During the earliest days of psychoanalytic practice, Freud and his students, excited by their discoveries, put great emphasis on the active role of the psychoanalyst. Even though he showed himself to be less of an inquisitor than in the Studies on Hysteria, it was the analyst who intervened, interpreted, "analyzed," and the patient was, at least in theory, the person on whom some form of therapeutic activity was practiced. The patient was the "analysand" of a psychoanalyst, who possessed the necessary theoretical knowledge from having first "undergone" the initiatory experience of psychoanalysis himself.
British authors were the first to use the gerundive form "analysand" to refer to the patient in analysis. The term is found as early as 1925 in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and was regularly used by English authors before the Second World War. As psychoanalysis developed and spread, and as increasing emphasis was placed on the transference and counter-transference in the dynamics of therapy, the patient turned out to be at least as, and sometimes more, active than the analyst. In 1972 Joyce McDougall created the term "anti-analysand."
Alain de Mijolla
See also: Framework of the psychoanalytic treatment; Psychoanalytic treatment; Technique with adults, psychoanalytic.
McDougall, Joyce. (1972). L'anti-analysant en analyse. Revue française de psychanalyse, 36, 167-206.