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Johannes Cremerius is professor emeritus of psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy at the University of Freiburg. He belongs to a small group of German analysts who were trained shortly after World War II. He has written about one hundred fifty papers, mostly in German and a few in Italian, as well as several books. The two volumes I have the pleasure of reviewing contain fourteen papers, thirteen of which were published between 1975 and 1983. While his scholarly productivity has continued, his interest also has turned to the institutional problems of psychoanalysis, offering criticism along the lines of Kernberg and others.
Cremerius delves into the daily work of the psychoanalyst, and is deeply concerned with a variety of technical problems of interest to all analysts. He advocates a flexible approach to the everyday conduct of analysis. He deals with some difficult problems of technique, including working through, the relationship between fantasy and defense, and the very current controversy over whether psychoanalysis is a hermeneutic or a scientific/empirical enterprise.
He is one of a growing number of people who want to find out how Freud really worked. His chapter, "Looking over Freud's Shoulder While He Is Working," deals with the inevitable tensions created by the discrepancies between Freud's technical instructions and his personal technique. Cremerius rejects the notion of a formalized standard technique in favor of a system of rules flexibly applied and empirically tested.