Concept
Working through
The repeated, gradual overcoming of resistance to an interpretation already understood.
Development
1914
introduced by Sigmund Freud
Freud names working through in his 1914 paper on technique. Naming a resistance does not end it, and the patient must be given time to go on working against it under the fundamental rule. It is a trial of patience for both parties, and it is the part of the work that changes the patient most and sets analysis apart from suggestion. Theoretically he likens it to the abreaction of hypnotic treatment.
In Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (1914)
1926
developed by Sigmund Freud
In 1926 Freud gives working through a dynamic ground. Even after the ego has resolved to give up its resistances, the repetition compulsion still binds the repressed drive to its unconscious prototypes. Of his five kinds of resistance, it is this resistance of the id, or of the unconscious, that makes working through necessary.
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926)
1940
reworked by Melanie Klein
Klein carries Freud's clinical term into development. For her, working through is not only how a patient overcomes a resistance in treatment: the infant works through the depressive position itself, in the infantile neurosis, and this is part of how the early ego is organized and integrated. Each later loss revives the position, so mourning becomes a renewed working through of it.
In Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States (1940)
Relations
- 1914 derives from Resistance
Freud introduces working through as the patient's labour on a resistance already named by the analyst: naming it does not end it, and the patient must be given time to work through and overcome it.
- 1914 introduced by Sigmund Freud
Freud names working through in his 1914 paper on technique. Naming a resistance does not end it, and the patient must be given time to go on working against it under the fundamental rule. It is a trial of patience for both parties, and it is the part of the work that changes the patient most and sets analysis apart from suggestion. Theoretically he likens it to the abreaction of hypnotic treatment.
- 1914 diverges from Cathartic method
Freud presents working through as analysis's counterpart to the abreaction of the cathartic method. Theoretically it does the same job, discharging the affect held back by repression. But it does so through slow work against resistance under the fundamental rule, not through a single hypnotic discharge, and this is what sets analysis apart from suggestion.
- 1926 derives from Repetition compulsion
Freud grounds working through in the repetition compulsion. Even after the ego has resolved to give up its resistances, the power of the repetition compulsion, the pull of the unconscious prototypes on the repressed drive process, still has to be overcome. This resistance of the unconscious is what makes working through necessary.
- 1926 developed by Sigmund Freud
In 1926 Freud gives working through a dynamic ground. Even after the ego has resolved to give up its resistances, the repetition compulsion still binds the repressed drive to its unconscious prototypes. Of his five kinds of resistance, it is this resistance of the id, or of the unconscious, that makes working through necessary.
- 1940 reworked by Melanie Klein
Klein carries Freud's clinical term into development. For her, working through is not only how a patient overcomes a resistance in treatment: the infant works through the depressive position itself, in the infantile neurosis, and this is part of how the early ego is organized and integrated. Each later loss revives the position, so mourning becomes a renewed working through of it.
Works
- 1926
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst), published in 1926 by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, is Freud's major revision of his theory of anxiety and his first systematic account of defence within the structural model of ego, id and super-ego set out in The Ego and the Id (1923). The book opens by distinguishing inhibition, a restriction of an ego function undertaken as a precaution or through an impoverishment of energy, from the symptom, the sign and substitute of an instinctual satisfaction that has not taken place and the result of repression. Its central move reverses Freud's earlier view that repressed libido is transformed directly into anxiety. Re-examining the animal phobias of Little Hans and the Wolf Man, he concludes that in both the motive force of repression was castration anxiety, the ego's fear of an external danger: anxiety makes repression, not repression anxiety. The ego is the sole seat of anxiety. It produces anxiety as a signal when it anticipates danger, and through the pleasure principle the signal enables it to inhibit the threatening process in the id. Anxiety is traced to a situation of helplessness before mounting excitation, of which birth is the prototype. Freud separates the traumatic situation, in which anxiety arises automatically, as in the actual neuroses, from the danger situation, in which the ego reproduces a weakened form of it as a warning. The danger situations form a developmental series, each tied to a phase: psychical helplessness in the immature ego, loss of the object in early childhood, castration in the phallic phase, the super-ego's anger and loss of its love in latency, and finally the fear of death, read as the super-ego projected onto the powers of fate. Neurosis arises where people go on reacting to danger situations long outgrown; symptoms are formed to remove the ego from the danger situation that anxiety signals. Neurotic anxiety is anxiety about an instinctual danger the ego does not know, as realistic anxiety is about a known one. The book compares symptom formation in phobia, conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis. In obsessional neurosis, regression to the anal-sadistic stage, a severe super-ego and reaction formations shape the symptoms, and Freud describes undoing and isolation as defensive techniques beside repression. He reinstates 'defence' as the general term for all the ego's protective techniques, repression being one of them. He discusses Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth (1924), crediting it with linking every danger situation to separation from the mother but rejecting the claim that the severity of the birth trauma decides who becomes neurotic; he names instead the long helplessness of the human infant, the interruption of sexual development between early childhood and puberty, and the ego's imperfect means of guarding against internal danger. The addenda distinguish five kinds of resistance and separate anxiety, the reaction to the danger that object loss brings, from pain, the reaction to the loss itself, and from mourning.
- 1940
Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States
Melanie Klein's 1940 paper in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis connects normal mourning with the depressive position of infancy. The mourner, she argues, passes through a modified and transitory manic-depressive state and comes out of it. An actual loss revives the early fear of having lost the loved internal objects, and the work of mourning rebuilds the inner world by reinstating them. The infantile depressive position finds expression in the infantile neurosis, through which it is worked through and gradually overcome. The paper also elaborates the manic defences, among them triumph, control and contempt.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety1926Evidence for a relation
- Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through1914Evidence for a relation
- Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States1940Evidence for a relation