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In considering the application of psychoanalysis to therapy, it may be well to recall that Freud during the early years of his investigations was not primarily interested in obtaining therapeutic results. Perhaps it is fair to say that until the very end the scientific and cultural implications of his structure engrossed him more deeply than its clinical aspects. Historically we may note that Wilhelm Stekel, editor of the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse with its subtitle, Medical Monthly for Psychic Science, showed a decided predilection for the direct approach and quick results. One of the causes of his disagreement in 1913 with Freud lay in his eagerness for therapeutic success and his readiness to discard the careful investigations of the unconscious which Freud considered necessary.
Since 1913 psychoanalysts have been questioning classical psychoanalytic procedures and seeking methods by which protracted and stagnant analyses might be shortened. When psychoanalysis was introduced into America about 1907, the fact that the early analysts lacked the guidance and supervision, direct or indirect, of Freud fostered many procedures which Freud certainly would not have approved both in private practice and the out-patient clinics of Cornell, Columbia and Mount Sinai. Also abroad many dissidents from Freud's formulations lost little time in putting their differences into print—among them Jung, Stekel, Adler, Ludwig Frank's, Psychocathartic Treatment of Nervous Disorders (1927), and very recently (1945) Alphonse Maeder's, Ways to Psychotherapy.
The book of Alexander and French and their co-workers at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute represents the first attempt from within the ranks of freudian psychoanalysts to advocate openly and to estimate the value of psychoanalysis when applied briefly. They regard their work as 'a continuation and realization of ideas first proposed by Ferenczi and Rank', and state of 'of more recent contributions, the work of Oberndorf com