PSYCHOANALYSIS

In an encyclopedia article published in 1924, its founder Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) defined psychoanalysis as "the name (1) of a procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way, (2) of a method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders and (3) of a collection of psychological information obtained along those lines, which is gradually being accumulated into a new scientific discipline." Within the theory there were four fundamental concepts on which the entire intellectual edifice was built: (1) the unconscious as a domain or a property of ideas (representations); (2) repression (and more generally a range of defenses that define the mind as a field of dynamic conflict); (3) the drives (or instincts), the basic elements that motivate the mind; (4) transference—the repetition or reenactment of early intense experiences, such as the "Oedipus complex," the ambivalent relation of the child to its parents—as the fundamental discovery and distinguishing feature of its therapeutic practice.

Freud was born on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg (now Príbor) in Moravia, a small town at the eastern end of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now the Czech Republic, not far from the Polish and Slovakian borders. Freud's family moved when he was three to Vienna, where he would live until he was forced by the unification of Austria and Germany in 1938 to emigrate to London that year; he died there three weeks after Britain's declaration of war on Germany. An outstanding student at school and later at the University of Vienna, Freud trained as a doctor; he was enamored of Darwinism, positivism, and the grand ambitions of experimental science in the 1870s, but was also a serious student of philosophy, taking courses with Franz Brentano (1838–1917), to whom key developments in twentieth-century logic and phenomenology can be traced. Freud's scientific training made him an exemplary exponent of experimental laboratory science and the histological study of the brain, under the leadership of Theodor Meynert (1833–1892), one of the most important brain anatomists of the period. Freud's intention to pursue a research career in brain science was, however, deflected when he met, fell in love with, and quickly became engaged to Martha Bernays in 1882. By 1884 he knew that he would have to go into general medical practice if he wished to marry in the near future. Envisaging a career specializing in the nervous diseases, in 1885–1886 he spent four and a half months on a scholarship to Paris, working with the world-famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893). He opened his medical practice in April 1886, married in September, and over the next nine years Martha gave birth to six children, the last of whom, Anna (1895–1982), would become her father's nurse, the protector of her father's work, and a great psychoanalyst in her own right.

Freud encountered Charcot when his work on the rehabilitation of hysteria employing hypnosis was at its height; Freud joined the large numbers of European and American physicians intent on finding psychological cures for the common nervous diseases, at times employing hypnotic suggestion. It was certainly Charcot who, perhaps inadvertently, turned Freud away from his anatomo-physiological orientation toward the psychological, where he would thereafter remain. But an old friend and colleague in Vienna, Josef Breuer (1842–1925), supplied Freud with his distinctive starting point: Breuer's exhaustive eighteen-month treatment of Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936, called "Anna O." in Freud's writings) in 1880–1882. The therapy Bertha invented, her "talking cure," consisted of tracing, in speech and in a cathartic reliving, the numerous occasions of the appearance of her symptoms. In 1893, Breuer and Freud put forward the thesis that "hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences"; they developed this argument in Studies on Hysteria of 1895, affirming the psychological causation of the neuroses and the efficacy of Freud's method of exhuming the past through the technique of "free association": the instruction to the patient to say whatever entered her mind. Throughout the 1890s, Freud sought the underlying causes of the disposition to neurosis, becoming convinced that he would find them in the domain of sexuality and the traumas of early life; this did not prevent him from elaborating materialistic brain-based models of the neuroses, which, when transposed into mentalistic language, would constitute his high-level theory.

Psychoanalysis came fully into existence with the publication in late 1899 of Freud's most important book, Die Traumdeutung (The interpretation of dreams), the fruit of several years of the practice of interpreting his own and his patients' dreams as part of a search for the fundamental mechanisms of unconscious mental activity and the sources of the repressed memories that led to neurotic symptoms. It was dream analysis that became the model for "self-analysis" and the extension of his theories to normal mental life. Freud set out the key theses of his work: the distinction between "latent" and "manifest" in mental life, particularly in dreams; the principle of psychic determinism, for Freud the guarantee of the possibility of a properly scientific study of the mind; the distinction between the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious, with the related distinction between primary and secondary modes of psychic functioning; the significance of early experience and memories for all aspects of mental life, and in particular the all-pervasiveness of sexuality, including childhood sexual experience, as causal factors in psychopathology.

In 1905 Freud published three major works: a case history ("Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria: 'Dora"'), Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, and the fundamental Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in which he outlined the theory of infantile sexuality that underpinned his account of the variety of forms of human sexuality and of the causality of neuroses. As he acquired an audience and followers in the ensuing years, he produced major works in the anthropology of kinship and religion, psychobiography (on Leonardo da Vinci), sociology and social psychology, alongside clinical and theoretical studies of the neuroses and the structure of the normal and abnormal mind. It was undoubtedly the fluency, cogency, and sheer variety of Freud's writing that made him and his movement so influential, both within professional circles and for the mass readership that he, like others such as Thomas Mann (1875–1955) and H. G. Wells (1866–1946), created in the postwar era. From very early on, Freud had a wide readership outside professional circles; but it was within professional circles that he would begin to build a visible movement.

The first of Freud's followers were outsiders—independent-mindedly Jewish physicians like him. However, from 1904 on, Freud was contacted by the respected psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939) and his young assistant, Carl Jung (1875–1961), at the famous Burghölzli Hospital, Zurich, who were interested in his dream theories, his claims about the meaningfulness of psychical symptoms, and the possibility of using the psychoanalytic method of treatment as both therapy and research tool. From this contact with the world of psychiatry in 1907–1908 came some of Freud's most important and enduring younger disciples: Karl Abraham (1877–1925), later the founder of psychoanalysis in Berlin; Max Eitingon (1881–1953), later also based in Berlin and a crucial figure in the institutional development of psychoanalytic clinical training in the 1920s; Abraham Arden Brill (1874–1948), a young American psychiatrist who would become the linchpin of psychoanalysis in New York; and Ernest Jones (1879–1958), who helped found psychoanalysis in North America and then became the key figure in its institutional development in the United Kingdom from 1912 to the 1940s. These younger men, in particular Jung, became belligerent proponents of Freud's views in heated debates among German-speaking neurologists and psychiatrists in the period from 1907 on. In the years before World War I, Freud's psychoanalytic movement founded branch societies in Vienna, Zurich, and Berlin, set up an International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) in 1910 and was riven by internal strife, with the departure of Alfred Adler (1870–1937), Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1940), and finally Jung himself, the president of the IPA.

Before 1914, psychoanalysis had already become a cause célèbre for modernists, Bohemians, and progressive professionals concerned with reforming sexual mores; undertaking the inner journey that would result in the literary modernism of Marcel Proust (1871–1922), Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), and James Joyce (1882–1941); and in applying these insights to the nervous diseases. Its impact on artistic and literary figures as well as "progressive" scientists and doctors was already considerable in the principal cities of Central Europe and in addition in circumscribed circles in New York and London.

The First World War unexpectedly became the turning-point for the expansion and reception of psychoanalysis, in two principal modes: firstly, a growing number of the mobilized physicians treating the tens of thousands of cases of "war neuroses" or "shell shock" became sympathetic to Freudian views concerning the psychogenic nature of these cases, and the use of psychoanalytic methods among other psychological therapies in their treatment. Secondly, the catastrophe of the war led to a sea change in cultural sensibility with which key psychoanalytic themes were resonant: its emphasis on the overwhelming power of instinctual forces and on the irrational forces determining human action. Psychoanalysis offered a powerful theory and therapy, alongside other psychotherapies that developed in the period, for doctors and other clinicians to deploy; it offered individuals—scientists, artists, politicians, ordinarily unhappy citizens—a description of the forces at work in the irrational mind that resonated with the times; and it offered a promise of a science of the mind, in reach of everyone, that could match the miseries and mysteries of a whole life and its history. The early 1920s became, in Germany, Britain, and the United States, the era of great new scientific discoveries, chief among which, alongside the theory of relativity, was psychoanalysis.

With psychoanalysis all the rage among modernist artists and with an expanding clientele of patients, the 1920s saw its professionalization: across Europe, following the model of Berlin, training institutes and clinics were established, centered on the obligatory training analysis; these training systems were independent of both universities and medical schools. They were also, in Europe, open to nonmedical ("lay") students. What was a movement before the First World War was rapidly becoming in addition an independent profession. But its independence—of academia, of medical schools—was both strength and weakness. Alliances between psychoanalysis and other disciplines drawn to its challenging and powerful ideas were manifold, often undisciplined, yet overall fitful. Psychoanalysis was taken up by maverick sociologists and anthropologists, relatively few academic psychologists, writers, and artists, some medical scientists (for instance, in psychosomatic medicine and general practice) in addition to its considerable (though exceedingly variable from country to country) influence on psychiatry in the mid-twentieth-century. A full consideration of the complex developments and manifold influences of psychoanalysis belongs to a history of the twentieth century rather than the long nineteenth century; but psychoanalysis was undoubtedly a product of that long nineteenth century, a part of the emergence of psychology as a discipline and practice, a part of the emergence of positivist science and Darwinist critiques of religion that accompanied the development of the novel profession of scientist. Nor was the emergence of psychoanalysis conceivable without the social transformations of groups that constituted its core clientele and practitioners: the Jews who, since the opening up of the Central European ghettos and their emigration westward to Vienna, Berlin, and the New World, were becoming a significant proportion of the medical, scientific, and professional sectors; and the emancipated New Woman, for whom psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the significance of sexuality and the rigors of the emotional life of the private sphere, would provide both ideology and novel professional practice. For these groups and many others, psychoanalysis offered a secular scientific alternative to traditional religious and ethical doctrines.

See alsoAdler, Alfred; Brentano, Franz; Darwin, Charles; Freud, Sigmund; Jews and Judaism; Jung, Carl Gustav; Modernism; Rank, Otto; Vienna.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. 24 vols. London, 1953–1974.

Secondary Sources

Appignanesi, Lisa, and John Forrester. Freud's Women. New York, 1992.

Ellenberger, Henri F. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. London, 1970. A monumental historical survey.

Gay, Peter. Freud. A Life for Our Time. London, 1988. A superbly researched and finely judged biography.

Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan & Co:. A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. London, 1990.

Roudinesco, Élisabeth, and Michel Plon. Dictionnaire de la Psychanalyse. Paris, 1997. The most reliable and comprehensive starting-point for all researches in the history of psychoanalysis.

Schorske, Carl E. Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York, 1979.

John Forrester