Psychoanalysis:
Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud himself provided the most complete, and now most classical definition for his invention, psychoanalysis: "Psycho-analysis is the name (1) of a procedure for investigating mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way, (2) of a method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders and (3) of a collection of psychological information obtained along those lines, which is gradually being accumulated into a new scientific discipline" (1923a [1922], p. 235). This definition, intended for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is still widely used today by many psychoanalytic training institutes.
Freud also wrote that the best way to understand psychoanalysis was to study its history. Its origins could be traced to the young Viennese doctor's medical practice. He frequently treated "nervous" patients, for the most part described as suffering from "hysteria," a field he came to specialize in after his return from Paris and his work assisting Jean Martin Charcot. He needed to heal these patients and develop a clientele large enough to support his growing family, even though therapeutic procedures at the time were practically nonexistent. The available techniques—electric shock, isolation in medical clinics, and sedatives—were soon abandoned. Hypnosis appeared to him at first to produce miraculous results, but it turned out to be a dead end, and he decided to apply the "cathartic method" that his mentor, Joseph Breuer, had discovered during the treatment of the patient known as Anna O. Taking the symptom as its starting point, this method strove to have the patient recall the circumstances of its first occurrence, and a successful outcome depended on this recollection by means of talk, which was supposed to make the symptom disappear.
Freud then discovered the "resistance" that patients would put up during the search for pathogenic "primal scenes," as if they wanted to keep the origin of their illness secret. The material that was "repressed" in this way always involved old memories associated with specific events related to the earliest sexual activity of children. His suggestion that such a sexuality even existed greatly shocked many of his contemporaries. His patients soon began drawing his attention to their dreams, which he encouraged them to recount. In keeping with his belief in determinism, Freud concluded that dreams fulfilled a function—the safeguarding of sleep through the fulfillment of wishes that had been ignored by consciousness—and consequently had an "unconscious" content, a meaning that could be deciphered. The analysis of resistance and the interpretation of dreams, together with the method of "free association," became the pillars of the psychotherapy to which Freud, in 1896, gave the name "psychoanalysis." The term appeared for the first time in an article written in French, "Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses" (1896a).
By the first years of the twentieth century, the principal features of psychoanalytic treatment that still define it at the beginning of the twenty-first had been established: The patient was placed on a couch and the therapist remained out of sight. The patient was asked to say whatever came to mind. Sessions were fairly long, frequent, and expensive, so that the treatment would become an important part of the patient's life and so that the bond with the psychoanalyst—the "transference"—would become the principal engine of the attempt to reconstruct the past and weaken the defenses the patient had set up against the pressure from contradictory drives. But the initial therapeutic successes were not as consistent or as long-lasting as Freud had hoped. The transference could become hostile and give rise to a "negative therapeutic reaction," leading to the discontinuation of treatment or its indefinite extension.
Freud was less a therapist than a researcher, something he often recognized; it was primarily his students and successors who introduced improvements to his methods, or different but connected methods, to make the "therapeutic" aspect of psychoanalysis more effective.
Thus Carl G. Jung and Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth worked with psychotic patients, and Anna Freud and Melanie Klein with children. Otto Rank and Sándor Ferenczi sought to improve psychoanalytic therapy and make it more effective. They introduced so-called "active" techniques and tried to shorten the length of therapy, even exploring a form of "mutual analysis." Traces of these early initiatives can be found in psychotherapeutic methods developed years later. Similarly, the extension of psychotherapy to patients presenting problems of psychosis or addiction, and the development of group analysis and psychodrama all tended to point up the therapeutic value of psychoanalysis. Some psychoanalysts sought to render their approach more effective by forging links with the neurosciences.
Following Freud, however, who quipped about the profession's "furor sanandi," other psychoanalysts emphasized the research implications of treatment. Thus Jacques Lacan, who in 1957 spoke of curing patients as merely an "extra" benefit of psychoanalysis, and who in 1964, when he founded theÉcole freudienne de Paris, described training analysis as "pure"—as opposed to simply "therapeutic"—psychoanalysis, clearly represents the tendency that embraces the third of Freud's three basic definitions of psychoanalysis.
In his daily practice, however, Freud never differentiated between what he experienced and what he theorized later. His letters to Wilhelm Fliess allow us to follow, almost day by day, the theory-building that turned psychoanalysis into the "depth psychology" Freud hoped would supplant academic psychology. A work of construction then—but also of deconstruction—Freud considered his ideas to be superstructures whose existence was necessarily ephemeral, and anticipated new discoveries better adapted to the knowledge obtained from clinical practice. A first model, developed in 1900, which described a psychic apparatus formed of three agencies—the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious—was replaced in 1923 by another conceptual scheme comprising the id, the ego, and the superego. And while Freud remained firmly committed to the Oedipus complex, he had, over a period of forty years of work, fleshed out the speculative aspects of his metapsychology with new concepts that improved and sometimes reversed his earlier hypotheses: narcissism, the death instinct, the phallic stage, the splitting of the ego.
Alfred Adler, in 1911, and Jung, in 1913, made their final breaks with Freud over theoretical disagreements and formed their own schools. The first psychoanalytic theory to be developed that broke with Freud's theories while also claiming to further the Freudian tradition was Melanie Klein's, developed between 1930 and 1962. Klein radically revised the Freudian view of the first moments of the formation of the mental apparatus, on the basis of her clinical experience with very young children and her interest in psychoses. Her theoretical model invoked very early stages she referred to as "depressive" or "paranoid-schizoid" positions, and she held that the Oedipus complex originated at a much earlier age than Freud thought. Her opposition to Anna Freud, who insisted on strict fidelity to the spirit and letter of her father's theories, gave rise to several important "controversies" (1941-1945) that determined the orientation of the British Psycho-Analytical Society after the Second World War. Following Klein, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, and Ronald Fairbairn helped develop British psychoanalytical theory and practice. In the United States a number of derivative psychoanalytic theories came into being, some of which parted ways with classical Freudian theory. The theory of ego-psychology was introduced by Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Rudolph Loewenstein, and was for years the major reference point of American psychoanalysis. Heinz Kohut developed a theory of narcissism, and Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan were cofounders of a "culturalist" approach. Erik Erikson's work was also notable.
In France, Jacques Lacan, under the banner of the "return to Freud" in November 1955, proposed new models that in his view could better account for the constitution of the "subject" and the relationship between the subject and the unconscious. The three categories of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic; the primacy of the phallus; the object a; Borromean knots; and mathemes were so many milestones in an evolving theory that Lacan developed week by week, from 1954 to 1981, in his famous seminars. His idiosyncratic use of the findings of modern linguistics, inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure, of structuralism, and of logical and mathematical models, enabled him to make an audience of even communities like the Catholic Church and the Marxist orthodoxy, which had previously rejected "Freudian doctrine" as "unscientific."
Whether or not psychoanalysis is a science has been debated for years, and the issue reappears regularly in the news. For epistemologists like Karl Popper and a host of other critics, the statements made by psychoanalysis cannot be considered scientific since they cannot be "falsified" and because the theory cannot be "refuted." For Freud, the scientific status of his theory was never in doubt, and he considered his metapsychological hypotheses no more implausible than those of contemporary physics. Psychoanalysis, as far as he was concerned, was a "natural science" ("Naturwissenschaft"). Despite holding a position deemed by some close to "scientism," Freud clearly distinguished his belief in a scientific ideal and the consistency of his hypotheses concerning the unconscious from a Weltanschauung, a "vision of the world" whose totalizing tendencies and illusory nature he feared. In The Question of Lay Analysis, he wrote: "Science, as you know, is not a revelation; long after its beginnings it still lacks the attributes of definiteness, immutability and infallibility for which human thought so deeply longs. But such as it is, it is all that we can have" (1926e, p. 191).
Freud also insisted on the importance of psychoanalysis as a cultural phenomenon and a special instrument for studying and understanding other cultural phenomena. On July 5, 1910, he wrote to Jung: "I am becoming more and more convinced of the cultural value of psychoanalysis, and I long for the lucid mind that will draw from it the justified inferences for philosophy and sociology" (p. 340).
His letters to Wilhelm Fliess already illustrate the extent to which his psychological discoveries provided new insights for the understanding of literature and visual art, and how their study provided him with new ideas or proofs of the correctness of his views. It was Sophocles who provided Freud with the name for his "Oedipus complex," discovered during his self-analysis in October 1897. In 1913 he indicated the fields of knowledge he felt would benefit (1913j) from psychoanalytic concepts. Aside from psychology, he listed the science of language, philosophy, biology, the history of the development of civilization, aesthetics, sociology, and pedagogy.
He confirmed this interaction in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: "In the work of psychoanalysis links are formed with numbers of other mental sciences, the investigation of which promises results of the greatest value: links with mythology and philology, with folklore, with social psychology and the theory of religion. You will not be surprised to hear that a periodical has grown up on psychoanalytic soil whose sole aim is to foster these links. This periodical is known as Imago, founded in 1912 and edited by Hanns Sachs and Otto Rank. In all these links the share of psychoanalysis is in the first instance that of giver and only to a less extent that of receiver" (1916-1917a, p. 167-68).
Despite the charge that Freudian concepts cannot be applied outside the framework of the treatment and notwithstanding the superficial way they have indeed too often sometimes been used, the fact is that "applied psychoanalysis" has profoundly modified our view of literature and the fine arts, of biography, and of sociological and political realities. Freud set the example by the way he approached Wilhelm Jensen's story "Gradiva," Leonardo da Vinci's life, and Michelangelo's sculpture, to mention only a few of his contributions. But on several occasions he expressed his reservations about the value of the psychobiographies produced by some of his followers and successors.
Toward the end of his life his clinical work took a secondary position to his writings on the great problems of religion and culture: The Future of an Illusion (1927c), Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a [1929]), and especially his last work, Moses and Monotheism (1939a [1934-1938]), which expands upon the anthropological ideas he had extensively covered in Totem and Taboo (1912-13a).
Later, the spread of Freudian ideas attracted the interest of writers, artists, and critics, who made use of them to enrich their own work. The Surrealists were among the first, but novelists, painters, and dramatists borrowed from psychoanalysis as well. Created at the same time as cinematography, psychoanalysis has inspired filmmakers from the early days. One has only to think of Secrets of a Soul (Geheimnisse einer Seele), the film G. W. Pabst made in 1926 in spite of Freud's reservations; or of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Spellbound and Vertigo; or of Freud, the Secret Passion, by John Huston, prepared with the help of Jean-Paul Sartre and released in 1962, in which Montgomery Clift plays the role of Freud; or, for that matter, of the comic treatment of psychoanalysis by Woody Allen.
Throughout the twentieth century, the discoveries of psychoanalysis and its theory of the unconscious have profoundly modified the rules mankind has established concerning its behavior and sexual taboos, its relation to guilt, to femininity, and more generally to other people, about whom a whole new unconscious aspect was now apprehended. Obviously, however, the wide dissemination and renown of psychoanalysis were themselves the product of the twentieth century. Psychoanalysis was inspired and carried along by that century, with its excesses, its political ideologies, its economic and religious ups and downs, and above all, its terrible conflicts, which despite all claims to civilized behavior mobilized the darkest and most barbaric of human impulses just as Freud had understood and feared (1915b, 1933b [1932]).
In so many ways—the liberalization of behavior, the advancement of the status of women (both inside and outside feminist movements and in spite of their virulent criticisms of Freudianism), the dawning recognition of sexual minorities (even though in Freudian theory their preferences have been explained as arrested libidinal development and more or less archaic fixations), a different approach to the subject and its relation to itself and the other—psychoanalysis has become a part of everyday life throughout the so-called "Western" world and is not about to simply disappear, despite all the wild swings of fashion.
Its expansion toward other cultural sensibilities, like the multiplication of the often contradictory theories and techniques that claim allegiance to it, as demonstrated by this Dictionary, show that psychoanalysis has never been a dogma or the kind of closed theory caricatured by dishonest critics. In his own time Freud defined those "cornerstones," which seemed to him to provide the foundation that his successors would trace back to him: "The assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of resistance and repression, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex—these constitute the principal subject-matter of psycho-analysis and the foundations of its theory. No one who cannot accept them all should count himself a psycho-analyst" (1923a [1922], p. 247). Nothing has really changed regarding the basic principles, in spite of the considerable diversity found in theoretical research and methods of practice, which has enriched the great network of the global psychoanalytic movement.
The recent rapid development of the neurosciences does not signal any decline in the value of the listening procedure that psychoanalysis has offered for more than a century in its attempt to understand and treat mental suffering. Apparently contradictory theoretical systems will eventually intersect and enrich each other, and the pessmism of the Cassandras can be answered with Freud's remarks, written in 1914: "At least a dozen times in recent years, in reports of the proceedings of certain congresses and scientific bodies or in reviews of certain publications, I have read that now psychoanalysis is dead, defeated and disposed of once and for all. The best answer to all this would be in the terms of Mark Twain's telegram to the newspaper which had falsely published news of his death: 'Report of my death is grossly exaggerated"' (1914d, p. 35).
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1912-13a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1-161.
——. (1913j). The claims of psycho-analysis to scientific interest. SE, 13: 163-190.
——. (1915b). Thoughts for the times on war and death. SE, 14: 273-300.
——. (1916-17a [1915-17]). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. Parts I and II. SE, 15-16.
——. (1923a [1922]). Two encyclopaedia articles. Psycho-analysis. SE, 18: 234-255.
——. (1926e). The question of lay analysis. SE, 20: 177-250.
——. (1930a [1929]). Civilization and its discontents. SE, 21: 57-145.
——. (1933b [1932]). Why war? (Einstein and Freud). SE, 22: 195-215.
——. (1939a [1934-38]). Moses and monotheism: Three essays. SE, 23: 1-137.
Freud, Sigmund, and Jung, Carl. (1974a [1906-13]). The Freud/Jung letters: The correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung (William McGuire, Ed., and Ralph Manheim and R.F.C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mijolla, Alain de. (1996). Psychoanalysts and their history. International Psychoanalysis: The Newsletter of the IPA, 5 (1), 25-28.
—ALAINDE MIJOLLA
