The analyst and the working alliance

the long version

Heinrich Deserno undertakes a critical examination of Greenson's working alliance concept and its claim to represent the basis for any kind of rational collaboration between psychoanalyst and patient. Deserno argues not only that this concept denies the analyst participation in the shaping of the transference process, but also that its postulation of a domain "outside" the transference situation lays the analytic situation wide open to the ingress of all kinds of social conventions geared to an unthinkingly meritocratic conception of what "work" actually means. Thus an uncritical orientation to the working alliance concept will necessarily undermine the critical potential inherent in psychoanalysis.