by Ruth Snowden
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From 1894 until 1900 Freud developed many of the theories that we now see as being central to psychoanalysis. He carefully examined and analysed the unconscious mechanisms, such as repression and resistance, that he saw underlying neurotic symptoms. Freud coined the term psychoanalysis in 1896. The main theories that he was developing during this period were connected with:
dream analysis
slips of the tongue
infantile sexuality.
Transference
Freud also became interested in what he called transference. Sometimes, even after weeks of work using the pressure technique, the patient would still become blocked and the analysis would seem to be going nowhere. In this case Freud suggested three possibilities:
there was really nothing further to be unearthed
the patient had come up against a resistance that could only be shifted later on
or – and he saw this as the worst possibility – the patient’s relationship with the doctor was somehow getting in the way. Freud believed that this problem arose sooner or later in every analysis.
Freud began to use the word transference to describe the emotional feelings the patient developed towards the analyst. This could involve either positive or negative emotions. For example, the patient may actually fall in love with the therapist, as Anna O did with Breuer. Alternatively, the patient might become very hostile towards the analyst. Freud decided that this is because the patient is beginning to attribute to the analyst ideas and attitudes that actually belong to other emotionally significant people, in particular the parents.
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Insight
Transference is about redirecting feelings and desires, especially those that have been repressed since childhood. Think of the type of complicated emotional response that can happen when someone says, or does, something that reminds you of sensitive issues from your past.
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Freud saw three main ways in which an emotional block could happen:
The patient feels he or she has been neglected or insulted by the doctor. This can easily be overcome by discussion in most cases.
The patient feels he or she is in danger of becoming too dependent on the doctor, or even falling in love with him. This is harder to deal with and can give rise to fresh hysterical symptoms.
Transference is occurring as the patient begins to project the upsetting ideas he or she is unearthing onto the doctor. Freud says that transference is a very common occurrence, for example one patient suddenly announced that she wanted Freud to kiss her. This, he maintained, proved to be a repressed desire from an incident that had occurred years earlier with another man. Her refusal to recognize this blocked the course of the analysis.
Whenever transference occurred, then analysis of the transference itself would finally unblock the problem. But this led Freud to a fresh problem, because anything the analyst did, such as a physical gesture or contact, might inadvertently reinforce the transference. This meant that eventually Freud rarely touched his patients at all, and was very careful about the way he greeted them and so on.
Nowadays it is accepted as normal for some degree of transference to take place during the course of psychoanalytic treatment – in fact, it is part of the healing process as the patient directs feelings of love or hostility towards the analyst. This can actually be very helpful because it recreates the original problem in miniature. Freud called this a transference neurosis. The advantage is that unconscious feelings are now out in the open and can be examined and hopefully dealt with properly.
The term ‘transference’ is nowadays extended to mean the patient’s whole emotional attitude to the analyst, and it is recognized that the current relationship between analyst and patient is often hugely important. Freud himself recognized this and gradually realized that it was impossible to maintain the totally clinical type of relationship with a patient that he had initially thought to be essential. Although he saw transference as a great nuisance, he began to recognize its importance and eventually realized that a counter-transference often occurred, where the therapist also has emotional reactions towards the patient. This, he explained, was because of the influence of the patient on the unconscious feelings of the therapist. Freud suggested that it was important to recognize this process and overcome it.
Freud’s self-analysis
Freud’s own self-analysis was to prove very important in the evolution of psychoanalysis, and it forms the core of his book The Interpretation of Dreams. In 1896 Freud’s father died. For the next three years Freud went through a period of gloom, while he struggled to come to terms with conflicting feelings thrown up by his father’s death. Freud later termed a mixed attitude such as this ‘ambivalence’. On the one hand he felt love and respect towards his father, and on the other he felt hostility and guilt. Freud had a lot of responsibilities by this time. He had six children, and his wife, mother and some of his sisters were also dependent on him. His father’s death must have left him feeling very alone in the world and he laid great emphasis on the trauma a man felt at this time. This was all part of Freud’s belief in the huge importance of the male as the figurehead of the family.
However, his period of darkness, one that we now know to be common at around the age of 40, did have its plus side in that it threw him into a period of intensive self-analysis that was to prove very productive. He began to realize that he had long repressed feelings of resentment and rage towards his father and that these feelings were now emerging in the form of feelings of shame and impotence. This revelation led him to examine his childhood memories, his dreams, and slips of the tongue which shed telling light on his unconscious world.
Freud recalled that he had often fantasized in his youth that his older half-brother Philip was his real father. (You will remember that Philip was in fact about the same age as his mother.) Eventually, he grasped the horrible truth of this fantasy – that he had actually had a death wish against his real father, because he was a rival for his mother’s attention. This revelation was to become one of the main bases for his Oedipus complex theory (see Chapter 7).
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Insight
The Oedipus complex is about the desire the child has to sexually possess the parent of the opposite sex, while excluding the parent of the same sex.
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Freud also realized that unconscious childhood memories often surfaced in adult dreams. For example, it was in a dream that he recalled having had sexual feelings towards his mother when he caught sight of her naked when he was a child. The importance of repressed childhood memories, which emerge in dreams and fantasies, also became central to psychoanalytic theory.
Freud had already found that dreams played a very important role in his analysis of neurotic patients. As he encouraged people to free-associate, they often mentioned their dreams, and the images in them would usually set off further trains of thought. Now he began to record and analyse his own dreams, and decided that they, like waking daydreams, always represented some sort of wish fulfilment. It was at this point that he decided to write The Interpretation of Dreams.
This book, arguably Freud’s most important work, contains analyses of many of Freud’s own dreams. They include the famous dream of ‘Irma’s Injection’, which is a very important dream in the history of psychoanalysis, because it was the first one of his own dreams that he submitted to methodical, public analysis. In this dream he and some other doctors are examining Irma, a patient of his, and discussing various symptoms that are plaguing her. Freud’s analysis suggests that the dream was allowing his unconscious to express some guilt and worry that he was feeling deep down about his partial failure in treating this patient and transfer the blame onto the other doctors.
He was always as objective as possible when working with his own dreams, trying to view himself as he would a client. In the book he explains that dreams have a double nature – a manifest content – which is what the dream appears to be about, and
a latent content – which is the dream’s true, hidden meaning.
By the time the book was published in 1900 Freud was much more confident about his theories and had laid down the main foundations – both the main techniques and the theoretical framework – of psychoanalytic thinking. He was using two main approaches with his clients, which are still used today:
The free-association method. Freud encouraged his patients to make connections between mental images and hidden memories. By talking about these he found that he could lead the person deeper and deeper into the unconscious.
Dream analysis. Freud found that dreams were a very revealing way of accessing what lay in the unconscious.
The Interpretation of Dreams was slow in gaining any recognition. Most scientists at the time dismissed dreams as being unimportant ramblings of the sleeping mind, so yet again Freud was ahead of his time. It took eight years to sell the original 600 copies printed in 1900: the scientific journals ignored it completely for the first year and a half, and critics were as damning of his ideas as ever, suggesting they could lead to ‘complete mysticism’. By 1910, however, Freud was gaining recognition and the first reprint of the book was made, followed by six more during Freud’s lifetime.
The Interpretation of Dreams shows us that Freud was beginning to realize that neurotic symptoms actually occur in all of us, not just in people who are ill. The second important book which bears out this idea, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, appeared at the end of Freud’s period of withdrawal, in 1901. This book covers the other main discoveries that he made during this period of intense self-analysis – that is, slips of the tongue and similar mistakes in speech and writing. From this point onwards psychopathology had entered the arena of so-called ‘normal’ life. Freud continued to analyse his own unconscious psychic world right up until the end of his life.
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Insight
The word psychopathology implies that something is wrong in the psyche, because pathology is the study of bodily disease.
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The analysis of Dora
Dora (her real name was Ida Bauer), was an 18-year-old girl whom Freud saw as a client in 1900. The case is interesting for two reasons:
It is one of the earliest recorded case histories in psychoanalysis and one of the first where dreams were used as the main basis for the analysis. Although the therapy itself was a failure the case was used for years as a classic case study for students.
It highlights some possible pitfalls in the psychoanalytic method.
Dora’s father had already been to Freud as a patient, presenting symptoms of syphilis, and he brought Dora along to Freud in order to ‘make her see reason’ (an interesting statement that may give a clue about the real source of Dora’s neurosis). Dora’s mother had an obsessive compulsive disorder, constantly cleaning the house, but Dora refused to take on the traditional female role and preferred instead to read a lot and try to educate herself. She was beginning to display typical hysterical symptoms, such as fainting and depression. She had an endless nagging cough and had at times become mute for a while. By the time she came to see Freud she had also threatened suicide.
The story is a complicated one, but the main focus was a tangled web of relationships that existed between Dora’s family and another family, referred to as the K family. Dora used to babysit for the young K children and Freud claimed that she had a crush on Frau K, who was also her father’s mistress. The two women were certainly close, almost like sisters, but it is not clear whether they actually had a sexual relationship. Meanwhile Frau K’s husband, Herr K, who knew all about his wife’s affair, had allegedly made sexual advances to Dora since she was 14. When Dora finally told her father what was going on he accused her of having invented the whole thing.
Freud believed Dora’s story, but even though Dora vehemently and consistently announced that she hated Herr K, he got it into his head that the root of the problem was that she was secretly in love with him. He even found it hard to understand why she felt revulsion rather than sexual excitement when Herr K pressed his erect penis against her. The more Dora declared her hatred, the more Freud announced that this was clear evidence of repression of her true feelings – even though on one occasion, when Herr K had propositioned her during a walk by a lake, she had slapped him across the face. The more vehement the denial, claimed Freud, the stronger the repression must be. Heads I win, tails you lose.
Eventually, after 11 weeks in therapy, Dora quit. She had been labelled by now as a lesbian, and the analysis certainly did nothing to alter her sexual orientation. However, Freud claimed that she had eventually accepted the idea that she was in love with Herr K. All this really goes to show is how stubborn and persuasive Freud could be once he got the bit between his teeth. He had warned Dora’s parents from the outset that therapy was unlikely to be successful, and in fact this proved to be the case. Hardly surprising since Dora’s own wishes had not been taken into account – she was not really ill, and she had not asked to be brought for therapy.
Dora finally accepts the idea that she is in love with Herr K.
It was not until 1905 that the Dora case notes appeared, starkly entitled Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, in a specialist journal. Although they were used for many years as a case study for students, more recently people have begun to realize that the Dora analysis was really just as much an analysis of Freud himself as of young Dora. Dora herself seems to have been a determined young woman struggling with extremely difficult emotional circumstances and putting up a fight against adults who had as yet limited understanding of women’s sexuality and adolescent needs.
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THINGS TO REMEMBER
Early on in the development of psychoanalysis, Freud decided that all neurotic symptoms were caused by sexual experiences.
At first he claimed that the key to all neuroses was in fact the suppressed memory of an early childhood seduction by an adult.
He developed a new therapeutic technique called the free-association technique. He used mainly free association and dream analysis in his therapy.
Freud coined the term psychoanalysis in 1896.
Transference refers to emotional attitudes developed by the patient towards the analyst. This can be a two-way process.
Freud’s mid-life crisis led him to carry out extensive self-analysis, with particular emphasis on dreams.
His book The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900.
The analysis of ‘Dora’ is one of the earliest recorded case histories in psychoanalysis.
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4
The interpretation of dreams
In this chapter you will learn:
why dreams are important in psychoanalysis
dream mechanisms and methods of interpretation
Freudian symbols and the origins of dreams.
Why dreams are important in psychoanalysis
Probably Freud’s greatest contribution to modern thinking is his theory of the unconscious. The positivism that was popular in Freud’s time claimed that people could gain real knowledge of the world and of themselves, and that we had rational control over both. This sort of attitude was reflected throughout scientific thinking, with its insistence on ‘hard facts’, and it even permeated psychology. Freud began to realize that such claims are at best delusions, because we are not always aware of what we really think and we are often motivated by unconscious forces within us. He suggested that consciousness actually existed in layers and that there were many psychic processes that went on below the surface, in the world of the unconscious. Dreams were the most immediate and accessible examples of this kind of unconscious thinking – not only did they prove that the unconscious exists, they also provided a means of accessing the information stored there. Freud’s book, The Interpretation of Dreams, really marks the beginning of psychoanalysis proper, in that it proposes the existence of a dynamic unconscious that begins to form in childhood and affects the behaviour
of all of us. It does not, however, live up to its claim that Freud had discovered a scientific method for unravelling the meaning of every dream.
People have always been interested in dreams, but before Freud they tended to think that the dream somehow arose from outside the dreamer, often as a message from the gods. Thus, dreams were often seen as omens or portents of things that were going to happen in the future. Another theory was that dreams were simply meaningless images caused by indigestion! There was already a great deal of literature concerning dreams in Freud’s day, but he pulled a whole variety of ideas together. He created the first proper theory of dreams and made them into a respectable topic for scientific study.
Freud had always been very interested in dreams and emphasized their importance in psychoanalysis. In fact, he regarded them as being so important that he said if anyone asked him how to become a psychoanalyst he would tell them to study their own dreams. He regarded his discovery of the importance of dreams as his greatest. Staying at the Schloss Bellevue outside Vienna in the summer of 1895, he had a dream which was the first he was able to interpret as a wish-fulfilment dream. This dream appears in The Interpretation of Dreams as ‘The Dream of Irma’s Injection’. Freud was so excited by his new ideas about dreams that he wrote a letter to Fliess, suggesting that one day a marble plaque would be erected at the Schloss Bellevue, commemorating his monumental revelation. The Schloss Bellevue has since been demolished, but Freud would have been delighted to know that such a plaque was at last placed on a monument on the site in 1977.