Psychoanalytic Explorations of Technique: Discourse on The Theory of Therapy. Harold P. Blum, Editor, New York:  International Universities Press, 1980,  468 pp.

The modifications of technique that may be required for the treatment of narcissistic patients strike many of the contributors to this collection as inconsistent with what they understand by psychoanalysis.

According to Blum, the editor, “Interpretation leading to insight is the specific and most powerful agent of the psychoanalytic curative process.” Since children and immature adults are developmentally restricted in their ability to employ insight and to profit from interpretation, he doubts whether the treatment employed for them can properly be called psychoanalysis.

Anna Freud and Hansi Kennedy agree that lack of insight is characteristic of children. Kennedy says that with children the analytic work goes hand in hand with the developmental process itself, and that intellectual insight plays a small part in the therapeutic results. Anna Freud notes that lack of insight in young children taxes the therapist's ingenuity and introduces the need for technical modifications which decrease with the age and maturity of the child.

Among the various contributors, Neubauer stands out by asking: “Does our clinical experience teach us that those patients who have achieved a stable and organized insight are those who have been cured?” He remarks that one view is that insight may be a byproduct of the analytic process, but that it is the process itself, not insight, that is therapeutic.