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DR. LIPTON HAS LONG BEEN EMBARKED on a lonely crusade to prove that Freud did not change his technique after 1910. No one except
H. Racker in 1968 seems to have agreed with him, least of all Freud, whose many technical papers after that marked continuous progression beyond 1910.
I was surprised and flattered to find myself chosen as the paradigm of contemporary standard analysis and I do indeed appreciate the time and effort Dr. Lipton has put into the usual critiques of the silent, neutral analyst. In general, a single session with one patient may differ considerably from another with him, and from sessions with other patients. Therefore the present sampling is just that. I am not disclaiming it—I am making that point before I join in generalizations. Moreover, I am sure Dr. Lipton committed an important methodological error when he dissociated the case from the specific thesis it was supposed to illustrate. The "standard analyst", as far as I am able to judge, does not use Freud's analytic pact and I was trying (not too hopefully) to persuade him to do so. I therefore match Dr. Lipton as a crusader, albeit not a particularly vigorous one.
My approach is actually from a rather suspect side—that of the therapeutic and working alliances, which are usually criticised by the "standards" as oriented to a two-person relationship that departs more or less from neutrality in the direction of helpfulness. Dr. Lipton rather lifts his eyebrows at the notion that Freud in 1938 was still making fundamental new contributions to analytic technique. The fact is however that the analytic pact, as its name implies, is indeed an alliance between the normal ego of the patient and the normal ego of the analyst. The patient promises to say without reserve everything that comes to his mind (free association), the