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DR. FRIEDMAN HAS SUCCEEDED IN packing into her 45-minute presentation an astounding amount of information about one crucial segment of a lengthy analysis. She has assembled her material with great skill, offering sufficient detail to provide a coherent narrative, without ever narrowing the focus to microscopic observational data that would only obscure the analytic forest to highlight certain interesting trees. At the same time, Friedman has
entirely refrained from stating any conclusions about the significance of her narrative; this tactful approach permits us to discuss her material without running the risk of seeming to second-guess her about the nature of the transactions she has described.
Despite her tour de force in summarizing a series of complex events, Friedman's selection of data inevitably imposes certain limitations on the kind of discussion we can fruitfully engage in. To mention only the most obvious of these boundaries, we have no information whatsoever about the course of the treatment over the six long years that preceded the events we are being asked to review. This terminus before which all is veiled in darkness makes it useless to speculate about possible reasons for the difficulties Friedman encountered in dealing with analytic developments in the seventh year of treatment. To put the matter somewhat differently, we are not in a position to judge whether the issues that became central at this late stage of the game could have been illuminated earlier in the analysis or not, depending on a different technical approach or a different personal response on the part of the analyst. I do not raise this point as a criticism of the presentation; on the contrary, I am merely trying to justify the rather narrow focus of my own thoughts about Friedman's mate