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We are all familiar with Freud's account of the historical development of his own attitudes toward psychoanalytic therapy. In his early therapeutic efforts he directly interpreted repressed psychic contents and was even somewhat annoyed, as the dream of Irma's injection shows, if the patient was not able to accept his interpretation. Later, however, he came to realize that repressed mental contents could only be brought to consciousness by analyzing the ego's defenses against them.
It has now become a standard principle of psychoanalytic technique, therefore, not to interpret the repressed content of id impulses directly without first carefully orienting oneself as to the nature and strength of the ego's defenses against them. The fascination of deep unconscious material is so great, however, that even the most experienced analysts are frequently tempted to violate this important technical principle, and beginners in psychoanalysis usually find it much easier to recognize and interpret immediately repressed unconscious wishes than to restrain their delight in discovery until they have gone to the trouble of orienting themselves carefully as to the relation of these repressed impulses to the patient's conscious attitudes and behavior.
In the following discussion I wish both to illustrate this well recognized and well established technical principle and to propose an extension of it. The principles that I wish to suggest are, I believe, practiced intuitively, at least at times, by most experienced psychoanalysts, but I wish to propose a systematic elaboration and application of them.
Analysis of the resistances focuses our attention on the ego's defenses and upon the defensive function of the ego. The ego's