Freud comments that, in a dialogue published in a Munich humor weekly, a man complained about the character of women, which makes them complicated and difficult, and that his interlocutor responded: "Yes, but they're the best we have for that sort of thing." Freud uses this comment to further assert that, for training psychoanalysts, the best we have are doctors.
What the weekly character said about women could also be said about men, and what Freud said about doctors could be said about many other things. While it is true that psychoanalysis is an enterprise whose difficulties demand unsuspected effort, and that it is disturbed by inevitable moments of discomfort for both the patient and the psychoanalyst, it is the best we have for achieving what we are trying to do with it.
But what are we trying to do? What sort of things does psychoanalysis deal with? We might also ask: what is the purpose of psychoanalytic treatment? And how can we lessen the discomfort that the process causes? These last two questions, which have merited the attention of psychoanalysis since its very beginning and which, given their nature, have always remained open to new investigations, initiated the path that led to the writing of this book.