You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author, who lists 196 works in his bibliography (no index attached), painstakingly
confronts Freudian views and their exegeses according to his own system of presentation. This constitutes both the virtue and the shortcoming of his project. He has a gift of compiling, and also producing, good formulations. Clear insights are not lacking. Besides highlighting the problems of resistance, transference and counter-transference, he makes a point of tracing structural modifications as well. However, he makes a ponderous task of encompassing everything important in his treatise; it is not by chance that he is most impressed by Freud's having "taken the patient seriously". He takes his own need towards perfectionism too seriously. He discusses the problem whether there is a hierarchy of defences, or whether they should be divided into successful versus unsuccessful, repressed versus not repressed, "lower" versus "higher" ones, and whether they should be regarded as stages in ego development. He discusses the nature of counter-cathexes and how far they limit therapeutic work. He quotes the six methods of "taming the instincts" by Nietzsche which he regards as a separate category of resistance, and he does not forget to mention the "normal defences": "acceptance, reflection, judgment and appropriate action". He lists the "semantic" and "propositional" aspects of interpretation, and draws attention to the connexion between interpretation and the formation of the ego. Again, he distinguishes between "anaclitic-diatrophic" and "neurotic" transferences, the "therapeutic" transference and the transference of the ego ideal or the superego. He sees three limits to analytical interpretation: (i) limits of individual creativity, (ii) physiological-biological limits of primary repression and (iii) an "iatrogenic" limit. The conditions of communication (pre-conditions of interpretation) are: (i) "Mit-Sein" (togetherness, empathy), (ii) the dialogue, and (iii) the "