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It is a rare pleasure to review a book on Freud by a major authority on Freud and psychoanalysis, and a friend. Dr. Friedman is professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical School, New York, a senior member of the Institute for the History of Psychiatry there, and an honorary member of American Psychoanalytic Association. In the course of his long career, Dr. Friedman has published numerous articles and books (e.g., The anatomy of psychotherapy, 600 pages long, published in 1988). His present book is a splendid book, a reader’s guide to Freud’s famous 1912-1915 papers on the psychoanalytic method enriched by multifaceted reflections on contemporary developments in psychoanalysis. Dr. Friedman invites the reader “to share the awe I feel before Freud’s little book, and to follow that awe into larger wonderings about psychoanalysis and the human condition” (p. 1). The climax of the book is the last chapter, number 15, in which, like Sigmund Freud in his 1926 “The question of lay analysis,” Dr. Friedman engages in a revealing dialogue with himself - and perhaps with an imaginary reader as well - to sum up the gist of the book.
Dr. Friedman’s interest in psychoanalytic methodology is exemplary among writers on psychoanalysis, most of whom focus on Freud’s theories of disorder. True, the bulk of the Standard edition of Freud’s psychological works does indeed deal with theories of disorder, whereas papers on technique remain a minimal fraction of it. Dr. Friedman therefore rightly disputes psychoanalyst Sander Abend’s emphasis on the relevance of the libido theory for the method. Dr. Friedman is thus spot-on to be concerned:
with questions like: What is the relationship between fantasy and memory? What does memory have to do with desire? How does fantasy—especially unconscious fantasy—get woven into current perception and striving? What is the relationship between habituated, passive perception and active intentional recreation? How can we describe wishes as hiding but