The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique

Etchegoyen sets out the whole apparatus of psychoanalytic technique in one systematic treatise, moving topic by topic from Freud through Klein, the British object-relations writers, ego psychology and the French. For each element of the work, the analytic setting and contract, transference and countertransference, resistance, interpretation, insight and working through, he lays out how the major contributors have understood it and where their accounts conflict.

The method is comparative. Etchegoyen states the competing theories, weighs what each buys and costs at the level of practice, and marks his own position without suppressing the disagreement. He treats interpretation as the analyst's central instrument and gives extended attention to how transference is read, tested and used in the session.

For the clinician the value is a reasoned map of the choices technique forces, with the arguments for each laid side by side rather than settled in advance.