Unorthodox Freud: The View from the Couch

Dear Sir,

Makari's recent review of our book, Unorthodox Freud: The View from the Couch, is an example of a careless review (Int. J. Psychoanal., 1997, 78: 1039-1041). Although he generally likes the book, he fails to notice its most important findings and instead imagines it to support a stereotype about Freud's clinical work which we question in the introduction and energetically refute throughout the body of the book and in its conclusion. We do not find, as Makari represents, that Freud wrote one thing about treatment in his papers on technique and did another in practice—the old stereotype of the starched Freud in print and the undisciplined libertine in the consulting room. From a close study of his analysands' accounts, we found that Freud behaved in a natural, personally engaged, and expressive manner towards them. Further, we found that this way of relating to patients was, on the whole, consistent with his writings on technique.

Able to read Freud in German, we show that Strachey's translation of Freud's papers pervasively over-emphasized the aseptic aspects of Freud's advice about technique (sic—Strachey changed Freud's word, Ratschläge, meaning pieces of advice, into recommendations in the ‘Recommendations to Physicians’ series). Worse, those aspects of Freud's suggestions which survived translation concerning kindness, empathy, and openminded respect for the great variability of psychotherapeutic phenomena were already in Freud's day being ignored in Europe and scarcely weathered the crossing to the United States. We concluded that what is considered mainstream and orthodox technique, at least in the United States, is based upon a fundamental misunderstanding not only of Freud's practice, but of his writings as well. What is now considered orthodox technique is a neo-orthodoxy; this doesn't make it bad, only different.

Ongoing misunderstandings concern such critical matters as Freud's ideas about the handling of resistance and transference. In the