Learning to Influence in Psychoanalysis: Discussion and Review of Psychoanalytic Supervision by Nancy McWilliams

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Disclosure Statement

Nancy McWilliams and I are longtime professional colleagues who share overlapping interests in aspects of psychoanalytic thinking and training. Besides being well known to each other in our work, we are personal friends over a period of many decades.

Notes

¹ I think this allegiance to truthfulness in the relationship points in part to what I think Benjamin (2004) means by the “moral third” (p. 9).

² Decades ago, Elizabeth Zetzel, a classically trained Boston analyst, attended a conference where a “behavior therapist,” at the time a revolutionary thing, presented. The presenter argued for how much behavior therapy could change things that psychoanalysis could not. Zetzel answered, “Yes, psychoanalysis changes very little. But it makes a big difference.”

³ A review essay of this kind is not the place for a detailed discussion of relational perspectives in psychoanalysis, Nevertheless I believe some discussion of what we mean when we use terms like “relational” has specific relevance for psychoanalytic supervision.

⁴ I have written elsewhere (Slavin and Rahmani, 2015) about the extraordinarily “relational” perspective on the psychoanalytic process that Freud elaborated in what was to be the last of his technical papers, “Constructions in analysis” (1937b). In that paper, more than 20 years after his discussion of neutrality (1915), Freud changed his thinking dramatically about the analytic process, although he does not openly acknowledge it (he says it was always, “known and, as it were, self-evident and is merely being brought into relief here and separately examined for a particular purpose” (p. 258). Freud speaks of the analyst’s effort to influence the patient. And reciprocally of the analyst’s mind being influenced by the patient’s cascading thoughts that come in response. As Freud (1937) describes it: The analyst finishes a piece of construction and communicates it to the subject of the analysis so that it may work upon him; he then constructs a further piece out of the fresh material pouring in upon him, deals with it in the way and proceeds in this alternating fashion until the end. (p. 260-261, italics added). It is to be noted that the phrase, “so that it may work upon him,” is Strachey’s exact translation from the German original (1937a), “damit es auf ihn wirke,” p. 46) which current German speakers that I have consulted translate simply as “influence,” or, “so that it may affect him” (Google translate).

⁵ In denoting these challenges as resistances, it has been difficult in psychoanalysis to discern the ways in which patients’ complex feelings about change and influence may also represent a nascent kind of agency, perhaps what might represent, paradoxically, a leading edge of health.

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Notes on contributors

Jonathan H. Slavin

Jonathan H. Slavin, PhD, ABPP, is Clinical Instructor in Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School: Adjunct Clinical Professor, and Supervising Analyst, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, New York University; Founding Director, Tufts University Counseling Center (1970-2006); Former President of the Division of Psychoanalysis (39), American Psychological Association; and Founding President, Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. Dr. Slavin has lectured and conducted workshops at: the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute; Northwestern University School of Medicine; Tel-Aviv University; The Hebrew University, Jerusalem; the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center; the University of Turin and the Turin Psychoanalytical Center; the School for Comparative Psychotherapy, Florence, Italy; the University of Oxford; the Austrian Association for Group Psychoanalysis, Vienna; the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis; the University of Haifa; The Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis, Madrid; the Center for Psychodynamic Therapies, Istanbul; the Women’s Counseling Center, Jerusalem, Israel; the Oregon Psychoanalytic Center; the Massachusetts Association for Psychoanalytic Psychology; and the South Jerusalem Mental Health Center, Jerusalem, Israel. Dr. Slavin’s published work has focused on fundamental human elements in the psychoanalytic relationship including agency, love, sexuality, desire, and truthfulness and their role in the repair of the mind. He is in private practice, Newton Highlands, MA.