THE ESSENTIALS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

Psychoanalysis, as procedure, theory and therapy, is a unique activity centred around a special approach to a formalised intersubjective relationship. The phenomena of transference and counter-transference between analyst and analysand allow the emergence of a generative interplay between creative impulses struggling for expression and a persistent search for clarity by appropriate analytic interpretations and synthetic constructions of what takes place. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 1993; 27:86-100 This paper proposes that the essentials of psychoanalysis are those parameters which make truth possible for both the method and the theory. The truth of the method rests on “negative capability ” as an iterative procedure progressively opening the pos-sibility of discovery and interpretation within the mutual field of the intersubjective relationship. The understanding and formulation of what occurs, the “theory”, requires the containment of a coherent metapsychology, as suggested by Freud. This in turn entails the containment of a coherent metaphysics such as the critical transcendental philosophy of Kant, immanent (but often obscured) in European philosophies of science. Freud’s “Copernican revolution ” can be seen in essence as an extension of that claimed by Kant. By holding the nature of human consciousness (taken in its broadest sense) in focus, Kant combined empirical realism with a transcendental idealism. We simul-taneously discover and construct the phenomena of the world we inhabit. Theory facilitates the discovery of, and enters into, our “facts”. This is true for all science and especially psychoanalysis. Ricoeur has brought out that the originality and power of Freud’s theoretical formulations lies in th