Robert Waelder on psychoanalytic technique: five lectures

Biographical information regarding Robert Waelder is readily available (Guttman, 1986), and this is not the place for it. The following is a rare and direct example of his "old-fashioned" teaching. "Old-fashioned" and "conservative" are criticisms often leveled at Waelder these days. Yet, "Old-fashioned is not precisely the word for Waelder.... He was a conservative in the best sense, as his later writings continued to prove, one who would not relinquish what is good for the sake of the supposed 'ideal' situation imagined by those restless for change. This was his ethic, and his conservatism was entirely humanitarian. He refused to idealize 'human nature' and tried to preserve the realism of his clinical sense in matters beyond the clinic" (Lewin, 1968, p. 9).