Problems of psychoanalytic technique

It might be expected that all the subjects with which psychoanalytic literature deals, questions involving what actually takes place in a psychoanalytic treatment and how the analyst's part therein may be made most effective would predominate. But this expectation does not prove to be correct. Questions of technique are approached in only a small proportion of psychoanalytic writings. This fact may have various causes. In the first place, because the young science of psychoanalysis has as its object of study the totality of human mental phenomena, it must set itself so many questions that the problem of therapeutic technique becomes just one subject among many others. Second, analysts doubtless have a particular aversion to a detailed discussion of this subject, based in part on subjective uncertainty or restraint, but to a greater extent based upon the objective difficulties of the matter itself. A third reason is however the decisive one: the infinite multiplicity of situations arising in analysis does not permit the formulation of general rules about how the analyst should act in every situation, because each situation is essentially unique. Freud 1 therefore declared a long time ago that just as in chess, only the opening moves and some typical concluding situations are teachable, but not all that goes on in between and comprises the actual analytic work.

Nor can this presentation dispel those difficulties inherent in the subject. In the transcript of a course of lectures given in 1936 in Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, these discussions presuppose in the reader an elementary understanding of analytic technique as well as a knowledge of the general theory of neuroses. They do not attempt to fill the place of a textbook on technique for which the time is not yet ripe, but rather, as the title states, they deal with selected problems of technique.

The selection of problems is such that I am prepared to hear the objection that my discussions are 'too theoretical'. But I know from experience that one circumstance often makes particular difficulties for inexperienced analysts: they may react in their analytic practice in a thoroughly free and elastic manner, and they may also show a good knowledge of the theoretical concepts; however, their practical and their theoretical knowledge remain to a certain extent isolated from each other. It is difficult for them to recognize again the well understood theoretical concepts in what they see and experience in the patient, and still more in what they themselves say and do during the analytic hour. [from author's Preface]