ABSTRACT
Freud, more than anyone, had been responsible for the change that occurred after the early days of analytic triumph in the cure of the symptomatic neuroses with dramatic results in short treatments (although today, as we review the early cases, the results were often less dramatic than they at first seemed). In the later period, there was an increasing demand on analysis to achieve more in the way of ‘deep’ or ‘structural’ change, and a tendency for a dismissive attitude toward mere symptom relief as transference cure. Freud himself had always been wary about the possibility that analytic results emanated from suggestion rather than
from specific interpretation, and that concern has not yet vanished from psychoanalysis. In trying to understand Freud’s thinking in ‘Analysis terminable and interminable’ it would be interesting to know how much analysis Freud himself was doing in the preceding few years, and what the duration of those analyses was; however, I have not been able to find this information.
