Difficulties in the Path of Psychoanalysis. A Confrontation of Past with Present Viewpoints: By Anna Freud. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1969, 88 pp.

This little book contains the Eighteenth Freud Anniversary Lecture given by Anna Freud for the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in April 1968. After commenting on the difficulties seen by Freud in his 1937 paper, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, Miss Freud turns her attention to developments in the last thirty years. She reports on her impressions of difficulties met in the field of child analysis and lists at least four personality characteristics that lead to failures in therapy.

In directing attention to the various suggestions for improving analytic efficiency, Miss Freud cites several current changes and movements in psychoanalytic technique and theory formation. She stresses particularly the analysis of the first year of life with the purpose of therapeutically modifying the impact of the earliest happenings. Freud's discovery that every adult neurosis is preceded by an infantile neurosis, which must be analyzed before the neurosis can be reached, is carried further. Every infantile neurosis in the Oedipal period is preceded by fateful interactions between infant and mother in the first few days and months of life. It is this archaic preverbal phase which has to be revived in the