The Wisdom of Sigmund Freud

,

• Publisher: Philosophical Library/Open Road
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781453202067
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

An invaluable guide to Freud's terminology and work. Repression, ego, analysis, neurosis—the language of psychology permeates our modern vocabulary. The brilliant observations of Sigmund Freud form not only the basis for psychoanalysis but also much of our current understanding of the human condition. This essential and approachable guide offers an A-to-Z glossary of terminology defined in Freud's own words, including his diagnostic and treatment recommendations as well as his well-known works, including dream interpretation, the Oedipal complex, and the practice of psychoanalysis. This ebook features a new introduction, image gallery, and index of the Hebrew alphabet.

The Wisdom of Freud A to Z

A

ABSTINENCE, SEXUAL—In considering the question of abstinence, far too little distinction is made between two forms of it, namely, abstention from any kind of sexual activity at all, and abstention from heterosexual intercourse.
CSMN

ADAPTABILITY, CULTURAL—A man's personal capacity for transformation of the egoistic impulses under the influence of the erotic.
TTWD

AFFECTIVITY—Affectivity manifests itself essentially in motor (i.e. secretory and circulatory) discharge resulting in an (internal) alteration of the subject's own body without reference to the outer world.
Ucs

AGGRESSION—The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man.
C & D—ch. 6

When the superego begins to be formed, considerable amounts of the aggressive instinct become fixated within the ego and operate there in a self-destructive fashion.
OoPA—ch. 2

The holding back of aggressiveness is in general unhealthy and leads to illness.
OoPA—ch. 2

AGORAPHOBIA—The sufferer from agoraphobia imposes a restriction upon his ego in order to escape an instinctual danger. The instinctual danger in question is the temptation to yield to his erotic desires; and to yield to them would be to reincarnate once again, as in childhood, the specter of the danger of castration or of an analogous danger. As an example I may refer to the case of a young man who became agoraphobic because he was afraid of yielding to the allurements of prostitutes and of acquiring syphilis as a punishment. The symptomatology of agoraphobia is complicated by the fact that the ego is not content with renouncing something; in addition to this, it takes steps to deprive the situation of its danger. This additional measure is usually a regression to childhood (in extreme cases, to the uterus, to a period when one was protected against the dangers which threaten today); the regression constitutes the condition under which the renunciation need not be made. Thus the agoraphobic may go on the street provided that, like a small child, he is accompanied by a person in whom he has full confidence. A similar caution may also permit him to go out alone, provided that he does not go more than a certain distance away from home, that he does not enter localities which he does not know well and where the people do not know him. In the choice of these specifications there becomes manifest the influence of the infantile motives which govern him.
PoA—ch. 7

AMBITION—A … connection is to be found between ambition and urethral erotism.
NILP—ch. 4

AMBIVALENCE—This form of the sexual organization can already maintain itself throughout life and draws to itself a large part of sexual activity. The dominance of sadism and the role of the cloaca of the anal zone stamps it with an exquisitely archaic impression. As another characteristic belonging to it, we can mention the fact that the contrasting pair of impulses are developed in almost the same manner, a situation which was happily designated by Bleuler by the term ambivalence.
TCTS II

AMNESIA

Amnesia, Hysterical—In hysteria it is possible for a traumatic impression to become subjected to amnesia.
PoA—ch. 6

Amnesia, Infantile—The peculiar amnesia which veils from most people (not from all) the first years of their childhood, usually the first six or eight years.
TCTS II

With few exceptions, the events of the early period of sexuality fall a victim to infantile amnesia.
OoPA—ch. 3

I believe we accept too indifferently the fact of infantile amnesia—that is, the failure of memory for the first years of our lives—and fail to find in it a strange riddle.
PEL—ch. 4

The period of infantile amnesia coincides with this early blossoming of sexuality.
M & M—Part III, Section I

The period of infantile amnesia is often interrupted by isolated fragmentary memories, the so-called “screen-memories.”
M & M—Part III, Section I

ANALYSIS [cf. also PSYCHOANALYSIS]—When in analysis we render the ego assistance, enabling it to undo its repressions, the ego regains its power over the repressed id and can so steer the course of the instinctual impulses as if the old danger situation no longer existed. What we achieve in this way is in complete harmony with what we accomplish in other spheres of medical activity. As a rule our treatment has to be satisfied with bringing about more rapidly, more certainly and with less trouble the satisfactory outcome which under favorable conditions would have resulted spontaneously.
PoA—ch. 10

Analysis is built on complete frankness.
QLA—ch. 4

Analysis of Children—Naturally one has to make extensive alterations in the technique of treatment which has been developed for adults when one is dealing with children. The child is, psychologically, a different thing from the adult; it does not yet possess a super-ego, it cannot make much use of the method of free association, and transference plays a different part with it, since its real parents are still there. The internal resistances, against which we have to fight in the case of adults, are in the case of children for the most part replaced by external difficulties.
NILP—ch. 6

Analysis, Fundamental Rule of—We impose upon him [the neurotic] the fundamental rule of analysis, which is henceforward to govern his behavior to us. He must tell us not only what he can say intentionally and willingly, what will give him relief like a confession, but everything else besides that his self-observation presents him with—everything that comes into his head, even if it is disagreeable to say it, even if it seems unimportant or positively meaningless.
OoPA—ch. 6

Analysis, Technique of—An analysis must go back to the patient's early childhood, because it was then, while the Ego was weak, that the decisive repressions occurred.
QLA—ch. 4

A correct reconstruction of such forgotten childhood experiences always has great therapeutic effects, whether it can also be confirmed from outside sources or not.
QLA—ch. 4

We induce the thus enfeebled [neurotic] ego to take part in the purely intellectual work of interpretation, which aims at provisionally filling the gaps in his mental resources, and to transfer to us the authority of his superego; we stimulate his ego to take up the struggle over each individual demand made by the id and to defeat the resistances which arise in connection with it. At the same time, we restore order in his ego, by detecting the material and impulses which have forced their way in from the unconscious, and expose them to criticism by tracing them back to their origin.
OoPA—ch. 6

The analyst never encourages the patient into the sexual field, he does not say in advance, “We must deal with the intimacies of your sexual life”! He lets him begin his communications where he likes, waiting quietly until he himself touches on sexual matters.
QLA—ch. 4

Analysis, Dreams in the—The analyst links up the communication which he has received in the form of a dream with the patient's other communications and proceeds with the analysis.
NILP—ch. 1

Analysis, Technique of—In civilian life illness may be used as a protection—to palliate incapacity at work or among competitors, or in family life as a means to force sacrifices and demonstrations of affection from others, or impose one's will upon them. All this is comparatively on the surface, and we put it all together under the heading “advantage gained by illness”; the only remarkable thing is that the patient—his Ego—knows nothing of the whole connection of such motives with his resulting behavior. One combats the influence of these impulses by forcing the Ego to accept this knowledge.

QLA—ch. 5

ANALYST—No one should practice analysis who has not qualified himself by a proper training. Whether the person is a doctor or not seems to me of altogether minor importance.

QLA—ch. 5

Analyst, personal influence of—Such an influence does exist, and plays a big part in the analysis. We do not employ this personal influence—the “suggestive” element—to suppress the symptoms from which the patient suffers, as is done in hypnotic suggestion. Further, it would be a mistake to think that this element bears the brunt and provides the main furtherance in the treatment. At first, yes; but later it stands in the way of our analytical purposes, and forces us to take most extensive countermeasures.

QLA—ch. 1

The neurotic sets himself to the work because he believes in the analyst, and he believes in him because he begins to entertain certain feelings towards him. The attitude is, in fact—to put it bluntly—a kind of falling in love. The patient repeats, in the form of falling in love with the analyst, psychical experiences which he underwent before; he has transferred to the analyst psychical attitudes which lay ready within him, and which were intimately linked with the inception of his neurosis. He repeats, too, his onetime defense reactions before our eyes, and wants nothing so much as to repeat all the vicissitudes of that forgotten period in his relations with the analyst. So what he is showing us is the very core of his most private life; he is palpably reproducing it, as though it were all happening in the present, instead of remembering it. With this, the riddle of transference-love is solved, and with the very help of the new situation, which seemed so threatening, the analysis can make progress.

QLA—ch. 5

ANXIETY—Anxiety is in the first place something felt. We call it an affective state, although we are equally ignorant of what an affect is. As a feeling it is of most obviously unpleasurable character, but this is not by any means a complete description of its quality; not every state of unpleasure may we call anxiety.

The analysis of the anxiety state gives us as its attributes: (1) a specific unpleasurable quality, (2) efferent or discharge phenomena, and (3) the perception of these.
PoA—ch. 8

Anxiety is a specific state of unpleasure accompanied by motor discharge along definite pathways.
PoA—ch. 8

Anxiety is the reaction to the danger of object loss.
PoA—ch. 11

The psychology of the neuroses taught us that when wish feelings undergo repression their libido becomes transformed into anxiety.

T & T—ch. 2

When the ego is forced to acknowledge its weakness, it breaks out into anxiety: reality anxiety in face of the external world, normal anxiety in face of the superego, and neurotic anxiety in face of the strength of the passions in the id. NIL

P—ch. 3

The ego withdraws (preconscious) cathexis from the instinct representative which is to be repressed and utilizes it in the release of unpleasure (anxiety).

PoA—ch. 2

We have no reason to ascribe any expression of anxiety to the superego. Anxiety is an affective state which can of course be experienced only by the ego. The id cannot be afraid, as the ego can; it is not an organization, and cannot estimate situations of danger.
PoA—ch. 8

Anxiety is after all only a perception—of possibilities of anxiety.

C & D—ch. 8

Anxiety, Neurotic—Neurotic anxiety is anxiety in regard to a danger which we do not know.

PoA—ch. 11

In a little essay on Anxiety Neurosis, written in 1895, I maintain that neurotic anxiety has its origin in the sexual life, and corresponds to a libido which has been deflected from its object and has found no employment. The accuracy of this formula has since then been demonstrated with ever-increasing certainty. From it we may deduce the doctrine that anxiety-dreams are dreams of sexual content, and that the libido appertaining to this content has been transformed into anxiety.

IoD—ch. 4

Anxiety, Object of—Let us call such a [danger] situation in which the efforts of the pleasure-principle come to nothing, a “traumatic” factor; in that way, by following the series, neurotic anxiety—objective anxiety—danger-situation, we can arrive at a simple formula: what is feared, the object of the anxiety, is always the emergence of a traumatic factor, which cannot be dealt with in accordance with the norms of the pleasure-principle.

NILP—ch. 4

Anxiety and Repression—It may still be correct to say that in repression anxiety is created out of the libidinal cathexis of instinctual impulses.

PoA—ch. 4

Anxiety, Reproduction of—Anxiety arose as a response to a situation of danger; it will be regularly reproduced thenceforward whenever such a situation recurs.

PoA—ch. 8

Anxiety, Sexual Practices and—I found that certain sexual practices, such as coitus interruptus, frustrated excitement, enforced abstinence, give rise to outbreaks of anxiety and a general predisposition to anxiety—which may be induced whenever, therefore, sexual excitation is inhibited, frustrated or diverted in the course of its discharge in gratification.

PoA—ch. 4

Anxiety, Signal of—An increase in unpleasure which is expected and foreseen is met by a signal of anxiety; the occasion of this increase, whether it threatens from without or within, is called a danger.

OoPA—ch. 1

Anxiety, True (Real) and Neurotic—A real danger is a danger which we know, a true anxiety, the anxiety in regard to such a known danger. Neurotic anxiety is anxiety in regard to a danger which we do not know…. There are cases in which the attributes of true and of neurotic anxiety are intermingled. The danger is known and of the real type, but the anxiety in regard to it is disproportionately great, greater than in our judgment it ought to be. It is by this excess that the neurotic element stands revealed.

PoA—ch. 11

ART—Incomplete and dim memories of the past, which we call tradition, are a great incentive to the artist, for he is free to fill in the gaps in the memories according to the behests of his imagination and to form after his own purpose the image of the time he has undertaken to reproduce.
M & M—Part III, Section I

As artistic talent and productive ability are intimately connected with sublimation, we have to admit also that the nature of artistic attainment is psychoanalytically inaccessible to us.

LDV—ch. 6

ASSOCIATIONS—Whenever one psychic element is connected with another by an obnoxious and superficial association, there exists also a correct and more profound connection between the two, which succumbs to the resistance of the censorship.

IoD—ch. 7

Associations in Dream Interpretation—Although in dream interpretation we are in general and predominantly dependent on the associations of the dreamer, nevertheless we treat certain elements of the content quite independently—mainly because we have to, because as a rule, associations refuse to come.

NILP—ch. 1

The associations to the dream are not the latent dream-thoughts. They are contained, but not completely contained, in the associations.

NILP—ch. 1

AUTOEROTISM—The most striking character of this sexual activity is that the impulse is not directed to other persons but that the child gratifies himself on his own body; to use the happy term invented by Havelock Ellis, we will say that he is autoerotic.

TCTS II

B

BEAUTY—Beauty is an instance which plainly shows that culture is not simply utilitarian in its aims, for the lack of beauty is a thing we cannot tolerate in civilization.
C & D—ch. 3

BED-WETTING—We are inclined to adopt the simple generalization that continued bed-wetting is a result of masturbation and that its suppression is regarded by boys as an inhibition of their genital activity, that is, as having the meaning of a threat of castration; but whether we are always right in supposing this remains to be seen.
AnDS

BEHEADING—Certain patients suffering from obsessions treat being beheaded as a substitute for being castrated.
C-S & S

BIOLOGY—The impulses and their transformations are the last things psychoanalysis can discern. Henceforth it leaves the stage to biological investigation…. Biological investigation of our time endeavors to explain the chief traits of the organic constitution of a person through the fusion of male and female predispositions in the material sense.
LDV—ch. 6

BISEXUALITY—Man, too, is an animal with an unmistakably bisexual disposition. The ind...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• TIMELINE OF THE LIFE OF SIGMUND FREUD
• IMAGE GALLERY
• THE WISDOM OF FREUD A TO Z
• KEY TO REFERENCES
• COPYRIGHT PAGE