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never invented analysis as a treatment for character. In fact, startlingly, he
failed to observe the character pathology in his early patients. He describes it
in detail and then says it isn't there, then rediscovers it as resistance. The
patients Freud treated in the first twenty years of analysis, with the goals he
had at that time, would not be seen as candidates for analysis today.
Marion Oliner:
I wanted to add something to the question of whether psy–
choanalysis has moved. I think you are speaking about American
psychoanalysis. I'm preparing a response to Janine Chassequet-Smirgel from
France who called me and wanted to find out what was going on in
American psychoanalysis. She believes that Americans have made radical
compromises, especially in the last few years, and she is highly critical of that.
I think you have described American psychoanalysis, not necessarily the way
psychoanalysis relates to other cultures.
Robert Michels:
I agree. I would say that in selecting Janine Chassequet–
Smirgel you pointed out that I described much of the world of analysis, but
not France. Certainly, I have been talking about America, and my guess is
that British, most German and much of Scandinavian psychoanalysis would
be much closer to America than to France in the terms we were talking
about. French psychoanalysis evolved along somewhat divergent paths. And
I am not the right person to be talking to you about French psychoanalysis.
Elaine Hoffinan Baruch:
It
sounds to me from your description of the
way American psychoanalysis is moving that it is becoming more of an art.
It
sounds very French. I don't think the French were ever particularly both–
ered by the idea that psychoanalysis is not a science, rather that they felt it
was an art for living better. All this emphasis on hermeneutics and metaphor
and construction of meaning sounds as if we are moving to Lacan. Are we
getting into that camp now?
Robert Michels:
Certainly it is closer to some of the French thinking than
American psychoanalysis was thirty years ago. But I'd say that French psy–
choanalysis is totally unconcerned about being unscientific. American
psychoanalysis is extremely anxious about the extent to which it has become
a hermeneutic activity and is preoccupied with not discarding its scientific
aspect and with searching for and exploring appropriate links and bound–
aries between what we know scientifically about human behavior and
development, and the mind, and the clinical hermeneutic process.
American psychoanalysts now are more comfortable seeing their activity in
the consultation room as artistic. But they are insistent that this artistic activ–
ity must be disciplined and bounded by scientific knowledge and
