Interview with Lewis Aron.

Abstract

Safran: What do you think that psychoanalysis will look like 10 or even 20 years from now? Aron: In some ways it depends on what you mean by psychoanalysis, because I think one of the ways that we’ve gotten ourselves into so much trouble is by defining psychoanalysis in contrast to psychotherapy. So, if we’re defining psychoanalysis in this very limited or narrow way, as opposed to psychoanalytic therapy or other analytic therapies, then the question of what the discipline of psychoanalysis will look like would lead you to one answer, which I do not think would be a very optimistic one. But I tend to think that it’s a mistake to define it that way, and that we need to think of psychoanalysis as a broad continuum of treatments with different frequencies and differences in variables of other types, all based on psychoanalytic ideas. And if we define psychoanalysis more broadly in this way, then I have a much more optimistic perspective on the future of psychoanalysis. Not everyone would agree with me on this. Kernberg, for example, defines psychoanalysis in the more narrow sense, and takes the position that psychoanalysis is for the very few and that most people are either too ill or too healthy for psychoanalysis. Thus, from his perspective, and from the perspective of many others, many people need some other treatment, an analytically modified kind of treatment. From his perspective, psychoanalysis is an appropriate treatment for very few people, and he believes that the most important contribution we can make as psychoanalysts is to develop a broad range of analytic treatments or therapies. Safran: I didn’t realize that was Kernberg’s position. Aron: Yes, I did a panel with him last year where he took that position . . . . And I think this position is based on a choice he makes to keep the definition of psychoanalysis rather narrow and very specific. But I think that’s a mistake. Merton Gill, for example, in his final book before he died, took the position that he didn’t differentiate between psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy. He spoke of all forms of psychoanalysis as consisting of a range of different forms of therapies, varying with respect to variables such as frequency, intensity, and so on. And I think there are many advantages to this type of perspective. For one thing, I think that it really is very troubling for analysts who spend most of their working lives doing what would have to be called modified analytic therapy (from Kernberg’s perspective) and then end up having a tremendous identity problem about what it means to be a psychoanalyst, since they’re not really doing “psychoanalysis.” And the statistics in the field are very clear. A number of surveys have shown that the great bulk of psychoanalysts are doing something other than psychoanalysis, as it was