Book
Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
Über Psychoanalyse
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.
Main ideas
- Psychoanalysis grew out of Josef Breuer's cathartic treatment of a hysterical young woman: her symptoms were memory-symbols of emotionally charged scenes. They vanished when she recalled the scenes and discharged the affect held back at the time. Hence the formula that hysterics suffer from reminiscences, and the idea of conversion.
- The force that keeps forgotten memories out of consciousness, felt in treatment as resistance, is the same force that once expelled them. This is repression of a wish incompatible with the ego's ethical and aesthetic standards. The symptom is a distorted substitute formation for the repressed, and mental splitting results from a conflict of forces rather than an inborn weakness of synthesis.
- Freud abandoned hypnosis, then pressure, for free association under the fundamental rule of saying everything. Associations allude to what is repressed, distorted in proportion to the resistance. The Zurich school's notion of the complex names the clusters of ideas they lead to.
- Dream interpretation is the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious. Behind the manifest content lie latent dream thoughts, transformed by the dream-work through condensation and displacement. Dreams fulfil wishes, and slips, forgetting and other parapraxes show that repression also works in healthy people.
- Analysis regularly traces symptoms to the patient's erotic life and back to childhood wishes. The child has a sexuality of its own: erogenous zones, autoerotism, component drives such as sadism and scopophilia, and early object choice. Neuroses are the negative of perversions, and the nuclear complex is love for one parent and hostility toward the other, as in Oedipus and Hamlet.
- People fall ill when reality denies their erotic needs. They take flight into illness, which gives a substitute satisfaction through regression, both temporal and formal, and through phantasy. Artistic talent can turn phantasies into works rather than symptoms. Following Jung, the sick and the healthy struggle with the same complexes, and the difference is one of quantity.
- Transference is the strongest confirmation of the theory. The patient directs tender and hostile feelings at the physician that stem from old unconscious wishes, and relives what cannot be remembered. Transference arises spontaneously in all human relations, explains the power of hypnotic suggestion, and is uncovered and put to use by analysis.
- Making the repressed conscious weakens rather than unleashes it. Analysis replaces repression with conscious judgment, frees energy for sublimation toward higher aims, and lets some impulses find direct satisfaction. Civilisation's excessive sexual repression drives people into neurosis without cultural gain, as the Schilda horse starved when its oats were cut.
What it shows
- 1905
Sigmund Freud critiqued 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.
- 1910
Sigmund Freud reworked 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.