ES2302- Education: Social and Political Thought II Freud – introduction The Autobiography 'Psychoanalysis: the aim is mo

1. ES2302- Education: Social and Political Thought II Freud – introduction The Autobiography 'Psychoanalysis: the aim is modest ... to turn neurotic misery into common unhappiness.'

2. Freud and his 'disciples' gave our culture an extended vocabulary of terms which continue to undermine naive assumptions about the integrity of the rational self.  Just as Marx gave theorists of society the means to analyse the experiences and features of industrialisation, Freud gave theorists of human thought the means to analyse the purity of willed action, and the apparent certainties of life in families, in sexual relationships, and in social life.

3. These Notes What follows is not intended as a substitute for the webpage. The text-commentary there is extensive as I have assumed that few of you have read much of Freud's work before now.

4. Freud summarised his ideas in a little essay written shortly before his death entitled 'Some Elementary Lessons in Psychoanalysis'. The points emphasised there are complemented here by extracts from An Outline of Psychoanalysis - another late publication.

5. Consciousness does not constitute the totality of psychic life - the unconscious is part of this and is the greater part. Psychologically, the child is father to the man. The equation that perception equals reality does not hold; our desires, fears, etc. distort our perception of the world. Psychic conflict is inevitable in the lives of individuals, groups, and societies. The basis of all psychic conflict is instinctual life pitted against the aspirations of consciousness, and conflict is indissolubly linked to anxiety.

6. The Autobiography (The title of the series to which this was a contribution is Die Medizen der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen – contemporary medicine presented through self-portraits. For our purposes, sections 1 and 2 provide some insight into his personal circumstances, section 3 contains the principal ideas you need to reflect upon, section 4 develops some of the methodological consequences of these, particularly in relation to dreams, while 5 gives further insight into the 'institutionalisation' of psychoanalysis from Freud's point of view. Note that section 6 provides a useful pre-reading for the second week's lecture.

7. All page references come from the Vintage edition of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XX, (1925-1926) and all italics are those used in this text - which one assumes were added by Freud during proof-reading.

8. Section 1 7) My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew myself. 9) These first impressions at the University (being rejected as a Jew), however, had one consequence which was afterwards to prove important; for at an early age I was made familiar with the fate of being in the Opposition and of being put under the ban of the 'compact majority'

9. 14) I wished to establish the thesis that in hysteria paralyses and anaesthesias of the various parts of the body are demarcated according to the popular idea of their limits and not according to anatomical facts.  17) [while visiting at Nancy in France] I received the profoundest impression of the possibility that there could be powerful mental processes which nevertheless remained hidden from the consciousness of men.

10. Section 2 19) I must supplement what I have just said by explaining that from the very first I made use of hypnosis in another manner, apart from hypnotic suggestion.  I used it for questioning the patient on the origin of his symptom, which in his waking state he could often describe only very imperfectly or not at all.

11. 21) It (the theory) did not seek to establish the nature of hysteria but merely to throw light upon the origin of its symptoms.  Thus it laid stress upon the importance of distinguishing between mental acts which are unconscious and those which are conscious (or rather capable of being conscious); it introduced a dynamic factor, by supposing that a symptom arises through the damming-up of an affect, and an ‘economic’ factor, by regarding that same symptom as the product of the transformation of an amount of energy which would otherwise have been employed in some other way.

12. 21 (cont.) Breuer spoke of our method as cathartic; its therapeutic aim was explained as being to provide that the quota of affect used for maintaining the symptom, which had got on to the wrong lines and had, as it were, become strangulated there, should be directed on to the normal path along which it could obtain discharge (or abreaction).

13. 29) Let us keep to a simple example, in which a particular impulsion had arisen in the subject's mind but was opposed by other powerful impulsions.  We should have expected the mental conflict which now arose to take the following course.  The two dynamic quantities - for our present purposes let us call them 'the instinct' and 'the resistance' - would struggle with each other for some time in the fullest light of consciousness, until the instinct was repudiated and the cathexis of energy withdrawn from its impulsion. Cont.

14. 29 (cont.) This would have been the normal solution.  In a neurosis, however, the conflict found a different outcome.  The ego drew back, as it were, on its first collision with the objectionable instinctual impulse; it debarred the instinct from access to consciousness and to direct motor discharge, but at the same time the impulse retained its full cathexis of energy.  ...  It was obviously a primary mechanism of defence, comparable to an attempt at flight, and was only a forerunner of the later-developed normal condemning judgement.  Cont.

15. 29 (cont.) The first act of repression involved further consequences.  In the first place the ego was obliged to protect itself against the constant threat of a renewed advance on the part of the repressed impulse by making a permanent expenditure of energy, an anticathexis, and it thus impoverished itself.  On the other hand, the repressed impulse, which was now unconscious, was able to find means of discharge and of substitutive satisfaction by circuitous routes and thus to bring the whole purpose of repression to nothing. Cont.

16. 29 (cont.) In the case of conversion the circuitous route led to somatic innervation; the repressed impulse broke its way through at some point or other and produced symptoms.  The symptoms were thus results of a compromise, for although they were substitutive satisfactions they were nevertheless distorted and deflected from their aim owing to the resistance of the ego.

17. 30) The theory of repression became the corner-stone of our understanding of neuroses.  A different view had now to be taken of the task of therapy.  Its aim was no longer to 'abreact' an affect which had got on to the wrong lines but to uncover repressions and replace them by acts of judgement which might result either in the accepting or in the condemning of what had formerly been repudiated.  I showed my recognition of the new situation by no longer calling my method of investigation and treatment catharsis but psycho-analysis.