ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis is not practised in accordance with a uniform set of technical procedures. Each psychoanalyst encourages his patient to follow the rule of free association. In its beginnings, psychoanalytic practice was an entirely empirical procedure. In the typical case, the psychoanalyst became the focus of the patient’s childhood object relations. The “structural” theory also facilitated a new theoretical perspective on the psychoanalysis of character and its abnormalities. In G. S. Klein’s theory, patients who participate in psychoanalytic treatment have a need to keep the analyst as a “good” object. It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that Fairbairn’s contributions to theory and technique have provided the foundation for the object relations school of the British Psychoanalytical Society. On what does the viability of a psychoanalytic treatment depend? What keeps the treatment in progress when the patient has to face anxieties and guilt “reactions”? The patient’s ability to persist and co-operate is clearly independent of the specific technique the analyst employs.
