Wild Analysis - Sigmund Freud

This powerful volume brings together Freud's major writings on psychoanalytic method and the question of psychoanalytic technique.

The fundamental concern of these works is the complex relationship between patient and analyst. Here Freud explores both the crucial importance of and huge risks involved in patients' transference of their emotions on to their therapist. He also shows the ambiguous dangers of 'wild analysis' by doctors who are insufficiently trained or offer instant solutions; looks at issues such as the length of a treatment; and offers a trenchant discussion of the controversy surrounding psychoanalysis as a medical discipline. And, in examining the tensions between the practice of psychoanalysis and its central theory - the disruptive nature of the unconscious - Freud asks, can there ever really be rules for analysis?

Psychoanalytic treatment utilised the patient's capacity to love and desire as a means to an end. The stuff of romance became the stuff of cure. When Freud is writing about technique in psychoanalysis - and these papers [in Wild Analysis] represent his most significant contributions to the subject over three decades of work - it is important to remember that he is talking about what a couple, an analyst and a so-called patient, can do in a room together. For better or worse.
Adam Phillips

Writings included:

• On 'Wild' Psychoanalysis
• On the Uses of Dream Interpretation in Psychoanalysis
• On the Dynamics of Transference
• Advice to Doctors on Psychoanalytic Treatment
• On Initiating Treatment
• Observations on Love in Transference
• Resistance to Psychoanalysis
• The Question of Lay Analysis
• Postscript to 'The Question of Lay Analysis'
• Analysis Terminable and Interminable
• Constructions in Analysis

Format: Paperback