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Psychoanalytic Neutrality in Therapy: Thompson on the Rule of Neutrality

Deception and Trauma in Existential Psychoanalysis: Laing and Freud on Mystification

Neutrality, as psychoanalysis uses the word, is not the absence of care, it is a way of refusing to take over someone else’s experience while still remaining fully present to it.

The trouble begins with the word itself. In everyday speech, “neutral” suggests detachment, evasiveness, even a kind of moral cowardice, as though the clinician were trying to avoid the risks of relationship by hiding behind a technical ideal. Thompson’s point, in his essay on the rule of neutrality, is that this misunderstanding is not a minor semantic problem but a distortion of technique itself, because it subtly encourages two equally familiar caricatures, the analyst who withdraws in the name of neutrality, and the analyst who manages the hour through interpretation, persuasion, or “helpful” direction, while telling himself this too is neutrality.

If you are a patient, the first caricature can feel like being treated as an object of study or, worse, like being left alone with your suffering while someone watches from behind glass. If you are a clinician, the second caricature can look like competence, since it offers the quick relief of taking charge, the relief of being the one who knows what is going on, what it means, and where it should go. Thompson insists that both can be defenses, and that the discipline of psychoanalytic neutrality in therapy exists precisely because the analytic situation reliably pressures the therapist to become either absent or controlling.

psychoanalytic neutrality in therapy in a calm office setting

Why neutrality is so often mistaken for emotional absence

One reason neutrality gets moralized is that it sounds like a moral posture. “Do not take sides” can sound like a refusal to commit, and a refusal to commit can sound like a refusal to care. Yet within the psychoanalytic tradition, neutrality is not primarily a statement about what the analyst feels, nor a rule about how the analyst should appear, but an attempt to describe a mental attitude that protects inquiry, an attitude that must withstand the patient’s provocations, the analyst’s anxiety, and the many subtle invitations to make the work easier by making it smaller.

Thompson notes, in effect, that neutrality is a technical term whose meaning is precarious outside the analytic lexicon, and that it has been repeatedly reduced to an image, the analyst as blank, cold, and withholding. The reduction is tempting because it is simple, and it permits one to confuse a style of interpersonal distance with a discipline of listening. But neutrality, as Thompson reads Freud, is closer to a cultivated openness, one that refuses premature certainty, refuses the seductions of therapeutic ambition, and refuses the gratification that comes from being the decisive author of the patient’s story.

Neutrality as a discipline of attention, not a personality style

Thompson’s most important correction is that neutrality belongs to the analyst’s manner of attending, and this places it immediately in the vicinity of Freud’s technical recommendation of “evenly suspended attention,” a stance that refuses to select too early what matters and what does not. In Freud’s view, the very act of selection is already a theory, already a bias, already a way of deciding in advance what is meaningful, and therefore a way of foreclosing what the material might disclose later.

This is one reason neutrality cannot be reduced to a performance of impassivity. One can be impassive and still be deeply biased, because bias does not require visible emotion, it only requires an interpretive hunger, an impatience with ambiguity, an inability to tolerate the patient’s experience showing itself in its own sequence rather than in the order the therapist would prefer.

Thompson connects this to a phenomenological sensibility that he names directly, the suspension of judgment, epoché, not as an academic ornament but as a clinical requirement: a disciplined bracketing of what one is certain one knows, so that what is present, but not yet articulate, has a chance to come forward. Here neutrality starts to look less like “not caring” and more like a form of restraint that makes room for experience, including the experience that embarrasses our theories and threatens our self-image as helpful professionals.

Three inherited definitions, and how they quietly moralize the technique

Thompson’s chapter becomes especially useful when he refuses to attack caricatures and instead takes seriously three influential definitions of analytic neutrality meaning, showing how each can be clinically sound in one respect and clinically misleading in another.

Roy Schafer’s formulation places emphasis on evenhandedness: no saints and sinners, no favorites, no advocacy for one side of a domestic conflict, and no easy conscription of the patient into the analyst’s personal values. There is real wisdom here, particularly for patients who arrive already looking for an ally, a witness, a judge, or a rescuer. At the same time, Thompson’s worry is that the definition can harden into an axiomatic ideal, a purity standard, as though neutrality were measurable by how consistently it is maintained, rather than by whether it serves the situation that is actually unfolding. When neutrality becomes an abstract criterion of “real analysis,” the analyst can begin to act as though the hour were a series of permissible and impermissible “incidents,” rather than a living relationship in which judgment, discretion, and timing are indispensable.

A second definition, from Moore and Fine’s Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, emphasizes countertransference and value restraint, framing neutrality as the avoidance of unwarranted interference, the refusal to impose personal values, and the effort to let the patient’s needs and capacities guide the work. The formulation also tries to avoid extremes, neither detachment nor overinvolvement, and it describes the analyst’s stance as one of helpful, benign understanding. Thompson’s objection is not to restraint itself, but to the fantasy that benign understanding is simply an “emotional attitude” one can calibrate, as if countertransference could be managed by turning down the volume on one’s feelings. Understanding, on his reading, is not merely a mood but a capacity that can oppose mood, especially when anxiety drives the analyst to act. He also insists, crucially, that treatment goals are always imposed in some sense, even if minimally and tacitly, because treatment without any goal would be purposeless. Neutrality therefore cannot mean the absence of aim; it must mean something like restraint in the way aim is pursued.

The third definition, from Laplanche and Pontalis, makes explicit the breadth of neutrality: neutrality toward religious, ethical, and social values, meaning no directing treatment toward an ideal and no counseling; neutrality toward transference, captured in the maxim “Do not play the patient’s game”; and neutrality toward the patient’s discourse itself. Laplanche and Pontalis then point to Freud’s 1912 recommendations as the clearest statement of what neutrality is meant to be, especially where Freud castigates therapeutic ambition in therapy and educative ambition, and likens the analyst to the surgeon whose single aim is to perform the operation as skillfully as possible. Thompson treats this as a pivot, noting the irony that Freud’s most extensive discussion of the stance later called neutrality occurs before Freud actually introduced the term, since the term appears later, in 1915.
What links these definitions, in Thompson’s hands, is the recurrent danger of mistaking neutrality for an external posture rather than an internal discipline, and of converting a technical principle into a moral identity. Once that happens, neutrality is no longer something the analyst does with his mind, moment by moment, but something he imagines he is, a “neutral” person, which can quickly become a justification for emotional absence, interpretive domination, or both.

Freud’s two injunctions, the surgeon and sympathetic understanding

This is the point at which the familiar accusation, “neutral means cold,” begins to look less like a patient’s misunderstanding and more like a consequence of analysts repeating Freud’s metaphors without hearing Freud’s argument.

Freud’s surgeon analogy is often recited as an endorsement of coldness, yet Freud introduces it to criticize the analyst’s temptation to turn treatment into something else: an educative project, a moral project, a scientific project, a project of proving one’s cleverness. The surgeon metaphor is not primarily about the analyst’s affect but about the analyst’s aim, which is why Freud places it in the context of condemning therapeutic ambition and its cousin, the wish to “set tasks” for the patient. When the analyst’s aim becomes the display of expertise, neutrality collapses, not because the analyst becomes warm, but because the analyst becomes intrusive.

At the same time, Freud is explicit elsewhere, in On Beginning the Treatment, that the therapist’s stance should be one of sympathetic understanding, and that the therapist must not enter the scene as a moralist or become an advocate for one side of a conflict. The apparent contradiction only persists if sympathy is confused with taking sides, or if neutrality is confused with withholding. Freud’s point, as Thompson reads him, is that sympathetic understanding is precisely what allows the analyst to refrain from moralizing, refrain from recruiting, and refrain from replacing inquiry with judgment, so that the patient can speak more fully into the space the analyst is holding.

The deeper issue, then, is not whether the analyst is warm or cool, but whether the analyst can remain open, patient, and ethically restrained while being fully engaged, and whether the analyst can tolerate the anxiety of not resolving the patient’s conflict by adjudicating it.

Neutrality vs abstinence, a clinical dialectic rather than a slogan

Thompson is also careful not to let neutrality be romanticized as pure openness, because openness has consequences, particularly in the transference. If neutrality is rooted in openness, patients will often experience this openness as a kind of love, and in the logic of transference it can feel personal, as though the analyst’s openness were meant for them alone. This is one reason Freud insisted that the treatment must be carried out in abstinence, that the patient’s need and longing should be allowed to persist so that it can become a force impelling work and change, and so that the analyst does not appease those forces through surrogates.

Thompson’s point is that neutrality vs abstinence is not a matter of choosing one slogan over another, but of recognizing that the two rules correct each other. Abstinence moderates how much openness is prudent in a given moment, guarding against seduction and against the quiet transformations of the analyst into lover, rescuer, or benefactor. Neutrality, in turn, guards abstinence from turning into a rigid withholding that inhibits candor, since a stance that is too afraid of encouraging fantasy can easily become a stance that discourages disclosure.

The important sentence in Thompson’s account is almost disappointingly plain: neutrality was never meant to be employed universally. It must be applied with discretion, depending on the forces at play, and discretion, unlike slogans, requires judgment.

rule of neutrality in psychoanalysis symbolized by balance

When neutrality becomes a caricature, permissiveness and interpretive compulsion

If neutrality is treated as universal, the analyst is tempted toward the fantasy of neutrality “full bore,” and Thompson is blunt that such a stance is impossible. Were it feasible, he argues, the analyst’s role would be compromised and reduced to a permissive patron, while the analysis itself would lose tension because patients would inevitably interpret the analyst’s inactivity as agreement. A caricature of neutrality thus becomes a covert form of collusion, not because it takes sides overtly, but because it refuses to take responsibility for the meanings and impacts of its own silence.

But Thompson also targets the opposite caricature, one that is especially common among talented clinicians, namely the interpretive compulsion.
Interpretations, by their nature, undermine cherished assumptions, and thus they often breach neutrality, not because interpretation is forbidden, but because it easily becomes a way of directing the patient, controlling the narrative, or relieving the therapist’s anxiety by producing quick explanatory mastery. Thompson suggests that this dilemma pushed figures like Winnicott and Lacan toward using fewer interpretations, sometimes toward dispensing with them more or less entirely, in order to widen the range of neutrality they could sustain, though he also notes that Freud warned against the opposite error, the abandonment of common sense, and explicitly advocated alternating a neutral frame of mind with an ordinary one, “swinging over according to need” from one mental attitude to the other.

The point is not to idolize silence or idolize interpretation, but to see how both can serve as defenses, and how neutrality, properly understood, is the attempt to keep one’s defenses from becoming the patient’s fate.

What patients experience, what therapists must bear

For patients, the lived experience of psychoanalytic neutrality in therapy is rarely neat. It can feel relieving when one recognizes that the analyst is not trying to recruit one into a worldview, not trying to win an argument about one’s life, and not trying to adjudicate one’s conflicts by declaring one side correct and the other pathological. It can also feel frustrating, since neutrality refuses the fantasy that someone else will finally solve the problem on one’s behalf, and the refusal is not punitive but structural, because psychoanalysis is built on the recognition that freedom and responsibility cannot be outsourced without cost.

Thompson also insists that neutrality should not inhibit friendliness, because neutrality is not a ban on human presence; it is a disciplined restraint in the use of power, a way of bracketing the analyst’s eagerness, morality, and ambition so that the patient’s experience has room to become articulate. When neutrality turns inhuman, it is no longer neutrality but defensiveness masquerading as technique.

For clinicians, especially clinicians in training, the most difficult implication is that neutrality is not something one “applies” once one memorizes a definition. It is a discipline of mind that requires patience, an ability to withstand pressures to do something, to demonstrate signs of success, to reassure oneself by acting. Thompson’s formulation becomes almost paradoxical here: doing nothing can be the principal means of effecting change, not because passivity is virtuous, but because premature action often serves the analyst’s anxiety more than the patient’s inquiry. The measure of analytic efficacy, on his view, is not how much neutrality is used, but whether the analyst knows when it is prudent to remain neutral and when it is necessary to take a position.

In that sense, neutrality is not the renunciation of responsibility but a particular form of responsibility, the responsibility not to steal the patient’s experience by interpreting it too quickly, moralizing it too readily, or rescuing the patient from the burdens that belong to existence itself.

analytic neutrality meaning openness and suspension of judgment.

Conclusion

Thompson’s reading of the rule of neutrality in psychoanalysis clarifies why neutrality has been so easily distorted, and why the distortions matter: neutrality is not a posture of coldness, it is a discipline of openness; it is not the refusal to care, it is the refusal to take over; it is not the absence of aim, but the restraint of aim, especially when therapeutic ambition threatens to turn treatment into persuasion, indoctrination, or performance.

Neutrality, in Thompson’s hands, is best understood as a cultivated capacity to suspend judgment without suspending contact, to listen without selecting too soon, to resist taking sides in therapy without refusing moral seriousness, and to balance openness with abstinence so that the analytic situation neither collapses into seduction nor hardens into inhumanity.

At Free Association Clinic, our work in psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy is grounded in this tension, and our training program treats it not as a slogan but as an ethic of attention. If you wish to explore whether this approach fits what you are looking for, you can contact Free Association Clinic

James Norwood, PsyD
Associate Director, New School for Existential Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociation.us)
Clinical Director, The Free Association Clinic for Existential Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociationclinic.com)
Founder/CEO, inpersontherapy.com (https://inpersontherapy.com)

References

Freud, S. (1912/1958). Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, J. Strachey, Ed. and Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1913/1958). On Beginning the Treatment. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, J. Strachey, Ed. and Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Laplanche, J., and Pontalis, J.-B. (1973). The Language of Psychoanalysis (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Moore, B., and Fine, B. (1990). Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts. American Psychoanalytic Association, Yale University Press.
Schafer, R. (1983). The Analytic Attitude. Basic Books.
Thompson, M. G. (1994). The Truth About Freud’s Technique: The Encounter With the Real. New York University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.

Deception and Trauma in Existential Psychoanalysis: Laing and Freud on Mystification

An essay in reading Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis (Chapter 11)

Deception and trauma in existential psychoanalysis are not treated as mere clinical “content” to decode, nor as the private property of an isolated mind. In Michael Guy Thompson’s Chapter 11, they become the ethical problem that quietly governs everything else: the question of what happens to a person’s relation to reality when reality is repeatedly bent, denied, or strategically withheld, and what it demands of a therapist who claims to practice psychoanalysis in the name of truth. Thompson’s wager is that R.D. Laing’s work, so often positioned as psychoanalysis’ rebellious counterpoint, becomes most intelligible when we notice how thoroughly Freud inhabits it, even where Freud is barely named.

This is not only a theoretical matter, and it is not a dispute to be settled by choosing a camp. For therapists, Thompson’s chapter presses on the uncomfortable point that technique is never merely technique, because every technique presupposes an ethic, and the ethic can be betrayed in the very procedures meant to protect it. For patients, it gives language to an injury that often resists language: the peculiar devastation of being made to doubt one’s experience, and of discovering, often too late, that one’s world had been organized around what was concealed. Thompson’s claim is that the trauma at issue here is not simply what “happened,” but what happened to the possibility of believing what happens.

The gulf Laing refused to accept

Thompson begins where existential psychoanalysis often begins, not with a doctrine but with a stance. He portrays the most telling feature of Laing’s clinical technique as a radical effort to eliminate the gulf that customarily hardens between therapists and their patients, so that the patient can feel, in the therapist’s presence, not the impersonal authority of a procedure but “another human being like themselves,” someone who shares the ordinary weight of living and the ordinary capacity for pain. The point is deceptively simple, and it becomes demanding precisely because it deprives the therapist of a familiar refuge: the refuge of role, the refuge of expertise performed as distance, the refuge of a professional posture that can quietly turn the other into an object. In Laing’s hands, the clinical encounter becomes an exposure, because the therapist’s relation to truth cannot be kept outside the room as a private virtue while technique proceeds inside the room as a neutral instrument.

Thompson does not sentimentalize this stance as “niceness,” and he does not treat it as a rejection of analytic discipline. He treats it as a more austere demand: that the therapist’s humanity is not an ornament of the work but one of its conditions, and that the ethical imperative is not an afterthought added to interpretation but the ground on which interpretation can be trusted. The deeper problem, in other words, is not whether a therapist can interpret cleverly, but whether the relationship being formed can bear truth without collapsing into coercion, and whether the therapist can bear the temptation to manage reality, even in the name of improvement.

A contemplative male therapist sits in a chair, hand on his forehead, surrounded by ghostly, cracked images of a screaming woman, a solemn child, and an older man—symbolizing emotional burden, intergenerational trauma, and the lingering presence of the past

Freud’s “Truth and Trauma” and the expansion of reality

If Laing’s technique begins with the abolition of the gulf, Thompson’s argument begins with a different abolition, the abolition of an easy story about Laing’s relation to psychoanalysis. Thompson insists that Freud’s influence on Laing was “pervasive,” though generally omitted, and he goes further, suggesting that Laing saw himself, quietly and without fanfare, as Freud’s intellectual heir, with a style of allusion that makes the inheritance hard to see unless one knows how to listen for it. What matters is not biographical gossip about influence but the alignment of a central preoccupation: deception and its relation to trauma.

Thompson’s route through Freud is precise, because it follows the transformation of Freud’s own theory of trauma. Freud begins, under Charcot’s influence, with a relatively direct idea, that hysterical symptoms follow from traumatic seductions, from sexual experiences imposed on the child, a theory whose apparent concreteness has a certain moral clarity. Yet the theory collapses under contradictory evidence, and Freud’s collapse becomes, for Thompson, one of psychoanalysis’ decisive expansions: if some patients trace symptoms to traumas that did not occur as events, then fantasies have force, and “psychical reality” must be taken into account alongside practical reality. That phrase is not an escape from truth but a widening of truth’s domain, because it names the way the psyche can be organized around scenes that have the status of reality for the person, regardless of historical verification, and because it locates trauma not only in external violation but in the psyche’s own struggle to bear what it anticipates, what it dreads, and what it cannot admit it already knows.

Thompson reads Freud’s later conception as a subtle account of how deception and conflict co-constitute each other. The child, vulnerable to disappointment, can repress what is too painful, replacing an objectionable reality with an inviting fantasy, and thereby “not experiencing” the disappointment in the ordinary sense while still suffering its effects; later, anxiety forms around the fear of discovering what one must not know, which is to say, around the dread of re-encountering something that, in reality, has already happened. Trauma becomes inseparable from concealment, and the psyche’s defenses become, in their own way, deceptions that purchase bearability at the cost of truth. It is in this terrain, where reality is not denied merely because a person is irrational but because reality is unbearable, that Freud’s theory can be extended without being reduced to moral judgment.

What matters clinically, and existentially, is that the question of truth is no longer reducible to whether something “really happened,” as if the psyche were a courtroom. The question becomes: what has the status of reality for this person, what has been split off in order to survive, and what kind of relationship is required for what has been disavowed to become bearable without humiliation or coercion. Freud’s move toward psychical reality, in this sense, is already an ethical move, because it refuses the contempt implicit in dismissing the person’s experience as mere fabrication, and it binds the analyst to a more difficult fidelity, fidelity to the reality that is lived, even when it is not easily verified.

From psychical reality to social phenomenology

This is the point at which Thompson’s chapter takes its most consequential turn, because he argues that Laing takes Freud’s conception of psychic trauma and applies it to delusional confusion, but does so “in a more dialectical framework,” and this dialectical shift changes the moral topology of the clinical scene. Freud had emphasized fantasy as a way the psyche avoids objectionable realities, and even when Freud attends to interpersonal deceptions, the conceptual center remains intrapsychic conflict. Laing, by contrast, asks what happens when deception is not primarily what I do to myself, but what is done to me, repeatedly, by others, and done in a way that aims not merely at my compliance but at the manipulation of my experience, and therefore my reality.

Thompson names this shift with Laing’s term “social phenomenology,” defined as an “internal critique” of how others affect, and sometimes play havoc with, my experience. The emphasis is decisive: the psyche is not simply a private theater, because the stage itself is partly built by others, and the lines one is forced to speak are sometimes the lines of another person’s denial. Laing’s dialectical dimension, as Thompson describes it, is the tormenting structure of interpersonal reality: what I think you think about me, and what you in fact think but conceal, and the way this concealment invades my capacity to know what is happening, and to trust that what is happening is nameable. When this dialectic becomes chronic, the problem is no longer only repression or wish-fulfillment; the problem becomes confusion as an existential injury.

Thompson’s formulation is stark and, if taken seriously, unsettling. Laing concluded that schizophrenia can be understood as the consequence of deceptions employed on someone who assumes he is being told the truth, and who depends on what the other tells him to be true. The language is careful. It does not romanticize psychosis. It does not reduce it to an abstract “break” from reality. It suggests that what is shattered is the person’s footing in reality, and that the shattering can be precipitated by relational conditions in which truth becomes unstable, where the person is repeatedly forced into the impossible task of sustaining a reality that is denied by those on whom he depends.

This is also where Thompson’s contrast between Freud and Laing becomes clinically useful, because it clarifies two different models of trauma that do not exclude each other but interact. Freud often conceived trauma in terms of frustration that thwarts anticipated pleasure, a model that makes sense for neurosis and for the ordinary compromises of life. Laing envisioned a different form of trauma that could account for psychotic anxiety and withdrawal: states of confusion that follow when one’s reality has been savaged, not through self-deception alone, but through being duped or deceived by another, and the loss of reality becomes more poignant precisely because it compounds frustration with disorientation. In contemporary idiom, one might reach for “gaslighting,” but Laing’s point is more radical than a popular term can hold, because it concerns the conditions under which a person is forced to betray his own perception in order to remain attached, and the way attachment can become the vehicle of unreality.

To say this is not to collapse all psychosis into family dynamics, nor to transform existential psychoanalysis into a single-cause polemic. Thompson explicitly resists simplistic causality. What he insists on, instead, is that reality is not merely a given, it is something that is sustained, confirmed, or subverted between people, and that the clinical task cannot be faithful to experience if it treats relational deception as incidental.

A distressed woman holds her head in anguish while a faded silhouette of a couple whispering looms behind her, split by visible cracks—conveying themes of psychological distress, secrecy, relational conflict, and emotional fragmentation

Mystification in therapy, a vocabulary for interpersonal deception

Thompson’s reading of Laing’s oeuvre sharpens the point further by showing that deception between persons is not a marginal theme in Laing, it is a sustained preoccupation across his most prolific decade. Thompson notes, with some irony, that The Divided Self is the only major work of Laing’s in which interpersonal deception does not play a major role, since it is oriented toward the existential experience of going mad rather than toward the social context that later becomes central. The shift is visible in Self and Others, where Laing turns toward the effect human beings have on one another in the etiology of severe psychological disturbance, and it is here that Thompson locates an important philosophical inflection: Laing’s engagement with Heidegger’s “On the Essence of Truth” and with the pre-Socratic term aletheia, truth as what emerges from concealment. Laing does not simply borrow Heidegger’s notion of truth, he twists it toward the interpersonal, emphasizing the interdependency between candor and secrecy, and thereby locating truth not as a detached property of propositions but as something that appears and recedes within conversation, within the fragile drama of what is disclosed and what is withheld.

This is where mystification becomes more than a provocative term, and becomes instead a conceptual instrument. Thompson underscores that Laing coined a vocabulary, terms such as collusion, mystification, injunction, untenable positions, and did so in order to name how ordinary interactions can distort truth so effectively that they affect each other’s reality, and therefore sanity. Thompson’s claim is not merely that Freud cared about deception and Laing cared about deception, but that Freud lacked this interpersonal vocabulary even where the problem was present, and that Laing supplies what psychoanalysis, in Thompson’s view, too often evaded: the possibility that pathology is not only a private compromise with desire, but also a response to a world in which reality is negotiated through power, denial, and coercive “care.”

Thompson’s account of Laing and Esterson’s family studies makes the clinical stakes concrete without collapsing them into accusation. In Sanity, Madness and the Family, Laing and Esterson demonstrate families in which massive forms of trickery and mystification are employed against the identified patient, sometimes with chilling casualness, and Thompson recounts the case of “Maya,” where parents deny to their daughter what they have openly admitted when she is absent, a denial that functions not simply as lying but as a systematic twisting of the child’s hold on reality. Thompson is careful to note the controversy that follows, and he observes that Laing did not claim that such incidents conclusively “cause” schizophrenia, only that they were ubiquitous in the families studied, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions. He also insists that mystification is not unique to “pathological” families, because it is inherent in the hypocrisy of everyday life, and the difference is often one of degree, persistence, and consequence.

Laing’s later work extends the analysis to other relational fields, including couples. Thompson’s discussion of Interpersonal Perception is striking because it presents the book as “radical even now,” precisely insofar as it exposes how duplicity and deception can be woven into love relationships through confused communication patterns that resemble, in magnified form, what occurs in families of schizophrenics. Laing’s “politics of experience” then names the wider terrain: how others confirm or disavow my experience, how they determine what my experience is permitted to be, and how severe disturbance is not only an internal defect but can be the consequence of human deviousness, sometimes unwitting, sometimes masked as altruism. Thompson’s point, again, is not that the world is nothing but cruelty, but that truth is always vulnerable to being politicized, and that psychic life cannot be understood without acknowledging this vulnerability.

If “mystification in therapy” is to mean anything, then, it cannot mean only that patients lie, resist, or distort. It must also name the more uncomfortable possibility that therapy itself can become a site of mystification when the therapist uses interpretation to override experience, or uses technique as a way of winning, or treats the patient’s reality as raw material to be managed. Thompson’s Laing is not simply warning against bad clinicians, he is exposing a structural temptation within the therapeutic situation: the temptation to convert an encounter into an operation, and thereby to reproduce, under the banner of help, the very distortions that have injured the person’s relation to reality.

Truthfulness in psychoanalysis, not as virtue, but as condition

Thompson’s chapter culminates where it began, with ethics, though the ethics here is not an external code but the condition under which psychoanalysis remains psychoanalysis. He argues that if we hope to resolve the dilemma of living amid disappointment and betrayal, the first step is not to explain the person away but to have one’s experience of the past confirmed rather than dismissed as “pathology.” The clinical rationale is existential, because the wound is often compounded by the denial that the wound exists, and the denial becomes a second trauma, a forced estrangement from one’s own perception.

From this vantage, the ethic of truthfulness in psychoanalysis is not a moral ornament, and it is not reducible to the therapist’s sincerity. It is the scaffolding of the analytic relationship, and it binds the therapist as much as the patient. Thompson notes that therapists, in their zeal to effect change, can resort to questionable tactics and transform therapy into a contest where the clever protagonist “wins,” a perversion of the work that is especially insidious because it can masquerade as clinical effectiveness. Laing’s technique, Thompson suggests, can be reduced to a single preoccupying concern, how honestly therapists are behaving with their patients, and how honest they are capable of being, a concern he links explicitly to Freud’s “fundamental rule,” the pledge exacted from the patient to be candid about what comes to mind.

Thompson then refuses the easy fantasy that the fundamental rule is simply a compliance instruction. Freud discovered that patients are loathe to disclose, because disclosure threatens their secrets and what those secrets might reveal about themselves. Laing adds a different emphasis, that many patients have learned, through experience, that it is wrong to think or feel as they do, so that concealment is not merely defensive but historically instructed, and the person may have “forgotten” what they think and lost the sense of who they are. In that context, truthfulness is not an order one can give. It is a relationship one can slowly make possible, if and only if the therapist’s neutrality is not coldness but a form of acceptance, and if the encounter is grounded in mutual respect rather than coercion.

Thompson ends the chapter with Freud’s blunt warning, the line that is easy to quote and harder to live: “psychoanalytic treatment is founded on truthfulness,” and it is dangerous to depart from that foundation. The point is not sanctimony. It is that psychoanalysis, when it is faithful to itself, cannot proceed by lies and pretenses without betraying its own authority, because the authority at stake is not social status but the credibility of the relationship in which truth can be spoken.

For existential psychoanalysis, this returns us to the first problem, the fragility of reality. If psychotics are not only anxious but confused, then the imperative is to understand the nature of their confusion and to avoid doing or saying anything that increases it, which means that deception, whether in the family, in the culture, or in the consulting room, cannot be treated as peripheral. Thompson recounts Laing’s insistence that victims of duplicity can be devastated when truth is discovered after long concealment, because they can feel as though their reality has been taken from their grasp, leaving them lost between the world they thought was real and the world that is suddenly thrust upon them. In that light, therapy is not the imposition of a “correct” story but the slow repair of a person’s relation to reality, which is also the slow repair of a person’s capacity to trust experience without surrendering it to someone else’s authority.

A man in a suit stares at his reflection in a shattered mirror, his expression tense and searching. The broken glass distorts his face, suggesting inner conflict, identity fragmentation, and the painful journey of self-confrontation. Books behind him, including Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, hint at psychoanalytic themes

Conclusion

Chapter 11 is not merely a comparison of Laing and Freud, and it is not a rehabilitation of Laing through Freudian credentials. It is a meditation on deception as an existential force, on trauma as what happens when reality becomes unstable, and on truthfulness in psychoanalysis as the ethical core without which technique becomes, at best, empty, and at worst, an instrument of mystification. Thompson’s contribution is to show that Laing’s work does not stand outside psychoanalysis as an ethical protest, but stands inside it as a demand for fidelity to experience, and as a warning about what happens when care becomes a vehicle for disconfirmation.

At Free Association Clinic, this question remains central to our understanding of depth psychotherapy, whether the struggle presents as anxiety, depression, relational deadlock, or the more diffuse suffering of not having one’s experience believed. If you want to learn more about our psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy services, or about how these questions appear in the work of couples therapy, you can also contact us when you are ready for a conversation.

References

Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.
Freud, S. (1914/1957). On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1915/1958). Observations on Transference-Love: Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis III (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1924/1961). The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Heidegger, M. (1977). On the Essence of Truth. In Basic Writings (D. F. Krell, Ed.). Harper & Row.
Laing, R. D. (1960). The Divided Self. Pantheon Books.
Laing, R. D. (1969). Self and Others (2nd rev. ed.). Tavistock Publications.
Laing, R. D., Phillipson, H., & Lee, A. R. (1966). Interpersonal Perception: A Theory and a Method of Research. Tavistock Publications.
Laing, R. D., & Esterson, A. (1964/1971). Sanity, Madness, and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics (2nd ed.). Basic Books.
Laing, R. D. (1967). The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. Penguin.

The Personal Relationship in Psychoanalytic Therapy: Thompson on the Demise of the Person

A Reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis

In psychoanalytic culture, the word personal often arrives with a faint odor of impropriety, as though it names whatever is left over when the real work is finished, or worse, whatever risks contaminating the analytic situation with ordinary human contact. Thompson begins Chapter 10, “The Demise of the Person in the Psychoanalytic Situation,” by naming a fact that is easy to overlook precisely because it is so mundane: person and personal are not standard technical terms in psychoanalytic nomenclature, and when they appear they usually function as offhand labels for what is “non-transferential” and “non-technical,” which is to say, what is easiest to marginalize.

Once the personal is treated as a conceptual remainder, it becomes possible, even virtuous, to define psychoanalysis by what it excludes. Thompson notes that for many analysts, psychoanalysis is distinguished from its more “user-friendly” cousin, psychodynamic psychotherapy, precisely by the absence of personal engagement, as though the analyst’s personhood were a kind of interference to be engineered out of the room. The consequence is not simply a colder atmosphere, but a tighter ontology: contemporary analysts “of virtually all persuasions,” he argues, increasingly reduce the psychoanalytic process to the analysis of transference, resistance, and enactments, and therefore assume that virtually all reactions to the analyst as a person should be treated as transference manifestations, while the analyst’s significant interventions are governed by whichever technical principles their school prescribes.

Thompson’s point is not that personal contact never happens, since every practitioner knows it does, but that entire training cultures have learned to treat such contact as irrelevant, risky, or analytically illegitimate, and therefore something to be avoided or, when unavoidable, promptly converted into an object of interpretation. The personal does not vanish, it is translated, and in that translation the encounter can become strangely airless, technically busy, and existentially empty.

Why “the Person” Can Disappear in Psychoanalysis

If the personal relationship in psychoanalytic therapy is reduced to an obstacle, then “the person” disappears by a kind of conceptual attrition. Thompson is explicit that this tendency cuts across schools that otherwise disagree on almost everything: he includes Kleinian analysts, American ego psychology (often called “classical Freudian” in this context), and many relational analysts among those who “deconstruct the very notion of a person-to-person engagement out of the psychoanalytic process.” What binds these positions together is not a shared theory of mind but a shared reflex, namely the conviction that the analyst’s personhood is best managed by being factored out.

His example is deliberately contemporary and slightly absurd, which is why it lands. He cites a discussion, originating in a Psychoanalytic Psychology article (Maroda, 2007) and later taken up in the New York Times, suggesting that analysts should not treat patients in a home office because it offers “keyholes” into the analyst’s personal life and may “over stimulate and overwhelm” the patient, as though contact with the analyst’s ordinary reality were inherently unsettling or even harmful. Thompson’s parenthetical aside is doing real work here, because it forces the reader to ask what kind of psychoanalytic imagination is operating when knowledge of a therapist’s personal reality is treated as intrinsically traumatic.

What matters is not whether one agrees with the example, but what it reveals about the background assumption: that the patient can only bear the analyst as a screen, and that the analyst’s person, when it appears, is automatically pathogenic. Thompson insists that this attitude is surprisingly recent in the long history of psychoanalytic writing, which is one way of saying that it is not destiny but fashion, and therefore open to critique.

personal relationship in psychoanalytic therapy in a consulting room

When Everything Becomes Transference: The Deconstruction of the Personal

Thompson describes a climate in which the psychoanalytic literature tends to focus so intensely on transference and countertransference, understood as specifically unconscious functions, that analysts are urged to attend above all to projections and their interpretation, while avoiding “interactions of a personal nature” that are implicitly defined as non-interpretive and therefore irrelevant to unconscious process. At first glance this can appear like rigor, an attempt to keep the treatment anchored in what psychoanalysis uniquely knows how to do; yet the rigor contains a peculiar impoverishment, because it quietly assumes that personal contact does not itself belong to the analytic field.

To dramatize the consequence, Thompson returns to a “slave metaphor” and claims that in certain relational formulations both analyst and analysand become “equally enslaved” by their unconsciouses, trapped in an “endless” intersubjective oscillation that tends toward infinite regress. The language is severe because the predicament is severe: once every vestige of the personal relationship has been transformed into transference and countertransference and placed under systematic interpretation, the human encounter no longer functions as a ground from which interpretation emerges, but as a surface upon which technical scrutiny must constantly operate.

From a more traditional angle, he argues, the problem does not disappear, it merely changes costume. If transference is conceived as a rarefied, trance-like regression that places the patient in a one-down position from which they cannot extricate themselves because they are always “in” the transference, then the analysand is implicitly treated as never fully the author of their experience, never fully a proper adult in an I–Thou relationship, but an “effect” of unconscious forces to which only the analyst is privy. One begins to see why some patients, especially thoughtful patients, report that analysis can feel depersonalizing: not because the analyst is unkind, but because the patient’s address is persistently converted into symptom, and the analyst’s response is persistently converted into technique.

Thompson sharpens the critique further by suggesting that transference itself can become a defense, not for the patient, but for the analyst, a way to withdraw from the “realness” of the person in treatment whenever proximity becomes too impacting. In that posture, closeness or informality is not explored as a human event that might matter, but interpreted preemptively as seduction or “transference,” which is another way of saying that the relationship is not allowed to become a relationship except as an object of analysis.

The Unconscious Without a Subject, and the Loss of Agency

It is tempting to say that Thompson is “defending the real relationship,” but the deeper issue is what kind of subject psychoanalysis is willing to recognize. If both parties are framed as governed by unconscious process, and if the only legitimate speech in the room is speech that can be converted into technical categories, then agency becomes difficult to locate without sounding naïve. Thompson’s worry is that psychoanalysis, when it becomes too enamored of its own conceptual apparatus, risks producing an unconscious without a subject, a drama of forces in which no one is answerable and no one can be addressed.

This is why the phrase “author of his or her experience” is so central in his description of what gets lost. To treat the patient as the effect of unconscious forces, and to treat the analyst as the privileged interpreter of those forces, is to generate a relationship that is, in principle, asymmetrical in authority even when it claims to be collaborative, and asymmetrical in personhood even when it claims to be relational. The patient is spoken about, perhaps even empathically, but not necessarily spoken with as a subject whose speech is an address to another subject.

Thompson’s discussion of Greenson helps clarify why this problem persists even when analysts try to reintroduce “the real relationship.” Greenson distinguishes a “real” relationship from transference, yet Thompson notes that such descriptions often emphasize the patient’s experience of the analyst while neglecting the analyst’s relationship with the patient, and because the dyad is not symmetrical, the “correlation between their respective positions is not identical.” What tends to happen, then, is that the patient’s side is described in the language of transference gradations, while the analyst’s side is described in the language of technique, a circumscribed set of behaviors epitomized by interpretive strategies, with countertransference increasingly defined as the totality of the analyst’s experience, including what used to be called “personal” reactions, now subsumed under technical oversight. The personal does not return, it is annexed.

For therapists, this is where Thompson’s critique becomes uncomfortably intimate, because it is not only a theoretical dispute about models, it is a question about what it means to remain a person while occupying a professional role, and whether our theories, however elegant, sometimes function as alibis for avoiding the impact of the other.

psychoanalytic relationship and reflective clinical writing

The Specifically Personal Dimension: Being Oneself Is Not a Technique

A predictable response to the “demise of the person” is to prescribe personhood, to turn genuineness into a technique, self-disclosure into a method, and warmth into a protocol. Thompson is unsparing about this move as well, because it repeats the original problem in a new register. He uses the example of Renik to make the point: even if a clinician insists they are not elevating their personal style into technique, the moment they advocate that manner of working as something all analysts should do, it becomes, by definition, technique, no longer a character trait but an intervention others are instructed to adopt.

Here the argument turns quietly existential, because Thompson is less interested in whether the analyst discloses, converses, or stays silent than in whether the analyst’s way of being is contrived. He writes that the problem with conceptualizing personal engagement as technique is that genuineness requires being true to one’s actual personality traits and behavioral characteristics, and therefore conducting oneself naturally, spontaneously, and “without guile.” In the same passage he names a complaint many patients make, not as a moral accusation but as a phenomenological report: analysts who rigidly conform to classical technique are often experienced as lacking genuineness. Yet the aim of analytic work, he adds, includes increasing the patient’s capacity for genuineness in relation to others and to themselves, which means the analyst cannot plausibly demand from the patient what the analytic situation structurally discourages in the analyst.

This is the paradox that Thompson crystallizes in a line that resists paraphrase: “Being oneself is, by definition, personal.” What follows is equally important for clinicians who want rules, because Thompson refuses them: there cannot be universal standards for how an analyst uses personality in treatment, it cannot be codified, and what counts as personal varies with the analyst, with the patient, with the time of day, with mood, with the phase of work. If this sounds unsatisfying, it is because it denies us the comfort of believing that personhood can be guaranteed by correct technique.

Conversation, Self-Disclosure, and the Question of Genuinenes

If being oneself is not a technique, then the personal relationship in psychoanalytic therapy does not appear as a prescribed behavior so much as it appears as a mode of presence, and Thompson locates its most common manifestation in something deceptively simple: conversation. For the personal relationship to be spontaneous, unpredictable, and authentic, it must be free of contrivance and subterfuge, “a manner of being” that, as he puts it, “comes from the heart.” From there, he notes that spontaneous conversations evolve between analyst and patient, sometimes including self-disclosures but not necessarily, because the point is not disclosure as performance but the recognition that not everything the analyst says should be limited to interpretation, data elicitation, or other technical considerations.

Thompson’s critique becomes especially sharp when he compares how different schools metabolize conversation. Classical analysts, he says, tend to reject it on the grounds that “conversing” has no discernible role in the analytic process, while relational analysts may reduce conversation to a technique, which can be experienced as contrived or manipulative. What is being lost in both cases is not chatter but humanity, because conversation can be restrained by abstinence without being abolished, and its abolition often feels artificial for analysts who are, like Freud and Ferenczi, naturally conversational.

He then gives a clinically recognizable scene that is also, in its own way, philosophical. There are times when patients want to muse about ideas, philosophical, literary, spiritual, and ask their analyst to reciprocate; the analyst may participate without needing to reduce the exchange to transference and analyze it accordingly, and Thompson suspects such extra-analytic exchanges can have a profound impact on both the relationship and the outcome of treatment, even if we cannot determine their effect moment to moment. This is not an argument for informality, but an argument that the medium of psychoanalysis is not interpretation alone, it is speech addressed to another, which is why psychoanalytic relationships cannot finally avoid personal contact, because “conversation is the essence of their professional activities.”

In other words, the personal relationship in psychoanalytic therapy is not a sentimental addition to the method, it is the condition under which the method can remain human.

“entering psychoanalytic therapy and the question of personhood

Character, Virtue, and the Analyst’s Presence

Once the personal is admitted as unavoidable, the question that follows is the one psychoanalytic institutes often prefer not to ask directly: what about the analyst’s character? Thompson insists that the character or person of the analyst is of “critical importance” to how patients experience and benefit from the relationship, and while he acknowledges that this cannot be empirically substantiated, he nonetheless claims, without hedging, that for some analysts the role of character matters more than technique. This is not an anti-technical position, since in the same passage he affirms that technical principles are indispensable, but it is a refusal of the fantasy that technique can substitute for who the analyst is.

He also observes that psychoanalysis has historically pathologized the notion of character, treating it primarily as embedded structures that compromise gratification or adaptation, and he notes that Freud used the term in two distinct ways: occasionally as virtue, more often as psychopathology. In contemporary analytic language, virtue tends to appear only in offhand, non-technical speech, even though in ordinary moral life we still speak of strong character as integrity, courage, honesty, and the like. Thompson’s provocation is that psychoanalysis has no coherent way to speak about these qualities without either moralizing or reducing them to structure, and yet the patient experiences them immediately, long before any interpretation “works.”

This returns us to training, where Thompson makes a claim that is modest in tone but radical in implication. Because character is hard to measure and depends on subjective judgment, institutes have tended to omit it from admissions considerations in the effort to make processes more democratic, and ironically this has allowed the relationship between character and technique to recede into the background. Even if personal virtue cannot be taught, he argues, it can and should be included in curricula, not as an ideal to impose, but as an object of awareness, a way of seeing how frustrations, preferences, limits, and attitudes shape what we call theory and what we call technique.

His conclusion is neither romantic nor permissive. He argues that the capacity to acknowledge a personal relationship with one’s patients, and to engage it freely in a manner that complements the needs of each treatment situation, lends genuineness and authenticity to the relationship, and that this has profound implications not only for how analysis is experienced but even for how technical principles are applied, adding that most analysts know this intuitively even when they do not articulate it.

Conclusion

Thompson’s Chapter 10 can be read as a critique of psychoanalysis at the moment it begins to confuse rigor with evacuation, as though the safest way to practice were to make the analyst disappear behind technique. Yet his argument is not a plea for a new orthodoxy of warmth, nor a demand that analysts disclose more, converse more, or sound more “human” in some standardized way, because the moment one tries to standardize personhood, one has already turned it back into technique. What he insists on, instead, is the simple and difficult claim that psychoanalysis is conducted by persons, not by methods, and that the personal relationship in psychoanalytic therapy is not what happens when the analysis fails, but what makes it possible for analysis to be addressed to someone rather than performed upon them.

At Free Association Clinic, our work in psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy takes seriously the depth of unconscious life while refusing to lose the person in the process. Clinicians interested in a more existentially grounded approach can explore our training program and psychoanalytic training, and prospective patients can contact Free Association Clinic to inquire about treatment.

Source

Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.

The Crisis of Experience in Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Returning to Lived Experience

A Reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis

Thompson’s Chapter 6 names a problem that tends to hide in plain sight: many contemporary forms of psychoanalysis risk losing the very phenomenon they claim to treat, the patient’s capacity to have experience, to undergo it, to recognize it, and to speak it as one’s own. This is what he calls the crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis: not a shortage of theories about psychic life, but a growing difficulty, culturally and clinically, in remaining answerable to lived experience in therapy itself.

People often come to psychoanalysis because something in their life is no longer coherent, not only because they suffer, but because their suffering has become strangely impersonal. They can describe what is happening with impressive clarity, sometimes even with moving candor, and yet they leave the hour with the faint suspicion that nothing has truly happened. Insight has been produced, but experience has not been reclaimed. Thompson’s wager is that this is not accidental. It is a consequence of how psychoanalytic technique and interpretation can drift, almost imperceptibly, toward commentary about experience, until the patient is asked to live in explanations rather than to re-enter what is being lived.

A therapist and patient sit in a dim, abstract room where experience seems to dissolve into swirling uncertainty.

Experience is not a concept, it is something you undergo

Thompson begins with a philosophical warning that becomes clinical the moment you take it seriously. Adorno suggests that experience is not simply a private event inside the head, but “the union of tradition with an open yearning for what is foreign,” and then adds the more disturbing thought: “the very possibility of experience is in jeopardy” (Adorno, 1992; discussed by Thompson, 2024).

What makes this relevant to the consulting room is that Adorno’s point is not merely that people are distracted, or that culture is superficial, but that experience itself can be thinned out until it becomes difficult to locate where, and in whom, it is happening. Thompson, drawing on Jay, underscores the conceptual difficulty that follows when “experience” becomes an empty password that everyone uses and no one can define without reducing it to something else, as though definition were always already a kind of betrayal (Jay, 1998; Adorno, 1992). In that light, the therapeutic risk comes into view. If experience cannot be defined without shrinking it, then a clinical method that treats experience as raw data to be processed will tend, despite itself, to process the life out of it.

Thompson’s etymological gesture makes the same point from another angle. “Experience” is linked to peril and to trial, to something tested and undergone rather than possessed, which means that experience is never guaranteed by the mere fact that something happened. It can be embraced or resisted, submitted to or evaded, and therefore it always implies risk, a willingness to be changed by what is encountered (Thompson, 2024). If you hold that thought and then listen to patients, you begin to hear why so many symptoms are not only expressions of pain but strategies for avoiding the peril of feeling what one’s life is doing.

Erfahrung and Erlebnis: being experienced and having an experience

Thompson’s Chapter 6 names a problem that tends to hide in plain sight: many contemporary forms of psychoanalysis risk losing the very phenomenon they claim to treat, the patient’s capacity to have experience, to undergo it, to recognize it, and to speak it as one’s own. This is what he calls the crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis: not a shortage of theories about psychic life, but a growing difficulty, culturally and clinically, in remaining answerable to lived experience in therapy itself.

Why phenomenology matters for psychoanalysis

Thompson’s argument is ultimately a defense of phenomenological psychoanalysis, not as an academic specialization, but as a necessary correction to a drift in psychoanalytic practice. He is explicit that what he has been describing “sounds a lot more like phenomenology than psychoanalysis,” and his response is telling: psychoanalysis is phenomenological, at least in the way Freud conceived it, insofar as it attends to experience as it is lived and spoken, rather than treating the patient as a specimen whose inner life must be inferred from a theoretical grid (Thompson, 2024).

The tension, of course, is that Freud’s unconscious can be read in a way that becomes nonphenomenological, as though something were happening “in” the mind that the person can never experience, as though the unconscious were a parallel theatre whose drama the patient does not witness. Yet Thompson insists that awareness and experience are interdependent phenomena, and that even when a person is “unaware,” what is at stake is often not the existence of a second life but a failure of listening, a failure of being present to one’s own thinking as it occurs (Thompson, 2024).

Here Thompson introduces an important reframing of “unconscious experience.” From a phenomenological angle, the unconscious can be understood less as a hidden content that the analyst discovers and more as a mode of consciousness the patient is not experiencing as consciousness, because the patient did not “hear” themselves thinking it when it occurred. The analytic task becomes reacquainting the patient with that dimension of Being that is typically concealed, so that experience becomes claimable precisely through speech, through free association, through hearing oneself for the first time (Thompson, 2024).
This is where the crisis begins to sharpen. If psychoanalysis forgets that its object is experience as lived and suffered, then it will inevitably become tempted by a different object: correctness, explanation, interpretive authority, and technical mastery.

Interpretation that deepens experience, not explanation that replaces it

In Thompson’s framing, the point is not to abolish interpretation, but to return interpretation to its phenomenological vocation. If speech can deepen experience, then interpretation should participate in that deepening, not by supplying the patient with a superior explanation of what is “really” going on, but by drawing the patient back toward what is being lived and avoided in the act of speaking. When interpretation becomes primarily explanatory, it can function as a defense, not only the patient’s defense but the analyst’s defense against the anxiety of not knowing, against the discomfort of remaining with what is ambiguous, conflicted, or still in the process of taking shape.

This is also where Thompson’s language about degrees of experience matters. Experience is not all-or-nothing; there are levels, and those levels depend on whether we are prepared to undergo the suffering involved in determining what our experience is (Thompson, 2024). In the clinic, this means that the most decisive moments are often not those in which an interpretation is accepted, but those in which a patient, sometimes with surprise, realizes that they have begun to feel what they have been saying, and that feeling is now theirs, not simply a theory about themselves.

The crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis: when technique outruns lived reality

Thompson’s critique is sharp because it is internal. He argues that not everyone approaches Freud’s conception of the unconscious phenomenologically, and that, as a result, psychoanalysis has “unwittingly contributed” to the broader cultural crisis of experience that has been unfolding since the close of the last century (Thompson, 2024). What is striking is his insistence that even earnest efforts to incorporate phenomenology into psychoanalytic theory have largely “fallen short” of reframing practice along phenomenological lines, which would require a more sustained emphasis on what experience itself entails as a psychodynamic event (Thompson, 2024).

His conclusion is uncompromising: the mainstream of psychoanalysis has, in effect, factored the phenomenological notion of experience out of existence, and even the turn to intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis often retains an empiricist account of experience rather than a phenomenological one (Thompson, 2024).

For patients, this is not an abstract dispute. It names a recognizable disappointment: the feeling of being spoken about, explained, even brilliantly interpreted, while one’s own experience remains strangely out of reach, as though the self were something the therapist can see more clearly than the person living it. For clinicians, it names a temptation that arrives precisely when a treatment becomes difficult, when the analyst begins to prefer the security of the conceptual apparatus over the vulnerability of staying with what is happening.

A solitary figure sits in a quiet room facing a hazy horizon, evoking reflection and ambiguity.

“Unconscious experience” and the problem of parallel lives

To make the crisis concrete, Thompson turns to Kleinian theory and to Susan Isaacs’ explication of “unconscious experience,” which he treats as a revealing contradiction: if something is unconscious in the strict sense, then in what sense can it be called experience at all (Thompson, 2024)? He follows Laing’s critique in Self and Others, where Isaacs is presented as implying that each person lives two parallel lives, one conscious and one unconscious, and that the unconscious life is never available to awareness (Thompson, 2024; Laing, 1969/1961).

If that is your theory of the psyche, then the technical consequences are almost unavoidable. You must infer what is going on “in” the unconscious, because the patient cannot experience it, cannot confirm it, cannot claim it. Isaacs, as Thompson presents her, insists that the unconscious has aims and motives that cannot become conscious and therefore cannot be experienced in the sense under discussion, which means that unconscious fantasy is treated as determining what can be consciously experienced (Thompson, 2024).

Laing’s protest, which is as ethical as it is conceptual, is that things become impossible when someone tells you that you are experiencing something you are not experiencing. As he puts it, “Things are going to be difficult if you tell me that I am experiencing something I am not experiencing” (Laing, 1969/1961; quoted by Thompson, 2024). The point is not that unconscious life is unreal, but that “unconscious experience” becomes a formulation that licenses a particular kind of interpretive sovereignty, in which the patient’s lived experience is treated as a disguise and the analyst’s inference is treated as reality.

Countertransference and projective identification: when the analyst becomes the arbiter

This is where Thompson’s critique of technique becomes especially pointed, because it touches the contemporary fascination with countertransference and projective identification. He argues that the Kleinian conception of projective identification has displaced repression as the prototypical defense, and in doing so has “virtually inverted” conventional notions of transference and countertransference, altering them so radically that they become “virtually unrecognizable” (Thompson, 2024).

The decisive shift is epistemic. Following this line, Bion concludes that the only means available to determine the patient’s unconscious experience is through the analyst’s experience of countertransference, a position that effectively relocates the evidence for the patient’s experience into the analyst’s experience (Bion, 1959; discussed by Thompson, 2024). Thompson quotes Bion describing how the analyst feels manipulated, as though made to play a part in someone else’s fantasy, and he presents this as a crystallization of the problem: psychoanalytic knowledge becomes increasingly grounded in what the analyst feels, rather than in what the patient can come to experience and claim.

None of this requires dismissing countertransference, nor denying that projective processes occur. The question is what kind of authority is created when the analyst’s felt experience becomes the privileged route to the patient’s truth, and what happens to the patient’s subjectivity when their own account is treated as secondary, suspect, or structurally incapable of reaching what is most real. The crisis of experience shows itself precisely here, where intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis can turn into a quiet conquest: the analyst becomes the one who experiences the patient’s life more fully than the patient does. Thompson’s insistence on phenomenology is, in this sense, a defense of the patient’s right to be the subject of their own experience, even when that experience is conflicted, defended against, or only barely speakable.

Two figures sit closely as their shared thoughts rise into a glowing form, symbolizing the intimacy and complexity of lived experience.

Returning therapy to experience: what changes in the consulting room

Thompson’s most concise description of psychoanalysis’ purpose deserves to be read slowly. The aim is “to return the analytic patient to the ground of an experience,” so that the patient can finally claim the experience as their own in the act of recounting it (Thompson, 2024). Once you take this seriously, the consulting room changes, not because technique disappears, but because technique is subordinated to the patient’s capacity to undergo, recognize, and speak what is happening, rather than to merely receive interpretations about what is supposedly happening.

In practice, this return to lived experience in therapy often looks deceptively simple, because it is less about dramatic interventions and more about a discipline of attention. The analyst stays close to the texture of what the patient is actually living in language, noticing where speech becomes a way of not feeling, where explanation substitutes for contact, and where a word is spoken with the body absent from it. Interpretation, when it arrives, is offered less as a verdict and more as a way of pressing experience downward, toward what Thompson calls the gravity of circumstances, toward the place where a patient cannot merely agree but must either encounter or resist what is being said.

For patients, the difference is often felt as a change in atmosphere: one is not treated as an object to be decoded, but as a subject being asked to re-enter one’s own life. For therapists, the difference is felt as a constraint on one’s own ambition to know too quickly, to be right, to do something impressive, because the analyst’s task becomes protecting the possibility that the patient might finally hear themselves, and be changed by what they hear.

If you are looking for this orientation in clinical work, Free Association Clinic offers psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy grounded in these phenomenological questions, where interpretation is kept in the service of experience rather than allowed to eclipse it.

What this chapter asks of clinicians in training

Thompson’s chapter does not flatter the clinician, and that is part of its value. The crisis of experience is not only a theoretical failure, it is also a temptation that lives inside training and practice, because uncertainty is hard to tolerate and theory offers a ready-made refuge. When the analyst begins to rely on speculative certainty, especially certainty grounded in their own countertransference as proof of what the patient “really” experiences, the analytic relationship risks becoming a place where experience is taken away from the patient under the guise of explaining it.

For clinicians in formation, this is not a call to abandon psychoanalytic knowledge, but to remember what psychoanalytic knowledge is for. It is for returning the patient to experience, and therefore it demands a kind of humility that cannot be simulated: a willingness to remain with not-knowing; to let the patient’s speech unfold without rushing to translate it; to hold one’s own experience as meaningful but not sovereign; and to keep asking, in every interpretive movement, whether the patient is being returned to the ground of their experience or being displaced from it by a more elegant account.

FAC’s training program in existential psychoanalysis is oriented around exactly these questions, because the point is not to produce technicians of interpretation, but clinicians capable of phenomenological listening, clinicians who can bear the anxiety of experience without replacing it with theory.

Conclusion

The crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis is not primarily a complaint that psychoanalysis has become too intellectual, nor a nostalgic wish for a more “human” therapy. It is a more exacting claim: that psychoanalysis risks reproducing, in the consulting room, the same impoverishment of experience that contemporary culture already encourages, replacing the dangerous vitality of lived experience with commentary, explanation, and interpretive mastery. Thompson’s insistence on phenomenology is therefore not a philosophical ornament, it is a clinical ethic. It asks whether psychoanalysis will remain faithful to the patient’s experience, including what is painful, resistant, and difficult to undergo, or whether it will trade that fidelity for a more comforting kind of knowledge.

If you want to explore therapy where lived experience in therapy is treated as primary, not as an afterthought, you can contact Free Association Clinic.

References

Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.
Adorno, T. W. (1992). Notes to Literature, Volume 1 (S. Weber Nicholsen, Trans.). Columbia University Press.
Jay, M. (1998, November 14). The Crisis of Experience in a Post-Subjective Age (public lecture). University of California, Berkeley.
Laing, R. D. (1969/1961). Self and Others. Pantheon.
Bion, W. R. (1959). “Attacks on Linking.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis.

Authenticity in Psychoanalytic Therapy: The Vicissitudes of Being Real

A reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s “Vicissitudes of Authenticity in the Psychoanalytic Situation,” in Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity (Thompson, 2024).

Introduction, why authenticity matters in psychoanalytic therapy

“Two chairs in a therapy room representing authenticity in psychoanalytic therapy

Authenticity in psychoanalytic therapy is rarely announced as the explicit aim of treatment, partly because the word itself has been worn thin by culture, and partly because psychoanalysis has historically preferred to speak in a technical idiom, as if what matters most can be safeguarded by speaking in concepts that keep the moral imagination at bay. Yet Thompson proposes that the analytic relationship, when taken seriously, is better characterized as a quest for authenticity than as the mere cultivation of insight, adaptation, or symptom relief, and he makes that proposal precisely because the consulting room is one of the few places where a person can discover, in a lived way, what it costs to tell the truth about themselves without converting that truth into a performance (Thompson, 2024).

This is not a romantic claim about “being yourself,” as though the self were a stable possession waiting behind the curtain, nor is it a recruitment slogan for therapy; it is closer to an existential claim about what it means to bear reality when one can no longer hide behind the small dishonesties that make life feel manageable. If psychoanalysis has an ethical gravity, it may be found less in the therapist’s values, and more in the peculiar demand that the situation makes on both people, namely that they meet one another under conditions where evasion becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

Introduction, why authenticity matters in psychoanalytic therapy

Patients rarely arrive saying, “I want authenticity,” and when they do, it is often because they have already tried to purchase that feeling through other means, through reinvention, through disclosure without consequence, through the curated honesty of social media, through the moral certainty of an identity that never needs to be questioned. More often, what arrives is distress, the fog of anxiety or the bluntness of depression, an unnameable dissatisfaction in love, or the weary sense of living at a distance from one’s own life, and yet, if one listens without rushing to interpret, a quieter wish can be heard beneath the presenting problem: the wish to become less divided, less strategic, less coerced by fear into living a life that does not feel like one’s own.

For therapists, that same wish appears in a different register, not as a “goal” to be delivered, but as the atmosphere that slowly develops when a patient senses that the hour is not organized around being managed, corrected, or recruited into optimism. In that atmosphere, what begins to matter is whether speech can become more than reporting, whether the patient can risk saying what is true enough to disturb their familiar self-understanding, and whether the therapist can tolerate the consequences of that disturbance without turning the work into reassurance or technique-as-theater.

Why psychoanalysis rarely names authenticity directly

Thompson’s first move is deceptively simple: he points out that authenticity is not a conventional technical term in psychoanalysis, even though what he means by authenticity has “pervaded psychoanalysis from its inception,” and he treats that mismatch as more than a historical curiosity (Thompson, 2024). When something is central yet unnamed, the unnamed thing tends to reappear in distorted forms, sometimes as ideology, sometimes as sentimentality, sometimes as the brittle insistence that one’s technique is “neutral” while one’s practice is quietly organized around fear.

Philosophy, culture, and the discomfort of ambiguity

The word authenticity enters the psychoanalytic bloodstream through existential philosophy, and Thompson notes that this alone creates resistance, since many analysts are temperamentally and institutionally averse to philosophical reading, even when the clinical situation forces philosophical questions upon them (Thompson, 2024). He also locates a cultural divide: European sensibilities have more readily treated suffering as a source of strength and character, whereas American sensibilities are more inclined to treat suffering primarily as trauma and psychopathology, and authenticity sits uneasily at precisely that interface because it refuses to promise comfort as the criterion of truth (Thompson, 2024).

What makes the term especially difficult, however, is not simply its philosophical pedigree but its ambiguity, since authenticity cannot be stabilized as a measurable outcome without being falsified by that very stabilization. Thompson suggests that the pragmatic, market-oriented description of psychoanalysis as increasing “work and love” becomes, in this context, a kind of defensive simplification, because it allows the field to speak in terms that sound sellable while avoiding the darker and more demanding question of what a person is willing to face about their own existence (Thompson, 2024).

Authenticity is not a moral checklist

One of Thompson’s most clarifying claims is that authenticity has “no specific moral agenda,” and that the absence of an inherent moral program is precisely what many clinicians find disturbing (Thompson, 2024). In a culture that alternates between moral exhibitionism and moral cynicism, it is tempting to make authenticity mean “doing the right thing,” or “saying the honest thing,” or “being transparent,” but psychoanalysis becomes unrecognizable when it is reduced to character education, and existential thought becomes kitsch when it is reduced to a lifestyle. Even Charles Taylor’s influential effort to rehabilitate authenticity within a moral frame, whatever its virtues, illustrates the ease with which authenticity is pulled toward moral discourse and away from the clinical texture of the hour (Taylor, 1991).

In the analytic situation, authenticity is less a set of correct statements than a stance toward one’s own evasions, a willingness to see how one uses speech to hide, seduce, attack, or manage, and a willingness to notice how the other person is being recruited into that same familiar drama. It is not, therefore, a doctrine of disclosure, since disclosure can be used defensively, and it is not a doctrine of emotional intensity, since intensity can be theatrical; rather, it concerns the slow collapse of contrivance, which is why it is so often accompanied by shame, fear, and the temptation to flee into theory.

What Thompson means by authenticity in the analytic situation

Thompson restricts authenticity, for the purposes of his argument, to a few elementary attributes that are clinically useful because they resist the sentimental uses of the word: authenticity tends to involve the road less traveled, it tends to be more arduous and therefore potentially more rewarding than the easier path, and it is genuine in a way that resists generalization because it is context-specific and characterized by an absence of subterfuge or contrivance (Thompson, 2024). That final attribute matters clinically because it immediately places authenticity inside relationship rather than inside private conviction, and it implicitly aligns authenticity with psychoanalytic efforts to name what is “real” or “honest” in what he calls the extra-transference dimension of the treatment relationship (Thompson, 2024).

Unconventional, difficult, and strangely rewarding

To call authenticity “unconventional” is not to romanticize rebellion, but to notice that the patient’s deepest evasions are rarely idiosyncratic; they are usually culturally reinforced, often rewarded, and sometimes identical with what the patient thinks of as their character. The analytic demand, then, is not a demand for novelty but for a different kind of fidelity, fidelity to what is actually happening, including the parts that the patient has learned to speak around, and including the ways the patient tries to make the therapist into a collaborator in their avoidance.

This is why authenticity is arduous. When a patient begins to abandon familiar defenses, what they lose first is not misery but protection, and what replaces protection is not immediate freedom but exposure, and exposure is experienced as danger long before it is experienced as liberation. The analytic situation makes room for that danger without rushing to annul it, and in that sense it becomes one of the few relational spaces where a person can discover that they are capable of bearing what they previously treated as unbearable.

A winding path symbolizing the difficult but rewarding path of authenticity in therapy

Context-specific truthfulness, not a “one size fits all” stance

Because authenticity is context-specific, it cannot be codified as a stable therapeutic posture, and this has implications for technique: if the therapist tries to apply authenticity as a rule, the therapist will inevitably become inauthentic, because the “application” will be driven by the therapist’s need to be a certain kind of clinician rather than by responsiveness to what is actually happening between two people. Thompson is explicit that analysts may emphasize some dimensions of authenticity and neglect others, and he notes that Freud, Winnicott, Bion, and Lacan had markedly different clinical styles while still exemplifying something essential about authenticity, which should caution us against confusing authenticity with any single school’s technical identity (Thompson, 2024).

The practical implication is not eclecticism for its own sake, but humility: the question becomes less “What would an authentic analyst do?” and more “What is being demanded of us, here, if we are not to lapse into contrivance?” That question is not answered once, because the analytic situation does not stop changing, and neither do the ways the patient tries to manage closeness, fear, desire, and disappointment.

Authenticity and suffering, what analysis does (and does not) promise

If authenticity is made into a therapeutic slogan, it will be used to smuggle in rescue fantasies, and Thompson’s argument is partly an argument against rescue, not because he is indifferent to suffering, but because rescue fantasies are themselves among the most tenacious forms of inauthenticity. Psychoanalysis does not promise happiness, and when it pretends to, it becomes indistinguishable from those cultural forces that deny the inevitability of disappointment by selling solutions.

Freud’s “common unhappiness” and the end of rescue fantasies

Thompson recalls Freud’s austere line about the aim of analysis, “to transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness,” and he reads it not as cynicism but as a demand for honesty about the human condition, including the reality that the end of neurosis is not the end of suffering (Breuer & Freud, 1893–1895/1955; Thompson, 2024). The phrase becomes clinically useful when it is heard not as a lowering of expectations but as a refusal to lie, because what many patients experience as despair is often the dawning recognition that no other person, no perfect love, and no correct interpretation will exempt them from the burdens of being a finite human being.

Thompson presses this further with a Lacanian theme that he treats as existentially significant: the fantasy that someone will appear and solve one’s problems, like a parent who arrives just in time, is not relinquished by reasoning or coercion, but through the day-to-day experience of bearing disappointment while simultaneously trying to understand one’s resistance to it (Thompson, 2024). The rescue fantasy is not a childish error to be scolded; it is a form of hope that has become fused with dependency, and letting it go feels, at first, like letting go of life itself, which is why it requires a setting where disappointment is not humiliating but metabolizable.

Winnicott and Bion, becoming a “sufferer,” and why fear belongs

Thompson’s use of Winnicott is similarly stark. He cites Winnicott’s claim that “If we are successful [as analysts] we enable our patients to abandon invulnerability and become a sufferer,” and he treats this as a description of what authenticity demands, namely the renunciation of invulnerability as a way of living (Winnicott, 1989; Thompson, 2024). The language is jarring only if one assumes that the goal of treatment is to eliminate suffering; if one assumes instead that the goal is to make suffering bearable without distortion, then becoming a sufferer sounds less like a defeat and more like a recovery of basic human capacity, the capacity to feel what is real without collapsing or retaliating.

Bion’s contribution, as Thompson presents it, is even less consoling: Bion suggests that analyst and patient should both be experiencing fear, and that if they are not, they have no business being there, a formulation that treats fear not as a symptom to be neutralized but as a sign of proximity to what matters (Bion, 1974; Thompson, 2024). This is not an endorsement of intimidation, and it is not a claim that therapy should be frightening, but it is an insistence that authentic work approaches what the patient has organized their life to avoid, and avoidance, when it begins to fail, is experienced as danger.

Technique in service of authenticity

In Thompson’s frame, technique is not discarded, but it is stripped of its defensive uses. Technique exists to protect the analytic situation from the seductions of comfort, control, and mutual collusion, and when technique is understood in that way, its ethical dimension becomes clearer: it is not primarily about being correct, it is about refusing the forms of dishonesty that both patient and analyst will tend to prefer.

Free association as an honesty practice

Thompson’s earlier work on honesty makes explicit something that is often treated as a historical artifact: the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis is, at its core, a pledge, a contract in which the patient agrees to be candid, to say what comes to mind and to try not to lie about it, even though Freud discovered that this is precisely what patients are loath to do because they fear what their secrets reveal about themselves (Thompson, 2004). When this is taken seriously, free association is not a quaint ritual; it is the difficult practice of speaking beyond the edited self, and the therapist’s task becomes not to reward eloquence but to keep faith with the premise that what is most important is what the patient least wants to say.

In that sense, free association and honesty in therapy are not reducible to confession, because confession often seeks absolution; free association seeks exposure, not exposure to the therapist’s judgment, but exposure to oneself, which is why it so often produces ambivalence and resistance. Thompson emphasizes that the analytic encounter is inherently conversational, even when classical technique tries to deny this, and that conversation, when it is not merely gratifying but intelligently restrained, becomes a humanizing tool that can deepen free association rather than dilute it (Thompson, 2024).

FNeutrality, “evenly suspended attention,” and “erasing memory and desire”

Neutrality becomes corrupt when it is mistaken for emotional absence, because emotional absence is not neutral, it is a stance, and often a stance organized around the analyst’s fear of being affected. Thompson’s account of neutrality, both in The Ethic of Honesty and in his reading of Freud, emphasizes something closer to “not knowing,” a disciplined openness that empties the mind of preconception so that the patient’s experience can appear as it is, rather than as the analyst needs it to be (Thompson, 2004). Freud’s phrase “evenly suspended attention” and Bion’s phrase “erasing memory and desire” point in the same direction, not toward blankness, but toward the courage required to listen without forcing the hour into the analyst’s preferred narrative (Freud, 1915/1958; Bion, 1967; Thompson, 2024).

Thompson treats this as a feature of authenticity because it demands that the analyst relinquish the small dishonesties of certainty and mastery. If neutrality is real, it is felt by the patient not as coldness but as the unsettling experience of not being managed, which can provoke rage and longing precisely because it interrupts the patient’s habitual strategies of control.

Notebook and pen symbolizing free association and honesty in psychoanalytic therapy

Abstinence and the courage to disappoint

Abstinence, in Thompson’s rendering, is not a synonym for cruelty, and the confusion between abstinence and aloofness has done immense damage to the public understanding of psychoanalysis. He quotes Freud’s admonition that the analyst should treat transference love “like no other emotional relationship,” while also never returning it, rejecting it, or demanding it, which is a formulation that places abstinence in the service of protecting the analytic space from seduction and retaliation rather than in the service of moral superiority (Freud, 1915/1958; Thompson, 2004).

In Thompson’s chapter on authenticity, this theme converges with Lacan’s stark insistence that the analyst abandon the wish to be helpful when help is asked, give up the fantasy of miracles, and even relinquish the hope of ending treatment with gratitude. Thompson’s summary is brutal and clarifying: “The goal of analysis is to disappoint,” and disappointment is painful, often unappreciated at the time, and yet potentially liberating because it undermines the patient’s investment in rescue fantasies (Thompson, 2024; Schneiderman, 1983). If abstinence is practiced with intelligence rather than sadism, it becomes one way of protecting the patient from the therapist’s wish to be needed, which is one of the most common sources of inauthenticity in clinical work.

Transference and countertransference, and the real relationship

If there is a point in Thompson’s chapter that should unsettle therapists, it is his insistence that the concept of transference can itself become a defense, not for the patient but for the analyst, a way of refusing the impact of proximity by translating whatever is human into something that can be interpreted away.

When “transference” becomes a defense against proximity

Thompson argues that post-Freudian technique, particularly the versions that advertise themselves as “classical,” often redefines the analytic relationship by eliminating the personal or real relationship and expanding technique to cover what Freud treated as personal engagement, a shift that robs the relationship of genuineness in ways patients can feel and often complain about (Thompson, 2024). He is blunt: transference can become “a vehicle of defense against the realness of the person of the patient,” especially when it is convenient for the analyst to remove themselves from the impact of closeness (Thompson, 2024).

This is not an argument against transference interpretation. It is an argument against hiding behind transference interpretation. When every sign of warmth is interpreted as seduction, when every moment of closeness is treated as regression, and when the therapist’s own fear of intimacy is masked as technique, the analytic situation becomes a theater of avoidance that calls itself depth.

The personal relationship, credibility, and the ordinary negotiations of treatment

Thompson does not romanticize the personal relationship, and he is clear that it cannot be codified, since it varies with analysts, with patients, with stages of treatment, and with the moods and limits of both people (Thompson, 2024). Yet he insists that analysts inevitably talk to patients about ordinary matters, whether the analysis is working, whether the couch should be used, disagreements about frequency, absences, fees, and the simple question of what is being asked of each person, and these matters are resolved not by theory but by credibility, by the patient’s sense that the analyst is speaking without guile (Thompson, 2024).

He also makes a claim that many clinicians privately know but publicly avoid: the patient’s love for the analyst, not merely as projection but as something real that emerges through sustained proximity, is often the very condition that makes the trials of analysis endurable, and the field’s reluctance to speak of love is itself a symptom of its discomfort with authenticity in the therapeutic relationship (Thompson, 2024). To acknowledge this is not to abolish boundaries, it is to refuse the lie that the work occurs without human impact.

Conclusion, authenticity requires courage from both people

Thompson’s conclusion is not a celebration of authenticity as an ideal, but an insistence that change is necessarily painful and requires sacrifice, and therefore cannot be demanded from the patient by an analyst who insists on remaining safe behind detachment. If the patient must bear disappointment, fear, and the loss of protective fantasies, then the analyst must also bear sacrifice, not as martyrdom but as participation, since authenticity cannot be “applied” as technique from the comfort of evacuation, but must be suffered repeatedly as an act of courage throughout the treatment (Thompson, 2024).

In that sense, authenticity in psychoanalytic therapy names something like an ethic without moralism: a commitment to a relationship that is continually tempted toward contrivance, and yet capable, under the pressure of the work, of becoming more honest, more real, and therefore more alive.

James Norwood, PsyD
Associate Director, New School for Existential Psychoanalysis
Clinical Director, The Free Association Clinic for Existential Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
Founder/CEO, In Person Therapy

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