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Difficult as it may be to identify the Freudian or classical technique, Dr. Segal very clearly expresses her view of the difference between it and the Kleinian. The principles (or “theoretical minimum”) are the same; the guidance of the cure is different. The interpretations refer to the Kleinian emphasis on the early development
of mental life and of the Oedipus complex. But rather than discuss the differences, I will concentrate on some technical points in Dr. Segal's paper.
As to strictness, Freudian analysts generally emphasize it more than theoretical “orthodoxy.” They do not think that certain classical alterations are good solutions to some of the difficulties presented by children, pre-psychotics or psychotics, psychopaths, delinquents, etc. More than a few Freudian analysts apply as strict and “economical” a technique as possible with these patients, sometimes with very good results. However, there are cases in which some alterations may be convenient (with the precaution of introducing only one at a time) when strictness threatens to turn itself against the development of the analytical process. Strictness should never become an expression of blind obedience. Although the strict classical technique applied in the majority of the cases may be considered typical, it is still a special variety of the analytic technique. In some cases, an “overstrict” technique—a “caricatural” strictness, so to speak—is advisable and fruitful.
Most Freudian analysts consider transference to be the core of the analytic experience, and the object of the interpretation to be the “total experience” of the patient, i.e., the whole of the defensive conflict in which the “instinctual impulse,” the “motive of defense,” the “mechanism of defense” are present. The instinctual impulse—or, better, the “unconscious wish”—is represented by unconscious phantasies and expressed by conscious phantasies, words and actions. The motive of defense is chiefly the “unconscious anxiety”—more accurat