ABSTRACT
From its inception in the matrix of the therapeutic experiments of Breuer and Freud, the effectiveness of psychoanalysis as a clinical procedure has posed a continuing challenge for successive psychoanalytic theories of mental life. The standard “psychoanalytic situation” finally crystallized in the course of the analysis of the Rat Man. Dissatisfaction with the oversimplified precept of early psychoanalysis-derived from the topographic theory of mental function—that the task of the treatment is to make the unconscious conscious actually preceded Freud’s revision of psychoanalytic psychology in the 1920s. Progress in the psychoanalytic theory of technique took place along a different track, one that exploited Freud’s refinement of the concept of resistances in his redefinition of the ego as one of the major structural divisions of the mind.
