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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

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.

Free Association in Psychoanalytic Training: Beyond the Institute Model

Reflection on Chapter 12 of Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity

There is a settled faith that shadows most professional training, even when no one says it outright: if you accumulate the right knowledge, and if the institution that guards the knowledge certifies you, then you become the kind of person who can practice it. Study hard, learn the method, pass the examinations, demonstrate competence, and you will have earned your authority.

In Chapter 12 of Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis, Michael Guy Thompson does not merely dispute this faith, he exposes the kind of human relationship it quietly presupposes, and he asks whether that relationship can possibly yield an analyst. His provocation is not that scholarship is worthless, nor that institutes should be burned down, but that psychoanalytic education cannot be reduced to academic education without losing the very sensibility it claims to transmit. When free association is treated as the founding condition of analysis, Thompson suggests, it becomes difficult to regard it as a technique alone; it begins to look like an ethic of formation, a model of how one learns to listen without coercion (Thompson, 2024, pp. 243–246).

This is not only a question for clinicians, even if it begins there. Patients rarely ask where an analyst trained, but they do encounter, immediately and unmistakably, what the training has made possible in the analyst’s presence: whether the room is a place where speech can unfold, or a place where speech is quietly pressured to conform.

Free Association in Psychoanalytic Training: Why the Question Matters

Technique or formation: what is actually being taught?

The title of Thompson’s chapter presents itself as a technical query, almost bureaucratic in tone, as though the question were simply where to file free association in the educational syllabus. Yet the force of the chapter comes from the fact that Thompson does not accept the premise that analysis is first a body of content to be mastered and only later a relational practice to be performed. Psychoanalysis, in his telling, concerns the conditions under which one human being can meet another without turning the other into an object to be managed. If that is what psychoanalysis is for, then education cannot be a matter of training candidates to reproduce an approved discourse; it has to be a formation of character and sensibility, the slow acquisition of an ability to bear what is uncertain, unflattering, and ethically demanding (Thompson, 2024, pp. 243–244).

So the question “What is being taught?” becomes sharper than it first appears. Are institutes teaching a procedure, a method that can be applied from the outside, or are they cultivating an inward capacity, a kind of disciplined openness, without which method becomes a form of evasion? Thompson’s wager is that free association, properly understood, does not sit comfortably inside the academic model precisely because it is not a content-area. It is a way of being with experience, and it is therefore a way of being with another person.

Notebook representing free association in psychoanalytic training

Thompson’s Critique of the Academic Model

Why book-knowledge cannot substitute for lived authority?

Thompson’s opening declaration is deliberately unsoftened: “The academic model of education is ill-suited to train and educate people to become psychoanalysts” (Thompson, 2024, p. 243). The sentence is blunt enough to provoke defensiveness, and Thompson anticipates that response by insisting he is not speaking as someone unfamiliar with academia. His point is not that universities should have no place in psychoanalytic education, but that academic formation, by its structure, tends to treat knowledge as something possessed, verified, and then licensed.

The most striking feature of his critique is how quickly he locates the psychoanalytic task in the moral texture of ordinary life. He writes that psychoanalysts are “concerned with the way human beings treat each other,” and that they help others come into their own by treating them with “respect, compassion, and honesty” (Thompson, 2024, p. 243). This is not a sentimental aside, it is the ground of his argument, because once psychoanalysis is framed as a matter of how persons treat persons, the fantasy that authority can be granted by institutional proof begins to look naïve in the pejorative sense, a wish for certainty where uncertainty is constitutive.

Academic training, at least in its prevailing form, is built upon a tautology: you learn by reading what others claim to know, and you prove learning by repeating, with increasing sophistication, what has already been said, until the institution determines you may finally practice. Thompson names this directly, noting how psychology programs presume that students can learn to be therapists by studying books and then being evaluated on how well the material has been absorbed before they are permitted to treat (Thompson, 2024, p. 243). The problem, for him, is not the reading. The problem is that the reading is too easily mistaken for the capacity to stand in the analytic situation without substituting knowledge for contact.

Training as confrontation with one’s own suffering

Thompson deepens the critique by moving from epistemology to experience. If analysis is not primarily the application of knowledge, then what grants authority? He gives an answer that is both simple and difficult to tolerate, because it does not flatter any institutional procedure: “We learn about human misery from our own suffering, and we learn to relieve it by coming to terms with the suffering that we have experienced and continue to experience every day of our lives” (Thompson, 2024, p. 244).

This sentence is the hinge of the chapter. It shifts training from an external sequence of requirements to an inward confrontation, and it does so without romanticizing suffering, because the point is not that pain automatically ennobles, but that unworked suffering easily becomes coercion. An analyst who has not begun to come to terms with his or her own misery will be tempted, in the consulting room, to manage the patient’s misery as a way of managing his own, which is to say, to impose an agenda under the guise of care.

Thompson therefore defines psychoanalytic training as the practical task of getting in touch with the roots of one’s suffering and devoting oneself to alleviating it from a psychoanalytic perspective, so that one can eventually accompany another without pretending to stand above the human condition one is addressing (Thompson, 2024, p. 244). In this light, “authority” is not granted by the institution, it is earned in the slow work of being educated by experience, which includes, unavoidably, the experience of one’s own limitation.

Free Association as a Model for Psychoanalytic Education

Self-disclosure, openness, and the refusal of an agenda

Thompson is attentive to the way free association becomes a cliché precisely because it is so familiar. One of the benefits, he says, of attempting to define it is discovering that it resists final definition; it is recognizable, yet elusive, and any concise account tends to falsify it (Thompson, 2024, p. 245). This matters because what cannot be finalized cannot be owned, and what cannot be owned cannot be administered with the same confidence as a curriculum.

In the chapter, Thompson treats free association as inseparable from self-disclosure and openness, not in the confessional sense of saying everything for its own sake, but in the existential sense of speaking from where one actually is, rather than from where one believes one should be. Its most distinctive feature, as he emphasizes, is the absence of an externally imposed agenda: there is no plan the patient is expected to follow, no sanctioned trajectory that would reassure both patient and analyst that the “right” material is being produced (Thompson, 2024, p. 245).

If this is what free association is, then one can see why Thompson is drawn to it as an educational model. An education modeled on free association would not be organized around predetermined outcomes, because predetermined outcomes are precisely the temptation that free association resists. Instead, education would have to cultivate a capacity to remain with what is unexpected and unfinished, and to allow understanding to arise as something earned in relation, not delivered as doctrine.

The cultivation of naiveté

At the center of Thompson’s argument is a line that should not be rushed past, partly because it is easy to sentimentalize and partly because it threatens every credentialist fantasy: “The key to analytic education isn’t the acquisition of knowledge but the cultivation of naïveté” (Thompson, 2024, p. 246).

Naiveté here does not mean ignorance. Thompson defines it as an “open state of mind,” an attitude that is antithetical to skepticism in its cynical form, but aligned with the phenomenological demand that one meet what appears without immediately explaining it away (Thompson, 2024, p. 246). The analyst’s knowledge, however extensive, can become a defense, a way of neutralizing the patient’s otherness by translating it too quickly into categories. In that sense, knowledge can function as a way of not listening, because it tempts the analyst to hear only what fits.

Thompson’s claim is that analytic candidates must be educated into a disciplined openness that is capable of letting experience teach, including the experience that contradicts one’s favorite theories. In my reading, this is not a rejection of theory but an insistence that theory remain answerable to the lived encounter, which is always more singular than the conceptual net we throw over it. A training that loses this capacity may produce therapists who can speak fluently about analysis while quietly fearing the very thing analysis requires: not knowing.

When Institutes Become a “Tight Ship”

Compulsion, obsessionality, and the longing for certainty

Thompson’s critique sharpens when he turns from education in principle to institutes in practice. In his account, many institutes embody a structure that is opposed to the spirit of free association, because the institutional imperative is to control, standardize, and legitimate. He describes the “tight ship” atmosphere, the “air of military precision,” the rigidly defined roles and rules, and he notes the irony that a discipline devoted to ambiguity should so readily construct training environments that defend against ambiguity (Thompson, 2024, p. 247).

He reads this rigidity not merely as a sociological quirk but as a psychological and ethical problem, because it tends to recruit and reward an obsessional sensibility, and that sensibility can be mistaken for seriousness. Thompson observes that analytic candidates are often driven, dedicated, and studious, and that these virtues can slide into humorlessness, ambition, and a defensive posture of control when the institutional environment invites it (Thompson, 2024, p. 247). One can pass such training by becoming increasingly adept at appearing certain, and one can become increasingly frightened of what cannot be made certain.

It is here that Thompson invokes Hans Loewald, who warns that what we call reality can itself become defensive. Loewald writes that reality can take on the quality of “a hostile-defensive integration, akin to the obsessional mechanism” (Loewald, 1980, p. 30, as quoted in Thompson, 2024, p. 247). The implication is unsettling: institutions that claim to teach analysis may end up reproducing, at the collective level, the very psychic defenses that analysis exists to illuminate at the individual level.

Thompson’s point is not that all institutes are uniformly corrupt, nor that discipline and standards have no place. It is that the longing for certainty, when it becomes the organizing principle of education, is not neutral; it shapes the analyst’s temperament, and it shapes the room the analyst later builds with patients. A training that rewards control will not easily cultivate the capacity to bear the patient’s uncontrolled speech.

A Salon Instead of an Institute

Seminar circle symbolizing mentorship-based psychoanalytic education

Equality, conversation, and psychoanalysis as philosophy

Thompson does not end with critique, and his alternative is not a utopian fantasy, but an experiment grounded in a particular historical moment. In 1988, invited by students who wanted training but were dissatisfied with conventional institutes, he and colleagues formed a psychoanalytic salon in San Francisco. They called it Free Association, a name he treats as a double entendre: it aimed to help students learn the free association method, and it understood itself as an association of equals devoted to the free dissemination of ideas (Thompson, 2024, p. 248).

What matters here is the ethos. The group included psychoanalysts, philosophers, historians, and others with backgrounds in phenomenology or psychoanalysis, and Thompson describes them as viewing psychoanalysis as philosophical in the Socratic sense, meaning that psychoanalysis belongs to a tradition in which ethics is conceived as a therapy for suffering, not merely a set of professional rules (Thompson, 2024, p. 248). This is a profound reframing: psychoanalysis is not simply a clinical technology housed in an institution, it is a practice of inquiry into the human condition, and education should resemble inquiry rather than indoctrination.

No curriculum, and the courage to meet the unexpected

The salon model becomes concrete in Thompson’s refusal of curriculum. He states, with an almost mischievous clarity, that their curriculum did not resemble conventional curricula because they did not have one (Thompson, 2024, p. 248). The point was not to be anti-structure for its own sake, but to avoid the subtle coercion of predetermined outcomes, the way a fixed sequence of requirements can quietly teach candidates that the goal of learning is compliance.

Instead, Thompson describes an atmosphere meant to invite students to grapple with what is unexpected, unexplained, and ambiguous, by approximating, as much as possible, the experience of a psychoanalytic session (Thompson, 2024, pp. 248–249). This is where free association becomes educational: education becomes a milieu in which one is asked to tolerate not knowing, and to let thought arise from encounter rather than from the safety of advance conclusions.

Mentorship, Apprenticeship, and the Here-and-Now of Seminars

Provocation over indoctrination

Thompson’s educational model leans toward apprenticeship, not because apprenticeship is simpler, but because it keeps education tethered to the lived authority of persons rather than the impersonal authority of an institution. He describes seminars organized around the instructor’s predilections and current professional concerns, and he portrays the value of such seminars as lying in their capacity to provoke, to generate controversy, and to inspire independent study, rather than to transmit a sanctioned orthodoxy (Thompson, 2024, p. 250).

There is a quiet ethical claim here. Indoctrination offers the comfort of belonging and the relief of borrowed certainty, but it risks producing analysts who cannot think, or worse, who can only think within the approved dialect of their school. Provocation, by contrast, can feel destabilizing, even threatening, but it is closer to what analysis requires, because analysis is not the repetition of doctrine, it is the encounter with what resists doctrine.

History as a living dimension

One of the most intellectually serious dimensions of Thompson’s salon model is his insistence that psychoanalysis be situated in an historical context broad enough to include its prehistory. He describes seminars devoted to phenomenological method, intentionality, intersubjectivity, and self-disclosure, and he traces free association to antecedents in meditation, Christian mysticism, and Montaigne, while linking neutrality to ancient skeptical traditions and abstinence to German Romanticism (Thompson, 2024, p. 250).

This is not antiquarianism. It is an attempt to keep psychoanalysis from collapsing into the cult of the new guru or the latest institutional fashion. History, for Thompson, is not a museum of dead ideas; it is a living dimension that keeps education from becoming captive to a narrow present. When the analyst learns to hear psychoanalysis as part of a longer conversation about suffering and truth, the analyst may become less tempted to treat technique as a proprietary invention that must be defended, and more able to treat it as an ongoing ethical task.

Standards, Authority, and the Ambiguity of “Completion”

Self-selection and the limits of evaluation

The predictable objection to Thompson’s model is the one he himself anticipates: without curriculum, without standardized evaluation, what becomes of standards? Thompson’s reply is not to deny the need for seriousness, but to refuse the fantasy that seriousness can be guaranteed by procedure. He describes the Free Association model as self-selecting in a strong sense: anyone may join seminars, students choose supervisors, and even the practical terms of work, such as whether the patient sits or lies down and how frequently sessions occur, are left to the discretion of the analyst and patient rather than being dictated by institutional templates (Thompson, 2024, p. 250).

He acknowledges that this absence of official criteria can seem alarming, and he turns the alarm back upon the objector by naming what everyone in training already knows but rarely says: standards are often arbitrary, the evaluation process is never neutral, and the question of “completion” is inherently ambiguous, in much the same way that termination in analysis is ambiguous (Thompson, 2024, p. 250). In other words, the demand for certainty in training repeats the demand for certainty in life, and analysis exists partly to expose the impossibility of satisfying that demand without distortion.

The deeper question is what kind of authority we are seeking. If authority means institutional sanction, then Thompson’s model will always look suspect. If authority means the capacity to remain ethically present in the analytic situation, to tolerate uncertainty without collapsing into control, then standards may need to be reconceived as matters of character and judgment that cannot be fully captured by checklists.

Creating Psychoanalysis Anew

Institutions, succession, and why renewal matters

Toward the end of the chapter, Thompson places his argument inside a recurring historical pattern. Freud, Sullivan, and Laing founded their schools by gathering students around themselves, and after their deaths institutes were created in their names, which then grew into institutions (Thompson, 2024, p. 254). Thompson does not treat this as a scandal so much as an almost inevitable drift, the way living traditions harden when they are preserved rather than enacted.

His most radical claim follows from that diagnosis: it may be that the only way to preserve the psychoanalytic instrument is to periodically create it anew, forming new institutes and dismantling old ones, so that successive generations can discover its “uncanny uniqueness” for themselves rather than inheriting it as doctrine (Thompson, 2024, p. 254). Free Association, in his telling, tried to enact this principle by refusing succession, hierarchy, and the competitive promise of spoils, and by aiming to train a group and then disband when the work of that moment was complete (Thompson, 2024, p. 254).

Thompson’s closing caution is sober and recognizably true to clinical life. Psychoanalysis is isolating, alienation is not merely an intellectual theme but an occupational reality, and loneliness can tempt the analyst to compromise what he most values, not out of malice but out of an all-too-human wish to belong (Thompson, 2024, p. 254). Education, then, is not only a matter of learning the instrument. It is also a matter of remaining vigilant about the ways one’s own needs can infiltrate one’s professional life and bend it toward corruption.

Therapy room emphasizing listening and the free association method

Conclusion

What this approach protects in the consulting room

Thompson’s Chapter 12 is, on its surface, about psychoanalytic training, but its true subject is the ethical architecture of the consulting room. If free association is treated as a technical rule, it becomes procedural, and procedure always risks becoming a defense. If free association is treated as an educational model, it becomes formative, shaping the analyst’s capacity to remain open, to resist coercion, and to bear ambiguity without prematurely converting it into certainty (Thompson, 2024, pp. 245–250).

For patients, what is at stake is not a debate about institutes, but the quality of presence they encounter when they speak. A room governed by the analyst’s need to know, to classify, to control, can feel subtly violent even when it is polite. A room governed by an educated naiveté can feel, paradoxically, more serious, because it does not flee from what is difficult by hiding behind explanations.

Connecting Thompson’s chapter to FAC’s clinical orientation

At Free Association Clinic, our work in psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy is grounded in this deeper ethic of listening, where technique is always answerable to encounter. For clinicians drawn to this orientation, you can learn more about our training program, or contact us to begin a conversation.

References

Kirsner, D. (2000). Unfree Associations: Inside Psychoanalytic Institutes. London: Process Press.
Loewald, H. (1980). Papers on Psycho-Analysis. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (1994). The Truth About Freud’s Technique: The Encounter With the Real. New York: New York University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Thompson, M. G., &Thompson, S. (1998). Interview with Dr. Otto Allen Will, Jr. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 34(2).

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.

Unconscious Experience in Psychoanalysis: Being, Meaning, and the Limits of “Knowing”

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

There is a particular kind of sentence that appears in the consulting room, not as a report of something that happened, but as a disclosure that alters what is happening now. The patient hears themselves, perhaps with embarrassment, perhaps with relief, and what comes into the room is not a new fact so much as a new relation to the facts, as if the same life has shifted its lighting, and a meaning that had been operative all along becomes suddenly difficult to deny.
This is one of the ordinary ways psychoanalysis earns the right to speak of “the unconscious,” though what is striking, if we are willing to linger with it, is how quickly the term tempts us into spatial metaphors and mechanical explanations, as if the person before us were divided into regions and agencies whose dealings we can map like a household with locked doors. Thompson’s Chapter 9, pointedly titled “Is the Unconscious Really All that Unconscious?,” begins by pressing on a deceptively simple problem: does it even make sense to speak of “experiencing” the unconscious if the concept refers to what is, by definition, beyond experience, and what could it mean to say someone suffers “unconscious experiences” if they are not aware of the experiences they are presumed to be suffering.

The force of the question is that it unsettles a habitual compromise in analytic speech, the compromise by which we treat experience as something like knowledge, and then treat the unconscious as a kind of unknown knowledge, a content that is hidden but nonetheless already there in the way a thought is there, waiting to be retrieved. Thompson’s dissatisfaction is not merely philosophical, because he explicitly characterizes the psychoanalytic endeavor in experiential terms: analysis aims at “bringing those aspects of consciousness that lie on the periphery of experience to experience,” to the degree that such a movement is feasible in each case.

Once this becomes the guiding thread, the problem of the unconscious cannot be handled as a scavenger hunt for contents. It becomes a question of how something can be effective in a life, shape desire, symptom, and relation, and yet remain un-lived in the fuller sense of being experienced as mine, in time, with the burden of implication that such ownership entails.

Freud’s psychic reality, and why “facts” are not enough

Thompson begins, as he must, with Freud’s first topography, and he emphasizes something that contemporary caricatures of Freud often forget: Freud’s earliest use of the term “unconscious” is inseparable from the problem of fantasy, precisely because fantasies may be conscious or unconscious and yet can be experienced as real, irrespective of whether they are factually true. What follows from this is not an invitation to relativism, as if facts do not matter, but a clinical claim about where meaning lives, because the meanings that govern a symptom are not identical with the historical accuracy of a memory, and analysis cannot be reduced to a forensic reconstruction of events.

Thompson sharpens this by invoking Freud’s distinction between psychical reality and factual reality, and by quoting Freud on guilt: what lies behind the sense of guilt are “psychical realities and never factual ones.” If we allow ourselves to hear what this implies, we can see why existential psychoanalysis is not a rejection of Freud, but a demand that we take Freud at his own most radical word. To speak of psychical reality is to admit that the human being suffers and acts on the basis of meanings that are lived as real, even when they do not correspond to the world’s objective record, and it is to admit that the analytic task cannot be accomplished by correcting the record alone, because the record is not what is suffered.

This is also why Thompson insists that fantasies and symptoms are not merely distortions, but are meaningful communications, and why he describes interpretation, in this early Freudian context, as the attempt to understand fantasies as “disguised messages” whose source is not straightforwardly available to the patient. Yet the moment we grant the symptom the dignity of meaning, the philosophical pressure arrives, not as an academic exercise, but as a clinical unease: if the symptom is meaningful, who, precisely, is doing the meaning, and what does it mean to attribute intention to a person who disclaims it.

To put it in the existential register Thompson keeps returning to, psychoanalysis risks either dissolving the person into mechanisms, which preserves the analyst’s explanatory confidence at the cost of the patient’s subjectivity, or it risks refusing mechanisms and falling into moralism, as if the patient were simply lying. The task becomes to find a language that can account for how a person can be implicated in meanings they do not yet experience as their own, without inventing a second “person” inside them.

unconscious experience in psychoanalysis, emergence into awareness

Primary and secondary processes, and the question of the thinking subject

Freud’s solution to this problem, or at least his most influential attempt, is bound up with the distinction between primary and secondary processes, a distinction that becomes the backbone of a developmental story about how the psyche learns reality by abandoning hallucinated satisfaction. Thompson’s point is not to dismiss this distinction, but to show how Freud’s developmental narrative begins to wobble under its own metaphors, because Freud often writes as if a “psychical apparatus” decides to abandon hallucinatory satisfaction, forms a conception of external circumstances, and endeavors to alter reality, even though the very distinction Freud draws seems to leave no subject capable of making such a decision at that stage.

Thompson highlights the fictional quality of Freud’s picture of infancy, the fantasy of an infant entirely helpless and cut off from reality while the mother alone is in touch with it, and he notes a critique, associated in his discussion with Rycroft, that even very early life already involves a primitive form of communication and adaptation, which means the infant is not a pure wish-machine but participates, however rudimentarily, in a shared world. The significance of this, for Thompson, is not developmental trivia, because once one concedes that a rudimentary relation to reality is present from the start, Freud’s sharp partition between a pleasure-bound primitive system and a reality-bound mature system begins to look less like a natural history and more like a theoretical imposition designed to solve the problem of agency.

At this point Thompson makes what, in an existential frame, becomes the decisive shift: he suggests that the issue is not whether primary processes exist, but how we conceptualize them. He proposes that what Freud calls “primary” can be understood as conscious but pre-reflective, and therefore “not experienced, properly speaking,” whereas secondary processes correspond to reflective awareness, which is what allows a person to take up a meaning as theirs, to recognize themselves in it, and to stand in relation to it.

This is a subtle move that deserves more than a passing paraphrase, because it changes the phenomenology of analytic listening. Instead of imagining the unconscious as a sealed repository of contents, we begin to imagine a dimension of living that is already there in the person’s gestures, choices, evasions, and forms of speech, and yet is not owned as experience because it has not been gathered into reflective time. In that sense, the problem is not that the person does not know what they are doing, as if knowledge were the missing ingredient, but that the person is living a meaning without being able to live it as theirs, which is to say without being able to experience it in a way that makes them answerable to it.

This also begins to clarify why “unconscious experience” may be a misleading phrase. If experience means what is lived as lived, then whatever is pre-reflective is not “unconscious” in the sense of absent, but it is not yet experience in the sense that matters most for analytic transformation, namely the sense in which a life becomes narratable, inhabitable, and ethically binding.

Sartre’s critique of the unconscious, and the paradox of the censor

Thompson’s turn to Sartre is often misunderstood by clinicians as a flirtation with philosophy for its own sake. In fact, Sartre appears because he attacks psychoanalysis at the point where clinicians are most likely to smuggle metaphysics into technique, namely in the presupposed conception of consciousness that makes Freud’s model intelligible. Thompson notes that there is surprisingly little analytic attention paid to the conception of consciousness that Freud’s unconscious presupposes, even though psychoanalytic discourse is saturated with epistemological terms like truth, knowledge, and understanding.

Sartre’s famous objection, as Thompson renders it, centers on the censor in Freud’s topographical model. If the censor regulates what is permitted into consciousness and what is repressed into the unconscious, then the censor must be aware of both sides; yet because the ego is unaware of the censor, the model effectively posits a “second consciousness,” a hidden knower who becomes the de facto subject of analysis while the analysand disclaims knowledge of the whole affair.

The clinical relevance of this objection is not that Sartre “debunks” repression, but that he exposes the danger of turning analysis into a drama of inner bureaucracies, where meanings are processed by quasi-persons who are neither the patient nor the analyst. Thompson’s way of keeping Sartre close is to emphasize Sartre’s distinction between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness. Sartre can say that a feeling is conscious at a pre-reflective level even when the person lacks reflective knowledge of it, and in that sense the feeling can be lived without being grasped as an object of awareness.

This distinction allows Thompson to name what clinicians encounter daily, namely that the patient may be conscious of a wish, a dread, a hatred, or a longing in the sense that it is enacted and effective, while simultaneously resisting the reflective recognition that would make it speakable and ethically charged. Thompson describes Sartre’s point in a formulation that helps keep the discussion from becoming scholastic: it is possible to be conscious of something, and yet not possess knowledge of it, because to know it would be to apprehend it as mine, which is precisely what resistance works to prevent.

At this point one can see why the question of “unconscious experience” is not a mere terminological quibble. The concept becomes a way of speaking about time, about the gap between living and owning, because reflective consciousness is where the person gathers what they do into the form of a self-account, and the refusal of reflective ownership is one of the most basic ways a life becomes split against itself.

Heidegger: why the question becomes ontological

If Sartre keeps us within the architecture of consciousness, Heidegger, as Thompson reads him, relocates the entire problem. Heidegger’s movement from epistemology to ontology leads him to abandon concepts like consciousness and even intentionality, at least in their Husserlian form, in order to focus on our relationship with Being and the way it is disclosed in the immediacy of everyday experience. This is why Thompson can say, in a strictly Heideggerian perspective, that psychoanalysis is already concerned with our manner of Being, because people enter analysis not satisfied with the manner of Being they embody and wanting to change it, and because to determine what our manner of Being is about we have to give ourselves to it through experience.

It is at this juncture that the existential psychoanalytic sensibility comes into focus as something more than a theoretical preference. Thompson argues that psychoanalysis gives us the opportunity to give thought to our experience by taking the time needed to ponder it, and he aligns this with Heidegger’s distinction between two fundamental types of thinking, calculative and meditative, a distinction that avoids both Freud’s and Sartre’s conceptual confusions around conscious and unconscious systems.

The point of this distinction, in Thompson’s hands, is not to romanticize “depth” or to disparage rationality, but to name something clinicians recognize: patients resist thinking about certain topics because they are distressing, and one manner of thinking is inherently comforting while the other is more likely to elicit anxiety or dread. Thompson writes that we tend to avoid thinking the thoughts that make us anxious, and instead abandon ourselves to fantasies that are soporific, and he frames the task of analysis as nudging our thinking into those areas we typically avoid so that we can access a region of existence we are loathe to explore, though it lies at the heart of our humanity.

Here the unconscious is no longer a hidden container. It is the lived structure of avoidance, the way a life organizes itself around what cannot yet be borne. If we still use the word “unconscious,” it begins to mean not an absence of consciousness but an absence of experienced ownership, a refusal to dwell in what is most disclosive and therefore most frightening.

Thompson then makes the Heideggerian move that is perhaps the most clinically fertile, because it gives a language for what interpretation is doing when it is doing more than producing insight. He explains Heidegger’s “ontological difference,” the distinction between beings, understood as entities and objects of scientific investigation, and being, understood as the disclosed significance of entities in time. Beings become being when they are experienced through interpretation, because interpretation is how temporal flux becomes meaningful for a particular person.

Thompson’s clinical translation is explicit: psychoanalysts already “temporalize” the patient’s experience when they interpret its historical antecedents, but the aim is not merely to help the patient “understand” themselves better. The aim is to help them experience who and what they are, essentially, so that the patient’s world comes alive again, and Thompson names this as what Heidegger calls doing “fundamental ontology.”

If we take this seriously, “unconscious experience” can no longer mean an experience that is experienced unconsciously, which is near nonsense, but rather a region of life whose being has not yet been disclosed in time, and whose disclosure requires interpretation not as translation into theory but as the opening of a world.

layers of experience in psychoanalysis

Laing’s language of experience, and what cannot yet be said

Thompson’s inclusion of Laing is not an eccentric historical gesture. Laing appears because he pushes the experiential stance to its ethical edge, and because he exposes how psychoanalytic theory can proliferate abstractions that attribute motives and experiences to patients who disclaim them, while leaving unasked the basic question: what is the person’s experience of themselves, and of the other, in the encounter that is actually happening.

Thompson connects this to Laing’s social phenomenology, but the point that matters most for the present question is how Laing describes conflict. In the language of psychic conflict, Laing agrees with Freud that people who suffer conflicts are essentially of two minds, struggling against the intrusion of a reality too painful to accept on one hand while harboring a fantasy incapable of being realized on the other, and he adds a claim that is both simple and uncompromising: their lives are held in abeyance until they can speak of their experience to someone willing to hear it with benign acceptance, without a vested interest in what that experience ought to be.

This matters because it reframes the unconscious not as a thing, but as a condition of speech and listening, and therefore as an ethical condition of the analytic situation itself. What cannot be said is not merely unknown; it is unlivable under the present conditions, and the analyst’s task is inseparable from the creation of a space in which the person can risk letting what is pre-reflectively lived become reflectively speakable.

Laing’s preference, as Thompson notes, is to avoid terms like consciousness and unconscious and to situate the discussion in the language of experience and the way experience determines perception of world and self. One could read this as an anti-theoretical move, but Thompson’s chapter suggests something more unsettling: perhaps the deepest theoretical fidelity is precisely a fidelity to experience, which forces us to treat theory as a secondary construct rather than the primary reality.

What changes in analysis, if not merely knowledge?

One can now see why Thompson’s chapter ends with an argument that is at once skeptical and oddly hopeful. He states that Freud’s models are “scientific” only to the degree that psychoanalysis is a theoretical science that presumes to explain what is inaccessible to experience, and that, as theoretical constructs, such models cannot be proved or disproved, which helps explain the proliferation of competing psychoanalytic theories.

But the existential pivot is sharper than skepticism about theory, because Thompson then says that from Heidegger’s ontological perspective the unconscious is not a theoretical construct “in” my head, but “out there, in the world, a dimension of being,” apprehended as an enigma that appears and disappears, and accessible to us only through interpretation in the sense of giving things name and significance in the ongoing movement of life.

The consequence is that the unconscious is never simply unconscious for me, but a living presence in my world, and this is why, Thompson concludes, the purpose of analysis is not finally to “know” the unconscious, but to return the patient to the ground of an experience from which they have lost their way, so that the patient can claim it as their own.

If we keep the initial question in view, we can now answer it without the usual evasions. “Unconscious experience” is a phrase that collapses under scrutiny if it is meant to designate an experience that is experienced while remaining unconscious, because experience implies some form of ownership, however faint. Yet the phrase can be rescued, existentially, if it is treated as a pointer toward what is lived without being lived as lived, toward pre-reflective involvement that has not been gathered into reflective time, and toward a dimension of being that remains concealed not because it is locked away somewhere, but because it has not yet become bearable enough to be spoken, remembered, and carried.

For patients, this reframes the unconscious away from the fantasy of an inner monster or a hidden vault of secrets, and toward the more intimate, more unsettling possibility that what is “unconscious” is often what you are already doing and suffering, but cannot yet experience as your own without anxiety. For therapists, it reframes interpretation away from the delivery of explanatory knowledge and toward the temporalization of experience, the slow work by which a world becomes newly disclosed, and by which the patient’s life ceases to be held in abeyance by what cannot yet be said.

At Free Association Clinic, this orientation grounds our understanding of depth work, whether one arrives through existential therapy or through psychoanalytic psychotherapy, because the task is not to impose a theory onto a life but to make room for experience to enter language and time with the seriousness it demands.

existential psychoanalysis and lived experience in the therapy room

Sources

Freud, S. (1953–1973). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (24 vols; J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper & Row.
Laing, R. D. (1965). The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Penguin Books.
Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and Nothingness (H. Barnes, Trans.). Washington Square Press.
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.

Happiness and Chance in Psychoanalysis: What It Means to Transform Hysterical Misery into Common Unhappiness

A reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis (Chapter 8, “Happiness and Chance”)

Many people enter psychoanalytic therapy in a condition that is difficult to dignify with the name “symptom,” even when symptoms are present, because what hurts is not only a panic, a compulsion, an insomnia, or a recurring conflict with others, but a more pervasive sense that one’s life is not inhabitable on its own terms. To speak about this kind of suffering as “unhappiness” can sound mild, almost polite, and yet for the patient it is often anything but mild, because it carries the feeling of being shut out from one’s own existence, as though the world has continued without one’s consent.

Thompson begins Chapter 8 with a folk tale that is deceptively simple: a prince is inconsolably unhappy, the king is helpless, and a cure is proposed that sounds like a child’s magic, obtain the shirt of a happy man. The search succeeds only by failing, because the happy man they find owns no shirt. The point is not merely that wealth and power do not guarantee happiness, although that is part of the sting; it is that happiness resists our attempt to secure it as a possession, to turn it into something we can guarantee, store, and distribute on demand, as though it were a stable commodity rather than an event that visits and withdraws.

That recognition quietly reorganizes the ethics of treatment. If happiness is elusive in principle, then a therapy that sells happiness as an outcome risks becoming the very kind of consolation that psychoanalysis exists to refuse.

Transforming Hysterical Misery into Common Unhappiness

Happiness as an expectation that enters therapy

Thompson is blunt about something clinicians know but do not always name: many patients do not arrive primarily seeking philosophical insight, and they rarely come because they have developed an abstract interest in the unconscious; they come because they are unhappy with their lives, and they hope that treatment will succeed where previous efforts have failed. It is hard to overstate how consequential that expectation becomes once the analytic relationship begins to take shape, because “being helped” quickly shades into “being made happy,” and “being made happy” is rarely a neutral wish.

The expectation of happiness, once it enters therapy, does not remain a private hope that the patient keeps politely tucked away. It becomes relational, which is to say it becomes transference material: the patient begins to imagine, consciously or not, that the analyst will provide what life withheld, repair what history damaged, or grant an exception to the disappointments that have already felt intolerable. In that sense, happiness and chance in psychoanalysis are never merely themes; they are forces that press into the treatment from the first hour, because the patient’s history has already taught them what fate can do, and they want an antidote.

crossroads representing happiness and chance in psychoanalysis

Why Freud’s “promise” is deliberately limited

Freud’s famous line, “transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness,” has the kind of afterlife that makes it seem like a slogan, a bitter quip, or an emblem of analytic pessimism. Thompson points out, however, that Freud buried this statement on the final page of Studies on Hysteria, and that many analysts know the line without being able to say where it appears or what surrounds it. Freud’s remark arrives not as a rhetorical flourish but as an answer to a patient’s objection: if illness is tied to circumstances, and circumstances cannot be altered, what kind of help is psychoanalysis offering at all?

Freud’s reply is sober: perhaps fate could relieve the patient more easily than the analyst can, but “much will be gained” if analytic work succeeds in transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness, because with a mental life “restored to health” one is “better armed” against that unhappiness (Breuer & Freud, 1893–1895/1955). The statement is not a taunt, and it is not a rejection of happiness as such; it is an ethical boundary, a refusal to promise what cannot be promised, and a redefinition of what “help” means when fate remains operative.

Thompson presses the implication: psychoanalysis cannot rewrite circumstance, cannot annul misfortune, cannot ensure that the world will become kind, and cannot guarantee that love will arrive and remain. What it can do, at its best, is alter the person’s relation to reality so that life no longer needs to be managed through a private counterfeit of happiness, which is to say through the neurotic symptom as a substitute for living.

Culture, Suffering, and Freud’s Problem of Unhappiness

Why society becomes the stage of unhappiness

Thompson’s chapter refuses to treat unhappiness as a purely private matter. He reminds us that Freud understood society as a principal source of our unhappiness, and that this conviction organizes Freud’s late work on culture, even down to the controversies around the book’s title. Thompson notes that the English title Civilization and Its Discontents is widely acknowledged to be misleading, and he traces Freud’s original German phrasing through its revisions: Das Unglück in der Kultur evokes “unhappiness in culture,” but more literally Unglück points toward misfortune or bad luck, the language of fate rather than merely the language of dissatisfaction.

This is not pedantry. It reveals something clinically decisive: in Freud’s cultural world, happiness itself is linguistically shadowed by fortune, and unhappiness by misfortune. The question “why am I unhappy?” is therefore never only psychological; it is also historical, linguistic, social, and ethical, because the patient’s suffering is always already entangled with the demands and disappointments of the world into which they were thrown.

To treat unhappiness as a private defect, or as a purely internal malfunction, is to miss the fact that the analytic room is full of society’s imperatives, its ideals, its humiliations, and its promises. Patients do not speak only as individuals; they speak as bearers of a culture’s account of what counts as a life worth living.

Suffering vs unhappiness, and what therapy can actually touch

Thompson follows Freud into an uncomfortable clarity about the sources of suffering. Freud names bodily limits and infirmities, and he names the calamities of the natural world; we can reduce our exposure to certain catastrophes by where we live, but there is no final escape from vulnerability. Thompson hesitates, though, to equate this kind of suffering with unhappiness itself, and he finds Freud inconsistent on that point, sometimes treating suffering and unhappiness as identical, and elsewhere separating them.

The third source is the one that matters most clinically. Freud insists, and Thompson underscores, that the most pervasive suffering in our lives arises from our relationships with other human beings, and that this suffering is “more painful than any other kind” we can endure. This is also, crucially, the only domain in which psychoanalysis can have “the slightest degree of influence,” because it is the only domain in which speech, memory, desire, and truth can reconfigure the person’s lived world.

The relational source of suffering, and the intimacy problem

To say that relationships are the most painful source of suffering is also to say that relationships are where happiness is most tempting, and where the fear of unhappiness most easily becomes a strategy of retreat. Thompson observes that some people avoid the most intimate forms of relation, or try to avoid relationships altogether, in order to protect themselves from rejection, frustration, and disappointment, yet this strategy fails in a predictable way, because without others we are pressed into isolation, alienation, and loneliness, and the burden of that isolation becomes another form of unhappiness.

Here the link between risk and intimacy in therapy becomes visible. Relationships are the field in which we suffer most, and also the field in which happiness is most possible, which means that any attempt to eliminate risk in the name of safety risks eliminating the very possibility of the kind of happiness the patient imagines they are seeking. Psychoanalytic therapy cannot abolish that paradox, but it can make it thinkable and livable, which is no small thing.

Neurotic Misery and the “Third Choice”

“Fight for what you want, or go without,” and why that feels unbearable

Thompson’s most clinically forceful move in this chapter is to take Freud’s view of mental health and state it without softening. Freud confronts the patient with a choice: either do something about the condition you are in, or accept it. The hallmark of mental health, in this view, is not comfort but the capacity to choose, and then to resign oneself to the consequences of that choice, even when the outcome increases suffering.

Freud makes this particularly explicit in “Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytical Therapy,” where he describes patients who have “taken flight into neurosis” to avoid conflicts they found too difficult to solve, and he asks what happens when that flight is barred by analysis. His answer is unforgiving and, for many patients, terrifying in its simplicity: they must face the conflict, “fight for what they want, or go without it” (Freud, 1910/1957). There is nothing here about guaranteed happiness, and there is no reassurance that the fight will succeed, because Freud is speaking about a stance toward reality, not a promised result.

Fantasy, bitterness, and the symptom as a compromise

What makes Freud’s view clinically sharp is his claim that many patients cannot accept this fork. Thompson describes what follows: the patient devises a “third,” inherently magical alternative, pining away in fantasy or bitterness, waiting for the day when fate, in the form of good fortune, will reward the refusal to face disappointment. This third choice is the symptom, the compromise formation, ingenious in its construction, and ruinous in its cost.

The symptom offers a respite from unhappiness, not by producing happiness, but by producing the anticipation of happiness, that hovering promise that one’s life will begin later, when conditions are finally right, when fate finally relents. That is why neurotic misery and common unhappiness are not the same.

Common unhappiness belongs to circumstances beyond our control, to the misfortunes of existence. Neurotic misery is self-imposed conflict, even when the inspiration for that conflict comes from relationships and conditions that the person could not control in the first place.

To say this is not to moralize. It is to name the tragedy Freud is naming: the symptom tries to outwit fate by refusing choice, and in doing so it produces an internal fate more punishing than the external one.

What acceptance looks like clinically (without romanticizing it)

Thompson refuses to romanticize acceptance, and this matters for both patients and therapists, because “acceptance” is often used as a slogan that implies resignation, compliance, or a thin optimism that bypasses pain. In Thompson’s reading, acceptance is an achievement that becomes possible only after the person relinquishes the third choice scenario. At that point, the patient may begin to discern the difference between ordinary frustration, what Freud calls common unhappiness, and the “legacies of unreality and alienation” that belong to psychopathological suffering.

That discernment matters because it reshapes guilt. Thompson argues that pathological suffering is compounded by the guilt we derive, unconsciously, from being the instrument of our own suffering, and by the anxiety that our secret will be discovered. Even when patients do not leave therapy feeling that all aspirations have been met, they may leave with a measure of serenity, and a clearer understanding of the role they play in their misfortunes, which is to say they may arrive at acceptance. The gain is not that life becomes fair. The gain is that the patient is no longer compelled to live as though fate can be defeated by fantasy.

chance and uncertainty as themes in existential psychoanalysis

Alternative Conceptions of Happiness

Eudaimonia as flourishing, conscience, and community

Thompson turns to the Greeks not to decorate psychoanalysis with classical references, but to widen what “happiness” can mean. The word eudaimonia is often translated as happiness, but Thompson emphasizes Aristotle’s distinctive clarity: eudaimonia is more like flourishing, making a life a success, and it is never reducible to a mood. Aristotle’s view, as Thompson presents it, is not naive, because Aristotle qualifies the pursuit of success by acknowledging the inevitability of guilt and suffering when success is pursued by any means, and he places conscience and respect for others alongside effort as conditions of flourishing.

This matters clinically because it reframes happiness less as a feeling to be acquired and more as a way of existing over time, a life that is always unfolding and therefore always vulnerable to ruin. Thompson notes that this Aristotelian tension between desire and conscience impressed Freud, informing Freud’s own mapping of id and superego, and the ego’s attempt to orchestrate a livable outcome. In that sense, Freud’s pessimism is not merely bleakness; it is an insistence that happiness is never separable from ethical conflict, from responsibility, and from the failures that responsibility inevitably entails.

Ataraxia as equanimity, and philosophy as therapy of the soul

After Aristotle, Thompson moves into the Hellenistic tradition, where philosophy becomes explicitly therapeutic. The Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics treat philosophy not primarily as a body of knowledge but as a practice meant to heal the soul, which is to say to cultivate a way of living that can endure frustration without collapse. It is here that ataraxia, often translated as serenity or equanimity, becomes central.

Thompson stresses that ataraxia does not aim to eradicate suffering. It aims to remain unbothered by it, in the sense of not being thrown into fear or bitterness when life goes wrong. The emblematic image is Socrates facing death without panic, not because death is desirable, but because a life trained in equanimity can meet even the most severe misfortune without cursing existence itself.

Thompson also notes that Freud doubted anyone could sustain such serenity permanently, though momentary periods might be possible. The point, then, is not a fantasy of invulnerability. The point is orientation: what sort of stance toward existence can be cultivated such that happiness is not wholly captive to fortune, and unhappiness is not met with vindictiveness or denial.

Chance, Risk, and the Analytic Relationship

Why “happy” is a word about chance

Thompson’s linguistic aside about German terms becomes crucial here. If Unglück names misfortune and Glück names fortune or good luck, then happiness is already, at the level of language, haunted by chance. Freud’s cultural seriousness, his fascination with history, and his awareness of how cultures name misfortune all converge on a single analytic realism: fate plays a decisive role in happiness and unhappiness alike.

The question, then, is not whether therapy can abolish chance. It cannot. The question is whether a person can relate to chance differently, such that misfortune does not automatically compel the construction of neurotic misery, and such that happiness, when it arrives, is not treated as something owed, guaranteed, or permanent.

Transference, love, and the analyst’s refusal to promise happiness

This is where transference and happiness become inseparable. Thompson argues that Freud rejected happiness as a goal of analysis partly because patients use the search for happiness as resistance, staging fantasies about what the analyst will do, or should do, to make them happy. Freud regards this as a desire for the analyst’s love, the easy route to momentary happiness, and therefore a route that cannot endure because it bypasses the patient’s own life.

If abstinence means anything in this context, it means that the analyst must not deliver that fantasy, even when the longing is genuine and the suffering acute. Thompson’s language is firm: the analyst is obliged to thwart these longings rather than help them come true, and it is through disillusionment that analysis can transform the neurotic from a hopeless dreamer into someone willing to accept life’s conditions, fighting for what they want or going without.

To call this “disillusionment” is not to call it cruelty. It is to describe an ethic of honesty in the analytic relationship: the analyst refuses to become an instrument of the patient’s magical third choice, and in refusing, the analyst also refuses the narcissistic gratification of being the one who finally “saves” the patient. The dignity offered is harsher, and therefore deeper: the patient is treated as someone capable of living in reality, not as someone who must be protected from it by a cultivated illusion.

Equanimity as an analytic attitude (free association, neutrality)

Thompson draws a line from the Sceptics’ method to Freud’s technical principles. The Sceptics cultivate equanimity through suspending judgment and expectation, and Thompson argues that this method shaped Freud’s core analytic attitudes: free association for the patient, neutrality for the analyst. In both, the discipline is the refusal to force experience into the shape we wish it to have, and the willingness to tolerate ambiguity long enough for something truer to emerge.

For clinicians in training, this offers a way to understand neutrality that is not reducible to aloofness. Neutrality becomes a kind of equanimity, a capacity to remain steady enough that the patient’s longing, anger, disappointment, and hope can appear without being prematurely soothed, corrected, or converted into reassurance. For patients, the implication is equally demanding, and perhaps equally relieving: psychoanalysis is not a transaction in which one purchases happiness; it is a relationship in which one learns, over time, how one’s own attempts to avoid misfortune have produced a private misery more punishing than misfortune itself.

udaimonia and ataraxia as philosophical roots of therapy and happiness

Conclusion

To “transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness” is not a bleak slogan. It is Freud’s refusal to sell salvation, paired with a more radical confidence in what a person can bear when their mental life is restored to greater honesty, and when the symptom no longer has to serve as a shelter from disappointment.

Thompson’s Chapter 8 reframes the analytic project as a confrontation with chance rather than an escape from it. Fate remains fate, and misfortune remains possible, but the analytic relationship can become a place where the person’s relation to misfortune changes, where the third choice scenario loosens its hold, and where equanimity becomes thinkable, not as a permanent serenity, but as a stance that permits living without guarantees.

In this way, existential psychoanalysis and suffering meet at a point that is both clinical and philosophical: happiness cannot be promised, yet a life can become more truthful, and that truth, while it does not abolish unhappiness, can make common unhappiness less humiliating, less mystified, and less isolating.

References

Aristotle. (2000). Nicomachean Ethics (R. Crisp, Trans.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Breuer, J. and Freud, S. (1893–1895/1955). Studies on hysteria. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 2, pp. 1–305). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1910/1957). Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytical Therapy. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 11, pp. 139–151). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1930/1961). Civilization and Its Discontents. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 21, pp. 59–145). London: Hogarth Press.
Irwin, T. (Ed.). (1999). Classical Philosophy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Nussbaum, M. (1994). The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sextus Empiricus. (2000). Outlines of Scepticism (J. Annas and J. Barnes, Trans.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (2016). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis. Routledge.

Psychoanalysis as an Ethic of Experience: The Sceptic Dimension to Psychoanalysis

Reflections on Michael Guy Thompson’s “The Sceptic Dimension to Psychoanalysis,” in Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis

Many people enter therapy with a hope so quiet it can be mistaken for common sense: that somewhere behind the confusion there is a final account, a settled explanation, a true story that will not change tomorrow, and that the right clinician, armed with the right theory, will be able to pronounce it. Therapists, too, can be tempted by their own version of this hope, which appears as a hunger for the correct technique, the clean formulation, the conceptual mastery that would protect them from being surprised by what a patient says and from being shaken by what the encounter evokes in them.

In Chapter 7 of Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis, Michael Guy Thompson disrupts this mutual fantasy without ridiculing it, and he does so by shifting the ground beneath the clinical conversation. Psychoanalysis, he argues, is best understood as an ethic of experience, not as a technology for manufacturing certainty, and the stance that makes analysis possible is, in a deep sense, sceptical, not in the modern sense of reflexive disbelief, but in the older sense of disciplined inquiry that refuses premature closure (Thompson, 2024).

This sceptic dimension matters in the analytic situation because psychological suffering is often organized around a particular kind of desperation, the desperation to stop experience from moving, to arrest it in a diagnosis, a moral verdict, a story of causality, or a metaphysical explanation that promises relief by promising control. Thompson’s wager is that psychoanalysis does not truly meet this desperation by satisfying it, because satisfaction would simply reinstall the very defence that suffering depends upon; it meets it by creating the conditions under which experience can be endured, thought, and eventually spoken more honestly.

Why Thompson begins with ethics, not technique

Thompson begins his chapter with a claim that can sound oddly anachronistic in a clinical culture that prefers methods, protocols, and outcome measures: psychoanalysis is an ethic, a “moral art” concerned with how one lives, how one bears oneself in the midst of conflict, disappointment, and desire (Thompson, 2024, pp. 117–118). In this framing, ethics is not synonymous with morality. Morality, he notes, pertains to distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad, while ethics, in the Greek sense, concerns the pursuit of a form of happiness whose mark is equanimity, a freedom from mental anguish that does not depend upon eradicating life’s difficulties (Thompson, 2024, pp. 117–118).

Once psychoanalysis is understood this way, the usual clinical questions begin to change their meaning. Symptoms are no longer treated as isolated malfunctions to be corrected by explanation, as though explanation were always the same thing as truth. Symptoms become intelligible as compromises within a life, as strategies of endurance that have become costly, and the analytic task becomes inseparable from an inquiry into the patient’s ethos, the customs of a life, the characteristic ways of thinking and avoiding and relating that both protect and imprison (Thompson, 2024, pp. 117–118).

This is also why Thompson can insist, without romance and without cynicism, that psychoanalysis revolves around work that “succeeds or fails,” because the question is not whether the clinician has produced a brilliant interpretation, but whether the encounter has fostered a transformation in the patient’s relation to experience itself, including the parts of experience that cannot be mastered, cured, or made to disappear (Thompson, 2024).

working through in existential psychoanalysis as a gradual process over time

Scepticism in psychoanalysis as inquiry, not cynicism

In contemporary speech, “skepticism” often implies dismissal, a posture that prides itself on not being taken in, and that treats belief as stupidity. Thompson’s usage is almost the opposite. The sceptic stance he retrieves is not a performance of superiority, but a discipline of open-ended inquiry, an insistence that experience is not to be replaced by a conclusion simply because a conclusion is soothing (Thompson, 2024).

He marks an important historical distinction that is also clinically clarifying. There were sceptics he calls the Academics, preoccupied with epistemological refutation, devoted to proving that certainty is impossible, and thus capable of producing an impressive, sterile negativity that ends in a cul de sac; and there were the Pyrrhonian sceptics, whom he calls the Therapists, who rejected epistemological questions “in principle” and devoted themselves to developing an ethic, a therapeutic method, oriented toward happiness understood as ataraxia, equanimity, freedom from psychic conflict (Thompson, 2024, p. 121; Annas & Barnes, 1994). Where academic knowledge privileges abstraction, these sceptic “therapists” emphasized the here-and-now of immediate experience, and in that emphasis Thompson hears an ancestor of analytic work, not because psychoanalysis repeats antiquity, but because it inherits a practical problem that never disappears: how to live when certainty cannot do the work we demand of it (Thompson, 2024, p. 121; Groarke, 1990).

Burnyeat’s famous question, “Can the sceptic live his scepticism?”, is not merely an academic puzzle from the history of philosophy, because it describes, in another register, the clinical problem of whether one can inhabit a stance of suspended certainty without collapsing into paralysis, despair, or fanaticism (Burnyeat, 1997). Psychoanalysis, at its best, does not answer that question with an argument. It answers by staging a relationship in which the refusal of premature certainty becomes tolerable, and in which the costs of certainty can become visible.

Epoché in therapy, the suspension of judgment as a clinical attitude

The centre of Thompson’s chapter is epoché, the suspension of judgment. The term can easily be misunderstood as a recommendation to become vague, or to “hold space” by refusing thought, or to adopt indifference in the name of neutrality. Thompson means something more exacting and more demanding. Epoché is the capacity to attend to experience as it unfolds, “from one unpredictable moment to the next,” while bracketing the reflex to explain, justify, moralize, or reduce what is happening to an already familiar schema (Thompson, 2024, pp. 121–122).

This suspension is not passive. It requires abandoning theoretical, conceptual, or causal considerations as a first move, not because such considerations are always false, but because they are too often seized as an escape from the shock of experience. It is, in Thompson’s language, an “emptied” mind, a negative capability, a willingness to be with the not-yet-known without forcing it to become knowable on command (Thompson, 2024, p. 122).

Patients tend to recognize, often with ambivalence, why this matters. The rush to certainty, whether it takes the form of self-diagnosis, moral condemnation, or a fixed narrative about one’s history, can function as a way of not having to feel what is being felt, and of not having to admit what is being avoided. The analytic encounter becomes ethically distinctive when it refuses to collaborate with this rush, not by withholding interest, but by insisting that experience be allowed to appear before it is disciplined into a conclusion.

For therapists, epoché is equally unsettling because it deprives the clinician of the fantasy that competence is equivalent to immediate knowing. In this sense, epoché is not simply a technique, it is a posture of humility, a constraint placed on the clinician’s wish to be right, and a safeguard against using theory as a shield. Wachterhauser’s collection on phenomenology and scepticism can be read as a reminder that this problem is perennial: how to keep inquiry open without dissolving into incoherence, and how to hold openness without turning it into dogma (Wachterhauser, 1996).

Neutrality as a sensibility, not a rule, and why that distinction matters

Thompson’s argument becomes clinically concrete when he turns to analytic technique and insists that what is usually taught as “neutrality” is better understood as a cultivated sensibility, an ethos, rather than a rigid method (Thompson, 2024). He is explicit that scepticism and neutrality are not rules to be obeyed mechanically, and that the language of rule-following can itself become antithetical to the analytic attitude, because rules invite a defensive performance rather than a receptive attention (Thompson, 2024).

When Thompson traces neutrality back to Freud, he emphasizes that Freud’s recommendation is not a performance of detachment for its own sake, but an attempt to protect the work from the analyst’s presuppositions. The stance entails making no assumptions, abandoning pretensions to knowledge, letting the patient’s experience determine the course of the work with minimal interference, and cultivating an “evenly-suspended” attention that does not seize selectively upon what confirms the analyst’s expectations (Freud, 1912/1958; Thompson, 2024).

Freud’s language is unambiguous about the discipline involved:

“Thus we are warned against introducing our own expectations into the material. We must allow ourselves to be taken by surprise and always meet the patient with an open mind, free from any presuppositions.”
(Freud, 1912/1958)

If neutrality is misunderstood as coldness, it is often because both patient and therapist feel, in different ways, the anxiety that openness evokes, and they seek protection by turning the encounter into something predictable. Yet neutrality, understood sceptically, is not the refusal of relationship. It is the refusal to coerce the other into one’s own conceptual comfort. It is an ethical gesture toward the patient’s experience, including the aspects of experience that are inconvenient to the clinician’s preferred theory.

psychoanalytic working through resistance in the therapy room “free association and resistance in existential psychoanalysis

Montaigne, Freud, and the ethic implicit in free association

Thompson’s chapter becomes historically vivid when he suggests that the sceptic attitude “insinuated itself” into Freud’s conception of technique, even as Freud sought to secure psychoanalysis within a scientific idiom, and he locates this sceptic inheritance especially in free association and the sensibility of neutrality (Thompson, 2024, p. 128). He is careful about the limits of historical certainty, yet he notes that Freud became acquainted with Montaigne “around the time” Freud’s technique took what Thompson calls “a more sceptical turn,” roughly between 1912 and 1915, and he reads Montaigne’s counsel as an anticipatory version of the analytic attitude (Thompson, 2024, pp. 128–129).

Montaigne’s formulation is worth quoting because it clarifies the ethical seriousness behind what can otherwise sound like a mere method:

“It is an act of love to undertake to wound and offend in order to benefit.”
(Montaigne, 1925, Vol. 4, p. 307)

In a therapeutic culture that often confuses kindness with reassurance, Montaigne’s sentence can feel severe, and it should, because it names a difficulty that patients know intimately: honesty hurts, not because truth is inherently cruel, but because our attachments to belief, to self-image, to fantasy, and to the protection those provide are passionate, tenacious, and often desperate. Thompson pushes the point further by suggesting that the intensity with which we defend our “sacred assumptions” is not merely an intellectual habit, but a root of psychopathology, because such defences organize avoidance and distort relationship (Thompson, 2024, p. 129).

When this is brought into the analytic room, free association ceases to look like a clever technique and begins to appear as an ethical demand placed on speech. It asks the patient to risk saying what is inconvenient, shameful, contradictory, or seemingly senseless, while the analyst risks not knowing in advance where the speech will go or what it will demand from them in return. In that reciprocity, the fundamental question is not whether the right interpretation will be delivered, but whether experience will be allowed to speak without being prematurely silenced by certainty.

When theory becomes an escape from experience

Thompson is not anti-theoretical, and the chapter does not lapse into the familiar anti-intellectual gesture that pretends experience is self-interpreting. His scepticism is aimed elsewhere. It is aimed at the way theory can become a refuge, a way of avoiding the encounter with what is actually happening between two people by replacing it with the comfort of conceptual recognition. The sceptics, he reminds us, rejected rote learning and emphasized immediate experience, and Thompson reads this as a clinical warning: the mastery of theory does not by itself produce the capacity to listen, because listening is not the passive reception of content but an exposure to what is unpredictable, disturbing, and morally consequential (Thompson, 2024, p. 121).

For therapists, this warning cuts against a common training fantasy: that competence is achieved by accumulating knowledge until one is immune to uncertainty. In reality, the analyst’s wish to know can become as defensive as the patient’s wish to know, and the analytic situation becomes distorted when theory is used to stop inquiry rather than to deepen it. At that point, schools of thought can function as shelters from experience, offering certainty as an identity, and certainty as an identity is always tempted by dogmatism.

For patients, the same point is often lived from the inside as a feeling of being reduced. When the clinician rushes to diagnosis or explanation, the patient may feel temporarily understood, but they may also feel quietly erased, as though their living experience has been translated into a concept that is easier for the clinician to handle than the person themselves. Thompson’s sceptic ethic would regard that translation as a danger, because it replaces the person with a theory of the person.

Equanimity, suffering, and the limits of cure

Thompson closes his chapter by returning to the ethical horizon that began it. If psychoanalysis is oriented toward equanimity, then its aim is not the eradication of suffering but a changed relation to suffering, a stance that can remain “unbothered” by suffering in the sense of accepting it as a condition of life rather than as evidence that life is an error (Thompson, 2024, p. 139). He writes, with a directness that is existential rather than consoling, that the truly happy individual is one who can cope with life’s problems without avoiding them, who can “endure the anguish of living without cursing it” (Thompson, 2024, p. 139).

This is where the sceptic lineage becomes something more than historical color. Sextus Empiricus, the physician of scepticism, suggests that if one can remove the intensity of one’s beliefs, one can endure “moderate suffering” (Sextus Empiricus, 1949). This is not a promise of cure, and it is not a minimization of pain. It is a description of how belief, especially dogmatic belief about what must be true, can amplify anguish by turning suffering into a verdict on existence itself.

Freud’s remark about transforming “hysterical misery into common unhappiness” is often repeated as a sign of pessimism, but it can also be heard as a sober ethical claim about the limits of psychotherapy, and about the possibility that a less defended life may suffer more honestly and therefore with less self-imposed cruelty (Freud & Breuer, 1893–1895/1955). Thompson’s sceptic ethic does not celebrate suffering, but it refuses the fantasy that suffering can be abolished without remainder, and it treats the desire for abolition as one more place where the human being tries to escape experience rather than to live it.

Conclusion

Thompson’s “sceptic dimension” is not a call to doubt everything, and it is not an invitation to cultivate vagueness; it is a disciplined refusal to replace experience with certainty, especially when certainty functions as a defence against the discomfort of living and the vulnerability of relationship.

Psychoanalysis, on this view, is ethical not because it preaches morality, but because it concerns the manner by which a person conducts themselves in the face of conflict and disappointment, and because it asks both patient and therapist to endure what is revealed when judgment is suspended long enough for experience to speak (Thompson, 2024).

At Free Association Clinic, this sensibility informs our understanding of psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy as forms of depth work that take experience seriously and resist the urge to substitute slogans for inquiry. For clinicians, our training program in existential psychoanalysis is oriented toward precisely this capacity, the capacity to listen without coercing, to think without retreating into dogma, and to remain receptive in the face of uncertainty. If you want to explore this work as a client or clinician, you can contact us.

References

Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis. Routledge.
Annas, J., & Barnes, J. (1994). Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of Scepticism. Cambridge University Press.
Burnyeat, M. (1997). Can the sceptic live his scepticism? In M. Burnyeat & M. Frede (Eds.), The Original Sceptics: A Controversy. Hackett Publishing.
Freud, S. (1912/1958). Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psychoanalysis. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S., & Breuer, J. (1893-1895/1955). Studies on Hysteria. In Standard Edition (Vol. 2). Hogarth Press.
Groarke, L. (1990). Greek Scepticism: Anti-Realist Trends in Ancient Thought. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Montaigne, M. (1925). The Essays of Montaigne (G. B. Ives, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Sextus Empiricus. (1949). Adversus Mathematicus (R. G. Bury, Trans.). Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann.
Wachterhauser, B. (1996). Phenomenology and Scepticism: Essays in Honor of James M. Edie. Northwestern University Press.

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.

Will and Desire in Existential Psychoanalysis: Rethinking Willpower in Therapy

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

Most of us have tried to change something about ourselves through sheer effort. We make a plan, set a rule, tighten our grip, and then watch ourselves do the very thing we swore we would not do.

It is easy to call this “a lack of willpower.” It is also easy to feel ashamed when willpower does not deliver.

In Chapter 4 of Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis, the question becomes more interesting, and more clinically useful. When we look closely at will and desire in existential psychoanalysis, “the will” is not simply the engine of change. Often it is the strategy we use to keep desire contained, especially when desire feels risky

The familiar proverb, and the hidden question behind it

“Where there is a will there is a way” sounds comforting. It suggests that a strong enough inner force can override fear, conflict, and ambivalence.

Thompson opens the chapter by quietly challenging that assumption. The proverb is not exactly wrong, but it hides a deeper question: what do we mean when we say “will” in the first place?

Because in actual human life, will is rarely just a clean, rational lever. It carries mood, morality, and history. It can sound like duty. It can sound like threat. It can also sound like a parent’s voice that we have learned to speak to ourselves with.

For people seeking therapy, this matters. Many forms of suffering come with an exhausting internal dialogue: I should be different. I need to be better. I have to get control.

Will as virtue, will as “free choice,” and why this history still matters

Part of Thompson’s point is that our modern idea of will did not appear out of nowhere. The “will” has a long philosophical lineage, and it often arrives dressed in moral language.

In very broad strokes, classical ethics tends to link the will to character formation and self-mastery. Religious philosophy tends to link the will to responsibility, temptation, and virtue. Even if we have never read Aristotle or Augustine, many of us have inherited a worldview where willpower is treated as proof of goodness, and failure of will is treated as a personal flaw.

In therapy, those inherited meanings show up as guilt and self-judgment. People do not simply want to change. They often feel they must change in order to deserve care, belonging, or respect.

Existential psychoanalysis does not dismiss responsibility. But it is suspicious of the way “responsibility” becomes a weapon turned inward.

will and desire in existential psychoanalysis, choice and risk

Schopenhauer, and the will we cannot simply command

Thompson turns to Schopenhauer for a remark that lands with a kind of cold clarity: “You can do as you will, but you cannot will as you will.”

It is a short sentence, but it reorganizes the problem. We may be able to force certain behaviors, at least for a while. But we cannot simply choose what we want, or stop wanting what we want, by issuing ourselves a command.

Schopenhauer’s view pushes the will down below the level of conscious intention. The will becomes something more like an underlying drive, closer to desire than to “decision.” If that is true, then “willpower” is not the same as the will. It is more like an executive function, a manager that tries to direct what is already moving.

Clinically, this is one reason a person can “know better” and still repeat the pattern. The knowledge is real. The intention is real. But desire is also real, and it often carries more force than our conscious plans.

Nietzsche and the hunger for a fuller life

Thompson also brings in Nietzsche, especially the riddle of “will to power.” In pop culture, this phrase can sound like domination. But Nietzsche’s point is often closer to vitality than tyranny.

If Schopenhauer emphasizes the way desire operates beneath the self’s proud claims, Nietzsche emphasizes the way desire moves toward intensity, toward aliveness, toward a more fully lived existence.

In therapy, this can be a helpful reframe. Sometimes the “problem behavior” is not merely a failure of control. Sometimes it is a distorted attempt to recover feeling, to break through numbness, to escape the flatness of life lived only through duty.

That does not make every desire wise. But it does remind us that desire is often the place where the person is trying to live.

Why “trying harder” can work, and why it often does not

Modern psychotherapy has many approaches that treat change as a function of volition. In the best versions, this is not simplistic. It can be deeply compassionate. It helps people identify patterns, practice skills, and build stability.

It can also work, especially when someone needs structure, containment, or immediate relief.

Thompson’s critique is not that volition is useless. It is that volition becomes misleading when it is treated as the core of psychic change. A willpower model tends to imagine the self as a commander standing above desire.

Existential psychoanalysis leans in a different direction. It asks: what if the “commander” is itself part of the conflict? What if the manager is not neutral, but frightened? What if “control” is sometimes the price we pay to avoid risk?

This is one reason desire and change are so closely linked. Desire almost always implies exposure. It implies the possibility of disappointment. It implies that we cannot fully guarantee the outcome.

willpower vs desire in therapy, finding direction

Laing, Sartre, and the problem of changing because you “should”

Thompson draws on R.D. Laing to make a sharp clinical observation: people often attempt change because they “should,” or because they “need to,” but change becomes durable when they genuinely want it.

Laing’s view, as Thompson presents it, is that our selfhood is located in desire rather than in ego or character traits. In that frame, the will has a limited role, it can synthesize, and it can repress.

This matters in the clinic because “the will” is frequently recruited as a defense.

A clear example in the chapter is addiction, but the point extends beyond substances. Many people try to force themselves out of a pattern using an internal voice of obligation, a kind of “introjected parent” that demands compliance. The person fights their desire while also protecting it. They go back and forth, and the struggle becomes a way of life.

Thompson’s deeper point is not moral judgment. It is existential. When we are terrified of the pain that desire brings, we will do almost anything to silence it.

When the will suppresses the pain of desire

Near the end of the chapter, Thompson offers a line that is easy to recognize if you have ever been stuck in a high-functioning version of suffering.

Sometimes the will is what remains when desire has gone quiet. A person can keep going, keep performing, keep achieving, all while feeling that something essential has been buried.

In that condition, willpower can look impressive from the outside. It can lead to success. It can also produce a life that feels strangely empty.

Thompson notes another uncomfortable truth: you do not always need a substance to reduce anxiety. The will can do it. You can tighten down, numb out, and survive. The cost is that desire, which often requires risk, gets treated as dangerous.

When will and desire are at cross purposes, will often wins, at least in the short run. But the victory is rarely satisfying.

And there is a further twist: the will frequently resists change. If the will has become the tool we use to stay safe, it is not eager to surrender its job.

existential psychoanalysis and the role of desire in change

Conclusion

One of Thompson’s most clinically useful suggestions in Chapter 4 is that meaningful change often arrives indirectly. Genuine change comes when we want to change, not because we should, and not because we are trying to force ourselves into compliance.

The function of therapy, in this view, is not to shout louder instructions at the self. It is to use reflection, a form of will, to examine why we repeatedly obstruct our own desire, and to put those defenses into question. We cannot simply will ourselves to drop our defenses, but sustained inquiry can loosen what once seemed rigid.

If you find yourself stuck between duty and desire, or caught in cycles of self-control followed by collapse, this is the kind of work we explore in depth at Free Association Clinic through both psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy. Clinicians in training who want to engage these questions clinically can also learn more about our training program. To begin a conversation, 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)
Aristotle. (1915). The Works of Aristotle, Vol. IX: Ethica Nicomachea (W. D. Ross, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Augustine. (2010). Augustine: On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). Cambridge University Press.
Laing, R. D. (1979). Personal communication.
Nietzsche, F. (2001). Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (J. Norman, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
Schopenhauer, A. (2012). The World as Will and Representation (E. F. J. Payne, Trans.). Dover Publications.
Thompson, M. G. (1994). The Truth About Freud’s Technique: The Encounter With the Real. New York University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (2020). Existential psychoanalysis: The role of freedom in the clinical encounter. In A. Govrin & J. Mills (Eds.), Innovations in Psychoanalysis: Originality, Development, Progress. Routledge.
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.

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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