On the Dialectics of Psychoanalytic Practice

Fritz Morgenthaler was a crucial figure in the return of psychoanalysis to post-Nazi Central Europe. In Technik, he developed revolutionary ideas for transforming clinical technique. On the Dialectics of Psychoanalytic Practice offers the first publication in English of this psychoanalytic, counterculture classic.

Fritz Morgenthaler (1919-1984) was a prominent Swiss physician, psychoanalyst, ethnologist, and painter. Cofounder of the interdisciplinary field of ethnopsychoanalysis, his writings on clinical practice, sexuality, and dream interpretation were essential reading for the counterculture and New Left in Continental Europe. Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author, most recently, of Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (2017) and Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (2018).

Part I Technik: 1. Theory of Technique and Analytic Process 2. Sequentiality in the Course of Associations 3. Setting Priorities-and Relativizing Them 4. The Actualization of the Transference-Conflict 5. Identification 6. The Transference-Resistance 7. The Dynamic of Contradictions in the Interpretive Process 8. The Working-Through of a Transference-Resistance 9. Function and Structure of Reconstructive Interpretation 10. Many Paths Lead to No Destination Part II Supplementary Material: 1. Review of Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders 2. Letter to Heinz Kohut, September 25, 1977 3. Modes of Interaction in Perversions and Perversion of Modes of Interaction