Work, Love, Play, Self Repair in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue

Work, Love, Play, Self Repair in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue

Joel Shor

New York, NY: Brunner/Mazel Publishers Inc., 212 pp., 1992

Dr. Shor has written a thought-provoking account of his humanistic approach to psychoanalytic therapy. Central to his method is a model of therapy aimed at providing a safe space, a playground which leaves the patient in charge of the pace and direction of treatment and facilitates the emergence of his or her innate potential for self-repair. The hypothesis underlying his view is that the individual’s desire to regain the lost illusions of “primary narcissism” (Freud) and “primary love” (Balint) of early infancy sets in motion powerful reparative wishes aimed at the self and the object. The therapeutic setting allows these wishes to be reactivated through “benign regressions,” allowing for the restructuring of the patient’s narcissism and object relationships. The author takes the controversial position that the benign authoritarianism of the classical tradition introduces iatrogenic treatment complications, impeding the creation of a playful, open-ended and generative dialogue between the patient and the analyst. Shor favors a responsive and unobtrusive analytic stance and eschews practices which he believes place the analyst in an authority position or interfere with the patient’s spontaneity: use of diagnostic categories, resistance analysis, introduction of the “basic rule,” emphasis on dream interpretation, etc.

Work, Love, Play is a mosaic of the author’s ideas, technical recommendations, unpublished writings, which are interwoven with a personal narrative that documents Shor’s association with influential mentors, the ideas gleaned from them, and the disillusion caused by the rift with them when he pursued uncongenial views. The author is a scholar and clinician who began his analytic training in the 40s with E. Kris and T. Reik and whose concerns drew him away from ego psychology and towards the work of Balint and Winnicott.

The book’s varied form makes reading difficult at times. The clinician may be most interested in the chapters which present a detailed account of his approach based on negotiation and dialogue. Dr. Shor’s attunement to the intersubjective and affective aspects of therapy shows through in these pages. This controversial book will be of interest to students of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis and to historians of psychoanalysis. My impression is that the author stretches his points too far. Examples are such statements as “the expression of transferences is thus in part a test of the therapeutic relationship,” and “the resisting patient…is demonstrating a healthy opposition to impositions.” While many clinicians recognize that certain groups of patients (narcissistic and borderline patients) display other than neurotic-type transferences, it remains that Freud based the specificity of psychoanalysis (what distinguishes it from other forms of psychotherapy) on the “facts of transference and resistance” (Freud 1914). Shor’s statements appear to reduce Freud’s “basic facts” to the status of artefacts.