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The technique of carrying out a psycho-analysis is largely a matter of experience. The complexity of the human mind is such that it is impossible to enumerate all the particular situations and difficulties that may arise in the course of an analysis. A pre-requisite, however, for the ability to make good use of such experience is a personal freedom and harmony, attainable only through personal experience of analysis, that enables one to detect at least an echo in oneself of any emotional reaction displayed by the patient and thus to comprehend its significance. Freud once remarked, as long ago as 1882,1 that it gave him an uncanny feeling whenever he was unable to gauge someone else's emotions through his own: a remarkable premonition of his future analytic capacity.
With this freedom the analyst's mind should be flexible enough to apprehend all the infinite variety of emotional attitudes he may encounter. The analyst works, however, not only with his unconscious but also with his conscious mind, and it has proved possible to assist him in his work through more or less didactic instruction concerning general principles, just as a chemist can learn by supplementing, though not replacing, his necessary laboratory experience with lectures and reading. Freud naturally felt it incumbent on him to help those who were adopting his methods by imparting to them the knowledge he had painfully acquired through experience. His own technique had changed very greatly from its first tentative beginnings in the early nineties. Many refinements had been evolved, discrimination established between the more important data and the less, and unnecessary and even deleterious elements eliminated.2
Freud had of course already given many indications of the nature of his technique. Three valuable papers in the years