Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

Sigmund Freud

• Publisher: Read & Co. Great Essays
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473396289
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This early work by Sigmund Freud was originally published in 1910 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis' is a collection of lectures delivered by the father of psychoanalysis. Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on 6th May 1856, in the Moravian town of Príbor, now part of the Czech Republic. He studied a variety of subjects, including philosophy, physiology, and zoology, graduating with an MD in 1881. Freud made a huge and lasting contribution to the field of psychology with many of his methods still being used in modern psychoanalysis. He inspired much discussion on the wealth of theories he produced and the reactions to his works began a century of great psychological investigation.

FIRST LECTURE

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - It is with novel and bewildering feelings that I find myself in the New World, lecturing before an audience of expectant enquirers. No doubt I owe this honour only to the fact that my name is linked with the topic of psycho-analysis; and it is of psycho-analysis, therefore, that I intend to speak to you. I shall attempt to give you, as succinctly as possible, a survey of the history and subsequent development of this new method of examination and treatment.

If it is a merit to have brought psycho-analysis into being that merit is not mine.¹ I had no share in its earliest beginnings. I was a student and working for my final examinations at the time when another Viennese physician, Dr. Josef Breuer,² first (in 1880-2) made use of this procedure on a girl who was suffering from hysteria. Let us turn our attention straightaway to the history of this case and its treatment, which you will find set out in detail in the Studies on Hysteria³ which were published later by Breuer and myself.

But I should like to make one preliminary remark. It is not without satisfaction that I have learnt that the majority of my audience are not members of the medical profession. You have no need to be afraid that any special medical knowledge will be required for following what I have to say. It is true that we shall go along with the doctors on the first stage of our journey, but we shall soon part company with them and, with Dr. Breuer, shall pursue a quite individual path.

¹ [Footnote added 1923:] See, however, in this connection my remarks in ‘A History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’ (1914d), where I assumed the entire responsibility for psycho-analysis.

² Dr. Josef Breuer, born in 1842, a Corresponding Member of the Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, is well known for his work on respiration and on the physiology of the sense of equilibrium.

³ Some of my contributions to this book have been translated into English by Dr. A. A. Brill of New York: Selected Papers on Hysteria (New York, 1909).

Dr. Breuer’s patient was a girl of twenty-one, of high intellectual gifts. Her illness lasted for over two years, and in the course of it she developed a series of physical and psychological disturbances which decidedly deserved to be taken seriously. She suffered from a rigid paralysis, accompanied by loss of sensation, of both extremities on the right side of her body; and the same trouble from time to time affected her on her left side. Her eye movements were disturbed and her power of vision was subject to numerous restrictions. She had difficulties over the posture of her head; she had a severe nervous cough. She had an aversion to taking nourishment, and on one occasion she was for several weeks unable to drink in spite of a tormenting thirst. Her powers of speech were reduced, even to the point of her being unable to speak or understand her native language. Finally, she was subject to conditions of ‘absence’,¹ of confusion, of delirium, and of alteration of her whole personality, to which we shall have presently to turn our attention.

When you hear such an enumeration of symptoms, you will be inclined to think it safe to assume, even though you are not doctors, that what we have before us is a severe illness, probably affecting the brain, that it offers small prospect of recovery and will probably lead to the patient’s early decease. You must be prepared to learn from the doctors, however, that, in a number of cases which display severe symptoms such as these, it is justifiable to take a different and a far more favourable view. If a picture of this kind is presented by a young patient of the female sex, whose vital internal organs (heart, kidneys, etc.) are shown on objective examination to be normal, but who has been subjected to violent emotional shocks - if, moreover, her various symptoms differ in certain matters of detail from what would have been expected - then doctors are not inclined to take the case too seriously. They decide that what they have before them is not an organic disease of the brain, but the enigmatic condition which, from the time of ancient Greek medicine, has been known as ‘hysteria’ and which has the power of producing illusory pictures of a whole number of serious diseases. They consider that there is then no risk to life but that a return to health - even a complete one - is probable. It is not always quite easy to distinguish a hysteria like this from a severe organic illness. There is no need for us to know, however, how a differential diagnosis of that kind is made; it will suffice to have an assurance that the case of Breuer’s patient was precisely of a kind in which no competent physician could fail to make a diagnosis of hysteria. And here we may quote from the report of the patient’s illness the further fact that it made its appearance at a time when she was nursing her father, of whom she was devotedly fond, through the grave illness which led to his death, and that, as a result of her own illness, she was obliged to give up nursing him.

¹ [The French term.]

So far it has been an advantage to us to accompany the doctors; but the moment of parting is at hand. For you must not suppose that a patient’s prospects of medical assistance are improved in essentials by the fact that a diagnosis of hysteria has been substituted for one of severe organic disease of the brain. Medical skill is in most cases powerless against severe diseases of the brain; but neither can the doctor do anything against hysterical disorders. He must leave it to kindly Nature to decide when and how his optimistic prognosis shall be fulfilled.¹

Thus the recognition of the illness as hysteria makes little difference to the patient; but to the doctor quite the reverse. It is noticeable that his attitude towards hysterical patients is quite other than towards sufferers from organic diseases. He does not have the same sympathy for the former as for the latter: for the hysteric’s ailment is in fact far less serious and yet it seems to claim to be regarded as equally so. And there is a further factor at work. Through his studies, the doctor has learnt many things that remain a sealed book to the layman: he has been able to form ideas on the causes of illness and on the changes it brings about - e.g. in the brain of a person suffering from apoplexy or from a malignant growth - ideas which must to some degree meet the case, since they allow him to understand the details of the illness. But all his knowledge - his training in anatomy, in physiology and in pathology - leaves him in the lurch when he is confronted by the details of hysterical phenomena. He cannot understand hysteria, and in the face of it he is himself a layman. This is not a pleasant situation for anyone who as a rule sets so much store by his knowledge. So it comes about that hysterical patients forfeit his sympathy. He regards them as people who are transgressing the laws of his science - like heretics in the eyes of the orthodox. He attributes every kind of wickedness to them, accuses them of exaggeration, of deliberate deceit, of malingering. And he punishes them by withdrawing his interest from them.

¹ I am aware that this is no longer the case; but in my lecture I am putting myself and my hearers back into the period before 1880. If things are different now, that is to a great extent the result of the activities whose history I am now sketching.

Dr. Breuer’s attitude towards his patient deserved no such reproach. He gave her both sympathy and interest, even though, to begin with, he did not know how to help her. It seems likely that she herself made his task easier by the admirable qualities of intellect and character to which he has testified in her case history. Soon, moreover, his benevolent scrutiny showed him the means of bringing her a first instalment of help.

It was observed that, while the patient was in her states of ‘absence (altered personality accompanied by confusion), she was in the habit of muttering a few words to herself which seemed as though they arose from some train of thought that was occupying her mind. The doctor, after getting a report of these words, used to put her into a kind of hypnosis and then repeat them to her so as to induce her to use them as a starting point. The patient complied with the plan, and in this way reproduced in his presence the mental creations which had been occupying her mind during the ‘absences’ and which had betrayed their existence by the fragmentary words which she had uttered. They were profoundly melancholy phantasies - ‘day dreams’ we should call them - sometimes characterized by poetic beauty, and their starting-point was as a rule the position of a girl at her father’s sick-bed. When she had related a number of these phantasies, she was as if set free, and she was brought back to normal mental life. The improvement in her condition, which would last for several hours, would be succeeded next day by a further attack of ‘absence’; and this in turn would be removed in the same way by getting her to put into words her freshly constructed phantasies. It was impossible to escape the conclusion that the alteration in her mental state which was expressed in the ‘absences’ was a result of the stimulus proceeding from these highly emotional phantasies. The patient herself, who, strange to say, could at this time only speak and understand English, christened this novel kind of treatment the ‘talking cure’¹ or used to refer to it jokingly as ‘chimney sweeping’.¹

¹ [In English in the original.]

It soon emerged, as though by chance, that this process of sweeping the mind clean could accomplish more than the merely temporary relief of her ever-recurring mental confusion. It was actually possible to bring about the disappearance of the painful symptoms of her illness, if she could be brought to remember under hypnosis, with an accompanying expression of affect, on what occasion and in what connection the symptom had first appeared. ‘It was in the summer during a period of extreme heat, and the patient was suffering very badly from thirst; for, without being able to account for it in any way, she suddenly found it impossible to drink. She would take up the glass of water that she longed for, but as soon as it touched her lips she would push it away like someone suffering from hydrophobia. As she did this, she was obviously in an absence for a couple of seconds. She lived only on fruit, such as melons, etc., so as to lessen her tormenting thirst. This had lasted for some six weeks, when one day during hypnosis she grumbled about her English “lady-companion”, whom she did not care for, and went on to describe, with every sign of disgust, how she had once gone into this lady’s room and how her little dog - horrid creature! - had drunk out of a glass there. The patient had said nothing, as she had wanted to be polite. After giving further energetic expression to the anger she had held back, she asked...

Table of contents

• Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis
• Sigmund Freud
• FIRST LECTURE
• SECOND LECTURE
• THIRD LECTURE
• FOURTH LECTURE
• FIFTH LECTURE