A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis by Fred Busch (review)

At a book talk at the University of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore a few years ago, an eager student asked Professor Jonathan Lear, “Why does psychoanalysis take so long?” Lear replied, “Well, if I just tell you what’s wrong with you, it’s only going to make you mad, especially if I’m right.” Lear’s response was an efficient and very amusing introduction to the clinical quandary of resistance, to which Fred Busch’s latest book, A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique, also addresses itself. Aptly appearing on the eve of the centenary of The Ego and the Id (1923), A Fresh Look elaborates what Busch sees as the unmined clinical implications of Freud’s structural model and 1926 revision of the theory of anxiety,2 in particular striving to integrate the concept of unconscious resistances into a coherent theory of clinical technique. In papers spanning the past 30 years, newly collected here, Busch’s book offers an erudite examination of the clinical ramifications of the shifts in Freud’s theorizing during the 1920s, while it also evinces some limitations of adhering to a century-old model of the mind. Busch seeks to address the “developmental lag” between theory and technique identified by Paul Gray (1982): the widespread persistence of a clinical stance based on Freud’s topographic model and committed to uncovering unconscious content, despite the greater clarity Freud provided with the structural model and second theory of anxiety. In Freud’s topographic model, forbidden wishes are censoriously repressed, yet continually striving for expression, resulting in a damming up of libidinal impulses that ultimately gives rise to psychic pressure and symptoms. According to this picture, the therapeutic task is to bring repressed wishes into the light of consciousness so BOOK REVIEWS