Mit Freud über Freud hinaus. Ausgewählte Vorlesungen zur Psychoanalyse [With Freud and beyond Freud: Selected lectures on psychoanalysis] By Wolfgang Loch Revised and edited by Josef Dantlgraber and Werner Damson Tübingen:  Edition Diskord. 2001.  143 pp.

In 1974-5, the years in which the lectures in this book took place, Wolfgang Loch was considered the leading German psychoanalyst, both as a clinician and as a theoretician and author of the most important articles in handbooks. In some quarters he was hailed as the German Bion. From 1969, he held the first chair of psychoanalysis in Germany. He was criticised by his psychoanalytic teachers in that country because he developed his thinking essentially from his treatments of patients. Some found it painful to observe that, in contrast to other German psychoanalysts, such as Alexander Mitscherlich, Alfred Lorenzer and Horst Eberhard Richter, he neither adopted a public position on contemporary political questions nor put forward any more general cultural and social theory. In this domain, Loch remained a student of the clinical thinking of the time of the three British psychoanalytical schools and the New York and Californian self-psychologists. As a clinician, he limited himself to using his native ability with his perceptions and thoughts to form his own hypotheses, attempts at refutation and theories. With the sentence ‘That could have been done differently, but not better’, he managed to allude to a dominant theory while at the same time acknowledging an independent interpretation by one of his supervisees. This was one of his special characteristics. His teaching was therefore classified as psychoanalytic constructivism, although this judgement was not always viewed entirely positively by adherents of stricter psychoanalytic schools. Loch, however, was able to tolerate criticism.

It is clear from his lectures that he not only understood how to develop his own ideas in a different and exciting way but beyond this could also accept and represent other theories. Even before the concept was invented, he was giving interactive lectures. Listeners could intervene in his talk with ideas that Loch could take up and develop further. If the contribution was intended to dest