Person

Sigmund Freud

1856–1939

Viennese neurologist who founded psychoanalysis.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was a Viennese neurologist who founded psychoanalysis. Trained in physiological research and clinical neurology, he moved from the treatment of hysteria, at first together with Josef Breuer, to a general psychology resting on an unconscious formed by repression. The Interpretation of Dreams¹ (1900) set out a method of reading dreams through the dreamer's associations and a model of the mental apparatus; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality² (1905) traced adult sexuality back to an infantile sexuality present from the start of life; and his papers on technique placed transference at the centre of the treatment.

After the First World War Freud revised his theory in two main steps. Beyond the Pleasure Principle³ (1920) set a death drive against the life drives, and The Ego and the Id⁴ (1923) divided the mind into id, ego and super-ego. In works such as Totem and Taboo⁵ (1913), Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego⁶ (1921) and Civilization and Its Discontents⁷ (1930) he applied psychoanalysis to religion, group life and culture.

Freud also organised the psychoanalytic movement, from the Wednesday Society of 1902 to the International Psycho-Analytical Association of 1910, and saw it divided by the departures of Alfred Adler in 1911 and Carl Gustav Jung in 1913. He lived with cancer of the jaw from 1923, left Vienna for London in 1938, and died there in September 1939. For decades the standard account of his life was Ernest Jones's The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud⁸.

Life and training

Freud was born at Freiberg in 1856. His biographer Ernest Jones describes a complicated family in which Freud was his mother's favourite. Jones holds that the principles of Freud's later psychology came from his years in Ernst Brücke's physiological institute and from the Helmholtz school to which it belonged, rather than from Jean-Martin Charcot or Breuer (The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud⁸). Freud gave up research for medical practice so that he could marry Martha Bernays, after a long engagement. Jones's account of the cocaine episode of these years is critical: Freud's friend Fleischl became addicted, and Freud later played down his own advice that the drug be injected.

Freud spent months with Charcot in Paris and did neurological work whose chief product was a book on aphasia. He then collaborated with Breuer, who had introduced the cathartic method in his treatment of Anna O. in 1880–1882. Their joint Preliminary Communication of 1893 already used the word repression, and in Studies on Hysteria⁹ (1895) Freud described an incompatible idea being pushed out of consciousness, with the same force reappearing in the treatment as resistance. The book also first named transference, which it presents as a "false connection". Jones's version of how Anna O.'s treatment ended is among the stories that later historians have questioned.

Jones traces the slow path by which Freud arrived at free association. In papers of 1896 Freud set out the seduction theory, which derived the neuroses from sexual seduction in childhood; in September 1897 he told his friend Wilhelm Fliess that he no longer believed in it. Jones reads the friendship with Fliess as a "delayed adolescence" and holds that Freud suffered from a psychoneurosis in the 1890s. The self-analysis Freud began in 1897, which Jones calls his most heroic feat, led to The Interpretation of Dreams¹, issued in November 1899 with the date 1900, which Jones regards as his greatest book.

Career

The Wednesday Society, the first circle of Freud's followers, began in 1902. Jones's biography follows the movement's growth from there: the interest of Bleuler and Jung in Zurich, the Salzburg congress of 1908, the visit to Clark University in 1909 and the founding of the International Psycho-Analytical Association in 1910, all against the hostility of much of the medical world. Freud's collaboration with Jung began in 1907, and Jung was the association's president at its Weimar congress in 1911.

The movement soon split. Adler left in 1911 and founded individual psychology; Freud broke with Jung in 1913, after which Jung founded analytical psychology. Jones, who explains these departures, and Stekel's, as a "return of resistance", proposed a secret Committee in 1912; he and Sándor Ferenczi were among its founding members. Freud analysed Ferenczi briefly in 1914 and again in 1916.

In postwar Vienna Freud lost his daughter Sophie, who died in 1920. Jones denies that grief over her death produced the theory of the death drive. From 1923 Freud had cancer of the jaw. In 1924 Otto Rank and Ferenczi published The Development of Psychoanalysis¹⁰, which argued for an analysis centred on present experience in the transference. Both men later departed from Freud's circle; Jones attributed this to their failing mental health, a judgement that later critics, Erich Fromm among them, disputed. The same years brought disputes over lay analysis, and in 1930 Freud received the Goethe Prize.

After the Nazis destroyed psychoanalysis in Vienna, Freud emigrated to London in 1938 with Jones's help, and he died there in September 1939. Jones describes his end as "the death of a realist".

The unconscious, dreams and sexuality

Jean Laplanche and Pontalis, in The Language of Psycho-Analysis¹¹, take the unconscious as the one word that sums up Freud's discovery. The word was older than Freud; what he introduced was the psychoanalytic concept of an unconscious formed by repression.

The Interpretation of Dreams¹ holds that a dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. Through the dreamer's associations the interpreter passes from the manifest content to the latent dream-thoughts, which the dream-work has transformed by condensation, displacement, considerations of representability and secondary revision. The seventh chapter sets out a model of the psychical apparatus, the topographical model, with the systems unconscious, preconscious and conscious, a censorship between them, and two modes of functioning, the primary and the secondary process. The book also first states the Oedipus theme, which Freud had hinted at to Fliess in 1897 and illustrated from Oedipus Rex and Hamlet; the term Oedipus complex itself appeared in print only in 1910. Freud enlarged the book in many later editions.

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life¹² (1901) applied the same reasoning to the forgetting of names and intentions, screen memories, slips of the tongue, of the pen and in reading, bungled and chance actions, and superstition. Freud traced each parapraxis to a disturbing thought that had been suppressed or repressed, and concluded that mental life is determined in healthy people as well as in the sick.

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality² (1905) dealt in turn with the sexual aberrations, infantile sexuality and the transformations of puberty. Freud argued that the sexual drive is present from infancy, is made up of component drives attached to erotogenic zones, and reaches its adult genital form only through a course of development. Later editions added the pregenital organisations that underlie the idea of psychosexual development.

Technique and metapsychology

The case of Dora, published as Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria¹³ (1905), concerned Ida Bauer, whom Freud treated for about eleven weeks at the end of 1900 for a cough and loss of voice. Her symptoms were bound up with her father's affair with Frau K. and with Herr K.'s advances to her, and the analysis turned on two dreams. She broke off the treatment on 31 December, and Freud attributed the failure to a transference he had not interpreted. He described transferences as "new editions" of old impulses, at once the greatest obstacle to the treatment and its most powerful aid.

His papers on technique developed this view. The Dynamics of Transference¹⁴ (1912) distinguished positive from negative transference and treated transference as the most powerful resistance. Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through¹⁵ (1914) treated the patient's wish to relive the past in place of remembering it as resistance. Observations on Transference-Love¹⁶ (1915) held that the patient's love for the analyst should be neither gratified nor suppressed.

On Narcissism: An Introduction¹⁷ (1914) treated narcissism as a normal libidinal state, distinguished ego-libido from object-libido and primary from secondary narcissism, set anaclitic against narcissistic object-choice, and introduced the ego ideal. In his 1915 paper on the unconscious Freud argued that unconscious processes must be assumed, separated the descriptive, dynamic and systematic senses of the term, and ascribed to the system unconscious the absence of negation, the primary process, timelessness and psychical reality; he also distinguished thing-presentations from word-presentations. Repression¹⁸ (1915) separated primal repression from after-pressure, and the fate of an idea from that of its quota of affect.

Mourning and Melancholia¹⁹ (1917) compared melancholia with mourning. The melancholic's lowered self-regard and self-reproaches are reproaches against a lost object with which the ego has identified, so that "the shadow of the object falls upon the ego", and a critical agency appears that anticipates the later super-ego.

Later theory

Beyond the Pleasure Principle³ (1920) started from traumatic dreams, a small child's fort–da game and repetition in the transference, all of which pointed to a compulsion to repeat. Freud described trauma as a breach of the protective shield, argued that the drives are conservative, and wrote that "the aim of all life is death". He set the death drives against the life drives, or Eros, and credited Sabina Spielrein in a footnote; her 1912 paper Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being²⁰ had placed destruction within the sexual drive itself. With The Economic Problem of Masochism²¹ (1924) and Civilization and Its Discontents, aggression came to be treated as a derivative of the death drive.

Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego⁶ (1921) started from Le Bon and McDougall, explained the cohesion of groups by libidinal ties, and took the church and the army as artificial groups. Freud described identification as the earliest emotional tie, and the group as formed by individuals who have put one and the same object in place of their ego ideal, with the leader standing for the primal father.

In The Ego and the Id⁴ (1923) Freud introduced the structural model. Much of the ego is itself unconscious; the id, a term taken from Groddeck, is the reservoir of the drives; the ego is the part of the id modified by the external world, "first and foremost a bodily ego"; and the super-ego, or ego ideal, is the heir of the Oedipus complex. The book also discusses the fusion and defusion of drives, an unconscious sense of guilt, the negative therapeutic reaction and the ego as servant of three masters. The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex²² (1924) completed the account of the positive and negative Oedipus complex, its ending under the threat of castration, and the identifications that form the super-ego. The best-known diagram of the structural model appeared in the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis²³ (1933).

Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety²⁴ (1926) reversed Freud's earlier view: anxiety makes repression, not the other way round. The ego is the sole seat of anxiety, which serves as a signal of danger; birth is the prototype of helplessness, and the dangers form a series running from helplessness through loss of the object, castration and the super-ego to death. Freud reinstated defence as the general term, of which repression is one kind, and rejected Rank's view that the trauma of birth decides the neuroses. Jones counts this book and the later theory of the ego among Freud's major achievements.

In Analysis Terminable and Interminable²⁵ (1937) Freud examined the limits of therapy: Rank's attempt to shorten treatment, the time limit he had himself set with the Wolf Man, and Ferenczi's complaint that his negative transference had not been analysed. He named trauma, the strength of the drives and alterations of the ego as the factors that decide the outcome, pointed to the death drive and the need for punishment, called the repudiation of femininity a "bedrock", and advised analysts to return to analysis periodically.

Culture and religion

Totem and Taboo⁵ (1913), whose essays first appeared in Imago in 1912–1913, compared the mental life of tribal peoples with that of neurotics through the horror of incest, taboo and ambivalence, and animism and the omnipotence of thoughts. Its central hypothesis is that the brothers of a primal horde killed and devoured their father, and that their remorse gave rise to totemism, the prohibitions on murder and incest, morality and religion.

The Future of an Illusion²⁶ (1927) argued that religious ideas console people for the renunciations civilization demands, and that they arise from childhood helplessness and the longing for a father. Freud called them illusions, beliefs motivated by wishes, described religion as a universal obsessional neurosis, and placed his hope in science.

Civilization and Its Discontents⁷ (1930) began from Rolland's "oceanic feeling" and argued that civilization demands the renunciation of sexual and aggressive drives alike. Aggression turned back on the self becomes the super-ego and produces guilt, and the book frames this within the conflict between Eros and the death drive.

Moses and Monotheism²⁷ (1939), completed in exile, argued that Moses was an Egyptian follower of Akhenaten who was killed by his people; the memory of the deed was repressed and returned after a period of latency, a pattern Freud linked to the murder of the primal father.

Influence and reception

The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud⁸ (1953–1957) was for decades the standard life. Jones rejected the charges that Freud was tyrannical, dogmatic or pessimistic, while granting his secretiveness, indiscretion, poor judgement of people and a hidden credulity, and he remained sceptical of the death drive. Critics, Fromm among them, objected to his portrayal of Rank and Ferenczi, and historians have questioned some of his stories.

Freud's concepts were taken up, revised and contested by later analysts. Karen Horney, in New Ways in Psychoanalysis²⁸ (1939), denied the Oedipus complex a biological basis, and Melanie Klein dated it earlier in childhood. Many analysts rejected the death drive, while Klein and André Green made it central to their work. Transference was reworked by Klein, by Jacques Lacan in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis²⁹ (1973) and by Heinz Kohut. Jean Laplanche returned to the seduction theory in Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse³⁰ (1987), calling its abandonment a going-astray, and in 1992 described Freud's discovery of the unconscious as an "unfinished Copernican revolution". Fromm sided with Ferenczi's call for an analyst who offers warmth and affirmation against what he saw as Freud's patricentric reserve. Among Freud's early readers, Lou Andreas-Salomé criticised Jung's desexualised libido in 1916.

The schools that followed Freud, among them ego psychology, Harry Stack Sullivan, Klein, Fairbairn and Winnicott, Erikson and Kohut, and Lacan, are surveyed by Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret Black in Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought³¹ (1995).

Selected works

Freud's principal books include Studies on Hysteria⁹ (with Breuer, 1895), The Interpretation of Dreams¹ (1900), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life¹² (1901), Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious³² (1905), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality² (1905), Totem and Taboo⁵ (1913), Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis³³ (1917), Beyond the Pleasure Principle³ (1920), Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego⁶ (1921), The Ego and the Id⁴ (1923), Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety²⁴ (1926), The Future of an Illusion²⁶ (1927), Civilization and Its Discontents⁷ (1930), the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis²³ (1933), Moses and Monotheism²⁷ (1939) and the posthumous An Outline of Psycho-Analysis³⁴ (1940).

His case histories include Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria¹³ (1905), Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy³⁵ (1909), Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis³⁶ (1909), Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia³⁷ (1911) and From the History of an Infantile Neurosis³⁸ (1918). Among his papers are The Dynamics of Transference¹⁴ (1912), On Narcissism: An Introduction¹⁷ (1914), Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through¹⁵ (1914), Instincts and Their Vicissitudes³⁹ (1915), Repression¹⁸ (1915), the paper on the unconscious (1915), Observations on Transference-Love¹⁶ (1915), Mourning and Melancholia¹⁹ (1917), The 'Uncanny'⁴⁰ (1919), The Economic Problem of Masochism²¹ (1924) and Analysis Terminable and Interminable²⁵ (1937).

Ideas

introduced

1894 Defense
Introduces defence in “Die Abwehr-Neuropsychosen” (1894): faced with an incompatible idea, the ego sets out to fend it off, and the attempt gives rise to hysterical, obsessional or hallucinatory symptoms. In Studies on Hysteria he recalls how clinical work led him to the idea.
1895 Transference
Describes the patient attaching to the physician ideas that belong elsewhere: a ‘false connection’.
1895 Free association
In his chapter on the psychotherapy of hysteria, Freud gives up hypnosis for concentration and the pressure of his hand, and binds the patient to report every image or idea that comes, without selection and uninfluenced by criticism or affect. In the case of Emmy von N. he records her asking him to stop asking where things came from and let her tell what she had to say.
1895 Repression
The Preliminary Communication with Breuer (1893) already speaks of things the patient intentionally 'repressed' from conscious thought. In his own parts of Studies on Hysteria Freud makes repression a mechanism: an idea incompatible with the dominant mass of ideas of the ego is pushed out of association, becomes pathogenic, and the same force of the ego reappears in treatment as resistance to its recall.
1895 Afterwardsness
Freud used nachträglich and Nachträglichkeit from the 1890s, most fully in the 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology, where a memory becomes a trauma only after the event, and in letters to Fliess. Laplanche and Pontalis later gathered these uses into one concept.

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1895 Resistance
In his chapter on the psychotherapy of hysteria, Freud infers from the effort that pressing patients to recall cost him that his work had to overcome a psychical force in the patient that opposes the pathogenic ideas becoming conscious, and names it resistance.
1896 Projection
Freud first described projection as the defence of paranoia, in a draft on paranoia sent to Fliess in January 1895 and in 'Weitere Bemerkungen über die Abwehr-Neuropsychosen' (1896): a reproach the ego cannot bear is not acknowledged as its own but attributed to someone else, and returns from outside as delusion. The Dora case restates the mechanism: in paranoia the projection of a reproach onto another, unchanged in content and without support in reality, shows itself as the process that forms delusions.
1896 Seduction theory
Freud set out the seduction theory in his papers of 1896 on the aetiology of hysteria and on the neuro-psychoses of defence, and told Fliess in September 1897 that he no longer believed in it.
1900 Dream-work
Freud set out the mechanism of dream formation in Die Traumdeutung (1900). In the Dora case history he refers back to that book's rule that every dream represents a wish as fulfilled, in disguise when the wish is repressed, and tests it against Dora's first dream; he calls the dream a detour around repression, a means of indirect representation.
1900 Regression
Freud introduced regression in chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), for the dream's backward movement through the psychical apparatus towards perception; he later spoke also of temporal and formal regression, among them the libido's return to earlier fixation points.
1900 Censorship
To explain why dreams are distorted, Freud posits in Die Traumdeutung two psychical forces, one forming the wish and the other exercising a censorship over it, and compares the dream to a political writer who must disguise what he says to get past the censor.
1900 Condensation
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.
1900 Displacement
In Die Traumdeutung Freud describes displacement (Verschiebung) as the second great operation of the dream-work: psychical intensity is shifted from the essential dream-thoughts onto indifferent elements, so that the dream is centred elsewhere than its latent content, a distortion he attributes to the censorship.
1900 Wish-fulfilment
The thesis that a dream is the (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish is the central claim of Die Traumdeutung, stated after the analysis of the Irma dream and defended against apparent counter-examples such as anxiety dreams.
1900 Primary process
Freud first sketched the distinction in his unpublished Project of 1895; in the last chapter of Die Traumdeutung he names the primary process as the mode of the unconscious system, in which excitation flows freely towards discharge by condensation and displacement, as seen in the dream-work.
1900 Secondary process
In the last chapter of Die Traumdeutung Freud sets a second, inhibiting process of the preconscious system against the primary process: excitation is bound, discharge is delayed, and thought can explore paths to satisfaction. In 1911 he tied it to the reality principle.
1900 Topographical model
Die Traumdeutung pictures the psychical apparatus as a series of systems, unconscious, preconscious and conscious, through which excitation passes as through a compound instrument; regression in dreams is a backward movement through them. Das Unbewußte (1915) sets the model out in its fullest form, with the systems Ucs., Pcs. and Cs.
1900 Psychical reality
The closing pages of Die Traumdeutung speak of psychical reality as a particular form of existence not to be confused with material reality. In the Introductory Lectures (Lecture XXIII) Freud states that in the world of the neuroses psychical reality is the decisive kind.
1900 Oedipus complex
After hinting at it to Fliess in 1897, Freud first published the idea in Die Traumdeutung, reading Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Hamlet as expressions of the child's love for one parent and death-wish against the other. The term 'Ödipuskomplex' itself appears in print only in 1910; in 1924 he described how the complex is dissolved.
1900 Identification
Freud first gave identification a psychoanalytic meaning in Die Traumdeutung, where hysterical identification, putting oneself in another's place on the ground of a shared unconscious element, explains a patient's dream and the spread of symptoms among patients.
1901 Parapraxis
Freud set out the theory of slips in Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, printed in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie in 1901 and as a book in 1904: the forgetting of names and intentions, slips of the tongue and pen, misreadings, bungled and chance actions are treated as meaningful acts with unconscious motives rather than accidents. In the Dora case he refers readers back to that treatise, and Jones in 1908 cites its sections on slips of the tongue and pen, bungled actions and chance actions as Freud's.
1905 Acting out
In the postscript to the Dora case Freud first uses 'agieren' for the patient's breaking off the treatment: taking revenge on him as she had wanted to on Herr K., she acted out a piece of her memories and fantasies instead of reproducing it in the treatment.
1905 Psychosexual development
Freud laid out infantile sexuality and its organization by body zones in the second of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905); the oral, anal and phallic phases were added in later editions and papers.
1905 Reaction formation
In the Dora case Freud observes that repression is often achieved by excessively strengthening the opposite of the thought to be repressed. He calls this “reactive reinforcement” (Reaktionsverstärkung), and the over-strong conscious thought the “reactive thought”, which holds its objectionable counterpart in repression. The same year the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality name the process “reaction formation” (Reaktionsbildung).
1905 Leaning-on
In the second of the Three Essays, Freud describes infantile sexual activity as at first attaching itself to the functions that serve self-preservation. His example is the child's sucking, which begins with feeding at the breast and only later becomes independent of it.
1905 Sublimation
In the Three Essays Freud names sublimation as the diversion of sexual drive energy from sexual aims to other, culturally valued ones. It begins in the latency period, and Freud makes it a source of artistic activity and of character.
1905 Drive
In the Three Essays Freud introduces the drive (Trieb) as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, whose object is not fixed in advance. Triebe und Triebschicksale (1915) gives it its classic definition, as a constant pressure with a source, an aim and an object, and lists its vicissitudes.
1905 Libido
The word was in use among sexologists, and Freud had used it in his papers on anxiety neurosis in the 1890s; the Three Essays make it the psychoanalytic name for the energy of the sexual drive, which the 1915 section on the libido theory and the 1914 paper on narcissism divide into ego-libido and object-libido.
1907 Unconscious sense of guilt
Freud first spoke of an unconscious consciousness of guilt in his 1907 paper on obsessive actions and religious practices. In Das Ich und das Es (1923) he made it a central clinical problem, behind the negative therapeutic reaction; in 1924 he linked it with a need for punishment, and in 1930 with the discontents of civilisation.
1908 Anal erotism
Freud counted the anal zone among the erotogenic zones in the Three Essays (1905) and named anal erotism in ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ (1908), where he derived orderliness, parsimony and obstinacy from its transformation.
1908 Castration complex
Freud first described the castration complex in 1908, among the sexual theories of children, and the case of Little Hans (1909), whose mother threatened to have his 'widdler' cut off, gave it its first clinical demonstration. In 1923 he tied it to the phallic phase, in which the child knows only one genital.
1909 Family romance
Freud's account of the family romance of neurotics was first printed within Rank's Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden (1909).
1910 Countertransference
Names the analyst’s countertransference and asks analysts to recognise and overcome it.
1911 Pleasure principle
In 'Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning' (1911), Freud named the tendency governing the primary processes the pleasure-unpleasure principle, or pleasure principle, and set the reality principle beside it.
1911 Reality principle
In 'Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning' Freud introduces the reality principle: when hallucinated satisfaction fails, the apparatus must form a conception of the real circumstances in the outside world and seek a real change in them, putting up with delay and unpleasure.
1912 Fundamental rule
Calls the obligation to communicate everything that comes to mind, without criticism, the 'psychoanalytic fundamental rule'. He observes that a patient caught in transference resistance takes the liberty of neglecting it.
1913 Primal horde
Taking Darwin's hypothesis of a primal horde ruled by a jealous father, Freud built on it in the fourth essay of Totem und Tabu the myth of the brothers who kill and eat the father, then out of guilt raise the totem and the incest taboo. In 1921 he read the group as a revival of the primal horde.
1914 Repetition compulsion
Freud named the compulsion to repeat in 'Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through' (1914): what the patient cannot remember is repeated in action, above all in the transference, and this repetition serves the resistance. Ferenczi and Rank take that paper as their starting point and credit Freud with having since shown, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the overriding importance of the repetition compulsion in the neuroses.
1914 Primary narcissism
Freud set out primary narcissism in 'On Narcissism: An Introduction' (1914), as an original libidinal investment of the ego from which object cathexes are later sent out and to which they can be withdrawn. Balint's critique of 1937 takes the hypothesis as Freud's.
1914 Idealization
Freud speaks of an idealization of the drive in the perversions in 1905. In 1914 he defines idealization as a process acting on the object, possible with ego-libido as with object-libido, as in the sexual overvaluation of the loved object, and he ties it to the forming of the ego ideal.
1914 Working through
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 Narcissism
The term was coined in clinical sexology (Näcke, 1899, as Freud notes); Freud used it from 1910 and in ‘On Narcissism’ (1914) made it a concept of libido theory, distinguishing primary from secondary narcissism and ego libido from object libido.
1914 Ego ideal
In 'On Narcissism' Freud introduces the ego ideal as the heir of infantile narcissism: what the subject projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost perfection of childhood, watched over by an agency of self-observation. In 1921 he explains the bond of a group by its members putting the leader in place of their ego ideal.
1915 Primal fantasy
Freud named the Urphantasien in ‘A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psycho-Analytic Theory of the Disease’ (1915): the fantasies of observing parental intercourse, of seduction and of castration. In Lecture 23 of the Introductory Lectures (1916–17) he suggested they were a phylogenetic endowment.
1915 Primal repression
Freud named primal repression (Urverdrängung) in 'Repression' (1915) as a first phase in which a drive's psychical representative is denied entry into consciousness, an idea foreshadowed in the Schreber case (1911) as fixation. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety he returns to it as his own earlier concept, presupposed by later repressions.
1917 Mourning
Freud had already said in Totem und Tabu that mourning has a psychical task to perform; Trauer und Melancholie makes it a concept, the work of mourning (Trauerarbeit), in which reality-testing shows that the loved object is gone and the libido is withdrawn from its memories bit by bit, and sets it against melancholia.
1918 Primal scene
In the Wolf Man case Freud reconstructs from the wolf dream a scene of parental intercourse observed at the age of one and a half and understood only later, names it the primal scene (Urszene), and asks whether such scenes are memories or primal fantasies.
1920 Death drive
Freud put forward the death drives in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920), setting them against the life drives and suggesting that the pleasure principle itself seems to serve them.
1920 Life drive
In Jenseits des Lustprinzips Freud gathers the sexual drives and the drives of self-preservation into the life drives, Eros, which strive to combine living substance into ever larger unities, and sets them against the death drives. Das Ich und das Es builds the second drive theory on this pair.
1923 Phallic phase
In 'The Infantile Genital Organization' (1923), Freud added to his theory of sexuality a childhood stage in which only the male genital counts for both sexes, a primacy of the phallus rather than of the genitals.
1923 Structural model
Finding that much of the ego and its defences is itself unconscious, Freud in Das Ich und das Es replaces the division by consciousness with three agencies, id, ego and super-ego, and in the New Introductory Lectures (1933) gives the model its best-known diagram.
1923 Id
Freud took the word das Es from Georg Groddeck, who had it from Nietzsche, and in Das Ich und das Es made it the name of the unconscious reservoir of the drives, out of which the ego is differentiated at its surface under the influence of the outside world.
1923 Super-ego
Das Ich und das Es introduces the super-ego (Über-Ich), at first as another name for the ego ideal, and derives it from the identifications with the parents that bring the Oedipus complex to an end, which makes it the heir of that complex.
1923 Denial
Freud gave disavowal (Verleugnung) its specific sense from 1923, when he described how children faced with the absence of a penis in girls deny the lack and believe they see one all the same; in his later writings on fetishism and splitting of the ego it becomes a defence against a perception of reality.
1924 Moral masochism
Das ökonomische Problem des Masochismus distinguishes erotogenic, feminine and moral masochism, and traces the last to an unconscious need for punishment, satisfied by the suffering the subject brings on himself.
1925 Negation
In Die Verneinung Freud shows that a repressed content can enter consciousness on condition that it is negated ('it is not my mother'): negation is a way of taking cognisance of the repressed, a lifting of repression though not an acceptance of it. He goes on to derive the function of judgement from the drives.
Unconscious phantasy
Isaacs traces the psychoanalytic sense of the term to Freud, who came to recognise phantasies that are unconscious; the wider Kleinian concept builds on his.
Unconscious
The word was in use among philosophers before him, but the psychoanalytic concept, an unconscious formed by repression whose contents reach consciousness only once resistances are overcome, is Freud's; Laplanche and Pontalis call it the single word that sums up his discovery.
Penis envy
Freud first described the girl's envy of the penis in "On the Sexual Theories of Children" (1908), used the word Penisneid from 1913, and set it out in the section on children's sexual researches that he added to the Three Essays in 1915.

developed

1895 Defense
Describes defence as turning a strong idea into a weak one by stripping it of its affect, and tentatively extends the concept to every form of hysteria.
1905 Transference
In the postscript to the Dora case, traces the end of the treatment to a transference he had not mastered in time.
1905 Condensation
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.
1905 Displacement
Carries displacement over from the dream to hysterical symptom formation: Dora’s disgust and the pressure she feels on her chest are sensations displaced from the genitals, from the lower body to the upper, and the jewel-case of her first dream is read as a product of condensation and displacement.
1905 Free association
In the preface to the Dora case, Freud writes that his technique has been transformed since the Studies: instead of tracing the symptoms one by one, he lets the patient choose the subject of each session and starts from whatever the unconscious presents on the surface. He reads hidden connections from the order in which the patient's ideas follow one another.

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1905 Parapraxis
Uses the symptomatic act clinically in the Dora case: Dora's playing with a small purse during a session, opening it and putting a finger in, is read as a pantomime of masturbation, and her quickly hiding a letter she was reading when Freud entered the waiting room as a further symptomatic act. Freud defines such acts as things done automatically and dismissed as meaningless, which on closer observation give expression to unconscious thoughts and impulses.
1905 Projection
In the Dora case Freud treats projection as a primitive, automatic defence that is not confined to paranoia. Defending against a self-reproach by raising the same reproach against someone else is modelled on children's tit-for-tat retorts, and Dora's reproaches against her father turn out to be lined with self-reproaches of the same content. In hysteria too, Dora's disgust at Herr K.'s embrace is read as projected by this mechanism, referring ultimately to her own discharge.
1912 Transference
Distinguishes positive from negative transference and treats transference as the most powerful resistance to treatment.
1912 Acting out
In the technical papers Freud places acting out within the transference: the unconscious impulses seek to be reproduced rather than remembered, the patient wants to act on them in the relation to the analyst, and the treatment must bring them back to remembering and psychic working over.
1912 Free association
Ties the failure of free association to the transference: whenever the patient's associations stop, the stoppage can be removed by telling him that he is in the grip of an idea about the physician. A patient caught in transference resistance feels free to neglect the fundamental rule.
1912 Resistance
Freud makes resistance a constant of the treatment, present in every association as a compromise with the forces aiming at recovery, and shows how transference is put in its service: the transference to the doctor serves resistance when it is negative, or positive but made of repressed erotic impulses.
1915 Transference
Treats the patient’s love for the analyst as transference, to be neither gratified nor suppressed.
1915 Repression
In the metapsychological paper Die Verdrängung Freud defines the essence of repression as turning something away from consciousness and keeping it at a distance, distinguishes primal repression from repression proper (after-pressure), and follows the separate fates of the idea and of the quota of affect.
1915 Unconscious
Das Unbewußte justifies the assumption of unconscious mental processes and sets out the special characteristics of the system Ucs.: freedom from contradiction, the primary process with its mobile cathexes, timelessness, and the replacement of external by psychical reality.
1918 Afterwardsness
The Wolf Man case is Freud's fullest published working of Nachträglichkeit: the scene observed at one and a half acquires its meaning and its traumatic force only when it is revived, in the dream at the age of four, by a sexual understanding the child did not have before.
1919 Double
In Das Unheimliche Freud drew on Rank's study to explain the uncanniness of the double.
1919 Projection
In Das Unheimliche Freud uses projection to explain uncanny figures and beliefs. The double is a content cast out of the ego as something foreign by a defensive effort, a survival of surmounted narcissism that returns as a figure of terror. The dread of the evil eye comes from attributing to others the envy one would feel in their place.
1919 Repetition compulsion
In 'The Uncanny' Freud traces the compulsion to repeat to the drives themselves: it rules the unconscious, is strong enough to override the pleasure principle, shows in small children's strivings and in the course of an analysis, and whatever recalls it is felt as uncanny. For the full account he points to a work already written, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).
1921 Identification
After describing narcissistic identification with the lost object in melancholia (1917), Freud devotes a chapter of Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse to identification as the earliest emotional tie to another person, distinguishing three forms of it; in 1923 he holds that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes.
1923 Ego
Freud had spoken of the ego since the 1890s as the agency that repels incompatible ideas; in Das Ich und das Es it becomes one of three agencies, a part of the id modified by the outside world, largely unconscious, first and foremost a bodily ego, and a 'poor creature' serving three masters: the id, the super-ego and reality.
1924 Oedipus complex
In Das Ich und das Es Freud sets out the complete Oedipus complex, positive and negative, rooted in bisexuality; in Der Untergang des Ödipuskomplexes he describes how in the boy the threat of castration makes the complex founder, its object-cathexes giving way to identifications that form the super-ego.
1926 Projection
Freud revisits his earlier view that a phobia is a projection, replacing an internal instinctual danger with an external perceptual one from which one can flee. He calls the remark correct but superficial: the instinctual demand is dangerous only because it brings a real external danger, castration. In obsessional neurosis, he adds, there is no appearance of projection, since the danger is wholly internalised, and he describes the fear of death as fear of the superego projected onto the powers of fate.
1926 Primal repression
Freud had set out primal repression in 1915 as a first phase in which an instinctual representative is denied entry to consciousness. In 1926 he holds that most repressions met in treatment are after-pressure that presuppose earlier primal repressions, and suggests that quantitative factors, an overwhelming excitation that breaks through the protective shield, are what occasion them.
1926 Working through
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.
1926 Resistance
Within the structural model, Freud ties resistance to the ego's counter-cathexis and distinguishes five kinds from three sources: repression resistance, transference resistance and the gain from illness in the ego; the resistance of the id, which calls for working through; and the super-ego's resistance, from the need for punishment.
1930 Death drive
In Das Unbehagen in der Kultur Freud treats the drive to aggression as the main derivative and representative of the death drive, sees civilisation as the struggle between Eros and death, and explains the severity of conscience as aggression turned back against the ego by the super-ego.

critiqued

1905 Hypnoid state
Freud distanced himself from the hypnoid state in stages. In 1895 he reports never having met a genuine hypnoid hysteria, since every case he took up turned into defence hysteria. In the Dora case (1905) he says he has given up only the stress on the hypnoid state, credits the idea wholly to Breuer, and calls the term superfluous and misleading. In 1909 he tells his Clark University audience that the notion proved obstructive and had been dropped.
1926 Birth trauma
In Hemmung, Symptom und Angst Freud kept birth as the prototype of anxiety but rejected Rank's claim that it explains the neuroses.

reworked

1910 Dissociation
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.
1926 Reaction formation
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety Freud recasts reaction formation within the structural theory as an alteration of the ego: the countercathexis of obsessional neurosis, which reinforces the attitude opposed to the drive to be repressed (pity, conscientiousness, cleanliness). He ranks it as a mechanism of defence beside regression and repression, and contrasts the obsessional's generalised character traits with the hysteric's reaction formation, which clings to one particular object.
1926 Repetition compulsion
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety Freud recasts the compulsion in the terms of the structural theory. It is the repetition compulsion of the unconscious id that fixates repression, so that a new impulse follows the path of the repressed as if the old danger still existed. It is also the resistance of the unconscious, which remains to be overcome after the ego has given up its own resistance.
1926 Repression
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety Freud reverses his earlier view that repressed libido is turned into anxiety: the ego's anxiety at a danger is what sets repression going. He also narrows the concept, bringing back 'defence' as the general name for the ego's techniques in conflict and keeping 'repression' for one particular method among them.

Influence

Affinity

collaborated with

1895 Josef Breuer
1907 Carl Gustav Jung
1909 Otto Rank
Rank worked closely with Freud from 1906 to the mid-1920s: Freud suggested and contributed to the hero-myth book, and Rank edited the journal Imago under him.
1912 Ernest Jones
Jones proposed the secret Committee of Freud's closest followers in 1912 and remained one of Freud's chief allies, later helping him and his family escape Vienna in 1938.

influenced

1907 Otto Rank
Rank's first book, Der Künstler (1907), presents itself as built on Freud's teachings.
1912 Lou Andreas-Salomé
After meeting Freud at the Weimar congress of 1911, Andreas-Salomé spent 1912–13 in Vienna attending his lectures and the Wednesday meetings, recorded in her diary In der Schule bei Freud; her open letter of 1931 for his seventy-fifth birthday sets out what she took from his work.
1939 Heinz Hartmann
Hartmann presented his ego psychology as taking seriously a widening of the theory of the ego already begun in several places by Freud, and he drew on Freud's ideas of alloplastic and autoplastic change for his account of adaptation.
Donald Winnicott
Winnicott regarded his own original ideas as growing out of Freud's psychoanalysis rather than departing from it.
Harry Stack Sullivan
Sullivan counted Freud among the three founders of a complete psychiatry and kept his attention to processes outside awareness and to the treatment relationship, while setting aside the libido theory.

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Erik Erikson
Erikson built his eight ages on Freud's theory of libidinal stages, widening it from the body zones to the social tasks of each period of life.
Erich Fromm
Fromm took from Freud the dynamic concept of character and the method of unconscious motivation, while rejecting the libido theory and Freud's picture of the individual as essentially opposed to society.
Jean Laplanche
Laplanche's work is a sustained reading of Freud: he interpreted Freud's texts as Freud interpreted his patients, to recover concepts Freud had marginalised or abandoned, and from 1988 he directed the French translation of Freud's complete works.

influenced by

1917 Lou Andreas-Salomé
In ‘On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism’ (1917) Freud adopted Andreas-Salomé’s image of the vagina as ‘leased’ from the rectum and cited her »Anal« und »Sexual« (Imago, 1916) in a footnote.
1920 Sabina Spielrein
In a footnote to Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920) Freud wrote that Spielrein had anticipated a good part of his speculation on the death drives in her 1912 paper, which called the sadistic component of the sexual drive “destructive”, though he found the paper not entirely clear.

Lineage

1910 analysed René Spitz
Spitz underwent a short didactic analysis with Freud in 1910–1911, one of the first of its kind.
1914 analysed Sándor Ferenczi
Brief analyses in 1914 and 1916.
1918 analysed Anna Freud

Conflict

1911 broke with Alfred Adler
1913 broke with Carl Gustav Jung
1926 broke with Otto Rank
After the dispute over the birth trauma, Rank left Vienna and Freud's circle in 1926, settling in Paris and later in the United States.
1926 disputed with Karen Horney
Horney contested Freud's account of female development in the 1920s, and in 1939 extended the dispute to his instinct theory as a whole, while declaring that she meant to build on his fundamental findings.
1927 disputed with Ernest Jones
A loyal ally who still differed from Freud on female sexuality, lay analysis, telepathy and the merits of Klein's work.
disputed with Ronald Fairbairn
Fairbairn rejected Freud's view of libido as pleasure-seeking in favour of object-seeking, and replaced the id, ego and superego with his own endopsychic structure, while remaining within psychoanalysis.

Works

1895
Studies on Hysteria
1900
The Interpretation of Dreams

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.

Sigmund Freud Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke (issued November 1899, with the imprint date 1900)
1901
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

Freud's study of the small failures of everyday mental life. It examines the forgetting of proper names, foreign words and intentions, screen memories, slips of the tongue, of the pen and in reading, bungled and chance actions, superstition and errors. Freud traces each of these parapraxes to the interference of a disturbing thought or wish that has been suppressed or repressed, and takes them as evidence that mental life is determined in healthy people as well as in neurotics. The work first appeared in two parts in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie in 1901, was published as a book by Karger in 1904, and was much enlarged in later editions.

Sigmund Freud First published in Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie 10 (1901); in book form Berlin: S. Karger, 1904
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.

Sigmund Freud Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie
1905
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious

Freud’s study of jokes. He analyses their techniques, such as condensation, displacement, double meaning and representation by the opposite, and finds them akin to the dream-work. He distinguishes innocent jokes from tendentious ones that serve hostility or obscenity, and explains the pleasure a joke gives as a saving in psychical expenditure, as when an inhibition is lifted. He also describes the social process of telling a joke to a third person. A final part compares jokes with the comic and with humour.

Sigmund Freud Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke

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1905
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

Freud's three essays, published by Deuticke in 1905, deal with the sexual aberrations, with infantile sexuality and with the transformations of puberty. Together they argue that the sexual drive is present from infancy, that it is made up of component drives bound to erotogenic zones, and that it reaches its adult genital form only through a course of development. Later editions added an account of the pregenital organisations of the libido.

Sigmund Freud Leipzig und Wien: Franz Deuticke
1908
Character and Anal Erotism

Freud’s short paper connecting a triad of character traits, orderliness, parsimony and obstinacy, to a strong constitutional anal erotism in childhood that has been given up. The traits are read as reaction formations against, and sublimations of, the pleasure once taken in the anal zone.

Sigmund Freud Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift 9 (52): 465–467
1909
Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy

Freud's case history of "Little Hans", a five-year-old boy who developed a phobia of horses, published in 1909 in the first volume of the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen. Freud met the boy only once: the treatment was conducted by the boy's father, a follower of Freud, and the case is written up from his notes. Freud interprets the phobia as arising from the boy's Oedipal situation (his love for his mother, his hostility toward his father, his fear of castration and his curiosity about birth and the genitals) and argues that anxiety born of repressed longing was displaced onto horses, which stood for the father. As the first analysis of a child, the case is offered as direct confirmation of the theory of infantile sexuality Freud had set out in 1905.

Sigmund Freud Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen 1 (1), 1–109
1909
Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis

Freud's case history of the "Rat Man", published in 1909 in the second half of the first volume of the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen. The patient, a young lawyer, was tormented by obsessional fears that a punishment involving rats would befall his father, who was already dead, and the lady he admired. The paper falls into two parts: the first presents extracts from the treatment, the second sets out a theory of obsessional neurosis. Freud traces the patient's compulsions and doubts to an intense ambivalence of love and hate toward his father, to sexual experiences and punishments in childhood, and to a belief in the omnipotence of thoughts, and he shows how obsessional thinking hides its meaning through displacement, isolation and the distortion of wording.

Sigmund Freud Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen 1 (2), 357–421
1910
The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy
1910
Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood

Freud's study of Leonardo da Vinci, published in 1910 as the seventh number of the series Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, is the first book-length psychoanalytic biography. It sets out to explain two features of Leonardo's life that his biographers recorded: the slowness and inhibition with which he painted, leaving many works unfinished as the investigator in him gradually overtook the artist, and a sexual life that seemed cool and abstinent, with an idealised attachment to handsome pupils. Freud builds his reading on a single note in Leonardo's notebooks, the recollection that as he lay in his cradle a bird (a 'vulture', Geier, in the German translation Freud used) came down and struck his lips with its tail. He treats it as a fantasy formed later in life and projected back into infancy, and reads it as a disguised memory of sucking at the mother's breast and of her kisses, recast as a passive homosexual scene. From the Egyptian hieroglyph in which the vulture stands for 'mother', and from the ancient fable that all vultures are female and conceive from the wind, he infers that the illegitimate Leonardo spent his first years alone with his mother Caterina, a 'vulture child' with a mother and no father, before he was taken into the house of his father, Ser Piero, and his childless wife. On this ground Freud builds a developmental account. The mother's tenderness made the boy sexually precocious and intensely curious; a wave of repression ended that phase, and most of his libido was sublimated into an insatiable urge to research, while a smaller part, fixated on the repressed love for the mother, became an ideal homosexual love in which he chose boys in his own image and loved them as his mother had loved him. The study goes on to the smile of the Mona Lisa and the strangely young Saint Anne of the Louvre painting, read as the revival of the mother's smile and a picture of the two mothers of his childhood; to a slip in Leonardo's note on his father's death; to his independence from authority, the ancients and religion, as the achievement of a son who grew up without a father's intimidation; and to the late regression in which the revived memory of the mother briefly freed his painting. Freud closes by marking the limits of the method: psychoanalysis cannot explain artistic talent or the capacity for sublimation, and must leave room for chance and organic constitution.

Sigmund Freud Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde 7 (Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke)
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.

Sigmund Freud
1911
Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning

Freud's short paper of 1911 sets out how the mind comes to take account of the external world. It starts from the observation that every neurosis estranges the patient from some part of reality. The older, primary processes, which survive in the unconscious, obey the pleasure principle: they strive for pleasure, draw back from unpleasure, and at first satisfy a need by hallucinating its object. Only when the expected satisfaction fails to come is the mental apparatus forced to represent real circumstances and seek real change, and so the reality principle is installed. The paper lists the adaptations this brings: attention, a system of notation that forms part of memory, judgement in place of repression, motor discharge turned into action, and thinking as experimental acting that allows discharge to be delayed. Phantasying splits off and stays under the pleasure principle. The sexual drives, kept autoerotic and then halted by latency, are educated to reality later than the ego drives, which lays down a disposition to neurosis. The paper then treats religion, science, education and art as different settlements between the two principles, and ties the choice of neurosis to the phase at which development was inhibited. It closes by warning that in the unconscious, thought-reality counts as external reality, so the analyst must reckon in 'neurotic currency'.

Sigmund Freud Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, 3 (1), 1–8
1911
Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)

Freud's study of the paranoia of Daniel Paul Schreber, a former presiding judge of the Saxon appeal court, written entirely from Schreber's published Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903); Freud never met him. He argues that, since paranoiacs say only what they choose to say, a printed self-account can stand in for personal acquaintance. The first part retells the case: a hypochondriacal illness in 1884–85 treated by the Leipzig psychiatrist Paul Flechsig, then, after a half-waking fantasy of how fine it would be to be a woman submitting to intercourse, a second illness from 1893 in which Schreber believed Flechsig, and later God, sought his "soul murder" and his transformation into a woman, until he accepted that transformation as the world order's demand, to be fertilised by divine rays and bear a new race. The second part interprets this: a surge of homosexual libido directed at Flechsig, standing for Schreber's brother and above all his father, the physician D. G. M. Schreber, was warded off by turning love into persecution; the replacement of Flechsig by God and the sun, both father figures, let the wish be accepted. The third part proposes the mechanism of paranoia: a fixation at the stage of narcissism, between autoerotism and object love; the derivation of persecution, erotomania, jealousy and megalomania as ways of contradicting the sentence "I (a man) love him (a man)"; repression in three phases; and the withdrawal of libido from the world, felt as its end, with the delusion as an attempt at recovery that rebuilds it. A postscript of 1912 reads Schreber's boast that he could gaze at the sun through the myth of the eagle that tests its young, and links neurosis to myth and totemism.

Sigmund Freud Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen 3 (1), 9–68
1912
The Dynamics of Transference
1913
Totem and Taboo

Four essays, first published in Imago in 1912–1913 and collected as a book by Hugo Heller in 1913, that compare the mental life of tribal peoples, as the anthropology of the time described it, with the mental life of neurotics. They treat in turn the horror of incest; taboo and the ambivalence of feeling; animism, magic and the omnipotence of thoughts; and the return of totemism in childhood. In the last essay Freud puts forward the hypothesis of a primal horde in which the brothers killed and devoured a violent father. Their remorse over the deed and their ambivalence toward him, he argues, gave rise to totemism, to the prohibitions on murder and incest, and to social organisation, morality and religion.

Sigmund Freud Leipzig and Vienna: Hugo Heller (the four essays first appeared in Imago, 1912–13)
1914
Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through
1914
On Narcissism: An Introduction

Freud's 1914 essay, published in the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, treats narcissism as a normal state of the libido. It sets the libido invested in the ego against the libido invested in objects, and primary narcissism against secondary narcissism. It contrasts two types of object-choice, the anaclitic and the narcissistic, introduces the concept of the ego ideal, and separates sublimation, which concerns the drive, from idealization, which concerns the object.

Sigmund Freud Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, Bd. 6 (1914), S. 1–24
1915
Observations on Transference-Love

"Observations on Transference-Love" is the third of Freud's "Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis", published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse in 1915. It takes up a situation that Freud counts among the only really serious difficulties of analytic work: a woman patient declares that she has fallen in love with her analyst. Freud sets aside the layman's solutions, marriage, an end to the treatment or a secret affair, and argues that the analyst must neither return the love nor suppress it with moral appeals or demands for renunciation. The love is induced by the analytic situation, not by the analyst's personal qualities, a fact that should warn him against his own countertransference. It breaks out as a resistance, often just when a painful memory is drawing near; yet resistance does not create it, but finds it already present, exploits it and exaggerates it. Freud lays down the rule that the treatment must be carried out in abstinence: the patient's need and longing are to be left in place as forces that drive the work, not stilled by substitutes. The analyst holds on to the transference-love but treats it as something unreal, to be traced back to its unconscious and infantile origins, so that the patient can reveal her conditions for loving and the phantasies bound up with them. He then asks whether such love is genuine, and answers that it is: like all love it repeats infantile prototypes, and it differs from ordinary love only in being provoked by the analytic situation, intensified by resistance and heedless of reality. Because the analyst called it forth by beginning the treatment, he may draw no personal advantage from it, and here ethical and technical reasons coincide. The paper ends by likening the analyst to a chemist who works with explosive forces, and by defending psychoanalysis at full strength against milder methods.

Sigmund Freud Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse
1915
The Unconscious

The longest of Freud's metapsychological papers of 1915, first printed in two parts in the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse. Freud argues that unconscious mental processes have to be assumed, and separates three senses of the word unconscious: descriptive, dynamic and systematic, the last referring to the systems unconscious, preconscious and conscious and the censorships between them. He asks whether feelings can be unconscious, and describes the topography and dynamics of repression in terms of the withdrawal of cathexes and of anticathexis. The system unconscious knows no negation or doubt, is governed by the primary process with its mobile cathexes, is timeless, and replaces external reality with psychical reality. A final section draws on the speech of schizophrenics to distinguish thing-presentations from word-presentations: a conscious presentation includes both, an unconscious one only the thing-presentation.

Sigmund Freud Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse 3 (4), 189–203 and 3 (5), 257–269
1915
Repression

The second of Freud's metapsychological papers of 1915, printed in the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse. Repression is one of the vicissitudes a drive impulse may undergo when it meets resistance: since the ego cannot flee from itself as it can from an external stimulus, repression stands midway between flight and condemnation by judgement. It occurs when the unpleasure that satisfying a drive would cause elsewhere in the mind outweighs the pleasure it would bring. Its essence lies in turning something away from consciousness and keeping it at a distance, and it presupposes a sharp division between conscious and unconscious mental activity; before that division, reversal into the opposite and turning round upon the self do the work of defence. Freud separates primal repression, in which the drive's ideational representative is refused entry into consciousness and a fixation is established, from repression proper, an after-pressure that bears on the derivatives of the repressed and is helped by the attraction the primally repressed exerts. The repressed goes on living and proliferating in the unconscious, and derivatives distant or distorted enough reach consciousness, which the technique of free association turns to use. Repression is individual and mobile, demanding a constant expenditure of energy that is relaxed in sleep. The ideational representative and the quota of affect have separate fates: the affect may be suppressed, appear as an affect, or be turned into anxiety, and a repression that does not spare unpleasure has failed. Substitute formations and symptoms are signs of a return of the repressed. Three examples compare repression in anxiety hysteria (an animal phobia), conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis.

Sigmund Freud Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse 3 (3), 129–138
1915
Instincts and Their Vicissitudes

The first of Freud’s metapsychological papers of 1915. It defines the drive as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, the psychical representative of stimuli arising within the organism, and distinguishes its pressure, aim, object and source. Freud keeps the dualism of ego drives and sexual drives, and describes four vicissitudes the drives may undergo: reversal into the opposite, turning round upon the subject’s own self, repression and sublimation. He illustrates the first two with the pairs sadism and masochism and scopophilia and exhibitionism, and ends with a study of love and hate.

Sigmund Freud Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse 3 (2), 84–100
1917
Mourning and Melancholia

Freud compares melancholia with normal mourning. In both the loved object is lost and interest in the world is withdrawn, but only in melancholia is self-regard lowered, so that the patient reproaches and reviles himself. Freud reads these self-reproaches as reproaches against a loved object, shifted back onto the patient’s own ego. Where the object choice rested on a narcissistic basis, the libido withdrawn from the lost object is drawn into the ego and used to set up an identification with it, so that the shadow of the object falls upon the ego. A critical agency in the ego, the forerunner of the super-ego, then treats the ego as the forsaken object. The paper also discusses ambivalence, the risk of suicide, and mania as a triumph over the lost object.

Sigmund Freud Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse 4 (6), 288–301
1917
Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

Twenty-eight lectures that Freud delivered at the University of Vienna in the winter terms of 1915–16 and 1916–17 to an audience of physicians and lay listeners, published in three parts by Hugo Heller in 1916–17. They became his most widely read general account of psychoanalysis. The first part treats parapraxes, such as slips and errors, as acts that carry meaning. The second sets out the theory of dreams: the dream censorship, symbolism, the dream-work and wish-fulfilment. The third offers a general theory of the neuroses, moving from the sense of symptoms, resistance and repression through the sexual life of human beings, the development of the libido and its organisations, regression and fixation, and the paths by which symptoms form, to anxiety, narcissism and the libido theory, and finally transference and analytic therapy.

Sigmund Freud Leipzig and Vienna: Hugo Heller, issued in three parts, 1916–1917
1917
On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism

Freud traces how anal erotism is transformed: in the unconscious, faeces, money, gift, child and penis are treated as equivalents and can stand for one another. He links the wish for a child in women to penis envy, and grounds the equation of faeces and penis in the body itself, borrowing Lou Andreas-Salomé’s image of the vagina as “rented” from the rectum.

Sigmund Freud Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse 4 (3): 125–130
1918
From the History of an Infantile Neurosis

Freud's case history of the patient known as the "Wolf Man", a young Russian aristocrat. Rather than recounting the adult illness and its treatment as a whole, Freud concentrates on the infantile neurosis that lay behind it. The centre of the account is a childhood dream of white wolves sitting in a tree, which Freud traces back to the child's sight of parental intercourse, the primal scene, at the age of one and a half; the scene, he argues, acquired its meaning and its traumatic force only later, by deferred action. The case also examines the boy's animal phobia, his religious obsessions, his anal erotism and his castration anxiety, and reports Freud's decision to set a time limit to the treatment. Written in 1914 and published in 1918, it serves at the same time as a defence of infantile sexuality against the revisions of Jung and Adler.

Sigmund Freud Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, Vierte Folge (Leipzig and Vienna: Hugo Heller, 1918), 578–717
1919
The 'Uncanny'

Freud's essay, published in the fifth volume of Imago in 1919, takes up a question he says aesthetics has neglected: what sets the uncanny apart within the wider class of the frightening. Against Ernst Jentsch, who in 1906 traced the feeling to intellectual uncertainty before the new and unfamiliar, Freud argues that the uncanny is the kind of fright that leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. He reaches this by two routes. The first is linguistic: entries from the dictionaries of Sanders and of the Grimms show heimlich ranging from 'homely, familiar' to 'concealed, secret', until it coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Schelling's remark that the uncanny is whatever ought to have remained hidden and has come to light becomes a key to the essay. The second route is a survey of uncanny experiences and fictions. Reading E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'The Sandman', Freud places the story's effect not in the automaton Olimpia but in the figure who tears out children's eyes, and reads the fear for the eyes as a substitute for castration anxiety, with the good and the bad father split across the tale's paired figures. Following Otto Rank's study of the double, he shows the double turning from an insurance against death, born of primary narcissism, into a harbinger of death, and links it to the self-observing, self-critical agency in the ego. Involuntary repetition of the same, which he ties to a compulsion to repeat in the unconscious, the omnipotence of thoughts, the evil eye, the return of the dead, severed limbs, being buried alive, and the blurring of the line between fantasy and reality are traced in turn to infantile complexes or to surmounted animistic beliefs. The female genitals, which neurotic men often call uncanny, he reads as the entrance to the human being's first home: the prefix 'un-' is the mark of repression. In the last section Freud concedes that his thesis cannot be reversed, and that fairy tales abound in wish-fulfilments and animated objects that are not uncanny at all. He answers these objections by separating the uncanny of experience from the uncanny of fiction and, within experience, the uncanny that comes from repressed infantile complexes from the uncanny that arises when surmounted primitive beliefs seem confirmed once more. Fiction can suspend reality-testing and so spare us the uncanny, as in fairy tales, in Dante, or in Shakespeare's ghosts, or it can heighten the uncanny beyond anything life allows when the writer pretends to stay within common reality. The uncanny of repressed complexes is the more resistant of the two. Because the writer also steers the reader's identification and mood, the same material can turn comic, as in Nestroy or in Wilde's 'The Canterville Ghost'. The uncanniness of solitude, silence and darkness Freud leaves tied to the anxiety of childhood.

Sigmund Freud Imago
1920
Beyond the Pleasure Principle

The essay in which Freud revised his theory of the drives. He starts from facts the pleasure principle does not account for: the dreams of the traumatic neuroses, including the war neuroses, which keep returning the patient to the accident; a small child’s game of throwing away a reel so that it is “gone” (fort) and pulling it back with a joyful “there” (da); and the patient in analysis who, instead of remembering the repressed, repeats it in the transference. From these he infers a compulsion to repeat that seems more original, more elementary and more drive-like than the pleasure principle. Trauma is described as excitation strong enough to break through the mind’s protective shield against stimuli, leaving it the task of binding the incoming quantities. Freud then proposes that the drives are conservative, striving to restore an earlier state, so that “the aim of all life is death”, and he sets death drives against the life or sexual drives, the libido he identifies with the Eros of the poets and philosophers. Biological findings on natural death and on the immortality of protists neither confirm nor remove the hypothesis, and he holds to the distinction between death drives and life drives, adding that the pleasure principle seems to serve the death drives. A footnote acknowledges that Sabina Spielrein had anticipated a good part of this speculation.

Sigmund Freud Beihefte der Internationalen Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 2 (Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag)
1921
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego

Freud’s study of group psychology. Starting from the accounts of crowds given by Le Bon and McDougall, he argues that what binds the members of a group together, and binds them to their leader, is libido diverted from its sexual aims. He takes the church and the army as examples of artificial groups held together by love for a leader. He develops the concept of identification as the earliest emotional tie to another person, and compares being in love and hypnosis to group formation: in each, an object is put in place of the ego ideal. A group is then a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in place of their ego ideal and so have identified with one another. Freud links the leader to the father of the primal horde, and separates the ego ideal from the ego as a differentiating grade within it.

Sigmund Freud Leipzig, Vienna and Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag
1923
The Ego and the Id

The book in which Freud sets out his structural model of the mind. Since much of the ego is itself unconscious, the division conscious/unconscious is not enough. Freud distinguishes the id, a term he takes from Georg Groddeck, as the reservoir of the drives; the ego, the part of the id modified by the influence of the external world, first and foremost a bodily ego; and the super-ego or ego ideal, formed by identification with the parents as the heir of the Oedipus complex. He restates the dualism of life drives and death drives, discusses fusion and defusion of the drives, the unconscious sense of guilt and the negative therapeutic reaction, and ends with the ego as a poor creature serving three masters: the external world, the libido of the id and the severity of the super-ego.

Sigmund Freud Leipzig, Vienna and Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag
1923
The Infantile Genital Organization

A short paper of 1923, subtitled "An Interpolation into the Theory of Sexuality", in which Freud corrects a passage of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. There he had held that infantile sexuality resembles the adult form in its object choice but lacks, or only imperfectly achieves, the primacy of the genitals. He now argues that at the height of infantile sexual development interest in the genitals and genital activity become dominant, hardly less than in maturity. What sets this infantile genital organization apart is that for both sexes only one genital, the male one, is taken into account: there is no genital primacy but a primacy of the phallus. Freud says he can describe the process only in the boy. The boy assumes that every being has an organ like his own and directs his sexual curiosity at it. When he discovers that girls lack it, he first denies what he saw, then supposes it will grow, and at last concludes that it was there and was taken away, through castration. Freud holds that the castration complex can be understood only from this origin in the phase of phallic primacy, and traces to it much of men's contempt for and horror of women, citing Ferenczi's reading of the Medusa's head. The child generalizes the lack only slowly, keeping the penis for respected women such as the mother until his theories of birth, and the vagina remains undiscovered. The paper ends by tracing how the polarity of the sexes changes through development: subject and object, active and passive in the sadistic-anal organization, phallic and castrated in the infantile genital organization, and male and female only at puberty.

Sigmund Freud Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 9 (2), 168–171
1923
Dr. Sándor Ferenczi (On His 50th Birthday)

Freud's unsigned tribute, issued in the name of the editors, for Ferenczi's fiftieth birthday. It recounts Ferenczi's early career in Budapest, his first rejection and later embrace of The Interpretation of Dreams, the trip to Clark University in 1909, his proposal of the International Psychoanalytic Association at Nuremberg in 1910 and his presidency from 1918, his founding of the Budapest group in 1913 and his university teaching in 1919, and it surveys his writings from the papers on introjection, hypnosis, the sense of reality and symbolism to the war neuroses and the first steps toward active therapy.

Sigmund Freud Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Bd. IX (1923), Heft 3, S. 257–259
1924
The Economic Problem of Masochism

Freud's 1924 paper asks how masochism can exist at all if mental life is ruled by the pleasure principle: if pain and unpleasure can become aims rather than warnings, the guardian of mental life seems paralysed. He first revises the position of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which had equated the pleasure principle with the Nirvana principle, the tendency, after Fechner and in Barbara Low's term, to reduce excitation to zero. Because there are pleasurable tensions and unpleasurable relaxations, pleasure and unpleasure cannot depend on the quantity of tension alone but on some qualitative factor, perhaps rhythm. He therefore sets out a series: the Nirvana principle expresses the death drive, the pleasure principle is its modification by the libido, and the reality principle a further modification due to the external world. Freud then distinguishes three forms of masochism. Erotogenic masochism, pleasure in pain, underlies the other two. Feminine masochism, described from the fantasies of masochistic men, casts the subject as a helpless, naughty child and, more deeply, in characteristically female situations: being castrated, copulated with or giving birth. Moral masochism is a norm of conduct. Erotogenic masochism rests on libidinal co-excitation and on the fate of the death drive: the libido diverts much of it outward as the destructive drive, part of which serves sexuality as sadism, while the portion that stays inside, libidinally bound, is primary masochism; sadism turned back on the self adds a secondary masochism. Erotogenic masochism takes on the guise of each libidinal phase, from the fear of being eaten to the wish to be beaten by the father. Moral masochism has loosened its tie to sexuality: the suffering itself matters, not who inflicts it. Freud finds it in the negative therapeutic reaction and the unconscious sense of guilt, which he proposes to call a need for punishment. He distinguishes the heightened sadism of the super-ego, usually conscious, from the masochism of the ego, which stays hidden and seeks punishment from the super-ego or from fate. Since the super-ego arose through the desexualisation of the Oedipus complex, moral masochism resexualises morality and revives the complex, tempting the subject to act against their own interests. Freud closes by observing that the cultural suppression of aggression strengthens conscience, and that even self-destruction does not take place without libidinal satisfaction.

Sigmund Freud Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 10 (2), 121–133
1924
The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex

Freud's short paper of 1924, published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, asks what brings the Oedipus complex, the central phenomenon of the sexual period of early childhood, to its end. He weighs two accounts: that the complex founders on the painful disappointments its impossible wishes meet, and that it passes away when its developmentally appointed time is over, as milk teeth fall out when the permanent ones come. He treats the two as compatible, the individual events realising an inherited programme. In the boy he locates the decisive factor in the phallic phase, in which only the male genital is known. A threat of castration, provoked by masturbation and at first disbelieved, takes effect retroactively once the boy has seen the female genitals. Since both the active and the passive Oedipal satisfactions would cost him his penis, his narcissistic interest in the organ wins out over the libidinal cathexis of his parents. The object cathexes are given up and replaced by identification. The parental authority taken into the ego forms the nucleus of the super-ego, which borrows the father's severity and perpetuates the prohibition of incest, while the libidinal trends are partly desexualised and sublimated and partly inhibited in their aim and turned into tenderness. The latency period begins. Ideally the process is more than a repression: it amounts to the destruction and abolition of the complex, whereas a complex that is merely repressed persists unconsciously in the id and may later have pathogenic effects. Freud then turns to the girl, whose development he finds obscure and incomplete. She takes her lack of a penis as a castration already carried out, not as a threat. Lacking castration anxiety, she has a weaker motive for setting up the super-ego and breaking off her infantile genital organisation, which owe more to upbringing and to the fear of losing love. Her Oedipus complex culminates in the wish to receive a child from her father, a substitute for the penis, and fades gradually because that wish is never fulfilled. Freud closes by allowing that the sequence he describes is typical but perhaps not the only possible one, and notes that Otto Rank's theory of the trauma of birth raises a question about castration anxiety that he leaves for another occasion.

Sigmund Freud Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 10 (3), 245–252
1925
Negation

Negation (1925) is a short paper of four pages in Imago. It starts from a clinical observation and ends with a theory of the origin of judgement. When a patient says that a figure in his dream is not his mother, the analyst may set the negation aside and keep the content: the idea has occurred to the patient, but he disowns it. In the same way, what a patient calls the least likely possibility is nearly always the truth. Freud concludes that a repressed idea can reach consciousness on condition that it is negated. Negation is a way of taking cognisance of the repressed. It is already a kind of lifting of the repression, but not an acceptance of what is repressed. Here the intellectual function separates from the affective process, and an intellectual acceptance can be reached while the essence of the repression persists. To deny something in a judgement is the intellectual substitute for repression, and its 'no' is a mark of where it comes from. The function of judgement makes two decisions. The judgement of attribution goes back to the oral language of the earliest drives, to take something in or spit it out; for the original pleasure-ego, the bad, the alien and the external are at first identical. The judgement of existence belongs to the later reality-ego. Reality-testing seeks to find again in perception an object that was once present and satisfying, which presupposes that such objects have been lost. Thinking is a trial action carried out with small expenditures of energy. Affirmation, as a substitute for uniting, belongs to Eros; negation, the successor of expulsion, belongs to the destructive drive. The symbol of negation gives thinking a first independence from the consequences of repression and from the compulsion of the pleasure principle. This fits the finding that analysis never discovers a 'no' in the unconscious, and that the strongest confirmation of an uncovered unconscious content is the patient's reply that he had not, or never, thought of it.

Sigmund Freud Imago 11 (3), 217–221
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.

Sigmund Freud
1927
The Future of an Illusion

The Future of an Illusion (1927) is Freud's sustained psychoanalytic critique of religion as a cultural institution. It starts from the problem of civilisation. Culture protects people against nature and regulates their relations with one another, but it rests on compulsory labour and the renunciation of drives, so the people who bear its demands are hostile to it. Besides coercion, culture defends itself with psychical possessions that reconcile people to their sacrifices: the internalisation of prohibitions in the super-ego, ideals, art, and above all religious ideas. Freud traces these ideas to human helplessness before nature, fate and death, which revives the infant's helplessness and its longing for a protecting father. The forces of nature are humanised and given a father's features as gods. Religious doctrines are illusions: beliefs whose dominant motive is wish-fulfilment. An illusion differs from an error, and also from a delusion, because it need not contradict reality. The credentials of religious doctrines are weaker than those of any other teaching, and appeals to revelation, to credo quia absurdum or to Vaihinger's philosophy of 'as if' cannot bind reason. In a running dialogue with an imagined opponent, Freud argues that resting cultural prohibitions on God endangers them as belief declines, and he proposes grounding them in reason instead. Religion also preserves, in distorted form, a historical truth about the murdered primal father. It resembles a universal obsessional neurosis of humanity, which humanity may outgrow as children outgrow theirs. Freud pleads for an 'education to reality' and concedes that his own hope may be an illusion. He closes by defending science as no illusion.

Sigmund Freud Leipzig, Vienna and Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag
1930
Civilization and Its Discontents

Freud’s essay on the conflict between the individual and civilisation. It opens with Romain Rolland’s “oceanic feeling”, which Freud traces to the infant’s early ego-feeling rather than to a source of religion. People seek happiness by many methods, yet civilisation, which protects them against nature and regulates their relations, demands that they renounce sexual and, above all, aggressive drives. The aggression this restrains is turned back against the ego as the super-ego, and its tension with the ego is felt as a sense of guilt, much of it unconscious, that grows with civilisation. Freud presents the history of civilisation as the struggle between Eros and the death drive, and ends by asking whether Eros will prevail.

Sigmund Freud Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag (issued December 1929, with the imprint date 1930)
1933
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse) is a book of seven further lectures by Sigmund Freud, issued in Vienna by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag in December 1932 with the imprint date 1933. Numbered XXIX to XXXV, they continue the Introductory Lectures of 1916–17. Although they are written in the form of lectures, they were never delivered; their purpose is to bring Freud's account of psychoanalysis up to date with his later theory. They deal with revisions of the theory of dreams; dreams and occultism; the dissection of the psychical personality into id, ego and super-ego, which closes with the maxim "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" (where id was, there ego shall be); anxiety and the life of the drives, including the revised view that the ego is the seat of anxiety; femininity; explanations, applications and orientations; and the question of a Weltanschauung, in which Freud holds that psychoanalysis belongs to the scientific world view.

Sigmund Freud Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag (issued December 1932, with the imprint date 1933)
1937
Analysis Terminable and Interminable

One of Freud's last papers, published in 1937 in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse: a sober review of what analytic therapy can and cannot achieve. Freud rejects Rank's attempt to shorten treatment by resolving the trauma of birth, and reviews his own expedient of fixing a date for ending the Wolf Man's analysis, whose later relapses showed that such a deadline brings some material to light while burying the rest. An analysis ends in practice when symptoms, anxieties and inhibitions are gone and a relapse seems unlikely; the more ambitious question is whether it can reach a point where nothing more could change. He recounts a former patient, himself an analyst, who years later reproached him for not having analysed a negative transference. Three factors decide the outcome: trauma, the strength of the drives, and alterations of the ego. Cures last best where the cause is mainly traumatic; the taming of a drive holds only as long as the ego is strong enough against it, so the quantitative, economic factor sets a limit, and analysis can neither inoculate against future conflicts nor reach conflicts that are not active, whether by provoking them or by talking about them. The ego's defence mechanisms, useful in childhood, harden into lasting alterations that return in treatment as resistances, even as a resistance against the uncovering of resistances; some differences of the ego are innate, and some patients show an adhesive or overly mobile libido or a general psychic rigidity. Behind the clinging to illness Freud sees the need for punishment and the death drive, whose struggle with Eros he finds anticipated by Empedocles. Analysts, who practise an impossible profession, need an analysis of their own and should return to it about every five years. The paper ends with the bedrock of the repudiation of femininity: penis envy in women and, in men, the struggle against a passive attitude toward other men, which Freud takes to be biological.

Sigmund Freud Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 23 (2), 209–240
1939
Moses and Monotheism

Freud's last book, made up of three essays on the origins of Jewish monotheism, of which the first two appeared in Imago in 1937. Freud argues that Moses was not a Hebrew but an Egyptian of high rank, an adherent of Akhenaten's monotheistic cult of the Aten, who gave that religion to a Semitic tribe, led it out of Egypt and was afterwards killed by it. The memory of the murder was repressed, and the Mosaic religion fused with the worship of a volcano god, Yahweh. After a period of latency the tradition of Moses' religion returned and came to rule the people. Freud reads this history as a return of the repressed, analogous to the latency and later outbreak of a neurosis in the individual, and links it to the killing of the primal father he had described in Totem and Taboo. Begun in Vienna, the book was completed in exile in London and published in Amsterdam in 1939.

Sigmund Freud Amsterdam: Verlag Allert de Lange (the first two essays appeared in Imago, 1937)
1940
An Outline of Psycho-Analysis

Freud's last, unfinished summary of psychoanalysis, written in 1938 in Vienna and then in London, and published after his death in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und Imago in 1940. In nine chapters arranged in three parts, it restates his theory in a compressed and dogmatic form. The first part sets out the psychical apparatus of id, ego and super-ego, the theory of the drives as Eros and the destructive drive, the development of the sexual function, the qualities of the psychical, and the interpretation of dreams. The second part turns to the technique of psychoanalysis and gives an example of its work. The third part, on the psychical apparatus and the external world and on the internal world, breaks off unfinished; it takes up the splitting of the ego in the process of defence and disavowal.

Sigmund Freud Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und Imago 25 (1), 7–67

Gallery

Sigmund Freud, photographed by Ludwig Grillich, c. 1905 Image credit: Ludwig Grillich, 1905Public domainWikimedia Commons
Sigmund Freud, half-length, leaning on the back of a chair, photographed by Max Halberstadt, 1909 Image credit: Max Halberstadt, 1909Public domainWikimedia Commons
Sigmund Freud among the participants of the International Psychoanalytic Congress at Weimar, photographed by Franz Vältl, 21 September 1911 Image credit: Franz Vältl, 1911Public domainWikimedia Commons
Sigmund Freud, photographed by Ferdinand Schmutzer, 1926 Image credit: Ferdinand Schmutzer, 1926Public domainWikimedia Commons

References

Sigmund FreudThe Interpretation of Dreams1900
Sigmund FreudThree Essays on the Theory of Sexuality1905
Sigmund FreudBeyond the Pleasure Principle1920
Sigmund FreudThe Ego and the Id1923
Sigmund FreudTotem and Taboo1913
Sigmund FreudGroup Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego1921
Sigmund FreudCivilization and Its Discontents1930
Ernest JonesThe Life and Work of Sigmund Freud1953
Josef Breuer and Sigmund FreudStudies on Hysteria1895
Sándor Ferenczi and Otto RankThe Development of Psychoanalysis1924
Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand PontalisThe Language of Psycho-Analysis1967
Sigmund FreudThe Psychopathology of Everyday Life1901
Sigmund FreudFragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria1905
Sigmund FreudThe Dynamics of Transference1912
Sigmund FreudRemembering, Repeating and Working-Through1914
Sigmund FreudObservations on Transference-Love1915
Sigmund FreudOn Narcissism: An Introduction1914
Sigmund FreudRepression1915
Sigmund FreudMourning and Melancholia1917
Sabina SpielreinDestruction as the Cause of Coming into Being1912
Sigmund FreudThe Economic Problem of Masochism1924
Sigmund FreudThe Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex1924
Sigmund FreudNew Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis1933
Sigmund FreudInhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety1926
Sigmund FreudAnalysis Terminable and Interminable1937
Sigmund FreudThe Future of an Illusion1927
Sigmund FreudMoses and Monotheism1939
Karen HorneyNew Ways in Psychoanalysis1939
Jacques LacanThe Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis1973
Jean LaplancheNew Foundations for Psychoanalysis1987
Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. BlackFreud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought1995
Sigmund FreudJokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious1905
Sigmund FreudIntroductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis1917
Sigmund FreudAn Outline of Psycho-Analysis1940
Sigmund FreudAnalysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy1909
Sigmund FreudNotes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis1909
Sigmund FreudPsycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)1911
Sigmund FreudFrom the History of an Infantile Neurosis1918
Sigmund FreudInstincts and Their Vicissitudes1915
Sigmund FreudThe 'Uncanny'1919
Sigmund FreudThe Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy1910Evidence for a relation
Ernest JonesThe Early Development of Female Sexuality1927Evidence for a relation
Otto RankThe Myth of the Birth of the Hero1909Evidence for a relation
Otto RankThe Artist1907Evidence for a relation
E. James LiebermanActs of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank1985Evidence for a relation
Ronald FairbairnEndopsychic Structure Considered in Terms of Object-Relationships1944Evidence for a relation
Ronald FairbairnPsychoanalytic Studies of the Personality1952Evidence for a relation
Ernest JonesRationalization in Every-Day Life1908Evidence for a relation
Helen Swick PerryPsychiatrist of America: The Life of Harry Stack Sullivan1982Evidence for a relation
Erik EriksonChildhood and Society1950Evidence for a relation
Lawrence J. FriedmanIdentity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson1999Evidence for a relation
Karen HorneyThe Flight from Womanhood: The Masculinity-Complex in Women, as Viewed by Men and by Women1926Evidence for a relation
Erich FrommEscape from Freedom1941Evidence for a relation
Erich FrommMan for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics1947Evidence for a relation
Nicholas RayForming new knots: Jean Laplanche, 1924–20122012Evidence for a relation
Jean LaplancheLife and Death in Psychoanalysis1970Evidence for a relation
Heinz HartmannEgo Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation1939Evidence for a relation
Susan IsaacsThe Nature and Function of Phantasy1948Evidence for a relation
Michael BalintEarly Developmental States of the Ego. Primary Object-Love1937Evidence for a relation
Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand PontalisFantasy and the Origins of Sexuality1964Evidence for a relation
Sigmund FreudFive Lectures on Psycho-Analysis1910Evidence for a relation
Sigmund FreudThe Infantile Genital Organization1923Evidence for a relation
Sigmund FreudFormulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning1911Evidence for a relation
Sigmund FreudCharacter and Anal Erotism1908Evidence for a relation
Sigmund FreudOn Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism1917Evidence for a relation
Lou Andreas-SaloméThe Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salomé1958Evidence for a relation
Lou Andreas-SaloméMy Thanks to Freud: Open Letter to Professor Sigmund Freud on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday1931Evidence for a relation
Sigmund FreudThe Unconscious1915Evidence for a relation
Sigmund FreudNegation1925Evidence for a relation

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