The psychic changes observable during psychoanalytic treatment involve two distinct processes. First, the therapeutic process applies to symptoms, personality traits, and behaviors amenable to transformation. Second, the psychoanalytic process applies to how the experience created by the analytic setting and the rules of technique is lived out. The articulation of these two processes defines the question of change in psychoanalysis.

Without ever acquiring a specific conceptual status, the idea of change has been the focus of continual questioning since the beginning of psychoanalysis. As pointed out by Daniel Widlöcher (1970), it is easily traced in Sigmund Freud's work. As early as their preliminary communication of 1893, which served to introduce their Studies on Hysteria (1895d), Freud and Breuer established both the modus operandi of the cathartic treatment of hysteria and the idea that the mechanism of treating the...