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In his latest book, Freud’s Papers on Technique and Contemporary Clinical Practice, Lawrence Friedman is a man with a mission. He is insistent that those of us who have studied and taught Freud’s papers on technique have missed the forest for the trees, because these papers are much more than a collection of technical principles, or hallowed rules of psychoanalytic conduct, but are better understood as lab journals, as “continuous narratives” showing us Freud’s discovery and creation of psychoanalysis. Friedman writes, “This book is a contemporary, real-time record of the discovery of a phenomenon of historical significance – the experience of a new degree of mental freedom” (p. 2). The Papers show us Freud at once exploring and interrogating himself, developing and experimenting with the scientifically and socially radical ideas that became psychoanalysis. While we tend to think about Freud as an authority handing down the guidelines of a nascent profession, Friedman wants us to appreciate and rediscover the Freud that was engaging in a continuous dialogue with himself and with his philosophical, literary and historical context. One feels fortunate to be admitted, with this book, into Friedman’s seminar on Freud, punctuated with provocative questions such as, “What is this thing called Papers on Technique,” “Why have the Papers been misunderstood,” and a list of
orienting questions at the end. Friedman makes a compelling case for the continuing relevance of this foundational text as he gives us “Friedman’s Freud.”
Certainly one might wonder what there is to learn in Friedman’s book about Freud’s “book”: why bother to revisit this well-worn—and to many current thinkers, outdated—“old school” path?
Friedman’s critical examination of Freud’s papers is permeated by his insistence on the core of discovery and openness to the new that Freud’s Papers exemplified. Friedman reminds us why it’s place in the history of ideas is a unique one, extracting from the Papers what F