Stephen grosz on the aim of psychoanalysis

I'm reading Love's Labour (or Love's Labor), by Stephen Grosz. I love his writing, and his other book - The Examined Life - is one of the very few books I've ever recommended to a patient. I struggle with Grosz, for at least one reason: it's very hard to know just what it is I'm reading, when I'm reading one of his books. He presents what purports to be anonymized clinical material, but there's just no way; it's either fiction, or it's not. I don't really mind the "fiction" possibility. If it is fiction, he's a great writer. But I don't love the liminal space in which he puts us as readers, having to believe simultaneously in the emotional truth of his words, but not in the transcriptual truth. I don't generally struggle with that challenge. In literature, though, I do, just a bit.

Anyway - my point here isn't to review the book, or to lament the ways in which I struggle with it. Rather, it's to share a passage I really loved:

"An aim," Grosz writes, "is an intrusion on the patient's autonomy - an attack on the power to identify one's own desires, decide one's own mind. Guilding the patient, even toward some benefit, limits psychoanalysis. Over time, as Freud gained clinical experience, he became alert to this danger. In paper after paper - especially in the New Introductory Lectures - he set out his view that a desire to cure the patient, what he called 'therapeutic zeal,' is a sign of the psychoanalyst's underlying cruelty. 'Helping the patint,' 'improving her well-being' - these aims can disguise an unconscious wish to limit the patient's freedom"

He continues, in his next paragraph, "The medicine of psychoanalysis is not helping but understanding. I remember something the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion told a patient: 'I don't know why you're so angry with me - I'm not trying to help you.'"