ABSTRACT
Suggestion relies on a combination of seduction (playing on the patient’s desire to be loved) and intimidation (playing on the patient’s fear of being spurned or rejected). In both cases, the analyst is taking advantage of the parental role assigned to him (and the child role assigned to the patient) in the patient’s transference. Bion has advocated that any desire that the analyst feels for the patient, including, or rather, especially the desire to do something therapeutic, be treated as material for self-analysis. To the degree that the analyst has been able to work through the countertransferences on which suggestion depends, he will be able to depart from the role of parent—that is, refuse to praise or condemn the patient—and to transform the inevitable forces of suggestion (and the transference and countertransference on which they rest) from something interfering with the analysis into the object of its scrutiny. Instead of praising or condemning, the analyst will in the ideal case merely observe how things are, without value judgement or suggestions—either in words, or more importantly, in music—about how they should be. Although very few, if any analysts will endorse praise or condemnation as good psychoanalytic technique, and all will maintain that they do not practise it, if we look at the unconscious register of song-and-dance, which is perhaps a more important mode of communication in clinical psychoanalysis than the conscious, verbal register, we see a different picture. Recent studies have shown that psychoanalysts in practice operate quite differently from their conscious conception of their work.
