The compulsion to confess and the compulsion to judge in the analytic situation

Abstract

In this paper the author shows that human beings have two quasi‐instinctual primitive tendencies – namely, the compulsion to confess and the compulsion to judge (to condemn or to absolve). These compulsions are originally unconscious and become conscious during the course of the analytic process.

The compulsion to judge is a natural consequence of the compulsion to confess. These two tendencies are intensified by the analytic situation. The patient has a compulsion to confess to the analyst and to himself, and likewise the analyst has a compulsion to confess to himself and to the patient. The patient therefore has a compulsion to judge himself as good or bad and to judge the analyst as good or bad while, on the other hand, the analyst has a compulsion to judge himself as good or bad and to judge the patient as good or bad. The task of analysis is to make both patient and analyst conscious of their compulsions to confess and to judge (to condemn or to absolve). The compulsion to judge in the analyst, particularly if unconscious, may give rise to mistakes in diagnosis, technique, treatment, and the assessment of analysability.

The requirement of analytic neutrality in the analyst constantly conflicts with his compulsion to judge. If we are profoundly involved in our patient's dramatic conflict, we are bound to pass a judgement (condemnation or absolution); however, when we judge, we are not neutral and therefore become incapable of intellectual consciousness of the patient's conflict. Conversely, if we do not judge, we are neutral, but are then relatively uninvolved in the patient's conflict and are hence virtually unable to achieve emotional consciousness.

The author attempts to show that neutrality cannot and must not be a preconstituted attitude in the analyst, but can and must be a point of arrival following a profound, intensely felt existential experience based on an attitude of non‐condemnation and non‐absolution.

Key words:

• neutrality
• compulsion
• judgment
• confess
• Freud
• Bion

1. Revised version of a paper presented at the Rome Psychoanalytic Centre on 13 June 1973. First published in Rivista Psicoanal 22:11–35, 1976.

2. Translated by Philip Slotkin MA Cantab. MITI.

1. Revised version of a paper presented at the Rome Psychoanalytic Centre on 13 June 1973. First published in Rivista Psicoanal 22:11–35, 1976.

2. Translated by Philip Slotkin MA Cantab. MITI.

Notes

1. Revised version of a paper presented at the Rome Psychoanalytic Centre on 13 June 1973. First published in Rivista Psicoanal 22:11–35, 1976.

2. Translated by Philip Slotkin MA Cantab. MITI.

3. The most telling example of this possibility is Freud's view of psychotics as unanalysable. In a letter to Hollós, Freud (1928, p. 21f.) expresses a very severe judgement: “Ultimately I had to confess to myself that [&] I do not care for these patients [psychotics], that they annoy me, and that I find them alien to me and to everything human. A peculiar kind of intolerance which undoubtedly disqualifies me as a psychiatrist. [&] Am I behaving in this instance as the physicians of yesterday did toward hysterics? Is this the consequence of an increasingly evident partiality for the primacy of the intellect, the expression of an animosity toward the id?” So Freud's tendency, or compulsion, to judge psychotics negatively probably contributed to his view that they were not analysable.

4. According to Nunberg (1948), the most primordial reason for a patient to seek treatment is not the wish for recovery, but the desire to be able to gratify his frustrated infantile wishes.

5. So there are at least four possible vicissitudes of the compulsion to judge: (a) the analyst condemns himself and the patient; (b) the analyst absolves himself and the patient; (c) the analyst condemns the patient and absolves himself; and (d) the analyst condemns himself and absolves the patient.