[1940] An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis by Sigmund Freud

Author:Sigmund Freud [Freud, Sigmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis
Published: 1940-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

We think it most undesirable if the patient acts outside the transference instead of remembering. The ideal conduct for our purposes would be that he should behave as normally as possible outside the treatment and express his abnormal reactions only in the transference.

The method by which we strengthen the weakened ego has as a starting-point an extending of its self-knowledge. That is not, of course, the whole story but it is a first step. The loss of such knowledge signifies for the ego a surrender of power and influence; it is the first tangible sign that it is being hemmed in and hampered by the demands of the id and the super-ego. Accordingly, the first part of the help we have to offer is intellectual work on our side and encouragement to the patient to collaborate in it. This first kind of activity, as we know, is intended to pave the way to another, more difficult, task. We shall not lose sight of the dynamic element in this task, even during its preliminary stage. We gather the material for our work from a variety of sources - from what is conveyed to us by the information given us by the patient and by his free associations, from what he shows us in his transferences, from what we arrive at by interpreting his dreams and from what he betrays by his slips or parapraxes. All this material helps us to make constructions about what happened to him and has been forgotten as well as about what is happening in him now without his understanding it. But in all this we never fail to make a strict distinction between our knowledge and his knowledge. We avoid telling him at once things that we have often discovered at an early stage, and we avoid telling him the whole of what we think we have discovered. We reflect carefully over when we shall impart the knowledge of one of our constructions to him and we wait for what seems to us the suitable moment - which it is not always easy to decide. As a rule we put off telling him of a construction or explanation till he himself has so nearly arrived at it that only a single step remains to be taken, though that step is in fact the decisive synthesis. If we proceeded in another way and overwhelmed him with our interpretations before he was prepared for them, our information would either produce no effect or it would provoke a violent outbreak of resistance which would make the progress of our work more difficult or might even threaten to stop it altogether. But if we have prepared everything properly, it often happens that the patient will at once confirm our construction and himself recollect the internal or external event which he had forgotten. The more exactly the construction coincides with the details of what has been forgotten the easier will it be for him to assent. On that particular matter our knowledge will then have become his knowledge as well.

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