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Stekel promises to describe and explain his technique but he fails to do so. There is a display of a vast number of cases with practical advice strewn between. This book proves again that Stekel is a
practitioner lacking the faculty to integrate his knowledge and experience into a solid theoretical structure. He himself feels it and parries by emphasizing that intuition and artistic empathy are the essentials of psychoanalytic technique and by accusing psychoanalysts of the 'orthodox freudian school' of intricate speculation at the expense of the clinical aspects of their work.
Stekel criticizes the length of the 'orthodox' psychoanalytic treatment. He mentions modestly, that Ferenczi and Rank tried to introduce his (Stekel's) method of short treatment, but that they were unsuccessful because they did not recognize that the unconscious does not exist and that the patients are merely actors whose deceptive manoeuvres must be recognized by the artistic physician with the intuition required by the 'active method'. Stekel admits infantile developments that influence the personality but he says it is one's life conflict (actual conflict) that is the essence of a patient's neurosis. This conflict is exposed and the patient (provided with the analyst's advice on how to handle it) is cured whether he believes it or not. Orthodox freudians merely poke around in the past and are blind to the most important actual conflicts, especially to the overwhelmingly important religious conflicts of the patients.
He contends that thirty years of practical experience have proved to him that there is no unconscious; therefore it is very interesting to learn what kind of faulty technique he must have applied to lead him to the negation of Freud's fundamental discovery. Since he fails to furnish a comprehensible description of his 'active' technique one has to pick from his book some outstanding examples of his procedure in order to gain an impression of what he is doing with his pa