ABSTRACT
If one has been following the literature about Freud’s clinical techniques that has accumulated over the past few decades, Unorthodox Freud 1 by Beate Lohser and Peter Newton will come as a refreshing improvement to the more stereotypical view of what Freud was likely to do in practice. Lohser and Newton do not concentrate on Freud’s technical recommendations, although of course they refer the reader to what Freud wrote about that which he thought a proper analysis supposedly consisted in. Lohser and Newton had the splendid idea of looking at some published firsthand accounts put in print by Freud’s former patients, and the authors of Unorthodox Freud deal with Freud’s analyses of Abram Kardiner, Hilda Doolittle, Joseph Wortis, John Dorsey, and Smiley Blanton. Although the bulk of the book gets taken up by separate chapters devoted to each of these cases, and presents the clinical situations from the point of view of patients, some general conclusions about technique do emerge from the material that is recounted.
