Int J Psychoanal 2004;85:567–78 PSYCHOANALYTIC CONTROVERSIES

A missing link in psychoanalytic technique:

Psychoanalytic consciousness

FRED BUSCH
246 Eliot St, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-1447, USA — drfredbusch@comcast.net

with a rejoinder by

BETTY JOSEPH
36 Clifton Hill, London, NW8 0QG, UK — betty@joseph36.fsnet.co.uk

For much of our history we have suffered from a pedestrian view of consciousness,
leading to discussions on this topic since Freud best characterized as a distant murmur
within proliferating theories of technique. While many outside of psychoanalysis
consider consciousness as one of the great mysteries of science (Kandel, 2000),
within psychoanalysis, if we consider consciousness at all, it is as an epiphenomenon.
Given this perspective it is not surprising that a majority of psychoanalysts seem to
consider consciousness a distraction from the true interest of psychoanalysis, the
unconscious. We have not come very far from what Anna Freud said over 65 years
ago, ‘Somehow or other, many analysts conceived the idea that, in analysis, the
value of the scientific and therapeutic work was in direct proportion to the depth of
the psychic strata upon which attention was focused’ (1936, p. 3).
It is my position that inherent in every interpretation of the unconscious in
clinical psychoanalysis is an implied definition of psychoanalytic consciousness.
Whenever we interpret something unknown to a patient we express our belief it is
knowable. Can we imagine taking a position that, for the majority of psychoanalytic
patients, it is a good idea to leave unconscious fantasies that are causing major
symptoms in a patient’s life at the level of the unconscious? Every interpretation
is an attempt to bring something from the unconscious closer to the surface of
the mind. Yet it is my impression we haven’t spent enough time considering
the reasons for this, leading to interpretive methods with little consideration for
surfaces in the mind.
Freud struggled with this same issue when discussing the method of free
association. He rejected any attempt on the patient’s part to exert conscious control
of associations, but in an attempt to acknowledge another clinical finding he
approvingly quotes Schiller:
Looked at in isolation a thought may seem very trivial or very fantastic; but it may be
important by another thought that comes after it, and, in conjunction with thoughts that seem
equally absurd, it may turn out to form a most effective link. Reason cannot form any opinion
upon all this unless it retains the thought long enough to look at it in conjunction with other

©2004 Institute of Psychoanalysis

568 FRED BUSCH WITH BETTY JOSEPH

thoughts. On the other hand, where there is a creative mind, Reason—so it seems to me—
relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell and only then does it look
through them and examine them in a mass (1900, p. 103, my italics).

Here, Freud defines one component of psychoanalytic consciousness as the

potential to keep in mind one’s observations long enough to observe them, later
described by Sterba (1934). It is based on an enhanced capacity to deal with anxiety-
provoking thoughts at multiple levels, leading to awareness of one’s thoughts as more
than fleeting images. This is not an intellectual process. Rather, it is a necessary step in
helping patients move from their regressive level of thinking in the face of conflicts.
A patient in the midst of conflict is like a 4-year-old waking from a bad dream. For
the 4-year-old the reality of the dream is primary. Assurances have little effect. It is
only as the child gradually returns to a wakeful state that the dream no longer has its
impact. Thus, it has never made much sense that we say the patient has to regress in
psychoanalytic treatment, when in areas of conflict patients’ minds are already in a
highly regressed state. A patient under the sway of an unconscious fantasy, and the
accompanying psychic reactions (shame, guilt, fear etc.), is convinced of the truth of
his thoughts and feelings (Busch, 1995b). For the adult in treatment, as for the child,
the mind is as the mind delivers. ‘As a result, the mind itself is transparent, and not
accessible to reflection by the child’ (Nelson, 1997, p. 260). Most analysts would
agree this is how analysands are throughout long periods of analysis. They think,
but they cannot think about how they think. Thoughts and feelings are not so much
expressions of psychic reality; they just are. Using Fonagy and Target’s description
of children’s thinking, and substituting ‘adult patient’ for where they use the term
child, we come close to the patient’s experience: ‘The child generally operates in
a “psychic equivalence” mode, where ideas are not felt to be representations, but
rather direct replicas of reality, and consequently always true’ (1996, p. 219).
We can observe the regressive nature of our patient’s thoughts in Flavell’s
Piagetian definition of the pre-operational thinking, where the individual ‘feels
neither the compunction to justify his reasoning to others or to look for possible
contradictions in his logic. He is, for example, unable to construct a chain of
reasoning, which he has just passed through’ (1963, p. 156).
In short, one component of a psychoanalytic understanding of consciousness
is a change in the patient’s capacity to keep in mind and reflect upon his thinking.
This is as Freud described: the capacity to allow in a mass of uncensored thoughts
followed by the ability to see where one has been. Libet et al. (1983) discovered
there is an extremely long period of time, in brain time, between when a stimulus
is first received and when it is acted upon. It is during this time that an individual,
in the face of conflict, is forced to act because of a need to undo a threat. With
analysis we expect the patient to develop the potential for reflection (Busch, 2001).
Pally and Olds (1998) liken it to the difference between a video recorder with and
without memory storage. Without the capacity for memory storage the individual
is limited to respond to fleeting images, while with it the individual has many
images, thoughts and feelings to compare, contrast and reflect upon the immediate
image. Our mind can process billions of pieces of information in one second,
 A MISSING LINK IN PSYCHOANALYTIC TECHNIQUE 569

so the reflection I am referring to is the time of an eye-blink, not a laborious,

obsessional process.
Now let us look at the issue of psychoanalytic consciousness from another side.
We tend to forget that the most frightening aspect of psychoanalytic treatment is for
the patient to consciously know, or sense he is becoming aware of: the specifics of
unconscious fantasies and how these are gratified;1 feelings of humiliation over what
he has done in order to gain love or power; how the people he’s needed to idealize
are not that ideal and the people he’s hated he’s also loved; and the list goes on.
Some patients are afraid to know they know anything, while protesting they know
everything.
From Freud onward we have seen that the purpose of defense processes is to take
the meaning out of behavior dominated by unconscious fantasies. In this way fantasies
can be lived out without any conscious knowledge. Fantasies have an active, ongoing
influence on thoughts, feelings and behavior, while the individual has no understanding
of their meaning and the fantasies driving them. Thus the critical accomplishment of
defenses is the establishment of a barrier between living out unconscious fantasies,
and conscious understanding of doing so. Conscious knowing, in a psychoanalytic
sense, is not the same as a perception or ‘knowing’ in its colloquial meaning. A patient
may know he is angry with his boss (a perception of a feeling), but this is different than
knowing he is angry with his boss. This latter type of ‘knowing’ includes a conscious
awareness that he is the source of his anger. We may make an interpretation to a patient
that is deeply unconscious, and the patient may now ‘know’ this about himself, but
this is very different to the patient experiencing the interpretation as a way of knowing
himself. To state it in its most pithy form, psychoanalytic consciousness involves the
potential for awareness of the role of one’s own mind in effecting life in and outside
of the analytic office. Psychoanalytic consciousness is not a static form, but a highly
variegated gradation, beginning with an inkling, a dim awareness, that there is a lot
going on in one’s mind.
I would now like to highlight briefly two components of psychoanalytic technique,
which are necessary in promoting psychoanalytic consciousness. Paniagua (2001)
has already documented how little these methods tend to be consistently used or
considered in clinical practice.

Resistance analysis
One of the most misunderstood concepts in psychoanalysis, resistance analysis is
given a preemptory nod by some and is disdained by many.2 The most important
component of resistances is that they are the guardians against terror over the seemingly
unknowable. The ego is continuously on guard against these dangers, which involve
the most frightening emotions in the psyche, that is, annihilation of the self, total
aloneness, castration, shame etc. Given the intensity of these emotions, it is difficult
to imagine how to bring into consciousness what is unknown without accounting for
1
It isn’t the gratification of unconscious wishes that is frightening, as patients fi nd innumerable ways of
gratifying these as long as they don’t know this is what they are doing.
2
See Busch (1992) and Gray (1982) for detailed examples.
570 FRED BUSCH WITH BETTY JOSEPH

unconscious resistances. Even when resistances are preconscious or conscious, the

reasons for their existence at the moment of operation are unconscious.
In working through resistances we face the same problem as with any unconscious
process or content, that is, how to bring them closer to conscious awareness in a way
that does not arouse overwhelming anxiety. This has been written about extensively
(e.g. Gray, 1994; Pray, 1994; Busch, 1995a, 1999, 2000), and thus I will not go into
it here. Suffice it to say it is difficult to appreciate how to work with resistances
without an appreciation for Freud’s (1926) second theory of anxiety. Many still
work with a variation of Freud’s first theory of anxiety, leading to a belief that
interpretation of the unconscious fantasy will lead to the freeing of anxiety.

The role of the preconscious

The significance of the preconscious in psychoanalytic technique has been captured
most elegantly by Green:
The analysis of the preconscious and in particular use of the patient’s analytical material
(in his own language) has been ignored since Freud. The reason for this appears to be
straightforward in that, since the preconscious can be reached by the conscious, the importance
of the preconscious is negligible and language is superficial. To me, however, this viewpoint
is superficial. The preconscious is, as we have seen, a privileged space where both the analyst
and the patient can meet to share part of the transference and go forward together. There is
no point in the analyst running like a hare if the patient moves like a tortoise. A meeting point
in depth is more probable if the thread that links the two travelers also serves to keep them
sufficiently apart (1974, p. 421).

Others have attempted to capture this same process, designating it as working

at the ‘analytic surface’ (Levy and Inderbitzen, 1990), finding a ‘workable surface’
(Paniagua, 1991) and working ‘in the neighborhood’ (Busch, 1993). All are based on
the premise that analysis proceeds in stages that eventuates in the patient approaching
that which is most frightening. By the time we make a deep interpretation, it shouldn’t
feel very deep at all. Interpreting a patient’s sexual desires for the analyst should not
come as a complete surprise to the patient. What we interpret is the meaning of what
is preconsciously knowable and deeply felt in what the patient consciously talks
about. Further, structural changes come about by gradual accretion of psychological
information available to consciousness, not by deep diving into the unknown (Busch,
1999). To return again to Green:
I support the Freudian concept of the ego in which the patient’s freedom is respected and
which allows one to proceed according to what the patient is able to understand of what we
are saying to him at that point in time of the treatment, i.e., permitting him to elaborate and
integrate in a regression-progression process, and so to proceed from the most superficial to
the deepest level (1974, p. 421).

In summary, it is my impression that one major cause of our difficulty in

appreciating the role of psychoanalytic consciousness as a guiding component
of technique is our struggle with Freud’s (1923) move to the structural model,
and especially the concepts of unconscious, preconscious and conscious ego. It
 A MISSING LINK IN PSYCHOANALYTIC TECHNIQUE 571

is within this model we find the framework for appreciating varying levels of
resistances to knowing, and the means for interpreting so the patient can approach
conscious knowing. As I’ve indicated, the fear in potentially knowing (a thought,
a feeling) is what leads a patient into repetitive actions, while psychoanalysis can
offer the possibility for reflection. It is this possibility that allows patients choices,
where previously there was only the necessity for action.
The contemporary Kleinians of London have been one of the groups struggling
with these issues over the last two decades. The significance of an ego concept (or its
absence) within the structural model can be seen in their attempts to come to grips
with the necessity to work closer to the surface (Schafer, 1994; Kernberg, 2001).
As Schafer (1997) noted, they are still working with an insufficient differentiation
between the concepts of an ego and self. I would add that they haven’t appreciated
the function of an ego distinct from its being a depository for abandoned object
cathexis as described by Segal (1997). Schafer concluded, ‘they do not concern
themselves with such key questions as what enables their analysands to answer
with more or less stable understanding to interpretations’ (1997, p. 20). It is my
impression the current Kleinians are struggling with their heritage from Klein, who
had the view that, in order to establish and sustain the analytic situation, the analyst
must give deep interpretations that locate the level of anxiety (Hinshelwood, 1989).
Fonagy’s (1999) attempt to rectify the inability to explain structural changes with
the concept of ‘mentalization’ still leaves him at a distance from a way of working
that incorporates the significance of psychoanalytic consciousness, and what I see
as the methods to bring this about.

References
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Rejoinder
BETTY JOSEPH

Fred Busch’s concern in this paper is with consciousness and various aspects of
it, which he feels have not been given sufficient attention by psychoanalysts. He
describes his position in the following way: ‘Whenever we interpret something
unknown to a patient we express our belief it is knowable’ and he adds that it is
his impression that ‘we haven’t spent enough time considering the reasons for this,
leading to interpretive methods with little consideration for surfaces in the mind’.
He goes on to mention a number of aspects such as the need to help the patient to
develop the capacity to deal with anxiety, the importance of taking very seriously
how for the patient ‘thoughts and feelings are not so much expressions of psychic
reality; they just are’. But I would add that surely trying to help our patients to use
their minds to think about what is going on rather than just taking them as they are
is basic to all our work as psychoanalysts?
Busch stresses the importance of the technique helping the patient to reflect
upon his thinking as opposed to just living out his phantasies. I again question
whether this is not basic to all psychoanalytic technique. He thinks that ‘the most
frightening aspect of psychoanalytic treatment is for the patient to consciously
know, or sense he is becoming aware of: the specifics of unconscious fantasies and
how these are gratified’. A further point that I consider a very major ‘frightening
 A MISSING LINK IN PSYCHOANALYTIC TECHNIQUE 573

aspect of psychoanalytic treatment’ is the fear of change. Busch goes on to talk

about an issue which to me is central to our discussion, that is, how, following an
interpretation of deeply unconscious material, ‘the patient may now “know” this
about himself, but this is very different to the patient experiencing the interpretation
as a way of knowing himself’. This leads him to talk about technique and what he
terms ‘resistance analysis’ (which I would consider more under the umbrella of
defences against anxiety, linked with the fear of change) and secondly the role of the
preconscious. He quotes Green (1974) saying, ‘the preconscious is, as we have seen,
a privileged space where both the analyst and the patient can meet to share part of
the transference and go forward together’. And Green continues, ‘a meeting point in
depth is more probable if the thread that links the two travelers also serves to keep
them sufficiently apart’.
While this way of expressing things about the transference would not be the same
as mine, as I understand it, considering Busch’s paper as a whole, the quotation from
Green is really the nub of the issue. I have described how Busch has spoken about
the importance of differentiating between the patient ‘knowing’ about and ‘knowing’
from experiencing, and to me the place where experience is experienced is in the
relationship between patient and analyst—the transference. The patient cannot but
live out his hopes, his anxieties, his defences against them—his pathology—in the
way he relates to the analyst. He cannot do otherwise than consciously, or more
likely unconsciously, attempt to draw the analyst into enacting his internal object
relationships and phantasies. We are, for example, familiar with the situation where
one slowly becomes aware that the session is becoming almost too easy and pleasant
and that one is being drawn into a seductive relationship with the patient. I think
that one aspect of ‘the thread that links the two travelers’ is what we would call
projective identification. But the further point that Green is making here, when he
says that it should also keep them apart, is, as I understand it, that the analyst should
be different from the patient. The patient, one might say by definition, acts out his
phantasies, his impulses, his defences in the session. But the analyst should be able
to feel how he is being subjected to pressures from the patient and by becoming
aware not actually live them out, not behave as his internal objects or objects of
his past were felt to be doing, but to use this awareness to help his understanding.
Indeed, I earlier quoted Busch as speaking about the patient’s need to be able to
reflect on his thinking rather than just living out his phantasies. I am suggesting that
in a subtle way this applies also to the analyst.
I think that, if he can start from this area where patient and analyst meet, that is
in the mood, the atmosphere in the room, attentive not just to what the patient says
but the way he says it, how he moves, laughs etc., we begin to open up what is going
on in the room in the relationship at a point where both can share the knowledge.
The knowledge gained this way is what I suspect Busch is aiming for when he wants
knowledge not based, I think he means, on explanation but on experiencing.
My approach to some of the issues that Busch is raising may be indicated briefly
by my bringing a dream from a patient in her mid-twenties. She had difficulties being
close to people, so that her relationships were limited; she seemed highly intelligent
but was holding a simple, almost unskilled job. In the analysis, her material was
574 FRED BUSCH WITH BETTY JOSEPH

repetitive and strangely superficial. When I made an interpretation she would pause,
but the pause did not seem thoughtful, and often it seemed rather that the words and
meaning were falling apart, and the meaning was lost. At other times she would
agree to something I had said as if she understood and might even give an example
from her current life or childhood as if corroborating it—but it collapsed and took us
no further. It seems that she ‘knew’ but did not experience. Or she might just go on
to another topic so that one rarely felt that what one had said was of much use. I shall
focus around a dream that she brought in about the fourth year of the analysis.
The patient was in a large place, something was going wrong; she was on one
side of the place, the analyst on the other. I, the analyst, took it on myself to phone
for help; my patient felt resigned and sad. She queried to herself would the phone
call be helpful or make more trouble since the police might just burst in.
In this dream, I think we can see elements of the patient’s attitude and behaviour
in her outside life reflected in the analysis and alive in the transference, particularly
her hope and yet her suspicion, doubt and sense of persecution. There is an awareness
that she needs help yet the analyst is kept at great distance—in the dream at the
other side of the place; in the session by the long pauses and constant withdrawal
of contact that I have described. The various dream figures carry split-off aspects
of the patient and analyst. She splits off her need for help and the active part that
could seek help, and this, as I have just suggested, is projected into the analyst: I
do the phoning and she remains passive and resigned. But her fear of the analysis
and analyst is also expressed in the police who might help but might also burst in
disruptively. From the point of view of the experiencing by both patient and analyst,
this is very relevant since I am so frequently put in the position of either waiting and
getting almost nowhere in the pauses and shifts, or feeling a desperate need to get on
with things, to break in and disturb my patient’s passivity and resignation.
But is her passivity and the slowness and difficulty of the work stimulating
a further anxiety expressed by the dream? I think that there is an unconscious
communication of the patient’s anxiety that I, the analyst, am frustrated and
despairing and feel a need to call for help with the work, while she remains resigned,
almost giving up hope. To become aware of and to give such an interpretation
probably stirs up strong defences in both analyst and patient (whether we call it
deep or not I do not know). In contrast, the fear of the police bursting in can more
easily be made conscious and experienced as expressing her fear of the analytic
process, her fear of my thoughts and ideas breaking into her mind and demanding
change.
There is, of course, much in Busch’s paper that I have not attempted to discuss,
and I have concentrated primarily on the technical aspect of what he describes in
the phrase ‘the patient experiencing the interpretation as a way of knowing himself’.
In my discussion and in the brief example that I have given, I have tried to describe
my attempt to help my patient to think about herself and what is really going on in
her mind. I hope that as she gets glimpses of processes active in the room, in the
relationship, she can start to pay attention to them rather than defensively avoiding
‘noticing’, that she can then verbalise and think about them. This is to my mind
where interpretations start from and aim to elucidate.
 A MISSING LINK IN PSYCHOANALYTIC TECHNIQUE 575

Response
FRED BUSCH

In her response to my paper Betty Joseph reflects on a patient’s dream, and by doing
so captures the essence of what I addressed in my paper on consciousness. In this
dream the patient is on one side of a large place, her analyst is on the other side
talking on the phone to someone else in order to get help. The patient feels that
‘something was going wrong’. Let us approach this with Freud—the analyst turns her
‘own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the
patient’ by adjusting herself ‘to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the
transmitting microphone’ (1912, p. 115f). The dream seems to demonstrate exactly
this, and presumably Joseph’s unconscious has received something right. However,
the dream also tells us that something goes wrong, and it is my understanding that the
patient saying this has to do with the communication from the analyst to the patient.
Far away from her patient, Joseph talks to someone else on the phone, not to the
patient’s conscious or preconscious ego on the other side of this place.
Thus, Joseph’s clinical vignette is helpful in picturing our different ways of
thinking based on the presence or absence of Freud’s structural model, especially the
role of the ego in mental life. She describes a case that seems to be at an impasse.
In the fourth year of analysis the patient’s associations still seem ‘repetitive and
superficial’, and she doesn’t meaningfully respond to her analyst’s interpretations.
Joseph understands the patient’s dream as a relatively undisguised transference
dream. If we view the unconscious ego as monitoring what is coming to mind for
potential dangers (according to Freud’s second theory of anxiety and the secondary
revision of dreams), then the manifest content of the dream is what the patient can
bear to know right now. This is helpful to keep in mind because it tells us something
interesting: the patient can make a connection with her analyst; she can dream of her,
and she can bring her dream into the session. Obviously she doesn’t need to defend
against this. Thus, she conveys to Joseph that she is thinking/dreaming about her
and the analysis, and is trying to tell Joseph about what she thinks of it. So in the
act of telling the dream the patient conveys her involvement with Joseph and their
transference relationship. Yet, Joseph sees this dream as an example of the patient’s
distance (the large place in the dream), and her passivity (she has her analyst doing
the talking on the phone). I would see the patient as reaching out through her dream
for help in exactly the way her ego can accept (i.e. doesn’t need to defend against)
at this point of the treatment. Thus, by looking at this dream from the perspective of
the ego, we get a different picture.
It might be due to the brief discussion, but it is interesting that the only voice
we hear speaking in the dream and after it is Joseph’s. Where is the patient’s voice,
either in her associations or silence? Even if we see the patient’s dream as a relatively
undisguised transference dream, it would still be important to hear what the patient
is able to associate to the dream to help us determine, in a layered fashion, what
is both tolerable (i.e. arouses anxiety that isn’t overwhelming), and closer to the
patient’s consciousness. No matter how brilliant our understanding of a dream, it is
576 FRED BUSCH WITH BETTY JOSEPH

not particularly useful information for the patient unless she is ready to hear it. In
contrast, the patient has Joseph speaking to someone else in order to get help.
Joseph views the patient’s dream as an example of how the patient ‘splits off her
need for help … and projects it into the analyst’. In contrast, I would suggest that
Joseph isn’t listening to the voice in the room (Busch, 2003). This voice is trying to
tell Joseph ‘something was going wrong’, leading the patient to feel ‘resigned’ and
‘sad’ over Joseph’s method of helping. The patient seems to be doing all a patient
can do in such circumstances, that is, to try and show her analyst in a dream that she
wishes for her help, but she is afraid that the analyst will have this ‘desperate need to
get on with things, to break in and disturb my patient’s passivity and resignation’.
The reader can see how, if one takes the concept of consciousness and
preconsciousness into consideration, both in terms of what is tolerable to the patient
to say to her analyst, and how we think about what the patient can meaningfully
hear, we come away with a different conclusion to Joseph. The major difference can
be conceptualized in terms of how much we take into consideration the patient’s
unconscious ego monitoring for danger.
Joseph’s discussion highlights, in a variety of other ways, my thesis that as analysts
we have tended to disregard the significance of consciousness and preconsciousness,
in considering how capable the patient will be of understanding, taking in, and
experiencing an interpretation of the transference (Busch, 1993; Paniagua, 2003).
When Joseph says, ‘of course’ we need to help patients to think and reflect about what
is going on, and that technique is important for this to occur effectively, I would also
say, ‘of course’. However, my paper was about why it is so difficult to help patients
think and reflect, and that this difficulty has to do with the fact that what is most
crucial for patients to know they are afraid to know. In spite of the fact that patients
defend against ‘deep interpretations’ (Busch, 2000), psychoanalysts usually care more
for the unconscious than the conscious, its working, and its capacity for integrating
interpretations. I believe the concept of a structured ego is best able to speak cogently
to these issues, without which we are left to the vagaries of tact and timing.
When Joseph describes the patient’s actions (i.e. laughing, movement, manner of
talking) as being in the room, I would suggest the patient’s movements and manner
of talking are more in the room for the analyst than the patient, and take considerable
analytic work for them to come into the patient’s room (Busch, 1995). The closer what
we observe is to unconscious actions, the less accessible it is to usable information
by the patient. The manner in which a patient walks into the hour or lies on the couch
represents complex compromise formations kept at the level of actions, in part, for
defensive reasons, or ways of thinking never integrated into adult thought (Busch,
1995). While it may represent information to the therapist, it isn’t necessarily an
intended communication from the patient. Actions are at a level of thought very far
from the patient’s ‘workable surface’ (Paniagua, 1991). This is why, in my experience,
patients are invariably caught off guard by comments on behaviors that are closer to
actions. By doing this, we are, at the very least, circumventing layers of unconscious
resistance that have led to behaviors staying at an action level, where the patient’s
capacity to reflect back on himself is limited. The concept of a developing, dynamic
ego (A.-M. Sandler, 1974) helps us make these distinctions.
 A MISSING LINK IN PSYCHOANALYTIC TECHNIQUE 577

A problem for the contemporary Kleinians, as I see it, is that, in their attempts to
integrate the concept of consciousness into their therapeutic strategy, they haven’t
yet grappled with a model of the mind that allows them to approach this issue in a
systematic fashion. Joseph’s discussion or more accurately her brief essay on how she
thinks about these issues exemplifies the conceptual difficulties one gets into without
such a model. What goes without saying (i.e. ‘of course’) from her understanding
of technique is, in my perspective, far from going without saying. I hope that my
thinking on these issues might contribute to a dialogue with contemporary Kleinians
who are interested in these issues.

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