This book, founded on the in-depth discussion of sixteen clinical cases of psychoanalysis, tries to answer the question of what psychoanalysts do when they are practicing psychoanalysis.

The authors have collaborated with over a thousand colleagues worldwide to collect a unique dataset of everyday clinical sessions using a new workshop discussion method designed to reveal differences. Faced with diversity but wanting to surface and understand it, not suppress it, they had to evolve a new theoretical framework. It covers different approaches to the analytic situation (using the metaphors, cinema, dramatic monologue, theatre and immersive theatre); different sources of data to use to infer unconscious content, differences in the troubles patients unconsciously experience and how to approach them and differences in when, about what and how a psychoanalyst should talk.

Eventually taking the form of 11 very practical questions for psychoanalysts to ask of each session they conduct, the framework tries to help experienced psychoanalysts and students alike to choose what they want to try to do and to assess for themselves how far they are doing it. A final chapter applies the new framework and eleven practical questions to some contemporary technical controversies with some surprising results.