A method advocated by Sándor Ferenczi starting in 1919, the active technique consisted of formulating to the patient, at certain moments of stagnation in the treatment, injunctions or interdictions concerning his or her behavior in such a way as to provoke tensions within the psychic apparatus, with the aim of reactivating the process and of bringing to light repressed material.

Only the patient was encouraged to perform certain actions. The psychoanalyst remained inactive and attentive to the emergence of new mnemic material in the associations of the patient. The process was used only as an "adjuvant" in order to precipitate the emergence of new associations, the interpretation of which remained, just as in the classic technique, the principle task of the analysis.

Impasses with the active technique led Ferenczi, several years later, to abandon an economic and authoritarian conception of psychoanalytic treatment and...