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Since psychoanalysis is not, like chemistry, a series of learnable and teachable techniques, it has to be passed-on by apprenticeship. Supervision of two or three cases offers a student, along with personal analysis, intimate contact with three or four established analysts, but apart from these and one or two intimates, how do we know the results or the methods of our colleagues?
Remarkably enough there are few accounts of clinical work which tell to the new, and to the learning, analyst how others, who are believed to be successful, work. Big issues of theory are pretty much established but it made a great impression when James Strachey told that he had reproached Freud for falling asleep in the hour and Freud had replied 'You shouldn't be so boring'. Also it was important when Guntrip described Fairbairn and Winnicott at work: the one fortified behind a desk and having long talks after the hour, about theory, before Guntrip caught the train from Edinburgh to Leeds. Winnicott coming in balancing a cup of tea and sitting behind on the edge of a hard chair.
Inventions always seem obvious once they are invented: the wheel; fire. So what are the issues which we would compare today with Freud's systematic studies of the oedipal complex, resistance, defence 'reminiscences' and the unconscious? Perhaps, since we take so much in common for granted, it is individual style.
The Piggle is one of those rarely open descriptions which establish a style. It is about