Introduction

IT is my opinion that despite the many difficulties involved, it is time for a textbook on psychoanalytic technique. I have the impression that there is a great danger in allowing ambiguities, divergencies, and deviations to be transmitted by word of mouth from training analyst to analysand, from supervising analyst to candidate, and from colleague to colleague, in private discussions without their being duly noted and recognized for what they are.

The standard works on technique written by Freud, Glover (1955), Sharpe (1930), and Fenichel (1941), excellent as they are, are only outlines. They do not describe in sufficient detail what the psychoanalyst actually does when he analyzes a patient. As a result, for example, analyzing a resistance can mean one thing to one analyst and something astonishingly different to another, yet each may believe he is analyzing a resistance according to classical psychoanalytic principles.

The panel on “Variations in Classical Psycho-Analytic Technique” held at the 20th Congress of the International Psycho-Analytical Association in Paris in 1957 illustrated the diversity of the points of view (see Greenson, et al., 1958). Glover's questionnaire on common technical practices, which he distributed to the members of the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1938, revealed an unexpected amount of disagreement among the members as well as a high degree of hesitancy, timidity, and indecision in revealing their techniques (Glover, 1955, p. 348). Helen Tartakoff's excellent

review (1956) of recent books on psychoanalytic technique stressed the finding that the term “psychoanalysis” in the titles of each of the new publications was loosely applied to very different therapeutic methods based on the author's personal and special theoretical postulates.

This confusion and uncertainty is borne out by the startling fact that the Committee on Evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy of the American Psychoanalytic Association disbanded in 1953 after six an