Freud Sigmund - On Freuds On Beginning the Treatment

IPA Publications Committee

This significant series was founded by Robert Wallerstein and subsequently edited by Joseph Sandler, Ethel Spector Person, Peter Fonagy, and lately by Leticia Glocer Fiorini. Its important contributions have always greatly interested psychoanalysts of different latitudes. It is therefore my great honour, as the new Chair of the Publications Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association, to continue the tradition of this most successful series.

The objective of this series is to approach Freuds work from a present and contemporary point of view. On the one hand, this means highlighting the fundamental contributions of his work that constitute the axes of psychoanalytic theory and practice. On the other, it implies the possibility of getting to know and spreading the ideas of present psychoanalysts about Freuds oeuvre, both where they coincide and where they differ.

This series considers at least two lines of development: a contemporary reading of Freud that reclaims his contributions, and a clarification of the logical and epistemic perspectives from which he is read today.

Freuds theory has branched out, and this has led to a theoretical, technical, and clinical pluralism that has to be worked through. It has therefore become necessary to avoid a snug and uncritical coexistence of concepts in order to consider systems of increasing complexities that take into account both the convergences and the divergences of the categories at play.

Consequently, this project has involved an additional taskthat is, gathering psychoanalysts from different geographical regions representing, in addition, different theoretical stances, in order to be able to show their polyphony. This also means an extra effort for the reader that has to do with distinguishing and discriminating, establishing relations or contradictions that each reader will have to eventually work through.

Being able to listen to other theoretical viewpoints is also a way of exercising our listening capacities in the clinical field. This means that the listening should support a space of freedom that would allow us to hear what is new and original.

In this spirit we have brought together authors deeply rooted in the Freudian tradition and others who have developed theories that had not been explicitly taken into account in Freuds work.

On beginning the treatment (1913) is one of the most important of Freuds 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 psychoanalysts, coming from different schools of psychoanalytic thought and from different geographical areas, confront the contemporary technical proposals to the Freudian precepts. The book re-examines, in the light of the latest advances in the analytic practice, such important questions as: the conditions of starting an analysis today; transference 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.

Special thanks are therefore due to the contributors to this volume which enriches the Contemporary Freud series.

Gennaro Saragnano
Series Editor
Chair, IPA Publications Committee