Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

Overview

These are real lectures, delivered to a mixed audience of doctors and general students at the University of Vienna across the winters of 1915 to 1916 and 1916 to 1917, while the war was on. Freud was sixty, his practice had collapsed because his patients were at the front, and he had time.

The book is five hundred pages and it is the friendliest thing he wrote. He addresses the audience directly, anticipates their objections, concedes points, makes jokes, and repeatedly reminds them that they have every right to be sceptical. The first lecture tells them outright that he cannot prove anything to them in a lecture hall, that psychoanalysis cannot be taught the way surgery can, and that they will have to test what he says on themselves.

The structure is the argument. Part one is slips and errors, which every listener has experienced. Part two is dreams, which everyone has and which Freud can analyse in front of them. Part three is the neuroses, which most of them have not seen. By the time he arrives at infantile sexuality he has spent three hundred pages establishing the method on material the audience can check.

Note what is not here. The lectures predate the structural model of id, ego and super-ego, the death drive, and most of the late cultural writing. This is the system at the point where Freud thought it was finished, just before he rebuilt it.

The argument

Part I: the psychology of errors, lectures 1 to 4. Freud starts as small as possible. You mean to say one word and say another. You put down a key and cannot find it. A name you know perfectly well will not come, and a wrong one arrives instead and keeps arriving.

The conventional explanation is fatigue, distraction, or similarity of sound. Freud argues that these may be conditions but are not causes, because the errors have a direction. He gives cases: the chairman who opens a session by declaring it closed, the man who proposes a toast and asks the company to hiccup rather than to cheer. In each the wrong word says something the speaker had reason not to say.

From this he extracts the principle the rest of the book rests on. Mental events are determined, nothing in the mind is accidental, and where a meaning can be found there is no ground for calling it chance.

Part II: dreams, lectures 5 to 15. The longest section and the best. Freud begins with the obstacle that dreams seem meaningless, and deals with it by way of the technique: not interpreting the dream himself but asking the dreamer to say whatever comes to mind about each element in turn.

He then introduces the distinction that organises the whole theory. The manifest content is what you remember. The latent content is what it was made from. Between them stands the dream-work, which does the disguising through condensation, several things compressed into one image, displacement, the emotional weight moved off what matters onto something trivial, representation in visual terms, and secondary revision, the tidying that gives the whole thing a spurious storyline on waking.

The conclusion is that a dream is a disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish, and the disguise exists because something in the mind will not let the wish through undisguised. Freud handles anxiety dreams and punishment dreams as apparent counter-examples and argues they fit. He also deals at length with symbolism, and is more cautious about it than his reputation suggests, insisting that the dreamer’s own associations come first and that a fixed dictionary of symbols is a last resort.

Part III: the neuroses, lectures 16 to 28. Now the clinical material, and the claim that a symptom is constructed exactly as a dream is, out of a conflict, by compromise, and that it therefore means something.

Freud sets out libido and its development through oral, anal and genital stages, fixation and regression, and the Oedipus complex. He explains resistance, why patients fight the treatment, and repression, and then transference, the patient’s redirection of old feelings onto the analyst, which he presents as both the main obstacle to treatment and the instrument that makes it possible.

Lecture 18 contains the famous comparison. Copernicus displaced the earth from the centre, Darwin displaced humanity from its separate creation, and psychoanalysis delivers the third and most wounding blow by showing the ego that it is not master in its own house.

The last lecture is about therapy, and it is notably modest. Analysis does not remove the possibility of illness; it gives the ego a freer choice. Freud declines to promise happiness, and remarks elsewhere that the aim is to turn hysterical misery into common unhappiness.

How to read it

Read the first four lectures even if you doubt the whole enterprise. They are short, the examples are entertaining, and they set up the move everything else depends on.

Read the dream lectures next, and try the method on one of your own dreams before deciding about it. Freud asks for exactly this and the book is much more interesting if you do.

Be alert to where the evidence changes. In parts one and two you can check him against your own experience. In part three you cannot, and the material is clinical reports from a practice nobody else observed. That shift is the point at which most careful readers start dividing what they accept from what they do not.

Read the sequel if you want the later system. The New Introductory Lectures of 1933 were written to be read rather than delivered, and they revise the model substantially.

Keep the criticisms in view without letting them do your reading for you. The standard objections, that the theory is constructed so that resistance confirms it, that the case evidence is unreproducible, that the dream theory does not fit what is now known about sleep, are serious. So is the observation that Freud’s account of how people actually behave remains more useful than most of what replaced it.

Questions it raises

• If nothing in mental life is accidental, what would an accident look like? Is the claim testable?
• A patient who denies an interpretation is said to be resisting. How can the theory be wrong, and does it matter that it is hard to say?
• Dreams are called disguised wish-fulfilments. What about nightmares, and is Freud’s answer an explanation or a rescue?
• Freud presents psychoanalysis as a natural science and its evidence as clinical. Is that the same kind of science as the physiology he was trained in?
• He offers not happiness but a freer choice. Is that a modest aim or an unfalsifiable one?
• The mind is said to be a site of permanent conflict. If that is right, what would count as mental health?