Microanalysis of Working Through in Psychotherapy

This journal has published few papers on psychodynamic psychotherapy recently—not because of prejudice but because only a few such papers have been submitted. One of the reasons for the paucity of psychodynamic papers is that they usually require lengthy case reports to illustrate theoretical assertions, and their preparation is thus very time-consuming. The author contends that selection of small segments of therapy for analysis is possible and should be encouraged because it focuses attention on low-level clinical inferences rather than on metapsychology. He presents a method of microanalysis that details the ideational structure of a conflict, views emotions as responses to incongruent ideas, describes the controlling operations motivated by these emotional responses, and indicates the sequential changes in conscious experience during a treatment episode.