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Comments on the Development of a
Psychoanalytic Technique
Michael Shulman Ph.D.
Published online: 05 Jan 2012.
To cite this article: Michael Shulman Ph.D. (2012) Comments on the Development of a Psychoanalytic
Technique, Psychoanalytic Inquiry: A Topical Journal for Mental Health Professionals, 32:1, 79-86, DOI:
10.1080/07351690.2011.553167
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Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 32:7986, 2012
Copyright Melvin Bornstein, Joseph Lichtenberg, Donald Silver
ISSN: 0735-1690 print/1940-9133 online
DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2011.553167
Comments on the Development of a Psychoanalytic
Technique
Michael Shulman, Ph.D.
The convergences and divergences in our techniques across analysts are, to me, the most fascinating
phenomena in the eld of clinical psychoanalysis. Although I assumed, before my psychoanalytic
education, that Id be learning about a standardized and monolithic technique, Ive actually found
much more divergence, and so I have become particularly interested in considering the how and why
of divergences.
THIS TECHNIQUE, THAT TECHNIQUE?
There have always been recommendations that seem like guides for technique. Some are old
like Fenichels recommendation for the movement of interpretations from surface to depth
some newer: Gray, Busch. Has technique evolved into a clear method, though, one that dictates
to the analyst how to proceed? I dont think so, and I will say in the following what I think are
the good reasons this is never going to happen. But I note at the outset that, in my experience,
even if a group of analysts self-identify, along with Busch and Gray, as ego psychological, there
is no consensus among them that Buschs and Grays close-process monitoring technique is
the only ego psychological version of psychoanalytic technique.
The idea of a named techniquethis one, versus that oneto which an analyst subscribes is
to my ear an archaism. Although close-process monitoring is an inuence of some prominence
and is sufciently delimited to merit being identied as a technique, its more or less the only one
with a name these days. Most analysts that I know dont have a name for their technique (unless
it were to be everyones private name for what they do as analysts, like The Right Way to Go).
I believe that the real underlying problem for our understanding of technique is that, even if we
subscribe to similar adjectives to describe our psychoanalytic theoretical orientation or preferred
vision of mind, and even if we train in the same institute, we each make different analyses, and we
dont have good ways to describe, let alone to model, howand why this happens. In the absence of
such ways of describing and modeling difference, at least at my institute and at national meetings,
however, analysts within a group go on talking as if they all believed they were trying to do some
ideal right thing. In the absence of fuller dialogue about what makes our differences, and in the
absence of ways to conceptualize and to model these differences, an imagined unity of technique,
the notion of a striving toward an ideal proper technique, seems to exist. Certainly, analysts are
known to point to others of different groups, or who they feel have gone astray within their own
Dr. Michael Shulman is Faculty, Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute; Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan
and Department of Psychology, Madonna University.
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80 MICHAEL SHULMAN
group, to complain that these enemies, or misguided colleagues, are no longer doing more or less
the right thing; but the difculty to which I wish to draw attention here is not this disdain for
the Other, for bad analysts, but the power of the illusion of a unity around a presumed proper
psychoanalytic technique and its presumed more-or-less identical optimal results. Within groups
of analysts, in other words, I have heard a lot of pretending to an identity, a unity, on the score of
technique or the common clinical method which does not exist, but is continually assumed to.
1
Glover recognized how much analysts even in the same group dont and cant seem to agree,
and this was long ago, when it was still possible for him to write things that seemed to indicate
that a general convergence in clinical understanding and, by implication, in technique, might
be just around the corner. For example, he could write that, when two analysts dont agree on
important points of doctrine, at least one of them is practicing suggestion instead of analyzing his
patients (Glover, 1955, p. vii). It sounds as if it was easier to think of right and wrong, erroneous
and correct then, than it is now. (Dale Boesky, 2008, has referred to an earlier era of analysis as
an Era of Certainty personal communication).
In the present, it is my impression that wishing or craving for a certain kind of scienticity,
analysts often prefer to imagine the differences from their in-group peers in the analyses of the
same patients that they, themselves, would conduct are either matters of veerings off course from
a proper method (such as those caused by omissions or commissions based in problem counter-
transferences), or are matters of small differences of emphasis, something akin to gradations of
color in painting or of spices in restaurant dishes. The notion of real, basic differences between
analysts is minimized or brushed aside. Once again, it is presumed that there is a proper way to
proceed, a proper ideal course. That is why, I believe, the search has been so devoutly pursued
into recent analytic history to describe such things as the analytic surface and ego psychological
psychoanalytic technique, a technique that could reliably point to just where in that surface is the
moment for intervention.
SEEKING THE (CORRECT) TECHNIQUE AND THE ANALYTIC SURFACE
Here is a beginning to a description of why that surface
2
will never be located and agreed to. The
primary difculty in the notion of a psychoanalytic surface is that it is as if this surface were not
one derived from a combination of two individuals minds (as Isakower described in his papers
given at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in the 1960s which detailed the joint creation of
the analytic instrument; e.g., Isakower, 1992). This surface is described as if it actually existed
entirely noncontingently, as a natural phenomenon, pristinely even, the same way, no matter who
the analyst were, so long as she did not disturb this surface and the derivatives emergingso
long as she is listening, in other words, and properly. This surface, as it were, is described as if it
were somehow free-standing, an assumed-to-be universally-accessible surfaceone that would
emerge reliably and fully formed, with any analyst.
1
I do not dispute that groups of analysts often share values, but it is my observation that such shared values do not
translate to techniques that are anywhere near the same across a given groups analysts.
2
I am following primarily Buschs (1995) use of surface as I understand it, which I regard as a delimited portion of
Paniaguas (1991) broader work on analytic surfaces.
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DEVELOPMENT OF A PSYCHOANALYTIC TECHNIQUE 81
Over and over, I have seen analysts liking to assume, especially if they like each other, that
theyd agree what the surface is in the session, and therefore, what to do technically. However,
if I know each of them, as one gets to, for example, as a supervisee or in a study group, I know
they really dont. This phenomenon of nonagreement occurs regularly even when the surface is
reported verbatim.
3
Why? Because there are too many simultaneous meaning-informing shapes
behind a given verbal surface for it ever to be a real stand-alone. When it comes to psychoanalytic
data, in other words, there will never be a Sergeant Fridays technique for psychoanalysts, in
which the analyst could ask for a properly delimited packet of evidentiary data, as Friday could
when hed order, Just the facts, maam.
WHY THERE WILL NEVER BE ONE RIGHT TECHNIQUE
What has implicitly been learned in the history of psychoanalytic technique, but is only occa-
sionally explicitly discussed, is that, although there are certainly many ways to make errors in
psychoanalysis, it is also the case that, because of the riches of overdetermination, there are also
multiple ways to be right. The very idea of a surface misses the multidimensional nature of a
work of art, the psyche, which we each necessarily engage differently.
Psychoanalysis, as a body of theory, lacks a way to model difference in clinical psychoanalyses
across analysts. Needed is a form of multidimensional modeling that does not yet exist. We may
not yet have a consciously available model for this problem, but it is, again, easy to witness when
considering the following issue: as with any subject matter one is learning, psychoanalysts all
have individual learning curves in getting to know each analytic caseones own way, and pace,
of learning; but this is, in our literature, a hardly discussed issue.
Instead, the history of psychoanalysis has mostly exemplied analysts preferring to go on
imagining a proper technique, and, in recent times, to looking at isolated sessions in detail and at
microprocessloving Bions epic, but also overstated, and certainly overquoted, lines on work-
ing without memory and desire, and fantasizing that psychoanalysts could validly understand
isolated session hours in detail; that they could fairly dispense with knowing all that has come
before, the hundreds or thousands of hours. A quixotic dream-goal is embodied in this attention
to microprocess: the quest for a Reliable Psychoanalytic Technique, in imagining that all analysts
would formulate and intervene the same way, might all see the same surface and experience the
same clarity, and surely agree just what the transference is, what the resistance, and where the
moment to intervene.
And yet, here is the learning curve problem: The issue in the patient that youanother
analystmight have discerned clearly by the 400th hour I may not understand until hour 600,
but I may have seen in hour 200 what you dont get to until hour 1,000, or never at all! Or vice
versa.
3
This point was brought home to me with particular force when I participated in a discussion of one of Boeskys
presentations of his work on psychoanalytic disagreements, a paper (now part of his book on this subject; Boesky, 2008)
on Ilany Kogans published verbatim case material. In the group discussion that followed his discussing the Kogan, after
I had found Boesky compelling in his use of evidence to argue his understanding of the material and I assumed others
would similarly, I noted wide disagreement from those in attendance, who were members of his local institute, who
heard the identical compelling single session of material quite differently from each other, and applied different rules of
understanding in listening to it.
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82 MICHAEL SHULMAN
The learning curve issue is not the same as the issue of countertransference blindspots, as
causes of error, and their overcoming; it is an issue of a different order and type, one related to
general human processes of coming-to-knowand of insight formation. It is an issue friendly to our
modern understanding of the inevitability of enactments, for example, and the analysts guring
out only ex post facto much of what shes been participating in unconsciously. The learning curve
issue is unfriendly to earlier, to my mind rigid, fantasy-ridden and perfectionist visions of analysis
which focused ineluctably, and quite unproductively, on the idea that errors are easy to spot, as
violations of an already-given method, one that produced a prescriptive technique characterized
by many rules (cf. Boeskys, 2008, discussion of Brenners commentary on Kogan).
Why do psychoanalysts continue to discuss each others work in the unproductive, single-
session, microprocess way? I dont have a certain answer, but I feel one very good one was
implied in something Stephen Mitchell is once reported to have said: Criticizing other peoples
clinical work is like shooting sh in a barrel. In discussing clinical material in groups, analysts
supervising others work continues to be the easiest thing for themto do, and it is a great challenge
to get them to consider others work without supervising it (Tuckett 2008). Its fun for many (so
long as a willing presenter, all-too-often a candidate, even at national meetings, is there to serve
himself up), and there are always things one can point to that someone else missed, especially
if its in the transference. Many continue to enjoy this ancient form of psychoanalytic sporting
event.
But the spectacle of the sporting event misses the most interesting issue: Why is it, after
all, so easy for each of us in listening to anothers material to notice what someone else has
missed? In other words: Why did they not see it themselves? Why is it so easy for us to see, and
for the other to be blind? The answers to these questions must lie in the direction of a general
human epistemological difculty: Each of us can only see just so much of a multidetermined, and
multiply functioning, phenomenon at any one time. This trio of questions just asked redescribes
what I mean by the learning curve issue.
I dont want to be misunderstood on the learning curve issue, or to be heard to be a radical
relativist, someone who believes everything that emerges in an analysis is coconstructed (if by
coconstructed were meant coinvented) by patient and analyst. A strong coconstructionist position
is logically incoherent and in no way follows from an appreciation of the learning curve problem.
Even if there is no universal surface, there are, of course, inner forces in the patient continually
shaping each present clinical moment. These forces produce in the process something that could
be thought of as a stream of data from the patient. This patient is a person with a real history,
which we assume in various ways constrains the unfolding of the streamof data within the session
(to believe otherwise would be to drop psychoanalysis most basic assumption, that of psychic
determinism, the basis of what a psychoanalyst listens for). This patient has a psyche and a
structure to this psyche also constraining, in myriad ways, the issues that unfold over the years of
the work, though not, I believe, the order of the unfolding of these issues, which will be one of
the major differences likely to occur across different analysts.
To further clarify my system of beliefs about the psyche: At the core of any given psyche, I
believe that different analysts would each encounter, in some form, the same set of organizing
unconscious fantasies (I give an example in the following)again, I am no radical relativist.
However, all in this paragraph and the previous one said: in my experience listening carefully to
hundreds of hours of analysts listening to each other, I have concluded that they simply respond
in too many different ways to the same stream of data for the idea of one proper method of tech-
nique ever to be useful. Once there is more than a very small sample of material in front of them,
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DEVELOPMENT OF A PSYCHOANALYTIC TECHNIQUE 83
psychoanalysts begin to hear different structures organizing the material from behind it, com-
pellingly in each of their own experiences, but only sometimes, maybe even only occasionally,
equally compellingly in others (cf. footnote 3).
And, if there were decisively consequential ways to be right and wrong, only a very small
number of analysts would be left in the business at all, certainly not enough to have given the
eld any public success, or to have kept it going over generations, which raises the subject of the
pragmatic.
PRAGMATISM AND TECHNIQUE
Currently, I have been thinking that, although real, the different analyses we make may not mat-
ter that much practically in the end for our patients, and it is a profoundly difcult task, again,
without any means to date, of which I am aware, to model the problem, to begin to imagine how
to fairly assess comparative outcomes of analysis (I know this view is heretical to some in my
own institute, but I have found them strong on conviction and short on argument). Psychoanalysts
have no sound, or even agreed-to, methodology for comparison, and in offering opinions of com-
parative outcomes, they are on the extremely thin ice of comparing a real outcome they know
(i.e., what they have done in the work with their patient) to a hypothetical one (i.e., what they
imagine they would/could have done in the work with anothers patient; cf. Mitchells previous
comment).
I nd much common ground in my views and those of Fonagy in some of his work (e.g.,
2003), where he is interested in the pragmatism of psychoanalytic technique and thinks that
much of what psychoanalysts have developed in the way of technique does not follow, in any
sense of logical deduction, from our developmental and psychopathology theories at all; rather,
this technique follows from our experience of what works to further the process and help with
the outcome. Pragmatism, our durable American friend, should not be absent from considera-
tions of psychoanalytic technique (and interest in pragmatism does not, by any means, commit
us to accept such particular and narrow positions on pragmatism as Reniks, 2006, which is
one in which multiple dimensions of the unconscious are ablated and in which it appears that
psychoanalysis is often sacriced for short-term therapeutic work and outcomes)!
Although I think Fonagy (2003) overstated the disconnection of theory from practice, I also
believe he is right that much of what is taught us (this is particularly true, in my observation, in
clinical supervision) as part of our analytic education in technique was deduced from no partic-
ular theory, but is, in fact, only a juxtaposition of multiple habits derived from the more useful
portions of the habits of others (supervisors and teachers), passed down, from generation to gen-
eration of analysts and, both creatively and uncreatively, identied with and disidentied with,
remembered, forgotten, mangled, and recast, with many old useless habits simply dropped and
forgotten without memorial along the way.
In my experience of supervisors and teachers, I could see that the fate of a great many old
convictions regarding technique recommendations, some of them held ercely in earlier times,
was to simply fade away. (As just two examples of such erceisms of the past: The giving of
any advice in an analysis, other than the recommendation for undertaking analysis, is an error;
the patient must be charged for all missed sessions, under any circumstance, or analysis cannot
occur). The teaching of psychoanalytic technique, at least where I received my psychoanalytic
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84 MICHAEL SHULMAN
education and I strongly suspect in most institutes, is the least reading-based part of the curricu-
lum, the one most subject, in a useful way, to the differences of personality among supervisors
and among other inuential teachers. In my experience, these persons often did not so much teach
technique, in the sense of talking about basic principles and building specic technique recom-
mendations from there, as embody it. Technique was an extension of themselves, which, as we
witnessed them in their engagements with our material, their patients, and themselves, we came
to feel and to gradually embody in an individual way for ourselves.
But again, even in supervision and technique seminars I found that there continued to be a
lot of fronting for the existence of unity on the subject of technique that did not, in fact, exist.
(I had one supervisor who still referred to something called standard technique among analysts
at our institute, though none of this individuals presumably standard colleagues did. The use of
the term standard technique had vanished for them).
NO NAME FOR MY TECHNIQUE, BUT HERE IS WHAT IS IMPORTANT IN IT
I eschew the idea of a formalized technique, because I dont have a name for the one formalized
technique I use. I think that the way I listen guides my technique, and that the way I listen has the
inuences I describe shortly. I dont think these listening priorities are other than ordinary ones
for analysts. I hope and believe, of course, as we all do, that these things to listen for are the most
important ones, the best effective distillation of what Ive been taught, but most of us tend to feel
weve been well taught, so we risk being overpleased with our individual distillations.
These principles also guide the listening I try to teach in supervision. They are listed here in
order from most to least central:
1. to listen for anxiety, especially anxieties active in the transference;
2. to listen for affective urgencies: What issue emerges affectively as in-play, as making a
claim, in a given session;
3. to listen for what threads are continued from the last (and sometimes other recent)
sessions, and which are new;
4. to listen for themes and variations on the theme; and
5. to listen for elements of a particular deep structure, the basic unconscious organizing
fantasy(ies) of a patient.
I do think of my technique as being guided by my listening. However, I also know I listen
in different ways at different times, sometimes because of new learning or a paper I have just
heard or read (e.g., after I attended a recent symposium on secrets in analysis, I, of course, was
hearing them left and right in my patients material; they seemed to be popping up everywhere,
where previously Id missed them everywhere; cf. my earlier discussion of blindness and seeing).
Sometimes, I listen accidentally: Because when I have a head-cold I have learned that I listen
differently (and not necessarily less effectively, or so I believe), that different-than-usual brain
activity on my part seems to be in play.
I believe to I sometimes try to listen in new ways is useful, the way that shining lights of
different wavelengths, and viewing from differing angles, is useful in the exploration of a work
of nature or of art, because we learn of more structures not yet visible to us but operating behind
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DEVELOPMENT OF A PSYCHOANALYTIC TECHNIQUE 85
the surface in this way.
4
When I particularly incline my neck, either further back, or to the side,
in my ofce armchair behind the couch, I know that I am craning for a new view. In trying these
days to embrace a greater plurality of views than they used to in our eld, psychoanalysts are
collectively craning for new angles to reveal new dimensions to our object of study, our patients.
Since I believe the psyche is a work of nature and of art, I know that new angles of view
are always of potential use. Thomas Kuhns (1962; 1996) analogue of the process of scientic
revolutions to that of the psychology of Gestalt shifts has great, and still largely unexplored,
application to listening and the capacity for openness, freshness of hearing and new learning in
clinical psychoanalysis. A paper remains to be written: Each psychoanalysis is a problem of sci-
entic revolutions (i.e., each one requires major, even radical, repeated exibility of perception
over time to allow the analyst the freedom she needs to help her patient achieve maximum under-
standing, to allow new ndings to be made even when it seems that everything is known already
and all the pieces t).
Finally, I think that what most serves to guide my technique is not a listening principle. Rather,
it is a desire: to be helpful to another person in understanding their particular lifetime pain and
suffering, and the deep unconscious fantasies and internal knots that are continuing to damage
him because these fantasies and knots are xed, rigid, and place that person in an impossible,
contorted position. For example, one traumatized patient suffered with, and from, the following
concatenated fantasies, which emerged piecemeal over a long period, each contributing the more
to tangling him into an impossible position: I needed to be a girl to be a person for my parents,
but I was born a boy; I am defective goods; I could only ever feel good if I believe I can
have xed my parents marriage which ended when I was 5, but because I was born, I caused this
marriage to fail, and each of them to be unhappy; and If I were never born, my parents would
not have been unhappy; then and only then could I be happy.
I am skeptical of some older views of the analyst that seem to describe the analysts technique
in terms of his working relentlessly to help the patient experience warded-off affects. As an
example of this phenomenon, I have heard an analyst say of a patient, He needs the chance to
experience his full rage toward me. Certain others I have heard describe their analytic technique
in terms that focus almost exclusively on the patients defenses against mourning and the constant
need for analysis of such defenses. One analyst I heard present, and who was taken by this view,
seemed to be in love with the idea that mourning, and interpretation of defenses against it, was
all of what analysis was about, as if in a good analysis something that needed to be mourned by
the patient should be identied by the analyst each analytic day.
I nd puzzling and disconcerting the idea that the clinical goals of analytic technique might
be dened by these intensive kinds of foci on warded-off affects or mourning work, because
I am disturbed by the narrowness and prescriptiveness of these notions. Many people have lots
of intense affects with which they have trouble; they dont need awareness for its own sake of
additional warded-off ones, as these analysts imply is the universal goal of analytic technique.
That would be to mistake something that is at most a feature of analysis (in some cases, for
example, with traumatized patients, a potentially treatment-destroying, because it is so easily a
4
I was an amateur astronomer as a boy and learned the usefulness of the expansion of our knowledge that came from
ultraviolet and infrared visualization, as well as radio-telescopic mapping, of interstellar objects; how much more of the
structure and functioning of a galaxy, for instance, could be learned by such juxtapositions of pictures of radiation, than
might come just from pictures based in wavelengths visible to the human eye.
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86 MICHAEL SHULMAN
hope-destroying, feature) for its goal. Or to mistake a part of analysis for the much larger whole
of what it offers.
Although the following view on my part may change, I dont think it will: Psychoanalysis as a
clinical practice is useful to the overcoming of affective misery via increased self-understanding
forged in a new experience. Two minds are denitely better than one, because they create new
possibilities (and certainly not just because warded-off affects have been reexperienced in the
here and now). The patient does, of course, need to work through the effects on themselves of
some of the old of their intense defended-against affects; but they need much more than this the
new of a jointly built platform from which to come to terms with themselves, providing a basis
that can allow the overcoming of destructive and unproductive unconscious emotional reexes
causing psychic contortion and imprisonment.
I appreciate very much the opportunity offered me by Mel Bornstein to further rene and make
explicit my thoughts on psychoanalytic technique in this article.
REFERENCES
Boesky, D. (2008), Psychoanalytic Disagreements in Context. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson.
Busch, F. (1995), The Ego at the Center of Psychoanalytic Technique. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Fonagy, P. (2003), Some complexities in the relationship of psychoanalytic theory to technique. Psychoanal. Quart., 72:
1347.
Glover, E. (1955), The Technique of Psycho-Analysis. New York: International Universities Press.
Isakower, O. (1992), Chapter four: The analyzing instrument: Further thoughts. J. Clin. Psychoanal., 1: 200203. (Paper
originally presented in 1963).
Kuhn, T. (1962), The Structure of Scientic Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. (1996), The Structure of Scientic Revolutions (3rd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Paniagua, C. (1991), Patients surface, clinical surface, and workable surface. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 35: 669685.
Renik, O. (2006), Practical Psychoanalysis for Therapists and Patients. New York: Other Press.
Tuckett, D. (2008), Psychoanalysis Comparable and Incomparable. London: Routledge.
117 N. First Street, Suite 113
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
mshulmanphd@gmail.com
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