Dear PINC, greetings from London! I am here to attend the conference “Knowing What Psychoanalysts Do and Doing What Psychoanalysts Know” held at the University College London, and to go to museums, the theatre, have milk with my tea, and eat sticky toffee pudding. The focus of the conference and book (Tuckett, 2024) that has been recently published is on the findings of a 20-year international study by the European Psychoanalytic Federation’s Comparative Clinical Methods (CCM) Working Party into the question: What do psychoanalysts do when they practice psychoanalysis? The team, led by David Tuckett, a prominent British analyst, meticulously studied process notes of sessions from more than 300 practitioners and cases from prominent analysts, including Bion, Green, and Kernberg. A force driving this work is Tuckett’s contention that theory is a necessary part of the analytic frame and that many contemporary psychoanalysts are suspicious of theory and, in particular, traditional theory. He believes there is a resistance to intellectual work within the field (Tuckett, 2021) and that often analysts struggle to describe what they do. I don’t quite see that kind of struggle or anti-intellectualism, especially given Queer, BIPOC, and other critical social theories influencing psychoanalysis today.
The group found common ground among the practitioners and concluded that there are four areas a psychoanalyst investigates and makes suppositions about: the analytic situation, the patient’s unconscious inference, unconscious repetition, and what makes for therapeutic change. Suppositions about the analytic situation have to do with the unconscious transactions between analyst and patient, the transference and countertransference. The term “unconscious inference” refers to ideas about the patient’s unconscious dynamics. Then there are suppositions about how those unconscious dynamics cause trouble for the patient. And the last area of supposition has to do with the theory of what makes for therapeutic change.
Of course, a lot gets lost in the process of winnowing down and simplifying such a complex process. Arguably, these four areas do not cover the range of focus (such as working with dissociation and unrepresented states) in contemporary work. They cleave to a traditional understanding of Freudian theory. I struggled to find where trauma and an appreciation of the social unconscious (the influence of social, cultural, and political forces) are found in the model. The group developed 11 questions that analysts can ask to help recognize the theory operating behind their work. At the conference, Tucket stressed that this model is meant as a living system, open to revision, intended to spark thinking and debate. It does. The group offers a useful heuristic device for wondering about what is going on unconsciously for the analyst in the session.
What I particularly appreciate in their model is the emphasis on suppositions: that is, guesses. Their findings suggest that a key contributor to making it psychoanalysis is the guess work that the analyst does. And while that is a refreshing contention, it’s not novel: they are referring to Freud’s word erraten in German (translated “guess”). It is also refreshing to have affirmed again that what makes it analytic isn’t so much the frequency of sessions or the use of the couch, but, rather, what the analyst does internally. In their view, the analyst is constantly formulating theory, making guesses, about what is happening to the patient, analyst, and dyad.
I presented a session Friday night during the seminar part of the conference. The aim was for the small group to use the 11 questions to reveal what theorizing was going on in the background while I was working intuitively. Unfortunately, the participants weren’t familiar with these questions ahead of time and it was difficult to apply the model. It was still possible to see some things: where, for example, I was making a supposition about the clinical situation, the transference, and a few times offering the patient an interpretation based on my theory of change (sometimes I was being an auxiliary ego for the patient, a good object to internalize, and at other times I facilitated the uncovering of affect).
Another motivating force behind the research may be Tuckett’s discomfort with the Relational School (which he usually refers to as North American analysts). He writes and speaks about Donnel Stern and Phillip Bromberg. He finds (I think accurately) that their clinical attention is not on the patient’s unconscious beliefs, the sine qua non for Tuckett (or at least doing what he contends Freud did). He believes the core suppositions Freud made are, therefore, being abandoned and fears psychoanalysis is at a crossroad given a rejection of these Freudian tenets (Tuckett, 2023). I see it differently. While crossroads evoke the Oedipal tragedy, I think it is healthy and invigorating that there are varied areas of clinical focus and practice. It may even be argued that these different approaches constitute substantially drifting away from Freud’s work.1 We are alive in the dynamic dialectic of past and future, extending the original Freudian project of “advances in these spheres of knowledge” (Freud, 1918, p.105).
I guess (no pun intended) what I’m saying is that I feel very connected to PINC while I am here among analysts (some of whom are familiar with PINC) from all over Europe. I feel connected to the work our community is doing, to the vital crossroads of change: DEI work and the interrogation of whiteness (I am thinking of our own Merson, 2021); the return of theorizing about the social, including the social unconscious, leading to PINC’s adoption of a quadripartite model of training which expands the range of theory and of practice beyond the individual and dyad to collectives of people outside the consultation room. Of course, as we know from our clinical work and personal experience, change is not easy. A woman came up to me during a break and identified herself as someone studying in London. She was very curious about what was happening at PINC, and I watched her eyes light up as we talked. I don’t think I needed to travel so far to appreciate what I have back home. That feeling traveled with me.
References:
Freud, S. (1918). From the history of an infantile neurosis. S.E., 17, 1-124.
Merson, M. (2021). The whiteness taboo: Interrogating whiteness in psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 31(1), 13-27
Tuckett, D. (2024). Knowing what psychoanalysts do and doing what psychoanalysts know. Rowman & Littlefield.
Tuckett, D. (2023). The supposition of “distance” and its value for thinking about everyday technique. IJP Open – Open Peer Review and Debate 9:1-19.
Tuckett, D. (2021). David Tuckett on ‘Inside and outside the window: Some fundamental elements in the theory of psychoanalytic technique’ (IJP, 2011). PEP/UCL Top Authors Project Video Collection 1:37.
