ABSTRACT
It is a generally accepted truism that psychoanalytic theory guides the methods of psychoanalytic technique and, vice versa, that clinical experiences with psychoanalytic methods influence the development and modifications in psychoanalytic theory. Little attention has been paid to a number of other factors that have been consequential for the specific forms of the theories and practices that have found ready acceptance among psychoanalysts. From their early beginnings some of the tensions and controversies that accompanied the growth of psychoanalytic theories seem to have been reflected in the development of therapeutic technique in psychoanalysis. When Freud first gave up hypnosis as a method for influencing patients, he substituted other methods of suggestion. For example, he would forcefully tell a patient to remember certain traumas and accompany the suggestion by pressing down on the patient's forehead. Naturally, many patients complied by dutifully remembering. Eventually, of course, he abandoned overt suggestion and adopted the method that Breuer's patient Anna O. had invented — she called it “chimney sweeping” — that is, the method of free association. In his discussion of the treatment of hysteria Freud (1895) summarized his therapeutic attitude:
One works to the best of one's power, as an elucidator (where ignorance has given rise to fear), as a teacher, as the representative of a freer or superior view of the world, as a father confessor who gives absolution, as it were, by a continuance of his sympathy and respect after the confession has been made. One tries to give the patient human assistance, as far as this is allowed by the capacity of one's own personality and by the amount of sympathy that one can feel for the particular case [pp. 282–283].
