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After 1924 Freud no longer took part in the conventions of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society. Instead, when his health was up to it, once a month he organised meetings at his house with his closest friends and collaborators in order to exchange views with them or present his latest work. In the course of one of these evenings (R. Sterba (1982) cites this episode as an example of the distaste the master felt for “technical parameters”) while he was speaking of how much patients must be urged on in order to help them overcome the difficulties and doubts involved in analysis (“Sometimes we promise a patient relief from his symptomes, an increase in his working capacity and an improvement in his personal and social relationships”) his daughter Anna objected that “we cannot promise these things when we do not know that we can keep the promise”. Her father answered: “There you can see that you are not a physician”.
Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psychoanalysis was the title Freud gave to one of his Papers on Technique (Jones 1953) and although subsequently he stated repeatedly that a degree in medicine was