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While a psychoanalyst inevitably recapitulates stages of the development of psychoanalysis in his own progress as a practitioner, and while there are discouraging indications that instruction by others exerts relatively little effect on this course as compared with one's own experience as analysand and practitioner, the attempt to enable each generation of analysts to start ahead of the previous one must be made. The well-known aphorism that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it applies with special force to psychoanalysts because the same disagreements about theory and technique continue to recur in new guises.
This volume makes a contribution to the study of the history of technique by providing a good selection of twenty-eight of the less accessible, important technical papers of the past. Except for several papers re-evaluating cases reported by Freud, the period covered is 1919-1939. The editors explain that they consider that Freud laid the foundation of analytic technique between 1910 and 1919; others, however, consider that the essentials of analytic technique were established earlier, as soon as free association replaced directed association, and transference and resistance were first conceptualized and dealt with, probably as early as 1898. The cut-off date of 1939 was chosen because it is the year of Freud's death.
The papers are organized chronologically (early papers, papers of the twenties, thirties) and in terms of their positions in relation to the controversy aroused by the writings of Sandor Ferenczi and Wilhelm Reich.
These relatively arbitrary criteria of organization betray how far we have yet to go to achieve a history of technique conceptualized in terms of the issues involved. One of the important issues which such a history would include is well specified by the editors: "Some