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Review of A Clinical Introduction to Freud by Bruce Fink. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2017. 384 pp.
Bruce Fink's new book, A Clinical Introduction to Freud is a well-written, often insightful, yet ultimately frustrating book. When Fink is at his best, he is a clear, imaginative writer. His discussions of the unconscious, dreams, symptoms, and especially of two of Freud's cases, Dora and the Rat Man, are excellent, supple, and informative. Fink shows how unconscious wishes are disguised and presents dreams as the royal road to uncovering the unconscious, as Freud did. Fink's discussion of dreams is straightforward and imaginative and would be useful for early clinicians. His critiques of Freud's technique, especially Freud's reliance on authority, often transmitted through “interpretive blitzkrieg” (p. 194), are apt and to the point.
Fink describes how symptom relief comes from tracing a symptom to its unconscious origin. He writes beautifully that “… I would venture to liken the contents of the unconscious to a computer virus … progressively corrupting one bit of data after another…. In other words, the memory we push out of mind begins infecting other closely related memories, drawing them out of mind as well” (p. 9). The analyst's job is to make these unconscious memories, wishes, and ideas conscious and accessible through “reverse engineering,” the goal of which is to “reverse the effects of the application known as repression” (p. 8). The analyst does this through working with slips of the tongue, dreams, and other such pathways into the unconscious. Here, I think, we have a snapshot of what Fink believes makes someone neurotic and what the therapist's optimal role is in treatment.
Fink wants to explicate, “… the myriad techniques he (Freud) devised with which to get at the unconscious and thereby undo many of the ill-effects of repression” (p. xiii). Fink writes that these “most basic methods Freud developed for accessing the unconscious are no
longer taught to