10. Relationship Between Theory and Practice

Sixty years ago Ferenczi and Rank (1924) attempted to clarify “the relationship between analytic technique and analytic theory” and to investigate “the extent to which the technique has influenced theory and the extent to which each currently assists or obstructs the other” — Freud's prize question (1922d, pp. 267-270). It is now time to compare today's problems with those of that time. A few general observations have survived the passage of time. For example, Ferenczi and Rank pleaded the case for both an inductive empirical procedure and a deductive procedure to test hypotheses when they wrote:

It is perhaps not an exaggeration to assert that this mutual control of cognition by experience (given facts, induction) and of experience by previous knowledge (systematization, deduction) is the only kind which can keep a science from erring. A discipline which utilized only one or the other of these paths of research or which prematurely attempted to forgo control by a countercheck would be condemned to lose the solid ground under its feet: pure facts because they lack the fructifying idea, pure theory because its premature omniscience would cause it to lose the motivation for further research. (Ferenczi and Rank 1924, p. 47)

In evaluating the interaction of theory and practice, it is essential to distinguish the growing treasure of knowledge and its systematization in the general and specific theories of neurosis from its appropriate therapeutic application. The fact that the theoretical phase (in which Ferenczi and Rank included, for example, knowledge of unconscious emotional mechanisms) raced ahead of therapeutic skill led analysts to place great emphasis on remembering and on rational reconstruction of the past. Thus the object of criticism was a therapeu-tically ineffective “interpretation fanaticism” derived from etiological theory.

Another aspect of this problem can be illustrated using the examples of the therapeutic function of remembering an