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Without attempting a prophecy in the literal sense, it seems worth while, in the present stage of advancement of psychoanalysis, to briefly review its present activities and attempt to ascertain what the future offers for its various medical and cultural aspects. As a therapeutic procedure, psychoanalysis is not only comparatively new but really epoch-making in the help it furnishes to nervous sufferers. As such, in certain well-selected cases of the neuroses and psychoneuroses, it is immeasurably superior to the so-called rest cure, a procedure whose effects in neurological therapeutics have been most pernicious.
Physicians are beginning to recognize the efficacy of psychoanalysis and while only a few mastered the technique, yet increasing numbers of cases are referred to those who have specialized in the subject in order that the nervous sufferer may be given the benefit of a really fundamental type of treatment. At least this has been my experience and I am sure it must be the experience of other workers along this line. It seems to be becoming more and more evident to the profession that the technique of psychoanalysis is something which must be learned and mastered through experience, in the same way that the technique of a Wassermann test must be learned in the widely different field of serology.
The technical methods of psychoanalysis, as in all fields of exact science, are undergoing modifications and improvements in the hands of the workers in the field; for instance, there seems to be a lessened tendency to explanation and the digging out of repressed fantasies and more stress and insistence laid upon the handling of the resistances and transferences. As stated by Adler1
“The revelation of such repressed feelings is not of much therapeutic