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Our interest in a systematic extension of analytic technique involves close investigation and theoretical appreciation of the phenomena occurring in the course of treatment. We must understand fully the relation between the methods employed and the results observed, which factors bring about the desired effect and through which channels they gradually become operative.
One has hardly settled down to these problems before it becomes apparent that the methods of treatment as carried out at the present time do not provide a suitable starting-point for the investigation. The technique of psycho-analysis, advancing tentatively along the lines of empirical observation, has already reached a stage where the analyst can achieve striking therapeutic (and pedagogic) results, but where the therapeutic conditions have become so complicated that it is by no means easy to dissect them or to present them in proper perspective. Following a hint given by Freud, 2 we shall exploit the advantages to be gained by a consideration of earlier procedures in psycho-therapeutics. Although the demands made on them were more modest and their possibilities more limited, these methods proved of good service and provided a satisfactory basis from which further advances were possible. I refer of course to those historic phases of development in technique, the use of ordinary hypnosis, the application of Breuer's cathartic hypnosis, of Freud's catharsis in a waking condition and 'analysis of symptoms' which laid the foundations of pure psycho-analysis. In so far as one views these fore-stages or forerunners of psycho-analysis as separate methods of treatment and practises them as such, consideration of them in the light of our present theoretical understanding becomes a plain necessity of immediate practical value.
Coming first of all to the clinical sequence of events during treatment,