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"The Elasticity of the Psychoanalytic Technique" is the title of a paper that Sándor Ferenczi gave to the Budapest Psychoanalytic Society, and which was first published in 1928. In essence he described the procedure he had introduced in his paper on the "contra-indications of the active technique" (1926), in which he recommended using relaxation to reduce tension in certain difficult cases. In two other articles from the same period ("Family Adaptation to the Child" and "The Problem of the End of Analysis") he dealt with difficulties in the educational environment. The question became one of how far the idea of elasticity could be taken. In 1967, Michael Balint would write on Ferenczi's problem, "His earlier experiences had familiarized him with two models: one was the classic technique with its objective and benevolent passivity, and apparently imperturbable and unlimited patience; the other was the active technique with its well-directed interventions founded on attentive observation and empathy."

In the 1928 paper, Ferenczi developed the technical importance of tact in deciding on the right moment to communicate to the patient any conjectures the analyst may have made, "based essentially on the dissection of our own Self." He stressed the notion of modesty, which should be "the expression of the acceptance of the limits to our knowledge," and to this end he preferred from the beginning of treatment to adopt a rather pessimistic attitude, in order to avoid creating enthusiastic confidence in the future patient, a confidence that often camouflaged "a healthy dose of distrust." Nothing could be more harmful, he continued, "than the attitude of a schoolmaster or an authoritarian doctor." He thus spoke of Einfühlung (feeling-with, empathy) as of a rule, from which he deduced the necessity, for the analyst, of developing "a rigorous control of his own narcissism and intense vigilance with regard to his own affective reactions." Analysts would have to "guess when the patient's esthetic sentiments have been offended by our own attitude" and, supporting this displeasure, behave like those little "culbutos" (small figures with lead ballast in their base that always return to a vertical position). Ferenczi proposed "a perpetual oscillation between feeling-with, self-observation and judgment activity."

He concluded this reflection on the counter-transference with a "metapsychology of the technique," denouncing the "fanaticism of interpretation as an infantile disease of analysis" because, in order for patients to become free of all emotional binds, they must "abandon, at least provisionally, all sorts of superegos, including that of the analyst." This position borders on "a demand for elasticity in the analysts themselves," a "metapsychology of the analysts." This then makes it absolutely essential to comply with the second rule of psychoanalysis, already problematic at the time, that analysts must themselves be analyzed.

PIERRE SABOURIN

See also: Active technique; Ferenczi, Sándor; Tact; Technique with adults, psychoanalytic.