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When we are conceiving a therapeutic strategy for a given patient, it is implicit that we have formulated some aims for the treatment. However, often the aims we are working out are rather unclear and general.
Freud's early cathartic method aimed at liberating strangulated affects and reintegrating repressed experiences and ideas that had been dissociated as a result of traumatic events. Around 1900, he started to reformulate and improve his catharsis model as he began to emphasize the healing power that lay in making unconscious processes conscious. In 1923, he substituted the topographical model with the structural. Then the goal of a psychoanalysis was further redefined. The analytic task was to cultivate the instinctual drives: “not unlike the draining of Zuider Zee”. The motto was, “Where id was, there ego shall be”. Since then, there have been added many various definitions of aims.
Sandler's and Dreher's book gives a thorough account of how Freud changed his conceptualisation of the aims of psychoanalysis. It is organised chronologically in the sense that the development of different views formulated by Freud and other leading analysts are discussed in a historical perspective and divided into decades. This arrangement conveys in a fascinating way how changing clinical and technical issues have inspired various clinicians, theorists and researchers to alter their definitions of analytic aims during this century. Almost every aspect of the problem of aims in psychoanalytic therapy is taken up, described, illuminated and discussed from different angles. The separation of chapters into specific decades is logical and illustrative as the authors centre their discussion on analytic aims around a specific issue that marked that period's debate.
Ch. 1 presents Freud's different views on aims, while ch. 2, The early Freudian's, elucidates how Nunberg and others in the 1920s tried to unite Freud's structural theory with new viewpoints on analytic aims. The treatment shou