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As for technique, if one compares the current situation with that which existed at the time of Freud’s death, psychoanalytic clinical work is a domain that has been modified and enriched considerably. There are multiple reasons for this, but the principal cause of this enrichment is the interest psychoanalysts have taken in pathological structures that had originally been excluded by Freud from the indications for analysis. When one compares the indications that he proposed for analysis at the beginning of his work and those that he announced in the article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1926, it can be seen that the list has grown considerably longer. There is a paradox here; for, though Freud seems on the one hand to have been emboldened and to have considered that psychoanalysis could achieve interesting results in a certain number of non-neurotic states, on the other he had also just described the compulsion to repeat and the negative therapeutic reaction (1920). However that may be, it was mainly after Freud, with the contributions of Melanie Klein and her pupils, that the field of therapeutic indications was extended in the direction of the non-neuroses. Melanie Klein did not trouble herself much with nosographical considerations. Following in the wake of Freud, she revised his ideas, underlining the regressive aspects that he had overlooked. This was the case with the Wolf Man. Between 1960 and 1970, some remarkable works appeared, the majority of which came from the Kleinian school, which could not fail to arouse the admiration of the reader. Certain bold and even adventurous therapeutic undertakings were reported concerning patients that few analysts had the courage to take into treatment. Herbert Rosenfeld, Hanna Segal, Betty Joseph, W. R. Bion were the heroes of this epic period in the discovery of unknown territories.
I have the feeling that although the adventure made the journey worthwhile, for it has taught us many things about psychotic functioni