The Patient as Interpreter of the Analyst's Experience
Irwin Z. Hoffman, Ph.D.
Introduction
THIS PAPER PRESENTS A POINT OF VIEW on the psychoanalytic situation and on psychoanalytic
technique through, in part, a selective review of the literature. An important underlying assumption of the paper is
that existing theoretical models inevitably influence and reflect practice. This is often true even of models that
practitioners claim they do not take seriously or literally. Such models may continue to affect practice adversely as
long as their features are not fully appreciated and as long as alternative models are not recognized or integrated.
An example of such a lingering model is the one in which the therapist is said to function like a blank screen in the
psychoanalytic situation.
The Resilience of the Blank Screen Concept
The psychoanalytic literature is replete with attacks on the blank screen concept, the idea that the analyst is not
accurately perceived by the patient as a real person, but that he serves rather as a screen or mirror to whom various
attitudes, feelings, and motives can be attributed depending upon the patient's particular neurosis and its
transference expression. Critiques of this idea have come from within the ranks of classical Freudian analysts, as
well as from Kleinians and Sullivanians. Even if one looks only at the classical literature, in one way or another, the
blank screen concept seems to have been pronounced dead and laid to rest many times over the years. In 1950, Ida
Macalpine, addressing only the implications for the patient's experience of classical psychoanalytic technique as she