Recent Advances in Psycho-Analysis1

The progress made in psycho-analytic knowledge during the past five or six years has been, in spite of the great external hindrances, very considerable, and in the attempt to present it one is met at the outset by two special difficulties: In the first place, the later researches have shewn that most of the problems in question are a good deal more complex than was perhaps at first realised, though such researches have naturally had to be based on the earlier work; it is therefore impossible to expound them without presupposing a knowledge of this earlier work, and I trust that this unavoidable fact will be borne in mind by those who find some of what follows too abstruse or abstract. The second difficulty in exposition is a more technical one, and is due to the multiplicity and variety of the contributions made during the past few years, which makes it hard to group or arrange them in any clear way. This difficulty I have dealt with mainly by the simple procedures of omission and selection. I shall not, for instance, touch on any branch of applied psycho-analysis except in the purely clinical field, and even here there are many interesting contributions with which I shall not be able to deal, among them being, to my regret, the valuable series of Pierce Clark's on the subject of epilepsy (1). In the narrower field itself thus circumscribed no general review of the literature will be attempted, this being now fortunately accessible elsewhere (2), and I shall merely aim at calling attention to a few of what I consider to be the main respects in which advance in our knowledge has been made. As may be anticipated from this definition, the work chiefly dealt with will be that of Freud himself, ever the pioneer in our science.

Technique. One striking new departure in technique has been made, the importance of which, however, cannot yet be estimated