You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The oxford congress, in 1929, was entitled “progresses in Psycho-Analytic Technique.” Sándor Ferenczi presented the groundbreaking paper “The Principle of Relaxation and Neocatharsis,” in which he expressed a rather strong criticism of psychoanalytic therapy based on the new structural model. Although the latter permitted a more sophisticated approach based on metapsychology, Ferenczi was not enthusiastic about scientific advances. He complained that “too little attention was paid to the libido” (Ferenczi, 1929, p. 112) and confessed that when he began to work from this perspective, he could not escape “the impression that the relation between physician and patient was becoming far too much like that between teacher and pupil” (p. 113). In Ferenczi's view, the new ego-metapsychological standpoint represented the culmination of a tendency to substitute teaching for analysis, which was ultimately rooted in Freud's own vacillation about the therapeutic implications of his own discovery.
The structural model of the mind was introduced by Freud (1921, 1923, 1926) after World War I, marking a transition in psychoanalysis from its focus on the unconscious to a period in which emphasis shifted to the ego as the primary source for shaping behavior. In 1929 the structural