The Compulsion To Confess and The Compulsion To Judge

Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95:977993
doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12263
Key Paper
The compulsion to confess and the compulsion to
judge in the analytic situation1
Stefano Fajrajzen2
(Accepted for publication 23 July 2014)
In this paper the author shows that human beings have two quasi-instinctual
primitive tendencies namely, the compulsion to confess and the compulsion
to judge (to condemn or to absolve). These compulsions are originally unconscious and become conscious during the course of the analytic process.
The compulsion to judge is a natural consequence of the compulsion to
confess. These two tendencies are intensified by the analytic situation. The
patient has a compulsion to confess to the analyst and to himself, and likewise
the analyst has a compulsion to confess to himself and to the patient. The
patient therefore has a compulsion to judge himself as good or bad and to judge
the analyst as good or bad while, on the other hand, the analyst has a compulsion to judge himself as good or bad and to judge the patient as good or bad.
The task of analysis is to make both patient and analyst conscious of their
compulsions to confess and to judge (to condemn or to absolve). The compulsion to judge in the analyst, particularly if unconscious, may give rise to mistakes in diagnosis, technique, treatment, and the assessment of analysability.
The requirement of analytic neutrality in the analyst constantly conflicts
with his compulsion to judge. If we are profoundly involved in our patients dramatic conflict, we are bound to pass a judgement (condemnation or absolution);
however, when we judge, we are not neutral and therefore become incapable of
intellectual consciousness of the patients conflict. Conversely, if we do not
judge, we are neutral, but are then relatively uninvolved in the patients conflict
and are hence virtually unable to achieve emotional consciousness.
The author attempts to show that neutrality cannot and must not be a preconstituted attitude in the analyst, but can and must be a point of arrival following a profound, intensely felt existential experience based on an attitude
of non-condemnation and non-absolution.
Keywords: neutrality, compulsion, judgment, confess, Freud, Bion
For some years now I have been seeking with keen interest and curiosity to
gain an as complete as possible understanding of what happens between the
patient and the analyst in the analytic situation, and I continue to this day
to marvel at the inexhaustibility of the study of analytic phenomenology.
My sense of wonder is, however, understandable if it is borne in mind that
all aspects of the human condition, in its biological, psychological, social,
1
Revised version of a paper presented at the Rome Psychoanalytic Centre on 13 June 1973. First
published in Rivista Psicoanal 22:1135, 1976.
2
Translated by Philip Slotkin MA Cantab. MITI.
Copyright 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
978
S. Fajrajzen
ethical, philosophical, religious, and artistic dimensions, are manifested in

the analytic situation.
In this paper I propose to examine certain relatively unexplored aspects
of the analytic situation and their relationship with the analytic process and
technique. I shall begin by provisionally defining the terms contained in the
title. The term compulsion to confess was coined by Theodor Reik (1925)
in his splendid essay, now perhaps somewhat forgotten, entitled
Gest
andniszwang und Strafbed
urfnis, which was published in English translation as The compulsion to confess (the somewhat inaccurate title of the Italian translation means the impulse to confess). The term compulsion to
judge was suggested to me by the contemporary British writer John Fowles, as we shall see below.
The compulsion to confess and the compulsion to judge are manifested in
any interpersonal relationship and are therefore present indeed, in heightened form in the analytic situation, in both patient and analyst.
I should explain from the outset that I use the term compulsion to
subsume a whole range of mental situations, extending from involuntary,
unconscious compulsions to the voluntary, conscious impulse to confess and
to judge. It is consequently important to distinguish an unconscious aspect,
on the one hand, from a preconscious and conscious aspect, on the other, of
the mental phenomena at issue. Where necessary for reasons of clarity, I shall
try to specify whether I am referring to a compulsive or a voluntary phenomenon, or an unconscious or a conscious phenomenon. In addition, I wish
to emphasize that the compulsion to judge includes both the compulsion to
condemn and the compulsion to absolve, as we shall see below.
The compulsion to confess

Every human individual has a quasi-instinctual urge to reveal and uncover
himself, to confess to another of his kind. There exists in all of us an urge
to communicate our most intimate self to another human being, to escape
from the condition of isolation, of secrecy (i.e. of being segregated, or
closed off within our own self) in order to enter into a state of communion
or communication with the other. As Freud (1905, p. 78) noted: [. . .]
betrayal oozes out of [us] at every pore.
The compulsion to confess is utilized in the analytic situation and is
amplified by the use of the couch, by free association, and by transference
regression, thus allowing unconscious aspects of the id, superego and ego to
be revealed by the patient to the analyst and by the patient to himself.
An infant at a tender age reveals himself completely: he is so to speak
physically and psychologically naked; he is transparent, his needs,
wishes, anxieties, anger, love and hate being spontaneously and completely communicated by somatic, psychosomatic and affective expressions, and later in words. During the course of development, the child
begins to repress and control various aspects of these expressive manifestations because they are becoming ego-dystonic that is, incompatible
with moral and cultural norms, parental demands and those of society.
As a result of this inhibition imposed by his upbringing, the child
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
The compulsion to confess and compulsion to judge
979
develops an opposite tendency to that of confession namely, the urge

to cut himself off, to shut himself away inside himself, and not to communicate so that, with effect from a certain age, all expressions of the
individual (gestures, words, character traits, dreams and symptoms) serve
at one and the same time to disclose and to conceal something of his
most intimate self.
In the analytic situation, the therapist seeks to induce the patient to reinstate that primal infantile expressiveness, and to this end finds a valuable
ally in the patients natural compulsion or impulse to confess. The analysand is led to reveal everything that has been repressed in other words,
his most primitive drives and affective states, and hence his polymorphously
perverse libidinal tendencies, infantile needs for dependence, affection and
love, as well as his infantile reactions of aggression, hate, revenge, envy and
jealousy. All these together constitute the patients se-cret his concealed,
intimate, segregated self.
To illustrate the concept of the compulsion to confess, I reproduce below
an example presented by Reik in the essay mentioned above:
Patient A starts his analytical session with the account of a small observation.
He says that, when entering my apartment, he noticed that my hat, which usually hangs on a certain hook on the wall in the foyer, was not in its place, but
on a distant hook. Usually he puts his hat next to mine. He felt it might perhaps
seem ridiculous but, when he missed my hat on the hook today, he could not
ward off the suspicion that I had changed its place intentionally. After a short
pause he continues. Perhaps I do not want his hat to touch mine. Here the topic
ends.
Then, apparently without transition, there follow reminiscences from early school
days, among them an obscure, uncertain one of scenes of mutual masturbation, in
which A and an older boy rubbed their genitals together. From still earlier times a
memory emerges now that he had pressed himself tenderly against his father and so
rubbed his penis on his fathers elbow. His father, he says, brushed him off angrily.
[. . .] Then follow lively feelings and memories concerning the experiences which he
had with his military superiors during the war. His behaviour had expressed itself
then as wavering between embittered defiance and humble submission toward those
authorities [. . .]
His remarks at the start of the session were rooted in the patients neurosis transferred to the analyst. They show hurt and bitterness over an imagined rejection of
a homosexual attachment. We can ascribe symptomatic value to the excitement
released in the patient by the observation of the changed place of my hat. We shall
certainly evaluate it and treat it in his analysis as a symptom. From the subject of
the hat as a stimulus, ideas now lead backward to reminiscences of former homosexual actions and rejections, the type of which subsequently contributed to the
development of the patients relations to older men.
(Reik, 1925, pp. 1802)
So at the beginning of the session, the patient has made a seemingly trivial, chance observation: the analyst has hung his hat on a different, more
distant hook; the analysis demonstrates that this observation by the patient
was dictated by a pressing, unconscious need to confess to the analyst his
S. Fajrajzen
980
infantile, sensual and affectionate wish for homosexual contact. The compulsion to confess had been completely unconscious in the patient, as had
also been the content of the confession itself. The analysts task was to
make the patient conscious of the unconscious meaning of the observation
expressed at the beginning of the session.
The compulsion to confess is manifested not only in the patients free
associations, but also in his dreams, memories, parapraxes, and enactments
in the analysis. According to Reik, the compulsion to confess is a particular
form of the return of the repressed.
The analytic situation powerfully encourages and stimulates this process
of confession. As Sidney Tarachow (1963) acutely observes, the most primordial and archaic tendency in two persons who find themselves alone
together is to abolish the mutual boundaries of the ego and to fuse with
each other. It could in my view also be maintained that the most universal
and archaic tendency in two individuals who find themselves alone together
is to regress from the state of separation/individuation to that of symbiosis.
Considering that patient and analyst meet day in day out, month in month
out, year in year out, in the same consulting room, cut off from the rest of
the world, it is understandable how strong the urge towards symbiosis must
be in both an urge manifested in the compulsion or impulse to confess, to
reveal themselves intimately to each other.
Jung writes that a secret isolates us from the rest of mankind and arouses
a sense of guilt in us:
As soon as man was capable of conceiving the idea of sin, he had recourse to psychic
concealment or, to put it in analytical language, repressions arose. Anything that is
concealed is a secret. The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which
alienates their possessor from the community. [. . .] To cherish secrets and to restrain
emotions are psychic misdemeanours for which nature finally visits us with sickness.
(Jung, 1933, pp. 31, 34)
The extent to which patients reveal their secrets to us analysts is variable.

No patient, unless profoundly psychotic, reveals himself both to himself
and to the analyst in all his most naked and complete intimacy; nor is it
desirable from the therapeutic point of view for the patient to regress in his
confession to actual or near psychotic levels. After all, when a patient
reveals himself completely and without shame in his utter psychological
nakedness from the very first sessions, we must suspect psychosis or
psychopathy.
In the analysis of any patient who is not severely psychotic, therefore, a
secret area remains. Bion (1970, p. 87) writes:
However thorough an analysis is, the person undergoing it will be only partially
revealed; at any point in the analysis the proportion of what is known to what is
unknown is small. Therefore the dominant feature of a session is the unknown personality and not what the analysand or analyst thinks he knows.
Again, according to John Klauber (1972, p. 388):

993
with the great problems of science and analytic knowledge and with those
of life and death as reflected in the microcosm of our patient. It is vitally
important for us to be conscious at all times of our compulsion to judge,
and hence to prejudge, matters where knowledge of our patient and ourselves is concerned.
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Bion WR (1970). Attention and interpretation. London: Heinemann.
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situation and analytic technique and their relation to an ethics of analysis]. Paper presented at the
Rome Psychoanalytic Centre, 23 May 1967.
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psychoses]. Monografie de Il lavoro neuropsichiatrico, 6 December.
Fowles J (1968). The aristos. London: Pan.
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ndniszwang und Strafbedu
rfnis], Zilboorg G,
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S. Fajrajzen
982
nature. Is it not the case that the analyst often discovers to his surprise that
he too, like his patient, has certain primordial, archaic infantile drives, of
which he had hitherto been either unconscious or barely conscious? The
patients confession of some of his primitive tendencies reactivates and
reveals the corresponding repressed infantile constellations in the analyst
constellations that had sometimes not been uncovered even in the course of
his own personal analysis.
To sum up, the patient confesses his secret to the analyst and to himself.
The analyst confesses his secret to himself and to a certain extent also to
the patient. The analyst, by his presence, stimulates the process of self-revelation in the patient, and the patient in turn, by his presence and activity,
stimulates the process of further self-revelation in the analyst.
The compulsion to judge

In a paper dating from 1906 entitled Psycho-analysis and the establishment
of the facts in legal proceedings, Freud wrote that an analyst attempting to
discover his patients secret can be likened to a judge who seeks to discover
a criminals secret:
I must draw an analogy between the criminal and the hysteric. In both we are concerned with a secret, with something hidden. But in order not to be paradoxical I
must at once point out the difference. In the case of the criminal it is a secret which
he knows and hides from you, whereas in the case of the hysteric it is a secret
which he himself does not know either, which is hidden even from himself [. . .] all
these illnesses are the result of the patients having succeeded in repressing certain
ideas and memories that are strongly cathected with affect [. . .]. But from this
repressed psychical material (these complexes) are generated the somatic and psychical symptoms which plague the patient in just the same way as a guilty conscience does. In this one respect, therefore, the difference between the criminal and
the hysteric is fundamental. The task of the therapist, however, is the same as that
of the examining magistrate. We have to uncover the hidden psychical material.
(Freud, 1906, p. 108)
Elsewhere, Freud (1915, p. 146) uses the term condemnation, describing

repression as a rejection based on a judgement; and in 1922 he refers to
absolution by the conscience (Freud, 1922). Finally, Freud (1932, p. 61)
writes that the principal task of the superego is to perform a judging function with respect to the ego.
In a very significant passage from his Little Hans essay, Freud writes:
Analysis replaces the process of repression, which is an automatic and
excessive one, by a temperate and purposeful control on the part of the
highest agencies of the mind. In a word, analysis replaces repression by condemnation (Freud, 1909, p. 145).
In their important book entitled The Criminal, the Judge and the Public,
Alexander and Staub (1931, pp. 568) write:
Crime and punishment is the meaning of a psychoneurosis, except that all this takes
place not in real life but in the unconscious world of phantasy, and is represented
983
by the neurotic symptoms. The study of neurosis yields unconscious material which
makes it possible for us to reconstruct not only the spirit of primitive justice the
talion principle, but also the nature of the primitive social problems, i.e., the primitive
crime of incest and murder of the father and even the primitive punishment castration. [. . .] [In] the psychoanalytic theory of the neuroses [. . .] the descriptions are
couched partly in literary terms, partly in the language of a jurist and [. . .] they are
based on a number of criminological concepts. [The medical man] will read [about]
the dipus complex, the content of which embraces the primitive crime of murder of
the father and incest with the mother [,. . .] the sense of guilt and expiation, of sacrifice
and penance, of bribery, of the severity of certain unconscious psychic agencies, of the
need for punishment and the compulsion to confess ones sins. [. . .] suddenly he finds
that psychoanalysis leads him into a sort of court room where the most primitive
spirit of primitive races, or children, rules supreme [. . .]. He also learns that [. . .] symptoms present a secret gratification of forbidden anti-social tendencies and that these
symptoms [. . .] present at the very same time the punishment for these transgressions.
[. . .] in order to understand and cure certain diseases [. . .] he suddenly faces the necessity of becoming a criminologist; he has to gain an understanding of criminal psychology, and delve deeply into the spirit of a remarkably primitive, barbarian penal code,
the chief subject matter of which is murder, incest, and castration. Thus, the road
from the psychoanalytical theory of the neuroses to the court room appears to us
much shorter than the road to anatomy and physiology of the brain or to the physical
chemistry of bodily processes.
We have seen, then, that Freud, Reik, and Alexander and Staub have
demonstrated the criminological and judicial aspects of neurosis and of
analytic work. However, it seems to me that these authors, despite their
felicitous insights, have overlooked their important implications for the analytic situation and analytic technique. The reason for this omission is that,
in the first decades of this [the 20th] century, countertransference problems
were not yet such a focus of analytic inquiry as they are today.
One of my aims in this contribution is to examine how the compulsion to
confess and the compulsion to judge influence the analytic situation, transference and countertransference phenomena, and analytic technique and
therapy.
The compulsion to judge as an inevitable consequence of the

compulsion to confess
The compulsion to confess always and inevitably entails the compulsion to
judge. The term compulsion to judge was suggested to me by the following
observation by John Fowles (1968):
All our judgements of right and wrong are [. . .] meaningless. But we are like a
judge who is compelled to judge. Our function is to judge, to choose between good
and evil. If we refuse to do so, we cease to be human beings [. . .].
The compulsion to judge is a fundamental psychological characteristic of

man, and this judging function is exercised continuously in relation to ourselves and others, in both waking and dreaming psychic activity. Analyst
and patient do not escape the universal compulsion to judge, which is in
S. Fajrajzen
984
fact intensified by the analytic situation. After all, if the libidinal and
aggressive infantile drives have been repressed by the ego acting in the
service of the superego, it is natural and inevitable for the compulsion to
confess (a particular form of the return of the repressed) to mobilize the
judging function of the superego or, more precisely, the judging function
of the ego acting in the service of the superego. When the patients prohibited unconscious drives emerge from the state of repression during the
course of the analytic process, this inevitably mobilizes the compulsion, or
tendency, in both patient and analyst, to judge the emerging psychic
material.
Like the compulsion to confess, the compulsion to judge includes a whole
range of manifestations, extending from the unconscious compulsion to the
impulse, need or deliberate conscious intention to judge. Hence, like the
compulsion to confess, the compulsion to judge too may be unconscious,
preconscious, or conscious.
Genesis of the compulsion to judge

The compulsion to judge stems from the primal infantile tendency to incorporate or expel anything that comes from the external and internal world.
An infants attitude is based on the elementary philosophy of wanting to
introject into itself everything that is good and to eject from itself everything that is bad (Freud, 1925, p. 237). This attitude of the infant already
contains in latent form an initial ethical valuation of the world of objects.
As in effect the childs first moral judgement, it is the very earliest distinction between good and evil, the proto-judgement, or seed, of the future
compulsion or impulse to judge, in its two fundamental aspects namely,
the compulsion or impulse to condemn (i.e. to reject, to find guilty) and the
compulsion or impulse to absolve (i.e. to accept, to find not guilty). In analytic language, condemnation means punishment of the ego by the superego,
while absolving means releasing (from the Latin absolvere): absolution is
the release, or liberation, of the ego from its bond of submission to the
superego.
The compulsion to condemn and the compulsion to absolve in the analytic situation are present in patient and analyst alike, and are manifested in
each member of the couple in relation to both himself and his partner. I
must emphasize that when I use the words our compulsion to condemn or
our compulsion to absolve the patient, I am referring exclusively to our
inner experience and not to verbal expressions or behaviour whereby we
condemn or absolve our patient, which, in theory at least, should never
exist.
The compulsion to condemn and the compulsion to absolve in the analytic
situation are derivatives of the infantile issue of the good and the bad object.
In a paper presented here in 1967, whose title translates as The analytic
situation and analytic technique and their relation to an ethics of analysis, I
attempted to show that the patient always and inevitably sees himself as a
good or a bad object and that, similarly, he always sees the analyst as good
or bad (Fajrajzen, 1967). However, we analysts too always and inevitably
985
tend at least to a certain extent to see the patient as a good or a bad object;
this tendency is reflected even in our psychopathological diagnoses, which are
in fact always, and fatefully, influenced by unconscious ethical factors and
value judgements. For example, a schizophrenic, a melancholic, a severely
obsessional patient, a psychopath, a pervert, or a mentally retarded subject
are generally seen by us, on either the unconscious or the conscious level, as
bad objects worthy of condemnation, whereas we more often experience a
hysterical, phobic, inhibited or infantile patient as a less bad, better, and more
lovable object. Not only our diagnoses, but also our technical concepts, are
influenced to a greater or lesser extent by unconscious or conscious moral valuations. For instance, we refer to the negative transference, in which the idea
of a negative valuation or condemnation is more or less implicit in the word
negative; and we speak of a patients resistance without always realizing that
we sometimes tend, consciously or unconsciously, to reject or condemn a
patient who stubbornly resists our interpretations and therapeutic efforts. We
say that a patient who resists excessively is a bad patient, while one who
exhibits a positive transference is a good patient. We say that our patient is
improving i.e. literally, getting better when his negative transference
becomes positive, and so on.
In my above contribution, I showed that our attitude to one and the
same patient constantly alternates and fluctuates; for example, we experience a psychotic patient initially as a bad object, then as a better or good
object, and then again as worse, and so forth. As we gradually come to
accept a schizophrenic patients aggression and narcissism and learn to love
him, we see him less and less as a bad or persecutory object; but if our
patient regresses again and subjects us to violent attacks, we are immediately induced to experience him as a bad and persecutory object. However,
if we succeed in causing the patients love for us to re-emerge during the
course of the same session, we again experience him as a good object. I
have called this constant alternation of ours between modal positive and
negative valuation and revaluation of the patient the process of analytic
transvaluation. It takes place both in the analyst and, to an even greater
extent, in the patient, who experiences the analyst as good and bad alternately and himself as good and bad alternately.
The complex vicissitudes of the transference and countertransference in
any analysis are closely bound up with this alternation of the good and the
bad object. I have called this modality of judgement, which has primitive
moral roots, infantile proto-morality, as opposed to the more mature
morality of an analysed adult, whose judgement is less impulsive, less absolute, and filtered through the reality testing of a more equitable ego, benevolently watched over by a less archaic, less intransigent superego. The
analyst gradually succeeds in appraising his patient in accordance with a
more mature, analytic code of morality, which will help the patient to judge
himself more realistically, more tolerantly, and in a more human way.
However, notwithstanding this development, the compulsion to judge in
both its forms (the compulsion to condemn and the compulsion to absolve)
can never be wholly eliminated either in the patient or in the analyst,
986
S. Fajrajzen
because it is intrinsic to the human condition. A clinical example of the

compulsion to condemn now follows.
A young adult patient suffering from severe persecutory and depressive
anxieties and who exhibits a manifest, active form of homosexuality has been
in treatment for some months. His attitude towards me, which has hitherto
been positive, is becoming very ambivalent: he is beginning to present feelings
of distrust and suspicion towards me, with hints of delusional persecution, as
well as, at the same time, homosexual phantasies and impulses in relation to
myself. I in turn begin to have ambivalent feelings towards the patient: on the
one hand, sympathy, pain and the wish to help him, and, on the other, antipathy, anxiety and rejection, coupled with the virtually compulsive formulation
of negative moral judgements and negative diagnostic valuations of the following type: The patient must be a paranoid schizophrenic; perhaps he is untreatable; his resistances are too powerful and insurmountable; his
promiscuous homosexual behaviour is morally unacceptable. The patient is
too narcissistic and selfish for any maturation to be possible.
My compulsion to condemn the patient of course remains an inner, unexpressed experience of mine. Analysis of my compulsion to judge and condemn the patient reveals the following to me:
1. I have responded aggressively to the patients aggression.
2. I have developed persecutory anxieties in consequence of the patients
paranoid attitude towards me.
3. I have had an erotic homosexual reaction to the patients intense homosexual transference.
In my countertransference regression, I have seen the patient as an imago
of the oedipal father and the oedipal and pre-oedipal mother of my infancy.
The patients analytic confession of his aggressive and libidinal impulses
towards me has triggered in me a return of the repressed that is, of my
infantile aggressive and homosexual drives. I have tried to defend against
the anxiety aroused in me by this return of the repressed, my attempted
defence taking the form of a compulsion to judge and condemn the patient.
Hence my condemnatory judgement of the patient was basically a projection of the condemnation of my homosexuality and aggression as aroused
by the contact with the patient. In my countertransference regression I
experienced the patient as a bad and persecutory object; this of course
increased the patients persecutory anxieties. The patient is ultimately right:
I am persecuting him with my condemnation; my condemnation, even if
unexpressed, has somehow been apprehended by the patient. The patients
resistance is, at least in part, a consequence of my negative attitude towards
him i.e. of my resistance to accepting his homosexuality and aggression
because I feel threatened by them.
When I became conscious of the unconscious roots of my compulsion to
judge and condemn the patient, a less involved, more accepting, calmer,
and more detached attitude on my part became possible. An improvement
in the patients transference attitude and symptoms ensued. My diagnosis
and prognosis have also changed: I no longer see the patient as a paranoid
schizophrenic; my moral condemnation of his homosexual promiscuity has
987
substantially weakened; and the patient now seems to me to be more

amenable to analytic treatment. My positive feelings of sympathy, warmth,
respect and concern have gained the upper hand and made it possible for
the treatment to be continued in a climate of greater analytic neutrality.
I shall now give a brief example of the compulsion to absolve.
The analyst is treating a woman unhappily married to a tyrannical husband who frustrates her in every possible way. After years of suffering, the
patient embarks on a relationship with another man. When she tells the
analyst this, he is surprised to observe in himself an immediate compulsion
or impulse (which of course remains unexpressed) to absolve the patient for
her adultery. Analysis of this compulsion reveals that the patients husband
represents the analysts bad father of his infancy; the analyst himself has
identified with the patients lover, while the patient has become an imago of
the analysts oedipal mother of infancy. Hence the analysts unconscious
motivation for the compulsion to absolve was his need to love the mother
in phantasy and to punish the bad father of his infancy; this unconscious
motivation had been rationalized as follows: the patient is doing the right
thing, she is perfectly entitled to take a lover because she is too frustrated
and tormented by her bad husband.
The above two examples are intended to illustrate the following points:
1. The patients compulsion to confess has the consequence of the analysts
compulsion to judge the patient.
2. The analysts compulsion to judge (in the sense of condemnation or of
absolution) can give rise to transference and countertransference difficulties and fuel the patients resistances.
3. The compulsion to judge may induce the analyst to see the patient as relatively or completely unanalysable.3
4. The impulsive and compulsive character of the analysts moral judgement stems from the activation of the deepest and most repressed strata
of the id in both parties. The more primordial and unconscious the libidinal and aggressive tendencies aroused in the patients transference
regression and the analysts countertransference regression, the greater
will be the analysts compulsion to judge the patient, in the sense either
of condemnation or of absolution.
5. The compulsion to judge may result in the formulation of a diagnosis
that does not correspond to the patients actual condition; for example,
we may see a patient who is merely neurotic as psychotic or borderline,
or vice versa. This may help to explain certain differences in the diagnosis of one and the same patient by different psychiatrists or psychoanalysts.
3
The most telling example of this possibility is Freuds view of psychotics as unanalysable. In a letter to
Holl
os, Freud (1928, p. 21f.) expresses a very severe judgement: Ultimately I had to confess to myself
that [. . .] I do not care for these patients [psychotics], that they annoy me, and that I find them alien to
me and to everything human. A peculiar kind of intolerance which undoubtedly disqualifies me as a psychiatrist. [. . .] Am I behaving in this instance as the physicians of yesterday did toward hysterics? Is this
the consequence of an increasingly evident partiality for the primacy of the intellect, the expression of an
animosity toward the id? So Freuds tendency, or compulsion, to judge psychotics negatively probably
contributed to his view that they were not analysable.
988
S. Fajrajzen
6. The analysts analysis of his own compulsion to judge (to condemn or to

absolve) is a fundamental part of analysis of the countertransference and
hence of analytic technique. This analysis permits a posture of greater
analytic neutrality, as we shall see below.
I shall now attempt to identify the sequence of stages leading up to the
analysts compulsion to judge:
1. Regression of the analyst to the same level as the patients transference
regression.
2. Empathic identification of the analyst with the patient.
3. Resonance of the analysts libidinal and aggressive drives with those
experienced by the patient in his regression, or reactivation of those
drives.
4. Emergence of the analyst from the state of identification with the
patient, followed by consciousness of his own primitive impulses that
have thereby been reawakened. This process can be described as a confession by the analyst to himself, in effect along the following lines: I
too have had, and am to some extent still having, the same primitive
phantasies and wishes as my patient.
5. The consciousness of this situation obliges the analyst to judge himself
and the patient; this has the consequence of the compulsion to condemn
himself and the patient or the compulsion to absolve himself and the
patient.
It is very important for the analyst to become conscious of two separate
things firstly, his own compulsion to judge and, secondly, his unconscious
reasons for condemning or absolving the patient at a given point in the analytic process. Consciousness of the compulsion to judge mitigates, but never
entirely eliminates, the compulsive character of the judgement.
I can well imagine that my thesis will give rise to objections, and I should
therefore like to support it with further considerations.
In my view, the study of what happens in our work with psychotics can
greatly help us to achieve a better understanding of what also happens,
albeit to a lesser extent, with our neurotic patients. The study of what happens in our countertransference with psychotics can afford a better illustration of what happens in our countertransference with neurotics, just as the
study of the more severe psychopathology of a psychotic can help us to
understand better its less severe counterpart in a neurotic subject.
Our analytic work with psychotic patients brings out in all their drama
and severity certain intense countertransference reactions on our part of
love, hate, anxiety, repulsion, primitive seduction, cruelty, perversion, and
so on (Fajrajzen, 1966, 1973).
An analyst working with psychotics experiences in powerful form the
compulsion, which is often perfectly conscious, to condemn or absolve
the patient. It cannot, of course, be imagined that these reactions, which
are so dramatic and obvious in an analyst working with psychotic
patients, are absent in an analyst who treats neurotics: in the contact
with neurotics, such reactions are admittedly less intense and less exposed
to the light of day, so that the analyst may overlook, repress, deny, or
989
isolate them, and consequently bask in the illusion of more or less complete neutrality.
Ultimately, it seems to me that the compulsion to judge is always present
in us, whether consciously or unconsciously, in the treatment of both psychotic and neurotic patients.
It is my hope that the examples given here will make it clearer that the
terms compulsion to condemn and compulsion to absolve refer exclusively to the analysts inner experience and not to verbal or behavioural
expressions of condemnation or absolution of the patient expressions
which, in theory at least, ought never to exist. Yet our compulsion to judge,
especially if unconscious, may ooze out of our behaviour, the tone of our
interpretation, the form and even the content of the interpretation itself, or
the atmosphere of our silence. Let us again recall Freuds concise formulation: betrayal oozes out of [us] at every pore. Although Freud was referring to patients, his remark also applies to the analyst, and it is indeed
possible for the analyst to fall victim to an unconscious compulsion of his
own to confess, in some non-verbal way, his moral judgement of condemnation or absolution in relation to a given attitude, behaviour, character trait,
dream, parapraxis or symptom in his patient.
The compulsion to judge and analytic neutrality

Given these disconcerting countertransference difficulties, it seems to me
essential to confront the complex problem of the relationship between the
compulsion to judge and analytic neutrality.
Freuds recommendations on technique are well known: the analyst must
model himself on the surgeon, who puts aside all his feelings, even his
human sympathy. [. . .] The doctor should be opaque to his patients and,
like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him (Freud,
1912, pp. 115, 118). All these recommendations show that Freud felt the
need to defend both himself and the patient against the powerful impact of
the feelings generated by the encounter, or contest, between the two protagonists in the analytic enterprise. The most recent injunction to maintain
strict neutrality was expressed by Bion (1970, p. 69), who holds that the
analyst must eliminate even memory and desire in himself: memory is a
dwelling on the unimportant to the exclusion of the important. Similarly,
desire is an intrusion into the analysts state of mind which covers up,
disguises, and blinds him to, the point at issue [. . .].
Several analysts have cast doubt on the possibility of complete neutrality.
The most uncompromising opinion to that effect is that of Edward Glover
(1955, p. 169): The idea of the analysts complete neutrality, under ordinary analytic conditions, is something of a myth. Other analysts have advocated a kind of compromise between neutrality, detachment and coldness,
on the one hand, and involvement, benevolence and human warmth, on the
other. This attitude of compromise is reflected in recommendations to adopt
attitudes such as the following: benevolent curiosity (Sharpe, 1950); identification coupled with detachment (Little, 1951); or compassionate neutrality (Greenson, 1959).
S. Fajrajzen
990
Berman (1949, p. 160f.) stresses the typical paradox of our technique,

which calls for this twofold attitude of emotional involvement and detachment at one and the same time:
The answer could simply be that the analyst is always both the cool detached surgeon-like operator on the patients psychic tissues, and the warm, human, friendly,
helpful physician. I think that such an answer is essentially correct [. . .].
The paradox described by Berman cannot in my view be resolved by

means of such a simple technical recommendation. The two attitudes
required simultaneously of the analyst (neutrality and benevolence, detachment and involvement) in reality give rise to a highly complex and conflictual situation.
Let us return for a moment to the patients compulsion to confess.
We have seen how the compulsion to confess impels the patient to
express his most primitive and infantile impulses in the form of a message that could hypothetically take the following form: I, the patient,
love and desire you, the analyst; I want to cuddle you, kiss you, suck at
your breast, penetrate into you, and fuse with you; I want to attack
you, torment you, torture you, and destroy you. I want to be eaten by
you, held in your womb, cuddled, kissed, looked at, and penetrated by
you . . . I know that all this is illicit and forbidden, I feel shame and a
sense of guilt, but I cannot give up my wish and I ask you to satisfy it
for me . . . In a remote past, these wishes of mine were gratified at least
partly, but then they were frustrated and condemned with my profound
suffering and privation. I now ask you to reimburse and compensate me,
to cure me of my wounds; I finally want to have everything that has
been denied me for so many years4; if you cannot satisfy these wishes of
mine, can you at least accept me? Can you at least love me as I am,
without condemning me; can you at least promise me that you will not
abandon me, not leave me alone, desperately alone?
Our patients ultimately want to be accepted and loved as they are, including their most infantile and primitive aspects. There is in my opinion no
better illustration of this primordial demand by our patients than this quotation by a character in Andre Malrauxs (1933) novel Mans Fate:
Men are not my kind [. . .]; they are those who look at me and judge me; my kind
are those who love me and do not look at me, who love me in spite of everything,
degradation, baseness, treason me and not what I have done or shall do who
would love me as long as I would love myself even to suicide.
Likewise, our patient succeeds but only if supported by the analyst in

the hope of finding this total comprehension in revealing himself in his
innermost secret intimacy. But how does the analyst react to this disturbing
message conveyed to him by the patient? We have already answered the
question: the analyst faces the dilemma of either condemning himself and
4
According to Nunberg (1948), the most primordial reason for a patient to seek treatment is not the
wish for recovery, but the desire to be able to gratify his frustrated infantile wishes.
991
the patient or absolving himself and the patient. It seems to me that even
the most expert analyst cannot completely escape this choice, for he is constantly steering a course between two dangerous rocks the Scylla of the
compulsion to condemn and the Charybdis of the compulsion to absolve.
Both these attitudes represent a threat to neutrality and hence to the progress of the analytic and therapeutic process. After all, prevalence of the
compulsion to condemn obviously reinforces the patients superego, which
is as a rule already only too severe and rigid, while prevalence of the compulsion to absolve may excessively reinforce the primitive and infantile
aspects of the id.
How are these difficulties to be overcome? While navigating in these
treacherous waters, the analyst, torn between the alternatives of condemnation and absolution, may perhaps glimpse the possibility of a third
approach. Having already confronted his own abyssal, perilous depths
through the suffering involved in his personal analysis, he may now have
an inner experience that could be described as follows: Yes, I too, like
my patient, have been and am still to some extent infantile, narcissistic,
insatiable in my need for love, bad, envious, and jealous. I am
ashamed of this and condemn myself for it, but I also try to accept it
as an inevitable part of my perennially conflicted human condition. It is
my fate as a human being and an analyst to know and recognize myself
thoroughly, to condemn myself and absolve myself, and to continue to
experience this twofold attitude of mine, of condemnation and
absolution.
An analyst who has this inner experience can somehow convey the following message to the patient: Through your analysis you have recognized that you are infantile, narcissistic, insatiable in your need for love
and perverse, bad, envious, and jealous like an infant. It is natural for
you to condemn yourself, but it is also natural for you to absolve yourself, because all this belongs to your human condition of perennial inner
division.
The analyst who experiences and suffers this existential conflict with his
patient comes to resemble the judge-penitent in Camuss famous tale, The
Fall (1956).
In conclusion, the analysts message should be as follows: Well then, my
patient, I neither condemn you nor absolve you, but continue to experience
and suffer with you in your conflict, and I do my best to help you to become
conscious of your human condition of perennial inner division and to confront by yourself the eternal dilemma of condemnation or absolution.
It seems to me that in the light of this approach, the concept of analytic
neutrality can be seen from a different perspective. Analytic neutrality
must not and cannot be a point of departure, but can become a point of
arrival for an analyst who experiences and suffers the neurotic and existential conflict with his patient. If neutrality were a point of departure an
attitude assumed by the analyst from the very beginning of the treatment
he would not be involved in his patients suffering, but would remain in an
aloof, defensive position, and his therapeutic influence would thereby be
diminished.
S. Fajrajzen
992
The concept of neutrality can and indeed must be considered in greater

depth because it lends itself to confusion. The word neutrale [neutral] is
defined as follows in the Garzanti dictionary of the Italian language (1965,
translated): not taking the side of either of two adversaries; from the Latin
neutralis or neuter: neither one nor the other. In the neurotic conflict, the
two adversaries are the ego and the id; the ego and the superego; the child
and the adult; and the male and the female within us. It seems to me that
the analyst, far from being neutral, should identify with each of the two
antagonists fighting with each other in the patient; it is only in this way,
through involvement in his patients inner struggle, that he can get close to
a position of neutrality experienced and suffered.
It might perhaps be possible to distinguish two types of neutrality: neutrality experienced and suffered; and a pre-programmed, cold and detached
neutrality. The latter often results from the analysts excessive use of
defences against the anxiety stemming from his countertransference regression. Chief among these defences are:
1. Withdrawal of the libido cathected on to the patient, potentially leading
to a lack of emotional interest in the patient.
2. Isolation.
3. Repression and disavowal by the analyst of his emotional reactions.
4. Projection. The analysts hostility to the patient is attributed to the latter, who is experienced as a bad, persecutory object and is therefore condemned, while the analyst absolves himself.
5. Turning against himself: the analyst turns his aggression towards the
patient against himself and therefore condemns himself and absolves the
patient.5
By constantly becoming conscious of these defence mechanisms, the analyst may be helped in the laborious task of avoiding an attitude of cold and
detached neutrality. Detached neutrality permits intellectual but not emotional consciousness in the analyst, and in consequence the patient too may
well gain intellectual but not emotional insight. The opposite danger also
exists: an analyst who experiences and suffers excessively with his patient
may become incapable of achieving the detachment necessary for attaining
the intellectual consciousness that should always follow the acquisition of
emotional consciousness.
I should like to end by reproducing the following remarks by Freud in
relation to his theory of the life and death instincts (1920, p. 59):
[. . .] people are seldom impartial where ultimate things, the great problems of science and life, are concerned. Each of us is governed in such cases by deep-rooted
internal prejudices, into whose hands our speculation unwittingly plays.
It seems to me that these considerations can be applied to the work we

do with our patients. After all, our activity puts us in touch on a daily basis
5
So there are at least four possible vicissitudes of the compulsion to judge: (a) the analyst condemns
himself and the patient; (b) the analyst absolves himself and the patient; (c) the analyst condemns the
patient and absolves himself; and (d) the analyst condemns himself and absolves the patient.
993
with the great problems of science and analytic knowledge and with those
of life and death as reflected in the microcosm of our patient. It is vitally
important for us to be conscious at all times of our compulsion to judge,
and hence to prejudge, matters where knowledge of our patient and ourselves is concerned.
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ethical, philosophical, religious, and artistic dimensions, are manifested in