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This very readable book is an impressively simple but finely focused investigation into the persistence of the ironic question of its title. The extension of the question - one which has affected practitioners from Freud onwards - is what do psychoanalysts want from the practice of psychoanalysis: to further theoretical and clinical research, or to cure? Embedded in this is the other chronic query: is psychoanalysis a science, a philosophy or an art? And, whatever its definition, how is ‘success’ measured? The authors, Joseph Sandler and Anna Ursula Dreher, take a chronological approach - dividing the research neatly into decades of thought, and looking at the material from three different perspectives: historical, cultural and clinical.
Freud at first saw psychoanalysis as a cure - the ‘talking cure’ - whose aim was to alleviate the patient's symptoms, at least to the point of ‘transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness’, or, more cheerfully, to enable the patient to attain a greater capacity ‘to work and to love’. With Freud's scientific ambition for his work, these aims expanded to include a growing variety of more or less measurable criteria. Decade by decade, each chapter traces the development of the various aims and consequent processes of psychoanalysis, and the theories and factions that have grown and split along the way.
From the beginning, conflict existed between the two objectives: Freud's caution regarding furore sanandi, the passion to cure, is set against his statement, ‘it is not a good thing to work on a case scientifically, while treatment is still proceeding’. This duality of purpose is sustained throughout his writings and forms the foundation of the discourse between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. The authors make clear their own view, however, that those practitioners who continue to think of psychoanalysis as pure science are deceiving themselves, since ‘all analysts are affected by therapeutic aims’.
The book charts the course o