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If one has been following the literature about Freud's clinical techniques that has accumulated over the past few decades, Unorthodox Freud will come as a refreshing improvement to the more stereotypical view of what Freud was apt to do in practice. Lohser and Newton do not concentrate on Freud's technical recommendations, although of course they refer the reader to what Freud wrote about that which he thought a proper analysis supposedly consisted of. Lohser and Newton had the splendid idea of looking at some published first-hand accounts put in print by Freud's former patients, and the authors of Unorthodox Freud deal with Freud's analyses of Abram Kardiner, Hilda Doolittle, Joseph Wortis, John Dorsey, and Smiley Blanton. Although the bulk of the book gets taken up by separate chapters devoted to each of these cases, and presents the clinical situations from the point of view of patients, some general conclusions about technique do emerge from the material that is recounted.
As far as I could detect, however, neither Lohser nor Newton seems to have had any personal familiarity with the patients they have chosen to write about, and the result is unfortunately on the wooden side. I was myself able to meet and interview Kardiner, Wortis, and Blanton, and had some correspondence with Dorsey; perhaps it is not surprising that Unorthodox Freud seems to be humanly disappointing. One might never guess, from the narrative the authors came up with, many of the idiosyncratic traits characteristically associated with the patients in question. To take an extreme example, I recall Kadiner telling me (with his typical pungency) that Hilda Doolittle had been psychotic, whereas all Lohser and Newton concede is that she belongs in today's category of “borderline,” a wastebasket concept as far as I am concerned. Regrettably nothing that Lohser and Newton describe reminds me of the patients they are writing about, although the authors have conscientiously studied the narrow published