“Meet it is I Write it Down……”

Psychoanalysis as a Science is difficult to present. The complaint is often made that psychoanalytic publications are unreadable. This complaint is all the more serious, as the literature has grown to vast proportions. The student is hard put to it if he wishes to make a comprehensive survey of one aspect, whether it be clinical, theoretical, or of analytic technique. Some of the confusion is due to a lack of separating clearly clinical material from the demonstration of analytic technique. Frequently, the material is not ordered as scientific expositions ought to be. The reader can be excused if, after working through a long paper, he finds himself unable to grasp whether it was meant to deal with theoretical or practical issues. Furthermore, there can often be found a failure to distinguish sharply between objective clinical findings and their evaluation. It is at times impossible to detect what are the analyst's own elaborations and speculations, and what legitimate and objective deductions from bare facts.

Freud himself was well aware of the difficulties inherent in the presentation of analytic material; he was also aware of the need to keep analytic publications as lucid and concise as possible. It may therefore be both of historical and practical interest to recall what Freud had to say about methods of analytic publication.

In “Bruchstück einer Hysteric-Analyse” (written in 1899 and published in 1905, Ges. W., V. p. 170) Freud discusses in his Foreword the limitations of the clinical history to be given. He goes on to say that, in one way, the incompleteness of his presentation of the case is self imposed: “I have, on the whole, refrained from showing in which way the patient's material emerged and was interpreted, and I have deliberately confined myself to giving the end results only. The analytic technique has, therefore, apart from dream interpretation, been revealed in a few instances only. In this history, I wanted to show more particularly the determinati