ABSTRACT
When Freud, and the early analysts in their turn, entered the field of psychotherapy, each had to learn the hard way that the work did not simply consist of enabling the patient to ventilate unexpressed emotion about incidents in the past. In those days most therapies were of female hysterical patients treated by male therapists. A pattern regularly encountered then and still encountered to this day is that such patients improve symptomatically very soon, but that if the therapist is deceived by this into suggesting termination, he is in for a shock, for the patient immediately relapses.
