ABSTRACT
Despite its conservative credentials, The Development of Psychoanalysis marked a decisive advance on the previously prevalent theory of treatment, that of Freud's (1911-15) "Papers on Technique." It was in the 1924 monograph that Ferenczi, for the first time, conceived of successful analytic treatment as a unitary process with an internal coherence of its own, rather than the decoding of a series of symptoms or complexes. Although he did not spell this out in the monograph, to judge by his subsequent modifications of technique, Ferenczi seems to have realized that, as a process, psychoanalytic treatment cannot be characterized exclusively as a function of the validity of the interpretations offered by the analyst.
