MY ANALYSIS WITH FREUD: Reminiscences

Five times a week for six months Dr. Kardiner saw Sigmund Freud at Berggasse 19; it was ""one of the peak experiences of [his] life"" and Kardiner's purpose here is to describe that original, classic technique. The patient was a New York physician already analyzed by Horace Frink, one of the few Americans practicing in the early Twenties. In his first session Kardiner presented a highly organized history--Freud commented on that--and discussed his early trauma, childhood phobias, parents, stepmother, a fateful romantic rejection. Freud spoke infrequently, pouncing on enigmatic details such as Kardiner's troubling dream of three urinating Italians. Generally he made aphoristic or strictly interpretive remarks rather than posing leading questions; together they identified patterns and resolved conflicts quickly although in retrospect Kardiner discovered that Freud missed one obvious manifestation of his own theory of transference. Kardiner also offers anecdotes of life in Vienna for the other analysands--the start of didactic courses, British therapy variations--and characterizes his own work later in New York, including a tantalizingly brief sketch of a man fearful of becoming a goat. Kardiner is not one to petrify the original orthodoxy and in closing he makes a plea for a reexamination of psychoanalysis, urging a conscious movement away from the couch and into the nursery for serious, cross-cultural studies. Brisk and revealing for that devoted band of disciples.