You ask me, or indeed tell me--what psychoanalysis is. Before considering your views, permit me first to try and mark out the territory and definition of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is primarily just a method--but a method complying with all the rigorous demands insisted upon to-day by the conception "method." Let it be made plain at once that psychoanalysis is not an _anamnesis_, as those who know everything without learning are pleased to believe. It is essentially a method for the exploration of the unconscious associations, into which no question of the conscious self enters. Again, it is not a _kind_ of _examination_ of the nature of an intelligence test, though this mistake is common in certain circles. It is no _cathartic method_, abreacting real and phantastic "traumata," with or without hypnosis. _Psychoanalysis is a method which makes possible the analytic reduction of the psychic content to its simplest expression, and the discovery of the line of least resistance in the development of a harmonious personality._ In neurosis, straightforward direction of life's energies is lacking, because opposing tendencies traverse and hinder psychological adaptation. Psychoanalysis, so far as our present knowledge of it goes, thus appears to be simply a rational nerve-therapy. For the technical application of psychoanalysis no programme can be formulated. There are only general principles, and, for the individual case, working rules. (Here let me refer you to Freud's work in volume I. of the _Internationale Zeitschrift für Ärztliche Psychoanalyse_.) My one working rule is to conduct the analysis as a perfectly ordinary, sensible conversation, and to avoid all appearance of medical magic. The leading principle of the psychoanalytic technique is to analyse the _psychic material which offers itself then and there_. Every interference on the part of the analyst, with the object of inducing the analysis to follow some systematic course, is a gross mistake in technique. _So-called chance is the law and the order of psychoanalysis._ Naturally in the beginning of the analysis the anamnesis and the diagnosis come first. The subsequent analytic process develops quite differently in every case. To give rules is well-nigh impossible. All one can say is that very frequently, quite at the beginning, a series of resistances have to be overcome, resistances against both method and man. Patients having no idea of psychoanalysis must first be given some understanding of the method. In those who already know something of it there are very often many misconceptions to set right, and frequently one has to deal also with many reproaches cast by scientific criticism. In either case the misconceptions rest upon arbitrary interpretations, superficiality, or complete ignorance of the facts.