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My aim is to follow up the main trend in Freud's general thesis, that for the aetiology of psycho-neurosis we must look to the Oedipus complex, and therefore to the interpersonal relationships as between three persons belonging to the child's toddler age. I do thoroughly believe in this theory. I have worked on the basis of this theory for forty years, and I believe, as most psycho-analysts do, that the training in the psycho-analytic technique should be done in respect of cases that can be treated by classical technique, that is, a technique devised for precisely this: the analysis of the psycho-neurotic.
As supervisors of students we find ourselves at our best when the student analyst has a good case, and indeed good analysis can only be done on a good case. If the case is not good (psycho-neurotic) we cannot tell whether the student is doing well or badly in his or her effort to learn the basic technique of our craft.
We all know, however, that in our practical work, once we are qualified as analysts, we cannot restrict our work to the analysis of psycho-neurotics. To start with, as our work gets deeper and more thorough we discover the psychotic (may I use the word?) elements in our psycho-neurotic patients. To jump ahead with my thesis, the pregenital fixations of our psycho-neurotic patients turn out sometimes to be there in their own right, not simply as regressive phenomena organized in defence on account of anxieties belonging to the Oedipus complex proper.
We cannot always make a correct diagnosis at the beginning. Some reactive depressions turn out to be more severe than we could have guessed; especially does hysteria tend eventually to show psychotic features as analysis proceeds. And there is the very real bugbear of the as-if personality—that which I personally