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This short, readable volume has two elements. The larger portion consists of a description of Freud-as-analyst, based on five patients who wrote about their experiences in analysis with Freud. Lohser and Newton then compare Freud's psychoanalytic technique with what became “orthodox” technique in the era of ego psychology. Freud emerges as a spontaneous, innovative, and active therapist, an explorer who is interested in transference, dreams, and unconscious fantasy. The authors suggest that the dominant voices in psychoanalysis after Freud, especially in the United States, created an orthodoxy that Freud never intended, though it claims a basis in his technical papers. “A sort of myth arose, that is, that the analyst uttered no words except interpretations” (the authors quote from Lipton, 1977, p. 181).
Five of Freud's patients wrote about their analytic experiences (Abram Kardiner, Hilda Doolittle, Joseph Wortis, John Dorsey, Smiley Blanton). Their analyses lasted from a few months to two years. Not surprisingly each came with a very different attitude toward psychoanalysis and toward Freud. Doolittle and Kardiner were reverential; Wortis was skeptical and hostile. What is common to the five chapters devoted to their analyses is the way Freud comes alive as a clinician—bold, speculating, insistent, irritated, pleased. The authors do a good job summarizing the analytic course that each of the five describe, although they tend to assume that when Freud says something to the patient he is correct. It would also have been useful to have some follow-up report on each case, so that the reader could make an independent judgment about the impact of the analysis. This is significant, since Lohser and Newton argue that Freud's technique was more dedicated to therapeutic goals than is that of later analysts.
The five analyses all take place when Freud is in his late 60s or