A reading of Freud's Papers on Technique

Abstract

Freud's Papers on Technique (1911-1915) is the canonical description of the psychoanalytic procedure. It is a puzzling work because it is dominated by the original paradigm of treatment as memory-retrieval, while at the same time it introduces a new picture, more consistent with Freud's emerging theory of passions, according to which treatment is the stirring up and integration of wishes. I suggest that Papers on Technique becomes less puzzling if we assume that, when he wrote it, Freud was mainly concerned not with theory but with a crucial problem of practice. In exchange for some theoretical inconsistency Freud acquired an important practical advantage, and Papers on Technique uses that advantage to teach analysts how to divide the patient's consciousness into a passionately committed experience, on the one hand, and a detached contemplation, on the other hand, without worrying about the element of manipulation that is involved. The lesson is that a theoretical ambivalence of this sort is essential to the analytic stance.