In recent years a so-called paradigm-shift is said to have shaken the foundations of psychoanalysis and altered its course. I refer to the emergence in the American psychoanalytic community of the relational and intersubjective perspectives that posture their views as advances over Freud’s technical formulations. It is claimed that a two-person psychology is distinct from a one-person paradigm and a relational perspective can be distinguished from a biological one. I perceive these developments as essentially theoretical in nature and so offer nothing novel or original in the way of technical innovation, despite claims to the contrary. In as much as this model is depicted as a departure from the classical drive perspective, I perceive in Freud’s technical formulations a sensibility that faithfully approximates a phenomenological orientation, even when his theories contradict his clinical intuition.
Approached from this angle, psychoanalysis is already phenomenological in its latency because it has always favored interpretation over explanation, and because it relies on the experience of the patient to guide the treatment, not what the psychoanalyst presumes to know. Yet despite the phenomenological nature of psychoanalytic inquiry, there has always been a tendency among analysts — beginning with Freud — to extrapolate theories from experience (or from the theoretical constructs of others) that presume to explain what they are unable to see with their eyes. Whereas the phenomenologist resists engaging in speculation as a matter of course, psychoanalysts appear to thrive on it, in effect wanting it both ways: to offer, in one breath, interpretations that endeavor to deepen the patient’s experience, while in the next offering explanations for what is presumed to have “caused” the patient to be such and such a way. In contrast, the phenomenologist admits from the beginning of his inquiries that he does not know where he is going and does not need to. This is why the phenomenologist’s perspective is skeptical instead of theoretical, because it is rooted in a philosophy of perpetual inquiry that is surprisingly compatible with Freud’s technical principles. I would even argue that Freud’s principles of technique make little sense outside of a phenomenological context.
It is my thesis that the fundamental pivot around which the psychoanalytic experience revolves is the self-disclosure that each patient affects through the act of free association. It will be surprising to some and perhaps ironic to others that, after a century of debate and discussion, there is still no universal agreement as to what free association is, and whether it is indispensable to the psychoanalytic conception of the treatment or superfluous. I believe that free association is not only ubiquitous to the therapeutic experience (even for those practitioners who reject this principle), but that one’s understanding of what it entails turns on a fundamental premise that has been systematically omitted from the psychoanalytic literature since Freud introduced it: the explicit (or implicit) promise to conceal nothing from one’s therapist, i.e., the pledge to be as honest or candid as one is capable of being throughout the duration of therapy. In a word, the pledge to be as authentic as possible.