Review of A Clinical Introduction to Freud by Bruce Fink. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2017. 384 pp.

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Notes

1 Fink writes that he does not “… elaborate here on the particulars of Freud's intellectual development from the 1880s to the 1930s … nor does he go into Freud's more “abstract concepts” or “forays into social and religious commentary…” (p. xv). Fink explains that “… my focus here is primarily on the clinically useful techniques Freud developed for getting at the unconscious…” (p. xv). However, many of these later works had major clinical implications for Freud and subsequent Freudians.

2 Based on this statement, another statement on psychosis that I will quote later, and Fink's strong position about analysis of “unconscious” and not of transference, resistance, and defense, all in the face of what I assume Fink knows about Freud's later thinking, I have to speculate that Fink has a model of unconscious and of mind that may differ from that of Freud, especially late Freud and post-Freudian writers. If this is so, it would have been important for Fink to spell this out. For one thing, the reader might better understand Fink's decisions about what to emphasize and what to omit. Even more, given that Fink devotes the bulk of his book to discussing symptom formation, dream interpretation, and the role of the unconscious, including how these play out in two of Freud's cases, the reader would be in a better position to evaluate the extent to which Fink's own ideas alter the lens through which he presents Freud's ideas.

3 Fink highlights a quote by Freud regarding transference (p. 179) but uses it to criticize Freud. The end of Freud's highlighted quote is: “Transference, which seems ordained to be the greatest obstacle to psychoanalysis, becomes its most powerful ally, if its presence can be detected each time and explained to the patient” (Freud, SE 7, p. 117, quoted by Fink, p. 179). Fink adds: “For many years, if not until the end of his life, Freud seems to have been under the misapprehension that it suffices to bring a particular transference to the conscious attention of the patient in order to make it disappear. As if it would be enough to simply tell a patient that she distrusts us like she distrusted her mother growing up for her to stop distrusting us!” (Fink, p. 179).

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Andrew B. Druck

Andrew B. Druck, Ph.D., A.B.B.P., is a fellow (training and supervising analyst), past president, former dean of training, and faculty member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR). He is a clinical associate professor of psychology, faculty member, and supervising analyst at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is a faculty member at the William Alanson White Institute. Dr. Druck is the author of Four Therapeutic Approaches to the Borderline Patient (Jason Aronson, 1989), and co-editor, along with Carolyn Ellman, Norbert Freedman, and Aaron Thaler, of A New Freudian Synthesis (Kanac, 2011).

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