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When invited to give the 18th Freud Anniversary Lecture, Miss Anna Freud chose to define the critical issues in the contemporary development of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Basically, there are two issues: namely that of the widening scope of analytic therapeutics, and that of metapsychological theorizing. Miss Freud assembles the momentum of her argument with an impeccable catholicity of judgement. Regarding the first issue, she argues that 'what strikes the observer first is a change in the type of psychic material with which the analysis is dealing'. She makes her stand explicit and definite on this score: 'There is, further, the question whether the transference really has the power to transport the patient back as far as the beginning of life. Many are convinced that this is the case. Others, myself among them, raise the point that it is one thing for preformed, object-related fantasies to return from repression and be redirected from the inner to the outer world (i.e. to the person of the analyst); but that it is an entirely different, almost magical expectation to have the patient in analysis change back into the prepsychological, undifferentiated, and unstructured state, in which no divisions exist between body and mind or self and object.' Now, it is up to those who evaluate the therapeutic prospects differently to state their case with a matching veracity, if not equal clarity.
The second issue—that of theory-making—Miss Freud handles with an even sharper discernment, and her whole statement compels full quotation: 'Nevetheless, in our times, the term metapsychology has assumed a very different meaning. What it denotes now is largely theory building, distant from the area of clinical material, an activity which demands and is reserved for a specfic quality of mind. As such it has become the bugbear of the clinically orientated analyst who feels wholly divorced from it. This brings about a division which, in the long run, threatens both a