Revolution In Mind by George Makari

Author:George Makari [Makari, George]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780715639498
Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co
Published: 2010-03-23T04:00:00+00:00

II.

PSYCHOANALYTIC METHOD HAD become a jumble. By 1911, the published guides for conducting an analysis were either outdated or insufficient. Around Europe and America, doctors who called themselves psychoanalysts used repudiated notions of catharsis and unconscious memory retrieval or hypnosis; others latched on to the dream book and analyzed symbols and dreams; still others advocated sexual activity as a cure. These practitioners publicly claimed they were using Freudian treatments. They were also, de facto, the scientists who were supposed to be empirically testing psychoanalytic findings. Most were flying blind.

If empirical observation was to be the foundation of the field, this was a terrible problem. It meant there were no rules for amassing the evidence that led to inferences about the unconscious. It was difficult enough to achieve consensus on unconscious processes that were neither directly observable nor quantifiable. But if the object of analysis was itself hard to grasp, it was paramount that the observers themselves be stable, uniform, and of course they were not. According to their own theory, Freudians viewed all human beings as desirous, resistant, at best half-deluded. Analysts too were filled with human wants and fears and dominated by their unconscious. If an analyst in Budapest was not the same as another in Zurich, how could a science of the unconscious ever achieve a working consensus?

Followers had begged Freud to show them how to proceed, but the Professor’s promises for a textbook on the practice of Freudian psychoanalysis never were fulfilled. Without Freud to guide them, clinicians turned to Stekel’s book on nervous anxiety, for it contained a short account of psychoanalytic technique. These scant descriptions included the use of a couch and the observation of resistance, but little more. Ernest Jones had written two short papers in English that outlined free association, Jung’s directed word-association method, and dream interpretation. These guides were spare, and for Freud at least, misleading. He did not approve of using the word-association test in treatment, and he no longer believed dream interpretation was the central act of psychoanalytic treatment. Dreams remained of special import to Freud, but he had been forced to recognize that there were dangers in an excessive reliance on them.

This lesson was brought home by Wilhelm Stekel. His forte was an uncanny ability to interpret unconscious content from dreams (like “a pig finding truffles,” Freud joked). In March 1911, this dream-meister published The Language of Dreams, in which he argued that dream symbols were a language from man’s prehistory that could be translated. A sword was always a symbol of war, a tree meant nature. Freud was amenable to the idea of phylogenetically inherited dream symbols, but he was surely displeased to find that Stekel used his universal symbols to argue that dreams were driven by an unconscious aggressive force similar to the one Alfred Adler postulated in the unconscious.

To make matters worse, Stekel’s book came out just as Freud’s war with Adler reached its apex. Freud detested The Language of Dreams and attributed it to the author’s “perverse” unconscious.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.