Dual Therapy and Genetic Psychoanalysis. By Joachim Flescher. New York:  D.T.R.B. Editions, 1966.  560 pp.

Let me straight off come to grips with a conclusion Dr. Flescher bases on his experience in recommending to the analytic profession the procedure he calls dual therapy. It seems that colleagues agree with him in his explications of certain standard difficulties of the analytic situation; but when he goes on to suggest his technical remedy (which I shall describe momentarily), agreement ends, and Flescher encounters, to use his term, resistance. He concludes that most of his colleagues are not intellectually hostile to his method but rather emotionally blocked against it. And he regards any such emotional disinclinations in a scientist as a disqualification. As a result, Flescher has had to draw his following from minds more open than he has been able to find within his professional associations, one of which is the New York Psychoanalytic Society.

There is an idea here as old as psychoanalysis: Your mere opposition disqualifies you from passing judgment. But what Flescher overlooks, it seems to me, is that his conclusion about resistance cuts both ways. There is as much emotionality-conviction is really the word-behind a psychotherapist's getting involved in something like dual therapy as there is behind his shying away from it. Otherwise, strong feelings about what one does professionally would be revealed only by those practitioners committed to error. Though an experiment once conceived needs to be executed with dispassion if it is to be worthy of the name experiment, the conception of an experiment requires a highly personal factor. Impartiality is found only in the last stages of imaginative thinking. Freud, in the case of Miss Lucy R., tells us that he gave up hypnosis (which several years before he claimed worked admirably) for largely temperamental reasons: “I soon began to tire of issuing assurances and commands such as ‘You are going to sleep … sleep,” and of hearing the patient as so often happened… remonstrate with me: ‘But, doctor, I'm not asleep,” and o