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The relative sparsity of psychoanalytic contributions either to the technique or to the theory of psychoanalytic treatment is not so amazing as Fenichel and many other practitioners before and after his time have found it. For it points as clearly to countertransference anxieties on the part of the analyst as the silences of the patient point to his resistances (transference or otherwise). It certainly cannot be attributed to lack of capacity on the analyst's part to describe or interpret psychic reactions or to elaborate theoretical systems. For in both these directions he has displayed a facility that verges on the compulsive.
The importance of this subjective block can be readily confirmed by contrasting articles dealing with matters of technique with those expounding the theory of the analytic situation. What the tyro and, no less, the experienced analyst continue to hope for is an adequate set of practical rules which will help them to guide the analytic process and to deal with the crises of anxiety and guilt which may arise during its course. What they usually get is a list of more or less agreed recommendations (which soon acquire the sanctity of axioms) having little specific relation to the differences between one clinical case and another. This exiguousness stands in marked contrast to the copiousness of such standardized theoretical outlines as they are offered and which tend to create the impression that the process of analysis can be pinned down and each phase set forth with cartographical exactitude.
This compensatory exposition of theory is subject to one serious drawback. It allows various unchecked idealizations of the process of psychoanalysis to masquerade in theoretical guise. Indeed it might be said with some justice that the more the analyst idealizes his technique, the more anxious and uncertain he is about it, with the result that the unfortunate student often finds himself confronted with a theoretical (therapeutic) ethic, which by ar