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This book seems primarily designed for those whose theoretical knowledge of psychoanalysis exceeds their clinical experience. A narrative, rather than an exposition, it describes psychic changes in response to analysis, clarified and emphasized by frequent repetitions, illustrated and dramatized by excerpts from analytic hours. In his story, the author demonstrates such phenomena as the distinction between symptoms and psychopathology, the motivation and mechanisms of hysteria and accidents, the relationship between the unconscious and reality, including in his chapter headings, for instance, Regression to Infancy, The Father Fixation, The Homosexual Component and the Defenses Against It, and The Self-Sufficiency of the Anal Character.
Those to whom all these topics have become commonplace through long familiarity will be grateful for the vividness with which old tales are retold; others, still struggling to define and strengthen their understanding of these essentials will be glad of the insight the book brings them. However, many readers may well ask, 'Why did the author not stress that his patient was unusually familiar with analytic terminology, rather than give the impression that all analyses are conducted, as this one was, by talk of the ego and id? Is it true that what the author says to his patient should be couched in the same terms as his asides to his presumably more conversant readers?'
Statements like the following should be amplified, lest they mislead: 'He [the analyst] is able on appropriate occasions to give a really deep interpretation of the superficialities which the patient is presenting. Such an interpretation is not premature if it does not arouse the patient's resistances … this is a process of the analyst siding with the patient's id in contradistinction to his previous would-be mentors who have merely sided with his ego.' Sound as these observations are in their context, they would be better for some comment on the interpretation of r