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Over the years I have discovered that I write for various reasons. I say it this way because when I started my psychoanalytic journey I never planned to be a writer, and I didn't know what impelled me to write. At some point I realized that I had started writing—and continued to write—in order to understand something that was puzzling me. Once I was able to find my own mind through psychoanalysis, I realized that I had many questions about assumed wisdom.
I found there was no better way to approach the many questions I had than writing about them. Only in writing am I able to see how an interesting idea—when put to paper is full of vagueness, gaps in logic, or unsubstantiated speculations. Being honest with myself about the clarity of my ideas is one of the most difficult parts of writing. It is easy, sometimes, to both realize an idea needs further elaboration and say to myself, “Oh, it's good enough.” Through work on editorial boards, I found that often a paper submitted to a journal has a thought-provoking idea as its premise, but the author offers fuzzy explanations or ambiguous clinical examples to support an argument. Given my own experience it is not difficult to understand how this happens. It's always helpful to have a colleague who will be frank in offering criticism, and I've been fortunate in this regard.
I believe that over the past forty years I have discovered elements of psychoanalytic technique—and a Freudian theory that explains them—that are central to how psychoanalysis is curative.1 As my understanding has developed through analytic work with patients and by reading other authors, my thinking has expanded from the ideas expressed in my first papers on technique (1992, 1993).2 I have found that when I present my perspective