ABSTRACT
In 1968 Greenacre (p. 211) decried the fact that the gradual emergence of the concept of a psychoanalytic process was not accompanied by a "very compact" literature on the subject. References to the concept were scattered throughout numerous papers on theory, technique, and clinical findings. She also pointed to the critical "interdependent roles of technique and theory" in the evaluation of the concept. If one accepts that very basic and reasonable hypothesis (which Greenacre did not explicitly pursue), then one should also accept the parallel hypothesis that as psychoanalytic theory developed and changed, there should have been parallel shifts in the theory of psychoanalytic technique—and in the conceptualization of a psychoanalytic process, however inchoate that conceptualization might be. Freud's (Breuer and Freud, 1893-1895) earliest concept of a psychoanalytic process would therefore be viewed as something quite unlike (though with some parallels to) that which we would delineate in the period since the enunciation of the dual instinct theory (1920), the elaboration of the tripartite system (1923), and the concept of signal anxiety (or signal affects) (1926).
