Introduction

This book might pass for a reader’s guide to Freud’s Papers on Technique ¹ and I hope it will be used that way since any new attention to that book is worthwhile, especially in today’s climate. But what I have written here is no modest, pedagogical “key to the text.” Although I discuss Papers in detail, my purpose is both grander and simpler: I want you to share the awe I feel before Freud’s little book, and to follow that awe into larger wonderings about psychoanalysis and the human condition.