Freud, “Character and Anal Erotism” (1908) (III)
Freud has argued that “obstinacy” is something like a “prolongation” into adulthood of the infant’s preoccupation with the anal zone, while his needs for cleanliness and order are “reaction-formations” against that same preoccupation. But he mentions a third possibility, as we saw in the last entry:
“the permanent character-traits are either unchanged prolongations [unveränderte Fortsetzungen] of the original instincts [ursprünglichen Triebe], or sublimations [Sublimierungen] of those instincts, or reaction-formations [Reaktionsbildurigen] against them.” (175)
We may now ask: which aspects of the anal character merit the label “sublimation?” What, in fact, does Freud mean by this term at this stage of his intellectual development?
As it happens, Freud’s use of the concept “sublimation” complicates somewhat the account I gave in the last entry. On the one hand, as we’ve seen, the paper’s concluding formula posits sublimation as a distinct process, midway between the prolongation of a drive, and a reaction-formation against it — again, traits are “either unchanged prolongations of the original instincts, or sublimations of those instincts, or reaction-formations against them.” Yet on the other hand, both in “Character and Anal Erotism” and Three Essays, Freud indicates that “sublimation” is, not a distinct process alongside those of “prolongation” and “reaction-formation,” but something like a fundamental mechanism at the basis of both of these. Freud uses the expression in this way, for example, in the following summary statement:
“It is…plausible to suppose that these character-traits of orderliness, parsimony and obstinacy, which are so often prominent in people who were formerly anal erotics, are to be regarded as the first and most constant results of the sublimation of anal erotism.” (171, my italics)
In other words, “sublimation” enjoys a logical priority: adult character-traits are all — whatever their ultimate form — “results” of sublimation.
What is sublimation, then? Freud consistently describes it in terms of a drive’s aim-deflection. (In other places, he adds object-deflection.) So Freud claims that “only a part” of the sexual drive “is made use of in sexual life; another part is deflected from sexual aims and directed towards others — a process which deserves the name of ‘sublimation’ [Sublimierung]” (171). And in Three Essays, again in nearly identical language:
“Historians of civilization appear to be at one in assuming that powerful components are acquired for every kind of cultural achievement by this diversion of sexual instinctual forces from sexual aims and their direction to new ones—a process which deserves the name of ‘sublimation.’” (178)
Broadly speaking, then, a drive has been “sublimated” when its original “aim” is displaced by another one. In the context of Freud’s article, we may say that the original sexual “aim” consisted in the infant’s concrete, pleasure-yielding activities around the anal zone. But the same sexual drive that powered these infantile activities is subsequently deflected towards another set of “aims,” which presumably embrace the anal character’s whole form-of-life. Both his moment-to-moment “activities” — e.g. scrubbing the kitchen and calculating expenses — and his basic moral orientation are then manifestations of this same drive, in “sublimated” form.
If this is correct, however, and all character traits are products of sublimation, then we must amend somewhat our comments in the last entry on “reaction-formations.” For when we spoke of the anal type’s “orderliness” as a reaction-formation, we implied that this trait sprung from a source beyond or outside the sexual drive itself. This seemed like the most reasonable interpretation of Freud’s own characterizations — for example, his suggestion that reaction-formations “rise like dams to oppose the later activity of the sexual instincts,” or that they are “built up…mental forces which are later to impede the course of the sexual instinct and, like dams, restrict its flow.” The “dam” metaphor clearly presents reaction-formations as prohibitive structures that are externally imposed on the sexual drives, which are then compelled to find other, more permissible outlets — precisely new “aims.”
Yet if orderliness is itself the result of sublimation, as Freud now explicitly asserts, then the image of “externality” cannot be quite accurate. In fact, we must infer that reaction-formations such as orderliness are not simply independent structures imposed, externally, on the sexual drive; they are precisely expressions or embodiments of that same sexual drive. Freud’s occasionally ambiguous phrases permit this reading. For example, he writes that “reaction-formations, or counter-forces…are actually formed at the expense of [auf Kosten] the excitations proceeding from the erotogenic zones” (171). And in Three Essays, too, we are told that reaction-formations “probably emerge at the cost [auf Kosten] of the infantile sexual impulses themselves” (178). It seems to me that, in the context of Freud’s account, the phrase “at the expense of” admits of two interpretations. It may simply mean that the reaction-formations dominate the sexual drives, or triumph "at the cost of” the drives’ defeat. (So we commonly speak of someone having fun at someone else’s expense.) Yet the phrase may also mean something like “drawing its strength from.” In other words, we may say that reaction-formations arise “at the expense” of the sexual drives because they expend or plunder the “energy” of those drives for its own purposes.
In the Three Essays, Freud construes the sexual drives as just such fungible quantities of “energy,” to be mobilized as required: “the activity of those [sexual] impulses does not cease even during this period of latency, though their energy is diverted, wholly or in great part, from their sexual use and directed to other ends” (178, my italics). In “Character and Anal Erotism,” likewise, Freud speaks of an “earlier impulsion…in the process of losing its aim…carried over to the newly emerging aim” (175). I think that this, finally, is what Freud has in mind when he accounts for the emergence of a trait like “orderliness” in the mechanism of “sublimation.” For while it is true that the anal character’s cleanliness is a reaction-formation against the sexual drive’s original form — “unseemly" pleasure in the anal zone’s — nevertheless, this trait is also a highly disguised objectification of that same drive. Hence all of the “interest” and “pleasure” taken by the anal type in cleanliness itself.
Freud, “Character and Anal Erotism” (1908) (II)
In the last entry, I discussed Freud’s observation that adults possessing a specific suite of character traits — who are “orderly [ordentlich], parsimonious [sparsam], and obstinate [eigensinnig]” (169) — were as infants inordinately preoccupied with the anal zone and its pleasures. And Freud speculates that this is no accident — that perhaps “the regularity with which this triad of properties is present in their character may be brought into relation with the disappearance of their anal erotism” (170).
But what sort of relation does Freud identity between the infantile behavior and the mature traits that finally depose that behavior — beyond, that is, this abstract metaphor of “deposition”? For Freud, it seems, the adult’s character traits — habits of thought, aesthetic and moral attitudes, and patterns of action — are something like crystallizations, either of the original sexual drive, or of some characteristic reaction to that drive. The article’s closing lines extrapolate from the analysis of anal characters to a more generic hypothesis regarding the origin of all adult “traits” in specific phases of the sexual drive:
“We can at any rate lay down a formula for the way in which character in its final shape is formed out of the constituent instincts: the permanent character-traits are either unchanged prolongations [unveränderte Fortsetzungen] of the original instincts [ursprünglichen Triebe], or sublimations [Sublimierungen] of those instincts, or reaction-formations [Reaktionsbildurigen] against them” (175)
The first of the three possibilities, that of “unchanged prolongation,” appears slightly misleading in the way it is phrased. After all, surely the “original drive” must be changed in some respect — if only as a conversion of drive into trait. But even this understates the implied change, which — following the action of repression — the adult in principle does not consciously link to the original drive, in part because of its “abstraction” from the organ and the behaviors connected to it. Thus the nominally “unchanged prolongation” — say, the infant’s drive to obstinacy, which becomes the adult’s characterological obstinacy — nonetheless involves some types of change: (a) from drive to trait; (b) from spontaneous, conscious expression, to unconscious vehicle; and, of course, (c) from concrete behaviors surrounding the “zone” in question, to an abstract orientation touching on all sectors of life.
The other two possibilities — that traits may also constitute “sublimations” of, or “reaction-formations” against, the “original instincts” — are, despite the simplicity of Freud’s expressions, also difficult to grasp precisely. In this essay, Freud identifies three paradigmatic reaction-formations, namely, those which culture inculcates as necessary attitudes during the child’s latency phase.
“During the period of life which may be called the period of ‘sexual latency’…reaction-formations, or counter-forces, such as shame, disgust and morality, are created in the mind. They are actually formed at the expense of the excitations proceeding from the erotogenic zones, and they rise like dams to oppose the later activity of the sexual instincts” (171, my italics)
In the earlier Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud had described the process in nearly identical language:
“It is during this period of total or only partial latency that are built up the mental forces which are later to impede the course of the sexual instinct and, like dams, restrict its flow—disgust, feelings of shame and the claims of aesthetic and moral ideals” (177)
Hence shame, disgust, morality, and — Freud adds — aesthetic ideals, as more or less prominent “traits” of adults, are hardly “prolongations” of sexual drives; they are rather structures established to restrict or suppress these (inadmissible) drives. And indeed, at least a portion of of the anal “character” seems to belong among these defensive structures: “Cleanliness, orderliness and trustworthiness give exactly the impression of a reaction-formation against an interest in what is unclean and disturbing and should not be part of the body” (172). Though Freud does not say this explicitly, it seems to follow from his account that the strength and persistence of these traits in the adult is a measure of the intensity of his original interest in the anal zone — uninhibitedly felt and expressed during infancy — against which those traits must contend. The anal type’s need for cleanliness is exactly as great and urgent as the “unseemly" excitations and pleasures it forced back from awareness.
Freud, “Character and Anal Erotism” (1908) (I)
Freud begins his essay as follows:
“Among those whom we try to help by our psycho-analytic efforts we often come across a type of person who is marked by the possession of a certain set of character-traits, while at the same time our attention is drawn to the behaviour in his childhood of one of his bodily functions and the organ concerned in it.” (169)
Now, if the wide circulation of Freudian ideas in our culture has not prepared us for the argument of the essay, its title — “Character and Anal Erotism” — certainly does. Freud quickly confirms our hunches about the identities of both the “character” and the “organ.” First, the “traits”:
“The people I am about to describe are noteworthy for a regular combination of the three following characteristics. They are especially orderly [ordentlich], parsimonious [sparsam], and obstinate [eigensinnig].” (169)
And a moment later, the “bodily functions and the organ concerned in it”:
“It is easy to gather from these people’s early childhood history that they took a comparatively long time to overcome their infantile incontinentia alvi [faecal incontinence], and that even in later childhood they suffered from isolated failures of this function. As infants, they seem to have belonged to the class who refuse to empty their bowels when they are put on the pot because they derive a subsidiary pleasure from defaecating; for they tell us that even in somewhat later years they enjoyed holding back their stool, and they remember…doing all sorts of unseemly things with the faeces that had been passed.” (170)
But again, the descriptor “anal” has become so much a part even of polite discussion that its intrinsically scandalous content must be recovered with effort. Remarkably, the concept of anality has in the last century become a synonym for the package of traits — “orderly, parsimonious and obstinate” — it was postulated by Freud to explain.
In the essay, then, Freud postulates an “organic connection between this type of character and this behaviour of an organ” (169). What behavior, exactly, does Freud connect to these traits? And what sort of connection does Freud postulate? The organ is of course the “anal zone.” But “behavior” seems to refer by turns to (a) the generic function — defecation — share by all, and (b) the specific conduct — activities, desires, and attitude — that in certain infants surrounds that function. In some instances, this “conduct” anticipates the adult into which such infants reliably develop: an “obstinate” refusal to defecate when the parent or nursemaid desires, or an attitude of “self-will” that easily shades into “defiance.” The amount of “control” exerted by this infant over the whole process, hence the prerogative of “parsimony,” is likewise a source of satisfaction that he does not willingly renounce. But in general, of course, the infant’s “unseemly” conduct is rather the opposite of that “orderliness” or cleanliness that characterizes the adult descendant.
(Those who attribute to psychoanalysis an essentially disenchanting trend — one that “reduces” the higher to the lower — may adduce this essay as evidence. What could be “higher,” after all, than traits which Aristotle might have included among the virtues — that is, dispositions which precisely announce reason’s rule over the soul’s “appetitive” impulses? And what could be “lower” than the animal functions, whose disguised expression these traits ostensibly are?)
For Freud, these infantile behaviors, which reflect a special interest and delight in the organ and its possibilities, admit of endogenous explanation. “From these indications we infer that such people are born with a sexual constitution in which the erotogenicity of the anal zone is exceptionally strong” (170). But what exactly does Freud mean here? In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud tells us that, as a rule, human beings develop through fairly discrete “phases.” Each phase refers to a specific “erotogenic zone” around which — owing to the powerful excitations and pleasures it affords — the child’s interest revolves. For example, the suckling infant at the breast finds its pleasures localized in the oral zone — an amalgam of of appetite- and erotic-satisfaction. (This distinction between the self-preservative and the sexual “drives” is confirmed for Freud when oral activities such as thumb-sucking separate out as independent sources of pleasure, despite their possessing no nutritive value. Such pleasures have nothing to do with satisfying hunger.)
From oral, to anal, to phallic, to genital “zones,” the infant’s attention is directed and then redirected to whichever organ, at a given moment of anatomical development, exerts the greatest “pull.” On a normal path — one that doesn’t prefigure neurosis in the adult — each erotogenic zone, while important in its own right and temporarily eclipsing the others, nevertheless continuously gives place to its “successor,” until the genital zone finally receives its rightful “investment.” All non-genital sites of pleasure are then decisively subordinated to that final zone — at least in non-neurotic cases.
Yet partly for the “constitutional” reasons Freud has identified, the values for the infant of the different zones, which in healthy development are “proportionately” distributed, are in some infants rather disproportionate. In the present case, the anal phase brings with it an order of excitement and stimulation that overshadows those belonging to earlier and later phases. Thus in claiming that the would-be anal “type” is endowed with “a sexual constitution in which the erotogenicity of the anal zone is exceptionally strong,” Freud is suggesting that this zone naturally yields a quality and quantity of pleasure to the developing infant that — unmatched by other zones even at their greatest intensity — “fixates” his or her libidinal development.
Now the “fixations” chronicled by psychoanalysis may be more or less figurative. In the present case they are evidently purely figurative: the child’s concrete behaviors towards the anal zone and its functions, on and off the toilet, do not persist into maturity. In general, the anal characters Freud describes take no more of an interest in this “zone” than anyone else: “none of these weaknesses and idiosyncracies are to be found in them once their childhood has been passed” (170), so that “we must conclude that the anal zone had lost its erotogenic significance in the course of development” (170). Indeed, precisely the mysterious cessation of the behaviors, together with the subsequent — equally inexplicable — emergence of the observed character traits, clears the way for Freud’s argument. In other words: that “anal” types do not exhibit the infants preoccupation with the anal zone is not a circumstance that weakens Freud’s argument; it is rather the basis of it. For just this reason, “it is to be suspected that the regularity with which this triad of properties is present in their character may be brought into relation with the disappearance of their anal erotism” (170).
Thomas Ogden, “Comments on Transference and Countertransference in the Initial Analytic Meeting” (1992) (II)
Arguably no theme divides the standpoints of classical and interpersonal psychoanalysis as starkly as anxiety: its causes and consequences, its meaning, and its management. From the interpersonal standpoint, anxiety is itself the cause of mental illness and so must be managed with extraordinary care — nothing therapeutic is possible in the absence of that management. This position accounts in large part for the importance of a set of metaphors reflecting the new analytic mandate: “holding,” “containment,” “titration,” and so on. If Ogden in this essay does not reject these analytic functions, he certainly does not underline their importance, either. And indeed, it is difficult to reconcile the importance of analytic “holding” with Ogden’s unreserved defense of analytic “neutrality,” even — perhaps especially — in cases of considerable anxiety:
“Despite the fact that transference anxiety is extremely high in the period leading to the initial interview, I do not view it as the analyst’s job to put the patient at ease in the first meeting. On the contrary, I believe it is his task to help the patient not miss an important opportunity to recognize and understand something about the transference thoughts, feelings, and sensations with which he has been struggling” (229)
Above all, Ogden cautions against the impulse to diminish this anxiety — one that dominates the first interactions — through any number of essentially non-analytic devices, including well-meaning chit chat; explanations of analytic theory and procedure; detailed inquiry; or even, as I noted in the last entry, frank answers to the majority of the patient’s questions. These palliatives, Ogden claims, foreclose precious opportunities for the patient’s self-understanding by imposing the analyst’s agenda (from motivations, further, related to his or her own unanalyzed, counter-transferential anxiety). These devices prevent the patient from spontaneously generating the content of the analysis and shaping the “space” within which it unfolds; and they purportedly establish a misleading precedent regarding the analytic attitude towards anxiety.
As a rule, then, efforts to directly diminish the patient’s anxiety — for Ogden, seemingly all anxiety in the first session is describable as “transferential” — deprive the patient of an opportunity for reflection, interpretation, and insight. But what if a new patient essentially requires, not self-understanding per se, but an experience in which difficult material is safely approached without incurring the disintegrating effects of anxiety? In this case, might Ogden’s approach entail missing another sort “opportunity” — namely, the opportunity to learn, affectively, that difficult material and safety can co-exist?
The title of this section of the article, “Sustaining Psychological Strain in the Analytic Setting” (230-34), conveys a rather different idea: anxiety is not an obstacle to analytic progress but rather its condition of possibility, the guise in which the main stuff of analysis surfaces. To defuse anxiety is therefore to preempt psychoanalysis itself. Ogden specifically objects to the analyst’s casual, “kind” comment that in the moment seems appealing as an anxiety-reducing measure: “‘I hope you didn’t have trouble finding a parking space. Parking is awful around here’” (230). Any such comment broadcasts particular unconscious messages that tilt analysis in a specific thematic direction, and constrain the patient’s “freedom” to initiate and direct the analysis however he or she chooses. But this measure also fatally misrepresents the analytic process — an impression that, Ogden indicates, the analyst will have trouble correcting later on:
“A comment of the type being discussed misleads the patient about the nature of the analytic experience. As analysts, we do not intend to relieve anxiety (our own or the patient’s) through tension-reducing activity, reassurances, gift-giving, or the like…Whether the incident is ever spoken of again, the analysand unconsciously registers the fact that the analyst has granted himself license to handle his own anxiety by means of countertransference acting in” (231, my italics)
This last line suggests another premise. Consider, again, Ogden’s objection: the analyst who helps himself to a casual comment “handle[s] his own anxiety by means of countertransference acting in.” This indicates that a certain mental content — e.g. anxiety — may either be expressed verbally or “acted in” (as opposed to the patient’s “acting out”). According to this tendentious contrast, analysis consists in articulating these contents, bringing them out into the open, where they admit of interpretation. The alternative to imparting discursive form to these contents is their unconscious discharge through action. Such action evades the needed interpretation; in fact, it embodies the exact neurotic “repetition compulsion” that must be analyzed and uprooted. Paul Ricoeur has captured this dimension of the traditional position in his essay, “Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics”:
“This restriction to language is…inherent to the analytic technique. [The latter] forces desire to speak, to pass through the defile of words, to the exclusion of any substitute satisfaction as well as any regression in the direction of ‘acting out’” (54)
On Ogden’s account, again, the analyst who handles anxiety by acting upon counter-transferential feelings — say, with a “casual” comment — models essentially anti-analytic behavior: he signals that distressing affects (or wishes, ideas, and fantasies) ought to be acted out (or “in”) and precisely not communicated.
But this classical premise, too, has been contested, at least in the form I have given it here. In particular, interpersonalists and relationalists have complicated the tidiness of any exclusive opposition between either expressing a content, analytically, or acting it out, non-analytically. In fact, any action will bear an expressive, communicative, or symbolic dimension (hence need not be avoided entirely, indeed, cannot be), just as, conversely, the verbalizations and interpretations of analysis are themselves in the nature of “actions.” The emphasis on “enactment” in this critical discourse — as something potentially valuable and, in any case, inescapable — should perhaps be understood in this context. The concept of enactment seems precisely to encompass a range of analytically-meaningful behaviors that are neither exclusively discursive nor instances of “acting out.” Rather, enactments contain admixtures of both. And in fact, Ogden himself gestures in this direction. After warning the analyst not to initiate things with an anxiety-dissipating comment to the patient, and thus “burdening him with the analyst’s own unconscious contents before he even sets foot in the consulting room” (231), Ogden concedes, parenthetically: “There will be plenty of time for that later, as the analyst inevitably becomes an unwitting actor in the patient’s unconscious fantasies” (231).
Thomas Ogden, “Comments on Transference and Countertransference in the Initial Analytic Meeting” (1992) (I)
In this article, which expands on a chapter from The Primitive Edge of Experience, Ogden argues that — with slight caveats and few exceptions — the first session should not differ from the subsequent “analysis.” Hence the analyst must vigilantly guard against temptations to view and conduct the “initial analytic meeting” as anything but psychoanalysis stricto sensu.
Yet in suggesting that “there is no difference between the analytic process in the first meeting and that in any other analytic meeting” (226), Ogden must commit himself to some conception of psychoanalysis generally. After all: which characteristic or characteristics, exactly, should the first meeting share with “any other analytic meeting”? How ought “any other analytic meeting” to look? For this reason, perhaps, Ogden allows that “the subject of the opening of the analytic drama…touches upon almost every aspect of psychoanalytic theory and technique” (226).
Ogden’s unspoken premise is worth contemplating explicitly, since it may restrict the application of his reflections. For even if we accept this opening gambit — that the first session ought to resemble subsequent sessions in all or most respects, that analysis always begins in medias res — we may still reject his notions of psychoanalysis proper, or dispute which norms and techniques, precisely, ought to be honored starting from the very first interactions.
This preamble seemed necessary, because Ogden largely presupposes some consensus about proper psychoanalytic technique — as it happens, a rather “classical” version. The question he addresses is merely whether, and in what respects, this “uncontroversial” technique should be extended to the initial analytic meeting. But once again, we may agree that “the function of the first meeting centrally involves the initiation of the analytic process” (229) without much agreement about the nature of that process.
How, then, does psychoanalytic technique look for Ogden, and what sorts of behavior tend at the very beginning to interfere with the functioning of that technique? The selection of an appropriate analytic technique will depend, of course, on the aim of psychoanalysis. Consider the following: “Everything that the analyst does in the first face-to-face analytic session is intended as an invitation to the patient to consider the meaning of his experience” (226). In other words, “technique” for Ogden comprises all the analyst’s efforts to communicate this “invitation” — to encourage the patient’s reflection on the “meaning of his experience.”
But let us consider Ogden’s starting point: is psychoanalysis exclusively or predominantly dedicated to generating this sort of self-reflection? Traditionally, this aim is indisputable. For Freud and his disciples, the therapeutic value of analysis is inseparable from its epistemic yield: what finally diminishes neurotic suffering is “insight” into formerly obscure motivations, fantasies, and conflicts. This neurotic conflict is “unconscious,” not accidentally, but essentially; mental suffering — at least of the sort that interests psychoanalysis — is a function of this unconsciousness. Hence the resolution of this suffering must follow the path of self-knowledge, of making the unconscious conscious, or precisely, as Ogden writes, inducing “the patient to consider the meaning of his experience.” This is a process of de-familiarization: “All that has been most obvious to the patient will no longer be treated as self-evident; rather, the familiar is to be wondered about, to be puzzled over, to be newly created in the analytic setting” (226).
Yet is this the result at which analysis should aim, and around which all methodological decisions should be arranged? Must everything answer to this de-familiarizing quest for unconscious significations? The epistemic tilt of psychoanalysis indicated here has been an object of implicit and explicit criticism in the 20th century, especially in the interpersonal and relational movements. This critical attitude is represented in such a concept as “corrective emotional experience.” On this later view, in the first instance, the patient requires, not insight into unconscious motivation and conflict — hence a process of reflection on “significations” designed to promote that insight — but rather a certain affect-laden relationship (of whatever type the patient has lacked).
I make this point, not because I think Ogden’s premise is wrong, but because I think it is unspoken, and because I want to reiterate that we may accept the explicit thesis — that analysis begins at the first meeting — while wondering about the features Ogden ascribes to that analysis. To be sure, many of Ogden’s observations, suggestions, and warnings, especially in the early part of the article, seem broadly acceptable among psychoanalytic tendencies. For example, analysts must square the need to accept the patient, without judgment, with the mandate to help change that patient (226); to somehow immediately involve the patient in an analytic “project” that his or her neurosis in principle obstructs (226-27); to reckon with the anticipatory transferences and counter-transferences that inaugurate the analysis well before the first meeting (on the basis of such things as the referral, the phone call, generic and personal ideas about psychoanalysis, and of course the biographies of the participants) (227); and to accept or decline patients for subtle reasons related to these transferences and counter-transferences (229).
But I imagine that other pieces of Ogden’s argument will be less broadly acceptable among different analytic factions. Doctrinal differences concerning the objectives and concomitant techniques of psychoanalysis would be pertinent to any aspect of the first “meeting.” They are especially pertinent, though, to the major focus of the article: how best to address the inevitable anxiety that, in both analyst and patient, overshadows the beginning of analysis. Ogden treats this anxiety, not as one important element among others, but as the overriding consideration, one that confers meaning on everything else, and in deference to which all “technique” is organized.
“Everything that the analysand says (and does not say) in the first hours can be heard in the light of an unconscious warning to the analyst concerning the reasons why neither the analyst nor the patient should enter into this doomed and dangerous relationship” (235)
Once again, though, one may share this assumption of Ogden’s — that the patient’s initial communications, correctly observed, reflect “the leading edge of transference anxiety” (235) — while disagreeing about how best to address this leading edge. In particular, one may wonder: are there perhaps legitimate anxiety-reducing measures that an analyst may take? — measures that do not compromise the analytic value of the interaction but instead enhance it? Later, Ogden recounts (with a hint of pride) his habit of repelling the questions of patients, with scant exceptions, as “fairly undisguised statements of the patient’s phantasies about the specific ways in which I will fail to understand him” (242). But surely we may grant the aptness of these characterizations of the patient’s behavior, while questioning the wisdom of the response Ogden recommends, that is, an attitude of unyielding reserve and non-gratification that verges on the inhuman.