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.