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The late Ralph R. Greenson's book presents a collection of thirty-two of his clinical and technical papers on psychoanalysis. In the preface to the book, the author informs us that the papers will tell us something about himself, as well as about his patients. This contention is well borne out in the text that follows.
My major thesis in this review is that many of the articles in this collection give evidence that Greenson, throughout his career, was in considerable conflict with a crucial aspect of psychoanalytic theory and technique—the centrality of the transference in the understanding and resolution of neurosis. By emphasizing the working alliance and the so-called "real" aspects of the relationship between patient and analyst in so many of his papers, Greenson, it seems to me, was attempting to dethrone transference interpretation as the royal (perhaps even the sole) road along which analyst and patient must travel in their attempt to work through the material in an analysis. He consistently advocates, as a replacement for the classical technical approach, the analyst's allowing his own "real" persona to shine through to the patient.
One of Greenson's early papers, "The Mother Tongue and the Mother" (1950), illustrates my thesis. In this work, the author contends that his young female patient was enabled to break through to the important affects bound up in the early mother-child interaction only by virtue of his suggestion that the analysis be switched from her adopted language, English, to her mother tongue, German. While there are many comments of interest in the paper, we are not offered any information about the patient's reactions