What is Psychoanalysis?
Psychoanalysis is a theory of the human mind, a therapy for mental distress, an instrument of research, and a profession. A complex intellectual, medical and sociological phenomenon.
It was conceived in the late 1890s by the Austrian physician Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who is still the figure most closely associated with the subject and most often attacked by critics.
Freud was forced to leave his home in Vienna when Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. He emigrated with his family to London, England, in June of that year. And it was there, at 20 Maresfield Gardens, in December 1938, less than a year before his death, that Freud broadcast a statement for the BBC. He summarized his life’s work and the history of psychoanalysis.
Today we are familiar with psychoanalysis from all the jokes and cartoon images that take some knowledge of it for granted.
Many of its concepts have become everyday cultural currency: “Freudian slip”, “wish fulfilment”, “Oedipus Complex”, “libido”, “dream symbolism”, “sexual stages”, “oral and anal personalities”, “ego, id and superego”, “repression” and the “unconscious”.
Psychoanalysis is more than a particular set of concepts and therapeutic procedures. For good or ill, it has become, as W.H. Auden wrote, a “whole climate of opinion”. It has given us a way to understand the “irrational” in human life as consistent with what we know of the “rational”. It has elucidated the importance of sexuality in human motivation. It has shown that psychological events have hidden meanings. It has emphasized the fundamental importance of childhood. It has recognized psychic conflict and mental pain as an inescapable part of the human condition.
It can truly be said that psychoanalysis has transformed the way we see ourselves in modern “Western” societies.
A Part of Psychology
Psychoanalysis is part of psychology. Some key psychologists are pictured with Freud. Brief sketches of their contributions can be found at the end of this book on here, along with the psychoanalysts named in the text. For Freud, psychoanalysis is about memories, thoughts, feelings, phantasies, intentions, wishes, ideals, beliefs, psychological conflict, and all that stuff inside what we like to call our minds.
A Depth Psychology
Freud called psychoanalysis a “depth psychology” because of its assumption of an unconscious part of the mind, and because he saw it as a comprehensive theory.
The metaphor of “depth” implies a stratified concept of the mind, one layer laid upon another. It is often assumed that the “deeper” the level, the more “primitive” and dangerous the contents.
In this model, the analyst’s role is to translate conscious thoughts, feelings, phantasies and behaviour into their unconscious antecedents (and supposed determinants). The patient says: “You’ve changed your curtains.” The analyst says: “You’re only saying that because you love your mother.” Not all psychoanalysts agree with this assumption of depth.
The Dream Work
In Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), the metaphor of depth is reproduced in the distinction between the “manifest content” of the dream and the unconscious “latent content”. Linking the two is a system of transformations – the dream work. Interpretation turns the strange and alien manifest dream into something with psychical meaning – an unconscious “wish” that the subject is attempting to express.