Psychoanalysis (RLE: Freud)

The First Ten Years 1888-1898

Walter A. Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317931331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1969, this was a new assessment of Freud's most creative years and the formative period in psychoanalysis and was the first book to attempt a systematic presentation of Freud's early ideas, relating them to his later work and to contemporary psychoanalysis. During the years 1888-1898 Freud published 15 papers and one book. In addition many of his ideas were formulated in a series of letters and drafts that he wrote to Dr Wilhelm Fliess. This material provided new insights into the nature of Freud's creative genius and gave new meaning to his published works.

Psychoanalysis: The First Ten Years reviews these early papers, drafts and letters, and describes tentative formulations that, in spite of their value, were not developed further because of lack of time or a shift in interest. As Dr Stewart observes, 'the study of this aspect of Freud's work is perhaps the most exciting. Freud's creativity in these years was remarkable. The ideas he discarded in this short period of time would, for a less gifted person, have been a full life's work of which he could have been proud.'

There is a good deal of historical and literary interest in his account of Freud's relationships with Fliess, Breuer and others, but the core of the book is the critical assessment and systematic presentation of Freud's early major insights, which dramatically reveal a creative genius in the process of discovery.

1. The Setting: Freud's Early Analytic Concepts

THIS BOOK PRESENTS a systematic formulation and a disscussion of the major ideas Freud developed during the period between 1888 and 1898.

During this ten-year period, representing one-fifth of his professional life devoted to psychoanalysis, Freud published fifteen papers and one book on the subject. In addition, many of his ideas were formulated in a series of letters and drafts of paper that he wrote to his “friend in Berlin,” Dr. Wilhelm Fliess. This material has only recently been published in English.¹ The relationship between these two men stressed the sharing of their ideas, a most fortunate fact for the student of Freud's work: at one point in his life Freud gleefully burned most of his working papers with the pleasure of knowing he was making it hard for his future biographers. He had exposed himself more than most men would have been willing to do in the recording and analyzing of his own dreams The Interpretation of Dreams ,1900, S.E. 4–5); more than this he did not feel was warranted.

Volume I of Ernest Jones's life of Freud² gives a brief history of how the letters to Fliess narrowly escaped the same fate. They were saved by the recipient, and after his death in 1928 his widow sold them to a Berlin book dealer named Mr. Stahl, with the provision that they would not be resold to Freud, who certainly would have destroyed them. The bookseller had in turn sold them for $480 to Princess Marie Bonaparte, an analysand, colleague, and close friend of Freud and his family. When Freud learned of their existence from her,³ he advised that they be burned and wrote on January 3, 1937, “I don't want any of them to become known to so-called posterity.” Because of the war and the danger that the letters might be destroyed by the Nazis, they were taken from a bank in Vienna and brought secretly to Paris, where they were left with the Danish legation. Immediately after the war the documents were sent to England. Because there still were mines in the English Channel, the papers were wrapped in waterproof material and made buoyant so that they would not be lost if the ship were sunk.

During the period from 1888 through 1898, ninety-seven letters and fourteen drafts of articles were written. Some of the letters and many of the drafts amount to the working papers that preceded published articles and thus show us not only the product but also the process of work in progress. Other drafts contain tentative formulations that were found to be inadequate and were discarded. Some of them contain ideas formulated at this time that were developed and published only many years later. Finally concepts are described which, in spite of their evident value, were not developed further because of a lack of time or a shift in interest. These remain as important clues to further research and thought.

One of these drafts is an untitled hundred-page manuscript that the editors of Origins have given the title “A Project for a Scientific Psychology” (Project).⁴ This in itself is an extraordinary document, written by Freud in 1895 with feverish intensity and great hope, but abandoned within a few months as an unsuccessful effort. Most of Freud's papers have to be read paragraph by paragraph. Of this highly condensed manuscript it can accurately be said that it has to be read and reread sentence by sentence and even word by word. It contains Freud's most closely reasoned and intricate thoughts and is the basis for many of Freud's fundamental concepts, which he developed in a different vocabulary during the remaining forty-two years of his life.

Finally there are three posthumously published “fragments” written in 1892. The first is a letter to Dr. Joseph Breuer, Freud's Vienna colleague and collaborator in his earliest papers; the next two fragments are notes written jointly with Breuer, but in Freud's handwriting. All three fragments are condensed notes made in preparation for writing their first analytic paper, “Preliminary Communication.”

The value of these posthumously published letters and drafts is beyond calculation. The papers Freud published at the time give only an incomplete picture of the intellectual work and creative ferment in his mind; the new papers allow a further insight into his intellectual life during these early years, which were not only the formative years, but also the most creative. Jones writes that the year 1897 “was the acme of Freud's life.” The papers illustrate what Heinz Hartmann⁵ has described as Freud's capacity for fruitful theorizing, which he states was on a level with his clinical genius.

Freud seldom attempted any systematic presentation of his concepts or even a careful definition of his terms. In this first decade, complex and intricately interrelated ideas were tentatively formulated, abandoned, revived, and modified from week to week. Freud was opposed to a preoccupation with consistency and preferred a fragmentary treatment of a subject that encouraged further exploration rather than premature closure. This was particularly and necessarily true of the early period in his work, when he was searching for the most fruitful concepts that he could apply to his observations of human behavior and feelings. Concepts developed in the first period are often now referred to by different terms. Also, the same terms may be used now, but frequently have a new or subtle difference in meaning. Even more confusing is the fact that Freud would develop an idea, lay it aside only to take it up again in connection with another problem even as much as forty years later. Freud seldom stopped to annotate these differences or integrate the past with the present. As a result of these changes in terms and discontinuity of discussion, many of Freud's later views can be fully understood only when the early formulations are known. The genetic point of view is as important to the understanding of the growth of psychoanalytic theory as it is to the theory itself. One of the aims of this book is to show the continuity and modification that occurred as Freud developed his ideas.

Another reason for providing a detailed review of these early papers, drafts, and letters is to offset the tendency for the ideas to be robbed of their detail. This is often the fate of complex ideas as is perhaps even more likely to occur in dealing with ideas that challenge man to face the detailed knowledge of the ways in which he is not master in his own house. It may be an unavoidable historical fate that Freud's ideas will suffer partial or complete distortion. The history of psychoanalysis, with its splinter groups of neo-Freudians who, with their “new discoveries,” ignorantly restate parts of Freud's ideas and throw out other essential parts, would lend support to this possibility. Paradoxically, recent additional knowledge of the problems Freud faced in his early years of work may decrease the study of this period, since it invites a stereotyped and codified view. The tendency has been to dismiss the early papers as a false start, based on Freud's “need to neurologize”; the detail and complexity of the thoughts can be ignored by viewing them as of historical interest only and by referring to them only with catch phrases such as the seduction theory, toxicological theory, strangulated affects, and so on.

The value of the historical approach is that it is an antidote to both uncritical acceptance and ignorant rejection of the ideas. The study of these papers counteracts the danger of a doctrinaire attitude that leads to a sterile approach to the unsolved problems. The reader who retraces the path that Freud first followed and shares the problems, understands the errors he made, the partial truths and the fundamental discoveries, is less likely to distort the material, discard the good with the bad, or confuse rediscovery with new advances.

A final reason for reviewing this material–somewhat less practical than those already mentioned–is that it offers an exciting intellectual experience. The letters and drafts in particular give a close-up of Freud in this searching period of creative excitement. In these ten years Freud originated the basic concepts with which he began to organize his observations. These led to elaborate formulations of great intellectual beauty, which were then succeeded by newer, equally elaborate theoretical formulations. It quickly becomes apparent that not all his efforts were successful and that the successes were not easily won. It may not be a typical form of creative genius to make only fundamental errors and fundamental discoveries, but it was certainly Freud's way. For example, at one time Freud erroneously believed that the prerequisite etiological factor in the psychoneuroses was a seduction of the individual as a child, and that without this premature sexual experience a psychoneurosis could not occur. The seducer was most often thought to be the patient's father, and when Freud's own sister showed clear evidence of a psychoneurosis, he felt that this implicated his father! This has come to be known as the seduction theory. Perhaps only a person who could pursue the seduction theory to its bitter end, in spite of its implausibility, could discover the “undiscoverable” existence of the unconscious. Other formulations, such as the concept of the actual neurosis (nonpsychogenic adult sexual pathology due to deleterious sexual practices), represent an early and unsuccessful effort to delineate the biological level of sexual illness. That problem is still unsolved and remains an important challenge to present and future students.

At the beginning of the period under discussion Freud was thirty-two years old. He had been married for two years and was the father of one child, Mathilde, named after Breuer's wife and born in 1887. His next five children, all born during the period under study, were: Jean Martin, named after Charcot and born in 1889; Oliver, named after Cromwell and born in 1891; Ernst, named after Ernst Brücke and born in 1892, the year of Brücke's death; Sophie, named after Freud's niece, Sophie Schwab, and born in 1893, the year of the publication of the first of Freud's truly analytic papers, the “Preliminary Communication”; and Anna, named after a daughter of Hammerschlag's and born in 1895, the year in which Freud's and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria was published and the Project was written. Had his last child been a boy, he would have named him Wilhelm after Fliess (Origins, Letter 37).

Drs. Brücke, Breuer, Jean Martin Charcot, and Fliess were of great importance in determining Freud's scientific attitude in his study of the neuroses. Freud's contact with the first of these men, Dr. Ernst Brücke, began in the late 1870's. At that time Freud, in his early twenties, was in medical school in Vienna and doing special research work under Brücke at the Institute of Physiology on the histology of the nerve cells of a fish, Amoecetes (Petromyzon). The work led to his first scientific publication, which appeared in the January, 1877, Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences. Dr. Brücke was described by Freud as “the greatest authority who affected me more than any other in my whole life.”⁶ Brücke, a small man with a large head, was a German Protestant. He was thought of as a strict, undemonstrative, and uncompromising man, yet his pupils were devoted to him and it is said that none was ever disloyal.

When he was a demonstrator at the Institute of Physiology, Freud sometimes reached the laboratory late. One day Brücke was there at the hour of opening and reprimanded Freud for being late. Freud recalled this episode in an association to a later dream, in The Interpretation of Dreams. He wrote, “His words were brief and to the point. But it was not they that mattered. What overwhelmed me were the terrible blue eyes with which he looked at me and by which I was reduced to nothing” (S.E. 5 422).

Brücke, along with Carl Ludwig (1816–95), Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818–96), and Hermann Helmholtz (1821–94), formed a group of scientists devoted to a physical-chemical approach to science as opposed to the vitalistic school of their teacher, Johannes Müller. When Brücke moved to Vienna, the members of his group who stayed in Berlin considered him their “Ambassador in the Far East.” It was from Brücke rather than Breuer or Charcot that Freud obtained the scientific philosophy that governed his studies.⁷

It was during the six years that Freud worked at Brücke's Institute in Vienna that he first met Dr. Joseph Breuer ( 1842–192...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. The Setting–Freud's Early Analytic Concepts
• 2. First Observations
• 3. Early Views on Sexuality–The Actual Neurosis
• 4. Early Views on Sexuality–The Neuropsychoses of Defense
• 5. The Economic Formulations
• 6. Affects
• 7. Early Metapsychology
• Bibliography
• Index