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In an essay written in 1930, the great German writer Hermann Hesse spoke strongly against the abuse of psychoanalytic insights by literary critics, and protested, with trenchant irony, against the attempt to explain the personality of an author by the psychoanalytic investigation of his works: "If a patient should say to his analyst, 'My dear sir, I don't have either the time or the inclination for all these sessions, but I will give you here a package containing my dreams, wishes and fantasies in so far as I have written them down, partly in verse; please take this material and decipher from it, if you please, whatever you need to know'—what a scornful response would such a naïve patient receive from the doctor!" (7).
The problem which Hesse points up so sharply has remained an important one from the early days of psychoanalysis to the present. Can there be psychoanalysis without the persevering study of transference and resistance in the consistent and relatively objective form of free associations, supported by the (at least initially present) cooperation of the analysand? The question is, of course, academic: psychoanalysts, beginning with Freud, have not restricted themselves to observing under optimal conditions but have employed the