New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

Overview

The New Introductory Lectures are two hundred and twenty pages in seven lectures, published in 1933, and none of them was ever given. Freud explains in the preface that he is no longer able to lecture: sixteen years of cancer of the jaw and palate, more than thirty operations, a prosthesis he called the monster that made speech difficult and often unintelligible. He wrote them as lectures anyway, addressing an audience he imagines in front of him, because the fiction had worked before.

They are a continuation rather than a replacement. The original Introductory Lectures of 1916 to 1917 had twenty-eight; these are numbered 29 to 35, and Freud assumes you have read the earlier course or know its ground.

What has changed in the intervening fifteen years is the model of the mind, and that is the main reason to read this book. The earlier lectures work with a topographical picture, conscious, preconscious and unconscious. By 1923 Freud had replaced it with the structural one, id, ego and super-ego, and this is where he explains the change to people who are not analysts.

He was seventy-seven when it appeared, in Vienna, five years before the Anschluss forced him out to London, where he died in 1939.

The argument

Lecture 29: revision of dreams. A return to the dream theory with the corrections experience had forced. The most important is the concession that the wish-fulfilment formula needs qualifying: in traumatic neurosis, dreams fail in their function and repeat the disaster, which Freud had already conceded in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and restates here.

Lecture 30: dreams and the occult. A curious chapter in which Freud takes telepathy more seriously than his admirers expect, examines several cases of apparent thought transference in analysis, and concludes cautiously that the question should remain open. It is a reminder that he did not regard himself as a debunker by temperament.

Lecture 31: the anatomy of the mental personality. The centre of the book and the reason to read it.

Freud explains why the old division would not do. The trouble was the super-ego: the part of the mind that criticises and punishes turned out to be largely unconscious itself, so a division that equated the unconscious with the repressed had broken down. Conscious and unconscious remain as qualities; the new division is into agencies.

The id is the oldest, the reservoir of the drives, containing everything inherited and constitutional. He says we can only describe it by analogy, as a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitations, with no organisation and no unified will, no negation, no sense of time, and no regard for contradiction, since contrary impulses sit side by side in it without cancelling.

The ego develops from the id by contact with the external world. Its job is self-preservation, perception, the postponement of discharge, and the control of the approaches to motility. Its situation is weak, and Freud’s images make the weakness vivid: the ego is like a rider on a horse who must check a strength greater than his own, except that the rider borrows the horse’s power to do it, and who is therefore often obliged to guide the horse where it wanted to go.

The super-ego is the heir of the parental authority, formed by identification, and it is the harshest of the three. Freud points out that its severity does not correspond to the severity of the actual parents, and that children raised gently often have the cruellest consciences.

The ego, then, serves three masters, and is threatened by three dangers: the external world, the id’s demands, and the super-ego’s severity. Hence the formula: where id was, there ego shall be, an enterprise of reclamation which Freud compares to the draining of the Zuider Zee, which is to say slow, deliberate, unfinished and not a conquest.

Lecture 32: anxiety and the drives. A substantial revision. Freud had held that anxiety was transformed libido; here he reverses it, making anxiety a signal produced by the ego in the face of a danger situation, and repression a consequence of anxiety rather than its cause. He also restates the late dualism of Eros and the death drive.

Lecture 33: femininity. The most notorious. Freud opens by telling the women in his imagined audience that they are themselves the riddle, and then gives his account: that the girl’s development is more complicated than the boy’s because she must change both her leading erotogenic zone and her primary love object, that her discovery of anatomical difference produces what he calls penis envy, and that this shapes a range of later dispositions.

Three things are worth holding together. The account is presented as inference from a small clinical sample. Freud explicitly says that psychoanalysis does not try to describe what a woman is, which he calls a task it could not perform, but only how she comes into being. And he ends by saying the lecture is incomplete and fragmentary and does not always sound friendly, and telling his audience to consult their own experience, or the poets, or to wait until science knows more. It remains the text that made Freud a permanent target, and Horney, Klein, Beauvoir and Mitchell all argue with it directly.

Lecture 35: the question of a Weltanschauung. Freud denies that psychoanalysis has a worldview of its own, on the ground that it is a branch of science and inherits science’s. That worldview he states minimally: there is no source of knowledge about the universe other than the intellectual working over of carefully checked observation, and nothing from revelation, intuition or divination. He then considers three rivals. Art he dismisses as harmless because it makes no claim to truth. Philosophy he regards as overrated, holding together a picture by methods that cannot be checked. Religion is the serious enemy, because it answers the questions people ask, offers consolation and the authority of a father, and demands belief. He concludes that science is young, slow and has given us very little, and that it is the only thing we have.

How to read it

Read Lecture 31 first and on its own. It is the model, it is clear, and everything people mean by Freudian psychology in ordinary conversation is in it.

Then Lecture 35 for what he thought he was doing, and Lecture 33 if you want to engage the argument about women, which is unavoidable in any serious reading of him.

Read the 1916 course first if you have not. These lectures were written as a continuation and assume you can follow references to it.

Read Lecture 33 in full rather than in summary, and then read a reply. Karen Horney was arguing against it within a few years, Beauvoir devotes a chapter of The Second Sex to it, and Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism makes the case that the account is a description of how women are produced under patriarchy rather than a claim about nature. Whether that rescue works is a good question.

Notice the tone. This is a very old and very ill man, writing to an audience he cannot address, revising positions he had held for decades, and conceding a good deal. The confidence people associate with Freud is not much in evidence here.

Questions it raises

• Where id was, there ego shall be. Is that a therapeutic aim, an ethical one, or a description of what maturity is?
• The super-ego is often harsher than the parents it derives from. What explains the surplus?
• The ego is said to serve three masters and control none of them. What is left of responsibility on that model?
• Freud says analysis describes how a woman comes into being and not what a woman is. Does that distinction do the work he wants?
• He grants that science has given us very little and holds to it anyway. What is the argument for that preference, and is it itself scientific?
• Religion is treated as science’s serious rival because it answers the questions people ask. Does science have to answer those questions to displace it?