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.
I learnt to restrain speculative tendencies and to follow the unforgotten advice of my master, Charcot: to look at the same things again and again until they themselves begin to speak.—FREUD (1914, p. 22)
IN HIS RECENT SEARCHING INQUIRY INTO THE SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITIES of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Heinz Kohut (1970) emphasized Anna Freud's statement that "the most important contributions which institutes can make to the maintenance of genuine
psychoanalytic research is through the enhancement of the students' capacity to think metapsychologically …, [implying] that the secure possession of this basic mode of thinking was a crucial precondition for the preservation of psychoanalytic research as such" (p. 472f.). Fortunately for all concerned, she also provided the best systematic teaching aid for the implementation of her ideas in the form of the Metapsychological Profile (Anna Freud, 1962). From the assessment of children it was extended to the evaluation of adolescents (Laufer, 1965) and adults (Anna Freud, H. Nagera, and W. E. F