Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique

Introduction

One might expect that of all the subjects with which psychoanalytic literature deals, questions involving what actually takes place in a psychoanalytic treatment and how the analyst's part therein may be made most effective would predominate. But this expectation does not prove to be correct. Questions of technique are approached in only a small proportion of psychoanalytic writings. This fact may have various causes. In the first place, because the young science of psychoanalysis has as its object of study the totality of human mental phenomena, it must set itself so many questions that the problem of therapeutic technique becomes just one subject among many others. Second, analysts doubtless have a particular aversion to a detailed discussion of this subject, based in part on subjective uncertainty or restraint, but to a greater extent based upon the objective difficulties of the matter itself. A third reason is however the decisive one: the infinite multiplicity of situations arising in analysis does not permit the formulation of general rules about how the analyst should act in every situation, because each situation is essentially unique. Freud1 therefore declared a long time ago that just as in chess, only the opening moves and some typical concluding situations