A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis gathers the twenty-eight lectures Freud delivered to a mixed audience of physicians and lay listeners at the University of Vienna in the winter terms of 1915-16 and 1916-17, during the First World War. Published in German as Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (1916-17), they are the fullest statement of psychoanalysis before Freud's revisions of the 1920s, and he composed them as a deliberate course: he starts with things every listener has experienced, moves to dreams, and only then reaches the neuroses he treated as a physician.
Medical tag
Psychiatry History
The history of psychiatry and its institutions, diagnoses (neurasthenia, melancholia, hysteria) and treatments.
Works
Hobbes to Hume appeared in 1959 as the fifth volume of Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy, a year after his account of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Where that book followed the continental attempt to build knowledge from clear ideas of reason, this one follows the British attempt to build it from experience, and it asks how far that attempt could go before it began to question its own foundations.
Copleston wrote this book after finishing the nine volumes of his History, and it first appeared in 1986 as Philosophy in Russia: From Herzen to Lenin and Berdyaev, published by Search Press in England and the University of Notre Dame Press in America. Continuum numbered it Volume X when it reissued the series in 2003, after Copleston's death.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 1920) is the short, openly speculative book in which Freud revised the foundations of his own theory. Until then psychoanalysis had assumed that mental life is governed by the pleasure principle: every process begins in a painful state of tension and seeks the relief of discharge.
This record brings together three short clinical papers that began the modern era of drug treatment in psychiatry. Before them, patients with severe mental illness were often confined for years in crowded hospitals, and the available physical treatments, such as sedation, insulin coma and electroconvulsive therapy, were limited or dangerous.
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse, 1921) asks why a person in a crowd, a church or an army thinks, feels and acts differently from the same person alone. Freud opens by denying any sharp line between individual and social psychology: in every mind someone else is always present, as model, object, helper or opponent.
Reflections on War and Death is the English title of two linked essays Freud wrote in the spring of 1915, some six months into the First World War, and published that year in the psychoanalytic journal Imago. A. A. Brill and Alfred B. Kuttner translated them for an American audience in 1918, while the United States was itself at war with Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Rousseau and Revolution is the tenth volume of The Story of Civilization, published in 1967 by Will and Ariel Durant and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1968. Its subtitle describes an unusual double frame: the history of France, England and Germany from 1756, and of the rest of Europe from 1715, to 1789.
Science and the Modern World grew out of eight Lowell Lectures that Alfred North Whitehead delivered in Boston in February 1925, a year after leaving London for a chair in philosophy at Harvard. The book, published that October, adds four further chapters to the lectures and pursues one question across thirteen: how has the picture of nature built by modern science shaped the outlook of Western civilisation over three centuries, and what is wrong with that picture?
The Age of Napoleon, published in 1975, is the eleventh and last volume of The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. Subtitled A History of European Civilization from 1789 to 1815, it covers the French Revolution, the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the culture of Europe during the quarter century of war that ended at Waterloo.
The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es, Vienna, 1923) is the short, dense treatise in which Freud replaced his earlier map of the mind, divided into conscious, preconscious and unconscious systems, with the structural model of id, ego and super-ego. Joan Riviere's English translation, revised by Ernest Jones, Anna Freud and James Strachey, appeared in 1927; her note calls it 'this very obscure book'.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in The New England Magazine in January 1892 and issued as a small book in 1899. It takes the form of a secret journal kept by an unnamed young wife and mother whose husband, John, a physician, has diagnosed her with "temporary nervous depression" after the birth of their baby.
Passages
- A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Lecture I
Description of analytic treatment as an exchange of words between physician and patient; defence of verbal psychotherapy against relatives who scorn 'mere talk'.
- A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Lecture VI
Bernheim's post-hypnotic experiments used to show that a subject can recover apparently forgotten experiences, with a comparison of hypnotic and natural sleep.
- A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Lectures XVI-XVII
Relation of psychoanalysis to psychiatry; heredity versus experience; case of an elderly woman's delusional jealousy; the table-cloth obsession; a girl's bedtime ceremonial.
- A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Lecture XXVI
Narcissism and the psychoses: dementia praecox and paranoia as withdrawal of libido from the world, with reference to Karl Abraham's 1908 thesis.
- A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Lectures XXVII-XXVIII
Transference, positive and negative, and the distinction between analytic therapy and direct hypnotic suggestion.
- A History of Philosophy, Vol. V: Hobbes to Hume, Chapter on problems in ethics, section on Hartley and the associationists
Association of ideas proposed as the mechanism of mental and moral development, linked by Hartley to vibrations in the nerves.
- A History of Philosophy, Vol. X: Russian Philosophy, Chapter on Chaadaev
The publication of the first Philosophical Letter in 1836 and the government's response, which declared its author mad and confined him to medical supervision.
- Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Ch. II
Repetitive dreams of the shock patient that return him to the disaster, treated as a problem for the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams; brief reference to Breuer and Freud's 1893 dictum on reminiscences and to Ferenczi and Simmel on war neuroses.
- Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Ch. III
Change in analytic technique from interpretation to overcoming resistance; patients repeating painful experiences in the transference neurosis rather than recollecting them.
- Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Ch. VIII and Ch. X
Hypnosis compared with being in love and with the group; the hypnotist as heir to the primal father; two kinds of hypnosis, soothing and threatening.
- Reflections on War and Death, Part I, opening paragraphs
Freud complains that science has lost its impartiality in wartime: the anthropologist calls the enemy degenerate and the psychiatrist diagnoses him as mentally deranged.
- Rousseau and Revolution, Rousseau chapters, exile and the quarrel with Hume (1762-1770)
Rousseau's growing belief in a plot against him, which the authors and later commentators have read in psychological terms.
- Science and the Modern World, Ch. IX, Science and Philosophy
Descartes thought of the body as a physicist, modern psychologists as medical physiologists; the neurologist's account of stimuli, nerve centres and motor response puts mind back into nature.
- The Age of Napoleon, French chapters on science and medicine under the Revolution and Empire
Military surgery, Pinel's reforms of asylum care, and the Paris hospitals as centers of clinical teaching.
- The Ego and the Id, Ch. V, paragraphs on the negative therapeutic reaction
Patients worsen as treatment progresses; after subtracting defiance and the advantages of illness, Freud identifies an unconscious sense of guilt that finds atonement in suffering.
- The Yellow Wallpaper, Middle entries
John threatens to send her to Weir Mitchell in the fall.
Quotes
“Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day”
“Psychoanalysis stands in about the same relation to psychiatry as does histology to anatomy”
“The work of overcoming resistance is the fundamental task of the analytic cure”
“The act is repeated in spite of everything; a powerful compulsion insists on it”
“The effect of physiology was to put mind back into nature”
“they get worse during the treatment instead of getting better. They exhibit the so-called negative therapeutic reaction”