Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

Overview

Sixty pages, five lectures, delivered at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in September 1909, and published the following year. Freud was fifty-three and had never been invited anywhere on this scale. G. Stanley Hall, the president of Clark and a serious psychologist, brought him over for the university’s twentieth anniversary, and Jung and Ferenczi travelled with him.

He spoke in German, from no manuscript, after working out each lecture on a walk that morning with Ferenczi. William James, then near the end of his life, walked out to hear him and afterwards told him that the future of psychology belonged to this work. Freud received an honorary doctorate, the only academic honour of his career.

His own account of the trip was less warm. He disliked American food, complained for years about his digestion afterwards, and made remarks about the country for the rest of his life, though he also said that the invitation was the first official recognition he had had and that it felt like the realisation of an incredible daydream.

What makes the lectures unusually useful is the form. Freud tells the story in order, from the case that started it to the technique he was using in 1909, and at each stage he explains what went wrong with the previous method. Nothing else he wrote gives you the development this clearly.

The argument

Lecture I: Breuer and Anna O. Freud opens by disclaiming credit. If it is a merit to have brought psychoanalysis into being, he says, it is not his merit; he was a student occupied with other things when the work began. The founder was Josef Breuer, and the case was a young woman treated between 1880 and 1882, known as Anna O.

She was twenty-one, intelligent, and had developed a formidable list of symptoms while nursing her dying father: paralyses of the limbs, disturbances of vision, an inability to drink despite thirst, and periods in which she could speak and understand only English though her native language was German.

Breuer found that if she described, in detail and under hypnosis, the circumstances in which a symptom had first appeared, the symptom went. The refusal to drink disappeared after she recalled seeing a companion’s dog drink from a glass and saying nothing out of politeness, and then, having told it, asking for water. She called the procedure the talking cure, and also, in a joke, chimney sweeping.

From this Breuer and Freud drew the conclusion they published in 1893: that hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences, and that the symptom is a residue of an experience that was never discharged.

Lecture II: from hypnosis to free association. Freud describes abandoning hypnosis, and he is candid about why: not everyone can be hypnotised, the depth varies, the results were not durable, and the relationship it produced between doctor and patient was unsatisfactory.

Looking for a substitute, he used a pressure technique, laying a hand on the patient’s forehead and insisting that something would come. What he found was that something always did, and that the patient resisted producing it. That resistance is the hinge of the lecture. If a force is opposing the material’s return now, the same force presumably drove it out in the first place, and Freud names that process repression. The symptom then becomes a substitute formation, a compromise between the repressed impulse and the force repressing it.

Eventually he dropped the pressure too and simply asked patients to say whatever came into their heads without selection, which is free association.

Lecture III: dreams and slips. The method applied outside the consulting room. Dreams are approached by the same technique, element by element, and shown to have a latent content distorted by the dream-work. Slips of the tongue, forgotten names and mislaid objects are treated as small compromise formations of the same kind. Freud’s purpose in this lecture is partly evidential: these are phenomena his American audience can check on themselves, and he uses them to argue that unconscious mental processes are not an exotic hypothesis confined to the ill.

Lecture IV: sexuality. The lecture he knew would cost him listeners, and he says so. The claim is that the impulses driven into repression are characteristically sexual, that sexuality begins in infancy rather than at puberty, and that its development passes through stages and can be fixated or regressed to.

He also makes here the admission that matters historically. He had at first believed his patients’ accounts of early seduction by adults literally, and had built a theory on it; he then concluded that in many cases these were fantasies rather than events, and revised. He presents this as a correction that opened the way to understanding infantile sexuality. It is also the decision that has been most fiercely attacked since, by critics who argue that he retreated from evidence of real abuse, and it is worth reading his own version of it here.

Lecture V: transference, and what a cure is. The patient transfers onto the physician feelings belonging to earlier figures, and this is both the chief obstacle to treatment and the only lever available, since it brings the old conflict into the room where it can be worked on.

Freud closes by addressing the objection that analysis simply releases what should be restrained. He answers that the repressed impulse, once made conscious, can be dealt with in ways unavailable to it while unconscious: it can be condemned deliberately, or directed to a higher aim, which is sublimation, and he argues that a portion can be allowed legitimate satisfaction. Suppression by repression, he says, is like handling a problem by locking the person raising it in a cellar; the shouting continues.

How to read it

Read all five, in order, in one sitting. It takes ninety minutes and the sequence is the argument.

Read them before the longer Introductory Lectures. This is the map; that is the territory.

Watch the method of exposition. Freud introduces each idea as a solution to a specific practical failure, which is the most persuasive form his case ever takes and quite different from the systematic presentations.

Follow up Anna O. Bertha Pappenheim was not cured by the treatment Breuer described; she spent time in a sanatorium afterwards, and then became a significant figure in her own right, a translator of Wollstonecraft, founder of the League of Jewish Women, and a campaigner against trafficking. The gap between the case history and the life is one of the more instructive things about the founding document of psychoanalysis.

Note what is not here. There is no id, ego or super-ego, no death drive, and none of the late cultural theory. In 1909 the system was the topographical one and the emphasis was clinical.

Questions it raises

• Freud gives the credit to Breuer and to a patient who named the method. How much of psychoanalysis was discovered by the people being treated?
• Hypnosis was dropped because it did not last and produced a bad relationship. Is free association a better instrument, or a different one with its own distortions?
• Resistance is taken as evidence of repression. Could a patient’s inability to produce a memory have other explanations, and how would you tell?
• Freud revised the seduction theory after concluding some accounts were fantasy. Was that a scientific correction or a retreat, and what turns on the answer?
• He argues that a conscious impulse can be condemned or redirected in ways an unconscious one cannot. Is that the whole case for the therapy?
• These lectures made his reputation in a country he disliked and distrusted. What does it mean that the most institutionally successful version of psychoanalysis grew there?