ABSTRACT
Karl Abraham's paper and Sigmund Freud's comprehensive letter of July 7 form the basis of this chapter. The chapter sketches the affinities and differences as they unfolded between the two men in 1907. In Abraham's reading of Freud, Freud had replaced trauma with an "abnormal psychosexual constitution" and had realised that children with an abnormal constitution reacted abnormally to sexual trauma and later became neurotic. Freud's introduction of the notion of phantasy and of the importance of psychic reality was a revolutionary idea, one that quite literally introduced a new level of reality into scientific thinking. In the psychoanalytic setting, "anger" points to the analyst's impulsive countertransference reactions whereas "mindfulness", "thoughtfulness", or "reflection" mean the working-through and containing of the analyst's aggressive impulses. Both are important, and both have their time and place in psychoanalytic work.
