You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychoanalysts and intellectual historians have much in common. Both aim to explore, re-create, and construct a narrative of thoughts and ideas from an earlier life or time. Both use primary sources in their research: the psychoanalyst explores the patient's fantasies, dreams, and associations, and the historian the personal histories, writings, and other communications of the major figures in the story to be told. Finally, both analyst and historian want to uncover new connections in the material that they explore and bring to life in their respective settings. In From Obstacle to Ally: The Evolution of Psychoanalytic Practice, Judith Hughes makes these parallels explicit. She does a masterful job of presenting the history of the clinical theory and practice of psychoanalysis, with the goal of showing how “failures” or technical problems in technique prompted “major advances in psychoanalytic practice” (p. 1).
The book is valuable on many levels. First, it is fun to read. Hughes tells illuminating stories about analysts and their patients and colleagues to illustrate her theory of how technique evolved. Second, she implicitly reminds us where we have been as a profession—both theoretically and technically. Naturally, one must therefore think about where we are headed. Third, From Obstacle to Ally is a valuable teaching text for any course in psychoanalytic history, technique, or clinical theory. Hughes's notes and annotated bibliography are a treasure in themselves.
To tell her stories most effectively, Hughes organizes the book by problems encountered historically in the treatment of five diagnostic categories—hysteria, obsessional neurosis, depression, paranoia, and narcissism. Clinical problems arose in the psychoanalytic treatment of each of these diagnoses, and Hughes describes each obstacle and how it was addressed by analysts who were the “lineal descendents of Freud” (p. 2). She focuses in the first chapter, for example, on the concept of transference as it i