Comments on the Development of a Psychoanalytic Technique

Abstract

The convergences and divergences in our techniques across analysts are, to me, the most fascinating phenomena in the field of clinical psychoanalysis. Although I assumed, before my psychoanalytic education, that I'd be learning about a standardized and monolithic technique, I've actually found much more divergence, and so I have become particularly interested in considering the how and why of divergences.

Notes

Dr. Michael Shulman is Faculty, Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute; Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan and Department of Psychology, Madonna University.

¹I do not dispute that groups of analysts often share values, but it is my observation that such shared values do not translate to techniques that are anywhere near the same across a given group's analysts.

²I am following primarily Busch's (1995) use of surface as I understand it, which I regard as a delimited portion of Paniagua's (1991) broader work on analytic surfaces.

³This point was brought home to me with particular force when I participated in a discussion of one of Boesky's presentations of his work on psychoanalytic disagreements, a paper (now part of his book on this subject; Boesky, 2008) on Ilany Kogan's published verbatim case material. In the group discussion that followed his discussing the Kogan, after I had found Boesky compelling in his use of evidence to argue his understanding of the material and I assumed others would similarly, I noted wide disagreement from those in attendance, who were members of his local institute, who heard the identical compelling single session of material quite differently from each other, and applied different rules of understanding in listening to it.

⁴I was an amateur astronomer as a boy and learned the usefulness of the expansion of our knowledge that came from ultraviolet and infrared visualization, as well as radio-telescopic mapping, of interstellar objects; how much more of the structure and functioning of a galaxy, for instance, could be learned by such juxtapositions of pictures of radiation, than might come just from pictures based in wavelengths visible to the human eye.