“This emotional muddling between analyst and patient is known in the trade as “transference”, and it’s important because it’s the way most of our relationships play out in the real world—as ambiguously defined contracts. This isn’t to say the analyst is short of techniques for managing that muddle, but it is to say that there’s no naively “clinical” position to be assumed. The consulting room thus transforms itself into a laboratory in which patients can learn about their impact on someone else in real time, and thus grow in self-awareness—which is the prerequisite for self-improvement.

The respected therapist and writer Irvin Yalom, among others, argues that depression and associated forms of sadness stem from an inability to make good contact with others. Relationships are fundamental to happiness. And so a science that has the courage to include the doctor’s relationship with the patient within the treatment itself, and to work with it, is a science already modelling the solution it prescribes. What psychoanalysis loses in scientific stature, it gains in humanity.”

In Defense of Psychoanalysis