THE KEY PRINCIPLES OF THE METHOD ESTABLISHED BEFORE THE FIRST CONSULTATIVE SESSION
The analyst-scientist will develop a defined Observational Field for clinical sessions in which potential variables on his part (i.e. transferences, countertransferences) that would contaminate it will be identifiable and containable on occurrence. He will also work exclusively with Objective Material processed by his Conscious Cognitive-Emotional Mind, and establish Essential Process Principles that contribute to the field. They will be Reference Points of how the situation would appear if there were no symptomatic behaviors in either party so that any present become identifiable by contrast.
All of this then, means that the working twosome must know what an analysis is and how it necessarily progresses towards its ultimate goal. They will know that: (a) the analysand’s symptoms are not his core self, but are accretions on it; (b) the analysis will be a self analysis with assistance; (c) the analysand will provide his own material; (d) the analyst will assist by offering himself as an outlet for transferences and providing expert information, directions and guidance when needed.
The analyst will also know that the analysand’s initial material will not be of the free-associative kind, as no one starting analysis would able to free associate and share the result with the analyst. He will therefore develop a well-thought-out realistic principle that explains the most useful thing the consultee/analysand can do to help the mutual effort on his behalf. Transferences will attached to and transform the analyst and his instruction, but the principle will be a reference point that highlights them at once. He will also establish what he does to help the mutual effort when what the analysand is doing is in effect.
The analyst will also be familiar with the confusion that reigns in the clinical situation when the analysand has been late or away, and he will also have thought out and created a treatment-supported principle that explains what each party can most usefully do to help the mutual effort on the analysand’s behalf on such occasions.
Then, with all of that groundwork done, he will enter the consultation and later treatment sessions prepared to observe and not interfere. He will only use existing theories when absolutely necessary, and they will be of the simplest, most logical and least-controversial kind. And what he will find will be the subject of his first scientific research. It will be an opportunity to: (a) settle a persistent theoretical controversy that has been given up as unsolvab; (b) create new basic and applied theories that help the consultee off to a fine start; (c) discover a consultative danger, to-date unknown, that silently destroys treatments at the start, even if they last for years.
He will then use his established research design as the current treatment for a specific symptom or symptoms progresses, relying on it to allow progress, test existing theories for predictive capability, isolate unexplained symptom phenomena, carry out new researches, and develop new hypotheses that culminate in theories. He will then apply his method in the many new consultation-treatments that come his way, working with a wide variety of symptoms and learning the different causes of each as bedrock-conflict roots are revealed,
And in the course of all that, in research efforts parallel and secondary to his clinical work, he will have abundant opportunities to test his ultimately-accepted, scientifically-developed theories hundreds of times.
[NOTE: It can be taken for granted that the above-described “job”: (a) is one that both people have happily and determinedly set out to do; (b) takes place in a setting of mutual respect, realness of selves, analyst empathy, and increasing freedom to objectively know and enjoy each other for the good people they are (as the analysand’s, and, if necessary, the analyst’s, transferences are systematically dismantled).
The situation is not different from the many variations of pleasure that people who have joined in a work project can experience as time passes and their project progresses. As the carpenter and the bricklayer are building a house for a client, they can be proud of their work, get to know each other, and (barring the operation of destructive negative transferences and behaviours that come with symptoms) develop a friendship.
It is also important to understand that every consultee-analysand is not, as is sometimes believed, “unique”. Many people have the same symptoms. It therefore follows that two people with obsessive-compulsive symptoms have root causes that are fundamentally similar. But working with tested scientific theories does not mean that analysands are not individuals. Both parties to the effort are indeed so, and as the analysis systematically relieves the analysand of conflicts that issue transferences, each becomes freer to be so.]