysis is an event created by Freud’s endeavor to follow up on his intuitions regarding hypnotism. There are various ways to choose an approach to that subject which would be based on the most valued findings like the unconscious, identification, projection, etc. My approach in that regard is to underline some of Freud’s insights about common things, which built his way of thinking and created the ‘psychoanalytic way of explaining the new ‘findings’, like repetition compulsion and somatization. The most remarkable thing in that venture is Freud’s natural leaning to simplicity instead of the appeal of complexity.

 

Listening, Interpreting, Reconstructing.

B. What do we hear when we listen

It will not come as a  surprise to anyone if I said that we hear at least two things in what is said to us: what is explicitly meant to be relayed (verbally, gesture, etc.), and something(s) else implicit in what we get from the explicit. Both the explicit and the implicit  might rarely match but usually they diverge. This is the nature of relating and communicating in humans because we communicate “linguistically”, not instinctively. We do not always talk but convey messages with other means, i.e.., we say more than what we meant to say, or people elicit from what we say more than what we intended to convey. It will also not be  surprising to anyone who is reading this posting- if- a psychoanalyst to say that most of the time people who speak are not fully aware(unconscious) of all what they convey.

 Psychoanalysts  claim that they depend on that division to get to the unconscious, because we learn in psychoanalysis that sometimes people  ‘unconsciously’ imply, infer, give hints to some things that they themselves are no aware of. I want to bring to attention and also to opening for discussion and review, that the nature of the link the  unconscious creates with consciousness, because it is a point of fundamental importance in the work of the supervisor.

The difference between what is conscious and what is unconscious is not determined by their content but by the function they perform at a particular moment, both in regular speech and in defined psychological events. What may well be unconscious regarding an aggressive notion in a certain context could be the conscious motive that makes it a gesture of love but in a different context. In better and more psychoanalytic way: we can say that every conscious notion could and does create its unconscious parallel, and visa- versa. Better, what I will later define or refer to as the unconscious is always a  product of something conscious. Strangely, what is conscious is also product of unconscious issues. I mean by  that the common idea that we psychoanalysts have learned till the seventies and the eighties  (before Lacan and Kohut) is that there are two conditions called Cs &Ucs. But now with what we know about the basis of those two conditions we should say that consciousness creates its specific unconscious version, exactly as the unconsciousness engenders a conscious reflection of itself. We can even say that Freud’s  old  topographic metapsychology has advanced us to a point when the conscious/unconscious duality exhausted its usefulness, and the typology of the Ego/Id with its structural components threatened the integrity of the psychoanalytic theory as a whole, and we should reconsider that fixed adage and get over it .

Psychoanalysis was almost totally exhausted if it was not for Lacan who gave the unconscious its structural meaning, and Kohut moving psychoanalysis from ego psychology to the psychology of narcissism. Psychoanalysis was no longer a psychology of issues and events but a psychology of structures and processes. What I mean and hope to bring to attention is that psychoanalysis is no longer a theory ‘of things psychological that are in dynamic interaction,’ but a theory of ‘the psychological human subject’ or what is human in the psychical phenomena. The unconscious is not consciousness denied recognition; the unconscious is a structure embedded in language itself that defines the human subject. We cannot talk to each other about the ‘whole thing’; we quietly talk about other things but metaphorically and metonymically, i.e., unconsciously. Sometimes , the listener makes sense of what we said and many times we discover that the listener reacted to what is implied and not was said. At the same time when we speak it is I that talk, not Me. Me is quite and just lives the moment.

We are now at a point that tells us what we know about the unconscious could explain to us what we do not understand about consciousness. The patient who started her sessions with crying was consciously saying how in pain she was, but though she did not say how her pain suits her well because it reflects a hidden pleasure of being closer to her father, she indirectly mentioned it.

The Supervisor’s Mission:

The supervisor- as a general rule- starts by showing the candidate how he-the supervisor-listens to what the patient says  to the candidate. At the same stage the supervisor should be able to show the candidate the ‘missed obvious’ in the patient’s speech if there is some. When this process is done well the candidate will gradually, and without much input from the supervisor- appreciate listening instead being eager to interpret. The common reason is that candidates are eager to show off their knowledge of the theory. At those moments the supervisor gets a chance to show the candidate that the vocabulary he is using as “theory” is more of ‘listening to the theory’ and is distracted by that from listening to the patient. Whether the patient was defending his narcissism by identifying with the domineering mother or splitting his father’s goodness and badness no material to explain (naming a process is embalming it).

Listening  to a patient is to hear the silent psychoanalytic theory he has about himself. That theory is  unconsciously spelled out in several conscious recalls: the candidate has to develop the skill to distinguish between the patient’s theory of himself and the psychoanalytic theory itself. The same patient who was crying  at the beginning of the session was not conscious that her complaint revealed something about having her father for herself and depicting a whole family drama. Listening to the patient and uncovering the unconscious parallel to the conscious material is psychoanalysis. What is going to be interpreted for the purpose of cure is the false interpretation has given to his theory of himself.

The supervisor shows the candidate the missing parts in  the rhetoric of the patient, which finding them and putting them in the proper  context of his personal life story brings the conscious and its specific unconscious component together and the psychoanalytic rhetoric of the patient would then be reconnected. The supervisor’s job is to show the candidate that the conscious and the unconscious are like the two sides of the same coin (they are two entities  tied together and are not separated by anything that is foreign to either of them. The old notion that we analysts are dealing with disconnected issues and that we look for the unconscious to explain the conscious does not put in focus the purpose of undergoing analysis: what is curative in psychoanalyzing?!!

is is not anymore valid. The Psyche is not a disjointed entity due to resistances and defense mechanism; the psyche is the entity formed from the unity between Cs.& Ucs. That formation requires the supervisor to show the candidate  from the patient’s material the rearrangement of past and present in the patient’s speech , the links made between the Cs. and Ucs., parental misinformation and patient’s misunderstanding to one time reconstruction  will be made.

Interpretation is the act of giving the meaningless issue a meaningful place in the main story of the patient. Thus, interpretation is what the analyst grasps (candidate) using unconnected and disconnected material to explain a central ides that seems to mean something. The patient who started her sessions with crying and complaining mentioned several times her disappointment in her father’s passivity and not making the mother give her some more attention. Those complaints were not connected or systematic but just casual complaints. I noted to the patient [aF1]  that happened to mention a total family situation that if we know more about,  we  could find out why she does not make the complaining  Passing over several useful analytic interventions at that point brings us to an old false psychoanalytic meaning of interpretation: interpretation is to get to a better (more general, etc.) meaning of  the material. In fact, and in practice interpretation exposes a defense against more findings. In old psychoanalysis interpretation was getting to the repressed reason for the issue at hand.

          There is more to be said about supervision but for purpose of not exceeding the average size of a posting I would just add something that I rarely found mentioned in meetings of training analysts-even in the bi-annual  meetings of the IPA. The supervisor should know the process that led him to his advice and to explain his intervention in the context of the supervising work.  

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 [aF1]