Papers on Psycho-Analysis

Papers on Psycho-Analysis (London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1913) was Ernest Jones's first book. It was one of the earliest presentations of Freud's work for English-speaking doctors. It collects twenty papers written between 1908 and 1912. Most were first read to medical and psychological societies in Britain, Canada and the United States, then revised and arranged under five headings: general papers, clinical papers, papers on treatment, papers on dreams and papers on education. In the preface Jones sets out the ideas he takes from Freud: the pleasure and reality principles, repression, sublimation, and the view of neurotic symptoms as failed or imperfect sublimations. He argues that much of the opposition to psychoanalysis comes from its subject matter, because uncovering the hidden roots of conduct offends people's aesthetic and rational image of themselves. He also says what the book leaves out: it gives no systematic theory of hysteria, obsessional neurosis or paranoia, and education is the only applied field it covers. The general papers introduce rationalisation, the inventing of plausible reasons for acts and beliefs whose real motives are unconscious. They also survey Freud's psychology. A third paper presents the psychopathology of everyday life, in which slips and errors are explained by a repressed counter-impulse and taken as evidence of psychical determinism. The clinical papers include: - a case of hysterical fugue with complete loss of personal memory, which Jones uses to argue that forgotten memories are preserved and only fail to be recalled; - an account of the psychoneuroses (conversion hysteria, anxiety hysteria and obsessional neurosis), with a plea to teach clinical psychology in medical school; - a distinction between the actual neuroses and the psychoneuroses; - a study of feigned childish foolishness in hysteria; - a paper on morbid anxiety, which Jones, following Freud, traces to unsatisfied sexual longing. The papers on treatment contrast psychoanalysis with suggestion. Jones argues that suggestion works through an emotional tie to the physician, a transference of positive feelings, and so replaces symptoms with dependence. Psychoanalysis instead brings repressed tendencies into consciousness, overcomes the resistances against them and frees them for sublimation. Its results are therefore lasting, educative and preventive. These papers also describe Jung's word-association method and answer criticisms of psychoanalysis made at the time. The dream papers set out Freud's theory of the dream as a disguised wish fulfilment and the guardian of sleep. They show how dreams can colour waking moods and even produce hysterical symptoms, and argue that dreams and neurotic symptoms are formed by the same mechanisms. One short note traces a forgotten dream to an Oedipal rescue phantasy. The last two papers apply psychoanalysis to education. The first is negative: it names the ways upbringing harms children. The second is positive: it proposes that education and re-education should guide instinctual energy towards sublimation.