The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis
A practical, example-rich account of interpretation and transference.
The working alliance is the relatively nonneurotic, rational, and realistic attitudes of the patient toward the analyst.
Greenson sets out the mechanics of classical technique one procedure at a time: how resistance is recognised and worked with before content is interpreted, how transference is permitted to develop and then read, and how an interpretation is timed, dosed, and phrased. Each move is grounded in transcribed exchanges from his own consulting room, so the reasoning behind an intervention is visible rather than a rule stated in the abstract.
The organising distinction is between three strands of the patient's tie to the analyst: the transference proper, the real relationship, and the working alliance, the rational bond that lets treatment continue while transference reactions run their course. Greenson treats the alliance as something the analyst helps build and can damage, not a given, and traces the technical consequences when it falters.
Volume I, published in 1967, covers resistance and transference; the projected companion material on further technical problems remained incomplete.
About the author
Ralph Romeo Greenson
Ralph R. Greenson (1911 to 1979) was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who worked within the classical Freudian tradition. He served as a training analyst at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and as clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA. He is remembered for developing the concept of the working alliance, the practical cooperation between patient and analyst that runs alongside transference. His book The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis (1967) remains a standard reference on analytic method. He also treated Marilyn Monroe.
Details
- 1967
- International Universities Press
- International Universities Press
- 470