Actualized Unconscious Fantasies and “Therapeutic Play ” in Adults ’ Analyses: Further Study of these Concepts

One of the major contributions of Veikko Tähkä to psychoanalysis is his illustration of how some hallmarks of psychoanalytic technique, canonized by Freud’s classical papers, have become blurred and require reexamination (1984, 1993). For example, he reexamined the concept of “interpretation, ” defined as bringing to the patient’s awareness mental conflicts and their contents that were previously unconscious. Tähkä states that the classical definition of interpretation links it with the phenomena of repression and dynamic unconscious. Therefore, interpretation as a therapeutic tool can be utilized only for those patients with neurotic pathology whose main defense mechanism is repression. Since we as psychoanalysts have extended our practice to include patients who are more severely disturbed than neurotic patients, we need to seek new technical concepts. For example, interpretation in the classical sense cannot correspond to a borderline patient’s subjective experience; even a borderline may grasp an interpretation intellectually. Therefore, Tähkä tells us, a borderline patient will not respond to interpretation. However, the borderline patient will respond to the analyst’s catching and describing the patient’s way of experiencing in a method that is analogou