Do we need to know what we are doing? Discovering our “working model” of psychoanalytic practice using the Comparative Clinical Method

There is now an extensive and highly developed literature within psychoanalysis on how best to understand the patients we work with, and their impact on the analyst or therapist, but far less on the mind of the clinician and how he or she thinks while working with the patient. One method for studying this, the Comparative Clinical Method developed by a group of European psychoanalysts, consists of a two step model: after a careful description of the interventions made by the analyst, an attempt is made to construct what is taken to be the analyst’s implicit working model, the internal template which he or she tacitly employs to conduct the analysis. In this paper I describe this model, which I then illustrate by taking a piece of published clinical material to show what an approach based on the Comparative Clinical Method might look like. Finally I make some comments on applying this model to the work of psychoanalytic psychotherapists