Some Remarks on Psychoanalytic Technique

Psychoanalytic technique is what distinguishes psychoanalysis from other forms of psychotherapy. It evolved gradually over the course of years from its beginnings in hypnosis to what we are familiar with today. At every stage of its development what an analyst did was guided by the understanding that was current at the time of how the mind works and what makes people mentally ill. It was guided, in other words, by what was known at the time of mental functioning and of psychopathology. At the beginning, that is, after he had given up hypnosis, what Freud was after were memories of what his patient was thinking and feeling at the time the patient's hysterical or obsessional symptoms first appeared, because that was what he thought had caused the patient's symptoms in the first place and what had to be abreacted for the patient to get rid of those symptoms. The technique he used was suggestion. He put his hand on his patient's forehead and told the patient that when he removed his hand something would come to the patient's mind that would lead to the desired but forgotten memories. Later on Freud realized that the origins of his patients' pathogenic conflicts reached far back into their child-hoods so that memories of relatively recent events weren't the real keys that unlocked the secrets of the conflicts that gave rise to their symptoms. He developed the method that he called free association, a method which, together with dream analysis, enabled him to reconstruct his patients' childhood sexual fixations. As he learned to recognize the manifestations of transference and came to appreciate their importance, he focused his therapeutic attention on them as well. As a result, psychoanalysis came to be variously defined as the method