SECTION TWO
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PART 1 - PART 2 |
Like many doctors, writers, and philosophers working at the end of the nineteenth century, Freud grew increasingly interested in the unconscious. He took the unconscious to be a dimension of human life at once inaccessible and important as a source of thoughts and actions. In his efforts to decipher the meanings of hysterical symptoms and other neglected mental phenomena that seemed beyond conscious control (such as dreams and slips of the tongue), Freud moved further away from his neurological training. Committed to the idea that apparently meaningless behaviors actually expressed unconscious conflict, he developed techniques for determining what the behaviors might mean. This section -- divided into six parts -- introduces us to some of Freud's most famous patients and the key concepts with which he tried to make sense of their symptoms and their lives.
Freud's interest in what lay beyond conscious life and in hypnotism and hysteria led him to study with the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. When Freud returned to Vienna, he began using hypnosis, massage, and pressure on the head to get patients to dredge up thoughts related to their symptoms. Only later did he ask them to say whatever crossed their minds. This he called "free association," what the patient "Anna O." had already described as the "talking cure."
Theory is good; but it doesn't prevent things from existing. -- Charcot, 1886 |
I felt no particular partiality for the position and activity of a physician in those early years, nor, by the way, later. Rather, I was moved by a sort of greed for knowledge. -- Sigmund Freud, 1925 |
But this procedure of free association and
so on is queer, because Freud never shows how we know where to
stop -- here is the right solution. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1942 |
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The hysterical attack corresponds to a memory from a patient's life. -- Sigmund Freud, 1895 |
Anna O.'s illness was the desperate struggle of an unsatisfied young woman who found no outlets for her physical and mental energies, nor for her idealistic strivings. -- Henri F. Ellenberger, 1972 |
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Rather than continuing her [Anna O.'s] role as a passive hysterical patient, through her writing she became one who controlled her own cure. -- Elaine Showalter, 1993 |
No evidence shows that only the patient's unconscious ideas guide the trains of associations in psychoanalytic treatment . . . -- Malcolm Macmillan, 1991 |
For Freud, interpretation was necessary to give meaning to the apparently random thoughts of free association. Freud's focus was on reading the obscure language of the unconscious, and he developed techniques of interpretation in order to do so. In the cases of patients known as Rat Man and Wolf Man, he wove together elaborate stories, explanations, and speculations to make sense out of constellations of symptoms that seemed impossibly puzzling. These case histories, written for colleagues, read like detective novels in which the analyst deciphers the significance of symptoms as if they are clues.
"Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis" |
Rat ManIn the case history known as "The Rat Man," Freud tells the story of Ernst Lanzer (1878 1914), a young lawyer plagued by powerful obsessions involving rats, torture, and punishment. Lanzer's obsessive acts and thoughts were traced to his deep ambivalence about sexuality and about his father. These symptoms expressed his ambivalence even as they covered it up. Freud's original process notes from this case are the most complete that still exist. He worked his raw materials into a publishable form that would serve the purposes of his theory, sometimes exaggerating the beneficial effects of the treatment and even its duration. |
It still strikes me as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. -- Sigmund Freud, 1895 |
Freud regarded memory and motive as inseparable. Recollection could have no force, no meaning, unless it was allied with motive. -- Oliver Sacks, 1998 |
Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. -- Vladimir Nabokov, 1951 |
If one takes Freud's advice, one finds psychological narratives without heroes or heroines. -- Richard Rorty, 1984 |
Freud in a chair next to his
analytic couch in an unidentified summer residence, 1932 |
Constructions in AnalysisThroughout his career Freud often considered what it was that made an analytic interpretation effective, and how it might be proven true. How were the interventions of the analyst different from the suggestions of a hypnotist? In this essay from very late in his life, Freud returned to the question of the influence of the analyst and how interpretation, construction, memory, and insight might be related to one another. |
Freud has a peculiar tendency to smuggle sexual significance into all possible and impossible dream contents. -- Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 1901 |
I must therefore content myself with bringing forward fragmentary portions, which the reader can put together into a living whole. -- Sigmund Freud, 1937 |
Freud used the concepts of "transference" and "counter-transference" to refer to the strong emotions projected by the patient onto the doctor and the doctor onto the patient. A transference -- such as treating an analyst like one's father -- might promote therapeutic work, but Freud was also aware that this could distort a patient's (and an analyst's) perspective. Given that an analysis might seem successful entirely because it felt that way, Freud (and his critics) wanted to know how to determine if it had in fact produced true insight. This influence of patient-doctor emotions on analysis plays a central role in two cases. One came at the beginning of Freud's analytic career (the case of Ida Bauer, whom Freud called "Dora") and another at the end (the case of poet Hilda Doolittle, who called herself "H.D.").
Dora -- A Botched CaseIda Bauer (1882-1945), the patient Freud wrote about as "Dora," was sent to him in 1900 suffering from so-called "hysterical" symptoms: a nervous cough, depression, and unsociability. The teenager had been resisting the advances of a family friend -- the husband of a woman with whom Dora's father was having an affair. Rather than interpreting what these hysterical symptoms meant to Dora, Freud insisted that they must have the significance that his theory of the sexual roots of hysteria required. Dora rejected Freud and his ideas and left the treatment. |
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[Psychoanalysis] all seems to me a false working-up, and an inducement to hysteria and insanity. -- D. H. Lawrence, 1921 |
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Introductory LecturesIn the winter terms of 1915-1916 and 1916-1917, Freud gave lectures on psychoanalysis to general audiences of men and women at the University of Vienna. In the lecture on transference he gave an elementary account of how the emotions of patients led them during therapy to repeat patterns from their earliest relationships. The goal of treatment was to make the patient aware of this repetition, bringing to consciousness what had been unconscious. |
Indeed, analysis does not set out to prevent pathological reactions, but should give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another. -- Sigmund Freud, 1923 |
H.D. -- An Archaeology
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Once the patient is free of the last authority, the therapist, he has achieved the only possible and real freedom; he is himself alone -- however diminished that self may be. -- Philipp Rieff, 1979 |
Sigmund and Anna Freud on holiday in
the Dolomites, Italy, 1913. |
From Acting Out to RecollectionOne of Freud's "Papers on Technique," this 1914 essay describes how making the repetition of childhood patterns visible in the transference can lead a person to self- awareness through recollection. It is by "working through" repetition, not just condemning it, that analysis aims to make the past something one can live with rather than something one is imprisoned in. |
take my hands in your hands, -- H.D., 1961 |
Ends of AnalysisIn 1937 Freud asked what it meant for an analysis to reach its end. The patient and analyst could decide to stop meeting, but did that mean there were no unconscious conflicts left to discover? In this pessimistic essay, Freud emphasizes again that unconscious conflicts will remain (even after a successful analysis) and may cause significant disturbances. |
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No psychoanalyst goes further than his own complexes and internal resistances permit. -- Sigmund Freud, 1910 |
It is the body of Dora which speaks pain, desire, speaks a force divided and contained. -- Hélène Cixous, 1976 |
PART 1 - PART 2 |
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