Where the Wild Things are

Freud's “‘Wild’ Psycho-Analysis” (1910/1957) is about what constitutes psychoanalytic practice, and who may call herself a psychoanalyst. The paper was published in 1910, the same year in which the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) was founded. This coincidence underscores the links between practice, malpractice, and regulation, as Freud states in the last paragraph of the paper that he founded the IPA to separate the true psychoanalysts from the wild ones.

If my German were at all serviceable, I'd know whether wilde has the same connotations as the English wild, but since it is not, I'll risk speculating that antonyms of the word, as Freud used it, might be controlled, orderly, or disciplined. Freud first takes to task a physician whose treatment of a patient included errors in diagnosis, theory, and technique. These errors were committed in the name and under the rubric of psychoanalysis. Freud's purpose is to discriminate between this practitioner and his practices, on the one hand, and psychoanalysts and their practices, on the other; to disavow the former and endorse the latter.

The doctor's diagnostic error consisted of interpreting a patient's anxiety as a symptom of actual neurosis when it was more likely a symptom of psychoneurosis. To explain, an actual neurosis is defined as a condition in which anxiety results from present day sexual deprivation or abstinence rather than from the repression of sexual impulses due to events in childhood or infancy.

The doctor's theoretical error (Freud calls it a scientific error) consisted of his failure to consider the effects of repression, defense, and resistance in producing the anxiety; his technical or procedural errors were that he did not exercise the tact and consideration that would conduce to the development of the positive transference necessary to the patient's tolerance of interpretations, or do the preparatory work of bringing the repressed contents to the surface.

For Freud, a c