Concept
Dissociation
A division of mental life in which a group of ideas, memories or functions runs on apart from the main body of consciousness, cut off from associative contact with it. French psychiatry described its extreme forms as double conscience, and Pierre Janet traced it to an innate weakness of psychological synthesis. In 1893 Breuer and Freud took it up as the splitting of consciousness present, at least in rudiment, in every hysteria, Breuer accounting for it by hypnoid states. Freud soon explained the split dynamically instead, as the outcome of a conflict between mental forces kept in place by repression, and the term receded in psychoanalysis until interpersonal and relational analysts and students of trauma took it up again in the twentieth century.
Development
1895
developed by Josef Breuer
In his theoretical chapter of Studies on Hysteria Breuer accepts, after the French researchers, that a splitting of mental activity occurs, and devotes a section to unconscious ideas and the splitting of the psyche. He prefers to speak of a splitting of the psyche rather than of consciousness, and makes hypnoid states its main condition in the major hysterias.
In Studies on Hysteria (1895)
1910
reworked by Sigmund Freud
In his Clark University lectures Freud sets Janet's account of hysterical dissociation, an innate inability to hold mental processes together in a unity, against his own: the split is not a deficit of synthesis but the result of an active struggle between two psychical groupings, kept up by repression and met in treatment as resistance.
In Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1910)
Relations
- 1893 gave rise to Hypnoid state
The hypnoid state was put forward to account for the splitting of consciousness that French psychiatry had described as double conscience. The Preliminary Communication holds that this split exists in rudiment in every hysteria, says the authors here agree with Binet and the two Janets, and groups the tendency to dissociation with the abnormal states it calls hypnoid. Breuer's theoretical chapter values hypnoid states above all for their power to bring about the splitting of the psyche.
- 1895 developed by Josef Breuer
In his theoretical chapter of Studies on Hysteria Breuer accepts, after the French researchers, that a splitting of mental activity occurs, and devotes a section to unconscious ideas and the splitting of the psyche. He prefers to speak of a splitting of the psyche rather than of consciousness, and makes hypnoid states its main condition in the major hysterias.
- 1910 reworked by Sigmund Freud
In his Clark University lectures Freud sets Janet's account of hysterical dissociation, an innate inability to hold mental processes together in a unity, against his own: the split is not a deficit of synthesis but the result of an active struggle between two psychical groupings, kept up by repression and met in treatment as resistance.
Works
- 1895
- 1910
Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Über Psychoanalyse) is the text of the five lectures Freud gave in German in September 1909 at the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were published in 1910 by Franz Deuticke in Leipzig and Vienna and dedicated to the university's president, G. Stanley Hall. Addressed to an audience of scholars and laypeople, they give a compact account of how psychoanalysis came about and what it had found by then. The first lecture credits the method's origin to Josef Breuer's treatment of a young hysterical woman in 1880–82. Under hypnosis she recalled the scenes in which her symptoms had arisen, and expressing the affect held back at the time made them disappear: the "talking cure". Freud sums up that hysterics suffer from reminiscences, and explains bodily symptoms as the conversion of strangled affect. The second lecture tells how Freud gave up hypnosis and found that forgotten memories are held back by a force felt in treatment as resistance. This is the same force that once pushed them out of consciousness: the repression of a wish incompatible with the person's ethical and aesthetic standards. The symptom is a distorted substitute for what was repressed. The third lecture describes free association under the fundamental rule, the "complex" of the Zurich school, dream interpretation as the royal road to the unconscious, and the meaning of slips and other parapraxes. The fourth argues that analysis regularly leads to the patient's sexual life and back to childhood. It sets out infantile sexuality (erogenous zones, autoerotism, component drives, object choice) and the nuclear complex of love for one parent and rivalry with the other. The fifth explains falling ill as a flight from frustrating reality into substitute satisfaction, by way of regression and phantasy, and contrasts neurosis with art. It presents transference as the strongest evidence for the theory and answers the fear that making the repressed conscious is dangerous. In analysis, conscious judgment replaces repression, energy is freed for sublimation, and some impulses are granted direct satisfaction. Freud closes by warning against the harm of excessive sexual repression in civilisation, with the tale of the Schilda townsfolk who starved their horse by cutting its oats.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Studies on Hysteria1895Evidence for a relation
- Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis1910Evidence for a relation