On Freud's "On Beginning the Treatment"

On beginning the treatment (1913) is one of the most important of Freud's technical articles, a theme he examined between 1904 and 1918. This text, which sets out the basis of the treatment and the conditions of psychoanalysis, still provides a solid reference for the analytic practice. Far from a group of rigid rules, Freud spoke of the technique as an art, thinking always of the singularity of each case, even if the fundamental methods of free association and suspended attention specify the psychoanalytical method that differentiates it from the suggestion. In this book, ten eminent analysts, coming from different schools of psychoanalytic thought, confront the contemporary technical proposals to the freudian precepts. The book reexamines, in the light of the latest advances in the analytic practice, such important questions as: the conditions of starting an analysis today; tranference and associativity; the play of the person of the analyst and intersubjectivity; the fundamental rule enunciation in contemporary practice; the conditions and functions of the interpretation; and the energetic drives in action during the treatment.Contributors:Alice Becker Lewkowicz, Hugo Bleichmar, Marie-France Dispaux, Antonino Ferro, Theodore Jacobs, Lewis A. Kirshner, Sergio Lewkowicz, Norberto Marucco, Patrick Miller, Rene Roussillon, Gennaro Saragnano, Christian Seulin, Rogelio Sosnik'The original title in German of this seminal work, in its full version, was reproposed as it was in the English translation by Joan Riviere of 1924. Subsequently, it was shortened in the version for the Standard Edition: On Beginning the Treatment", as Strachey explains in his presentation of the Freudian text, was the first part of a trilogy that included The Question of the First Communications and The Dynamics of the Cure. Seeing it as a trilogy that goes beyond the beginning of the treatment returns the work to its original importance. Although Freud protects himself by using the metaphor of the game of chess, his "recommendations" (not rules) lay the bases for what today we still consider to be the fundamental characteristics of the psychoanalytical method. All the circumstances - and there are several - that advise us not to ask for "any unconditional acceptance" of the recommendations, do not prevent the author from establishing a procedure "to set in motion a process". In psychoanalysis, everything is played out between these two elements: the method and the process, i.e. the instruments that set in motion the process and the process itself. The reader of this book will find that the authors of the various chapters have carefully explored the possibilities offered by a contemplation of the method that crosses Freud's entire life until chapter VI of An Outline of Psychoanalysis. Only by working hard on the method and its raisons d'etre will we be able in the future - as we were in the past - to broaden the therapeutic possibilities of psychoanalysis.'- Jorge Canestri, MD, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, training and supervising analyst for the Italian Psychoanalytic Association and for the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association