ABSTRACT
In emphasizing the hard experiences Freud wrestled with in Papers on Technique I hope I have not left the impression that its title is deceptive, as though it is not at all a technical manual but simply and solely an account of Freud’s own difficulty in practice, and his personal, one-time attempt to find a solution. Rather, as we follow Freud’s uneasy handling of these problems, we see a larger figure emerging – it appears to be a dissection of psychoanalysis. And what’s striking, making the lesson so peculiar, is that the outcome is not a stable formula but a way of wrestling with the problems. Finally, it dawns on us that Papers on Technique is, indeed, a technical manual because Freud’s troubled effort to comprehend the various paradoxes – the effort itself – is also a model of psychoanalytic technique when it is duplicated under the gun in the treatment hour. The technique consists of keeping in mind these tensions, paradoxes and difficulties in the context of a particular patient. Here we have a profession so strange that a book of “do’s” and “don’t’s,” of admonitions to “look at things this way but also oppositely,” qualifies as a description of its technique. In fact, that is probably the only kind of technical manual that could be written for psychoanalysis. Such idiosyncrasy says something about both the peculiar practice and the nature of the human mind. But that is a point I wish to make only by implication in this chapter.
