On making rules: Toward a reformation of the dynamics of transference in psychoanalytic treatment

Becoming an Individual: Technically Subversive Thoughts on the Role of the Analyst's Influence

“…Even as psychoanalysis shifted, in the work of Winnicott, for example, in the direction of a two-person psychology, with his understanding of the essential influence of a "holding environment" (Winnicott, 1960, p. 591) one can draw from Winnicott a sensibility that the "good enough" BECOMING AN INDIVIDUAL 311 4 I have discussed elsewhere (Slavin, 1994) that this interpretation may in fact be a misunderstanding of Freud's point. A close reading of the "surgeon analogy" text indicates that Freud was more preponderantly addressing the question of the analyst's ambition and narcissism in effecting a cure.…”

“…It was not until the advent of the American relational perspective (Aron, 1991;Benjamin, 1995;Davies, 1994;Ehrenberg, 1982;Fast, 1992aFast, , 1992bGreenberg, 1986;Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983;Hoffman, 1983;Mitchell, 1988Mitchell, , 1997Renik, 1993;Seligman, 1999;J. Slavin, 1994;J.…”

“…Slavin, 1994)-the analyst's neutrality, abstinence, and minimalized participation-can be understood as aimed at trying to eliminate, or at least reduce, the analyst as a personal influence, a specific subject, on the process and on the patient's mind, thus enabling the patient's authentic self to emerge. In the context of this aim, a "transference cure" indicates a failure to protect the delicate emergence of the patient's true voice, resulting in the substitution of the voice of the original authority (the internalized parents') with the voice of another (the analyst's) in the patient's mind.…”

Models of learning and psychoanalytic traditions can reform be sustained in psychoanalytic training?

“…And in no other advanced postgraduate field of education, where those being taught are already mature professionals, are those in training made to feel so much like beginners, whose prior study and experience prepares them little, if at all, for what they are about to undertake (J. Slavin, 1992).…”

“…The paper deals with the rules that we make as analysts (J. Slavin, 1994) and suggests that some of these rules have arisen because of the fears experienced in dealing with intense transferential and countertransferential feelings. I suggested that the rules can sometimes be so concretized that important information we need about our Downloaded by [Ryerson University Library] at 00:40 05 June 2016 patients, and ourselves, can be lost in a defensive adherence to them.…”