Introduction To Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud Pdf
Miriam
Few, especially in this country, realize that while Freudian themes haverarely found a place on the programs of the American PsychologicalAssociation, they have attracted great and growing attention and foundfrequent elaboration by students of literature, history, biography,sociology, morals and aesthetics, anthropology, education, and religion.They have given the world a new conception of both infancy andadolescence, and shed much new light upon characterology; given us a newand clearer view of sleep, dreams, reveries, and revealed hithertounknown mental mechanisms common to normal and pathological states andprocesses, showing that the law of causation extends to the mostincoherent acts and even verbigerations in insanity; gone far to clearup the terra incognita of hysteria; taught us to recognize morbidsymptoms, often neurotic and psychotic in their germ; revealed theoperations of the primitive mind so overlaid and repressed that we hadalmost lost sight of them; fashioned and used the key of symbolism tounlock many mysticisms of the past; and in addition to all this,affected thousands of cures, established a new prophylaxis, andsuggested new tests for character, disposition, and ability, in allcombining the practical and theoretic to a degree salutary as it israre.
These twenty-eight lectures to laymen are elementary and almostconversational. Freud sets forth with a frankness almost startling thedifficulties and limitations of psychoanalysis, and also describes itsmain methods and results as only a master and originator of a new schoolof thought can do. These discourses are at the same time simple andalmost confidential, and they trace and sum up the results of thirtyyears of devoted and painstaking research. While they are not at allcontroversial, we incidentally see in a clearer light the distinctionsbetween the master and some of his distinguished pupils. A text likethis is the most opportune and will naturally more or less supersede allother introductions to the general subject of psychoanalysis. Itpresents the author in a new light, as an effective and successfulpopularizer, and is certain to be welcomed not only by the large andgrowing number of students of psychoanalysis in this country but by theyet larger number of those who wish to begin its study here andelsewhere.
The impartial student of Sigmund Freud need not agree with all hisconclusions, and indeed, like the present writer, may be unable to makesex so all-dominating a factor in the psychic life of the past andpresent as Freud deems it to be, to recognize the fact that he is themost original and creative mind in psychology of our generation. Despitethe frightful handicap of the odium sexicum, far more formidable todaythan the odium theologicum, involving as it has done for him lack ofacademic recognition and even more or less social ostracism, his viewshave attracted and inspired a brilliant group of minds not only inpsychiatry but in many other fields, who have altogether given the worldof culture more new and pregnant appercus than those which have comefrom any other source within the wide domain of humanism.
A former student and disciple of Wundt, who recognizes to the full hisinestimable services to our science, cannot avoid making certaincomparisons. Wundt has had for decades the prestige of a mostadvantageous academic chair. He founded the first laboratory forexperimental psychology, which attracted many of the most gifted andmature students from all lands. By his development of the doctrine ofapperception he took psychology forever beyond the old associationismwhich had ceased to be fruitful. He also established the independence ofpsychology from physiology, and by his encyclopedic and always throngedlectures, to say nothing of his more or less esoteric seminary, hematerially advanced every branch of mental science and extended itsinfluence over the whole wide domain of folklore, mores, language, andprimitive religion. His best texts will long constitute a thesauruswhich every psychologist must know.
Again, like Freud, he inspired students who went beyond him (theWurzburgers and introspectionists) whose method and results he could notfollow. His limitations have grown more and more manifest. He has littleuse for the unconscious or the abnormal, and for the most part he haslived and wrought in a preevolutionary age and always and everywhereunderestimated the genetic standpoint. He never transcends theconventional limits in dealing, as he so rarely does, with sex. Nor doeshe contribute much likely to be of permanent value in any part of thewide domain of affectivity. We cannot forbear to express the hope thatFreud will not repeat Wundt's error in making too abrupt a break withhis more advanced pupils like Adler or the Zurich group. It is ratherprecisely just the topics that Wundt neglects that Freud makes his chiefcorner-stones, viz., the unconscious, the abnormal, sex, and affectivitygenerally, with many genetic, especially ontogenetic, but alsophylogenetic factors. The Wundtian influence has been great in the past,while Freud has a great present and a yet greater future.
In one thing Freud agrees with the introspectionists, viz., indeliberately neglecting the "physiological factor" and building onpurely psychological foundations, although for Freud psychology ismainly unconscious, while for the introspectionists it is pureconsciousness. Neither he nor his disciples have yet recognized the aidproffered them by students of the autonomic system or by thedistinctions between the epicritic and protopathic functions and organsof the cerebrum, although these will doubtless come to have their dueplace as we know more of the nature and processes of the unconsciousmind.
If psychologists of the normal have hitherto been too little disposed torecognize the precious contributions to psychology made by the cruelexperiments of Nature in mental diseases, we think that thepsychoanalysts, who work predominantly in this field, have been somewhattoo ready to apply their findings to the operations of the normal mind;but we are optomistic enough to believe that in the end both theseerrors will vanish and that in the great synthesis of the future thatnow seems to impend our science will be made vastly richer and deeper onthe theoretical side and also far more practical than it has ever beenbefore.
To be sure, this much I may presume that you do know, namely, thatpsychoanalysis is a method of treating nervous patients medically. Andjust at this point I can give you an example to illustrate how theprocedure in this field is precisely the reverse of that which is therule in medicine. Usually when we introduce a patient to a medicaltechnique which is strange to him we minimize its difficulties and givehim confident promises concerning the result of the treatment. When,however, we undertake psychoanalytic treatment with a neurotic patientwe proceed differently. We hold before him the difficulties of themethod, its length, the exertions and the sacrifices which it will costhim; and, as to the result, we tell him that we make no definitepromises, that the result depends on his conduct, on his understanding,on his adaptability, on his perseverance. We have, of course, excellentmotives for conduct which seems so perverse, and into which you willperhaps gain insight at a later point in these lectures.
Do not be offended, therefore, if, for the present, I treat you as Itreat these neurotic patients. Frankly, I shall dissuade you from comingto hear me a second time. With this intention I shall show whatimperfections are necessarily involved in the teaching of psychoanalysisand what difficulties stand in the way of gaining a personal judgment. Ishall show you how the whole trend of your previous training and allyour accustomed mental habits must unavoidably have made you opponentsof psychoanalysis, and how much you must overcome in yourselves inorder to master this instinctive opposition. Of course I cannot predicthow much psychoanalytic understanding you will gain from my lectures,but I can promise this, that by listening to them you will not learn howto undertake a psychoanalytic treatment or how to carry one tocompletion. Furthermore, should I find anyone among you who does notfeel satisfied with a cursory acquaintance with psychoanalysis, but whowould like to enter into a more enduring relationship with it, I shallnot only dissuade him, but I shall actually warn him against it. Asthings now stand, a person would, by such a choice of profession, ruinhis every chance of success at a university, and if he goes out into theworld as a practicing physician, he will find himself in a society whichdoes not understand his aims, which regards him with suspicion andhostility, and which turns loose upon him all the malicious spiritswhich lurk within it.
However, there are always enough individuals who are interested inanything which may be added to the sum total of knowledge, despite suchinconveniences. Should there be any of this type among you, and shouldthey ignore my dissuasion and return to the next of these lectures, theywill be welcome. But all of you have the right to know what thesedifficulties of psychoanalysis are to which I have alluded.
First of all, we encounter the difficulties inherent in the teaching andexposition of psychoanalysis. In your medical instruction you have beenaccustomed to visual demonstration. You see the anatomical specimen, theprecipitate in the chemical reaction, the contraction of the muscle asthe result of the stimulation of its nerves. Later the patient ispresented to your senses; the symptoms of his malady, the products ofthe pathological processes, in many cases even the cause of the diseaseis shown in isolated state. In the surgical department you are made towitness the steps by which one brings relief to the patient, and arepermitted to attempt to practice them. Even in psychiatry, thedemonstration affords you, by the patient's changed facial play, hismanner of speech and his behavior, a wealth of observations which leavefar-reaching impressions. Thus the medical teacher preponderantly playsthe role of a guide and instructor who accompanies you through a museumin which you contract an immediate relationship to the exhibits, and inwhich you believe yourself to have been convinced through your ownobservation of the existence of the new things you see.
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