What evidence is there that the history of psychoanalysis has been marked by continuing progress rather than shifts of fashion and what reason is there to believe that continuing progress is what the future holds for psychoanalysis? These are the questions with which we will be mainly concerned in this paper.

“The Idea of Progress in Psychoanalysis” is an ambiguous title insofar as it can be interpreted to refer to progress in psychoanalytic treatment or in psychoanalytic theory. The ambiguity is intentional because we believe that some similar considerations apply to progress both in treatment and in theory. Just as in theory one must distinguish between changes per se