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On a spring afternoon, I approached a Manhattan cross-walk with my 3-year-old daughter in hand. Not a car was in sight. I began strolling across the street when I felt a tug. My daughter pointed to the blinking red sign and said: ‘it says don't go’. As the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud tried to formulate rules to teach his students how to make their way effectively and safely across many a mental street. Though the promised textbook on psychoanalytic technique never appeared, Freud offered his acolytes ways of learning through his expositions of dream analysis, his published case reports, and of course his seminal papers on technique. Freud also taught a select few psychoanalysts by performing their training analyses. And in those analyses—at least by his analysands’ reckoning—Freud did not practise all that he preached. In fact, he seemed to be jaywalking all the time.
The authors of this volume seek to foreground and refine our understanding of the contrast between Freud's technical writings and his actual analytic work. To do so, they present elegantly distilled summaries of some of the most famous published accounts by Freud's later analysands: Smiley Blanton, Hilda Doolittle, John Dorsey, Abram Kardiner and Joseph Wortis. There are no surprises here: all of this material has already been published in book form. In fairness, it should be said that though published, some of these accounts— Blanton's and Dorsey's, most obviously—are long out-of-print, and published by obscure