Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/533

Yet, we cannot deny it. There seems to be some kind of general over-all benefit to psychoanalysis. Probably, it is so difficult to determine, more people are benefited than are hurt. If this be true, I have an idea why. In the very absence of meeting, in the essential square peg to round hole, the misapplied and erroneous S-concept of the analyst attached to the er-released matter there is a liberty for the patient to come to his or her own conclusions. I suspect that when the patient makes a poor transference, there are often surprisingly good results. This, at least, for Freudian analysts. What happens is that a self-analysis with an essentially unimportant but nonetheless not-to-be-ignored chaperone has taken place. The analyst says, “Dependency drives, castration fantasies”—the patient feels: and feels beneath words: “I know what love is, I know what power is, I know (and this is private H knowledge) that I am not as bad as I thought I was, but this I’m keeping to myself. If I give it to old Four-Eyes he’ll tack it on his article board, put it under glass, and give it a name.”

So, beneath the surface, a mighty ventilation takes place. On the surface there is guilt, hostility, pain, self-hatred—in the deep reaches of the er, there is shame, opening of rhythm, pleasure, self-love, and the suppressed H understanding and S admitting that one is not so bad after all. What characterizes the successful analysis is that the S has been dealt a blow, not the er. It isn’t that one learns to control one’s outrageous id, as Freudians would have it, but rather that the sup loses power, must take retreats, must admit some of its imposture. On the surface the analyst believes he has tamed the patient; what has happened is that the patient has out-foxed him. There was more than one girl I laid who said to me, “I’m not going to tell my analyst I’ve been sleeping with you until you leave town, because if I do, he’s going to fuck it up.”