ABSTRACT
T. S. Eliot said of good writing, "We cannot say at what point technique begins or where it ends" (Pritchard 1994, p. 11). I think something similar could be said of psychoanalysis when it is going well. It is not staged, pre-scribed, or formulaic. But it is far easier to say what it is not than what it is. To explain to oneself how one works as a psychoanalyst, how one conceives of what one is doing in the consulting room, and what one aspires to in one's work is a lifelong task. What follows is part of that ongoing, always tentative, always incomplete dialogue with myself. The loosely knit "excerpts" from that dialogue that I will present here address specific aspects of psychoanalytic work, and in no sense comprise a comprehensive, balanced statement of a theory of technique. Rather, the thoughts presented are heavily weighted in the direction of aspects of analytic technique and practice that are currently of most interest to me (perhaps because I understand them least well).
