Tag: relational psychoanalysis

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

Source

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