I am very much interested in the last mentioned item:
"what helps patient."
Weiss, of Control-Mastery fame has stressed the importance
of the "correctional emotional experience."
This reminds me of Alexander's writings.
In my training, three factors were stressed:
The interplay of interpretation, the positive caring
of the therapist and the positive working alliance.
Question: Can the "corrective emotional experience"
be subsumed under my "trio"?

Best,
Norm


ERIC GILLETT wrote:
>
> For those who are tired of my preaching, perhaps it would help if I posted all
> of these messages about psychoanalysis as a science under the heading of "Saving
> the Rain Forest" which would provide them a warning to delete. I refer
> interested readers to Making Science by Stephen Cole (1992 Harvard U. Press). He
> is neither a positivist nor a constructivist. In science there is a distinction
> between the "frontier" where there is a lot of controversy versus the "core"
> where there is consensus. The function of scientific debate is to promote
> discovery of the truth by selecting out those ideas worthy of further pursuit
> and attempt to reach a consensus on the best answers to scientific questions
> even if this consensus is later overturned. I am not the first to claim that
> psychoanalysis is deficient with respect to the critical evaluation of new
> ideas. Greenson elaborated on this point in his 1969 paper, "Origin and Fate of
> New Ideas in Psychoanalysis" and Arlow and Brenner (1988) also underscore this
> problem. Those who are familiar with the psychoanalytic literature know that
> most new ideas proposed by individuals (versus schools) receive no published
> debate. There is no process in psychoanalysis that attempts to incorporate new
> ideas into standard theory. My own theoretical ideas concern the nature of the
> unconscious, and I don't complain that nobody on this list will publicly discuss
> these ideas. I do believe that anyone who believes that science has a place in
> psychoanalysis (in addition to poetry) should support scientific debate of new
> ideas regardless of their own interests. They might become weary of my preaching
> but should be sympathetic to the message. It seems to me that only those who are
> anti-scientific should be irritated by my preaching, but perhaps I am wrong
> about my ideas on science. If so, I wish they would help me to see the light.
> There has been lively discussion on this list, but many questions that seem
> important to me are never discussed. For example, there has been little
> discussion on what makes patients ill and what helps them--two very broad
> questions that subsume many more specific issues.
> Eric Gillett, M.D.  [log in to unmask]

--