Unsettling, Upsetting, and Undoing: The Real Therapeutic Action

Abstract

This story could easily be recruited to use Freud’s influential presence to demonstrate his dismissal of his own technical rules. I, on the other hand, examine it with a more modern lens to suggest that his activity actually falls within a postclassical way of thinking about neutrality. This version is one that emphasizes the importance of the analyst’s capacity to be embedded and to extricate himself from a patient’s procedural system, thus perturbing it to support change.

Keywords:

• technique
• procedural
• perturbation
• psychoanalysis

Acknowledgments

Previous versions of this paper were presented at the Spring Meeting of the Division of Psychoanalysis (39), American Psychological Association, San Francisco, April 2015, and the meeting of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Rome, 2016.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karen Rosica

Karen Rosica, PsyD, is a clinical professor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center; faculty, Denver Psychoanalytic Institute; and an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She is in private practice in Denver, Colorado.