Concept
Condensation
Several ideas or images fused into a single element.
Development
1900
Sigmund Freud introduced by
In Die Traumdeutung Freud names condensation (Verdichtung) as the first operation of the dream-work: the manifest dream is brief and meagre beside the wealth of latent thoughts it compresses, so that each of its elements is overdetermined, standing for several dream-thoughts at once.
1905
Sigmund Freud developed by
Applies condensation in a clinical dream analysis: in the Dora case he treats the jewel-case of her first dream as a product of condensation and displacement and a compromise between opposed currents.
1957
Jacques Lacan reworked by
Reads condensation as the superimposition of signifiers in which metaphor has its field, and displacement as metonymy (‘L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient’, 1957). In Seminar XI (1964) he restates condensation as a signifying operation with the effect of metaphor and refers back to that article.
Relations
- 1900 introduced by Sigmund Freud
In Die Traumdeutung Freud names condensation (Verdichtung) as the first operation of the dream-work: the manifest dream is brief and meagre beside the wealth of latent thoughts it compresses, so that each of its elements is overdetermined, standing for several dream-thoughts at once.
- 1905 developed by Sigmund Freud
Applies condensation in a clinical dream analysis: in the Dora case he treats the jewel-case of her first dream as a product of condensation and displacement and a compromise between opposed currents.
- 1957 reworked by Jacques Lacan
Reads condensation as the superimposition of signifiers in which metaphor has its field, and displacement as metonymy (‘L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient’, 1957). In Seminar XI (1964) he restates condensation as a signifying operation with the effect of metaphor and refers back to that article.
- 1957 gave rise to Metaphor
Lacan's metaphor is his linguistic reformulation of Freud's condensation. In Seminar XI he says his formula of metaphor is essential for showing where the unconscious appears, because signifying condensation is fundamental to it.
Works
- 1900
Freud's book on dreams, issued by Deuticke in November 1899 with the imprint date 1900, argues that a dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. It sets out a method of interpreting dreams through the dreamer's associations and distinguishes the manifest content of a dream from the latent dream-thoughts. The dream-work turns the latter into the former through condensation, displacement, considerations of representability and secondary revision. The seventh chapter proposes a model of the psychical apparatus made up of the systems unconscious, preconscious and conscious, with a censorship between them and two modes of functioning, the primary and the secondary process. The book is also the first printed statement of the theme Freud later named the Oedipus complex. Freud enlarged it in many later editions.
- 1905
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Freud's case history of "Dora", an eighteen-year-old Viennese woman (later identified as Ida Bauer) whom he treated for about eleven weeks at the end of 1900; written in 1901, it appeared in 1905 in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie. Dora suffered from a nervous cough, loss of voice, shortness of breath and low moods, and her father brought her to Freud after her parents found a letter in which she hinted at suicide. Behind the symptoms Freud uncovers a family entanglement: her father's affair with Frau K., and the advances of Frau K.'s husband, Herr K., whom Dora slapped after a proposal by a lake and whose earlier kiss had filled her with disgust. Freud reads her symptoms as the expression of repressed sexual wishes — love for Herr K., a revived childhood attachment to her father and, at the deepest layer, love for Frau K. — and builds the case around the interpretation of two dreams: a burning house from which her father rescues her while her mother wants to save her jewel case, and a wandering through a strange town after her father's death. Dora broke off the treatment on 31 December. In the Postscript Freud attributes the failure to his not having recognised and interpreted in time the transference of her feelings for Herr K. onto himself, and gives his first sustained account of transference as a new edition of old impulses directed at the physician.
- 1973
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
The seminar Lacan gave in 1964 at the École Normale Supérieure, after the International Psychoanalytical Association had made his removal from the list of training analysts the condition for admitting the Société Française de Psychanalyse. Established by Jacques-Alain Miller, it was published by Éditions du Seuil in 1973 as Book XI of Le Séminaire, and in English in Alan Sheridan's translation. Speaking to a larger and less specialised audience than before, Lacan set out to bring coherence to four concepts on which psychoanalysis rests: the unconscious, repetition, transference and the drive. He opens with his 'excommunication', and moves from asking whether psychoanalysis is a science to asking what kind of science could include it. The seminar treats the unconscious and repetition, the gaze as objet petit a, transference and the drive, and the field of the Other, where alienation, aphanisis and the subject supposed to know are taken up.
See also
People
References
- The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis1973 Evidence for a relation
- Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria1905 Evidence for a relation
- The Interpretation of Dreams1900 Evidence for a relation