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Freud, we know, had 'never been a therapeutic enthusiast' (Freud, 1933, p. 151). Throughout his life he maintained an austere reticence, verging on the pessimistic, regarding the therapeutic effects of the analytic process. In a letter to Jung (25.1.1909), we find him saying: 'To salve my conscience I often tell myself: above all, don't try to cure, just learn and earn some money. These are the most useful conscious aims' (Freud, 1961, p. 288). We are all familiar with the most modest and humble way he ends his 'Studies on Hysteria' (1895), with the following passage:
When I have promised my patients help or improvement by means of a cathartic treatment I have often been faced by this objection: 'Why, you tell me yourself that my illness is probably connected with my circumstances and the events of my life. You cannot alter these in any way. How do you propose to help me, then?' And I have been able to make this reply: 'No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health you will be better armed against that unhappiness.'
And in his last serious discussion of the question of technique and cure in 'Analysis Terminable and Interminable' (1937), Freud summed up his own stand as follows:
Our aim will not be to rub off every peculiarity of human character for the sake of a schematic 'normality', nor yet to demand that the person who has been 'thoroughly analysed' shall feel no passions and develop no internal conflicts. The business of the analysis is to secure the best possible psychological conditions for the functions of the ego; with that it has discharged its task.
We now know that this paper was, partially at least, a retrospective answer to Ferenczi's reproach to Freud that he had not analysed sufficiently Ferenczi's negative transferen