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In seven concise and stimulating chapters Fenichel sets forth certain basic findings and conceptions regarding the theory and practice of psychoanalytic
technique. The translation by David Brunswick is especially notable for its clarity and precision. This is a factor of special significance in a field where, as in psychoanalysis, so much depends upon well-conceived qualities of definition and differentiation. It is also a special value of the text at hand, where a chief aim of the author has been to clarify the basis of psychoanalytic thinking. It is stressed that the student of psychoanalytic theory and technique does not at present find in his field the clarification and precision of terms which long periods of preliminary spade-work have made for in other branches of science; the effects of which have been to bring conceptual differences and apparent contradictory elements toward a synthesis of practicable working unity.
The text deals successively with introductory conceptions; the theory of psychoanalytic therapy; the first analytical steps—dynamics and economics of interpretation; the structural aspects of interpretation; the analysis of the transference; special technical problems; and comments on the literature of psychoanalytic technique. It is pointed out that the discussion deals only with selected problems of technique, and presupposes in the reader some earlier understanding of the subject as well as certain knowledge of the general theory of the neuroses.
Specifically not designed as a comprehensive textbook, the present chapters are based on a course of lectures given in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in 1936. A stated aim has been to bring about in the technique of the working analyst a closer interrelation between theoretical principles and analytic practice. A central obstacle therapy lies often in the difficulty of recognizing again “the well understood theoretical concepts in what they see and experience in the patient, and still more in wh