ID: 590 type: concept tags:
- psychology
- psychiatry
A means of investigating the unconscious dimension of the human mind established by Freud, Sigmund on the basis of his self-analysis and his experience as a practising clinician dealing with hysteria and projection patients. Freud himself stated that psychoanalysis has three dimensions: it is (i) a method for investigating the unconscious meanings of the things patients say and do; (ii) a therapeutic technique; and (iii) a cluster of inter-related theories that attempt to explain systematically the functioning of the psychical apparatus. It is described in this way, as a cluster of theories, because although Freud was responsible for initiating psychoanalysis, he was rapidly joined by a large number of other practitioners, who, in due course, contributed their own theories, sometimes building on Freudâs own work and taking it further, and sometimes challenging his hypotheses and offering counter-proposals. In time, schools and factions developed and psychoanalysis as a movement fractured along a variety of fault lines, making it impossible to describe it as being just one thing. Although the different schools of thought in psychoanalysis share a number of common points, the differences between them can be quite radical, as splinter groups initiated by Jung, Carl, Klein, Melanie, and others show very well. Lacan, Jacques, one of Freudâs most important interpreters (particularly from the perspective of critical theory), frequently insisted that Freudâs theories can only be fully understood in the context of the analytic situation, that is to say, in the context of the therapeutic relation between the analyst and analysand (patient). His famous battle cry that psychoanalysis needed to âreturn to Freudâ meant precisely this: the core of psychoanalysis is transference, the relationship between analyst and analysand. The history of the development of psychoanalysis tends to bear out Lacanâs claim inasmuch that psychoanalysis as we know it today wasnât born until Freud abandoned both hypnosis (a technique he adopted from the great French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and refined further with his colleague Josef Breuer) and seduction theory, which he did when he found them both to be therapeutically limiting. Freud stopped using hypnosis because he realized that what people say freely, without suggestion, is more not less indicative of what is happening in their unconscious, provided one knows how to interpret it. As he later demonstrated at length in Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (1901), translated as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1914), the little repetitions, hesitations, mistakes, and so on we routinely make in everyday conversation can all betray the workings of the unconscious. He abandoned seduction theory when he realized that the stories his patients were telling him, which frequently included accounts of childhood rapes and what would later be known as field fantasies, could not all be true, even if the patients insisted they were. The path of psychoanalysis was henceforward to comprehend the mechanisms of the unconscious, or what Freud called the primary processes. Having ruled out actual seduction, Freud had to explain both the fact that fantasies can have such a strong effect and the seeming omnipresence of sex in those fantasies. He was able to do so by proposing a topography of the psychical apparatus, separating it into three distinct but interconnected spheres: the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious. The unconscious, he argued, is where the instinct (of which there are two main types---the life instinct and death instinct, both of which are intimately related to sex) reside and these instincts exert a constant pressure on the other parts of the psychical apparatus, but they cannot pass through the preconscious into the conscious in their raw form without causing a psychic disturbance. They are held in place by a powerful counterforce he called repression. Repression does not necessarily mean absolute negation, it can also take the form of distortion (dreamwork), which disguises unacceptable thoughts and impulses in an acceptable form. Neuroses, he then reasoned, are caused either by the exhausting effort of maintaining this repression and/or because the effort had failed. One of Freudâs earliest patients, FrĂ€ulein Anna O (later identified as Bertha van Pappenheim), whom he wrote about in Studien ĂŒber Hysterie (1895), translated as Studies on Hysteria (1955), described psychoanalysis as a talking cure because Freudâs therapeutic technique consisted in asking patients to describe their dreams, or recent activities, and then ask them to think through and talk about all the associations that came to mind as they did so. By this means his patients became gradually aware of the operations of the unconscious. Interestingly, Freud did not generally interpret peopleâs dreams for them, but rather taught them the means of analysing them themselves. Some patients resisted this process, a fact that Freud usually interpreted as meaning they actually needed it, while others became all but addicted to it, a problem he never fully resolved. Psychoanalysis is undoubtedly one of the most influential intellectual movements of the past century. Although he was highly critical of psychoanalysis, Foucault, Michel nevertheless described Freud as a âfounder of discourseâ because his work created the possibility of a new way of thinking and speaking about the human subject. Its influence is all but incalculable---it is vital to critical theory, the Frankfurt School, Dada, Surrealism, and literary studies, just to mention a few of the more obvious fields where its impact has been substantial. Further Reading: C. Surprenant Freud: A Guide for the Perplexed (2008). T. Thwaites Reading Freud: Psychoanalysis as Cultural Theory (2007).