A basic issue for all those essaying to write comprehensive texts on the
nature of psychoanalysis, whether oriented primarily to the exposition
of the theory or of the technique of psychoanalysis, - within the
American literature the books by Brenner and by Greenson come to mind as
exemplars of the two categories - is that of the relationship of the
theory to the technique and the practice. This issue is however not
always brought into explicit focus in this literature and thereby its
problematic nature as a fundamental and not yet satisfactorily re-
solved dilemma of our discipline is often glossed over, or even by-
passed completely, as if we could comfortably assume that Freud had,
uniquely in the world's intellectual history, fully succeeded in
creating a science and a discipline in which the theory (the
understanding) and the therapy (i. e., the cure) were inherently
together and truly the same, but two sides of the same coin.