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Psychoanalysis vs Psychotherapy

48:36 recording · AUTO · 1 speaker

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Brief overview

Psychoanalysis proper differs from analytic psychotherapy by deliberately evoking and analyzing the transference neurosis.

  1. Truth therapy dismantles defenses, lie therapy rebuilds themLangs's basic distinction: some patients, Freud's widow among them, cannot be given truth in exchange for their symptoms.
  2. Transference is everywhere, transference neurosis is notThe speaker has a transference to his dentist and his grocery deliverer; the transference neurosis makes the analysis itself the patient's obsession.
  3. The transference neurosis is the dividing lineAnalytic psychotherapy analyzes transference but does not set out to evoke a transference neurosis and make its resolution the central aim.
Executive Summary AI
  • Answering a listener named Gavin Behrens, the speaker sets out to distinguish psychoanalytic psychotherapy from psychoanalysis proper and to say how his own clinical technique has shifted.0:00
  • He uses Robert Langs's mid-1970s paper 'Truth therapy / lie therapy' to divide therapies into those that dismantle defenses and those that rebuild crumbling ones, citing Freud sending away a late-middle-aged widow rather than removing symptoms he had nothing to replace.2:12
  • Turning to Brian Bird's early-1980s paper, he separates ubiquitous everyday transference from the transference neurosis, which in well-structured patients may take six months or the better part of a year and emerges sooner at four or five sessions a week.11:48
  • He warns that a transference neurosis regressing from the depressive-reparative into the paranoid-schizoid position becomes a transference psychosis with stalking and acting out, mirrored by a countertransference neurosis in the analyst, which is why an analyst in personal crisis should return to analysis, supervision, or withdraw from practice.31:08
  • He recounts a Montreal candidate, later the only analyst in Calgary, who told a prospective patient she did not have to fall in love with him and was nearly thrown out of training, and concludes that psychoanalysis proper still seeks and contains this explosive material.41:31
Key Quote
“You know, Surin Kierkegaard said, don't make the symptoms go away.”
— Speaker6:12
Key Quote
“The symptoms are messengers.”
— Speaker6:18
Key Quote
“Transference is ubiquitous.”
— Speaker12:51