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This book is an extremely articulate, well-researched, and thoughtfully annotated attempt at placing Freud's papers on technique in a historical context. Thus, the author first deals with the antecedent roots of these papers, and then with the current perspectives derived from these papers.
The first sections of this book deal with Freud's recommendations concerning the transference, dream interpretation, parameters of technique, and the questions of reconstruction and termination. In each of these sections, Ellman begins by explaining at what point in the evolution of Freud's theorizing that papers relevant to these issues occurred, and briefly summarizing the papers. The papers are then presented in their entirety, with annotations that are meant to further our understanding of Freud's writing. Each section ends with a comparison of Freud's papers with contemporary psychoanalysts' contrasting positions. Heinz Kohut and Merton Gill were chosen for the ways in which they have departed from analytic technique, while Charles Brenner represents a more classical (Freudian) position. Finally, the ways in which Freud actually conducted treatment are addressed (with emphasis on the case of the Rat man), as are the issues confronting an analyst at the beginning of the treatment process. In the last section of the book, there is a summary of the contrasting opinions of Freud, Brenner, Gill, and Kohut.
Ellman suggests that much of what Freud recommended concerning psychoanalytic technique was informed by the model of cure that characterized that phase of his thinking. Freud initially suggested that cure was a result of the recovery of pathogenic memories, while he later focused on the analysis of the transference neurosis. We can see how each of these models affects his thinking on the interpretation of dreams, the timing of