Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique. By Otto Fenichel, translated by David Brunswick. New York:  Psychoanalytic Quarterly Press, 1969,  130 pp. $39.99.

Otto Fenichel's Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique, originally published in 1941 and again in 1969 in paper by the Psychoanalytic Quarterly Press, is at once conspicuously dated and strikingly modern in its exposition of psychoanalytic theory and technique.

All assumptions stem from a belief in the economic theory of drives and the primacy of infantile sexuality. Focus on the drives leads Fenichel to conceptualize the central analytic goal as the transformation of infantile sexuality into genital sexuality; achieving that goal is facilitated by the freeing of dammed-up sexual energy, which in turn strengthens the orgastic response. Most analysts today are not so wedded to the theory of drives, but even those for whom it remains central would likely view these ideas as overly simplistic and limited. Aggression as a drive has come to hold a primacy at least equal to the sexual drive, and for many years it has been dominant at least among analysts in the United States, where issues around authority have become prominent since the late 1960's. Only recently has attention returned to sexuality—and now, attachment would be viewed as equivalent in importance by many analysts.

Fenichel's conceptualization of the psychosexual stages as discrete has likewise been superseded. Analysts today have integrated those pioneering ideas about infantile sexuality with the rich array of more recent discoveries rooted in both clinical experience and observational data. Contemporary psychoanalytic developmental theory has evolved a much more complex picture of overlapping stages, colored and influenced by other factors, such as cognitive development. There is no longer a belief that character and conflict are fixed by the age of five or that the capacity for emotional and cognitive flexibility are frozen at a particular point in development. Fenichel's conviction that analysis