Ron Britton in conversation with David Tuckett on What Do Analysts Do

“Knowing What Psychoanalysts Do and Doing What Psychoanalysts Know” published in the United States on February 9^th 2024 by Rowman and Littlefield, contains an in-depth discussion of sixteen clinical cases of psychoanalysis. The book tries to answer the question of what psychoanalysts do when they are practicing psychoanalysis. The Comparative Clinical Methods author team, led by David Tuckett, collaborated with over a thousand colleagues worldwide over twenty years to collect a unique dataset of everyday clinical sessions, using a new workshop discussion method designed to reveal differences. Faced with diversity and wanting to surface and understand it, they had to evolve a new theoretical framework. This framework covers different approaches to the analytic situation (using the metaphors of cinema, dramatic monologue, theater, and immersive theater): different sources of data to infer unconscious content; differences in the troubles patients unconsciously experience and how to approach them; and differences in when, about what, and how a psychoanalyst should talk.

Taking the form of eleven very practical questions for psychoanalysts to ask of each session they conduct, the framework helps experienced psychoanalysts and students alike determine their intention and independently assess their progress. A final chapter applies the new framework and practical questions to contemporary technical controversies with some surprising results.

Ron Britton and David Tuckett, both past winners of the Sigourney Award, are distinguished fellows and training and supervising analysts of the British Psychoanalytical Society. This conversation offers a unique opportunity to explore crucial questions for everyday psychoanalysts and psychotherapists with the opportunity for the audience to submit questions to the two participants.

“An admirable, heroic, rigorous, sustained, effort that gives us access to information well beyond surmise, the only other approach to find out what analysts do, and even more valuably what they think and what they unknowingly believe they are doing and why. The book is very stimulating and I hope our fellow practitioners appreciate it.” - Ronald Britton