INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
DICTIONNAIRE INTERNATIONAL DE LA PSYCHANALYSE
EDITORIAL
EDITORIAL BOARD
BOARD AND
AND TRANSLATORS
TRANSLATORS
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Alain de Mijolla
President and founder of the International Association for the History of Psychoanalysis
Neuropsychiatrist and psychoanalyst
Member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society)
Member of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA)
Member of the Conceptual and Empirical Research Committee of the IPA
EDITORIAL BOARD (French Edition)
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Psychoanalyst and professor of psychopathology and psychoanalysis
University of Paris VII, Denis-Diderot
Member of the Quatrième groupe (O.P.L.F.)
Roger Perron
Director of Honors Research at National Center for Scientific Research, Paris
Member of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA)
Bernard Golse, MD
Pediatric psychiatrist and psychoanalyst
Chief of staff of Pediatric psychiatry, Saint-Vincent de Paul Hospital, Paris
Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
University of Paris V, René Descartes
U.S. ADVISORY BOARD
Edward Nersessian, MD
Training and Supervising Analyst
New York Psychoanalytic Institute
Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry
New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center
Paul Roazen, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, Social and Political Science
York University
BOARD OF TRANSLATORS
Philip Beitchman
Jocelyne Barque
Robert Bononno
Andrew Brown
Dan Collins
Liam Gavin
John Galbraith Simmons
Sophie Leighton
Donald Nicholson-Smith
Scott Savaiano
Paul Sutton
Gwendolyn Wells
ii
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
DICTIONNAIRE INTERNATIONAL DE LA PSYCHANALYSE
VOLUME ONE
A–F
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
EDITOR IN CHIEF
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
DICTIONNAIRE INTERNATIONAL DE LA PSYCHANALYSE
VOLUME TWO
G–PR
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
EDITOR IN CHIEF
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
DICTIONNAIRE INTERNATIONAL DE LA PSYCHANALYSE
VOLUME THREE
PS–Z
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
EDITOR IN CHIEF
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
DICTIONNAIRE INTERNATIONAL DE LA PSYCHANALYSE
Editor in Chief
Alain de Mijolla
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Dictionnaire international de la psychanalyse. English.
International dictionary of psychoanalysis = Dictionnaire international
de la psychanalyse / Alain de Mijolla, editor in chief.
p. ; cm.
Enhanced version of the 2002 French edition.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-02-865924-4 (set hardcover : alk. paper) - -ISBN 0-02-865925-2
(v. 1) - -ISBN 0-02-865926-0 (v. 2) - -ISBN 0-02-865927-9 (v. 3)
1. Psychoanalysis–Encyclopedias.
I. Mijolla, A. de.
II. Title.
III. Title:
Dictionnaire international de la psychanalyse.
[DNLM: 1. Psychoanalysis- -Encyclopedias- -English. WM 13 D5555
2005a]
RC501.4.D4313 2005
616.89’17’03–dc22
2005014307
This title is also available as an e-book
ISBN 0-02-865994-5 (set)
Contact your Thomson Gale sales representative for ordering information.
Printed in the United States of America
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CONTENTS
CONTENTS
Preface to the French Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vii
Preface to the American Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
Introduction to the American Edition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix
List of Entries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxiii
Directory of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lv
Thematic Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .lxix
Chronology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lxxxv
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
A–B. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Photograph Insert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following p. 238
C–F . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .239
G–L. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .663
Photograph Insert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following p. 998
M–Pr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .999
Ps–S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1345
Photograph Insert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following p. 1722
T–Z. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1723
Freudian Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1893
General Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1903
Translation of Concepts/Notions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2013
Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2045
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2049
v
EDITORIAL
STAFF
EDITORIAL AND
AND PRODUCTION
PRODUCTION STAFF
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Publisher
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Senior Manufacturing Specialist
vi
PREFACE
PREFACE TO
TO THE
THE FRENCH
FRENCH EDITION
EDITION
This preface outlines the history and options of an editorial undertaking which, since it took shape gradually
over a ten-year period, could naturally not be brought up to date in every detail. I hope that what follows will
answer most of the questions of readers taken aback by such and such an omission or such and such an editorial decision. My most important concern, however, is that these remarks should help elicit the indispensable
additions and corrections that it is to be hoped will be submitted as time goes on.
To participate in the step-by-step construction of an international dictionary of psychoanalysis is a strange adventure, marked not only by enthusiasm but also from time to
time by disillusion. The process might well be compared to the education of children, a
realistic view of which (sometimes attributed to Freud) asserts that one may be almost
certain that one’s hopes will not be fully realized. All the same, the years I spent with the
editorial board assigning and patiently gathering in the more than fifteen hundred articles comprising this work, and the subsequent years preparing all this material for publication, have been among the most exciting I have known. One reason was the variety
and cordiality of the international connections that the project created; another was the
growing awareness of the vigorous multifacetedness of psychoanalysis as a whole, which
has been evolving for over a century now within so many different nations, languages
and cultures.
The charge of dogmatism, too often leveled at psychoanalysis, simply evaporates in
face of the heterogeneity apparent to anyone who explores the many ways in which psychoanalytic theory and practice are understood and experienced around the world.
Freud’s metapsychological concepts, which he called ‘‘Grundbegriffe’’— a set of foundations few in number but solidly anchored—have constantly demonstrated their usefulness, and they have endured almost unchanged. On the other hand, most Freudian,
post-Freudian or even para-Freudian notions are like so many living organisms—ever
prone to modification, and tending to be forgotten and (sometimes) resurrected; above all,
they are subject to divergent interpretations, reflecting the element of the unforeseeable
that is inevitably present for any analyst who refuses to be tied down by rigid theoretical
models. Such divergences result too from the lessons of clinical practice and the temporary
or permanent changes which that experience imposes on analytic theory; they are the
traces of an empirical inquiry that has continued unabated from Freud’s earliest tentative
explorations to the confrontation with life as it is lived today. The coexistence in this dictionary of ideas that are oftentimes in contradiction with one another, or that have been
developed in different ways from one continent to another, is testimony to their main characteristic: they are provisional conceptual tools, and their ephemeral quality indicates that
in psychoanalysis, in one sense at least, everything always remains to be discovered, for the
questions asked are forever being posed anew.
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Once the idea of this dictionary had been conceived, based on the principle of a diversity
of viewpoints, I proposed to the publishers, Calmann-Lévy, that an editorial board be
formed, to be made up of recognized colleagues belonging to French psychoanalytic
schools of differing orientations. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the friends who constituted that small group: Professors Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor, Roger Perron, and Bernard
Golse, joined during the first stages by Dr. Jacques Angelergues. They all made vital contributions during those crucial early days. It is in their name, moreover, that I shall now
describe our work methods and the route we took.
At a very early stage, thanks to a letter announcing our plan, we won the allegiance of a
number of distinguished psychoanalysts. They became a kind of support committee, and
their prestige lent weight to our approach to potential contributors. Simultaneously, we
solicited the participation and counsel of not a few researchers known to us from our years
as practitioners of psychoanalysis; we were also able to draw on connections built up over
the fifteen-year existence of the International Association for the History of Psychoanalysis
(IAHP). In this way a group of ‘‘advisors’’ was assembled, each of whom was asked to
assume responsibility for a particular segment of our vast field of operations, to suggest to
the editorial committee those concepts or individuals that they felt should absolutely be
included as entries in the panoramic vision of the dictionary, and to identify the authors
who in their view would be the best fitted to write those articles. Their advice was gratefully
received and closely followed.
At the same time, we consulted a good number of indexes of existing psychoanalytic
works in order to reach a first list of concepts; and the IAHP’s Revue Internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse (International Review of the History of Psychoanalysis; discontinued in 1992) was a good source in determining which figures or events were the most frequently cited. In 1995 and 1996, at our editorial committee meetings, we debated all the
proposed topics thus accumulated, rejecting some and adding others, until we arrived at a
list that, truth to tell, was never completely finalized until the very last days before the
manuscript was delivered. Our choices were made in a collegial spirit, before each of us was
put in charge of a variable number of entries to assign to their respective authors along
with general composition and format guidelines intended to impose some measure of uniformity on the immensely varied material to be produced.
Since almost a third of the entries commissioned were written in languages other than
French, our commitment to an international approach was indeed undeviating, but there
is no denying that this dictionary was conceived and realized by psychoanalysts trained
and practicing in France. The selection of topics and the content of the entries may well
reveal a somewhat ‘‘French’’ cast of mind. How indeed could it be otherwise? But it is my
sincere hope that foreign readers will adopt an actively critical attitude in this connection,
by suggesting, even contributing, additions. Nothing could be more in tune with our desire
for the widest possible opening onto the world at large.
On the other hand, of course, by opting for a great diversity of contributors we risked
losing a sense of unity, and unity is reassuring. We were quite aware that alert critics were
bound to underscore the lacunae, the inadequacies, even the outright contradictions that
would appear among entries written, say, by a French author, an English or American analyst, and a colleague from South America—each loyal, moreover, to a particular theoretical
orientation. Similarly, the very topics chosen by our advisors must perforce reflect their
personal judgments rather than ours. Occasionally we editors proposed additional subjects, but by and large we allowed the advisors’ selection to stand, out of respect for the
agreement we had with them; in any event, it would have ill behooved the editorial board
or the editor-in-chief to claim a knowledge superior to that of the advisors whom we had
chosen as our guides in the matter.
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It should be noted that despite our request that authors abide by specified space limitations, some were so carried away by their attachment to their assigned topic that they
turned in longer contributions than anticipated. In some cases we were obliged to ask for
significant cuts, and I should like to thank all contributors concerned for their goodnatured and prompt acquiescence to what were surely painful self-amputations. As for
those who found it easier to abide by our space constraints, their contributions were
retained unmodified, at the risk of giving readers the mistaken impression, in view of disparities of length, that we meant either to downplay or to highlight some particular concept or individual.
Such editorial changes to submitted manuscript as we made were minor, concerned
chiefly with formal aspects (style, ordering of paragraphs, standardization of references, etc.).
In no case was any kind of censorship exercised by me or by any member of the editorial
board, and no important revision was made without first suggesting it to the author concerned. It was out of the question that any article be published in seriously modified form
without the writer’s full approval. All articles are signed, and while the editors are responsible
for their publication in the context of this dictionary, they belong in the moral and literary
senses to their individual authors. With this in mind, each contributor had a contract and
was remunerated appropriately, the main purpose being to acknowledge his or her authorship and to keep our collaboration, friendships notwithstanding, within a clearly legal
framework.
Let me reiterate, as a last point, that this dictionary was created over a period of years.
As with all such enterprises, and especially one involving so many contributors sprinkled
across the globe, it was bound to be overtaken here and there by events, with no realistic
prospect of a complete updating prior to publication. We must hope that such time-related
shortcomings will be rectified as future editions appear.
Why is a dictionary of psychoanalysis needed? Interestingly, it was rather late on in the
history of psychoanalysis that the call for a clearer definition of Freudian terms, whose precision was threatened by their wider and wider currency, was first heard. The teaching
offered before the Second World War at the Berlin and later at the Vienna Institute of Psychoanalysis certainly helped show up the need for analysts in training to have to hand a
work that, though not a manual, would furnish precise information on a still vigorously
evolving body of theory. The fact that Freud lent his support to the idea, coupled no doubt
with the anxiety aroused by the defections and misapplications then plaguing the young
discipline of psychoanalysis, provided added impetus.
Thanks to Richard F. Sterba’s Reminiscences of a Viennese Psychoanalyst (Detroit: Wayne
State U. P., 1982), we are acquainted with the circumstances under which the first tentative
attempt to compile a dictionary of psychoanalysis was made:
In 1931, at the suggestion of A. J. Storfer, I had undertaken the task of writing a psychoanalytic dictionary (Handwörterbuch der Psychoanalyse). Storfer actually began this work with the definition of a few
terms beginning with the letter A, but he found the task too time consuming. He asked me to continue
the work with him, to which I agreed. It was a project for which my experience in 1925 and 1926, working on the index of the Gesammelte Schriften von Sigmund Freud (Collected Works of Sigmund
Freud) was an enormous help. Soon, however, Storfer lost interest in or courage for the enormous project and dropped out of our partnership. As ransom for dissolving the partnership, he gave me the
index galleys and typescript pages and all of the eleven volumes of the Gesamtausgabe. I carried on the
work alone. The dictionary was supposed to appear gradually in sixteen issues, of which the first was
published on the occasion of Freud’s eightieth birthday, 6 May 1936.
The preface to the first issue was the facsimile of a letter Freud wrote to me. When I had finished the
letter A of the dictionary, I had given a copy to Anna Freud and asked her to submit it for Freud’s scrutiny. After a short while I received this letter from Freud, which I quote here in English translation:
‘‘Your ’dictionary’ gives me the impression of being a valuable aid to learners and of being a fine
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achievement on its own account. The precision and correctness of the individual entries is in fact of
commendable excellence. English and French translations of the headings are not indispensable but
would add further to the value of the work. I do not overlook the fact that the path from the letter A to
the end of the alphabet is a very long one, and that to follow it would mean an enormous burden of
work for you. So do not do it unless you feel an internal obligation—only obey a compulsion of that
kind and certainly not any external pressure’’ (pp. 99–100; Freud’s letter translated by James Strachey,
Standard Edition, Vol. 22, p. 253).
In the wake of this first effort, and very soon in the case of North America, there
appeared several dictionaries, or lexicons presenting select passages from Freud’s writings,
designed to help define psychoanalytic concepts for analysts in training in the institutes;
some went further, offering explanations meant to make psychoanalytic theory more accessible to the general reader. Important works falling under this general rubric are the
Glossary of Psycho-Analytical Terms published under the editorship of Ernest Jones in 1924,
a harbinger of the Standard Edition; the lists generated by the French Commission Linguistique pour le Vocabulaire Pschanalytique in 1923-24; or the New German-English PsychoAnalytical Vocabulary of 1943. It is also well worth citing the Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis
edited by Ludwig Eidelberg (New York: Free Press, 1968) and Charles Rycroft’s idiosyncratic Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London: Nelson, 1968).
In France, the initiatives of Daniel Lagache began as early as the 1950s, with the start of
a dictionary in installments published in Maryse Choisy’s journal Psyché, and they culminated in that matchless work tool, the Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, by Jean Laplanche
and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (Paris: PUF, 1967; translated as The Language of PsychoAnalysis, London: Institute of Psycho-Analysis/Hogarth, 1973). It should be borne in
mind, however, that Laplanche and Pontalis’s in-depth study was restricted for the most
part to the concepts of psychoanalysis as developed in Freud’s work alone.
Later French dictionaries of psychoanalysis were also intentionally circumscribed in one
way or another. Pierre Fédida’s Dictionnaire abrégé, comparatif et critique des notions principales de la psychanalyse (Paris: Larousse, 1974) is a case in point. Some works pointed up
the theoretical contributions of Jacques Lacan, such as the Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse
edited by Roland Chemama and Bernard Vandermersche (Paris: Larousse, 1993; expanded
edition, 1998), or Pierre Kaufmann’s L’Apport freudien (The Freudian Contribution). Kaufmann’s book (Paris: Bordas, 1993) is presented as a psychoanalytic encyclopedia rather
than a dictionary, which would presumably be more condensed. In fact, despite the inclusion of a few biographical sketches, very brief, and limited to the main figures in the history
of psychoanalysis, the work does not display the diversity and world-wide scope what we
have pursued in our own dictionary. Nor does it deal with the principal concepts developed
on the basis of practices derived from or collateral to psychoanalysis, such as those of Jungian analytical psychology.
Outside France, noteworthy titles—among many others which we have made no
attempt to inventory here—include A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought by Robert K. Hinshelwood (London: Free Association Books, 1989), the Bibliographisches Lexicon der Psychoanalyse of Elke Mühlleitner (Tubingen: Diskord, 1992), and Dylan Evans’s Introductory
Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), the first restricted to
Kleinians, the second to members of the Vienna Society between 1902 and 1938, and the
third to the thought of Jacques Lacan. More recently, in the United States, Burness E.
Moore and Bernard D. Fine have edited Psychoanalysis: The Major Concepts (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1995), which elaborates in a distinctly encyclopedic manner on some
forty major psychoanalytic themes.
The present dictionary differs markedly in fact from all its predecessors in the field,
including Elizabeth Roudinesco and Michel Plon’s Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse (Paris:
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Fayard, 1997) or the collected psychoanalytic articles of the French Encyclopaedia Universalis (1997).
It is the only work that presents not just some nine hundred concepts or ideas, but also
three hundred and sixty biographies of eminent psychoanalysts from around the world,
one hundred and seventy of their most noted works, and fifty countries where psychoanalysis has taken root; more than a hundred entries deal with events that have punctuated the
history of psychoanalysis in its multifarious lines of development; the institutions that
have embodied that development are likewise described in detail, as are the contributions
of movements, such as analytical psychology and individual psychology, which stemmed
from psychoanalysis.
A chronological approach was a guiding principle, and even if it could not be followed
in every single entry, our contributors were urged to hew fast to a historical perspective.
Only thus can theoretical choices be relativized so that they lose their rigidly fixed character
and reveal themselves to be variable according to time and place. By offering a dais to a
large number of psychoanalysts of different theoretical and practical persuasions, moreover, we hoped to arrive at a kind of overall picture that was contradictory precisely
because it was alive—a candid shot, as it were, of psychoanalysis today, complete with the
more or less conflict-prone schools in the context of which it has developed up to now
and, it is to be hoped, will continue to evolve in the future. Our intention was to distinguish our dictionary as clearly as possible from works written by a small number of collaborators expressing the point of view of a particular psychoanalytic group or tendency.
All the same, it must be understood that we believe unequivocally that psychoanalysis
was conceived and has developed in the context of Freudian ideas. The reference to Freud
is cardinal in this work, and other theoretical and practical options have a place here only
insofar as they have a direct or indirect, temporary or permanent connection with Freud,
with Freud’s history, or with the history of the psychoanalytic movement that Freud
founded.
Psychoanalysis was created as the twentieth century opened, and it developed along
with that century, affecting its historical, cultural and moral character by reason of the new
way of thinking it represented. The reader should not therefore be surprised to find entries
here whose subjects are writers, philosophers—even a literary movement like Surrealism,
or such events as the First and Second World Wars. But in such cases we chose not to offer
a detailed and biographical or historical account, or a complete account of an individual’s
work, but rather to confine ourselves to the subject’s relationship to psychoanalysis. This
also makes it possible, however, to trace the ways in which the sound and fury of the world
reverberated within psychoanalysis, causing it to change or readapt. It should be remembered, too, that if psychoanalysis has a closer intimacy with the individual’s psychic suffering than do other approaches, this is attributable to the intense personal involvement of
those who helped refine its powers; for this reason we paid particular attention to the biography of the pioneers and their chief successors. Readers who find certain biographical
details merely anecdotal are urged to bear in mind that no theoretical proposition should
be entirely detached from the conscious and unconscious life of its originator, and this
goes for Freud as much as for anyone else. We have nevertheless refrained from any hasty
or ‘‘wild’’ interpretations of individual figures: nothing could be more radically at odds
with the psychoanalytic approach than to pass judgment on a human being in just a few
lines.
It was indeed never the mission of this dictionary to rank individuals or tendencies. Of
course, it is impossible to avoid assuming criteria of worth, but even these cannot claim to
exist sub specie aeternitatis; rather, they are mainly reflections—setting aside the enthusiasm of a particular author for his or her subject—of the spirit of the times or of geograINTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
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phical context. The articles concerned with Jung or Jungian notions were thus assigned to
colleagues belonging to the societies of analytical psychology. Matters Adlerian were
handled likewise. And topics relating to a Sándor Ferenczi, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan or
Françoise Dolto were entrusted to writers close to them and their ideas. All is not told—
and gossip hounds are likely to be disappointed. In our view, a dictionary such as this is
neither holy writ nor pamphlet, but a kind of mirror held up to the time of its writing,
bearing all the signs of that time’s fashions and conformities, and addressed to future generations, who with the benefit of hindsight will assuredly be able to read far more between
the lines than is discernible to us.
With respect to our handling of Freud’s works, we decided that the best way to avoid
entanglement in the thickets of editions and translations around the world was to adopt as
our basic system of reference the chronological bibliographical tags updated in Ingeborg
Meyer-Palmedo and Gerhard Fichtner’s Freud-Bibliographie mit Werkkonkordanz (Frankfurt on the Main: S. Fischer, 1989). Our ‘‘Freud Bibliography’’ lists works of Freud according to this system; in each case the title is given in German and in English, along with a
reference where applicable to the Gesammelte Werke and to the Standard Edition. It should
be noted that we list only those works of Freud that are mentioned in the dictionary. Similarly, the ‘‘General Bibliography’’ is confined to works referred to in the text, and is in no
sense intended to replace Alexander Grinstein’s Index of Psychoanalytic Writings (New
York: International Universities Press, 1956-75).
‘‘A strange adventure,’’ I wrote at the beginning of this preface, and the reader will perhaps have surmised on the basis of the above description of our modus operandi that the
going was not always painless, or without its conflicts and clashes, even its moments of
despondency. Yet we were always boosted by encouraging words from friends and colleagues who had got wind of our project in its earliest days and, from near or far, followed its
progress throughout. Nor did we ever relinquish the conviction that this dictionary would
answer a clear need in the analytic profession and among students or researchers who
would find it to be a tool unlike any produced thus far.
If there is such a thing as a ‘‘language of psychoanalysis,’’ albeit one considered opaque
at times by its critics, we are confident that the present work will show it to be neither a
wooden nor a dead language. It has grown up from roots shared by all psychoanalysts, but,
as the range of our entries shows, from these common origins have sprung a variety of
‘‘dialects.’’ Each of them—Adlerian, Jungian, Rankian, Ferenczian, Lacanian, or Bionian—
has developed in its own way, and inevitably affected the others in the process. Each, to a
greater or lesser degree, has weathered conflict, or eclipse and revival—testimony to a salutary psychoanalytic ‘‘heteroglossia,’’ and to the kind of freedom that stimulates thought.
The infinite variety of human beings, the diversity of their personal histories and the complexity of a psychological approach that encompasses the dimension of the unconscious
can never be forced into the mold of a hypostasized language or submit to the dictates of
some Big Brother preparing the ‘‘Newspeak’’ dictionary.
You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying
words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. . . .
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall
make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every
concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined.
. . . Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller (George
Orwell, 1984. London: Secker and Warburg, 1987 [1949], pp. 53–54, 55).
Alea jacta est. This work is now in the hands of its readers. They are invited to handle it
as they will. To contribute notes or offer corrections. To convey to us their critical thoughts
and to suggest topics they would like to see dealt with in the future. Such active expressions
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TO THE
FRENCH EDITION
of interest would be the best possible reward for me personally and indeed for all those
who have lent their hand over these last years to this portrait of psychoanalysis in the world
of today.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
PARIS, JUNE 19, 2001
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PSYCHOANALYSIS
x ii i
PREFACE
PREFACE TO
TO THE
THE AMERICAN
AMERICAN EDITION
EDITION
I am thrilled and honored to be a part of the initiative Thomson Gale (represented by
Frank Menchaca as well as the highly-effective and ever-smiling Nathalie Duval) has undertaken to share this Dictionary, whose production I directed in France, with an American
audience. This enormous and very difficult work has been successfully completed by a
highly-motivated team, including (amongst the many others whom I shall not name):
Rachel J. Kain, Rita Runchock, and Patricia Kamoun-Bergwerk; the remarkable American
advisors Edward Nersessian and Paul Roazen who reviewed all the texts; Nellie Thompson,
whose aid was invaluable at various stages in the project; Matthew von Unwerth, who compiled the ‘‘Further Readings’’ sections, and above all, the translators and revisers who fulfilled the difficult task of rendering texts into English that had for the most part been written by authors from France, Spain, Germany, and Portugal.
These translators encountered difficulties raised by more than just the languages in
which the authors wrote about these psychoanalytic concepts or biographies they were
charged with. Despite a common foundation stemming directly from FreudÕs ideas, divergent conceptions leading them to be grasped from slightly more theoretical versus clinical
viewpoints, depending on where one is standing, were necessarily in evidence—a fact that
had to be both respected and, at the same time, made more accessible to American readers.
However the sheer number of authors and the scope of their starting-points, as much
national as related to different schools of psychoanalysis, nonetheless help us to avoid any
sort of monolithic thinking, and beckon the reader to go beyond his or her reading of these
dictionary entries with research that deepens their insight. For example, we have avoided
repeating the precise definitions of terms cited by specific entries that the dictionary
defines elsewhere. We have instead trusted that this dictionary would avail itself from page
to page, concept to concept, psychoanalyst to psychoanalyst, to the likings of the systematic
research or slightly poetic wanderings that constitute the most effective, or the most enlivened, approaches to getting to know a work such as this.
In the Preface to the French edition I offer detailed ‘‘directions for use’’ to readers of this
work, so there is no need to revisit that subject. Let me rather use the few lines afforded me
here to reiterate the particular importance of this American edition—in my eyes at any
rate. It speaks English, like most of the countries in the world today, and English is, of
course, an indispensable vector for any thought with claims to universality. Since its humble beginnings in Vienna, psychoanalysis has obviously had a global impact not only in the
clinical and therapeutic realms, but also in the arenas of culture and thought. The twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been marked by ideas whose development has deeply affected the existence of each and every one of us. Our sexual and political lives, our
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morality, our ways of understanding our relationships with others-all bear the unmistakable stamp of Freud’s legacy. By virtue of his family background and his many-sided education and training, Freud ended up at the point of intersection of cultural inflluences out of
(and against) which psychoanalysis was gradually forged. This dual process, by no means
painless, ensured the new discipline a position and multiple functions, which, as we may
now plainly see as we look back over the years, have themselves been subject to continual
evolution.
A procedure for psychopathological investigation, a method with therapeutic aims, or a
conceptual apparatus to account for the workings of the psyche (l Õesprit) in its external productions as well as its corporeal bonds—out of this ideological and scientific past which Freud
conveyed, psychoanalysis has, in turn, modified the conditions of research into the most varied domains of knowledge and none, today, may pretend to be totally beyond its influence.
No matter what position pharmacology assumes, (and we must believe in its progress),
the encounter with the mentally ill, the listening to their discourse and the decryption of
their delusional sayings in order to glean their secret message, like the patient reestablishing
vanished relational capacities, will forever remain an affair that takes place between two
human beings, from one psychical apparatus to another. The hope that inspired Jung and
Bleuler when they first took responsibility for the schizophrenics in the Burghöltzi Asylum
was as great as their disappointment. This phenomena repeated itself always and everywhere: Psychoanalysis began by appearing as ‘‘The Solution’’ to the unsolvable problems of
mental illness. The example of America, beacon of enthusiasms and of disappointments, is
illustrative in this respect—even more spectacularly so in that the all-powerful American
Psychoanalytic Association permitted only doctors, psychiatrists for the most part, to join
its ranks for the better part of 60 years.
Such is not the case today. Yet even though this puncturing of belief-systems might
make us think of a destructive tidal wave, this investigatory drive remains—a drive that
mobilizes psychoanalysts for their research into new clinical terrain, as they attempt to
shed light on and treat ever more diverse and grave pathological conditions. One day, no
doubt, new psychopathological conceptions will effect another exploratory synthesis of the
psyche and its dysfunctions, thereby authorizing new avenues of approach that will once
again appear to us as nothing short of miraculous. But in the meantime, the patient and
modest relational exchange, which underpins the psychoanalytic approach to patients in
the psychical domain, remains todayÕs most developed adjuvant therapy, whose evergreater efficacy and more precise pinpointing may be looked for in the progress of the neurosciences, neurobiology, genetics or immunology.
Although it continues to furnish, as Freud suggested, a ‘‘yield of knowledge’’ for other
scientific domains, psychoanalysis gains its creative power and persistent originality from
its position on the margins, due to the fact of its being the ‘‘other’’ that cannot be integrated into these disciplines, including literature, history, philosophy, etc. It is the ‘‘other’’
which disrupts through its theoretical a priori of a subversive discourse subjacent to all
manifest discourse and which, (as the example of Freud himself proves), can never forget
that its own words, as well as its thoughts, are condemned to expressing double-meanings,
to contradiction, to interrogation; and which could therefore never be thought of as a finished product, a self-enclosed theory, still less a dogma.
The turbulent political events of recent years have refueled the diffusion of psychoanalysis into territories that had previously been closed to it. Therefore both theory and practice
will have to rub shoulders with new cultures, languages and other philosophical, religious,
medical and scientific traditions. No doubt they will thereby come to brave new storms,
know new successes and, fleeting declines. But we must always hope they will be capable of
enriching themselves with these various contributions. For only thus is the never-ending
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research into the human psyche and its creations embarked upon anew—a quest that constitutes the psychoanalystÕs true place in the world of yesterday, today and, for an unforeseeable time still, tomorrow.
Once again, I am particularly pleased and proud that the American edition of this dictionary is contributing, more so than all those that came before it, to extending and diffusing this perpetual renewal of Freudian thought throughout the world.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
xvii
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION TO
TO THE
THE AMERICAN
AMERICAN EDITION
EDITION
Psychoanalysis is over 100 years old. Over the course of the 20th century, many new terms
and concepts have been added to FreudÕs original constructs. This evolution has occurred
not just in Vienna, Berlin, or Europe, but rather, all over the world. Consequently, new
ideas have been formulated throughout and across the increasingly far-flung psychoanalytic community, and despite the existence of an international organization with a rich scientific program, regularly published journals, and an abundance of meetings and exchanges,
the language of psychoanalysis is not as uniform as one would expect. Some concepts are
understood differently and more importantly, have varying implications in different parts
of the world. Other ideas are highly developed and given special status in some countries,
while they are unknown or rarely utilized in others. To complicate matters further, schools
of thought have developed with variant degrees of deviation from FreudÕs metapsychology.
A student entering the field of psychoanalysis today has a more difficult task than students of previous generations, in that there is much more to learn and understand, and a
greater imperative to be in communication with colleagues in other parts of the world. To
integrate the disparate concepts elaborated in different parts of the world, todayÕs practitioner and anyone interested in the history of psychoanalysis must know, understand, and
be capable of evaluating many divergent ideas and theoretical constructs. Well-informed
dialogue among colleagues from different countries with other perspectives demands that
psychoanalysts have a resource—a handbook, so to speak—that provides a brief, concise,
but nevertheless sufficiently rigorous exposition of the lexicon of the field.
There have been some attempts in the past to create a dictionary and a glossary of psychoanalysis; The Language of Psychoanalysis by Laplanche and Pontalis is one such major
effort in this direction; another is the glossary prepared under the aegis of the American
Psychoanalytic Association. However, neither of these two works, as useful as they have
been, has been able to cover all the disparate concepts, and many analysts have felt the need
for an international encyclopedia of psychoanalysis. This need has become even more
acute as psychoanalysts have become increasingly interested in facilitating an international
exchange of ideas.
When Dr. de Mijolla decided to embark on this project, he was undertaking a Herculean
task, but one whose value is unquestionable. Naturally, it would be impossible for one person to develop such an encyclopedia alone, and therefore, it was essential that he obtain
the help of psychoanalysts from all over the world. Thus, the 1569 entries in this volume
are the work of many contributors, with some contributing more than one entry. While
such an arrangement made the timely development of an encyclopedia possible, it also created difficulties in the achievement of a uniform style. On the other hand, there is an
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important advantage to this way of proceeding, in that authors known to be experts on a
particular subject could contribute an entry in their area of specialization, enhancing the
quality of the entries.
A second challenge, and one more specific to the English edition, is the difficulty in
translating from the original French text. The team working on this edition has done its
best to make the translations as fluid and easily comprehensible as possible. Nevertheless,
given the number of translators and the inherent difficulties of interpretation, there may
occasionally be a certain degree of rigidity to the sentences or differences from entry to
entry. The final product, however, manages to offer a text that is simultaneously eminently
approachable and extremely useful.
It will also become clear upon perusing the dictionary that a substantial number of the
authors are French. As a result, there is more material on areas of psychoanalysis that have
either developed more fully in France or are mostly used by French analysts. This, of
course, makes the dictionary a unique source for anyone interested in understanding specific notions and concepts that are prevalent in the thinking of French psychoanalysts. It
does, however, engender less coverage of ego psychology, conflict theory, and relational
theory by the French authors; moreover, the impression of a negative view of ego psychology, in particular, and American psychoanalysis in general may be an artifact of the composition of the group of contributors. This is not surprising, given the lack of acceptance of
HartmanÕs views in France, particularly by Lacan. Additionally, the animosity that developed between Rudolph Loewenstein and Jacques Lacan had no small hand in the increasingly critical attitude taken by the latter towards ego psychology. Some in France consider
ego psychology to be too close to the conscious, and perhaps even too superficial, and
therefore are dismissive of it, a viewpoint for which the reader may see evidence in some of
the entries. On the other hand, American analysts, if writing about French psychoanalysis,
could possibly take a prejudicial attitude and accuse French psychoanalysts of doing ‘‘wild
analysis.’’ However, with the increase in dialogue and exchange between French and American analysts, these sorts of prejudices are diminishing, and the sharing of perspectives has
enriched the members of both groups. As one example of such cross-fertilization, this current edition of the encyclopedia has attempted to present ego psychology and compromise
theory in a more balanced way, with the addition of a number of new entries, such as that
of Dr. Charles Brenner on modern conflict theory. In addition, to supplement those entries
that refer too exclusively to French works, this edition has added a list of suggested readings
with references to American sources, compiled by Matthew von Unwerth.
The reader may also notice that the biographies of some prominent psychoanalysts are
not mentioned in this volume, as only deceased analysts are included. Unfortunately, some
omissions are unavoidable in any reference work that attempts to be as comprehensive as
this encyclopedia. Hopefully, the reader will find the addition of photos from the archives
of psychoanalysis enlivening and enriching.
Finally, I would like to thank those whose beneficent help made this work not only possible, but even enjoyable. Alain de Mijolla is of course, first and foremost, not only for entrusting me with this task, but also for allowing me a free hand, to a large extent, and for trusting
my opinion on those occasions when independent judgment was needed. Nathalie Duval
was another important anchor, enormously supportive and unfailingly good-humored, even
at the most difficult moments. Her staff, too, was of great help, always in the background,
unassuming, but faithfully executing the necessary tasks to ensure the work could proceed
smoothly. A special word of thanks goes to the editors and translators whose work could not
have been easy, considering the amount of highly technical material that required faithful
interpretation. I would particularly like to single out the work of Donald Nicholson-Smith
who never ceased to amaze me with his understanding of the semantics of psychoanalytic
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language and the elegance and precision of his translations. And, finally, in the end, my gratitude and I am sure that of yours, the reader, goes to the men and women who penned the
original entries, as well as a special grateful acknowledgment to those analysts who have
added their contributions to this new edition of the encyclopedia.
EDWARD NERSESSIAN
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
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x xi
LIST
OF ENTRIES
LIST OF
ENTRIES
A
‘‘A. Z.’’
Álvaro Rey de Castro
Translated by Liam Gavin
Abandonment
Jean-Claude Arfouilloux
Translated by Liam Gavin
Abel, Carl
Laurent Danon-Boileau
Translated by Robert Bononno
Aberastury, Arminda, also known as
‘‘La Negra’’
Eduardo J. Salas
Translated by Robert Bononno
Abraham, Karl
Johannes Cremerius
Translated by Robert Bononno
Abraham, Nicolas
Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok
Translated by Robert Bononno
Abstinence/rule of abstinence
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Dan Collins
Act/action
Roger Perron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Acting out/acting in
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Donald
Nicholson-Smith
Action-(re)presentation
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Action-language
Simone Valantin
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Action-thought (H. Kohut)
Agnès Oppenheimer
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Translated by Robert Bononno
Active imagination (analytical
psychology)
Joan Chodorow
Adorno, Theodor and Freud
Sergio Paulo Rouanet
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Active technique
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Dan Collins
Agency
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Activity/passivity
Serge Gauthier
Translated by Robert Bononno
Aggressiveness/aggression
Jean Bergeret
Translated by Dan Collins
Act, passage to the
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Dan Collins
Aichhorn, August
Jeanne Moll
Translated by Robert Bononno
Actual neurosis/defense neurosis
Claude Smadja
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Aimée, case of
Bernard Toboul
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Acute psychoses
Michel Demangeat
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Ajase complex
Keigo Okonogi
Adaptation
Roger Perron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Addiction
David Rosenfeld
Translated by Robert Bononno
Adhesive identification
Robert D. Hinshelwood
Adler, Alfred
Helmut Gröger
Translated by Robert Bononno
Adolescence
Alain Braconnier
Translated by Robert Bononno
Adolescent crisis
Philippe Jeammet
x xi ii
Alchemy (analytical psychology)
Beverley D. Zabriskie
Alcoholism
Jean-Paul Descombey
Translated by Robert Bononno
Alexander, Franz Gabriel
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by Robert Bononno
Alienation
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Dan Collins
Allendy, René Félix Eugène
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Allendy-Nel-Dumouchel, Yvonne
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Translated by Robert Bononno
LIST
OF
ENTRIES
Allergic object relationship
Robert Asséo
Translated by Robert Bononno
Allergy
Robert Asséo
Translated by Robert Bononno
Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für
Psychotherapie
Geoffrey Cocks
Almanach der Psychoanalyse
Andrea Huppke
Translated by Robert Bononno
Alpha function
Hanna Segal
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Alpha-elements
Hanna Segal
Alter ego
Agnès Oppenheimer
Translated by Robert Bononno
Althusser, Louis
Michèle Bertrand
Translated by Robert Bononno
Altruism
Bernard Golse
Translated by Robert Bononno
Alvarez de Toledo, Luisa Agusta
Rebeca Gambier de
Augusto M. Picollo
Translated by Robert Bononno
Amae, concept of
Takeo Doi
Ambivalence
Victor Souffir
Translated by Robert Bononno
Amentia
Augustin Jeanneau
Translated by Robert Bononno
American Academy of Psychoanalysis
Samuel Slipp
American Imago
Martin J. Gliserman
American Psychoanalytic
Association
Leon Hoffman and Sharon Zalusky
Amnesia
François Richard
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Amphimixia/amphimixis
Pierre Sabourin
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
xx iv
Amplification (analytical psychology)
Andrew Samuels
Anaclisis/anaclictic
Jean Laplanche
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Anaclitic depression
Bernard Golse
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Anagogical interpretation
Jacques Angelergues
Translated by Dan Collins
Anna O., case of
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Année psychologique, L’Annick Ohayon
Translated by Robert Bononno
Annihilation anxiety
Marvin S. Hurvich
Translated by Liam Gavin
Anorexia nervosa
Philippe Jeammet
Translated by Liam Gavin
Anality
Dominique J. Arnoux
Translated by Robert Bononno
Anthropology and psychoanalysis
Michèle Porte
Translated by Robert Bononno
Anal-sadistic stage
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Donald
Nicholson-Smith
Anticathexis/counter-cathexis
Paul Denis
Translated by Dan Collins
Analysand
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Anticipatory ideas
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
‘‘Analysis of a Phobia in a
Five-year-old Boy’’ (Little Hans )
Veronica Mächtlinger
Antilibidinal ego/internal
saboteur
Jennifer Johns
‘‘Analysis Terminable and
Interminable’’
René Péran
Translated by Dan Collins
Antinarcissism
Michèle Bertrand
Translated by Dan Collins
Analytic psychodrama
Nadine Amar
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Analytical psychology
Murray Stein
Analyzability
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Andersson, Ola
Per Magnus Johansson
Translated by Robert Bononno
Andreas-Salomé, Louise (Lou)
Inge Weber
Translated by Robert Bononno
Animal magnetism
Jacqueline Carroy
Translated by Robert Bononno
Animistic thought
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Liam Gavin
Animus-Anima
Betty De Shong Meador
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia
Sylvie Gosme-Séguret
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Anxiety
Francisco Palacio Espasa
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Anxiety dream
Roger Perron
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Anzieu, Didier
René Kaës
Translated by Robert Bononno
Aphanisis
Bernard Golse
Translated by Dan Collins
Aphasia
Georges Lantéri-Laura
Translated by Robert Bononno
Applied psychoanalysis and the
interaction of psychoanalysis
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
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ENTRIES
Apprenti-historien et le
maı́tre-sorcier (L’-) [The
apprentice historian and the
master sorcerer]
Ghyslain Charron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Aubry Weiss, Jenny
Marcelle Geber
Translated by Robert Bononno
Balint group
Michelle Moreau Ricaud
Translated by Dan Collins
Aulagnier-Spairani, Piera
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Archaic
Cléopâtre Athanassiou-Popesco
Translated by Robert Bononno
Australia
O.H.D. Blomfield
Balint, Michael (Bálint [Bergsmann],
Mihály)
Judith Dupont
Translated by Dan Collins
Archaic mother
Sylvain Missonnier
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Archeology, the metaphor of
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Austria
August Ruhs
Translated by Robert Bononno
Autism
Didier Houzel
Translated by Dan Collins
Archetype (analytical psychology)
Murray Stein
Autistic capsule/nucleus
Geneviève Haag
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Archives de psychologie, Les
Annick Ohayon
Translated by Robert Bononno
Autistic defenses
Elsa Schmid-Kitsikis
Translated by Dan Collins
Argentina
Roberto Doria-Medina Jr, Samuel Arbiser,
and Moisés Kijak
Translated by Robert Bononno
‘‘Autobiographical Study, An’’
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Arlow, Jacob
Harold P. Blum
Autobiography
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Armand Trousseau Children’s
Hospital
Frédérique Jacquemain
Translated by Liam Gavin
Autoeroticism
Roger Perron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Arrogance
James S. Grotstein
Autohistorization
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
As if personality
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Liam Gavin
Automatism
Pascale Michon-Raffaitin
Translated by Dan Collins
Association psychanalytique de
France
Jean-Louis Lang
Translated by Robert Bononno
Autoplastic
Steven Wainrib
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Autosuggestion
Jacqueline Carroy
Translated by Robert Bononno
Asthma
Robert Asséo
Translated by Liam Gavin
Asthma in contemporary medicine
and psychoanalysis
John Galbraith Simmons
Attachment
Antoine Guédeney
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bachelard, Gaston
Roger Bruyeron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Baginsky, Adolf
Johann Georg Reicheneder
Translated by Robert Bononno
Attention
Bernard Golse
Translated by Dan Collins
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
B
Bak, Robert C.
Hungarian Group
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Balint-Szekely-Kovács, Alice
Judith Dupont
Translated by Dan Collins
Baranger, Willy
Madeleine Baranger
Translated by Robert Bononno
Basic assumption
Bernard Defontaine
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Basic fault
Corinne Daubigny
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Basic Neurosis, The—Oral Regression
and Psychic Masochism
Melvyn L. Iscove
Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry
Simone Valantin
Translated by Robert Bononno
Baudouin, Charles
Mireille Cifali
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bauer, Ida
Patrick Mahony
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Beirnaert, Louis
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Robert Bononno
Belgium
André Alsteens
Translated by Robert Bononno
Belief
Odon Vallet
Translated by Robert Bononno
Benedek, Therese
Delphine Schilton
Translated by Robert Bononno
Benign/malignant regression
Michelle Moreau Ricaud
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Berge, André
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Berggasse 19, Wien IX
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LIST
OF
ENTRIES
Ingrid Scholz-Strasser
Translated by Robert Bononno
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Florian Houssier
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bergler, Edmund
Melvyn L. Iscove
Binswanger, Ludwig
Ruth Menahem
Translated by Robert Bononno
Berliner Psychoanalytische Poliklinik
Regine Lockot
Translated by Liam Gavin
Biological bedrock
Michèle Porte
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Berliner Psychoanalytisches Institut
Regine Lockot
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht
Parthenope Bion Talamo
Berman, Anne
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bernays-Freud, Minna
Albrecht Hirschmüller
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bernfeld, Siegfried
R. Horacio Etchegoyen
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bernheim, Hippolyte
Jacqueline Carroy
Translated by Robert Bononno
Beta-elements
Hanna Segal
Beta-screen
Hanna Segal
Bettelheim, Bruno
Nina Sutton
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Michèle Porte
Translated by Robert Bononno
Biblioteca Nueva de Madrid (Freud,
S., Obras Completas)
José Gutiérrez Terrazas
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bibring, Edward
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bibring-Lehner, Grete
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bick, Esther
Bernard Golse
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bigras, Julien Joseph Normand
Élisabeth Bigras
Translated by Robert Bononno
Binding/unbinding of the instincts
Pierre Delion
xx vi
Body image
David Rosenfeld
Boehm, Felix Julius
Regine Lockot
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Bonaparte, Marie Léon
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bipolar self
Agnès Oppenheimer
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Book of the It, The
Herbert Will
Translated by Liam Gavin
Birth
Didier Houzel
Translated by Liam Gavin
Borderline conditions
Augustin Jeanneau
Translated by Robert Bononno
Birth, dream of
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Boredom
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bisexuality
Paulo R. Ceccarelli
Translated by Dan Collins
Bizarre object
Edna O’Shaughnessy
Borel, Adrien Alphonse Alcide
Nadine Mespoulhès
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bjerre, Poul
Per Magnus Johansson
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bornstein, Berta
Simone Valantin
Translated by Liam Gavin
Black hole
Bernard Golse
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Bose, Girindrasekhar
Sudhir Kakar
Translated by Robert Bononno
Blackett-Milner, Marion
Didier Rabain
Translated by Liam Gavin
Boston Psychoanalytic Society
Sanford Gifford
Blank/nondelusional psychoses
Michel Demangeat
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Blanton, Smiley
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bleger, José
Susana Beatriz Dupetit
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bleuler, Paul Eugen
Bernard Minder
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bloc—Notes de la psychanalyse
Mario Cifali
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bloch, Jean-Richard
Michelle Moreau Ricaud
Translated by Robert Bononno
Blos, Peter
Boundary violations
Glen O. Gabbard
Bouvet, Maurice Charles Marie
Germain
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bowlby, Edward John Mostyn
Nicole Guédeney
Translated by Robert Bononno
Brain and psychoanalysis, the
Daniel Widlöcher
Translated by Robert Bononno
Brazil
Marialzira Perestrello
Translated by Liam Gavin
Breakdown
Denys Ribas
Translated by Robert Bononno
Breast, good/bad object
Robert D. Hinshelwood
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
LIST
Breastfeeding
Joyceline Siksou
Translated by Robert Bononno
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Cárcamo, Celes Ernesto
Roberto Doria-Medina Jr
Translated by Robert Bononno
Brentano, Franz von
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Caruso, Igor A.
August Ruhs
Translated by Robert Bononno
Breton, André
Nicole Geblesco
Translated by Robert Bononno
Case histories
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Liam Gavin
Breuer, Josef
Albrecht Hirschmüller
Translated by Robert Bononno
Castration complex
Jean Bergeret
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Brierley, Marjorie Flowers
Anne Hayman
Brill, Abraham Arden
Arnold D. Richards
British Psycho-Analytical Society
Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner
Catastrophic change
James S. Grotstein
Brücke, Ernst Wihelm von
Helmut Gröger
Translated by Robert Bononno
Cathartic method
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Brun, Rudolf
Kaspar Weber
Translated by Robert Bononno
Brunswick, Ruth Mack
Paul Roazen
Bulimia
Christine Vindreau
Translated by Liam Gavin
Bullitt, William C.
Paul Roazen
Burghölzli Asylum
Bernard Minder
Translated by Robert Bononno
Burlingham-Tiffany, Dorothy
Bernard Golse
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Burrow, Trigant
Malcolm Pines
Cäcilie M., case of
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Canada
Jacques Vigneault
Translated by Robert Bononno
OF
Certeau, Michel de
François Dosse
Translated by Robert Bononno
Change
Daniel Widlöcher
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Character
Robert Asséo
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Character Analysis
Roger Dadoun
Translated by Dan Collins
Character formation
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Character neurosis
Robert Asséo
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Charcot, Jean Martin
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Cathexis
Paul Denis
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Chertok, Léon (Tchertok, Lejb)
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Cénac, Michel
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute
John Galbraith Simmons
Censoring the lover in her
Michel Ody and Laurent
Danon-Boileau
Translated by Liam Gavin
Censorship
Roger Perron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Centre psychopédagogique
Claude-Bernard
Claire Doz-Schiff
Translated by Liam Gavin
Capacity to be alone
Certainty
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Chentrier, Théodore
André Michel
Translated by Robert Bononno
Centre de consultations et de
traitements psychanalytiques
Jean-Favreau
Jean-Luc Donnet
Translated by Liam Gavin
Cahiers Confrontation, Les
Chantal Talagrand
ENTRIES
Cathectic energy
Paul Denis
Translated by Dan Collins
Centre Alfred-Binet
Gérard Lucas
Translated by Liam Gavin
C
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
Catastrophe theory and
psychoanalysis
Michèle Porte
Translated by Robert Bononno
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Child analysis
Antoine Guédeney
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Childhood
Claudine Geissmann
Translated by Robert Bononno
Childhood and Society
Paul Roazen
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Children’s play
Nora Kurts
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Chile
Omar Arrué
Translated by Robert Bononno
China
Geoffrey H. Blowers and Teresa Yuan
Choice of neurosis
Daniel Widlöcher
Translated by Robert Bononno
xxvii
LIST
OF
ENTRIES
Choisy, Maryse
Jacqueline Cosnier
Translated by Robert Bononno
Christians and Jews: A Psychoanalytical Study
Michelle Moreau Ricaud
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Collective unconscious (analytical
psychology)
David I. Trésan
Colloque sur l’ inconscient
Georges Lantéri-Laura
Translated by Robert Bononno
Cinema criticism
Glen O. Gabbard
Colombia
Guillermo Sanchez Medina
Translated by Liam Gavin
Civilization and its Discontents
Michèle Porte
Translated by Robert Bononno
‘‘Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest’’
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Liam Gavin
Claparède, Édouard
Mireille Cifali
Translated by Robert Bononno
Clark University
Robert Shilkret
Clark-Williams, Margaret
Georges Schopp
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Claude, Henri Charles Jules
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Claustrophobia
Laurent Muldworf
Translated by Robert Bononno
Clinging instinct
Hungarian Group
Cocaine and psychoanalysis
David Rosenfeld
Translated by Liam Gavin
Cognitivism and psychoanalysis
Daniel Widlöcher
Translated by Robert Bononno
Collected Papers on Schizophrenia
and Related Subjects
Richard M. Waugaman
Collective psychology
Michèle Porte
xx viii
Congrès international de l’hypnotisme
expérimental et scientifique,
Premier
François Duyckaerts
Translated by Robert Bononno
Collège de psychanalystes
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Robert Bononno
Cinema and psychoanalysis
Pierre-Jean Bouyer and Sylvain Bouyer
Translated by Robert Bononno
Civilization (Kultur)
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Congrès des psychanalystes de langue
française des pays romans
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Liam Gavin
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Conscious processes
Raymond Cahn
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Consciousness
Raymond Cahn
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Combined parent figure
Robert D. Hinshelwood
Compensation (analytical psychology)
Peter Mudd
Compensatory structures
Arnold Goldberg
Translated by Andrew Brown
Complemental series
Bernard Golse
Translated by Liam Gavin
Complex
Roger Perron
Translated by Dan Collins
Complex (analytical psychology)
Verena Kast
Translated by Dan Collins
Compromise formation
Roger Perron
Translated by Dan Collins
Constitution
Claude Smadja
Translated by Liam Gavin
Construction de l’espace analytique
(La-) [Constructing the analytical
space]
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Liam Gavin
Construction/reconstruction
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Liam Gavin
‘‘Constructions in Analysis’’
Christian Seulin
Translated by Robert Bononno
Contact and psychoanalysis
Bernard This
Translated by Robert Bononno
Contact-barrier
Hanna Segal
Compulsion
Gérard Bonnet
Translated by Robert Bononno
Container-Contained
Jean-Claude Guillaume
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Concept
Pedro Luzes
Translated by Robert Bononno
Contradiction
Michèle Porte
Translated by Dan Collins
Condensation
Laurent Danon-Boileau
Translated by Liam Gavin
‘‘Contributions to the Psychology of
Love’’
Roger Perron
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Conflict
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Confrontation
Chantal Talagrand
‘‘Confusion of Tongues between
Adults and the Child’’
Pierre Sabourin
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Controversial Discussions
Riccardo Steiner
Convenience, dream of
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Conversion
Roger Perron
Translated by Robert Bononno
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
LIST
Coprophilia
Dominique J. Arnoux
Translated by Liam Gavin
Dark continent
Julia Kristeva
Translated by Robert Bononno
Coq-Héron, Le
Judith Dupont
Translated by Robert Bononno
Darwin, Darwinism, and psychoanalysis
Roger Perron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Corrao, Francesco
Anna Maria Accerboni
Translated by Robert Bononno
Day’s residues
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Counter-identification
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Dan Collins
Dead mother complex
André Green
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Counter-Oedipus
Roger Perron
Translated by Dan Collins
Death and psychoanalysis
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Counterphobic
Francis Drossart
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Death instinct (Thanatos)
Pierre Delion
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Counter-transference
Claudine Geissmann
Translated by Dan Collins
Decathexis
Paul Denis
Translated by Liam Gavin
‘‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’’
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Defense
Elsa Schmid-Kitsikis
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Creativity
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Defense mechanisms
Elsa Schmid-Kitsikis
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Criminology and psychoanalysis
Daniel Zagury
Translated by Robert Bononno
Deferred action
Jean Laplanche
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Cruelty
Annette Fréjaville
Translated by Robert Bononno
Deferred action and trauma
Odile Lesourne
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Cryptomnesia
Erik Porge
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Cultural transmission
Madeleine Baranger
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Cure
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Dan Collins
Déjà vu
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Delay, Jean
Claude Delay
Translated by Robert Bononno
Delboeuf, Joseph Rémi Léopold
François Duyckaerts
Translated by Robert Bononno
Czech Republic
Michael Sebek
D
Delgado, Honorio
Álvaro Rey de Castro
Translated by Robert Bononno
Dalbiez, Roland
Annick Ohayon
Translated by Robert Bononno
Delusion
Augustin Jeanneau
Translated by Robert Bononno
Danger
Claude Barrois
Translated by Robert Bononno
Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s
‘‘Gradiva’’
Roger Perron
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
OF
ENTRIES
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Demand
Gabriel Balbo
Translated by Dan Collins
Dementia
Richard Uhl
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Denmark
Ole Andkjær Olsen
Translated by Robert Bononno
Dependence
Bénédicte Bonnet-Vidon
Translated by Robert Bononno
Depersonalization
Paul Denis
Translated by Robert Bononno
Depression
Francisco Palacio Espasa
Depressive position
Robert D. Hinshelwood
Deprivation
Grazia Maria Fava Vizziello
Translated by Robert Bononno
Desexualization
Marc Bonnet
Translated by Robert Bononno
Desoille, Robert
Jacques Launay
Translated by Robert Bononno
Destrudo
Bernard Golse
Translated by Robert Bononno
Determinism
Dominique Auffret
Translated by Robert Bononno
Detski Dom
Irina Manson
Translated by Robert Bononno
Deuticke, Franz
Lydia Marinelli
Translated by Robert Bononno
Deutsch, Felix
Paul Roazen
Deutsches Institut für Psychologische
Forschung und Psychotherapie
(Institut Göring)
Geoffrey Cocks
Deutsch-Rosenbach, Helene
Paul Roazen
Development of Psycho-Analysis
xx ix
LIST
OF
ENTRIES
Corinne Daubigny
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Developmental disorders
Roger Perron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Devereux, Georges
Simone Valantin
Translated by Robert Bononno
Diatkine, René
Florence Quartier-Frings
Translated by Robert Bononno
Dipsomania
Jean-Paul Descombey
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Direct analysis
Roger Perron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Directed daydream (R. Desoille)
Jacques Launay
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Disavowal
Bernard Penot
Translated by Robert Bononno
Discharge
Alain Fine
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Disintegration products
Arnold Goldberg
Translated by Andrew Brown
Disintegration, feelings of, anxieties
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Dismantling
Geneviève Haag
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Disorganization
Claude Smadja
Translated by Robert Bononno
Displacement
Elsa Schmid-Kitsikis
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Displacement of the transference
François Duparc
Translated by Dan Collins
Disque vert, Le
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
‘‘Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, A’’
Henri Vermorel
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
xx x
Documents et Débats
Jean-Yves Tamet
Translated by Robert Bononno
Dream’s navel
Roger Perron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Dolto-Marette, Françoise
Bernard This
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Drive/instinct
Michèle Porte
Translated by Dan Collins
Don Juan and The Double
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Dualism
Michèle Porte
Translated by Robert Bononno
Doolittle-Aldington, Hilda (H.D.)
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Dubal, George
Mario Cifali
Translated by Liam Gavin
‘‘Dostoyevsky and Parricide’’
Marie-Thérèse Neyraut-Sutterman
Translated by Robert Bononno
Dugautiez, Maurice
Daniel Luminet
Translated by Liam Gavin
Dynamic point of view
René Roussillon
Translated by Liam Gavin
Dosuzkov, Theodor
Eugenie Fischer and René Fischer
Translated by Liam Gavin
E
Double bind
Jean-Pierre Caillot
Translated by Liam Gavin
Early interactions
Bernard Golse
Translated by Liam Gavin
Double, the
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Eckstein, Emma
Bertrand Vichyn
Translated by Robert Bononno
Doubt
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
École de la Cause freudienne
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Dan Collins
Dream
Roger Perron
Translated by Robert Bononno
École experimentale de Bonneuil
Michel Polo
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Dream interpretation
Roger Perron
Translated by Robert Bononno
École freudienne de Paris (Freudian
School of Paris)
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Dan Collins
Dream-like memory
Didier Houzel
Translated by Liam Gavin
Economic point of view
René Roussillon
Translated by Liam Gavin
‘‘Dream of the Wise Baby, The’’
Pierre Sabourin
Translated by Liam Gavin
Dream screen
Bernard Golse
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Dream symbolism
Roger Perron
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Écrits
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Dan Collins
Eder, David Montagu
Michelle Moreau Ricaud
Translated by Robert Bononno
Dream work
Roger Perron
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Ego
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Donald
Nicholson-Smith
Dreams and Myths
Johannes Cremerius
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Ego, alteration of the
Ernst Federn
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
LIST
Ego (analytical psychology)
Mario Jacoby
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Ego states
Marvin S. Hurvich
OF
ENTRIES
Translated by Robert Bononno
Ego-syntonic
Ernst Federn
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Enuresis
Gérard Schmit
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Eissler, Kurt Robert
Clifford Yorke
Envy
Robert D. Hinshelwood
Eissler-Selke, Ruth
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Envy and Gratitude
Robert D. Hinshelwood
Ego boundaries
Marvin S. Hurvich
Eitingon, Max
Michelle Moreau Ricaud
Translated by Robert Bononno
Eros
Roland Gori
Translated by Robert Bononno
Ego, damage inflicted on
Ernst Federn
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Elasticity
Pierre Sabourin
Translated by Liam Gavin
Eroticism, anal
Dominique J. Arnoux
Translated by Dan Collins
Ego (ego psychology)
Ernst Federn
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Elementi di psiocoanalisi
Anna Maria Accerboni
Translated by Robert Bononno
Eroticism, oral
Dominique J. Arnoux
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Ego feeling
Marvin S. Hurvich
Elisabeth von R., case of
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Eroticism, urethral
Dominique J. Arnoux
Translated by Dan Collins
Ellenberger, Henri Frédéric
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Erotogenic masochism
Denys Ribas
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Embirikos, Andreas
Anna Potamianou
Translated by Robert Bononno
Erotogenic zone
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Emden, Jan Egbert Gustaaf van
Jaap Bos and Christien Brinkgreve
Erotogenicity
Roland Gori
Translated by Liam Gavin
Ego and the Id, The
Jean-Luc Donnet
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense,
The
Elsa Schmid-Kitsikis
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Ego autonomy
Marvin S. Hurvich
Ego functions
Ernst Federn
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Ego ideal
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Ego ideal/ideal ego
Bernard Penot
Translated by Andrew Brown
Ego identity
Paul Roazen
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Emmy von N., case of
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Ego-instinct
Pierre Delion
Translated by Dan Collins
Emotion
Didier Houzel
Translated by Robert Bononno
Ego interests
Ernst Federn
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Empathy
Daniel Widlöcher
Translated by Robert Bononno
Ego-libido/object-libido
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Empty Fortress, The
Nina Sutton
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Ego psychology
Marvin S. Hurvich
Encopresis
Gérard Schmit
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Ego Psychology and the Problem of
Adaptation
Ernst Federn
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Ego Psychology and the Psychoses
Marvin S. Hurvich
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
Encounter
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Enriquez-Joly, Micheline Eugène
Enriquez
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Erikson, Erik Homburger
Paul Roazen
Erotomania
Michel Demangeat
Translated by Robert Bononno
Erythrophobia (fear of blushing)
Bernard Golse
Translated by Liam Gavin
Essential depression
Alain Fine
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Estrangement
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Ethics
Roland Gori
Translated by Dan Collins
Ethnopsychoanalysis
Marie-Rose Moro
Translated by Robert Bononno
Ethology and psychoanalysis
xx xi
LIST
OF
ENTRIES
Boris Cyrulnik
Translated by Robert Bononno
Fairbairn, William Ronald Dodds
Jennifer Johns
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Études Freudiennes
Danièle Brun
Translated by Sophie Leighton
False self
Jennifer Johns
Federación psicoanalı́tica de
América latina
Cláudio Laks Eizirik
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
European Psychoanalytical
Federation
Alain Gibeault
Translated by Robert Bononno
Evenly-suspended attention
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Évolution psychiatrique (l’ -)
(Developments in Psychiatry)
Jean Garrabé
Translated by Liam Gavin
Examination dreams
Roger Perron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Excitation
Alain Fine
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Exhibitionism
Delphine Schilton
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Experience of satisfaction
Bernard Golse
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Externalization-internalization
Delphine Schilton
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Extroversion/introversion (analytical
psychology)
Marie-Laure Grivet-Shillito
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Family
Alberto Eiguer
Translated by Robert Bononno
Family romance
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Fanon, Frantz
Guillaume Suréna
Translated by Robert Bononno
Fantasy
Roger Perron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Fantasy, formula of
Bernard Penot
Translated by Dan Collins
Fantasy (reverie)
Roger Perron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Fascination
Catherine Desprats-Péquignot
Translated by Robert Bononno
Fate neurosis
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Father complex
Roger Perron
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Fatherhood
Anne Aubert-Godard
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Ey, Henri
Jean Garrabé
Translated by Robert Bononno
Favez, Georges
Bernard Golse
Translated by Robert Bononno
F
Favez-Boutonier, Juliette
Bernard Golse
Translated by Robert Bononno
Face-to-face situation
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Facilitation
Bertrand Vichyn
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Fackel, Die
Erik Porge
Translated by Robert Bononno
Failure neurosis
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Liam Gavin
xxxii
Favreau, Jean Alphonse
Marie-Thérèse Montagnier
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Fear
Claude Bursztejn
Translated by Robert Bononno
Feces
Dominique J. Arnoux
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Fechner, Gustav Theodor
Bernd Nitzschke
Federn, Paul
Anna Maria Accerboni
Translated by Robert Bononno
Fedida, Pierre
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Female sexuality
Julia Kristeva
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Feminine masochism
Denys Ribas
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Femininity
Monique Schneider
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Femininity, rejection of
Monique Schneider
Translated by Dan Collins
Feminism and psychoanalysis
Rosine Jozef Perelberg
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Fenichel, Otto
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by Robert Bononno
Ferenczi, Sándor
Éva Brabant-Gerö
Translated by Robert Bononno
Fetishism
André Lussier
Translated by Robert Bononno
Finland
Per Magnus Johansson
Translated by Robert Bononno
First World War: The effect on the
development of psychoanalysis
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
Maı̈té Klahr and Claudie Millot
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Fixation
Claude Smadja
Translated by Dan Collins
Fliess, Wilhelm
Erik Porge
Translated by Robert Bononno
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
LIST
Flight into illness
Alain Fine
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Framework of the psychoanalytic
treatment
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Flournoy, Henri
Olivier Flournoy
Translated by Robert Bononno
France
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Flournoy, Théodore
Olivier Flournoy
Translated by Robert Bononno
Franco da Rocha, Francisco
Fabio Herrmann and Roberto Yutaka
Sagawa
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Flower Doll: Essays in Child
Psychotherapy
Bernard This
Translated by Liam Gavin
Frankl, Viktor
Jacques Sédat
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Flügel, John Carl
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Free association
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Fluss, Gisela
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Free energy/bound energy
Bertrand Vichyn
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Foreclosure
Charles Melman
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Freud, Anna
Clifford Yorke
Forgetting
François Richard
Translated by Robert Bononno
Freud-Bernays, Martha
Clifford Yorke
Formations of the unconscious
Alain Vanier
Translated by Dan Collins
Freud, Ernst
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Fornari, Franco
Giancarlo Gramaglia
Translated by Robert Bononno
Freud, Jakob Kolloman (or Keleman
or Kallamon)
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Fort-Da
Gérard Bonnet
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Foulkes (Fuchs), Siegmund
Heinrich
Malcolm Pines
Freud, (Jean) Martin
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Freud, Josef
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Four discourses
Joël Dor
Translated by Dan Collins
Freud: Living and Dying
Roy K. Lilleskov
Freud Museum
Michael Molnar
Fourth analysis
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Dan Collins
OF
ENTRIES
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Freud’s Self-Analysis
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Dan Collins
Freud, Sigmund (siblings)
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Freud, Sigmund Schlomo
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Freund Toszeghy, Anton von
Michelle Moreau Ricaud
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Friedländer-Fränkl, Kate
Clifford Yorke
Friendship
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Fright
Claude Barrois
Translated by Robert Bononno
Frink, Horace Westlake
Paul Roazen
‘‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’’ (Wolf Man)
Patrick Mahony
Fromm, Erich
Paul Roazen
Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda
Ann-Louise S. Silver
Frustration
Luiz Eduardo Prado de Oliveira
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Functional phenomenon
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Fundamental rule
Jean-Luc Donnet
Translated by Sophie Leighton
‘‘Fragment of an Analysis of a
Case of Hysteria’’ (Dora/Ida
Bauer)
Patrick Mahony
Freud-Nathanson, Amalia Malka
Alain de Mijolla
Fusion/defusion
Cléopâtre Athanassiou-Popesco
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Freud, Oliver
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Fusion/defusion of instincts
Josette Frappier
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Fragmentation
Agnès Oppenheimer
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Freud, The Secret Passion
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Future of an Illusion, The
Odon Vallet
Translated by Robert Bononno
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
xxx iii
LIST
OF
ENTRIES
G
Malcolm Pines
Gaddini, Eugenio
Anna Maria Accerboni
Translated by Robert Bononno
Goethe and psychoanalysis
Henri Vermorel
Translated by Robert Bononno
Gain (primary and secondary)
Dominique Blin
Translated by Liam Gavin
Goethe Prize
Thomas Plänkers
Translated by Robert Bononno
Gardiner, Muriel M.
Nellie L. Thompson
Good-enough mother
Jennifer Johns
Garma, Angel
R. Horacio Etchegoyen
Translated by Robert Bononno
Göring, Matthias Heinrich
Geoffrey Cocks
Gattel, Felix
Nicolas Gougoulis
Translated by Robert Bononno
Geleerd, Elisabeth
Nellie L. Thompson
Gender identity
Christopher Gelber
General theory of seduction
Jean Laplanche
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Genital love
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Robert Bononno
Genital stage
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
German romanticism and
psychoanalysis
Madeleine Vermorel and
7Henri Vermorel
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Germany
Regine Lockot
Translated by Robert Bononno
Gesammelte Schriften
Ilse Grubrich-Simitis
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Gessammelte Werke
Ilse Grubrich-Simitis
Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith
Gestapo
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Gift
Dominique J. Arnoux
Translated by Robert Bononno
Graf, Herbert
Veronica Mächtlinger
Graf, Max
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by Robert Bononno
Grandiose self
Agnès Oppenheimer
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Granoff, Wladimir Alexandre
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Robert Bononno
Graph of Desire
Bernard Penot
Translated by Dan Collins
Great Britain
Malcolm Pines
Greece
Anna Potamianou
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Group Psychology and the Analysis of
the Ego
Michèle Porte
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Group psychotherapies
René Kaës
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Guex, Germaine
Jean-Michel Quinodoz
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Guilbert, Yvette
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Guilt, feeling of
Léon Grinberg
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Guilt, unconscious sense of
Léon Grinberg
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
H
Halberstadt-Freud, Sophie
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Hall, Granville Stanley
Florian Houssier
Greenacre, Phyllis
Nellie L. Thompson
Hallucinatory, the
César Botella and Sára Botella
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Greenson, Ralph
Daniel Greenson
Hallucinosis
Edna O’Shaughnessy
Gressot, Michel
Jean-Michel Quinodoz
Translated by Robert Bononno
Hamlet and Oedipus
François Sacco
Translated by Robert Bononno
Grid
Pedro Luzes
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Groddeck, Georg Walther
Herbert Will
Translated by Robert Bononno
Gross, Otto Hans Adolf
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Glover, Edward
Clifford Yorke
Group analysis
René Kaës
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Glover, James
Group phenomenon
xxxiv
Bernard Defontaine
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Hampstead Clinic
Delphine Schilton
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Handling
Campbell Paul
Happel, Clara
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Hard science and psychoanalysis
Michèle Porte
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Hartmann, Heinz
Lawrence Hartmann
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
LIST
Hatred
Nicole Jeammet
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Hirschfeld, Elfriede
Nicolas Gougoulis
Translated by Robert Bononno
Heimann, Paula
Margaret Tonnesmann
Historical reality
René Roussillon
Translated by Robert Bononno
Held, René
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Historical truth
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Heller, Hugo
Lydia Marinelli
Translated by Liam Gavin
History and psychoanalysis
Roger Perron
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Hellman Noach, Ilse
Clifford Yorke
Translated by Liam Gavin
Hitschmann, Eduard
Harald Leupold-Löwenthal
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Helplessness
Anne Aubert-Godard
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
‘‘Heredity and the Etiology of the
Neuroses’’
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Liam Gavin
Heredity of acquired characters
Roger Perron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Hoffer, Willi (Wilhelm)
Clifford Yorke
Hogarth Press
Clifford Yorke
Holding
Campbell Paul
Hermann, Imre
Hungarian Group
Hollitscher-Freud, Mathilde
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Hermeneutics
Dominique Auffret
Translated by Robert Bononno
Hollós, István
Michelle Moreau Ricaud
Translated by Liam Gavin
Heroic identification
Bernard Golse
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Homosexuality
Bertrand Vichyn
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Horney-Danielson, Karen
Bernard Paris
Heroic self
Riccardo Steiner
Hospitalism
Léon Kreisler
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Hesnard, Angélo Louis Marie
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Hug-Hellmuth-Hug von
Hugenstein, Hermine
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Heterosexuality
Bertrand Vichyn
Translated by Liam Gavin
Heuyer, Georges
Jean-Louis Lang
Translated by Robert Bononno
Hietzing Schule/Burlingham-Rosenfeld School
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Hilferding-Hönigsberg, Margarethe
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by Robert Bononno
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
OF
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Hypnoid states
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Hypnosis
Jacqueline Carroy
Translated by Robert Bononno
Hypochondria
Alain Fine
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Hypocritical dream
Roger Perron
Translated by Dan Collins
Hysteria
Jacqueline Schaeffer
Translated by Robert Bononno
Hysterical paralysis
Augustin Jeanneau
Translated by Dan Collins
I
I
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Dan Collins
Id
Michèle Porte
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Idea/representation
Roger Perron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Idealization
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Dan Collins
Idealized parental imago
Agnès Oppenheimer
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Idealizing transference
Agnès Oppenheimer
Translated by Dan Collins
Ideational representation
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Humor
Jean-Pierre Kamierniak
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Ideational representative
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Hungarian School
Hungarian Group
Identification
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Hungary
Éva Brabant-Gerö
Translated by Robert Bononno
Hypercathexis
Richard Uhl
PSYCHOANALYSIS
ENTRIES
Identification fantasies
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Identification with the agressor
xx xv
LIST
OF
ENTRIES
Clifford Yorke
Translated by Robert Bononno
Identificatory project
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Individuation (analytical psychology)
Christian Gaillard
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Identity
Agnès Oppenheimer
Translated by Robert Bononno
Infans
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Ideology
Dominique Auffret
Translated by Robert Bononno
Infant development
Monique Piñol-Douriez and Maurice
Despinoy
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Illusion
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Imaginary identification/symbolic
identification
Marc Darmon
Translated by Dan Collins
Imaginary, the (Lacan)
Marie-Christine Laznik
Translated by Dan Collins
Imago
Antoine Ducret
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Imago Publishing Company
Clifford Yorke
Imago. Zeitschrift für die Anwendung
der Psychoanalyse auf die
Geisteswissenschaften
Lydia Marinelli
Translated by Robert Bononno
Imposter
Andrée Bauduin
Translated by Robert Bononno
Incest
Roger Perron
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Incompleteness
René Péran
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Inconscient, L’
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
India
Sudhir Kakar
Indications and contraindications for
psychoanalysis for an adult
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Individual
Henri Vermorel
xx xvi
Insight
Roger Perron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Instinct
Claude Smadja
Translated by Dan Collins
Infant observation (direct)
Drina Candilis-Huisman
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
‘‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’’
Michèle Porte
Translated by Dan Collins
Infant observation (therapeutic)
Christine Anzieu-Premmereur
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Instinctual impulse
Michèle Porte
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Infantile amnesia
François Richard
Translated by Dan Collins
Instinctual representative
Roger Perron
Translated by Dan Collins
Infantile neurosis
Serge Lebovici
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Infantile omnipotence
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Infantile schizophrenia
Serge Lebovici
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Infantile sexual curiosity
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Dan Collins
Infantile, the
Cléopâtre Athanassiou-Popesco
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Inferiority, feeling of
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Inferiority, feeling of (individual
psychology)
François Compan
Translated by Liam Gavin
Inhibition
Nicolas Dissez
Translated by Liam Gavin
Initial interview(s)
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Innervation
Bertrand Vichyn
Translated by Liam Gavin
Infant observation
Robert D. Hinshelwood
Infantile psychosis
Bernard Touati
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety
Bernard Golse
Translated by Robert Bononno
Institut Claparède
Simone Decobert
Translated by Robert Bononno
Institut Max-Kassowitz
Carlo Bonomi
Translated by Robert Bononno
Integration
Bernard Golse
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Intellectualization
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Liam Gavin
Intergenerational
Haydée Faimberg
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Internal object
Marie Eugénie Jullian Muzzo Benavides
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Internal/external reality
Jean-Pierre Chartier
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
International Association for the
History of Psychoanalysis
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
LIST
Isaacs-Sutherland, Susan
Riccardo Steiner
International Federation of
Psychoanalytic Societies
Carlo Bonomi
Translated by Liam Gavin
Isakower phenomenon
Bernard Golse
Translated by Liam Gavin
International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, The
Riccardo Steiner
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Robert S. Wallerstein
Internationale Zeitschrift für
(ärztliche) Psychoanalyse
Lydia Marinelli
Translated by Liam Gavin
Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag
Lydia Marinelli
Translated by Robert Bononno
Interpretation
Jacques Angelergues
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Isakower, Otto
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Isolation
Elsa Schmid-Kitsikis
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Interpretation of dreams (analytical
psychology)
Thomas B. Kirsch
Interpretation of Dreams, The
Roger Perron
Translated by Robert Bononno
ENTRIES
Jouissance (Lacan)
Marie-Christine Laznik
Translated by Dan Collins
Journal de la psychanalyse de l’enfant
Jean-Claude Guillaume
Translated by Liam Gavin
Journal d’un médecin malade
Marguerite Frémont
Translated by Robert Bononno
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
Arnold D. Richards
Israel
Yolanda Gampel
Jouve, Pierre Jean
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Italy
Rosario Merendino
Translated by Robert Bononno
Judaism and psychoanalysis
Jacques Ascher and Pérel Wilgowicz
Translated by Liam Gavin
J
Judgment of condemnation
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Jacobson, Edith
Nellie L. Thompson
Interprétation
Josette Garon
Translated by Sophie Leighton
OF
Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse
Lydia Marinelli
Translated by Liam Gavin
Jalousie amoureuse, La
Régine Prat
Translated by Liam Gavin
Jung, Carl Gustav
Thomas B. Kirsch
Jung-Rauschenbach, Emma
Brigitte Allain-Dupré
Translated by Liam Gavin
Jury, Paul
André Michel
Translated by Robert Bononno
Janet, Pierre
Annick Ohayon
Translated by Robert Bononno
K
Jankélévitch, Samuel
Annick Ohayon
Translated by Robert Bononno
Kantianism and psychoanalysis
Bernard Lemaigre
Translated by Robert Bononno
Japan
Keigo Okonogi
Kardiner, Abram
Ethel S. Person
Introjection
Pierre Sabourin
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Jekels (Jekeles), Ludwig
Harald Leupold-Löwenthal
Translated by Robert Bononno
Katan, Maurits
Robert A. Furman
‘‘Introjection and Transference’’
Pierre Sabourin
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Jelliffe, Smith Ely
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Introspection
Roger Perron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Jokes
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Invariant
Jean-Claude Guillaume
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Jokes and their Relation to the
Unconscious
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Intersubjective/intrasubjective
Bernard Golse
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Irma’s injection, dream of
Roger Perron
Translated by Robert Bononno
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
Jones, Ernest
Riccardo Steiner
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Katan-Rosenberg, Anny
Robert A. Furman
Katharina, case of
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Kemper, Werner Walther
René Péran
Translated by Liam Gavin
Kestemberg, Jean
Liliane Abensour
Translated by Liam Gavin
Kestemberg-Hassin, Evelyne
Liliane Abensour
xx xvii
LIST
OF
ENTRIES
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Khan, Mohammed Masud Rasa
Bernard Golse
Translated by Robert Bononno
Klein-Reizes, Melanie
Robert D. Hinshelwood
Klinische Studie über die halbseitiger
Cerebrallähmung der Kinder
[Clinical study of infantile cerebral
diplegia]
Johann Georg Reicheneder
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Knot
Henri Cesbron Lavau
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Knowledge or research, instinct for
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Koch, Adelheid Lucy
Leopold Nosek
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Kohut, Heinz
Agnès Oppenheimer
Translated by Robert Bononno
Korea
Geoffrey H. Blowers
Kosawa, Heisaku
Keigo Okonogi
Law and psychoanalysis
Marie-Dominique Trapet
Translated by Robert Bononno
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Dan Collins
Lack of differentiation
Bernard Golse
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Law of the father
Patrick De Neuter
Translated by Robert Bononno
Laforgue, René
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Lagache, Daniel
Eva Rosenblum
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Lainé, Tony
Patrice Huerre
Translated by Liam Gavin
Laing, Ronald David
James R. Hood
Lebovici, Serge Sindel Charles
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Lampl, Hans
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by Liam Gavin
Lechat, Fernand
Daniel Luminet
Translated by Liam Gavin
Lampl-de Groot, Jeanne
Elizabeth Verhage-Stins
Leclaire (Liebschutz), Serge
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Dan Collins
Landauer, Karl
Hans-Joachim Rothe
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Langer, Marie Glass Hauser de
Janine Puget
Translated by Liam Gavin
Language and disturbances of
language
Georges Lantéri-Laura
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Kovács-Prosznitz, Vilma
Judith Dupont
Translated by Liam Gavin
Language of Psychoanalysis, The
Jean-Louis Brenot
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Kraus, Karl
Erik Porge
Translated by Robert Bononno
Lanzer, Ernst
Patrick Mahony
Kris-Rie, Marianne
Ernst Federn
Translated by Liam Gavin
L
L and R schemas
Patrick Delaroche
Translated by Dan Collins
Lacan, Jacques-Marie Émile
xxxviii
Le Bon, Gustave
Annick Ohayon
Translated by Robert Bononno
Learning from Experience
James S. Grotstein
Kouretas, Démétrios
Anna Potamianou
Translated by Liam Gavin
Kris, Ernst
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by Robert Bononno
Lay analysis
Roger Perron
Translated by Dan Collins
Latency period
Rodolfo Urribarri
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Latent
André Missenard
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Latent dream thoughts
Roger Perron
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Laurent-Lucas-ChampionnièreMaugé, Odette
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Leeuw, Pieter Jacob Van der
Elizabeth Verhage-Stins
Lehrinstitut der Wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung
Eva Laible
Translated by Liam Gavin
Lehrman, Philip R.
Michelle Moreau Ricaud
Translated by Liam Gavin
Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of
his Childhood
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Letter, the
Jean-Paul Hiltenbrand
Translated by Robert Bononno
Leuba, John
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Levi Bianchini, Marco
Anna Maria Accerboni
Translated by Robert Bononno
Liberman, David
Gilda Sabsay Foks
Translated by Liam Gavin
Libidinal development
Michèle Pollak Cornillot
Translated by Liam Gavin
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
LIST
Libidinal stage
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Libido
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Loewenstein, Rudolph M.
Michelle Moreau Ricaud
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Logic(s)
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Lie
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Look/gaze
Jean-Michel Hirtt
Translated by Dan Collins
Liebeault, Ambroise Auguste
Jacqueline Carroy
Translated by Liam Gavin
Life and Work of Sigmund Freud
Riccardo Steiner
Life and Works of Edgar Allen Poe: A
Psychoanalytic Interpretation
Anne-Marie Mairesse
Translated by Robert Bononno
Life instinct (Eros)
Isaac Salem
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Lifting of amnesia
François Richard
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Limentani, Adam
Moses Laufer
‘‘Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic
Therapy’’
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Lingüistica, Interacción
comunicativa y Proceso
psicoanalı́tico
David Rosenfeld
Translated by Liam Gavin
Linguistics and psychoanalysis
Anne-Marie Houdebine
Translated by Robert Bononno
Lorand, Sándor
Michelle Moreau Ricaud
Translated by Liam Gavin
Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Societies
and Institutes
John Galbraith Simmons
Lost object
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Listening
Marie-France Castarède
Translated by Liam Gavin
Little Arpåd, the boy pecked by a cock
Pierre Sabourin
OF
Mania
Alban Jeanneau
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Manic defenses
Elsa Schmid-Kitsikis
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Manifest
André Missenard
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Mann, Thomas
Didier David
Translated by Robert Bononno
Mannoni, Dominique-Octave
Jacques Sédat
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Love-Hate-Knowledge (L/H/K links)
Bernard Golse
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Marcinowski, Johannes (Jaroslaw)
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by Liam Gavin
Low, Barbara
Clifford Yorke
Marcondes, Durval Bellegarde
Fabio Herrmann and Roberto Yutaka
Sagawa
Translated by Liam Gavin
Lucy R., case of
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
M
Marcuse, Herbert
Roger Dadoun
Translated by Robert Bononno
Maeder, Alphonse E.
Kaspar Weber
Translated by Liam Gavin
Martinique
Guillaume Suréna
Translated by Liam Gavin
Magical thinking
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Martins, Cyro
Germano Vollmer Filho
Main, Thomas Forrest
Malcolm Pines
Literature and psychoanalysis
Anne Roche
Translated by Robert Bononno
Bertrand Pulman
Translated by Robert Bononno
Love
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Robert Bononno
Mahler-Schönberger, Margaret
Philippe Mazet
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Literary and artistic creation
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
ENTRIES
Mannoni-Van der Spoel, Maud
(Magdalena)
Jacques Sédat
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Mahler, Gustav (meeting with
Sigmund Freud)
Dominique Blin
Translated by Robert Bononno
Linking, attacks on
Edna O’Shaughnessy
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
Translated by Liam Gavin
OF
Mâle, Pierre
Pierre Bourdier
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Malinowski, Bronislaw Kaspar
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Marty, Pierre
Rosine Debray
Translated by Robert Bononno
Marxism and psychoanalysis
Michèle Bertrand
Translated by Dan Collins
Masculine protest (individual
psychology)
François Compan
Translated by Liam Gavin
Masculinity/femininity
Philippe Metello
Translated by Robert Bononno
Masochism
Denys Ribas
x xx ix
LIST
OF
ENTRIES
Translated by Robert Bononno
Mass Psychology of Fascism, The
Roger Dadoun
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Mastery
Marc Bonnet
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Mastery, instinct for
Paul Denis
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Masturbation
Franck Zigante
Translated by Dan Collins
Memories
François Richard
Translated by Robert Bononno
Memory
Yvon Brès
Translated by Robert Bononno
Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society
Ernst Federn
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Meng, Heinrich
Thomas Plänkers
Translated by Liam Gavin
Mirror stage
Marie-Christine Laznik
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Menninger Clinic
Glen O. Gabbard
Mirror transference
Agnès Oppenheimer
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Menninger, Karl A.
Glen O. Gabbard
Maternal
Anne Aubert-Godard
Translated by Robert Bononno
Mentalization
Alain Fine
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Maternal care
Yvon Gauthier
Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
Georges Lantéri-Laura
Translated by Robert Bononno
Maternal reverie, capacity for
Bernard Golse
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Jean Garrabé
Translated by Robert Bononno
Mitscherlich, Alexander
Hans-Martin Lohmann
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Mnemic symbol
François Richard
Translated by Dan Collins
Mnemic trace/memory trace
François Richard
Translated by Dan Collins
Metaphor
Joël Dor
Translated by Dan Collins
Modern conflict theory
Charles Brenner
Matheme
Henri Cesbron Lavau
Translated by Dan Collins
‘‘Metapsychological Supplement to
the Theory of Dreams’’
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Mathilde, case of
Albrecht Hirschmüller
Translated by Robert Bononno
Metapsychology
René Roussillon
Translated by Robert Bononno
Mom, Jorge Mario
Gilda Sabsay Foks
Translated by Liam Gavin
Matte-Blanco, Ignacio
Jorge L. Ahumada
Metonymy
Joël Dor
Translated by Dan Collins
Money and psychoanalytic treatment
Ghyslain Levy
Translated by Robert Bononno
Mexico
Luis Féder
Money-Kyrle, Roger Earle
Riccardo Steiner
Meyer, Adolf F.
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Monism
Michèle Porte
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Maturation
Roger Perron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Mauco, Georges
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Mead, Margaret
Bertrand Pulman
Translated by Robert Bononno
Megalomania
Marc Bonnet
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Melancholia
Alban Jeanneau
Translated by Robert Bononno
Melancholic depression
Francisco Palacio Espasa
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Memoirs of the future
James S. Grotstein
xl
Meyerson, Ignace
Annick Ohayon
Translated by Liam Gavin
Meynert, Theodor
Eva Laible
Translated by Liam Gavin
Midlife crisis
Bernard Golse
Translated by Liam Gavin
Minkowska-Brokman, Françoise
Jean Garrabé
Translated by Liam Gavin
Minkowski, Eugène
Modesty
Jean-Jacques Rassial
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Moral masochism
Denys Ribas
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Moreno, Jacob Levy
Nadine Amar
Translated by Liam Gavin
Morgenstern-Kabatschnik, Sophie
Frédérique Jacquemain
Translated by Liam Gavin
Morgenthaler, Fritz
Kaspar Weber
Translated by Liam Gavin
Morichau-Beauchant, Pierre Ernest
René
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
LIST
Michelle Moreau Ricaud
Translated by Liam Gavin
Odon Vallet
Translated by Robert Bononno
Morselli, Enrico
Giancarlo Gramaglia
Translated by Liam Gavin
Myth of origins
Julia Kristeva
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Moser-van Sulzer-Wart, Fanny
Louise
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Liam Gavin
Myth of the Birth of the Hero, The
René Kaës
Translated by Andrew Brown
Myth of the hero
René Kaës
Translated by Robert Bononno
Moses and Monotheism
Pierre Ferrari
Translated by Robert Bononno
‘‘Moses of Michelangelo, The’’
Brigitte Lemérer
Translated by Robert Bononno
Mother goddess
Odon Vallet
Translated by Robert Bononno
Mythomania
Bernard Golse
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Myths
Nicole Belmont
Translated by Liam Gavin
Mourning
Benjamin Jacobi
Translated by Dan Collins
N
‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Nacht, Sacha Emanoel
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Liam Gavin
Mourning, dream of
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Nakedess, dream of
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Mouvement lacanien français
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Dan Collins
Name-of-the-Father
Charles Melman
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Müller-Braunschweig, Carl
Regine Lockot
Translated by Liam Gavin
Narcissism
Michel Vincent
Translated by Robert Bononno
Multilingualism and psychoanalysis
Juan-Eduardo Tesone
Translated by Robert Bononno
Murray, Henry A.
Paul Roazen
Musatti, Cesare
Giancarlo Gramaglia
Translated by Liam Gavin
Music and psychoanalysis
Marie-France Castarède
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Mutative interpretation
Jacques Angelergues
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Mutual analysis
Pierre Sabourin
Translated by Dan Collins
Mysticism
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
Mythology and psychoanalysis
Nicos Nicolaı̈dis
Translated by Robert Bononno
OF
OF
ENTRIES
Narcissistic neurosis
Michel Vincent
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Narcissistic rage
Agnès Oppenheimer
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Narcissistic transference
Paul Denis
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Narcissistic withdrawal
Martine Myquel
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Narco-analysis
Vassilis Kapsambelis
Translated by Liam Gavin
National Psychological Association
for Psychoanalysis
Gerald J. Gargiulo
Need for causality
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Dan Collins
Need for punishment
Léon Grinberg
Translated by Dan Collins
Negation
Laurent Danon-Boileau
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
‘‘Negation’’
Monique Schneider
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Negative capability
James S. Grotstein
Narcissism of minor differences
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Liam Gavin
Negative hallucination
François Duparc
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Narcissism, primary
Michel Vincent
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Negative therapeutic reaction
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Dan Collins
Narcissism, secondary
Michel Vincent
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Negative transference
Paul Denis
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Narcissistic defenses
Elsa Schmid-Kitsikis
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Negative, work of
André Green
Translated by Robert Bononno
Narcissistic elation
Marie-France Castarède
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Neopsychoanalysis
Irma Gleiss
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Narcissistic injury
Panos Aloupis
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Nervous Anxiety States and their
Treatment
Francis Clark-Lowes
PSYCHOANALYSIS
xli
LIST
OF
ENTRIES
Netherlands
Han Groen-Prakken
Neurasthenia
Georges Lantéri-Laura
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
‘‘Neurasthenia and ‘Anxiety
Neurosis’’’
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
North African countries
Jalil Bennani
Translated by Liam Gavin
Translated by Robert Bononno
Oceanic feeling
Henri Vermorel and Madeleine Vermorel
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Norway
Sverre Varvin
Odier, Charles
Jean-Michel Quinodoz
Translated by Liam Gavin
Nostalgia
André Bolzinger
Translated by Robert Bononno
Neuro-psychosis of defense
Elsa Schmid-Kitsikis
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
‘‘Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad,’
A’’
Dominique Auffret
Translated by Robert Bononno
Neurosis
Francis Drossart
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
‘‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional
Neurosis’’ (Rat Man)
Patrick Mahony
Neurosis and Human Growth
Bernard Paris
Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse
Edmundo Gomez Mango
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Neurotic defenses
Elsa Schmid-Kitsikis
Translated by Dan Collins
Neurotica
Didier Anzieu
Translated by Robert Bononno
Neutrality/benevolent neutrality
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Liam Gavin
New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
New York Freudian Society
Joseph Reppen
Omnipotence of thoughts
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Numinous (analytical psychology)
Aimé Agnel
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Nunberg, Hermann
Harald Leupold-Löwenthal
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Oberholzer, Emil
Kaspar Weber
Translated by Robert Bononno
Oedipus complex, early
Robert D. Hinshelwood
‘‘On Dreams’’
Roger Perron
Translated by Dan Collins
Nuclear complex
Roger Perron
Translated by Dan Collins
O
Oedipus complex
Roger Perron
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
‘‘On the History of the Psychoanalytic
Movement’’
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
‘‘On the Origin of the ‘Influencing
Machine’ in Schizophrenia’’
Marie-Thérèse Neyraut-Sutterman
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
‘‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’’
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith
New York Psychoanalytic Institute
Manuel Furer
Object
Nora Kurts
Translated by Dan Collins
Night terrors
Philippe Metello
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Object a
Valentin Nusinovici
Translated by Dan Collins
Nightmare
Philippe Metello
Translated by Robert Bononno
Object relations theory
Otto F. Kernberg
Ontogenesis
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Object, change of/choice of
Maı̈té Klahr and Claudie Millot
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Operational thinking
Alain Fine
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Obsession
Marc Hayat
Translated by Robert Bononno
Opere (Writings of Sigmund Freud)
Giancarlo Gramaglia
Translated by Robert Bononno
Obsessional neurosis
Marc Hayat
Translated by Dan Collins
Ophuijsen, Johan H. W. Van
Han Groen-Prakken
Translated by Liam Gavin
Occultism
Odon Vallet
Optical schema
Marie-Christine Laznik
Nin, Anaı̈s
Gunther Stuhlmann
Nirvana
Clifford Yorke
Nodet, Charles-Henri
Marcel Houser
Translated by Robert Bononno
Nonverbal communication
Bernard Golse
Translated by Robert Bononno
xlii
‘‘On Transience’’
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
LIST
Translated by Dan Collins
P
Orality
Dominique J. Arnoux
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Pain
Drina Candilis-Huisman
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Oral-sadistic stage
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith
Pair of opposites
Roger Perron
Translated by Dan Collins
Oral stage
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Organ pleasure
Claude Smadja
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Pankow, Gisela
Marie-Lise Lacas
Translated by Robert Bononno
Pappenheim, Bertha
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Organic psychoses
Vassilis Kapsambelis
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Organic repression
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Organization
Claude Smadja
Translated by Liam Gavin
Orgone
Roger Dadoun
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Ornicar?
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Dan Collins
Ossipov, Nikolai Legrafovitch
Eugenie Fischer and René Fischer
Translated by Liam Gavin
Overdetermination
Mathieu Zannotti
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Over-interpretation
Delphine Schilton
Translated by Dan Collins
Penis envy
Colette Chiland
Translated by Liam Gavin
Perceptual identity
Dominique Auffret
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Perestrello, Danilo
Marı́a de Lourdes Soares O’Donnell
Translated by Liam Gavin
Paranoid psychosis
Bernard Touati
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Perrier, François
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Paranoid-schizoid position
Robert D. Hinshelwood
Perrotti, Nicola
Anna Maria Accerboni
Translated by Robert Bononno
Parenthood
Geneviève Delaisi de Parseval
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Parricide
Marie-Dominique Trapet
Translated by Robert Bononno
Partial drive
OF
Payne, Sylvia May
Pearl H. M. King
Paranoid position
Robert D. Hinshelwood
Parcheminey, Georges
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Outline of Psychoanalysis, An
Christian Seulin
Translated by Robert Bononno
Passion
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Perception-consciousness
(Pcpt.-Cs.)
Dominique Auffret
Translated by Dan Collins
Parapraxis
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Otherness
Yvon Brès
Translated by Robert Bononno
Pass, the
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Dan Collins
Paradox
Jean-Pierre Caillot
Translated by Robert Bononno
Paraphrenia
Nicolas Gougoulis
Translated by Dan Collins
Other, the
Charles Melman
Translated by Dan Collins
Pasche, Francis Léopold Philippe
Michèle Bertrand
Translated by Liam Gavin
Peraldi, François
Jacques Vigneault
Translated by Robert Bononno
Paranoia (Freudian formulas of)
Luiz Eduardo Prado de Oliveira
Translated by Sophie Leighton
ENTRIES
Michèle Porte
Translated by Dan Collins
Parade of signifiers
Joël Dor
Translated by Dan Collins
Paranoia
Harold P. Blum
Orgasm
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
Pankejeff, Sergueı̈
Patrick Mahony
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Persecution
Vassilis Kapsambelis
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Peru
Moisés Lemlij
Translated by Liam Gavin
Perversion
Joyce McDougall
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Perversion (metapsychological
approach)
Luiz Eduardo Prado de Oliveira
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Pfister, Oskar Robert
David D. Lee
xliii
LIST
OF
ENTRIES
Phallic mother
Sylvain Missonnier
Translated by Dan Collins
Phallic stage
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Phallic woman
Catherine Desprats-Péquignot
Translated by Dan Collins
Phallus
Bernard Penot
Translated by Dan Collins
Phantom
Bernard Golse
Translated by Robert Bononno
Phenomenology and psychoanalysis
Georges Lantéri-Laura
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Translated by Liam Gavin
Pichon-Rivière, Enrique
Samuel Arbiser
Translated by Liam Gavin
Pictogram
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Pleasure ego/reality ego
Ernst Federn
Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith
Pleasure in thinking
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Pleasure/unpleasure principle
Francisco Palacio Espasa
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Philippines
Geoffrey H. Blowers
Poland
Michel Vincent
Translated by Liam Gavin
Philippson Bible
Eva Laible
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Politics and psychoanalysis
Roger Dadoun
Translated by Robert Bononno
Philosophy and psychoanalysis
Bernard Lemaigre
Translated by Robert Bononno
Politzer, Georges
Roger Bruyeron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Phobia of committing impulsive acts
Christiane Guitard-Munnich and Philippe Turmond
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Porto-Carrero, Julio Pires
Marialzira Perestrello
Translated by Liam Gavin
Phobias in children
Claude Bursztejn
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Portugal
Pedro Luzes
Translated by Liam Gavin
Phobic neurosis
Francis Drossart
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Postnatal/postpartum depression
Monique Bydlowski
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Phylogenesis
Roger Perron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Pötzl, Otto
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by Liam Gavin
Phylogenetic Fantasy, A: Overview of
the Transference Neuroses
Ilse Grubrich-Simitis
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Preconception
Pedro Luzes
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Physical pain/psychic pain
Laurence Croix
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Piaget, Jean
Fernando Vidal
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Pichon, Édouard Jean Baptiste
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
xliv
Preconscious, the
Andrée Bauduin
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Pregenital
Dominique J. Arnoux
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Pregnancy, fantasy of
Marie Claire Lanctôt Bélanger
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Prehistory
François Sacco
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Premature-Prematurity
Anne Frichet
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Premonitory dreams
Roger Perron
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Prepsychosis
Paul Denis
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Prereflective unconscious
Robert D. Stolorow
Primal fantasies
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Primal repression
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Primal scene
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Primal, the
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Primary identification
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Primary love
Michelle Moreau Ricaud
Translated by Robert Bononno
Primary masochism
Denys Ribas
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Primary need
Bernard Golse
Translated by Dan Collins
Primary object
Marie Eugénie Jullian Muzzo Benavides
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Primary process/secondary process
Roger Perron
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Primitive
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Primitive agony
Jennifer Johns
Primitive horde
Eugène Enriquez
Translated by Robert Bononno
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
LIST
Principle of constancy
Bertrand Vichyn
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Principle of identity preservation
Agnès Oppenheimer
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Principle of (neuronal) inertia
Bertrand Vichyn
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Principles of mental functioning
René Roussillon
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Privation
Luiz Eduardo Prado de Oliveira
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Psi(y) system
Bertrand Vichyn
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Psychanalyse et les nevroses, La
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie (psychoanalysis and pediatrics)
Bernard This
Translated by Liam Gavin
Psychanalyse, La
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Dan Collins
Psyché, revue internationale
de psychanalyse et des sciences
de l’homme (Psyche, an
international review of
psychoanalysis and human
sciences)
Jacqueline Cosnier
Translated by Liam Gavin
Process
Bernard Golse
Translated by Robert Bononno
Processes of development
Roger Perron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Progressive neutralization
Arnold Goldberg
Prohibition
Roger Perron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Psyche. Zeitschrift für Psychanalyse
und ihre Anwendungen
Hans-Martin Lohmann
Translated by Liam Gavin
‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology, A’’
Bertrand Vichyn
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Psyche/psychism
Yvon Brès
Translated by Robert Bononno
Projection
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Psychic apparatus
Yvon Brès
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Projection and ‘‘participation
mystique’’ (analytical
psychology)
Christian Gaillard
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Psychic causality
Jean-Pierre Chartier
Translated by Robert Bononno
Psychic energy
Paul Denis
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Projective identification
Robert D. Hinshelwood
Psychic envelope
Didier Anzieu
Translated by Robert Bononno
Protective shield
Josiane Chambrier
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Protective shield, breaking through
the
Josiane Chambrier
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Proton-pseudos
Bernard Golse
Translated by Liam Gavin
Protothoughts
Pedro Luzes
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
Psychoanalyse des névroses et des
psychoses, La
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Psychoanalysis
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Psychoanalysis of Children, The
Francisco Palacio Espasa
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Psychoanalysis of Dreams
Gilda Sabsay Foks
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Psychoanalysis of Fire, The
Bernard Golse
Translated by Robert Bononno
Psychoanalyst
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Dan Collins
Psychoanalytic epistemology
Roland Gori
Translated by Robert Bononno
Psychoanalytic family therapy
Françoise Diot and Joseph Villier
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Psychoanalytic filiations
Paul Ries
Psychoanalytic nosography
Augustin Jeanneau
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
‘‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an
Autobiographical Account of a
Case of Paranoia (Dementia
Paranoides)’’
Roger Perron
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Psychoanalytic Quarterly, The
Owen Renik
Psychoanalytic research
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Psychic representative
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Psychoanalytic Review, The
Martin A. Schulman
Psychic temporality
PSYCHOANALYSIS
ENTRIES
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Psychic reality
René Roussillon
Translated by Robert Bononno
Psychic structure
Augustin Jeanneau
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
OF
Psychoanalytic semiology
Augustin Jeanneau
Translated by Robert Bononno
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, The
George Downing
x lv
LIST
OF
ENTRIES
Psychoanalytic Theory of Neuroses,
The
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
The
Gisèle Harrus-Revidi
Translated by Robert Bononno
Psychoanalytic treatment
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Psychoses, chronic and delusional
Michel Demangeat
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Psychoanalytical Treatment of
Children
Frédérique Jacquemain
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Psychoanalytische Bewegung, Die
Lydia Marinelli
Translated by Liam Gavin
Psychobiography
Larry Shiner
Translated by Liam Gavin
Purposive idea
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Putnam, James Jackson
Edith Kurzweil
Q
Psychosexual development
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Liam Gavin
Quantitative/qualitative
Philippe Metello
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Psychosomatic
Alain Fine
Translated by Robert Bononno
Quasi-independence/transitional
stage
Jennifer Johns
Psychosomatic limit/boundary
Gisèle Harrus-Revidi
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Quatrième groupe (O.P.L.F.), Fourth
group
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Dan Collins
‘‘Psychogenesis of a Case of
Homosexuality in a Woman, The’’
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Psychoterapia (Psixoterapija-Obozrenie voprosov lecenija I prikladonoj
psixologii)
Alexandre Mikhalevitch
Translated by Liam Gavin
Psychogenesis/organogenesis
Claude Smadja
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Psychotherapy
Serge Frisch
Translated by Dan Collins
Psychogenic blindness
Jean-Michel Hirtt
Translated by Liam Gavin
Psychotic defenses
Elsa Schmid-Kitsikis
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Psychohistory
Larry Shiner
Psychotic panic
Edna O’Shaughnessy
Quota of affect
Francisco Palacio Espasa
Translated by Robert Bononno
Psychological tests
Roger Perron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Psychotic part of the personality
Edna O’Shaughnessy
R
Psychotic potential
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Racamier, Paul-Claude
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Psychotic transference
David Rosenfeld
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Racism, antisemitism, and
psychoanalysis
Jacques Ascher and Perel Wilgowicz
Translated by Donald
Nicholson-Smith
Psychological types (analytical
psychology)
John Beebe
Psychology and psychoanalysis
Roger Perron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Psychology of Dementia præcox
Bernard Minder
Translated by Liam Gavin
Psychology of the Unconscious, The
Viviane Thibaudier
Translated by Liam Gavin
Psychology of Women, The. A Psychoanalytic Interpretation
Jacqueline Lanouzière
Translated by Liam Gavin
Psychopathologie de l’échec (Psychopathology of Failure)
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Translated by Liam Gavin
xlvi
Question of Lay Analysis, The
Roger Perron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Psychotic/neurotic
Georges Lantéri-Laura
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Puberty
Jean-Jacques Rassial
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Racker, Heinrich
R. Horacio Etchegoyen
Translated by Liam Gavin
Radó, Sándor
Paul Roazen
Puerperal psychoses
Odile Cazas
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Punishment, dream of
Roger Perron
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Purified-pleasure-ego
Alain de Mijolla
Qu’est-ce que la suggestion?
[What is suggestion?]
Mireille Cifali
Translated by Liam Gavin
Raimbault, Émile
Michelle Moreau Ricaud
Translated by Liam Gavin
Rambert, Madeleine
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Rank (Rosenfeld) Otto
E. James Lieberman
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
LIST
Rank-Minzer (Münzer), Beata
Helene Rank-Veltfort
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Rapaport, David
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Reich, Wilhelm
Roger Dadoun
Translated by Robert Bononno
Rascovsky, Arnaldo
Elfriede S. Lustig de Ferrer
Translated by Liam Gavin
Reik, Theodor
Joseph Reppen
Rationalization
Michèle Bertrand
Translated by Robert Bononno
Relations (commensalism, symbiosis,
parasitism)
Didier Houzel
Translated by Liam Gavin
Reaction-formation
Michèle Bertrand
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Relaxation principle and neocatharsis
Pierre Sabourin
Translated by Liam Gavin
Real trauma
Françoise Brette
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Relaxation psychotherapy
Marie-Lise Roux
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary father
Patrick De Neuter
Translated by Dan Collins
Real, the (Lacan)
Martine Lerude
Translated by Dan Collins
Religion and psychanoalysis
Odon Vallet
Translated by Robert Bononno
Remembering
Claude Barrois
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Reality principle
René Roussillon
Translated by Robert Bononno
‘‘Remembering, Repeating and
Working-Through’’
René Péran
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Reality testing
René Roussillon
Translated by Dan Collins
Realization
James S. Grotstein
Reciprocal paths of influence
(libidinal coexcitation)
Sophie de Mijolla Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
‘‘Recommendations to Physicians
Practicing Psychoanalysis’’
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Rees, John Rawlings
Malcolm Pines
Régis, Emmanuel Jean-Baptiste
Joseph
Gérard Bazalgette
Translated by Robert Bononno
‘‘Repression’’
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Repression, lifting of
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Dan Collins
Repudiation
Bernard Penot
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Rescue fantasies
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Resistance
Michèle Pollak Cornillot
Translated by Dan Collins
Resolution of the transference
Paul Denis
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Return of the repressed
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Reverie
Roger Perron
Translated by Dan Collins
Repetitive dreams
Roger Perron
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Representability
Katia Varenne
Translated by Dan Collins
Representation of affect
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Reich, Annie
Lilli Gast
Repressed
Jean-François Rabain
OF
Repression
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Reparation
Robert D. Hinshelwood
Regression
Martine Myquel
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
Repressed, derivative of the; derivative of the unsonscious
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Reverchon-Jouve, Blanche
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Translated by Robert Bononno
Repetition compulsion
Gérard Bonnet
Translated by Dan Collins
PSYCHOANALYSIS
ENTRIES
Translated by Dan Collins
Reminiscences
Claude Barrois
Translated by Robert Bononno
Repetition
Gérard Bonnet
Translated by Dan Collins
OF
Reversal into the opposite
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Revista de psicoanálisis
Carlos Mario Aslan
Revista de psiquiatria y disciplinas
conexas
Álvaro Rey de Castro
Translated by Liam Gavin
Revue française de psychanalyse
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Dan Collins
Richard, case of
Robert D. Hinshelwood
Rickman, John
Pearl H. M. King
xlvii
LIST
OF
ENTRIES
Rie, Oskar
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Rycroft, Charles Frederick
Paul Roazen
Michel Demangeat
Translated by Robert Bononno
S
Rite and ritual
Michèle Porte
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Sachs, Hanns
Reiner Wild
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Schlumberger, Marc
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Rittmeister, John Friedrich Karl
Ludger M. Hermanns
Translated by Liam Gavin
Sadger, Isidor Isaak
Bertrand Vichyn
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Schmidt, Vera Federovna
Irina Manson
Translated by Liam Gavin
Sadism
Denys Ribas
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Schneider, Ernst
Jeanne Moll
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Rivalry
Steven Wainrib
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Riviere-Hodgson Verrall, Joan
Athol Hughes
Rivisita di psicoanalisi
Rosario Merendino
Translated by Robert Bononno
Robertson, James
Jennifer Johns
Róheim, Géza
Éva Brabant-Gerö
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Rolland, Romain Edme Paul-Émile
Henri Vermorel and Madeleine
Vermorel
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Romania
Michel Vincent
Translated by Liam Gavin
Rorschach, Hermann
Mireille Cifali
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Rosenfeld, Eva Marie
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Liam Gavin
Rosenfeld, Herbert Alexander
Riccardo Steiner
Rosenthal, Tatiana
Anna Maria Accerboni
Translated by Liam Gavin
Ross, Helen
Nellie L. Thompson
Rubinstein, Benjamin B.
Robert R. Holt
Russia/USSR
Alexandre Mikhalevitch
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
xlviii
Schmideberg-Klein, Melitta
Pearl H. M. King
Schreber, Daniel Paul
Zvi Lothane
Sadomasochism
Denys Ribas
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Schultz-Hencke, Harald Julius Alfred
Carl-Ludwig
Regine Lockot
Translated by Liam Gavin
Sainte-Anne Hospital
Jean Garrabé
Translated by Dan Collins
Schur, Max
Roy K. Lilleskov
Salpêtriere Hospital, La
Daniel Widlöcher
Translated by Robert Bononno
San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society
Robert S. Wallerstein
San Francisco Psychotherapy
Research Group and Control-Mastery Theory
Robert Shilkret
Schweizerische Ärztegesellschaft für
Psychoanalyse
Mireille Cifali
Translated by Liam Gavin
Science and psychoanalysis
Roland Gori
Translated by Robert Bononno
Scilicet
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Andrew Brown
Sandler, Joseph
Riccardo Steiner
Sarasin, Philipp
Kaspar Weber
Translated by Liam Gavin
Sartre and psychoanalysis
Georges Lantéri-Laura
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Scoptophilia/scopophilia
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Dan Collins
Scotomization
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Dan Collins
Saussure, Raymond de
Jean-Michel Quinodoz
Translated by Liam Gavin
Screen memory
François Richard
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Schiff, Paul
Claire Doz-Schiff
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Sechehaye-Burdet, Marguerite
Mario Cifali
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Schilder, Paul Ferdinand
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Second World War: The effect on the
development of psychoanalysis
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Schiller and psychoanalysis
Madeleine Vermorel
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Schizophrenia
Secondary revision
François Duparc
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
LIST
Secret
Anne-Marie Mairesse
Translated by Robert Bononno
Agnès Oppenheimer
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Self-representation
Raymond Cahn
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Secret Committee
Gerhard Wittenberger
Translated by Robert Bononno
Self-state dream
Arnold Goldberg
Secrets of a Soul
Paul Ries
Seduction
Henri Sztulman
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Seduction scenes
Roger Perron
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Selected fact
Didier Houzel
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Self
Maurice Despinoy and Monique PiñolDouriez
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Self (analytical psychology)
Joseph L. Henderson
Sigmund Freud Institute
Michael Laier
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Servadio, Emilio
Anna Maria Accerboni
Translated by Robert Bononno
Sexual theories of children
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Self-mutilation in children
Claude Bursztejn
Translated by Robert Bononno
Sexual trauma
Françoise Brette
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Self-object
Agnès Oppenheimer
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Sexuality
Colette Chiland
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Self-preservation
Roger Perron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Self-punishment
Bertrand Étienne and Dominique Deyon
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Self psychology
OF
Sharpe, Ella Freeman
Pearl H. M. King
Sense/nonsense
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
‘‘Sexual Enlightenment Of Children,
The’’
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Self-image
Philippine Meffre
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Shame
Serge Tisseron
Translated by Dan Collins
Sigmund Freud Copyrights Limited
Thomas Roberts and Mark Paterson
Sexual drive
Michèle Porte
Translated by Dan Collins
Self-hatred
Nicole Jeammet
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Shakespeare and psychoanalysis
Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly
Seminar, Lacan’s
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Dan Collins
Sexual differences
Paulo R. Ceccarelli
Translated by Robert Bononno
Self-esteem
Raymond Cahn
Translated by Liam Gavin
Shadow (analytical psychology)
Hans Dieckmann
Translated by Robert Bononno
Sigmund Freud Archives
Harold P. Blum
Sex and Character
Erik Porge
Translated by Liam Gavin
Self-consciousness
Marie Claire Lanctôt Bélange
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
ENTRIES
Self (true/false)
Jennifer Johns
‘‘Seventeenth-Century Demonological
Neurosis, A’’
Roger Perron
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Self-analysis
Didier Anzieu
Translated by Dan Collins
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
Self, the
Bernard Golse
Translated by Philip Beitchman
OF
Sexualization
Arnold Goldberg
Sexuation, formulas of
Alain Vanier
Translated by Dan Collins
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Sigmund Freud Museum
Ingrid Scholz-Strasser
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Signal anxiety
Bernard Golse
Translated by Robert Bononno
Signifier
Julia Kristeva
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Signifier/signified
Joël Dor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Signifying chain
Joël Dor
Translated by Dan Collins
Silberer, Herbert
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Silberstein, Eduard
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Silence
Pearl Lombard
Translated by Andrew Brown
Simmel, Ernst
Ludger M. Hermanns and Ulrich SchultzVenrath
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Skin
Didier Anzieu
xlix
LIST
OF
ENTRIES
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Skin-ego
Didier Anzieu
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Sleep/wakefulness
Philippe Metello
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Slips of the tongue
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Smell, sense of
Dominique J. Arnoux
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Smirnoff, Victor Nikolaı̈evitch
Hélène Trivouss-Widlöcher
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Social feeling (individual psychology)
François Compan
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Société française de psychanalyse
Jean-Louis Lang
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Société psychanalytique de Genève
Jean-Michel Quinodoz
Translated by Liam Gavin
Société psychanalytique de Montréal
Jacques Vigneault
Translated by Liam Gavin
Société psychanalytique de Paris and
Institut de psychanalyse de Paris
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Sociology and psychoanalysis/
sociopsychoanalysis
Eugène Enriquez
Translated by Liam Gavin
Sokolnicka-Kutner, Eugénie
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Liam Gavin
Somatic compliance
Alain Fine
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
‘‘Some Psychical Consequences of
the Anatomical Distinction
between the Sexes’’
Colette Chiland
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Somnambulism
Philippe Metello
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Spain
l
State of being in love
Laurent Danon-Boileau
Translated by Robert Bononno
Maria Luisa Muñoz
Translated by Liam Gavin
Specific action
Roger Perron
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Stekel, Wilhelm
Francis Clark-Lowes
Spielrein, Sabina
Nicolle Kress-Rosen
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Sterba, Richard F.
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Spinoza and psychoanalysis
Michèle Bertrand
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Sterba-Radanowicz-Hartmann,
Editha
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Spitz, René Arpad
Kathleen Kelley-Lainé
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Split object
Panos Aloupis
Translated by Dan Collins
Stoller, Robert J.
Christopher Gelber
Stone, Leo
Zvi Lothane
Storfer, Adolf Josef
Ingrid Scholz-Strasser
Translated by Liam Gavin
Splits in psychoanalysis
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Dan Collins
Strachey, James Beaumont
Riccardo Steiner
Splitting
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Dan Collins
Strachey-Sargent, Alix
Riccardo Steiner
Splitting of the ego
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
‘‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of
Defense, The’’
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Splitting of the object
Robert D. Hinshelwood
Stranger
Léon Kreisler
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Strata/stratification
Michèle Porte
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Structural theories
Roger Perron
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Structuralism and psychoanalysis
Dominique Auffret
Translated by Andrew Brown
Splitting of the subject
Alain Vanier
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Studienausgabe
Ilse Grubrich-Simitis
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Splitting, vertical and horizontal
Arnold Goldberg
Squiggle
Jennifer Johns
Stage (or phase)
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Stammering
Christiane Payan
Translated by Liam Gavin
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
Riccardo Steiner
Studies on Hysteria
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Subconscious
Annick Ohayon
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Subject
Raymond Cahn
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Subject of the drive
Marie-Christine Laznik
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
LIST
OF
ENTRIES
Translated by Dan Collins
Translated by Dan Collins
Translated by Dan Collins
Subject of the unconscious
Bernard Penot
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Surrealism and psychoanalysis
Nicole Geblesco
Translated by Robert Bononno
Subject’s castration
Luiz Eduardo Prado de Oliveira
Translated by Dan Collins
Sweden
Per Magnus Johansson and David
Titelman
Translated by Liam Gavin
Szondi, Leopold
Jacques Schotte
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Subject’s desire
Patrick Delaroche
Translated by Dan Collins
Switzerland (French-speaking)
Jean-Michel Quinodoz
Translated by Liam Gavin
Sublimation
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Substitute/substitutive formation
Mathieu Zannotti
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Substitutive formation
Roger Perron
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Sucking/thumbsucking
Anne-Marie Mairesse
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Sudden involuntary idea
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Switzerland (German-speaking)
Kaspar Weber
Translated by Liam Gavin
Swoboda, Hermann
Erik Porge
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Symbiosis/symbiotic relation
Cléopâtre Athanassiou-Popesco
Translated by Andrew Brown
Symbol
Alain Gibeault
Translated by Dan Collins
Symbolic equation
Hanna Segal
T
Taboo
Michèle Porte
Translated by Robert Bononno
‘‘Taboo of Virginity, The’’
Roger Perron
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Tact
Pierre Sabourin
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Tausk, Viktor
Marie-Thérèse Neyraut-Sutterman
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Tavistock Clinic
Marcus Johns
Technique with adults,
psychoanalytic
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Suffering
Drina Candilis-Huisman
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Symbolic realization
Jean-Michel Quinodoz
Translated by Liam Gavin
Suggestion
Jacqueline Carroy
Translated by Robert Bononno
Symbolic, the (Lacan)
Jean-Paul Hiltenbrand
Translated by Dan Collins
Suicidal behavior
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Symbolism
Harold P. Blum
Tegel (Schloss Tegel)
Ludger M. Hermanns and Ulrich SchultzVenrath
Translated by Liam Gavin
Symbolization, process of
Alain Gibeault
Translated by Robert Bononno
Telepathy
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Sullivan, Harry Stack
Marco Conci
Symptom
Augustin Jeanneau
Translated by Dan Collins
Tenderness
Régine Prat
Translated by Robert Bononno
Sum of excitation
Michèle Porte
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Symptom-formation
Augustin Jeanneau and Roger Perron
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Termination of treatment
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Dan Collins
Superego
Jean-Luc Donnet
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Symptom/sinthome
Valentin Nusinovici
Translated by Dan Collins
Thalassa. A Theory of Genitality
Pierre Sabourin
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Supervised analysis (control case)
Roger Perron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Synchronicity (analytical
psychology)
John Beebe
‘‘Theme of the Three Caskets,The’’
Ilse Grubrich-Simitis
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Suppression
Francisco Palacio Espasa
System/systemic
Françoise Diot and Joseph Villier
Therapeutic alliance
Alain de Mijolla
Suicide
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Philip Beitchman
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Technique with children,
psychoanalytic
Bernard Golse
Translated by Philip Beitchman
li
LIST
OF
ENTRIES
Translated by Robert Bononno
Thing, the
Jean-Paul Hiltenbrand
Translated by Dan Collins
Thing-presentation
Alain Gibeault
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Twentyeighth President of the United
States. A Psychological Study
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Thompson, Clara M.
Sue A. Shapiro
Thought
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Thought identity
Dominique Auffret
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
‘‘Thoughts for the Times on War and
Death’’
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Thought-thinking apparatus
Pedro Luzes
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality
Roger Perron
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Tics
Christiane Payan
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Time
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Tomasi di Palma di Lampedusa-Wolff
Somersee, Alessandra
Anna Maria Accerboni
Translated by Robert Bononno
Topique
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Topographical point of view
René Roussillon
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Topology
Bernard Vandermersch
Translated by Dan Collins
li i
Torok, Maria
Jacques Sédat
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Transference relationship
Paul Denis
Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith
Tosquelles, François
Pierre Delion
Translated by Liam Gavin
Transformations
James S. Grotstein
Totem and Taboo
Michèle Porte
Translated by Robert Bononno
Transgression
Simon-Daniel Kipman
Translated by Andrew Brown
Totem/totemism
Michèle Porte
Translated by Robert Bononno
Transitional object
Nora Scheimberg
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Training analysis
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Dan Collins
Transitional object, space
Jennifer Johns
Transitional phenomena
Campbell Paul and Ann Morgan
Training of the psychoanalyst
Jean-Luc Donnet
Translated by Robert Bononno
Translation
Michèle Pollak Cornillot
Translated by Robert Bononno
Trance
Jacqueline Carroy
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Transmuting internalization
Arnold Goldberg
Transcultural
Marie-Rose Moro
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Transsexualism
Colette Chiland
Translated by Liam Gavin
Transference
Paul Denis
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Trattato di psicoanalisi
Giancarlo Gramaglia
Translated by Robert Bononno
Transference and
Countertransference
Fidias Cesio
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Trauma
Françoise Brette
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Transference/counter-transference
(analytical psychology)
Jean Kirsch
Transference depression
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Tube-ego
Bernard Golse
Translated by Liam Gavin
Transference in children
Bernard Golse
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Transference love
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Transference of creativity
Agnès Oppenheimer
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Traumatic neurosis
Françoise Brette
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Truth
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Dan Collins
Transference hatred
Jean-François Rabain
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Transference neurosis
Gail S. Reed
Trauma of Birth, The
Didier Houzel
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Turning around
Roger Perron
Translated by Dan Collins
Turning around upon the subject’s
own self
Jean-Baptiste Déthieux
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Tustin, Frances
Didier Houzel
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
LIST
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
V
Twinship transference/alter ego
transference
Agnès Oppenheimer
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
‘‘Vagina dentata,’’ fantasy of
Marie Claire Lanctôt Bélanger
Translated by Dan Collins
Typical dreams
Roger Perron
Translated by Sophie Leighton
Valdizán, Hermilio
Álvaro Rey de Castro
Translated by Liam Gavin
Venezuela
Rafael E. López-Corvo
Translated by Liam Gavin
U
Ulcerative colitis
Alain Fine
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Vertex
Didier Houzel
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Unary trait
Marc Darmon
Translated by Dan Collins
Viderman, Serge
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
‘‘‘Uncanny,’ The’’
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
Unconscious as Infinite Sets, The: An
Essay in Bi-Logic
Juan Francisco Jordan Moore
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Unconscious concept
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Dan Collins
Unconscious fantasy
Robert D. Hinshelwood
Unconscious, the
Michèle Porte
Translated by Dan Collins
Vienna General Hospital
Eva Laible
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Vienna, Freud’s secondary
school in
Eva Laible
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Walter, Bruno
Nicolas Gougoulis
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Want of being/lack of being
Alain Vanier
Translated by Dan Collins
War neurosis
Anne Bizot
Translated by Dan Collins
Washington Psychoanalytic Society
John Galbraith Simmons
Weaning
Grazia Maria Fava Vizziello
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Weininger, Otto
Erik Porge
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Weiss, Edoardo
Anna Maria Accerboni
Translated by Robert Bononno
Weltanschauung
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Violence of Interpretation, The: From
Pictogram to Statement
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
‘‘Why War?’’
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Visual
Jean-Michel Hirtt
Translated by Dan Collins
Undoing
Elsa Schmid-Kitsikis
Translated by Robert Bononno
ENTRIES
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Vienna, University of
Eva Laible
Translated by Liam Gavin
Violence, instinct of
Jean Bergeret
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
‘‘Unconscious, The’’
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Translated by Robert Bononno
OF
Wiener psychoanalytische
Vereinigung
Wilhelm Burian
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Wilbur, George B.
Paul Roazen
United States
Edith Kurzweil
Visual arts and psychoanalysis
Michel Artières
Translated by Robert Bononno
‘‘ ‘Wild’ Psycho-Analysis’’
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Unpleasure
Michèle Pollak Cornillot
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Voyeurism
Jean-Michel Hirtt
Translated by Robert Bononno
Winnicott, Donald Woods
Jennifer Johns
Unvalidated unconscious
Robert D. Stolorow
W
Urbantschitsch (Urban), Rudolf von
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by Liam Gavin
Waelder, Robert
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Uruguay
Sélika Acevedo de Mendilaharsu
Translated by Liam Gavin
Wagner-Jauregg, Julius (Julius
Wagner Ritter von Jauregg)
Eva Laible
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Winterstein, Alfred Freiherr von
Harald Leupold-Löwenthal
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Wish for a baby
Christine Petit
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Wish, hallucinatory satisfaction of a
Roger Perron
l ii i
LIST
OF
ENTRIES
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Wish/yearning
Gérard Bonnet
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Wish-fulfillment
Delphine Schilton
Translated by Philip Beitchman
Witch of Metapsychology, the
Roger Perron
Translated by Liam Gavin
Wittels, Fritz (Siegfried)
Elke Mühlleitner
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Wittkower, Eric
Patrick Mahony
Wolfenstein, Martha
Nellie L. Thompson
Wolff, Antonia Anna
Thomas B. Kirsch
Work (as a psychoanalytical notion)
Michèle Pollak Cornillot
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Working-off mechanisms
Elsa Schmid-Kitsikis
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Wulff, Mosche (Woolf, Moshe)
Ruth Kloocke
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Word association
Renos K. Papadopoulos
Word-presentation
Alain Gibeault
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Yugoslavia (ex-)
Michel Vincent
Translated by Liam Gavin
li v
Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse
Lydia Marinelli
Translated by Liam Gavin
Working-through
René Péran
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Young Girl’s Diary, A
Alain de Mijolla
Translated by Robert Bononno
Zavitzianos, Georges
Anna Potamianou
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische
Pädagogik
Jeanne Moll
Translated by Liam Gavin
Working over
François Duparc
Translated by Gwendolyn Wells
Y
Z
Zetzel-Rosenberg, Elizabeth
Nellie L. Thompson
Zulliger, Hans
Jeanne Moll
Translated by Liam Gavin
Zweig, Arnold
Bernard Golse
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
Zweig, Stefan
Christine de Kerchove
Translated by John Galbraith Simmons
and Jocelyne Barque
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
DIRECTORY
OF CONTRIBUTORS
CONTRIBUTORS
DIRECTORY OF
With texts originating from regions all over the world, each possessing its own unique conventions, and in order to maintain the Dictionary’s character as an international work, we have refrained from standardizing the biographies sent to us by the 463 authors who contributed to it.
Liliane Abensour
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Anna Maria Accerboni
Instructor of Dynamic Psychology
University of Trieste
Psychotherapist
Member
International Association for the History
of Psychoanalysis
Sélika Acevedo de
Mendilaharsu, M.D.
Professor Emeritus
Titular Member
Psychoanalytic Association of Uruguay
Aimé Agneel
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société française de psychologie
analytique
Jorge L. Ahumada
Training Analyst
Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic
Association
Editor for Latin America, International
Journal of Psychoanalysis
Brigitte Allain-Dupré
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société française de psychologie
analytique
Director
Institut C. G. Jung (Paris)
Panos Aloupis
Psychiatrist and
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
André Alsteens
Former President
Société belge de psychanalyse
Director
Centre de guidance pour enfants et adolescents à Uccle-Bruxelles
Nadine Amar
Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Asociación Psicoanalı́tica de Buenos
Aires
Jean-Claude Arfouilloux
Doctor, Psychiatrist, and Psychoanlayst
Member
Association psychanalytique de France
Dominique J. Arnoux
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Omar Arrué
Full Member
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Titular Member, Training Analyst, and
Past President
Asociación Psicoanalı́tica Chilena
Jacques Angelergues
Doctor, Psychiatrist and Child
Psychiatrist
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Michel Artières
Doctor and Psychoanalyst
Member
Quatrième Groupe-O.P.L.F.
Didier Anzieu
Psychoanalyst
Member
Association psychanalytique de France
Jacques Ascher
Doctor
Centre hospitalier et universitaire de
Lille
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Christine Anzieu-Premmereur
Psychoanalyst and Child Psychiatrist
Doctor at the Centre Alfred-Binet, Paris
Samuel Arbiser
Doctor
Titular Training Member
lv
Carlos Mario Aslan
President, Member, and Training
Analyst
Argentine Psychoanalytic Association
Member
DIRECTORY
OF
CONTRIBUTORS
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Robert Asséo
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Medical Director
Institut de psychosomatique
Cléopatre Athanassiou-Popesco
Psychoanalyst
Anne Aubert-Godard
Professor of Psychopathology
Director, Laboratory of Health and
Psychopathology
University of Haute-Normandie
Dominique Auffret
Docteur d’Etat in Letters and the
Human Sciences
Professor of Fundamental Psychology
EFP in Lyon
Gabriel Balbo
Psychoanalyst and Psychodramatist
Director
Psychanalyse de l’enfant
Madeleine Baranger
Member
Argentine Psychoanalytic Association
Claude Barrois
Tenured Professor of Psychiatry
Val-de-Grâce
Member
Association psychanalytique de France
Andrée Bauduin
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Titular Member, Société psychanalytique de Paris
Gérard Bazalgette
Psychiatrist-Member
Quatrième Groupe-O.P.L.F.
John E. Beebe
Jungian Analyst
Assistant Clinical Professor
Department of Psychiatry
University of California Medical School,
San Francisco
Nicole Belmont
Curriculum Director
Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences
socials
Jalil Bennani
Psychiatrist-Psychoanalyst
Rabat, Morocco
lv i
Jean Bergeret, M.D., Ph.D.
Psychoanalyst (Société psychanalytique
de Paris)
Professor
University of Lyon II
Jean Bergès
Neuropsychiatrist
Psychoanalyst (Association freudienne
internationale)
Bertrand, Michèle
Professor
Université de Franche-Comté
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris and
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Elisabeth Bigras
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Société psychanalytique de Montreal
and Société canadienne de
psychanalyse
Parthenope Bion Talamo
Psychoanalyst
Anne Bizot
Psychologist and Psychoanalyst
Dominique Blin
Psychoanalyst and Psychologist
Owen Hugh D. Blomfield
Member
Australian Psychoanalytical Society and
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Geoffrey H. Blowers
Senior Lecturer, Director, and P.C.
Psychiatrist
University of Hong Kong
Gérard Bonnet
Psychoanalyst
Member
Association psychanalytique de France
Marc Bonnet
Clinical Psychologist
Analyst-Member
Quatrième Groupe-O.P.L.F.
Bénédicte Bonnet-Vidon
Psychiatrist
Carlo Bonomi
Dr. of Psychology and Dr. of Philosophy
Training Analyst
H.S. Sullivan Institute, Florence
Jaap Bos
Doctor and Psychologist
César Botella
Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Member
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Sára Botella
Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Member
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Pierre Bourdier
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Jean-Pierre Bourgeron
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Pierre-Jean Bouyer
Scriptwriter
Harold P. Blum, M.D.
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry
NYU School of Medicine
Training Analyst
New York Psychoanalytic Institute
Member
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Sylvain Bouyer
Psychoanalyst
Member of Espace analytique
Eva Brabant-Gero
Psychoanalyst, Historian
André Bolzinger
Doctor, Psychiatrist, and Psychoanalyst
Member of Evolution psychiatrique
Member
Société de psychanalyse freudienne
Alain Braconier
Doctor, Psychiatrist, and Psychoanalyst
Association psychanalytique de France
Charles Brenner
Training Analyst
New York Psychoanalytic Institute
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
DIRECTORY
Former President
American Psychoanalytic Association
Jean-Louis Brenot
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Yvon Brès
Professor Emeritus
Université de Paris-VII
Françoise Brette
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Christien Brinkgreve
Professor, Doctor, and Sociologist
Danièle Brun
Psychoanalyst
Professor
Université de Paris-VII
Member of Espace analytique
Claude Bursztejn
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Professor of Psychiatry
Université Louis-Pasteur
Jean Cournut
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Josiane Chambrier
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Colette Chiland
Professor Emeritus of Clinical
Psychology
Université de Paris-V
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Mario Cifali
Psychoanalyst
Geneva, Switzerland
Raymond Cahn
Titular Member and former President
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Jean-Pierre Caillot
Psychiatrist
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Drina Candilis-Huisman
Psychologist
Jacqueline Carroy
Curriculum Director
École des hautes etudes en sciences
sociales (EHESS)
Marie-France Castarède
Doctor in Letters and Human Sciences
Université de Paris-V
Odile Cazas
Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist
OF
Fidias R. Cesio
Doctor and Psychoanalyst
Titular and Training Member
Asociación Psicoanalı́tica Argentina
Joan Chodorow, Ph.D.
Analyst Member
C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco
Monique Bydlowski
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Director of Research INSERM
Psychiatric Associate
American Academy of Psychoanalysis
Jacqueline Cosnier
D.E.S. in Philosophy
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Jean-Pierre Chartier
Psychoanalyst
Member
Quatrième Groupe-O.L.P.F.
Wilhelm Burian
Psychiatrist
Member and Training Analyst
Vienna Psychoanalytical Society
CONTRIBUTORS
Henri Cesbron Lavau
Psychoanalyst
Member
Association freudienne internationale
Ghyslain Charron
Psychoanalyst
Roger Bruyeron
Aggregated Philosopher
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
Roberto Paulo Ceccarelli
Psychologist and Psychoanalyst
OF
Mireille Cifali
Professor
Université de Genève
Francis Clark-Lowes
B.S. (Sociology), London University
M.A. (Psychology, Therapy, and
Counseling)
Johannes Cremerius, M.D.
Psychiatrist
Member
Deutsche Psychoanlytische Vereinigung
Laurence Croix
Psychoanalyst and Doctor in
Psychology
Université de Paris-V and XIII
Boris Cyrulnik
Director of Ethological Studies
Faculty of Medicine, Marseille
Roger Dadoun
Professor Emeritus
Université de Paris-VII
Writer and Philosopher
Laurent Danon-Boileau
Professor
Université de Paris-V
Marc Darmon
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Member
Association freudienne internationale
Corinne Daubigny
Psychoanalyst
Didier David
Pediatric Psychiatrist
Patrick De Neuter
Member
Association freudienne internationale
Geoffrey Cocks
Royal G. Hall Professor of History
Albion College, Michigan
Betty De Shong Meador, Ph.D.
Analyst Member
C. G. Jung Institute, San Francisco
François Compan
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
President
Société française de psychologie
individuelle
Rosine Debray
Psychoanalyst
Professor of Clinical Psychology
Université de Paris-V
Marco Conci, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Brescia School of Medicine
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Simone Decobert
Pediatric Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
lvii
DIRECTORY
OF
CONTRIBUTORS
Bernard Defontaine
Psychoanalyst (Société psychanalytique
de Paris)
Psychotherapist
Institut Edouard-Claparède de Neuilly
Geneviève Delaisi De Parseval
Psychoanalyst
Patrick Delaroche
Psychoanalyst
Former Member
École freudienne de Paris
Member of Espace Analytique
Claude Delay-Tubiana
Psychoanalyst and Writer
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Pierre Delion
Psychiatrist
Angers, France
Michel Demangeat
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Former Member
École freudienne de Paris
Paul Denis
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Jean-Paul Descombey
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Chief Doctor
Centre Henri-Rousselle (Saint-Anne, Paris)
Maurice Despinoy
Hospital Practitioner
Marseilles
Catherine Desprats-Péquignot
Psychoanalyst
Lecturer
Université de Paris-VII
Member
Association freudienne internationale
Jean-Baptiste Déthieux
Psychiatrist
Dominique Deyon
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Hans Dieckmann
Doctor and Training Analyst
C. G. Jung Institute, Berlin
Françoise Diot
Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst, and Family
Therapist
lv ii i
Nicolas Dissez
Psychiatrist
François Duyckaerts, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Universités de Liège et Bruxelles
Psychoanalyst
Karin A. Ditrich, Ph.D., Psy.D.
Psychoanalyst
Munich
Alberto Eiguer
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Takeo Doi, M.D.
Psychiatrist
Member and Training Analyst
Japan Psychoanalytic Society
Cláudio Laks Eizirik, M.D., Ph.D.
Member and Training Analyst
Sociedade Psicanalitica de Porto Alegre
Jean-Luc Donnet
Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Joël Dor
Lecturer and Director of Resesarch at the
U.F.R.
Université de Paris-VII
Member of Espace analytique
Robert Doria-Median, Jr.
Doctor
Titular Member and Training Analyst
Asociación psicoanaltı́tica Argentina
François Dosse
Historian
Co-animator of Espaces Temps
Eugène Enriquez
Professor Emeritus of Sociology
Université de Paris-VII
R. Horacio Etchegoyen
Doctor
Titular Member, Training Analyst, and
Past President
Asociación Psioanalı́tica de
Buenos Aires
Past President
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Bertrand Etienne
Psychiatrist
ASM 12
George Downing
Psychologist and Clinical Supervisor
Pitié-Salpêtrière
Haydée Faimberg
Doctor and Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Claire Doz-Schiff
Doctor of Clinicial Psychology
Centre psycho-pédagogique ClaudeBernard
Grazia Maria Fava Vizziello
Professor of Psychopathology
University of Padua
Francis Drossart
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Luis Féder, Psy.D., M.Psy, B.A.
Founding Member
Asociación Psicoanalı́tica de Mexico
Training and Supervising
Psychoanalyst
Academy of Medical Sciences,
Instituto Mexicano de cultura
Antoine Ducret
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
François Duparc
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
President
Groupe lyonnais de psychanalyse
Susana Beatriz Dupetit
Doctor, Psychiatrist, and
Psychoanalyst
Member
Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Association
Judith Dupont
Doctor and Psychoanalyst
Associate Member
Association psychanalytique de France
Ernst Federn
Social work therapist in the U.S.
(1948–1972)
Social therapist with the Austrian
correctional system (1972–)
Pierre Ferrari
Professor of Child Psychiatry and
Psychoanalyst
Alain Fine
Doctor and Psychoanalyst
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
DIRECTORY
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Eugenie Fischer, M.D.
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Member
Deutsche Psychoanalytische
Vereinigung and the International
Psychoanalytical Association
René Fischer, M.D.
Psychoanalyst
Deutsche Psychoanalytische Vereinigung
and International Psychoanalytical
Association
Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly, Ph.D.
Psychoanalyst
Member
Canadian Psychoanalytic Society
Member
Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute
Olivier Flournoy, M.D.
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Université de Lausanne
Josette Frappier
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Annette Fréjaville
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Marguerite Frémont
Assistant to Dr. René Allendy
(1932–1942)
Anne Frichet
Clinical Psychologist
Centre de guidance infantile (Paris)
Serge Frisch
Psychiatrist
Psychoanalyst (Belgian Society)
Former President
EFPP
Robert A. Furman, M.D.
Psychoanalyst
Training Analyst
Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
Christian Gaillard
Professor, Psychologist, and Psychoanalyst
Yolanda Gampel
Training Analyst
Israeli Psychoanalytic Society
Professor
Tel Aviv University
Gerald J. Gargiulo
Psychoanalyst
Fellow at IPTAR
Member
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Josette Garon
Psychoanalyst
Member
Canadian Psychoanaltyic Society
Jean Garrabé
Psychiatrist
President
Evolution psychiatrique
Lilli Gast, Ph.D.
Psychologist
Freiberufliche Wissenschatlerin, Berlin
Serge Gauthier
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Yvon Gauthier
Doctor, Pediatric Psychiatrist, and
Psychoanalyst
Member
Canadian Psychoanaltyic Society
Marcelle Geber
Pediatric Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Nicole Geblesco
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société internationale de poiétique
Manuel Furer
Training Analyst and Supervisor
New York Psychoanalytic Institute
Glen O. Gabbard, M.D.
Director
Baylor Psychiatry Clinic
Training Analyst and Supervisor
Houston/Galveston Psychoanalytic
Institute
Claudine Geissmann
Psychiatrist
Curriculum Director
Université Victor-Segalen Bordeaux-II
Member
Association psychanalytique de France
Christopher Gelber, Ph.D.
Psychologist and Psychoanalyst
Alain Gibeault
Titular Member
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
OF
CONTRIBUTORS
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Secretary General
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Sanford Gifford, M.D.
Director of Archives
Boston Psychoanalytic Society and
Institute
Irma Gleiss, Ph.D.
Psychoanalyst
Martin J. Gliserman, Ph.D.
Psychoanalyst, (NAAP-certified)
Arnold I. Goldberg, M.D.
Professor of Psychiatry
Rush Medical School
Bernard Golse
Pediatric Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Edmundo Gomez Mango
Psychoanalyst
Roland Gori
Psychoanalyst
Professor of Psychopathology
Université d’Aix-Marseille-I
Sylvie Gosme-Séguret
Psychologist and Psychotherapist
Nicolas Gougoulis
Psychiatrist, Hospital practitioner, and
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Giancarlo Gramaglia
Psychoanalyst
Torino, Italy
André Green
Doctor, Psychiatrist, and Psychoanalyst
Past President
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Past President
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Daniel Greenson
Physician and Psychoanalyst
Léon Grinberg
Training Analyst
Psychoanalytic Association of Madrid
Marie-Laure Grivet-Shillito
Doctor of Psychoanalysis and
Psychopathology
Member
l ix
DIRECTORY
OF
CONTRIBUTORS
International Society of Psychoanalytic
Psychology
Han Groen-Prakken, M.D.
Full Member and Training Analyst
Dutch Psychoanalytic Society
Gisèle Harrus-Revidi
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Helmut Gröger
Art and Medical Historian
Assistant Professor and Lecturer
Institut fuer Geschichte der medizin der
Universitaet Wien
Lawrence Hartmann, M.D.
Past President
American Psychiatric Association
James S. Grotstein, M.D.
Clinical Professor of Psychology
School of Medicine at the University of
California, Los Angeles
Psychoanalyst
Past Vice-President
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Hungarian Group
Gábor Flaskay, M.D.
Gyoergy Hidas, M.D.
Livia Nemes, Ph.D. (pdt)
Gyoergy Vikar, M.D.
Ilse Grubrich-Simitis
Psychoanalyst
Member
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Training Analyst and Supervisor
German Psychoanalytic Association
Antoine Guédeney
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Nicole Guédeney
Child Psychiatrist
Jean-Claude Guillaume
Pediatric Psychiatrist-Psychoanalyst
Christiane Guitard-Munnich
Doctor, Psychiatrist, and
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
José Gutiérrez Terrazas
Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Universidad Autonoma de Madrid
Member
Asociación Psicoanálisis de Madrid
Geneviève Haag
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
lx
Robert R. Holt
Psychologist
Founding director
Research Center for Mental Health
Professor of Psychology Emeritus
New York University
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
James R. Hood, M.D.
MBCHM Glas and MRC Psychology
Member
British Psychoanalytical Society
Marc Hayat
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Past President
Association Ecart
Anne-Marie Houdebine
Psychoanalyst and Doctor of Letters and
Human Sciences
Professor of Linguistics and Semiology
Université René Descartes, Paris-V
Anne Hayman
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Member
British Psycho-Analytical Society
Archivist
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Marcel Houser
Doctor and Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Joseph L. Henderson
Training Analyst and Past President
C. G. Jung Institute in San Francisco
Ludger M. Hermanns
Psychoanalyst
Member
German Psychoanalytic Association
Lecturer and Honorary Archivist
Karl Abraham Institute of Berlin
Florian Houssier
Psychologist and Psychotherapist
Research Professor
Université de Paris-VII
Didier Houzel
Pediatric Psychiatrist and
Psychoanalyst
Member
Association psychanalytique de France
Fabio Herrmann, M.D.
Titular Member and Training
Analyst
Sociedade Brasileira de Pscicanálise de
Sao Paolo
Patrice Huerre
Psychiatrist
Medical Director
University Medical Clinic GeorgesHeuyer (Paris)
Jean-Paul Hiltenbrand
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Member
Association freudienne international
Athol Hughes, Ph.D.
Member
British Psychoanalytical Society
Robert D. Hinshelwood
Member
British Psychoanalytical Society
Albrecht Hirschmuller
Consultant Psychiatrist and Neurologist
Psychotherapist
Jean-Michel Hirt
Psychoanalyst
Lecturer in Psychopathology
Université de Paris-Nord
Leon Hoffman, M.D.
Training and Supervising Analyst
New York Psychoanalytic Institute
Andrea Hupke, Psy.D.
Independent Scholar
Marvin S. Hurvich, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology
Long Island University
Melvyn L. Iscove
Fellow
Royal College of Physicians (Canada)
Benjamin Jacobi
Psychologist and Psychoanalyst
Lecturer
University Medical Clinic
Georges-Heuyer, Université de
Provence
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
DIRECTORY
Mario Jacoby, Ph.D.
Faculty, Board of Directors (Curatorium),
and Training and Supervising Analyst
C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich
Lecturer
Université de Rouen
OF
CONTRIBUTORS
Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Hospital,
Paris
Vassilis Kapsambelis
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Ruth Kloocke, M.D.
Independent Scholar
Nicole Jeammet
Lecturer in Psychopathology
Université de Paris-V
Verena Kast
Professor of Psychology
University of Zurich
Training Analyst
C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich
Léon Kreisler
Pediatric Doctor and Psychiatrist
Co-founder
Institut de psychosomatique (Paris)
Philippe Jeammet
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Professor of Psychiatry
Université de Paris-VI
Kathleen Kelley-Lainé
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Alban Jeanneau
Psychiatrist
Christine de Kerchove
Psychologist and Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Frédérique Jacquemain
Pediatric Psychiatrist
Augustin Jeanneau
Psychiatrist
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Per Magnus Johansson
Psychoanalyst and Doctor in the History
of Science
Jennier Johns
Physician and Psychoanalyst
Member
British Psychoanalytical Society
Marcus Johns, M.D.
Child and Family Psychiatrist
Member
British Psychoanalytical Society
Otto F. Kernberg, M.D.
Director
Personality Disorders Institute, New
York Presbyterian Hospital, Cornell
University
Professor of Psychiatry
Cornell University (Westchester)
Training and Supervising Analyst
Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research
Moisés Kijak
Doctor
Titular Member and Training Analyst
Asociación Psicoanálisis de Argentina
Juan Francisco Jordan Moore
Psychiatrist
Past President, Titular Member, and
Training Analyst
Asociación Psicoanálisis Chilena
Pearl H. M. King
Psychoanalyst
Member
British Psychoanalytical Society
Rosine Jozef Perelberg, Ph.D.
Training Analyst
British Psychoanalyst Society
Simon-Daniel Kipman
Past President
Association française de psychiatrie
Marie Eugénie Jullian Muzzo
Benavides
Psychoanalyst and Psychologist
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Jean Kirsch, M.D.
Past President
C. G. Jung Institute in San Francisco
Member
International Psychoanalytical
Association
René Kaës
Psychoanalyst
Professor Emeritus
Université Lumière Lyon-II
Sudhir Kakar
Professor and Doctor
Thomas Kirsch, M.D.
Psychiatric Training
Stanford University
Diplomat
C. G. Jung Institute in San Francisco
Jean-Pierre Kamieniak
Psychoanalyst
Maı̈té Klahr
Psychologist-Psychoanalyst
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Nicolle Kress-Rosen
Psychoanalyst
DESS in Psychology (Spain)
Julia Kristeva
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Professor in Linguistics
Université de Paris-VII
Permanent Visiting Professor, Department of French
Columbia University and at the University of Toronto
Nora Kurts
Psychologist
Psychoanalyst Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Edith Kurzweil
University Professor and Director
Center for Humanities and Social
Thought at Adelphi University
Marie-Lise Lacas
Neuropsychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Eva Laible
Doctor
Member
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
Michael Laier, M.D.
Medical Historian
Senckenbergischen Institut fuer Medizin
der Universitaet Frankfurt
Marie Claire Lanctôt Bélanger
Philosopher and Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris of
Montréal and Société canadienne de
psychanalyse
Jean-Louis Lang
Former Head
Clinical Faculty at Université de
Paris-VII
lxi
DIRECTORY
OF
CONTRIBUTORS
Jacqueline Lanouzière
Doctor of Letters and Human
Sciences
Professor Emeritus of Psychopathology
Université de Paris-XIII
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Georges Lantéri-Laura
Honorary Chief
Esquirol Hospital
Honorary President
Evolution psychiatrique
Jean Laplanche
Titular Member
Association psychanalytique de France
Moses Laufer, Ph.D.
Past President
British Psychoanalytical Society
Jacques Launay
Past President
Groupe Internationale du Rêve éveillé
en psychanalyse
Marie-Christine Laznik
Psychoanalyst
Member
Bureau de l’Association freudienne
internationale
Serge Lebovici
Pediatric Psychiatrist
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Past President
International Psychoanalytical
Association
David D. Lee, Ph.D.
Independent Scholar
Bernard Lemaigre
Affiliated Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Brigitte Lemérer
Psychoanalyst
Former Member
École freudienne de Paris
Moisés Lemlij, M.D., DPM, MRC
Training Analyst and Titular Member
Sociedad Peruana de Psicoanálisis
Martine Lerude
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Member
Association freudienne internationale
lx ii
Odile Lesourne, Ph.D.
Psychoanalyst
Elfriede S. Lustig de Ferrer, M.D.
Full Member
Asociación Psicoanálisis Argentina and
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Training Analyst and Past Vice
President
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Harald Leupold-Löwenthal
Psychoanalyst
Member
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
Ghyslain Levy
Psychoanalyst
Member
Quatrième Groupe-O.P.L.F.
Pedro Luzes
Professor of Clinical Psychology
University of Lisbon
E. James Lieberman
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry
George Washington University
Veronica Mächtlinger
Dip. Clin. Psychology (London)
Roy K. Lilleksov, M.D.
Independent Scholar
Patrick J. Mahony, Ph.D.
Member
Société royale du Canada
Training Analyst
Société canadienne de psychanalyse
Regine Lockot, Ph.D.
Psychoanalyst
Hans-Martin Lohmann
Lecturer, Editor, and Author
Anne-Marie Mairesse
Lecturer in Clinical Psychology
Psychoanalyst (Société psychanalytique
de Paris)
Pearl Lombard
Psychiatrist
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Irina Manson
Psychoanalyst
Vice President
Pérénos
Rafael E. López-Corvo
Associate Professor
Mc Gill University
Training Analyst
Asociación Venezola de Psicoanálisis
Lydia Marinelli
Cultural Historian
Archivist at the Freud Museum, Vienna
Zvi Lothane, M.D.
Clinical Associate Professor of
Psychiatry
Mount Sinai School of Medicine, CUNY
Gérard Lucas
Psychiatrist AIHP
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Daniel Luminet
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Belge
Honorary Professor
Université de Liège
André Lussier
Doctor in Psychology
Former Titular Professor
Université de Montréal
Former Vice President
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Philippe Mazet
Professor of Psychiatry
AP-HP, Paris
Joyce McDougall
D.Ed. and Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Full Member
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Member
New York Freudian Society
Philippine Mefre
Psychologist and Psychotherapist
Charles Melman
Former Hospital Psychiatrist
Former Director of Scilicet
Founder
Association freudienne internationale
Ruth Menahem
Director of Research at the CNRS
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
DIRECTORY
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Rosario Merendino
Psychoanalyst
Member
Società Psicoanalitica Italiana
Michelle Moreau Ricaud
Psychoanalyst
Member
Quatrième Groupe-O.P.L.F.
Nadine Mespoulhés
Psychotherapist-Psychoanalyst
Ann Morgan
Private Practice
Melbourne
Philipe Metello
Pediatric Psychiatrist
André Michel
Writer
Honorary Professor of Classical Letters
Pascale Michon-Raffaitin
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Alain de Mijolla
Neuropsychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
President
International Association for the History
of Psychoanalysis
Member
International Psychoanalytical Association
Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
Psychoanalyst
Professor of Psychopathology
Université de Paris-VII
Member
Quatrième Groupe-O.P.L.F.
Sylvain Missonnier
Lecturer in Psychology
Université de Paris-X, Nanterre
Jeanne Moll, M.A., German, DESS
IUFM, Alsace
Michael Molnar
Research Director
Freud Museum, London
OF
Annick Ohayon
Psychology Instructor
Université de Paris-VIII
Ole Andkjaer Olsen, Ph.D.
Senior Research Worker and Writer
Elke Mühlleitner, Ph.D.
Psychologist
Researcher, History of Psychoanalysis
Agnès Oppenheimer
Lecturer in Psychopathology
Université de Paris-V
Laurent Muldworf, M.D.
Psychiatrist
Francisco Palacio Espasa
Ordinary Member
Société Suisse de Psychanalyse
Marı́a Luisa Muñoz
Training Analyst
Asociación Psicoanálisis de Madrid
Martine Myquel
Professor of Pediatric Psychiatry
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Janine Noël
Consultant Psychiatrist
C.O.P.E.S.
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
André Missenard
Psychoanalyst and Psychiatrist
Quatrième Groupe-O.P.L.F.
Michel Ody
Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Peter Mudd
Jungian Psychoanalyst
Bernd Nitzschke, PsyD., Ph.D.
Psychoanalyst
Bernard Minder, M.D.
Psychiatrist
Edna O’Shaughnessy
Training Analyst
British Psychoanalytical Society
Keigo Okonogi, M.D.
Training Analyst
Japan Psychoanalytic Society
Nicos Nicolaı̈dis
Doctor
Titular Member
Société Suisse de Psychanalyse
Claude Millot
Psychologist-Psychoanalyst
CONTRIBUTORS
Marie-Rose Moro
Child Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Marie-Thérèse Neyraut-Sutterman
Psychiatrist, DESS, and Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Alexandre Mikhalevitch
Doctor of Psychoanalysis
Université de Paris-VII
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
Marie-Thérèse Montagnier
Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
OF
Leopold Nosek, M.D.
Training Analyst and Past President
Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society
Valentin Nusinovici
Psychoanalyst
Member
Association freudienne internationale
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Renos K. Papadopoulos
Professor of Analytical Psychology
University of Essex
Bernard J. Paris, Ph.D.
Director
International Karen Horney Society
Mark Paterson
Director
Sigmund Freud Copyrights
Campbell Paul
Consultant Infant Psychiatrist
Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne
Christiane Payan
Pediatric Psychiatrist
Bernard Penot
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
René Péran
Doctor, Psychiatrist, and Psychoanalyst
Member
Quatrième Groupe-O.P.L.F.
Marialzira Perestrello
Doctor, Psychoanalyst, and Poet
Pioneer of Psychoanlaysis in Rio de
Janeiro
Roger Perron
Honorary Director of Research
lx ii i
DIRECTORY
OF
CONTRIBUTORS
National Center for Scientific Research,
Paris
Former Director of Research
Université de Paris-V
Christine Petit
Psychiatrist and Hospital Practicioner
Augosto M. Picollo
Titular Member and Training Analyst
Asociación Psicoanálisis Argentina
Malcolm Pines
Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery
(Cambridge)
Fellow
Royal College of Physicians (London)
Fellow
Royal College of Psychiatrists
Monique Piñol-Douriez
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Professor Emeritus
Université de Provence
Tomas Plänkers, Ph.D., Psy.D.
Psychoanalyst
Michèle Pollak Cornillot
Lecturer
Université de Paris-V
Michel Polo
Psychoanalyst
Member
Espace analytique
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand
Titular Member
Association psychanalytique de France
Series Editor at Éditions Gallimard
Writer
Erik Porge
Psychoanalyst
Former Member
École freudienne de Paris
Michèle Porte
Psychoanalyst and Psychotherapist
Paul-Brosse Hospital
Instructor
École Normale Supérieure
Anna Potamianou, Ph.D.
Psychoanalyst
Training Analyst
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Luiz Eduardo Prado de Oliveira
Doctor of Clinical Psychology
lx iv
Member
Sociedade de Psicanálise Iracy Doyle-Rio
de Janiero
Régine Prat
Psychologist-Psychoanalyst
Janine Puget
Doctor
Founding Member
Argentine Group Therapy Association
Titular Member
Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Association
Bertrand Pulman
Lecturer, Social Sciences Department
Université de Paris-V
Florence Quartier-Frings
Founding Titular Member
Société Suisse de psychanalyse (International Psychoanalytical Association)
Jean-Michel Quinodoz
Titular Member and Training Analyst
Société Suisse de psychanalyse
Didier Rabain
Pediatric Psychiatrist
Salpêtrière Hospital
Joseph Reppen, Ph.D.
Editor
Psychoanalytic Books
Member
International Psychoanalytical Association
New York Freudian Society
Alvaro Rey de Castro
Psychoanalyst
Professor
Catholic University of Peru
Titular Member and Past President
Sociedad Peruana de Psicoanálisis
Denys Ribas
Doctor
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
François Richard
Psychologist and Psychoanalyst
Professor of Psychopathology
Université de Paris-VII
Arnold D. Richards, M.D.
Training and Supervising Analyst
New York Psychoanalytic Institute
Jean-François Rabain
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Paul Ries, M.A., Ph.D.
University Lecturer, Faculty of Modern
and Medieval Languages
University of Cambridge
Psychoanalytic-Psychotherapist
Nicholas Rand
Professor of French Literature and
Senior Research Fellow
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Paul Roazen
Professor Emeritus, Social and Political
Science
York University (Toronto)
Helene Rank-Veltfort, Ph.D.
Psychotherapist
ex-teacher at the Proctorship Committee
Mills-Peninsula Hospital
Thomas Robert
Archivist
Sigmund Freud Copyrights
Jean-Jacques Rassial
Professor of Psychopathology
Université de Paris-XIII
Member of Espace analytique
Gail S. Reed, Ph.D.
Training and Supervising Analyst
New York Freudian Society
Anne Roche
Former student at the École Normale
Supérieure
Professor
Université de Provence
Eva Rosenblum
Psychoanalyst, Paris
Research Attache
CNRS
Johann Georg Reicheneder
Doctor
Owen Renik
Training and Supervising Analyst
San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute
Associate Editor
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly
David Rosenfeld
Doctor
Training Analyst
Professor of Mental Health, Faculty of
Medicine
University of Buenos Aires
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
DIRECTORY
Hans-Joachim Rothe, M.D.
Independent Scholar
René Roussillon
Professor
Université Lyon-II
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Elsa Schmid-Kitsikis
Professor of Clinical Psychology
University of Geneva
Gérard Schmit
Professor of Child Psychiatry and
Psychoanalyst
UFR of Medicine at Reims
Marie-Lise Roux
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Monique Schneider
Psychoanalyst
Research Director at the CNRS
August Ruhs
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse
Ingrid Scholz-Strasser
General Secretary
Sigmund Freud Society
Pierre Sabourin
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Georges Schopp
Psychoclinician and Psychoanalyst
Gilda Sabsay Foks
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
(Argentina)
Titular Member
Argentine Psychoanalytic Association
Jacques Schotte
Psychiatrist-Psychoanalyst
Professor Emeritus of Clinical
Psychology
Universities of Louvain-la-Neuve and
Louvain-Leuven
François Sacco
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Eduardo J. Salas
Doctor
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Training Analyst
Argentine Psychoanalytic Association
Martin A. Schulman, Ph.D.
Editor
Psychoanalytic Review
Former Dean of Faculty and
Curriculum
The National Psychological Association
for Psychoanalysis
Isaac Salem
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Ulrich Schultz-Venrath
M.D. of Psychotherapeutic Medicine,
Neurology, and Psychiatry
Professor
University Witten/Herdecke
Andrew Samuels
Professor of Analytical Psychology
University of Essex
Training Analyst
Society of Analytical Psychology,
London
Michael Šebek
Direct Member
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Training Analyst
Czech Study Group
Guillermo Sanchez Medina
Doctor and Psychoanalyst
Titular Member and President
Colombian Psychoanalytic Society
Jacques Sédat
Psychoanalyst
Member of Espace analytique
Secretary General
International Association for the History
of Psychoanalysis
Jacqueline Schaeffer
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Nora Scheimberg
Psychologist and Psychoanalyst
Delphine Schilton
Psychoanalyst
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
Hanna Segal
Doctor
Fellow
Royal College of Psychiatry
Training Analyst and Past President
British Psychoanalytic Society
PSYCHOANALYSIS
OF
CONTRIBUTORS
Christian Seulin
Psychiatrist
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Sue A. Shapiro, Ph.D.
Supervising Analyst
NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis
Robert Shilkret
Professor of Psychology and Education
Mount Holyoke College
Larry Shiner
Professor of Philosophy
University of Illinois at Springfield
Joyceline Siksou
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Ann-Louise S. Silver, M.D.
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Chestnut Lodge/C.P.C. Faculty:
Washington Psychoanalytic Institute
John Galbraith Simmons
Writer, Screenwriter, and Independent
Scholar
Jöel Sipos
Psychoanalyst
Member
Institut de formation de l’Association
psychanalytique de France
Samuel Slipp, M.D.
Past President
American Academy of Psychoanalysis
Claude Smadja
Doctor, Psychiatrist, and Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Marı́a de Lourdes Soares O’Donnell
Doctor and Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society of Rio
de Janeiro
Victor Souffir
Former Chief Doctor of Psychiatry
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Michel Soulé
Honorary Professor of Child Psychiatry
Université de Paris-V
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
lxv
DIRECTORY
OF
CONTRIBUTORS
Ethel Spector Person, M.D.
Training and Supervising Analyst
Columbia University Center for Training and Research
David Titleman
Doctor of Psychology
Training Analyst
Swedish Psychoanalytic Society
Murray Stein, Ph.D.
Training Analyst
C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago
Bernard Toboul
Psychoanalyst
Member of Espace analytique
Member
International Association for the History
of Psychoanalysis
Riccardo Steiner
Psychoanalyst
Member
British Psychoanalytical Society
Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D.
Training Analyst and Director of
Supervision
Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles
Gunther Stuhlmann
Writer
Founder and Editor
Anaı̈s: An International Journal
Guillaume Suréna
Orthophonist and Psychoanalyst
Nina Sutton
Writer and journalist
Henri Sztulman
Dean of Professors (Toulouse-II)
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Jean-Yves Tamet
Psychiatrist
Psychoanalyst (Association
psychanalytique de France)
Juan-Eduardo Tesone
Doctor, Psychiatrist, and
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Viviane Thibaudier
Psychoanalyst
Training Analyst
Société française de psychologie
analytique
Bernard This
Psychoanalyst
Nellie L. Thompson, Ph.D.
Psychoanalyst and Historian
Member
New York Psychoanalytical Society
Serge Tisseron
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
lx vi
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Margret Tonnesmann, M.D.
Psychoanalyst
British Psychoanalytical Society
Odon Vallet
Former student at the ENS
Doctor of Law and Religious Studies
Director of Curriculum
Paris-I and Paris-VII
Bernard Vandermersch
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Member
Association freudienne internationale
Alain Vanier
Professor
Université de Paris-VII
Psychoanalyst
Member of Espace analytique
Maria Torok
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Bernard Touati
Pediatric Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Centre Alfred-Binet
Member
International Association for the History
of Psychoanalysis
Katia Varenne
Psychologist and Psychoanalyst
Titular Member at the EPS
Sverre Varvin, M.D.
Psychoanalyst
President
Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society
Marie-Dominique Trapet
Docteur d’Etat in Law and Doctor of
Common Law
Psychoanalyst and Magistrate
Elizabeth Verhage-Stins
Psychologist, Psychoanalyst, and
Training Analyst
Amsterdam
David I. Tresan, M.D.
Member
C. G. Jung Institute of Northern
California
Henri Vermorel
Former hospital Psychiatrist and
Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Hélène Trivouss-Widlöcher
Psychoanalyst and Neuropsychiatrist
Titular Member, Association
psychanalytique de France
Madeleine Vermorel
Psychoanalyst
Chambéry
Philippe Turmond
Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst
Richard Uhl
Psychiatrist
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris,
Rodolfo Urribarri
Professor
University of Buenos Aires
Member
Argentine Psychoanalytical Society
Simone Valantin
Senior Lecturer
Université de Paris-VII
Bertrand Vichyn
Psychoanalyst
Doctor of Psychoanalysis
Instructor
Université de Paris-VII
Fernando Vidal
Université of Geneva
Jacques Vigneault
Sociologist and Psychoanalyst
Member
Société psychanalytique de Montréal
Joseph Villier
Psychoanalyst and Family Therapist
Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris,
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
DIRECTORY
Michel Vincent
Psychoanalyst
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Christine Vindreau
Former Chief Clinician,
Psychiatrist, and Hospital
Practitioner
Analyst-in-Training
Association psychanalytique de France
Germano Vollmer Filho
Training and Supervising Analyst
Past-President
Porto Alegre Psychoanalytic Society
Steven Wainrib
Psychiatrist
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Curricular Director
Université de Paris-VII
Robert S. Wallerstein
Training and Supervising Analyst
San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute
Professor Emeritus and Former Chair,
Department of Psychiatry
University of California, San Francisco
School of Medicine
Richard M.Waugaman, M.D.
Training and Supervising Analyst
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
Washington Psychoanalytic Institute
Inge Weber, Psy.D.
Doctor of Natural Sciences
Psychoanalyst (German Psychoanalytic
Society)
Kaspar Weber, M.D.
FMG specialist in Psychiatry and
Psychotherapy
Psychoanalyst
Member
Société Suisse de Psychanalyse
Daniel Widlöcher, M.D., Psy.D.
Professor Emeritus
Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, Paris-VI
Reiner Wild
Doctor of Philosophy
Professor of New German Literary
History
University of Mannheim
Pérel Wilgowicz
Titular Member
Société psychanalytique de Paris
Herbert Will, M.D.
Theologian
Psychoanalyst
Gerhard Wittenberger, Ph.D., DGSV
Group-dynamics Trainer
Psychoanalyst
PSYCHOANALYSIS
OF
CONTRIBUTORS
Clifford Yorke
Physician
Training Analyst
British Psychoanalytical Society
Roberto Yutaka Sagawa
Assistant Professor and Clinical
Supervisor
Psychology Department
Universidade Estadual Paulista (Sao
Paulo)
Beverley D. Zabriskie, MSW
Jungian Analyst
Sharon Zalusky, Ph.D.
North American Regional Editor
International Psychoanalysis
International Psychoanalytical Association Newsletter Chair
The American Psychoanalytic
Association
Mathieu Zannotti
Pediatric Psychiatrist
Franck Zigante
Psychiatrist
Assistant Chief Clinician, Faculty of
Medicine
Université de Paris-VI
lxvii
THEMATIC
OUTLINE
THEMATIC OUTLINE
This outline provides a general overview of the conceptual structure of the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. The outline is
organized by four major categories: Concepts/Notions, Biographies, Works, and History. All categories are subcategorized, with the exception of Biographies. The entries are listed alphabetically within each category or subcategory. For ease of reference, one entry may be listed
under several categories.
I. Concepts/Notions
Abandonment
Absence
Abstinence/rule of abstinence
Act, action
Acting out/acting in
Action-language
Action-(re)presentation
Action-thought (H. Kohut)
Active technique
Activity/passivity
Actual neurosis/defense neurosis
Acute psychoses
Adaptation
Addiction
Adhesive identification
Adolescence
Adolescent crisis
Adoption
Affects, quota of affect
Agency
Alpha-elements
Aggressiveness/aggression
Alchemy
Alcoholism
Alienation
Allergic object relationship
Allergy
Alpha function
Alter ego
Altruism
Amae, concept of
Ambivalence
Amentia
Amnesia
Amphimixia/amphimixis
Anaclisis/anaclictic
Anality
Anagogical interpretation
Analyzability
Analysand
Analyse quatrième
Analytical Psychology (Jung)
Active imagination
Amplification
Analytical psychology
Archetype
Collective unconscious
Compensation
Complex
Ego
Extroversion/introversion
Individuation
Interpretation of dreams
Numinous
Psychological types
Projection and ‘‘participation mystique’’
Self
Shadow
Synchronicity
Transference/counter-transference
Animal magnetism
Animistic thought
lxix
Animus-Anima
Anorexia nervosa
Anticathexis/counter-cathexis
Anticipatory ideas
Antinarcissism
Anxiety
Annihilation anxiety
Anxiety
Anxiety dream
Anxiety, development of
Signal anxiety
Aphanisis
Aphasia
Applied psychoanalysis and the interaction
of psychoanalysis
Archaic
Archaic mother
Archeology, the metaphor of
Arrogance
As if personality
Asthma
Attachment
Attention
Autistic capsule/nucleus
Autistic defenses
Autobiography
Autoeroticism
Automatism
Autoplastic
Autosuggestion
Basic assumption
THEMATIC OUTLINE
Basic fault
Belief
Benign/malignant regression
Beta-elements
Beta-screen
Binding/unbinding of the instincts
Biological bedrock
Birth
Bisexuality
Bizarre object
Black hole
Blank/nondelusional psychoses
Body image
Borderline conditions
Boredom
Boundary violations
Breakdown
Breastfeeding
Breast, good/bad object
Bulimia
Capacity to be alone
Catastrophic change
Cathartic method
Cathectic energy
Cathexis
Censoring the lover in her
Censorship
Certainty
Change
Concept
Condensation
Conflict
Conscious processes
Consciousness
Constitution
Construction-reconstruction
Contact and psychoanalysis
Contact-barrier
Container-Contained
Contradiction
Conversion
Coprophilia
Counter-identification
Counter-Oedipus
Counterphobic
Counter-transference
Creativity
Cruelty
Cryptomnesia
Cultural transmission
Cure
Danger
Dark continent
Daydream
Day’s residues
Death instinct (Thanatos)
Decathexis
Defense
Character
Character formation
Character neurosis
Child analysis
Childhood
Children’s play
Civilization (Kultur)
Claustrophobia
Clinging instinct
Collective psychology
Combined parent figure
Compensatory structures
Complementary series
Defense
Defense mechanisms
Manic defenses
Neuro-psychosis of defense
Neurotic defenses
Deferred action
Deferred action and trauma
Déjà-vu
Delusion
Demand
Dementia
Depersonalization
Depression
Complex
Castration complex
Complex
Dead mother complex
Father complex
Nuclear complex
Oedipus complex
Oedipus Complex, early
Compromise formation
Compulsion
lx x
Basic depression
Depressive position
Postnatal/postpartum depression
Transference depression
Deprivation
Desexualization
Destrudo
Determinism
Developmental disorders
Dipsomania
Direct analysis
Directed daydream (R. Desoille)
Disavowal
Discharge
Discourse
Disintegration, feelings of, anxieties
Disintegration products
Dismantling
Disorganisation
Displacement
Doing/Undoing
Double bind
Double, The
Doubt
Dream
Birth, dream of
Convenience, dream of
Dream
Dream-like memory
Dream screen
Dream symbolism
Dream work
Dream’s navel
Examination dreams
Hypocritical dream
Irma’s injection, dream of
Latent dream thoughts
Mourning, dream of
Nakedness, dream of
Punishment, dream of
Premonitory dreams
Repetitive dreams
Typical dreams
Drive
Drive/instinct
Partial drive
Sexual drive
Subject of the drive
Dualism
Dynamic point of view
Early interactions
Economic point of view
Elasticity
Ego
Antilibidinal ego/internal saboteur
Ego
Ego, alteration of the
Ego autonomy
Ego boundaries
Ego, damage inflicted on
Ego (ego psychology)
Ego feeling
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
THEMATIC OUTLINE
Ego functions
Ego ideal
Ego ideal/ideal ego
Ego identity
Ego-instinct
Ego interests
Ego-libido/object-libido
Ego psychology
Ego, splitting of the
Ego states
Ego-syntonic
Pleasure ego/reality ego
Tube-ego
Emotion
Empathy
Encopresis
Encounter
Enuresis
Envy
Eros
Eroticism
Eroticism, anal
Eroticism, oral
Eroticism, urethral
Erotogenic masochism
Erotogenic zone
Erotogenicity
Erotomania
Erythrophobia (fear of blushing)
Estrangement
Ethics
Event
Excitation
Exhibitionism
Experience of satisfaction
Externalization-internalization
Face-to-face situation
Facilitation
Family
Family romance
Fantasy
Fantasy
Fantasy, formula of
Fantasy (reverie)
Pregnancy, fantasy of
Primal fantasy
Rescue fantasies
Unconscious fantasy
‘‘Vagina dentata,’’ fantasy of
Fascination
Fatherhood
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
Fear
Feces
Female sexuality
Feminine masochism
Femininity
Feminity, rejection of
Fetishism
Fixation
Flight into illness
Foreclosure
Forgetting
Formations of the unconscious
Fort-Da
Fragmentation
Framework of the psychoanalytic
treatment
Free association
Free energy/bound energy
Free-floating attention
Friendship
Fright
Frustration
Functional phenomenon
Fundamental rule
Fusion/defusion
Fusion/defusion of Instincts
Gain (primary and secondary)
Gender identity
General theory of seduction
Genital love
Gift
Gifts
Good-enough mother
Graph of Desire
Grid
Group analysis
Group phenomenon
Group psychotherapies
Guilt, feeling of
Guilt, unconscious sense of
Hallucinosis
Hallucinatory, the
Handling
Hatred
Helplessness
Heredity of acquired characters
Hermeneutics
Heterosexuality
Historical reality
Holding
Homosexuality
Hospitalism
Humor
Hypercathexis
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Hypnoid states
Hypnosis
Hyponchondria
Hysteria
Hysterical paralysis
I
Id
Idealization
Idealized parental imago
Ideational representation
Ideational representative
Identification
Heroic identification
Identification
Identification fantasies
Identification with the aggressor
Imaginary identification/symbolic
identification
Projective identification
Identificatory project
Identity
Ideology
Illusion
Imaginary, the (Lacan)
Imago
Imposter
Impulsive acts or impulsivity
Incest
Incompleteness
Indications and contraindications for psychoanalysis for an adult
Individual
Infans
Infant development
Infant observation
Infant observation (direct)
Infant observation (therapeutic)
Infantile amnesia
Infantile psychosis
Infantile schizophrenia
Infantile sexual curiosity
Infantile, the
Inferiority, feeling of
Inferiority, feeling of (individual
psychology)
Inhibition
Initial interview(s)
Innervation
Insight
Instinct
Instinct for knowledge or research
Instinctual impulse
Instinctual representative
lx xi
THEMATIC OUTLINE
Integration
Intellectualization
Intergenerational
Internal object
Internal/external reality
interpretation
Interpretation of dreams
Intersubjective/intrasubjective
Introjection
Introspection
Invariant
Isakower phenomenon
Isolation
Jokes
Jouissance (Lacan)
Judgment of condemnation
Knot
L and R schemas
Lack of differentiation
Language and disturbances of language
Latency period
Latent
Law of the father
Lay analysis
Letter, the
Libidinal development
Libido
Lie
Life instinct (Eros)
Lifting of amnesia
Linking, attacks on
Listening
Logic(s)
Look/gaze
Lost object
Love
Love-Hate-Knowledge ( L/H/K links)
Magical thinking
Mania
Manic defenses
Manifest
Masculine protest (individual psychology)
Masculinity/femininity
Masochism
Mastery
Mastery, instinct for
Masturbation
Maternal
Maternal reverie, capacity for
Matheme
Maturation
Megalomania
Melancholia
Melancholy
lx xi i
Memoirs of the future
Memory
Mentalization
Metaphor
Metapsychology
Metonymy
Midlife crisis
Mnemic symbol
Mnemic trace/memory trace
Model
Modesty
Money and psychoanalytic treatment
Moral masochism
Mother goddess
Mothering
Motricity, psychomotricity
Mourning
Mutative interpretation
Mutual analysis
Mysticism
Myth of the hero
Myth of origins
Mythomania
Myths
Name-of-the-Father
Narcissism
Narcissism
Narcissism of minor differences
Narcissism, primary
Narcissism, secondary
Narcissistic defenses
Narcissistic elation
Narcissistic injury
Narcissistic neurosis
Narcissistic rage
Narcissistic transference
Narcissistic withdrawal
Narco-analysis
Need for Ccusality
Need for punishment
Negation
Negative capability
Negative hallucination
Negative therapeutic reaction
Negative, work of the
Neopsychoanalysis
Neurosis
Actual neurosis/defense neurosis
Choice of neurosis
Failure neurosis
Fate neurosis
Infantile neurosis
Neurosis
Obsessional neurosis
Phobic neurosis
Traumatic neurosis
War neurosis
Neurotica
Neutrality, benevolent neutrality
Nightmare
Nirvana Neurasthenia
Nocturnal/night terrors
Nonverbal communication
Normality
Nostalgia
Object
Object a
Object relations theory
Object, change of/choice of
Obsession
Occultism
Oceanic feeling
Omnipotence of thoughts
Omnipotence, infantile
Ontogenesis
Operative thinking
Optical schema
Orality
Organ pleasure
Organic psychoses
Organic repression
Organization
Orgasm
Orgone
Other, the
Otherness
Overdetermination
Over-interpretation
Pain
Pair of opposites
Parade of the signifier
Paradox
Paranoia
Paranoid position
Paranoid psychosis
Paranoid-schizoid position
Paraphrenia
Parapraxis
Parenthood
Parricide
Pass, the
Passion
Penis envy
Perceptual identity
Persecution
Perversion
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
THEMATIC OUTLINE
Phallic mother
Phallic woman
Phallus
Phantom
Phobia of committing impulsive acts
Phobias in children
Phylogenesis
Physical pain/psychic pain
Pleasure in thinking
Pleasure/unpleasure principle
Pregenital
Prehistory
Premature-prematurity
Prepsychosis
Prereflective unconscious
Primal repression
Primal scene
Primal, the
Primary identification
Primary love
Primary masochism
Primary need
Primary object
Primary process/secondary process
Primitive
Primitive agony
Primitive horde
Principle of (neuronal) inertia
Principle of constancy
Principle of identity preservation
Principles of mental functioning
Perception-consciousness (Pcpt.-Cs.)
Pictogram
Preconception
Preconscious, the
Privation
Process
Processes of development
Progressive neutralization
Prohibition
Projection
Protective shield
Protective shield, breaking through the
Proton-pseudos
Protothoughts
Psychodrama
Psi system
Psyche/psychism
Psychic apparatus
Psychic causality
Psychic energy
Psychic envelope
Psychic reality
Psychic structure
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
Psychic temporality
Psychical representative
Psychoanalyst
Psychoanalytic epistemology
Psychoanalytic family therapy
Psychoanalytic filiations
Psychoanalytic treatment
Psychoanalytical nosography
Psychobiography
Psychogenesis/organogenesis
Psychogenic blindness
Psychohistory
Psychological tests
Psychoses
Psychoses, chronic and delusional
Psychosexual development
Psychosomatic
Psychotherapy
Psychotic defenses
Psychotic/neurotic
Psychotic panic
Psychotic part of the personality
Psychotic potential
Purposive idea
Puberty
Puerperal psychoses
Purified-pleasure-ego
Quantitative/qualitative
Rationalization
Reaction-formation
Real, the (Lacan)
Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary father
Real trauma
Reality principle
Reality testing
Realization
Reciprocal paths of influence (libidinal
coexcitation)
Regression
Relations (commensalism, parasitism,
symbiosis)
Relaxation principle and neo-catharsis
Relaxation psychotherapy
Remembering
Reminiscences
Reparation
Repetition
Repetition compulsion
Representability
Representation
Representation of affect
Representative
Repressed
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Repressed, derivative of the; derivative of
the unsonscious
Repression
Repression, lifting of
Repudiation
Resistance
Return of the repressed
Reversal into the opposite
Rite and ritual
Rivalry
Sadism
Sadomasochism
Schizophrenia
Scoptophilia/scopophilia
Scotomization
Screen Memory
Secondary revision
Secret
Seduction
Seduction scenes
Selected fact
Sense/nonsense
Sexual theories of children
Sexual trauma
Sexuality
Sexualization
Sexuation, formulas of
Shame
Signifier
Signifier/signified
Self
Bipolar self
False self
Grandiose self
Heroic self
Self
Self-analysis
Self-consciousness
Self-esteem
Self-hatred
Self-image
Self mutilation in children
Self-object
Self-preservation
Self psychology
Self-punishment
Self-representation
Self-state dream
Self (true/false)
Self, the
Turning around on the subject’s own self
Sexual differentiation
Signifying chain
l x x ii i
THEMATIC OUTLINE
Skin-ego
Silence
Sleep/wakefulness
Slips of the tongue
Smell,sense of
Skin
Social feeling (individual psychology)
Somatic compliance
Somnambulism
Specific action
Split object
Splitting
Splitting of the subject
Splitting of the object
Splitting, vertical and horizontal
Squiggle
Stages
Anal-sadistic stage
Genital stage
Libidinal stage
Mirror stage
Oral-sadistic stage
Oral stage
Phallic stage
Quasi-independence/transitional Stage
Stage (or phase)
Stammering
State of being in love
Stranger
Strata/stratification
Structural theories
Subconscious
Subject
Subject of the unconscious
Subject’s castration
Subject’s desire
Sublimation
Substitute/substitutive formation
Substitutive formation
Sucking/thumbsucking
Sudden involuntary idea
Suffering
Suggestion
Suicidal behavior
Suicide
Sum of excitation
Superego
Supervised analysis (control case)
Suppression
Symbiosis/symbiotic relation
Symbol
Symbolic Equation
Symbolic realization
lx xi v
Symbolic, the (Lacan)
Symbolism
Symbolism , process of
Symptom
Symptom/sinthome
Symptom-formation
System/systemic
Tenderness
Time
Taboo
Taboo of virginity
Tact
Technique with adults, psychoanalytic
Technique with children, psychoanalytic
Telepathy
Termination of treatment
Therapeutic alliance
Thing, the
Thing-presentation
Thought
Thought-thinking apparatus
Thought identity
Tics
Topographical point of view
Topology
Totem/totemism
Training analysis
Training of psychoanalysts
Trance
Transcultural
Transference
Idealizing transference
Lateral transference
Mirror transference
Negative transference
Psychotic transference
Resolution of the transference
Transference depression
Transference
Transference/counter-transference (analytical psychology)
Transference hatred
Transference in children
Transference love
Transference neurosis
Transference of creativity
Transference relationship
Twinship transference/alter ego
transference
Transformations
Transgression
Transitional object
Transitional object, space
Transitional phenomena
Translation
Transmuting internalization
Transsexualism
Trauma
Truth
Turning around
Ulcerative colitis
Unary trait
Unconscious, the
Unconscious concepts
Unpleasure
Unvalidated unconscious
Vertex
Violence, instinct of
Visual
Voyeurism
Want of being/lack of being
Weaning
Weltanschauung
Wish
Wish for a baby
Wish-fulfillment
Wish, hallucinatory satisfaction of a
Wish/yearning
Witch of Metapsychology, the
Word association
Work (as a psychoanalytical notion)
Word-presentation
Working over
Working -off mechanisms
Working-through
II. Biographies
Abel, Carl
Aberastury, Arminda, also known as ‘‘La
Negra’’
Abraham, Karl
Abraham, Nicolas
Adler, Alfred
Aichhorn, August
Alexander, Franz Gabriel
Allendy, René Félix Eugène
Allendy-Nel-Dumouchel, Yvonne
Althusser, Louis
Alvarez de Toledo, Luisa Agusta Rebeca
Gambier de
Andersson, Ola
Andreas-Salomé, Louise, dite Lou
Anzieu, Didier
Arlow, Jacob A.
Aubry Weiss, Jenny
Aulagnier-Spairani, Piera
Bachelard, Gaston
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
THEMATIC OUTLINE
Baginsky, Adolf
Bak, Robert C.
Balint, Michael (Bálint [Bergsmann],
Mihály)
Balint-Szekely-Kovács, Alice
Baranger, Willy
Baudouin, Charles
Beirnaert, Louis
Benedek, Therese
Berge, André
Bergler, Edmund
Berman, Anne
Bernays, Minna
Bernfeld, Siegfried
Bernheim, Hippolyte
Bettelheim, Bruno
Bibring, Edward
Bibring-Lehner, Grete
Bick, Esther
Bigras, Julien Joseph Normand
Binswanger, Ludwig
Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht
Bjerre, Poul
Blanton, Smiley
Bleger, José
Bleuler, Paul Eugen
Bloch, Jean- Richard
Blos, Peter
Boehm, Felix Julius
Bonaparte, Marie Léon
Borel, Adrien Alphonse Alcide
Bornstein, Berta
Bose, Girindrasekhar
Bouvet, Maurice Charles Marie Germain
Bowlby, Edward John Mostyn
Brentano, Franz von
Breton, André
Breuer, Josef
Brierley, Marjorie Flowers
Brill, Abraham Arden
Brücke, Ernst Wihelm von
Brun, Rudolf
Brunswick, Ruth Mack
Bullitt, William C.
Burlingham-Tiffanny, Dorothy
Burrow, Trigant
Cárcamo, Celes Ernesto
Caruso, Igor A.
Cénac, Michel
Certeau, Michel de
Charcot, Jean Martin
Chentrier, Théodore
Chertok, Léon (Tchertok, Lejb)
Choisy, Maryse
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
Claparède, Édouard
Clark-Williams, Margaret
Claude, Henri Charles Jules
Corrao, Francesco
Dalbiez, Roland
Delay, Jean
Delboeuf, Joseph Rémi Léopold
Delgado, Honorio
Desoille, Robert
Deuticke, Franz
Deutsch, Felix
Deutsch-Rosenbach, Helene
Devereux, Georges
Diatkine, René
Dolto-Marette, Françoise
Doolittle-Aldington, Hilda (H.D.)
Dosuzkov, Theodor
Dubal, George
Dugautiez, Maurice
Eckstein, Emma
Eder, David Montagu
Eissler, Kurt Robert
Eissler-Selke, Ruth
Eitington, Max
Ellenberger, Henri Frédéric
Embirikos, Andreas
Emden, Jan Egbert Gustaaf Van
Enriquez-Joly, Micheline
Erikson, Erik Homburger
Ey, Henri
Fairbairn, William Ronald Dodds
Fanon, Frantz
Favez, Georges
Favez-Boutonier, Juliette
Favreau, Jean Alphonse
Fechner, Gustav Theodor
Federn, Paul
Fenichel, Otto
Ferenczi, Sándor
Fliess, Wilhelm
Flournoy, Henri
Flournoy, Théodore
Flügel, John Carl
Fluss, Gisela
Fornari, Franco
Foulkes (Fuchs), Siegmund Heinrich
Franco da Rocha, Francisco
Frankl, Viktor
Freud, (Jean) Martin
Freud-Nathanson, Amalia Malka
Freud, Anna
Freud-Bernays, Martha
Freud, Ernst
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Freud, Jakob Kolloman (ou Keleman ou
Kallamon)
Freud, Josef
Freud, Oliver
Freud, Sigmund Schlomo
Freud, Sigmund, (siblings)
Freund Toszeghy, Anton von
Friedländer-Fränkl, Kate
Frink, Horace Westlake
Fromm, Erich
Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda
Gaddini, Eugenio
Gardiner, Muriel M.
Garma, Angel
Gattel, Felix
Glover, Edward
Glover, James
Göring, Matthias Heinrich
Graf, Herbert
Graf, Max
Granoff, Wladimir Alexandre
Greenacre, Phyllis
Greenson, Ralph
Gressot, Michel
Groddeck, Georg Walther
Gross, Otto Hans Adolf
Guex, Germaine
Guilbert, Yvette
Halberstadt-Freud, Sophie
Hartmann, Heinz
Heimann, Paula
Held, René
Heller, Hugo
Hellman Noach, Ilse
Hermann, Imre
Hesnard, Angélo Louis Marie
Heuyer, Georges
Hilferding-Hönigsberg, Margarethe
Hirschfeld, Elfriede
Hitschmann, Eduard
Hoffer, William (Wilhelm)
Hollitscher-Freud, Mathilde
Hollós, István
Horney-Danielson, Karen
Hug-Hellmuth-Hug von Hugenstein,
Hermine
Isaacs-Sutherland, Susan
Isakower, Otto
Jacobson, Edith
Janet, Pierre
Jankélévitch, Samuel
Jekels (Jekeles), Ludwig
Jelliffe, Smith Ely
Jones, Ernest
lx xv
THEMATIC OUTLINE
Jouve, Pierre Jean
Jung, Carl Gustav
Jung-Rauschenbach, Emma
Jury, Paul
Kardiner, Abram
Katan, Maurits
Katan-Rosenberg, Anny
Kemper, Werner Walther
Kestemberg-Hassin, Evelyne
Kestemberg, Jean
Khan, Mohammed Masud Rasa
Klein-Reizes, Melanie
Koch, Adelheid Lucy
Kohut, Heinz
Kosawa, Heisaku
Kouretas, Démétrios
Kovács-Prosznitz, Vilma
Kraus, Karl
Kris, Ernst
Kris-Rie, Marianne
Lacan, Jacques-Marie Émile
Laforgue, René
Lagache, Daniel
Lainé, Tony
Laing, Ronald David
Lampl, Hans
Lampl-de Groot, Jeanne
Landauer, Karl
Langer, Marie Glass Hauser de
Lanzer, Ernst
Laurent-Lucas-Championnière-Maugé,
Odette
Le Bon, Gustave
Lebovici, Serge Sindel Charles
Lechat, Fernand
Leclaire (Liebschutz), Serge
Leeuw, Pieter Jacob Van der
Lehrman, Philip R.
Leuba, John
Levi Bianchini, Marco
Liberman, David
Liebeault, Ambroise Auguste
Limentani, Adam
Lorand, Sándor
Low, Barbara
Lowenstein, Rudolph M.
Maeder, Alphonse E.
Mahler-Schönberger, Margaret
Main, Thomas Forrest
Mâle, Pierre
Malinowski, Bronislaw Kaspar
Mann, Thomas
Mannoni, Dominique-Octave
lx xv i
Mannoni-Van der Spoel, Maud
(Magdalena)
Marcinowski, Johannes (Jaroslaw)
Marcondes, Durval Bellegarde
Marcuse, Herbert
Martins, Cyro
Marty, Pierre
Matte-Blanco, Ignacio
Mauco, Georges
Mead, Margaret
Meng, Heinrich
Menninger, Karl A.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
Meyer, Adolf F.
Meyerson, Ignace
Meynert, Theodor
Milner-Blackett, Marion
Minkowska-Brokman, Françoise
Minkowski, Eugène
Mitscherlich, Alexander
Mom, Jorge Mario
Money-Kyrle, Roger Earle
Moreno, Jacob Levy
Morgenstern-Kabatschnik, Sophie
Morgenthaler, Fritz
Morichau-Beauchant, Pierre Ernest René
Morselli, Enrico
Moser-van Sulzer-Wart, Fanny Louise
Müller-Braunschweig, Carl
Murray, Henry A.
Musatti, Cesare
Nacht, Sacha Emanoel
Nin, Anaı̈s
Nodet, Charles-Henri
Nunberg, Hermann
Oberholzer, Emil
Odier, Charles
Ophuijsen, Johan H. W. Van
Ossipov, Nikolaı̈ legrafovitch
Pankejeff, Sergueı̈
Pankow, Gisela
Pappenheim, Bertha
Parcheminey, Georges
Pasche, Francis Léopold Philippe
Payne, Sylvia May
Peraldi, François
Perestrello, Danilo
Perrier, François
Perrotti, Nicola
Pfister, Oskar Robert
Piaget, Jean
Pichon, Édouard Jean Baptiste
Pichon-Rivière, Enrique
Politzer, Georges
Porto-Carrero, Julio Pires
Pötzl, Otto
Putnam, James Jackson
Racamier, Paul-Claude
Racker, Heinrich
Radó, Sándor
Raimbault, Émile
Rambert, Madeleine
Rank (Rosenfeld) Otto
Rank-Minzer (ou Münzer), Beata
Rapaport, David
Rascovsky, Arnaldo
Rees, John Rawlings
Régis, Emmanuel Jean-Baptiste Joseph
Reich, Annie
Reich, Wilhelm
Reik, Theodor
Reverchon-Jouve, Blanche
Rickman, John
Rie, Oksar
Rittmeister, John Friedrich Karl
Riviere-Hodgson Verrall, Joan
Robertson, James
Róheim, Géza
Rolland, Romain Edme Paul-Émile
Rorschach, Hermann
Rosenfeld, Eva Marie
Rosenfeld, Herbert Alexander
Rosenthal, Tatiana
Ross, Helen
Rubinstein, Benjamin B.
Rycroft, Charles Frederick
Sachs, Hanns
Sadger, Isidor Isaak
Sandler, Joseph
Sarasin, Philipp
Saussure, Raymond de
Schiff, Paul
Schilder, Paul Ferdinand
Schlumberger, Marc
Schmideberg-Klein, Melitta
Schmidt, Vera Federovna
Schneider, Ernst
Schreber, Daniel Paul
Schultz-Hencke, Harald Julius Alfred CarlLudwig
Schur, Max
Sechehaye-Burdet, Marguerite
Servadio, Emilio
Sharpe, Ella Freeman
Silberer, Herbert
Silberstein, Eduard
Simmel, Ernst
Smirnoff, Victor Nikolaı̈evitch
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
THEMATIC OUTLINE
Sokolnicka-Kutner, Eugénie
Spielrein, Sabina
Spitz, René Arpad
Stekel, Wilhelm
Sterba, Richard F.
Sterba-Radanowicz-Hartmann, Editha
Stoller, Robert J.
Stone, Leo
Storfer, Adolf Josef
Strachey, James Beaumont
Strachey-Sargent, Alix
Sullivan, Harry Stack
Swoboda, Hermann
Szondi, Leopold
Tausk, Viktor
Thompson, Clara M.
Tomasi di Palma di Lampedusa-Wolff
Somersee, Alessandra
Torok, Maria
Tosquelles, François
Tustin, Frances
Urbantschitsch (Urban), Rudolf von
Valdizán Hermilio
Viderman, Serge
Waelder, Robert
Wagner-Jauregg, Julius (Julius Wagner Ritter von Jauregg)
Walter, Bruno
Weininger, Otto
Weiss, Edoardo
Wilbur, George B.
Winnicott, Donald Woods
Winterstein, Alfred Freiherr von
Wittels, Fritz (Siegfried)
Wittkower, Eric
Wolfentstein, Martha
Wolff, Antonia Anna
Wulff, Mosche (Woolf, Moshe)
Zavitzianos, Georges
Zetzel-Rosenberg, Elizabeth
Zulliger, Hans
Zweig, Arnold
Zweig, Stefan
III. Works
A) Freud
‘‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old
Boy’’ (little Hans)
‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’
‘‘Autobiographical Study, An’’
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Civilization and its Discontents
‘‘Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific
Interest’’
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
‘‘Constructions in Analysis’’
‘‘Contributions to the Psychology of Love’’
‘‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’’
Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘‘Gradiva’’
‘‘Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,
A’’
‘‘Dostoyevsky and Parricide’’
Ego and the Id, The
Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
‘‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’’ (Wolf Man )
Future of an Illusion, The
Gesammelte Schriften
Gessammelte Werke
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the
Ego
‘‘Heredity and the Aetiology of the
Neuroses’’
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
‘‘Instinct and their Vicissitudes’’
Interpretation of Dreams, The
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious
Klinische Studie über die halbseitiger Cerebrallähmung der Kinder [Clinical study
of infantile cerebral diplegia]
Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his
Childhood
‘‘Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic
Therapy’’
‘‘Metapsychologic Complement to the
Theory of Dreams’’
Moses and Monotheism’’
‘‘Moses of Michelangelo, The’’
‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’
‘‘Negation’’
Nervous Anxiety States and their Treatment
‘‘Neurasthenia and ‘Anxiety Neurosis’’’
New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis
‘‘Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad,’ A’’
‘‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’’ (Rat Man)
‘‘On Dreams’’
‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’
‘‘On the History of the Psychoanalytic
Movement’’
‘‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’’
‘‘On Transience’’
Opere ( writing of Sigmund Freud)
‘‘Outline of Psychoanalysis, An’’
Phylogenetic Fantasy, A :Overview of the
Transference Neuroses
‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology, A’’
PSYCHOANALYSIS
‘‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia
(Dementia Paranoides)’’
‘‘Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality
in a Woman, The’’
Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The
Question of Lay Analysis, The
‘‘Recommandations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis’’
‘‘Remembering, Repeating and WorkingThrough’’
‘‘Repression’’
‘‘Seventeenth-century Demonological
Neurosis, A’’
‘‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’’
‘‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of
Defense, The’’
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
Studies on Hysteria
‘‘Sexual Enlightenment Of Children, The’’
‘‘‘Uncanny,’ The’’
‘‘Unconscious, The’’
‘‘Theme of the Three Caskets, The’’
Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Twenty-eighth
President of the United States. A Psychological Study
‘‘Thoughts for the Times on War and
Death’’
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Totem and Taboo
‘‘Why War?’’
‘‘‘Wild’ Psycho-Analysis’’
B) Other Works
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Gilles Deleuze et Felix Guattari)
Apprenti-historien et le maı́tre-sorcier (L’-)
[The apprentice historian and the master sorcerer]( Piera Aulagnier)
Basic Neurosis, The—Oral Regression and
Psychic Masochism (Edmund Bergler)
Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry (Georges
Devereux)
Book of the It, The (Georg Groddeck)
Character Analysis (Wilhelm Reich)
Childhood and Society (Erik H. Erikson)
Christians and Jews: A Psychoanalytical
Study (Rudolf M. Loewenstein)
Collected papers on schizophrenia and
related subjects (Harold F. Searles)
‘‘Confusion of Tongues between Adults
and the Child’’ (Sándor Ferenczi)
lx xvii
THEMATIC OUTLINE
Construction de l’espace analytique (La-)
[Constructing the analytical space]
(Serge Viderman)
Development of Psycho-Analysis, The (Sándor Ferenczi and Otto Rank)
Don Juan and the Double (Otto Rank)
Dreams and Myths (Abraham Karl)
‘‘Dream of the Wise Baby, The’’ (Sandor
Ferenczi)
Écrits (Jacques Lacan)
Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, The
(Anna Freud )
Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (Heinz Hartmann)
Ego Psychology and Psychosis (Paul Federn)
Elementi di psiocoanalisi (Eduordo Weiss)
Empty Fortress, The (Bruno Bettelheim)
Envy and Gratitude (Melanie Klein)
Estudios sobre técnica psicoanalı́tica (Heinrich Racker)
Freud: Living and Dying (Max Schur)
Freud’s Self-Analysis (Didier Anzieu)
Freud, the Secret Passion (John Huston)
Hamlet and Oedipus (Ernest Jones)
‘‘Introjection and Transference’’ (Sandor
Ferenczi)
Jalousie amoureuse, La (Amorous jealousy)(Daniel Lagache)
Language of Psychoanalysis, The (Jean
Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis)
Learning from Experience (Wilfred R. Bion)
Lingüistica, Interacción comunicativa y Proceso psicoanalı́tico (David Liberman)
Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (Ernest
Jones)
Life and Works of Edgar Allen Poe, The: A
Psychoanalytic Interpretation (Marie
Bonaparte)
Mass Psychology of Fascism, The (Wilhelm
Reich)
Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society (Hermann Numberg and Ernst
Federn)
Nervous Anxiety States and their Treatment
(Wilhelm Stekel)
Neurosis and Human Growth (Karen
Horney)
‘‘On the Origin of the ‘Influencing
Machine’ in Schizophrenia’’ (Viktor
Tausk)
Philippson Bible
Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie [Psychoanalysis
and pediatrics] (Francoise Dolto)
lx xv ii i
Psychoanalyse des névroses et des psychoses,
La (Regis Emmanuel and Angelo Hesnard )
Psycho-Analysis of Children, The (Melanie
Klein)
Psychoanalysis of Dreams (Angel Garma)
Psychoanalysis of Fire, The (Gaston
Bachelard)
Psychoanalysis and the Neuroses (René
Laforgue and René Allendy)
Psychoanalytic Theory of Neuroses, The
(Otto Fenichel)
Psychoanalytical Treatment of Children
(Anna Freud)
Psychology of Women, The. A Psychoanalytic
Interpretation (Helene Deutsch)
Psychology of Dementia præcox (Carl Gustav Jung)
Psychology of the Unconscious, The (Carl
Gustav Jung)
Psychopathologie de l’échec (Psychopathology of Failure) (René Laforgue)
Qu’est-ce que la suggestion? [What is suggestion?] (Charles Baudouin)
Secrets of a Soul (Georg Wilhelm Pabst)
Seminar, Lacan’s (Jacques Lacan)
Sex and Character (Otto Weininger)
Thalassa. A Theory of Genitality (Sandor
Ferenczi)
Transference and Countertransference
(Heinrich Racker)
Trattato di psicoanalisi (Cesare Musatti)
Trauma of Birth, The (Otto Rank)
Unconscious as Infinite Sets, The: An Essay
in Bi-Logic (Ignacio matte-Blanco)
Violence of Interpretation, The: From Pictogram to Statement (Piera CastoriadisAulagnier)
Young Girl’s Diary, A (Hermine von HugHellmuth)
C) Journals and other publications
Almanach der Psychoanalyse
American Imago
Année psychologique, L’
Archives de psychologie, Les
Bloc—Notes de la psychanalyse
Coq-Héron
Disque vert, Le
Documents et Débats
Études Freudiennes
Évolution psychiatrique, L’ (Developments
in Psychiatry)
Fackel, Die
Imago. Zeitschrift für die Anwendung der
Psychoanalyse auf die
Geisteswissenschaften
Inconscient, L’
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, The
Internationale Zeitschrift für (ärztliche)
Psychoanalyse
Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag
Interprétation
Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse
Journal de la psychanalyse d’enfants
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association
Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse
Ornicar?
Psychanalyse, La
Psyché, revue internationale de psychanalyse
et des sciences de l’homme (Psyche, an
international review of psychoanalysis
and human sciences)
Psyche. Zeitschrift für Psychanalyse und ihre
Anwendungen
Psychoanalytic Bewegung, Die
Psychoanalytic Quarterly, The
Psychoanalytic Review, The
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, The
Psychoterapia (Psixoterapija-Obozrenie
voprosov lecenija I prikladonoj psixologii)
Revista de psicoanálisis
Revista de psiquiatria y disciplinas conexas
Revue française de psychanalyse
Rivisita di psicoanalisi
Topique
Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Pädagogik
Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse
IV. History
A) COUNTRIES
ARGENTINA
Aberastury, Arminda, also known as ‘‘La
Negra’’
Alvarez de Toledo, Luisa Agusta Rebeca
Gambier de
Argentina
Baranger, Willy
Bleger, José
Cárcamo, Celes Ernesto
Langer, Marie Glass Hauser de
Liberman, David
Mom, Jorge Mario
Pichon-Rivière, Enrique
Racker, Heinrich
Rascovsky, Arnaldo
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
THEMATIC OUTLINE
AUSTRALIA
Australia
AUSTRIA
Adler, Alfred
Aichhorn, August
Almanach der Psychoanalyse
Austria
Berggasse 19, Wien IX
Bernays, Minna
Bernfeld, Siegfried
Breuer, Josef
Caruso, Igor A.
Committee,The
Deuticke, Franz
Eckstein, Emma
Eissler, Kurt Robert
Fluss, Gisela
Frankl, Viktor
Freud, Amalie
Freud, Anna
Freud, Bernays, Martha
Freud, Ernst
Freud, Jakob Kolloman
(ou Keleman ou Kallamon)
Freud, (Jean) Martin
Freud, Josef
Freud Museum
Freud, Oliver
Freud, Sigmund Schlomo
Freud, Sigmund, ( siblings)
Friedländer-Fränkl, Kate
Graf, Herbert
Graf, Max
Gross, Otto Hans Adolf
Halberstadt-Freud, Sophie
Hartmann, Heinz
Heller, Hugo (et éditions)
Hellman Noach, Ilse
Hietzing Schule/Burlingham-Rosenfeld
Hilferding-Hönigsberg, Margarethe
Hitschmann, Eduard
Hollitscher-Freud, Mathilde
Hug-Hellmuth-Hug von Hugenstein,
Hermine
Institut Max-Kassowitz
Jekels (Jekeles), Ludwig
Kraus, Karl
Kris-Rie, Marianne
Lanzer, Ernst
Lehrinstitut der Wiener
psychoanalytischen Vereinigung
Meynert, Theodor
Pappenheim, Bertha
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
Pötzl, Otto
Rank (Rosenfeld) Otto
Rank-Minzer (ou Münzer), Beata
Reich, Annie
Reich, Wilhelm
Reik, Theodor
Rie, Oksar
Sadger, Isidor Isaak
Schilder, Paul Ferdinand
Schur, Max
Sigmund Freud Museum
Silberer, Herbert
Stekel, Wilhelm
Sterba, Richard F.
Swoboda, Hermann
Tausk, Viktor
Urbantschitsch (Urban), Rudolf von
Vienna, Freud’s secondary school in
Vienna General Hospital
Vienna, University of
Waelder, Robert
Wagner-Jauregg, Julius (Julius Wagner
Ritter von Jauregg)
Weininger, Otto
Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung
Winterstein, Alfred Freiherr von
Wittels, Fritz (Siegfried)
Zweig, Stefan
BELGIUM
Belgium
Delboeuf, Joseph Rémi Léopold
Dugautiez, Maurice
Lechat, Fernand
BRAZIL
Brazil
Franco da Rocha, Francisco
Kemper, Werner Walther
Koch, Adelheid Lucy
Marcondes, Durval Bellegarde
Martins, Cyro
Perestrello, Danilo
Porto-Carrero, Julio Pires
CANADA
Bigras, Julien Joseph Normand
Canada
Lainé, Tony
Peraldi, François
North America
Société psychanalytique de Montréal
CHILE
Blanco, Ignacio
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Chile
CHINA
China
COLOMBIA
Colombia
CZECH REPUBLIC
Czech Republic
DENMARK
Denmark
FINLAND
Finland
FRANCE
Allendy, René Félix Eugène
Allendy-Nel-Dumouchel, Yvonne
Althusser, Louis
Association psychanalytique de France
Aulagnier-Spairani, Piera
Dolto-Marette, Françoise
Enriquez-Joly, Micheline
Ey, Henri
Favez, Georges
Favez-Boutonier, Juliette
Favreau, Jean Alphonse
Anzieu, Didier
Aubry Weiss, Jenny
Bachelard, Gaston
Beirnaert, Louis
Berge, André
Berman, Anne
Bernheim, Hippolyte
Bloch, Jean- Richard
Bonaparte, Marie Léon
Borel, Adrien Alphonse Alcide
Bouvet, Maurice Charles Marie Germain
Breton, André
Cénac, Michel
Centre Alfred-Binet
Centre de consultations et de traitements
psychanalytiques Jean-Favreau
Centre psychopédagogique ClaudeBernard
Collège de psychanalystes
Colloque sur l’ inconscient
Certeau, Michel de
Charcot, Jean Martin
Chentrier, Théodore
Chertok, Léon (Tchertok, Lejb)
Choisy, Maryse
Claude, Henri Charles Jules
Dalbiez, Roland
l x x ix
THEMATIC OUTLINE
Delay, Jean
Desoille, Robert
Diatkine, René
Flournoy, Henri
Flournoy, Théodore
France
Granoff, Wladimir Alexandre
Guilbert, Yvette
Held, René
Hesnard, Angélo Louis Marie
Heuyer, Georges
Janet, Pierre
Jankélévitch, Samuel
Jouve, Pierre Jean
Kestemberg-Hassin, Evelyne
Kestenberg, Jean
Jury, Paul
Lacan, Jacques-Marie Émile
Laforgue, René
Lagache, Daniel
Lainé, Tony
Laurent-Lucas-Championnière-Maugé,
Odette
Le Bon, Gustave
Lebovici, Serge
Leclaire (Liebschutz), Serge
Liebeault, Ambroise Auguste
Leuba, John
Mâle, Pierre
Mannoni, Dominique-Octave
Mannoni-Van der Spoel,
Maud (Magdalena)
Marty, Pierre
Mauco, Georges
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
Meyerson, Ignace
Minkowska-Brokman, Françoise
Minkowski, Eugène
Morichau-Beauchant, Pierre Ernest René
Mouvement lacanien française
Nacht, Sacha Emanoel
Nodet, Charles-Henri
Pankow, Gisela
Parcheminey, Georges
Pasche, Francis Léopold Philippe
Perrier, François
Pichon, Édouard Jean Baptiste
Politzer, Georges
Racamier, Paul-Claude
Raimbault, Émile
Reverchon-Jouve, Blanche
Régis, Emmanuel Jean-Baptiste Joseph
Rolland, Romain Edme Paul-Émile
Sainte-Anne Hospital
lx xx
Salpêtriere, hospital
Schiff, Paul
Schlumberger, Marc
Smirnoff, Victor Nikolaı̈evitch
Société française de psychanalyse
Société psychanalytique de Paris and Institut
de psychanalyse de Paris
Torok, Maria
Tosquelles, François
Viderman, Serge
Sigmund Freud Institute
Tegel (Schloss Tegel)
Walter, Bruno
Zweig, Arnold
GERMANY
HUNGARY
Abel, Carl
Abraham, Karl
Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für
Psychotherapie
Baginsky, Adolf
Berliner Psychoanalytische Poliklinik
Berliner Psychoanalytisches Institut
Brentano, Franz von
Brücke, Ernst Wihelm von
Deutsches Institut für Psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie (Institut
Göring)
Eitington, Max
Eissler-Selke, Ruth
Eitington, Max
Fechner, Gustav Theodor
Foulkes (Fuchs), Siegmund Heinrich
Fromm, Erich
Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda
Gattel, Felix
Germany
Goethe (prize)
Gross, Otto Hans Adolf
Göring, Matthias Heinrich
Groddeck, Georg Walther
Hirschfeld, Elfriede
Horney-Danielson, Karen
Jacobson, Edith
Kemper, Werner Walther
Landauer, Karl
Mann, Thomas
Marcinowski, Johannes (Jaroslaw)
Meng, Heinrich
Mitscherlich, Alexander
Müller-Braunschweig, Carl
Pankow, Gisela
Rittmeister, John Friedrich Karl
Rosenfeld, Eva Marie
Sachs, Hanns
Schreber, Daniel Paul
Schultz-Hencke, Harald Julius Alfred
Carl-Ludwig
Abraham, Nicolas
Alexander, Franz Gabriel
Bak, Robert C.
Balint group
Balint, Michael (Bálint [Bergsmann],
Mihály)
Balint-Szekely-Kovács, Alice
Benedek, Therese
Devereux, Georges
Ferenczi, Sándor
Freund Toszeghy, Anton von
Hermann, Imre
Hollós, István
Hungarian School
Hungary
Kovács-Prosznitz, Vilma
Lorand, Sándor
Radó, Sándor
Rapaport, David
Róheim, Géza
Spitz, René Arpad
GREECE
Embirikos, Andreas
Greece
Kouretas, Démétrios
Zavitzianos, Georges
INDIA
Bose, Girindrasekhar
India
ISRAEL
Israel
Wulff, Mosche (Woolf, Moshe)
ITALY
Corrao, Francesco
Fornari, Franco
Gaddini, Eugenio
Italy
Levi Bianchini, Marco
Morselli, Enrico
Musatti, Cesare
Perrotti, Nicola
Servadio, Emilio
Tomasi di Palma di Lampedusa-Wolff
Somersee, Alessandra
Weiss, Edoardo
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
THEMATIC OUTLINE
JAPAN
Schmidt, Vera Federovna
Spielrein, Sabina
Japan
Kosawa, Heisaku
SOUTH AFRICA
KOREA
Ellenberger, Henri Frédéric
Korea
SPAIN
MARTINIQUE
Garma, Angel
Spain
Martinique
MEXICO
SWEDEN
Mexico
Andersson, Ola
Bjerre, Poul
Sweden
NETHERLANDS
Emden, Jan Egbert Gustaaf Van
Lampl, Hans
Lampl-de Groot, Jeanne
Leeuw, Pieter Jacob Van der
Netherlands
Ophuijsen, Johan H. W. Van
SWITZERLAND
Nacht, Sacha Emanoel
Romania
Baudouin, Charles
Binswanger, Ludwig
Bleuler, Paul Eugen
Brun, Rudolf
Burghölzli asylum
Claparède, Édouard Dubal, George
Dubal, George
Gressot, Michel
Guex, Germaine
Jung, Carl Gustav
Jung-Rauschenbach, Emma
Maeder, Alphonse E.
Morgenthaler, Fritz
Moser-van Sulzer-Wart, Fanny Louise
Oberholzer, Emil
Odier, Charles
Pfister, Oskar Robert
Piaget, Jean
Rambert, Madeleine
Rorschach, Hermann
Sarasin, Philipp
Saussure, Raymond de
Schneider, Ernst
Schweizerische Ärztegesellschaft für
Psychoanalyse
Sechehaye-Burdet, Marguerite
Société psychanalytique de Genève
Switzerland (French-speaking)
Switzerland (German-speaking)
Zulliger, Hans
RUSSIA
UNITED KINGDOM
Andreas-Salomé, Louise, dite Lou
Detski Dom
Dosuzkov, Theodor
Ossipov, Nikolaı̈ legrafovitch
Pankejeff, Sergueı̈
Rosenthal, Tatiana
Russia/USSR
Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht
Bowlby, Edward John Mostyn
Brierley, Marjorie Flowers
British Psycho-Analytical Society
Controversial Discussions
Eder, David Montagu
Fairbairn, William Ronald Dodds
NORTH AFRICA
North African countries
NORWAY
Norway
Peru
‘‘A. Z.’’
Delgado, Honorio
Peru
PHILIPPINES
Philippines
POLAND
Bornstein, Berta
Deutsch-Rosenbach, Helene
Bick, Esther
Morgenstern-Kabatschnik, Sophie
Poland
PORTUGAL
Portugal
ROMANIA
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Flügel, John Carl
Glover, Edward
Glover, James
Great Britain
Hampstead Clinic
Heimann, Paula
Hoffer, William (Wilhelm)
Hogarth Press
Imago Publishing Company
Isaacs-Sutherland, Susan
Khan, Mohammed Masud Rasa
Klein-Reizes, Melanie
Low, Barbara
Milner-Blackett, Marion
Money-Kyrle, Roger Earle
Payne, Sylvia May
Rees, John Rawlings
Rickman, John
Riviere-Hodgson Verrall, Joan
Robertson, James
Rosenfeld, Eva Marie
Rosenfeld, Herbert Alexander
Rycroft, Charles Frederick
Sandler, Joseph
Schmideberg-Klein, Melitta
Sharpe, Ella Freeman
Strachey, James Beaumont
Strachey-Sargent, Alix
Tavistock Clinic
Tustin, Frances
Winnicott, Donald Woods
Wittkower, Eric
UNITED STATES
Alexander, Franz Gabriel
American Academy of Psychoanalysis
American Imago
American Psychoanalytic Association
Arlow, Jacob A.
Blanton, Smiley
Brill, Abraham Arden
Brunswick, Ruth Mack
Bullit, William C.
Burrow, Trigant
Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute
Clark-Williams, Margaret
Doolittle-Aldington, Hilda (H.D.)
Eissler, Kurt Robert
Eissler-Selke, Ruth
Ellenberger, Henri Frédéric
Erikson, Erik Homburger
Frink, Horace Westlake
Gardiner, Muriel M.
Greenacre, Phyllis
lxxxi
THEMATIC OUTLINE
Greenson, Ralph
Halberstadt-Freud, Sophie
Hartmann, Heinz
Horney-Danielson, Karen
Jacobson, Edith
Jelliffe, Smith Ely
Jekels (Jekeles), Ludwig
Kardiner, Abram
Katan, Maurits
Katan-Rosenberg, Anny
Kris, Ernst
Lehrman, Philip R.
Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and
Society
Lowenstein, Rudolph M.
Mahler-Schönberger, Margaret
Marcuse, Herbert
Mead, Margaret
Menninger, Karl A.
Meyer, Adolf F.
Moreno, Jacob Levy
National Psychological Association for
Psychoanalysis
New York Freudian Society
New York Psychoanalytic Institute
Nin, Anaı̈s
North America
Nunberg, Hermann
Putnam, James Jackson
Róheim, Géza
Rubinstein, Benjamin B.
Sachs, Hanns US
San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society
San Francisco Psychotherapy Research
Group and Control-Mastery Theory
Schilder, Paul Ferdinand
Simmel, Ernst
Spitz, René Arpad
Sterba, Richard F.
Sterba-Radanowicz-Hartmann, Editha
Hungary
Stoller, Robert J.
Stone, Leo
Sullivan, Harry Stack
Thompson, Clara M.
Waelder, Robert
Weiss, Edoardo
Walter, Bruno
Washington Psychoanalytic Society
Zetzel-Rosenberg, Elizabeth
URUGUAY
Uruguay
VENEZUELA
lx xx ii
Venezuela
WEST INDIES
Fanon, Frantz
YUGOSLAVIA
Yugoslavia (ex)
B) Case histories
Aimée, the case of
Ajase complex
Anna O., case of
Cäcilie M., case of
Elisabeth von R., case of
Emmy von N., case of
Flower Doll: Essays in Child Psychotherapy
‘‘Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria’’ (Dora, Ida Bauer)
Katharina, case of
Little Arpåd, the boy pecked by a cock
Lucy R. case
Mathilde, case of
C) Events
Clark University
Congrès international de l’hypnotisme
expérimental et scientifique, First
Congress of French-speaking psychoanalysts from Romance-language-speaking
countries
Controversial Discussions
First World War
Gestapo
Mahler, Gustav (meeting with Sigmund
Freud)
Second World War
D) Psychoanalysis and
Other Disciplines
Anthropology and psychoanalysis
Cinema and psychoanalysis
Cinema criticism
Cocaine and psychoanalysis
Feminism and psychoanalysis
Multilingualism and psychoanalysis
Music and psychoanalysis
Brain and psychoanalysis, the
Catastrophe theory and psychoanalysis
Cognitivism and Psychoanalysis
Darwin, darwinism and psychoanalysis
Death and psychoanalysis
Ethnopsychoanalysis
Ethology and psychoanalysis
German romanticism and psychoanalysis
Goethe and psychoanalysis
Hard science and psychoanalysis
Historical truth
History and psychoanalysis
Judaism and psychoanalysis
Kantianism and psychoanalysis
Law and psychoanalysis
Linguistics and psychoanalysis
Literary and artistic creation
Literature and psychoanalysis
Marxism and psychoanalysis
Monism
Mythology and psychoanalysis
Phenomenology and psychoanalysis
Philosophy and psychoanalysis
Politics and psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic research
Psychoanalytic semiology
Psychoanalytic splits
Psychology and psychoanalysis
Racism, anti-Semitism and
psychoanalysis
Religion and psychanoalysis
Sartre and psychoanalysis
Schiller and psychoanalysis
Science and psychoanalysis
Shakespeare and psychoanalysis
Sociology and psychoanalysis,
sociopsychoanalysis
Spinoza and psychoanalysis
Structuralism and psychoanalysis
Surrealism and psychoanalysis
Visual arts and psychoanalysis
E) Organizations and Institutions
Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für
Psychotherapie
American Academy of Psychoanalysis
American Psychoanalytic Association
Armand Trousseau Children’s Hospital
Association psychanalytique de France
Berliner Psychoanalytische Poliklinik
Berliner Psychoanalytisches Institut
Burghölzli Asylum
British Psycho-Analytical Society
Centre Alfred-Binet
Centre de consultations et de traitements
psychanalytiques Jean-Favreau
Centre psychopédagogique ClaudeBernard
Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute
Collège de psychanalystes
Colloque sur l’ inconscient
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THEMATIC OUTLINE
Deutsches Institut für Psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie (Institut
Göring)
École de la Cause Freudienne
Ecole experimentale de Bonneuil
École Freudienne de Paris (Freudian school
of Paris)
Fédération européenne de psychanalyse
Federación psicoanalı́tica de américa latina
Freud Museum
Hampstead Clinic
Goethe Prize
Hietzing Schule/Burlingham-Rosenfeld
Hogarth Press
Hungarian School
Imago Publishing Company
Institut Claparède
Institut Max-Kassowitz
International Federation of Psychoanalytic
Societies
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International Association for the History
of Psychoanalysis
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Internationaler Psychoanalytischer
Verlag
Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and
Society
Lehrinstitut der Wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung
Menninger Clinic
National Psychological Association for
Psychoanalysis
New York Freudian Society
New York Psychoanalytic Institute SainteAnne Hospital
Quatriéme Groupe (O.P.L.F.), Fourth
Group
Salpêtriere Hospital, La
Schweizerische Ärztegesellschaft für
Psychoanalyse
PSYCHOANALYSIS
San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society
San Francisco Psychotherapy Research
Group and Control-Mastery Theory
Société française de psychanalyse
Société psychanalytique de Genève
Société psychanalytique de Montréal
Société psychanalytique de Paris and
Institut de psychanalyse de Paris
Sigmund Freud Archives
Sigmund Freud Copyrights
Limited
Sigmund Freud Institute
Sigmund Freud Museum
Tavistock Clinic
Tegel (Schloss Tegel)
Vienna General Hospital
Vienna, University of
Washington Psychoanalytic Society
Wiener psychoanalytische
Vereinigung
lxxxiii
CHRONOLOGY
CHRONOLOGY
This chronological list was based upon the 17,000 sources of historical data that I have gathered for over twenty
years and upon the articles published in this Dictionary. It can neither presume completion, since my choices
were necessarily arbitrary, nor absolute precision, which does not exist in any work of history, no matter the
scrutiny and rigor of its author. As with the Dictionary, it will indefinitely remain subject to additions and
revisions. It should therefore only be considered as a point of departure for the more thorough research of our
vigilant readers, to benefit future publications. —Alain de Mijolla
DATE
EVENT
1815–1855
December 18, 1815 – Jakob (Kallamon Jacob) Freud,
Sigmund Freud’s father, son of Schlomo Freud and
Peppi [Pesel] (née Hoffmann), is born in Tysmenitz,
Galicia (Poland)
1833 – Presumed date of birth of Emanuel Freud,
Sigmund’s half-brother, in Tysmenitz, Galicia (Poland)
1834 or 1835 – Presumed date of birth of Philipp Freud,
Sigmund’s half-brother, in Tysmenitz, Galicia (Poland)
August 18, 1835 – Amalie (Amalia, Malka) Nathanson,
Sigmund Freud’s mother, daughter of Jacob Nathanson
and Sara (née Wilenz), born in Brody
January 15, 1842 – Josef Breuer born in Vienna
(Austria)
October 3, 1846 – James J. Putnam born in Boston,
Massachusetts (USA)
July 29, 1855 – Jakob Freud and Amalie Nathanson
marry in Vienna
August 18, 1855 – Johann (John) Freud, son of Emanuel
Freud and Maria Freud-Rokach, Sigmund’s nephew and
playmate, born in Freiberg (Moravia)
1856–1860
May 6, 1856 – Sigismund Schlomo born in Freiberg
(Moravia) at 6:30 pm, delivered, as all of Emmanuel and
Maria’s children, by the midwife Cäcilia Smolka; circumcised on May 13
October 1857 – Julius, Sigmund Freud’s first brother,
born in Freiberg (died on April 15, 1858 at the age of six
months)
October 24, 1858 – Wilhelm Fliess born in Arnswalde
(Choszczno)
December 31, 1858 – Anna, Sigmund’s first sister, born
in Freiberg
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CHRONOLOGY
August 1859–March 1860 – Jakob Freud leaves for
Vienna; Amalia,Sigmund, and Anna follow, stopping in
Leipzig en route. Emanuel Freud’s family emigrates to
Manchester (England) with Philipp Freud
March 21, 1861 – Regine Debora (Rosa) Freud, Sigmund Freud’s second sister, fourth child of Jakob and
Amalie, born in Vienna
August 23 – Francisco Franco da Rocha born in Amparo,
State of São Paulo (Brazil)
1861–1865
February 12, 1861 – Louise Andreas-Salomé, called
‘‘Lou,’’ born in St. Petersburg (Russia)
March 22, 1861 – Maria (Mitzi) Freud, Sigmund Freud’s
third sister, fifth child of Jakob and Amalie, born in
Vienna
July 26, 1861 – Martha Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s
future wife, daughter of Berman Bernays and Emmeline
(née Philipps), born in Hamburg
July 23, 1862 – Esther Adolfine (Dolfi) Freud, Sigmund
Freud’s fourth sister, sixth child of Jakob and Amalie,
born in Vienna
May 3, 1864 – Pauline Regine (Paula) Freud, Sigmund
Freud’s fifth sister, seventh child of Jakob and Amalie,
born in Vienna
June 18, 1865 – Minna Bernays, the younger sister of
Martha, Sigmund Freud’s wife, born in Hamburg
June 20, 1865 – Josef Freud (Sigmund Freud’s uncle)
arrested for trafficking counterfeit rubles in Vienna
October 1865 – Sigmund Freud admitted to the Leopoldstätter Real- and Obergymnasium
1866–1870
April 15 or 19, 1866 – Alexander Gotthold Efraim Freud,
Sigmund Freud’s brother, eighth and last child of Jakob
and Amalie, born in Vienna
October 13, 1966 – Georg Groddeck born in Bad Kösen
an der Saale (Germany)
March 18, 1868 – Wilhelm Stekel born in Boyan
(Bukovnia)
February 7, 1870 – Alfred Adler, second of six brothers,
born in the Viennese suburb of Rudolfsheim (Austria)
1871–1875
August 31, 1871 – Hermine Hug-Hellmuth-Hug von
Hugenstein born in Vienna (Austria)
October 13, 1871 – Paul Federn born in Vienna (Austria)
August–September 15, 1872 – Along with two school
friends (Eduard Silberstein, Horaz Ignaz Rosanes) Freud
visits the Fluss family in Freiburg. Freud claims to be in
love with Gisela Fluss
February 23, 1873 – Oskar Pfister born in Zurich
(Switzerland)
March 24, 1873 – Edouard Claparède born in Geneva
(Switzerland)
July 7, 1873 – Sándor Ferenczi born in Miskolc (Hungary), the eighth of eleven children of Baruch Fraenkel
(who will adopt the name Bernát Ferenczi), bookseller,
printer, concert agent, and Róza Eibenschütz’s agent
July 1873 – Freud is accepted to his Matura (excellently
‘‘vorzüglich’’)
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October 1873 – Freud attends the Wiener Universität, at
the medizinischen Fakultät
October 12, 1874 – Abraham A. Brill born in Kanczugv
(Austria)
July 26, 1875 – Carl Gustav Jung born in Kesswill
(Switzerland)
August 1875 – Freud travels to England to the Manchester home of his half-brothers Emanuel and Philipp
Freud
August 28, 1875 – Marco Levi Bianchini born in Rovigo
(Italy)
1876
March – Freud studies in Trieste at Karl Claus’s Institute
of Comparative Anatomy
May 24 – Poul Bjerre born in Göteborg (Sweden)
October – Freud attends the Ernst Brücke Physiologische
Institut as ‘‘Famulus’’
1877
January 4 – Freud’s first publication: ‘‘Über den
Ursprung der hinteren Nervenwurzeln im Rückenmarke
von Ammocoetes (Petromyzon Planeri)’’ (1877a)
May 3 – Karl Abraham born in Bremen (Germany)
October 12 – Nikolaı̈ Ossipov born in Moscow (Russia)
1878
January 22 – Ernst Lanzer (the Rat Man) born in Vienna
(dies in Russia in 1918)
May 10 – Mosche Wulff (or Moshe Woolf) born in Odessa
(Russia)
July 27 – August Aichhorn born in Vienna (Austria)
1879
January 1st – Ernest Jones born in Gowerton, Glamorgan,
Wales (Great Britain)
March 12 – Viktor Tausk born in Zsilina (Slovakia)
1880
November 6 – Sylvia May Payne born in Wimbledon, Surrey (Great Britain)
December –Treatment of Bertha Pappenheim begins
(Anna O.) under Josef Breuer
1881
January 10 – Hanns Sachs born in Vienna (Austria)
March 31 – Freud becomes a medical doctor
April 5 – Ludwig Binswanger born in Kreuzlingen, canton
of Thurgovia (Switzerland)
April 8 – Carl Müller-Braunschweig born in Braunschweig (Germany)
June 25 – Felix Boehm born in Riga (Lithuania)
June 26 – Max Eitingon born in Mohilev (Russia)
November 28 – Stefan Zweig born in Vienna (Austria)
1882
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March 30 – Melanie Klein-Reizes born in Vienna
(Austria)
April – Freud first meets Martha Bernays
April 4 – Ernst Simmel born in Wroclaw (Poland)
July 2 – Marie Bonaparte, princess of Greece and Denmark, born in Saint-Cloud (France)
October – Freud, having given up a career in research,
goes to work in different capacities at the General Hospital of Vienna
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CHRONOLOGY
November 1 – Ida Bauer (Dora) born (dies in New York in
1945)
November 12 – Johan H.W. van Ophuijsen born in Sumatra (Dutch East Indies)
Jean-Martin Charcot is named Professor of the Clinic of
Mental Illnesses
1883
June 28 – Joan Riviere-Hogson Verrail born in Brighton
(Great Britain)
July 13 – Josef Breuer tells Freud about the case of
Anna O.
December 24 – Emil Oberholzer born in Zweibrücken
(Switzerland)
1884
January 23 – Hermann Nunberg born in Bendzin, Galicia
(Poland)
April 22 – Otto Rank (Rosenfeld) born in Vienna (Austria)
June 14 – Eugenia Sokolnicka-Kutner born in Varsovia
(Poland)
October 9 – Helene Deutsch-Rosenbach born in Przemysl (Poland)
1885
March 24 – Susan Isaacs-Sutherland born in Bolton,
Lancashire (Great Britain)
April 1885 – Freud’s research and publications on
cocaine
April 28 – Freud tells Martha that he destroyed his old
notes, letters, and manuscripts
June 19 – A traveling stipend is awarded to Freud for a
six-month stay in Paris and Berlin
July 18 – Freud is named Privatdozent in Neuropathology, a decision that will not become official until September 5
September 15 – Karen Horney-Danielsen born in Hamburg (Germany)
October 13 – Freud begins his internship under Professor
Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris
1886
February 28–April 3 – Freud leaves Paris for Berlin and
an internship with professor Baginsky, at the Clinic of
Children’s Diseases, to prepare for his future post at the
Kassowitz Clinic in Vienna
March 28 – Henri Flournoy born in Geneva (Switzerland)
April 25 – Freud opens his medical practice in Vienna on
Easter Day, at No. 7 Rathausstrasse
May 22 – Angélo Hesnard born in Pontivy, Morbihan
(France)
September 13 – Civil marriage of Sigmund Freud and
Martha Bernays at the Wandsbek Rathaus. Brief religious
ceremony on September 15
October 16 – Adelheid Lucy Koch born in Berlin
(Germany)
1887
January 6 – Sergei Pankejeff, the Wolf Man, born in Russia on January 6 in the Gregorian Calendar (December
24, 1886, in the Julian Calendar), died in Vienna in
1979
January 29 – René Spitz born in Vienna (Austria)
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July 9 – Heinrich Meng born in Hohenhurst (Germany)
September 7 – Julio Pires Porto-Carrero born in Pernambuco (Brazil)
September 26 – James Strachey born in London (Great
Britain)
October 12 – Karl Landauer born in Munich (Germany)
October 16 – Mathilde Freud (first child of Sigmund and
Martha) born in Vienna, Maria-Theresienstrasse 8
November 10 – Arnold Zweig born in Glogau (Silesia)
November 24 – Freud’s first letter to Wilhelm Fliess
1888
January 13 – Edward Glover born in Lesmahagow, Scotland (Great Britain)
May 12 – Theodor Reik born in Vienna (Austria)
1889
February 19 – René Allendy born in Paris (France)
May 1 – First day of treatment of Emmy von N . . . ‘‘Don’t
move! Don’t say anything! Don’t touch me!’’
July 19–August 9 – Freud travels to Nancy to visit Hippolyte Bernheim, then to Paris
August 8–12 – First International Congress of Experimental Hypnotism and Therapy in Paris, for which Freud
is registered
August 11 – William R. Fairbairn born in Edinburgh,
Scotland (Great Britain)
September 21 – Edoardo Weiss born in Trieste (Italy)
October 23 – Frieda Fromm-Reichmann born in Karlsruhe (Germany)
November 13 – Imre Hermann born in Budapest
(Hungary)
December 6 – Jean Martin Freud (second child of Sigmund and Martha) born in Vienna, Maria-Theresia-Str. 8
Clark University founded (USA); Stanley Hall (1844–
1924) is named president
1891
January 22 – Franz Alexander born in Budapest
(Hungary)
February 19 – Oliver Freud (third child of Sigmund and
Martha) born in Vienna, Maria-Theresia-Str. 8
May 2 – Freud publishes his first book, dedicated to
Breuer, Zur Auffassung der Aphasien (Towards an Interpretation of Aphasia)
August 17 – Abram Kardiner born in New York (USA)
September – The Freud family moves to 19 Berggasse,
where they will reside until 1938
September 12 – Géza Róheim born in Budapest
(Hungary)
October 11 – Dorothy Burlingham-Tiffany born in New
York (USA)
1892
March 7 – Siegfried Bernfeld born in Lemberg, Galicia
(Poland)
April 6 – Ernst Freud (fourth child of Sigmund and
Martha) born in Vienna, 19 Berggasse
May 6 – Jacob Freud gives Sigmund the second volume
of the Philippson Bible for his thirty-fifth birthday
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CHRONOLOGY
June 28 – First letter in which Freud uses the familiar
‘‘you’’ with Wilhelm Fliess
October – In the case of Frl E. von R.., Freud renounces
hypnotism and creates the ‘‘concentration technique’’
for what he calls ‘‘psychic analysis’’
November 8 – Therese Benedek born in Budapest
(Hungary)
xc
1893
February – Translated in Spanish in the Barcelona Medical Sciences Review, volume XIX, no. 3, ‘‘Psychic
Mechanisms of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication.’’ The article is also published in the Gaceta
Médica de Granada (‘‘Grenada Medical Gazette’’),
volume XI, 232 and 233. According to James Strachey,
it’s ‘‘the very first publication of a translation of a psychological work by Freud in the world’’
April 12 – Sophie Freud (fifth child of Sigmund and
Martha) born in Vienna, 19 Berggasse
July 22 – Karl A. Menninger born in Topeka, Kansas
(USA)
July 29 – Pierre Janet defends his medical thesis in
Paris: ‘‘Contribution to the Study of Mental Accidents
Among the Hysterical’’
August 16 – Jean-Martin Charcot dies suddenly in
Quarré-les-Tombes in the Morvan (France)
October 3 – Clara M. Thompson born in Providence,
Rhode Island (USA)
1894
April – Frederick W. H. Myers reports on the ‘‘Preliminary
Communication’’ during a session at the Society for Psychical Research (London). Jones states that this report
was the basis for his interest in Freud’s work (Great
Britain)
April 20 – Edward Bibring born in Stanislau, Galicia
(Poland)
May 3 – Phyllis Greenacre born in Chicago, Illinois (USA)
August 2 – Raymond de Saussure born in Geneva
(Switzerland)
November 4 – Heinz Hartmann born in Vienna (Austria)
November 5 – René Laforgue born in Thann, Alsace
(Germany)
William James writes a summary of the ‘‘Psychic
Mechanisms of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication’’ in the Psychological Review (USA)
1895
February – Wilhelm Fliess operates on Emma Eckstein,
Freud’s patient, and forgets a dressing in the operating
room
March 4 – First account of a dream as ‘‘wish fulfillment,’’
Rudi Kaufmann’s dream on sleeping (Frau Breuer’s
nephew)
May 15 – Freud and Josef Breuer publish Studies on
Hysteria
July 24 – Freud’s first complete analysis of one of his
own dreams about ‘‘the injection given to Irma’’ on the
night of July 23–24 during his vacation at the Bellevue
Hotel, near Vienna
August – Freud goes to Italy for the first time, accompanied by his brother Alexander
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September 21 – While returning to Berlin in the train,
after a meeting withW. Fliess, Freud edits the beginning
of the ‘‘Outline of a Scientific Psychology’’
November 29 – Minna Bernays, Martha’s sister, comes
to stay with the Freuds and remains with them until the
end of her life
December 3 – Anna Freud, sixth and last child of Sigmund and Martha, born in Vienna, 19 Berggasse
1896
March 30 – First appearance of the word ‘‘psycho-analysis’’ in an article by Freud in French on ‘‘L’Hérédité et
l’étiologie des névroses’’ (Heredity and Etiology of Neuroses) in the Revue neurologique (1896a)
April 7 – Donald W. Winnicott born in Plymouth (Great
Britain)
October 23 – Jakob Freud dies after four months of illness. He is buried two days later (dream: ‘‘We are asked
to close our eyes/an eye’’)
December 3 – Michael Balint (Bàlint, Mihály) born in
Budapest (Hungary)
1897
January – Freud’s first four dreams of Rome date from
January of this year
March 27 – Wilhelm Reich born in Dobrzcynica, Galicia
(Poland)
May 10 – Margaret Mahler-Schönberger born in Sopron
(Hungary)
July – Beginning of Selbstanalyse (self-analysis)
July 17 – Heisaku Kosawa born in Atsugi, Kanagawa
(Japan)
September 8 – Wilfred R. Bion born in Mattra (United
Provinces, India)
September 21 – Cesare Musatti born in Dolo, Venice
(Italy)
September 21 – Letter to Wilhelm Fliess: ‘‘I don’t believe
anymore in my neurotica’’
September 23
Gesellschaft
–
Freud
joins
the
B’nai-B’rith-
September 26 – Max Schur born in Stanislav (IvanoFrankovsk, Ukraine)
October 15 – Letter to Wilhelm Fliess: first mention of
the future ‘‘Oedipus complex’’
December 2 – Otto Fenichel born in Vienna (Austria)
December 5 – First conference on dreams at the B’naiB’rith-Gesellschaft
December 22 – Nicola Perrotti born in Penne, Pescara
(Italy)
December 25 – In Breslau Freud meets with Wilhelm
Fliess, who talks to him about bisexuality and bilaterality
1898
February 9 – Rudolph M. Loewenstein born in Lodz
(Poland)
February 9 – ‘‘I am giving up self-analysis to devote
myself to a book on dreams’’ writes Freud to W. Fliess
May 6 – Richard F. Sterba born in Vienna (Austria)
August 21 – John Rittmeister born in Hamburg
(Germany)
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September 22 – First analysis, written to Wilhelm Fliess,
on forgetting the name of Signorelli, the painter of the
‘‘Last Judgment’’ in Orvieto
1899
January 11 – Grete Bibring-Lehner born in Vienna
(Austria)
February 3 – Paula Heimann-Glatzko born in Danzig
(Germany)
July 20 – Edmund Bergler born in Austria
August 6 – Werner Kemper born in Hilgen, Rhenania
(Germany)
August 27 – Final writing and first corrections to the
drafts of The Interpretation of Dreams
September 11 – The manuscript of The Interpretation of
Dreams is delivered to the printer
October 24 – Date of the dedication in the copy of The
Interpretation of Dreams sent to Wilhelm Fliess: ‘‘Seinem theuern Wilhelm z. 24 OKT 1899’’
November 27 – Durval Marcondes born in São Paulo
(Brazil)
1900
January 8 – ‘‘The new century, which interests us especially owing to the fact that it includes in itself the date
of our death, only brought me a stupid report in the Zeit,’’
wrote Freud to Wilhelm Fliess
March 23 – Erich Fromm born in Frankfurt (Germany)
April 24 – Freud gives a conference on Fécondité by
Emile Zola before the B’nai-B’rith-Gesellschaft
April 26 – Ernst Kris born in Vienna (Austria)
May 27 – Marianne Kris-Rie born in Vienna (Austria)
September 24 – ‘‘I’m slowly writing the ‘Psychopathology of Everyday Life,’’’ writes Freud to Wilhelm Fliess
October 14 – The beginning of Dora’s treatment
announced; it ends on December 31
1901
April 14 – Jacques Lacan born in Paris (France)
August 7 – ‘‘You side against me saying that ‘he who
read the thoughts of others only finds his own thoughts,’
which takes away all validity from my research,’’ Freud
writes to Wilhelm Fliess, their distance more pronounced
day by day.
August 30–September 14 – Freud’s first trip to Rome
accompanied by his brother Alexander
September 23 – Sacha Nacht born in Racacini, Bacau
(Romania)
November 23 – Muriel M. Gardiner born in Chicago, Illinois (USA)
The Archives de psychologie founded in Geneva by
Edouard Claparède and his uncle Théodore Flournoy
(Switzerland)
Freud publishes Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens
(Über Vergessen, Versprechen, Vergreifen, Aberglaube
und Irrtum) (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
1901b)
1902
March 5 – Freud is named ‘‘outstanding professor’’
March 11 – Freud’s last letter to Wilhelm Fliess before
Swoboda affair in 1904
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April 9 – Annie Reich-Pink born in Vienna (Austria)
June 15 – Erik Homburger Erikson born in Frankfurt
(Germany)
October – Freud sends postcards inviting Alfred Adler,
Wilhelm Stekel, Max Kahane, and Rudolph Reitler to
scientific meetings entitled ‘‘Psychological Wednesday
Society’’ (‘‘Psychologischen Mittwoch-Vereinigung’’).
Alfred Meisl and Paul Federn will join him in 1903
1903
February 14 – Marriage of Carl G. Jung and Emma
Rauschenbach
June – Otto Weininger’s book, Geschlecht und Charakter
(Sex and Character) published. He commits suicide on
October 4
August 11 – Celes Ernesto Cárcamo born in La Plata
(Argentina)
August 28 – Bruno Bettelheim born in Vienna (Austria)
August 3 – Daniel Lagache born in Paris (France)
1904
April 26 – Freud resumes contact with Wilhelm Fliess,
but Fliess later accuses Freud of being at the source of
the plagiarism of his discovery on bisexuality, for which
Hermann Swoboda is later found guilty
June 24 – Angel Garma born in Bilbao (Spain)
August 14 – Emilio Servadio born in Sestri, Genoa (Italy)
August 17 – Sabina Spielrein is admitted to the Burghölzli Shelter, where she will be treated by Jung in a method
inspired by Freud (Switzerland)
September 4 – Freud’s improvised voyage with his
brother Alexander in Greece. Trip to the Acropolis in
Athens
1905
Eduard Hitschmann joins the ‘‘Psychologischen Mittwoch-Vereinigung’’
Otto Rank and Eugen Bleuler write to Freud
Publication of two books by Freud: Der Witz et seine
Beziehung zum Unbewußten (The Joke and its Relationship with the Unconscious, 1905c), Drei Abhandlungen
zur Sexualtheorie (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905d), and of two articles, ‘‘Über Psychotherapie’’
(On Psychotherapy, 1905a) and ‘‘Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse’’ (Dora: An Analysis of Case of Hysteria,
1905e), begun in 1901
Ragnar Vogt, future leading professor of psychiatry in
Norway, draws on Freud’s psycho-cathartic method in
Psykiatriens grundtræk (Outline of Psychiatry) (Norway)
1906
February – First article on psychoanalysis in the USA
written by James J. Putnam in the Journal of Abnormal
Psychology (USA)
April 11 – Carl Gustav Jung’s first letter to Freud
May 8 – In Freud’s letter to Arthur Schnitzler: ‘‘I have
often asked myself with astonishment where you gather
knowledge of such and such a hidden point, when I only
acquired it after tedious investigative work, and I came
to envy the writer that I already admired.’’
September – Freud’s Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur
Neurosenlebre aus den Jahren 1893–1906, Volume I
(Collection of Articles on Neuroses, Dating from 1893 to
1906) published
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October 10 – First meeting of the Psychological Wednesday Society where Otto Rank ‘‘functions as paid secretary.’’ The sessions take place every Wednesday at 8:30
pm at Freud’s home. The conferences begin at 9:00 pm.
The order of the speakers in the discussion is determined
by drawing lots.
1907
January 1 – After the publication of Psychologie der
Dementia praecox by Carl G. Jung, Freud writes to him:
‘‘Please quickly renounce this error that your writing on
dementia praecox did not very much please me. The simple fact that I expressed criticism can prove it to you.
Since, if it were otherwise, I would find sufficient diplomacy to hide it from you. It would really be wiser to go
against the best that were ever associated with me. I see,
in reality, in your essay on d. pr. the most important and
rich contribution to my work that I have come across, and
I don’t see among my students in Vienna, who probably
have a non univocal advantage over you from personal
contact with me, in fact only one can put himself on the
same rank as you for comprehension, and none are up to
do as much for the cause as you, and ready to do it.’’
January 30 – Max Eitingon visits Freud, with a patient
February 26 – John Bowlby born in London (Great
Britain)
March 3 – Carl G. Jung and Ludwig Binswanger’s first
visit with Freud on Sunday, March 3 at 10:00 am
June 8 – Edouard Claparède, the director of the laboratory of experimental psychology in Geneva, visits Carl G.
Jung to be introduced to the technique of association
(Switzerland)
June 25 – Enrique Pichon-Rivière born in Geneva
(Switzerland)
June 25 – Karl Abraham’s first letter to Freud
July 4 – First reading in France of ‘‘The PsychoAnalytical Method and Freud’s ‘Abwehr Neuropsychosen’’’ by Adolf Schmiergeld and P. Provotelle during the
session of the Neurology Society in Paris
September 2–7 – First International Congress of Psychiatry, Psychology and Assistance for the Insane in
Amsterdam. Carl G. Jung responds to attacks against
Freud (Netherlands)
September 27 – First session of the Freud-Gesellschaft
in Zurich, founded by Carl G. Jung (Switzerland)
October 1 – First consultation of the Rat Man
October 9 – Freud announces his intention to dissolve
the Psychological Wednesday Society to create the
Vienna Psychoanalytical Society
November 6 – Freud presents the case of the Rat Man to
the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society and Otto Rank
notes: ‘‘The technique of the analysis has changed in the
sense that the psychoanalyst no longer seeks to obtain
the material that interests himself, but allows the patient
to follow the natural and spontaneous course of his
thoughts’’
December 15 – Karl Abraham’s first visit with Freud
Studie über Minderwertigkeit von Organen (Study on the
Inferiority of Organs) by Alfred Adler published (Austria)
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1908
February 2 – Sándor Ferenczi, accompanied by Fülöp
Stein, visits Freud for the first time
April 15 – The Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung
(Vienna Psychoanalytical Society) founded
April 26–27 – Zusammenkunft für Freudsche Psychologie, first international congress on Freudian psychology
in Salzburg, a meeting suggested by Carl G. Jung.
Freud’s conference on the Rat Man lasts four hours
April 30 – Ernest Jones and Abraham A. Brill visit and
lunch with Freud in Vienna
May 3 – Freud’s first letter to Stefan Zweig
May 8 – Cyro Martins born in Porto Alegre (Brazil)
June 2 – Kurt Eissler born in Vienna (Austria)
August 27 – First meeting of the Berlin Psychoanalytical
Association founded by Karl Abraham with Iwan Bloch,
Magnus Hirschfeld, and Otto Juliusburger (Germany)
September 2–15 – Freud travels to England to visit his
elder brothers
September 20 – Alexander Mitscherlich born in Munich
(Germany)
September 26 – Ernest Jones settles in Toronto at the
Toronto Lunatic Asylum (Canada)
October 3 – Ignacio Matte-Blanco born in Santiago
(Chile)
November 6 – Françoise Dolto-Marette born in Paris
(France)
Nikolai Ossipov meets Freud in Vienna. He edits the
translations of Freud’s works and founds the first psychoanalytical circle in Moscow, the ‘‘little Fridays’’ (Russia)
Ludwig Jekels edits the first publications of Freud in the
Polish language (Poland)
Nervöse Angstzustände und ihre Behandlung (Nervous
Anxiety States and Their Treatment) by Wilhelm Stekel
published (Austria)
1909
January 18 – Freud’s first letter to Oskar Pfister
February 7 Marriage of Mathilde, the first of Freud’s
children to marry, to Robert Hollitscher
March – First half-volume of the Jahrbuch für psychopathologische und psychoanalytische Forschungen.
Directors: Eugen Bleuler and Freud. Editor-in-chief: Carl
G. Jung
March 10 – Alfred Adler gives a conference at the Vienna
Society: ‘‘From Psychology to Marxism’’
April 25 – Oskar Pfister’s first visit with Freud
May 30 – Sabina Spielrein’s first letter to Freud for an
interview on the subject of his relationship with Carl G.
Jung
July 2 – Pieter van der Leeuw born in Zutphen
(Netherlands)
August 27 – Freud, Carl G. Jung and Sándor Ferenczi
arrive in New York, at the invitation of G. Stanley Hall.
Freud is named Doctor Honoris Causa at Clark University
(Worcester, Massachussetts) where he gives, beginning
on September 6, five conferences on psychoanalysis. On
November 9, 1909, Putnam writes to him: ‘‘Your visit to
America had a profound impact on me; I work and I read
your writings with an even greater interest.’’ (USA)
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October 16 – Jeanne Lampl-de Groot born in Schiedam
(Netherlands)
November 17 – Correspondence begins between Freud
and James Jackson Putnam
Study Group in Sydney founded by Dr. Donald Fraze
(Australia)
First article on psychoanalysis written by a Spanish psychiatrist, Dr. Gayarre, ‘‘Sexual Origin of Hysteria and
General Neurosis,’’ published in the Clinical Review of
Madrid (Spain)
Psychoterapia (Psixoterapija – Obozrenie voprosov lecenija i prikladonoj psixologii) founded. It is published
until 1917 (Russia)
Freud publishes ‘‘Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjahrigen
Knaben (Der kleine Hans)’’ (Little Hans) 1909b, first
study of the case from which the clinical material, originating from the cure of a child by his father, Max Graf,
confirms the Freudian theories of child sexuality
Freud publishes ‘‘Bemerkungen über einen Fall von
Zwangsneurose (Der Rattenmann)’’ (Remarks on a Case
of Obsessional Neurosis (The Rat Man), 1909d)
Der Mythus der Geburt des Helden. Versuch einer psychologischen Mythendeutung (The Myth of the Birth of
the Hero) by Otto Rank published (Austria)
Traum und Mythus. Eine Studie zur Völkerpsychologie.
Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde (Dreams and
Myths) by Karl Abraham published (Germany)
1910
February – Beginning of the first analysis of the ‘‘Wolf
Man,’’ Sergei Konstantinovich Pankejeff. It concludes on
July 14, 1914
March 30 – First public definition of countertransference
in Freud’s conference at the Nuremburg Congress: ‘‘Our
attention is directed to the ‘counter-transference’ which
registers with the physician as a consequence of the
influence the patient exerts upon the unconscious feelings of his analyst. We are all ready to require that the
physician recognizes and controls in himself this contertransference.’’ (1910d)
March 30 – Berliner Psychoanalytische Vereinigung
(Berlin Psychoanalytic Society) founded (Germany)
March 30–31 – 2nd Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Nuremberg (Germany) during which the International Psychoanalytical Association
is founded with its headquarters in Zurich (Switzerland).
President: Carl G. Jung. Secretary: Franz Riklin. The
existing psychoanalytical associations become local
branches. Its official monthly mouthpiece, the Korrespondenzblatt, founded. The Zentralblatt fur Psychoanalyse; Medizinische Monatsschrift für Seelenkunde (Central sheet for psychoanalysis; Medical monthly for
Psychology) is founded; Freud is the editor-in-chief and
the editors are Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel
April – The Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung
(Vienna Psychoanalytical Society) leaves Freud’s residence and meets at Doktorenkollegium, Rothenturmstr.
19 (Austria)
April 10 – Margarethe Hilferding-Hönigsberg becomes
the first female member of the Viennese Psychoanalytical Society (Austria)
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May 2 – The American Psychopathological Association
founded by Ernest Jones, in conjunction with A.A. Brill,
August Hoch, Morton Prince, and James Putnam. President: Morton Prince (USA)
July 2 – Herbert Rosenfeld born in Nuremberg
(Germany)
August 23 – Freud’s letter to Poul Bjerre (Sweden) marks
the beginning of their correspondence
August 30 – Freud ‘‘analyzes’’ Gustav Mahler during his
stay in Leiden (Holland)
September 24 – Arminda Aberastury born in Buenos
Aires (Argentina)
October 12 – Alfred Adler is elected president and Wilhelm Stekel vice-president of the Viennese Psychoanalytical Society (Austria)
December – Freud’s first letter from France, from Dr.
Pierre Morichau-Beauchant, in Poitiers: ‘‘This letter will
show you that you also have disciples in France who passionately follow your work’’ (France)
Germán Greve Schlegel publishes the first psychoanalytical article known in Latin America, in Chile: ‘‘Sobre Psicologı́a y Psicoterapia de Ciertos Estados Angustiosos.’’
The presentation of this study in Buenos Aires in 1910
was noted by Freud in the Zentralbaltt fur Psychoanalyse
(1911) and in Contribution to the History of the Psychoanalytical Movement (1914d) (Chile)
The term Oedipus complex appears in Freud’s article
entitled ‘‘Contribution to the Psychology of Love’’
(1910h)
The Flexner report, underlining the lack of teaching standards in teaching medicine, is published in America. It
becomes one of the bases for refusing non-doctors in
American psychoanalytical associations (USA)
Freud publishes Über psychoanalyse (Five Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis, 1910a), deriving from conferences
given in the United States
Freud publishes Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo
da Vinci (Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, 1910c)
1911
January – Psychoanalytical group in Munich founded by
Leonhard Seif (Germany)
January 17 – Poul Bjerre gives a conference on ‘‘Freud’s
Psychoanalytical Method’’ before the Association of
Swedish Doctors (Sweden)
February 12 – New York Psychoanalytic Society founded
by Abraham A. Brill with fifteen physicians, in opposition
to the American Psychoanalytic Association that Ernest
Jones founds in May (USA)
February 22 – Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel resign
from their posts at the head of the Vienna Society; Freud
resumes the presidency with Eduard Hitschmann as
vice-president and Hanns Sachs as librarian
May – Jan van Emden and August Stärke visit Freud
(Holland)
May 2 – Leonid Drosnes visits Freud (Odessa)
May 9 – American Psychoanalytic Association founded
in Baltimore by Ernest Jones with James Putnam and
eleven members, the majority physicians (USA)
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June – Alfred Adler leaves the Vienna Psychoanalytical
Society (Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung). Nine
members and the editorial staff of Zentralblatt follow suit
in July (Austria)
June 28 – First psychoanalytical lecture addressed to the
medical community by David Eder at a conference of the
British Medical Association: while he speaks, the audience leaves (Great Britain)
August 14 – Maurice Bouvet born in Eu, Seine Maritime
(France)
September – Sigmund Freud writes ‘‘On Psycho-Analysis’’
(1913n [1911]), at the request of Andrew Davidson,
secretary of the Branch of Psychological Medicine and
Neurology at the Australian Medical Congress in Sydney
(Australia) where, in addition, lectures are given by Carl G.
Jung and Havelock Ellis
September 20 – Ralph Greenson born in Brooklyn, New
York (USA)
September 21–22 – 3rd Congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association in Weimar (Germany). President: Carl G. Jung
October 30 – Emma Jung writes to Freud about the uneasiness between her and her husband since the publication in the Jahrbuch of the beginning of ‘‘Wandlungen
und Symbole der Libido’’ (Metamorphosis and Symbols
of the Libido) by Carl G. Jung
December – Eugen Bleuler resigns from the International
Psychoanalytical Association
Freud, A. Einstein, D. Hilbert, E. Mach, etc., sign a Call
(Aufruf) for the creation of an association to express positivist philosophy
1912
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March – Imago. Zeitschrift für die Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften founded
(1912–1941). Editorial Director: Sigmund Freud.
Editors-in-chief: Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs
July 30 – Ernest Jones suggests, at Sándor Ferenczi’s
instigation, the founding of a Secret Committee excluding Carl G. Jung and including as members himself,
Freud, Karl Abraham, Ferenczi, Otto Rank, Hanns Sachs,
and, starting in 1919, Max Eitingon
September – Carl G. Jung is invited by Smith Ely Jeliffe
to give nine conferences at Fordham University, in New
York (USA)
September 3 – Jacob A. Arlow born in New York (USA)
September 27 – Lou Andreas Salomé first letter to Freud
November 6 – Wilhelm Steckel resigns from the Vienna
Psychoanalytical Society (Austria)
November 24 – Presidents’ conference in Munich: Carl
G. Jung and Franz Riklin for the IPA, Freud, Ernest
Jones, Karl Abraham, and J.H.W. van Ophuijsen. Freud
faints (Germany)
December 18 – Carl G. Jung’s letter to Freud marks the
rupture: ‘‘I am in fact not at all neurotic—good thing
(. . .) You know well how far the patient can go in his selfanalysis, he doesn’t come out of his neurosis—like you.
One day when you will be completely freed from complexes and you no longer play the father towards your
sons, in whom you constantly sight the weaknesses, that
you will put yourself into that position, then I want to
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reverse myself and eliminate all at once the sin of my disagreement with you.’’
Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute founded in Geneva by
Edouard Claparède (Switzerland)
1913
January 15 – To replace the Zentralblatt fur Psychoanalyse, the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse is founded at the instigation of S. Ferenczi and
O. Rank
May 19 – Budapest Psychoanalytic Society founded by
Sándor Ferenczi. President: S. Ferenczi, Vice-president:
I. Hóllos, Secretary: S. Rádo, Treasurer: Lajos Lévy
(Hungary)
May 25 – First meeting of the Secret Committee. Freud
offers to each a Greek intaglio taken from his own collection that they will have mounted in signet rings. Ernest
Jones is the president
August 5 – Carl G. Jung uses the expression ‘‘analytical
psychology’’ for the first time in a conference (‘‘General
Aspects of Psychoanalysis’’) before the London Psychomedical Society (Great Britain)
August 6–12 – 17th International Medical Congress in
London. Confrontation between Pierre Janet and Ernest
Jones to whom Freud then wrote: ‘‘I will not know how to
say how much I was overcome by your report to the Congress and by the way in which you had undone Janet in
front of your compatriots’’ (Great Britain)
September 7–8 – 4th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Munich. President: Carl G.
Jung, who resigns from his post as editor-in-chief of the
Jahrbuch (Germany)
October – The Psychoanalytic Review in New York
founded by Smith Ely Jeliffe and William Alanson White,
Director of the Government Hospital for the Insane,
Washington, DC (USA)
October – Freud publishes Totem and Taboo (1912–
1913) as a book
October 15 – Frances Tustin born in Darlington (Great
Britain)
October 30 – The London Psycho-Analytic Society
founded by Ernest Jones. President: E. Jones, Vice-president: Douglas Bryan, Secretary: M. D. Eder
Alfred Adler transforms the Verein für Freie Psychoanalytische Forschung (Society for Psychoanalytical
Research), founded after his secession, into Verein für
Individualpsychologie (Society for Individual Psychology) (Austria)
A. A. Brill (New York) publishes the first English translation of The Interpretation of Dreams (USA)
1914
April 20 – Carl G. Jung resigns from the International
Psychoanalytical Association. Karl Abraham is elected as
provisional president of the association
May – Boston Psychoanalytic Society founded. President: James Putnam, Secretary: Isador Coriat (USA)
June – Freud publishes ‘‘Zur Einführung des Narzißmus’’
(On Narcissism: An Introduction, 1914c) and ‘‘Zur
Geschichte der psychoanalytischen Bewegung’’ (On the
History of the Psychoanalytical Movement, 1914d)
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June 28 – The Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinates Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo
July 6 – The Washington Psychoanalytic Society founds
St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC, with acting
president William Alanson White, Hospital Superintendent (USA)
July 10 – The Zurich local branch (Carl G. Jung, Eugen
Bleuler, Alfons Maeder, etc.) vote fifteen to one for its
definitive withdrawal from the International Psychoanalytical Association (Switzerland)
July 28 – Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia, the
first stage of the First World War
November 2 – Beginning of the First World War
December – Publication of the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse is suspended by Deuticke, the editor
First official recognition of psychoanalysis in Europe
with a lecture by Gerbrandus Jelgerma at the University
of Leyde (Netherlands)
Publication of La psycho-analyse des névroses et des
psychoses. Ses applications médicales et extra-médicales (Psychoanalysis of Neuroses and Psychoses. Their
Medical and Extra-Medical Applications) by Emmanuel
Régis and Angélo Hesnard, first book in France devoted
to psychoanalysis (France)
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1915
March–July – Freud works on twelve essays on metapsychology of which only five will be published between
1915 and 1917
June 10 – Serge Lebovici born in Paris (France)
September 15 – Freud observes his grandson Ernst Wolfgang Halberstadt, eighteen months old, indulge in the
game ‘‘fort-da’’ with a spindle
October–March 1916 – Last series of conferences during
the winter semester at the University published under
the title of Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1916–
1917a [1915–17]), ‘‘in front of an auditorium of around
70 people, among which were two of my daughters and
one daughter-in-law,’’ writes Freud. Otto Fenichel takes
part
Sulla psicoanalisi, Cinque Conferenze sulla psicoanalisi,
the first work of Freud translated into Italian by Marco
Levi Bianchini published for the ‘‘Biblioteca Psichiatrica
Internazionale’’ (Italy)
Genserico Pinto publishes his thesis, Da Psicanálise. A
sexualidade das Neuroses, in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)
1916
February 28 – Danilo Perestrello born in Rio de Janeiro
(Brazil)
May 6 – Freud’s sixtieth birthday, celebrated discreetly
because of the war. Edouard Hitschmann gives him an
‘‘undelivered speech’’
September 15 – Serge Viderman born in Rimnic-Sarat
(Romania)
1917
March 24 – Neederlandsche Vereeniging voor Psychoanalyse (Netherlands Society for Psychoanalysis)
founded by Gerbrandus Jelgersma, Jan van Emden,
Johan H.W. van Ophuijsen, and Johann Stärke
(Netherlands)
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May 27 – Georg Groddeck’s first letter to Freud, who
replies on June 5: ‘‘Whoever recognized that transference and resistance constitute the pivot of treatment
belong forever to our uncivilized horde’’
November 7 – The Bolsheviks take power in Russia
(October Revolution)
Ruı́z Castillo, at the suggestion of José Ortega y Gasset,
buys the publishing rights for the complete works of Sigmund Freud in Spanish, past and future. López Ballesteros is responsible for the translation (Spain)
Geza Róheim publishes in Imago the first psychoanalytical article written by an anthropologist, ‘‘Spiegelzauber’’
(The Magic Mirror), an excerpt of a book that will be published in 1919
1918
March 11 – Pierre Marty born in St. Céré, Lot (France)
September 28–29 – 5th Congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association, in the Great Room of the
Academy of Sciences of Hungary, in Budapest (Hungary). Freud’s conference: ‘‘Wege der psychoanalytischen Therapie’’ (Paths of Psychoanalytical Therapy).
Sándor Ferenczi is elected president of the IPA but the
political situation in Hungary will lead Ernest Jones to
succeed him in October 1919 as ‘‘acting president’’
November 4 – James Jackson Putnam dies in Boston,
Massachusetts (USA)
November 11 – The Armistice ends the First World War
December 3 – In the name of the foundation created by
Anton von Freund, Freud awards a medical prize for the
article by Karl Abraham on the pregenital phase of the
libido, in part, as well as for the brochure by Ernst Simmel on the neuroses of war, and the Imago prize for the
article by Theodor Reik on the puberty rites of primitive
societies
The Revista de Psiquiatria y Disciplinas Conexas,
founded by Hermilio Valdizán and Honorio Delgado in
Lima (Peru)
Freud publishes ‘‘Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen
Neurose’’ (From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, The
Wolf Man, 1918b [1914])
1919
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January 15 – The publishing house Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag founded. Editorial Board: S.
Freud, S. Ferenczi, A. von Freund, and O. Rank. Otto
Rank is the director of the organization; Theodor Reik,
assistant.
February 20 – British Psycho-Analytical Society founded
by Ernest Jones (Great Britain)
March 24 – Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Psychoanalyse (Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis) founded by Oskar
Pfister, Ludwig Binswanger, Herman Rorschach, Emil
and Mira Oberholzer, etc. (Switzerland)
April 29 – Sándor Ferenczi receives his nomination as
professor with the creation of the first Psychoanalysis
Chair at the University of Budapest. In August, the Miklós Horthy’s anti-Semitic government removes Ferenczi
from this post, then from the management of the Batizfalvy Sanatorium on May 28, 1920. He will finally be
expelled from the Royal Association of Medicine in Budapest for ‘‘collaboration with the Bolsheviks’’ (Hungary)
July 3 – Viktor Tausk commits suicide in Vienna (Austria)
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October – Max Eitingon becomes a member of the Secret
Committee
Kinderheim Baumgarten founded by Siegfried Bernfeld.
Nearly three hundred Polish-Jewish refugees, boys and
girls, are taken in, a model for future psychoanalytical
teaching institutions (Germany)
Geneva Psychoanalytical Circle founded by Edouard Claparède, who becomes president (Switzerland)
Tatiana Rosenthal becomes director of the Polyclinic for
the Treatment of Psychoneuroses in connection with the
V. Bechterev Research Institute in St. Petersburg
(Russia)
‘‘Über die Entstehung des Beiflussnngsaparate in der
schizophrenie’’ (On the Origin of the ‘‘Influencing
Machine’’ in Schizophrenia) by Viktor Tausk published
(Austria)
Tagebuch eines halbwüchsigen Mädchens (A Young
Girl’s Diary) by Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth published
(Austria)
1920
January 25 – Freud’s daughter, Sophie Halberstadt, dies
during the epidemic of the Spanish flu
February 14 – Poliklinik für psychoanalytische Behandlung nervöser Krankheiten (Polyclinic for Psychoanalytical Treatment of Mental Illness), known as the Berliner
Poliklinik (Berlin Polyclinic), situated at 29 Potsdamerstrasse, founded by Max Eitingon, Ernst Simmel, and
Karl Abraham. It was arranged by Ernst Freud (Germany)
September – Genfer Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft
(Geneva Psychoanalytic Society), founded with the participation of Pierre Bovet, Henri Flournoy, Charles
Odier, Pierre Morel, Sabina Spielrein, W. Boven, and
Raymond de Saussure. President: Edouard Claparède
(Switzerland)
September 8–11 – 6th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in The Hague (Netherlands).
President: Ernest Jones (acting president), Introduction
by Freud ‘‘Ergänzungen zur Traumlehre’’ (Additions to
the Dream Doctrine)
September 20 – Beginning of the 361 Rundbriefe (circular letters) exchanged between the members of the
Secret Committee until March 14, 1926
October 15 – Meeting of the Kommission für Kriegsneurosenbehandlung (Commission for the Treatment of War
Neuroses). Freud presents his expertise
December – Publication of Freud’s first book translated
into French, ‘‘Five Lectures from 1909,’’ under the title
‘‘Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis’’ in the Geneva Review. Translator is Yves Le Lay and the preface is
by Edouard Claparède. (Switzerland)
Melanie Klein’s first publication ‘‘Der Familienroman in
Statu Nascendi’’ in the Internationale Zeitschrift für
Psychoanalyse
The Italian review Archivio generale di neurologia, psichiatria e psicoanalisi and the American journal Psyche
and Eros founded (Italy–USA)
O pansexualismo na doutrina de Freud by Franco da
Rocha, first professor of neuro-psychiatry at the Medical
School of São Paulo, published (Brazil)
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The Tavistock Clinic, 51 Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury,
London, founded by Crichton-Miller (Great Britain)
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, the English
publication of Die Internationale Zeitschrift für Aertzliche Psychoanalyse, and of the ‘‘Glossary Committee,’’ with Joan Riviere, James and Alix Strachey, with an
eye to the future Standard Edition, founded by Ernest
Jones (Great Britain)
‘‘Biblioteca Psicoanalitica Internazionale’’ founded by
Marco Levi Bianchini (Italy)
Freud publishes Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, 1920g)
1921
March – Eugénie Sokolnicka, Polish psychoanalyst analyzed by S. Ferenczi and Freud, establishes herself in
Paris with Freud’s endorsement (France)
April 18 – Franco Fornari born in Rivergaro, Piacenza
(Italy)
August – Detski Dom (Children’s Home) founded in Moscow, under the authority of Ivan Ermakov, President of
the Society and of the Psychoanalytical Institute, but
directed by Vera Schmidt. Sabina Spielrein practices
there upon their return to Russia in 1923 (Russia)
August 6 – Freud publishes Massenpsychologie und Psychoanalyse des Ich (Group Psychology and the Analysis
of the Ego, 1921c)
André Breton visits Freud in Vienna (France)
The New Library of Psycho-Analysis founded by Ernest
Jones. The publication is ensured by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press (Great Britain)
A psychoanalytical association founded in Moscow with
Vera and Otto Schmidt, Ivan Ermakov, Mosche Wulff,
I.W. Kannabich, Alexander Riom Luria. It was not be
recognized at the 7th Congress of the IPA (Russia)
1922
January 22 – Indian Psycho-Analytical Society in Calcutta founded by Girindrasekhar Bose (India)
February 20 – Berliner Psychoanalytische Institut (BPI)
(Berlin Psychoanalytical Institute) founded, comprised
of the polyclinic, a training institute (conferences, seminars on case studies, didactic and controlled analyses)
and a commission on the cursus (Germany)
May 14 – Freud’s letter to Arthur Schnitzler: ‘‘I think that
I avoided you from a kind of fear of meeting my double’’
May 22 – Lehrinstitut der Wiener Psychoanalytischen
Vereinigung (‘‘Ambulatorium,’’ the Vienna psychoanalytical polyclinic) opens under Eduard Hitschmann’s direction (Austria)
June 13 – Anna Freud becomes a member of the Vienna
Psychoanalytical Society
July 25 – François Perrier born in Paris (France)
August 13 – Willy Baranger born in Bône (Algeria)
September – A psychoanalytical work group is created in
Leipzig around Therese Benedek (Germany)
September 25–27 – Seventh Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Berlin (Germany).
President: Ernest Jones. A prize is created for a competition whose subject is: ‘‘Relationship of analytical technique and analytical theory’’
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December 14 – Francesco Corrao born in Palermo (Italy)
The first volume of the Spanish translation of Freud’s
works published, translated by López Ballesteros with a
foreword by José Ortega y Gasset. Published in seventeen
volumes between 1922 and 1932 (Spain)
1923
March 4 – Freud’s first letter to Romain Rolland: ‘‘I will
keep until the end of my days the joyful memory of having
been able to exchange a greeting with you. Since for us
your name is associated with the most precious of all the
beautiful illusions, the one of love expanding for all
humanity.’’ (France)
April – Freud publishes Das Ich und das Es (The Ego and
the Id, 1923b)
April 20 – Freud’s first operation by the oto-rhino-laryngologist Marcus Hajek, Schnitzler’s brother-in-law: excision on the right side of the upper jaw of a leucoplast.
Freud writes to Jones on the April 25: ‘‘I still have not
begun working again, and I cannot swallow anything.
They assured me the thing is benign, but as you know,
nobody can guarantee the evolution when it will begin
again to develop. Personally, I had diagnosed an epithelioma, but they didn’t go along with me. Tobacco is the
suspect in the etiolation of this tissue in rebellion.’’
June 19 – Heinz Rudolf Halberstadt (‘‘Heinerle’’ or ‘‘Heinele’’), Sophie’s second son, dies in Vienna at four and a
half years old, from miliary tuberculosis. Freud writes to
Ludwig Binswanger on October 15, 1926: ‘‘He was the
favorite of my children and grandchildren, and since Heinele’s death I can no longer stand my grandchildren, and
I no longer have a taste for life. That’s the secret of my
indifference—what was called courage—facing my own
risk of death.’’
July 8 – Didier Anzieu born in Melun (France)
August 2–7 – Angélo Hesnard presents the annual psychiatric report during the 17th Congress of Alienists and
Neurologists of France and of French-language countries
(Besançon): ‘‘Psychoanalysis. Etiological, methodological, therapeutic and psychiatric value of doctrine.’’ In its
conclusion he writes: ‘‘It is there that Psychoanalysis,
relieved from its terminological errors, from its doctrinaire utterances, and from the symbolic artifice of semiological research, is connected with Psychiatry, of which
it is tributary, and with clinical psychology (. . .) It is
there that this doctrine-method, still awkward, but very
perfectible, has its incontestable rights to our scientific
and French sympathy.’’ (France)
August 26 – Meeting of the Secret Committee at the Castel Toblio, then at San Cristoforo, at the Lago Caldonazzo. This will be the last, due to the dissensions, particularly between Ernest Jones and Otto Rank, and the
Committee will be dissolved in April 1924. This is likewise Freud’s last stay in Italy
October – Edoardo Weiss gives a conference on psychoanalysis at the Florence Congress of the Italian Society of
Psychology (Italy)
October 4 and 11 – Operations on Freud’s tumor at the
Auersperg Sanatorium. He is henceforth required to wear a
prosthesis that makes eating and speaking painful for him
October 22 – Maud (Magdalena) Mannoni-van der Spoel
born in Courtrai (Belgium)
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October 25 – René Laforgue’s first letter to Freud
(France)
November 19 – Piera Aulagnier-Spairani born in Milan
(Italy)
December – Das Trauma der Geburt (The Trauma of
Birth) by Otto Rank published (Austria)
Because of Freud’s illness, Paul Federn will assume the
vice-presidency of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society
from 1923 to 1938
Buch vom Es. Psychoanalytische Briefe an eine Freundin
by Georg Groddeck published (Germany)
The New York Psychoanalytic Society designates the first
Educational Committee, in charge of organizing and
improving its pedagogical activities (USA)
1924
April 21–23 – 8th Congress if the International Psychoanalytical Association in Salzburg, for the first time in
the absence of Freud (Austria). President: Karl Abraham
April 27 – Otto Rank’s departure for several months in
America (USA)
May 14 – Romain Rolland visits Freud in Vienna (France)
July 6 – Serge Leclaire (Liebschutz) born in Strasbourg
(France)
September 9 – Dr. Hermine Hug-Hellmuth is murdered
by her eighteen-year-old nephew, Rudolph Hug, her sister’s illegitimate child whom she took care of after her
sister’s death (Austria)
1925
February 24 – The Viennese municipality, by decree, forbids Theodor Reik to practice psychoanalysis (Austria)
April – First publication of the future review L’Evolution
psychiatrique, Psychanalyse—psychologie clinique
(Psychiatric Evolution, Psychoanalysis—Clinical Psychology) edited by Angélo Hesnard and René Laforgue
(France)
June 7 – Società Psicoanalitica Italiana (S.P.I.) founded
by Marco Levi Bianchini. The journal Archivio Generale
di Neurologia, Psichiatria e Psicoanalisi becomes its official mouthpiece (Italy)
June 20 – Josef Breuer dies in Vienna (Austria)
July – Melanie Klein is invited to London where she gives
a series of six conferences in English on ‘‘Frühanalyse’’
(Great Britain)
August 14 – The Narkompros (Ministry of Public Instruction) orders the closing of Detski Dom (Children’s
Home), founded and directed by Véra Schmidt (Russia)
September 2–5 – 9th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Bad Homburg (Germany).
President: Karl Abraham. Training Committee founded
by Max Eitingon, who becomes president and states the
rules of supervision
September 30 – Freud begins the analysis of princess
Marie Bonaparte; he writes of her to Sándor Ferenczi on
October 18: ‘‘She not at all an aristocrat, rather ein
Mensch and the work with her is going marvelously.’’
(France)
October – Rudolph M. Loewenstein settles in Paris as a
didactician. He eventually becomes the analyst of Sacha
Nacht, Jacques Lacan, and Daniel Lagache (France)
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December 15 – Robert J. Stoller born in Crestwood, New
York (USA)
December 25 – Karl Abraham dies in Berlin. Freud writes
to Ernest Jones five days later: ‘‘Abraham’s death was
without a doubt the biggest loss that could hit us, and it
hit us. I called him, in jest, in certain letters ‘mon rocher
de bronze.’ I felt reassured in the absolute trust he
inspired in me as well as all the others. I applied to him
the words of Horace: ‘Integer vitae scelerisque purus’
(The onewhose life has integrity and is without reproach).
Max Eitingon succeeds him in the presidency of the IPA
Lehrinstitut der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung
(Training Institute of the Vienna Psychoanalytical
Society) is created by the Vienna Psychoanalytical
Society under the direction of Helene Deutsch, Anna
Freud, and Siegfried Bernfeld. The committee consists
of P. Federn, H. Nunberg, W. Reich, and E. Hitschmann
(Austria)
The analytical cure is recognized by the new Prussian
enactment on honorarium and the German general convention of physicians (Germany)
Adolf Josef Storfer succeeds Otto Rank as director of the
Internationalen Psychoanalytischen Verlag. Max Eitingon, Sandor Rado, and Sándor Ferenczi replace Rank at
the editorial desk of the Internationale Zeitschrift für
(ärztliche) Psychoanalyse
Freud publishes Selbstdarstellung (An Autobiographical
Study, 1925d [1924])
1926
January 21 – Freud publishes Hemmung, Symptom und
Angst (Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, 1926d
[1925])
March 24 – Geheimnisse einer Seele (Mysteries of a
Soul), first film on psychoanalysis, produced by G. W.
Pabst, presented in Berlin (Germany)
April 13 – Last meeting between Otto Rank and Freud,
who writes to Sándor Ferenczi: ‘‘I found no motive to
show a particular tenderness, at the time of his parting
visit; I was frank and hard. But we don’t have to put a
cross on him.’’
April 24 – The Berliner Psychoanalytische Vereinigung
becomes the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft
(D.P.G.) (Germany)
August 1 – First Conference of Psychoanalysts in the
French Language (Geneva), presided over by Raymond
de Saussure (Geneva) with reports by René Laforgue
(Paris) on ‘‘Schizophrenia and Schizonoia’’ and by
Charles Odier (Geneva), ‘‘Contribution to the Study of
Superego and Moral Phenomenon.’’ The creation of a
Linguistic Commission is decided upon to unify French
psychoanalytic vocabulary (Switzerland)
September – Freud publishes Die Frage der Laienanalyse
(The Question of Lay Analysis, 1926e)
September – Sigmund Freud, a biography by Honorio
Delgado, published (Peru)
September – Melanie Klein leaves Berlin for London
(Great Britain)
September 22 – Sándor Ferenczi leaves for America for a
six-month stay (USA)
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September 28 – The Psychoanalytical Clinic founded in
London with the donation of an ex-patient, Pryns Hopkins. Ernest Jones states: ‘‘The team includes a director,
myself, an assistant director, Dr. Edward Glover, nine
physicians, the Doctors Bryan, Cole, Eder, Herford,
Inman, Payne, Rickman, Riggall and Stofddart, with five
assistants’’ (Great Britain)
October – The Wolf Man begins analysis again with Ruth
Mack Brunswick
November 4 – Société psychanalytique de Paris founded
by Marie Bonaparte, Eugénie Sokolnicka, Angélo Hesnard, René Allendy, Adrien Borel, René Laforgue,
Rudolph Loewenstein, Georges Parcheminey, and
Edouard Pichon (France)
November 23 – A circular letter written by Anna Freud
under her father’s dictation reestablishes the Rundbriefe
(circular letters), and the Secret Committee acts henceforth as the ‘‘central management of the International
Psychoanalytical Association’’
November 28 – Freud is named Honorary Member of the
Swiss Society of Psychiatry in place of Emil Kraepelin
Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Pädagogik founded by
Heinrich Meng (Germany) and Ernst Schneider
(Switzerland)
Almanach der Psychoanalyse founded and published by
the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag (International Psychoanalytical Publishers). Thirteen volumes
appear before the Nazis liquidate the publishing house
in 1938
1927
January 10 – Joseph Sandler born in Cape Town (South
Africa)
April 10 – Schloss Tegel—Psychoanalytische Klinik
Sanatorium (Tegel Castle—Psychoanalytical Clinic Sanitorium) founded by Ernst Simmel (Germany)
June 25 – Revue française de psychanalyse (French
Review of Psychoanalysis) founded (France)
September – Tenth Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Innsbruck (Austria). President:
Max Eitingon
Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise founded in São
Paulo by Durval B. Marcondes. President: Franco da
Rocha. It will be recognized provisionally in 1929 by the
International Psychoanalytical Association but without
final establishment (Brazil)
Freud publishes Die Zukunft einer Illusion (The Future of
an Illusion, 1927c)
The Burlingham-Rosenfeld/Hietzing Schule (Burlingham-Rosenfeld School or Hietzing School) founded in
Vienna by Dorothy Burlingham and Eva Rosenfeld, a private school placed under Anna Freud’s care (Austria)
Melanie Klein becomes member of the British PsychoAnalytical Society (Great Britain)
1928
September 30 – Ernst Simmel inaugurates the new premises of the Berliner Psychoanalytische Institut (BPI)
(Berlin Psychoanalytical Institute), arranged under Ernst
Freud’s direction (Germany)
October – Sándor Ferenczi gives conferences in Spain.
He writes to Georg Groddeck on October 17: ‘‘Aside from
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that, the doctors, here, are still half-Breuerians, already
half-Jungians, without having ever been Freudians.’’
(Spain)
Tokyo Psychoanalytic Institute founded by Kenji Otsuki.
It is recognized by the International Psychoanalytical
Association in 1931 (Japan)
A subsidiary of the Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise
de São Paulo founded in Rio by V. Rocha, Durval B. Marcondes, and Julio Pires Porto-Carrero (Brazil)
Schweizerische Ärtegesellschaft für psychoanalyse
(Swiss Medical Association for Psychoanalysis) founded
by Emil Oberholzer and Rudolf Brun. It is never recognized by the IPA and dissolves in 1938 (Switzerland)
1929
February 10 – Frankfurter Institut der ‘‘Südwestdeutsche Psychoanalytische Arbeitsgemeinschaft’’
(Frankfurt Institute of Psychoanalysis) founded by Karl
Landauer, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Heinrich
Meng. It is tied to the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) of Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno (Germany) and its role is to dissemination the
ideas of psychoanalysis by didactic analyses and theoretical courses at the university without therapeutic training (Germany)
July 28–31 – Eleventh Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Oxford (Great Britain). President: Max Eitingon. The New York Psychoanalytical
Society, through the intervention of A. A. Brill, its president, agrees to welcome analysts who are not doctors
(USA). La Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise de São
Paulo is recognized provisionally (Brazil)
August – Freud writes Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930a [1929]), which is
published at the end of December but dated 1930
October 24 – The stock market crash in New York ruins
Max Eitingon
December 25 – Sándor Ferenczi distances himself from
Freud and writes to him: ‘‘Psychoanalysis practices too
unilaterally the analysis of obsessional neurosis and the
analysis of character, that is to say, the psychology of the
ego, neglecting the organic-hysteric base if the analysis;
the cause is the overestimation of fantasy—and the
underestimation of traumatic reality in pathogenesis.’’
The first translation in Japanese of Freud’s work published (Japan)
Lehrinstitut der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung
founded from a department for borderline and psychotic
patients by Paul Schilder; Eduard Bibring succeeds its
management after Schilder’s emigration to America
(Austria)
Adolf J. Storfer founds the bi-monthly journal Die Psychoanalytische Bewegung at the International Psychoanalytical Publishers. It is published until December
1933 (Austria)
Franz Alexander emigrates from Germany and settles in
Chicago (USA)
1930
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May 9 – Otto Rank excluded from the list of honorary
members of the American Psychoanalytical Association
at the time of his business meeting during the 1st Inter-
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national Congress of Mental Hygiene in Washington (May
5–10)
August 28 – Anna Freud accepts the Goethe Prize from
the town of Frankfurt-am-Main for her father (Germany)
September 12 – Freud’s mother, Amalia (Malka) Freud,
née Nathanson, dies in Vienna, at the age of ninety-five
Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Society founded.
It is comprised of, among other members, Ernest E. Hadley, Adolf Meyer, Harry Stack Sullivan, Clara Thompson,
and William A. White, and is accepted as Constituent
Society by the American Psychoanalytic Association
Psychoanalytical Institute founded in The Hague
(Netherlands)
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life translated into
Japanese by Kiyoyasu Marui
1931
August 22 – A Study Circle, which will become the Nordisk Psykoanalytisk Samfund (Nordic Psychoanalytical
Society) founded in 1933 at the initiative of the Dane
Sigurd Naesgaard, the Norwegian Harald Schjelderup,
the Finn Vriö Kulovesi, and the Swede Alfhild Tamm
September 24 – The New York Psychoanalytic Institute,
the first on the American continent, founded with the
support of Abram A. Brill. Sándor Radó, who just emigrated, becomes the director
October 25 – A commemorative plaque is placed on
Freud’s birthplace at Pribor-Freiberg at the initiative of
Dr. Emmanuel Windholz, Jaroslav Stuchlik, and Nicolaı̈
Ossipow
November – Angel Garma, after her training in Berlin,
settles in Madrid until 1936
December – Henri Claude creates the post Head of
Laboratory of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at the
Clinic of Mental Illnesses at the Paris Faculty of Medicine. Sacha Nacht holds the post
December 18 – Official opening of the Budapest Psychoanalytical Polyclinic, 12 Mészàros Street, founded with
the support of Frédéric and Vilma Kovács. It will be directed by Sándor Ferenczi with Michael Balint as his assistant who will succeed him in 1933
Richard F. Sterba, at the suggestion of Adolf J. Storfer,
undertakes the publication of the first dictionary of psychoanalysis (Handwörterbuch der Psychoanalyse) of
which the first installment will be published on May
6,1936, for Freud’s eightieth birthday
First translation in Brazil of a Freud work, Five Lectures,
by Durval B. Marcondes and J. Barbosa Correia
Edoardo Weiss publishes Elementi di psicoanalisi in
Milan (Italy) with a preface by Sigmund Freud
Wilhelm Reich founds the German Association for a Sexual Proletarian Policy (Sex-Pol)
Martin Freud succeeds Adolf J. Storfer as commercial
director of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag
1932
June – The Psychoanalytic Quarterly founded by Dorian
Feigenbaum, Bertram D. Lewin, Johns Hopkins, and Gregory Zilboorg, all members of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the New York Psychoanalytic Society
September 4–7 – Twelfth Congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association in Wiesbaden (Germany)
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President: Max Eitingon. Affiliation of the Tokyo Psychoanalytical Institute and of the Chicago and WashingtonBaltimore Societies. Ernest Jones is elected president of
the IPA, Johan H.W. van Ophuijsen and Anna Freud
remain vice-presidents, A.A. Brill is named third vicepresident. Sándor Ferenczi presents his lecture ‘‘The
Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child. The
Language of Tenderness and of Passion’’
September 7 – Date of the medical thesis presented by
Jacques Lacan De la psychose paranoı̈aque dans ses rapports à la personnalité (Of paranoid psychosis in its relationship to personality) (France)
October 1 – Società Psicoanalitica Italiana (SPI)
founded in Rome by Edoardo Weiss, Nicola Perrotti, and
Emilio Servadio. Marco Levi Bianchini becomes honorary
president. It is recognized by the IPA in 1935. The first
issue of the Rivista italiana di psicoanalisi is published
in April 1935, and immediately forbidden by the fascist
regime. The Society is dissolved in 1938
Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis founded by Franz
Alexander, who remains president until 1952. Karen
Horney, recently emigrated from Berlin, becomes the
associate director
Die Psycho-Analyse des Kindes (The Psycho-Analysis of
Children) by Melanie Klein published
Heisaku Kosawa (Japan) visits Freud and presents an
account of his theory of the Ajase Complex
American Psychoanalytic Association is reorganized into
a federation of associations. A ‘‘Council on Professional
Training’’ created (USA)
Publication of the first Czech Directory of Psychoanalysis, under the direction of E. Windholz (Czechoslovakia)
Verwahrloste Jugend (Wayward Youth) by August Aichhorn published (Austria)
1933
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January 30 – Adolf Hitler is elected chancellor of the
Reich (Germany)
April 8 – Francisco Franco da Rocha dies in Amparo,
State of São Paulo (Brazil)
May 10 – Freud’s books are burned in Berlin
May 22 – Sándor Ferenczi dies in Budapest (Hungary)
June 21 – Carl G. Jung becomes president of the Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychoterapie (AAGP)
after Ernst Kretschmer’s resignation (Germany)
November 18 – Felix Boehm and Carl Müller-Braunschweig take the presidency of the Berlin Psychoanalytical
Society, Max Eitingon having been dismissed as a Jew
(Germany)
December – Psykoanalytisk Samfund founded, with the
Swede Poul Bjerre, the Dane Sigurd Naesgaard, and the
Norwegian Irgens Stromme (Denmark)
December 31 – Max Eitingon leaves Berlin for Jerusalem, where he founds the Palestine Psychoanalytical
Society with Mosche Wulff (emigrated from Berlin the
same year), Ilja Schalit, Anna Smelianski, Gershon and
Gerda Barag, Vicky Ben-Tal, Ruth Jaffe, etc. (Israel)
The Prague Psychoanalytical Study Group founded and
directed by Frances Deri until 1935, the year of his emigration to Los Angeles. Otto Fenichel succeeds him until
1938 (Czechoslovakia)
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Johan H.W. van Ophuijsen resigns from the Netherlands
Psychoanalytical Society (NVP) to found the Netherlands
Society of Psychoanalysts (VPN) with Van Emden and
Maurits Katan (Netherlands)
Freud publishes Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (New Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis, 1933a [1932])
Charakteranalyse (Character Analysis) and Die Massenspsychologie des Faschismus (The Mass Psychology
of Fascism) by Wilhelm Reich published (Austria)
Life and Works of Edgar Poe: A Psycho-Analytical Study
by Marie Bonaparte published
1934
January 10 – Institute of Psychoanalysis inaugurated in
Paris. Director: Marie Bonaparte (France)
February 19 – Nikolai Ossipov dies in Prague (Czech
Republic)
May 19 – Eugenia Sokolnicka-Kutner commits suicide in
Paris (France)
June 11 – Georg Groddeck dies in Knonau bei Zürich
(Switzerland)
August 26–31 – Thirteenth Congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association in Lucerne (Switzerland).
President: Ernest Jones. Wilhelm Reich is expelled
from the International Psychoanalytical Association. A
Dano-Norwegian association and a Finn-Swedish association Svensk-Finska Psykoanalytiksla Foereningen
(Otto Fenichel, Ludwig Jekels) are created
1935
May 15 – Freud is named Honorary Member of the Royal
Society of Medicine of London (Great Britain)
October 24 – Edith Jacobsohn, militant in the socialist
resistance group Neu Beginnen (New Beginnings) is
arrested and imprisoned (Germany)
December 1 – Meeting of the Berlin Psychoanalytic
Society, under Ernest Jones’s presidency. The Jewish
members leave ‘‘voluntarily’’ (freiwillig Rücktritt)
(Germany)
1936
March 28 – The Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag repository in Leipzig is sequestered by the Nazis
(Germany)
April – A psychoanalytical polyclinic founded in Paris by
John Leuba and Michel Cénac (France)
May – Deutsches Institut für Psychologische Forschung
und Psychotherapie (1936–1945) founded under the
direction of Matthias Heinrich Göring. Felix Boehm is
named dean (Germany)
May 5 – Ernest Jones inaugurates the new home of the
Vienna Psychoanalytical Association, 7 Berggasse,
designated for Association meetings, the Viennese Psychoanalytical Institute, consultation, and a library
May 6 – Celebration of Freud’s eightieth birthday
June 30 – Freud is named ‘‘Foreign Member, Royal
Society’’ of Great Britain, a supreme scientific honor in
England (Great Britain)
July – Beginning of the civil war in Spain (1936–1939),
followed by Franco’s dictatorship
August 2–8 – Fourteenth Congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad (Czechoslo-
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vakia). President: Ernest Jones. The Czech Study Group
is officially recognized. The American Psychoanalytical
Association obtains exclusive power over its composition
in North America (exclusion of non-doctors)
Anna Freud publishes Das Ich und die Abwehrmechanismen (The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense)
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1937
January – Marie Bonaparte acquires the correspondence
between Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Fliess
February 5 – Lou Andreas-Salomé dies in his house
‘‘Loufried’’ in Göttingen (Germany)
May 30 – Alfred Adler dies in Aberdeen, Scotland (Great
Britain)
July 27 – The Russian Psychoanalytic Society halts its
activities. Twenty years of silence on psychoanalysis will
follow in Russia
December 30 – Julio Pires Porto-Carrero dies in Rio de
Janeiro (Brazil)
Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Society founded (USA)
Adelheid L. Koch, recent émigrée from Germany
endorsed by Ernest Jones and Otto Fenichel (her analyst), begins the didactic analyses of Durval Marcondes,
Darcy Mendonça Uchôa, Virginia Bicudo, Flavio Dias,
Frank Philips, etc., in São Paolo (Brazil)
Freud publishes ‘‘Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse’’ (‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’, 1937c)
1938
March 10 – The German Army invades Austria. On March
12, Vienna is occupied and Hitler arrives on the 14th.
March 15, the ‘‘Anschluss,’’ the connecting of Austria to
Germany, is proclaimed
March 20 – Vienna Psychoanalytic Society dissolved in
the presence of Sigmund Freud; the commissioner
appointed by the NSDAP (National Socialist [Nazi]
Party), Dr. Anton Sauerwald; Ernest Jones, President of
the International Psychoanalytical Association; Marie,
Princess of Greece, Vice-President of the International
Psychoanalytical Association; Anna Freud, Vice-President of the International Psychoanalytical Association
and Vice-President of the Viennese Psychoanalytical
Society; Carl Müller-Braunschweig, Secretary of the German Society of Psychoanalysis and administrative council member of the German Institute of Psychological
Research and Psychotherapy in Berlin; Paul Federn,
Vice-President of the Viennese Psychoanalytical Society,
Eduard Hitschmann, Edward Bibring, Heinz Hartmann,
Ernst Kris, Robert Waelder, Willi Hoffer, B. Steiner,
members of the board of directors; and Martin J. Freud,
of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. The
Society will be officially liquidated under an ordinance of
the Magistrate of the city of Vienna, September 1, 1938
March 22 – Freud notes in his journal: ‘‘Anna bei
Gestapo’’ (‘‘Anna with Gestapo’’)
May – Hanns Sachs founds American Imago in Boston,
Massachusetts. The first issue will be published in
November 1939 (USA)
May 29 – Bruno Bettelheim is arrested by the Gestapo.
He spends ten and a half months in Dachau then in
Buchenwald, where meets Ernst Federn again (Austria)
June 4 – Freud leaves Vienna on June 4 with Martha,
Anna, Paula Fischl, and Dr. Josephine Stross. Arriving in
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Paris the next day, he stays with Marie Bonaparte before
leaving for London, where he arrives on June 6
June 23 – Three secretaries of the Royal Society (Sir
Albert Steward, A. V. Hill, Griffith Davies) bring Freud
the Charter Book to sign (Great Britain)
June 23 – Freud receives Stefan Zweig, who presents to
him Salvador Dali. Freud remarks on Dali’s ‘‘candid and
fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery’’
August 1–5 – Fifteenth Congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association in Paris (France). President: Ernest Jones. The American Psychoanalytic Association appeals and assumes the right, on account of the
war and citing the ‘‘1938 rule,’’ to total autonomy concerning standards in the United States, in excluding nondoctors, with the exception of those who had trained
before 1938
September 27 – Freud and Anna move to 20 Maresfield
Gardens, which Martha and Paula Fischl fix up in two
days
November 19 – The Deutsche Psychoanalytische
Gesellschaft (D.P.G.) is dissolved and carries on as
Arbeitsgruppe A (Work Group A) within the Deutsches
Institut für psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie (Germany)
1939
March 10 – Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische
Religion: Drei Abhandlungen (Moses and Monotheism:
Three Essays, 1939a [1934–38]) published in
Amsterdam
September 1 – Hitler invades Poland. Beginning of the
Second World War
September 23 – Sigmund Freud dies before midnight
after morphine injections given at his request by his doctor Max Schur, after a day and a half in a coma. He is cremated on the September 26 at the Golder’s Green
Crematorium
October 31 – Otto Rank (Rosenfeld) dies in New York
(USA)
Franz Alexander publishes the journal Psychosomatic
Medicine, with Flanders Dunbar, Stanley Cobb, Carl Binger, and others (USA)
Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis founded
(USA)
Ichpsychologie und Anpassungsproblem (Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation) by Heinz Hartmann
published (Germany)
1940
June 25 – Wilhelm Stekel commits suicide in London
(Great Britain)
September 31 – Edouard Claparède dies in Geneva
(Switzerland)
October 10 – Melbourne Institute for Psychoanalysis
founded (Australia), inaugurated by Judge Foster at 111
Collins Street. Due to the generosity of Miss Lorna Traill,
the first meeting takes place at the home of Hal Maudsley, a prominent figure in Australian psychiatry
The Detroit Psychoanalytic Society founded by Richard
F. Sterba with Leo H. Bartemeier and Klara HappelPinkus. Sterba is president from 1946 to 1952 (USA)
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Carl G. Jung retires from the Allgemeine Ärztliche
Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie (AAGP) (Germany)
Psicoanalisis de los sueños (Psychoanalysis of Dreams)
by Angel Garma published (Argentina)
Abriss der psychoanalyse (‘‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis,’’ 1940a [1938]) by Sigmund Freud published
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February 13 – Minna Bernays dies in London (Great
Britain)
April 2 – Karen Horney is excluded from the didacticians
of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. She will found
the Association for Advancement of Psychoanalysis,
accompanied by Clara M. Thompson, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Erich Fromm. She will also organize the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, where she will be Dean
until her death in 1952
December 7 – Attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese
aircraft
Abram Kardiner leaves the New York Psychoanalytic
Institute (USA)
1942
February 22 – Stefan Zweig commits suicide in Petropolis (Brazil)
July 12 – René Allendy dies in Montpellier (France)
December 15 – Associacion Psicoanalitica de Argentina
(APA) founded by Angel Garma, who becomes the first
president, with Celes Ernesto Càrcamo, Guillermo Ferrari
Hardoy, Marie Glas de Langer, Enrique Pichon-Rivière,
and Arnaldo Rascovsky
San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society founded by Otto
Fenichel and others (USA)
Freud’s sisters Marie (Mitzi), Pauline (Pauli), and Rosa
killed in deportation
Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis founded by Karl
Menninger in the hospice of the Menninger Clinic (USA)
1943
January 27 – Susan Isaacs presents her writing on the
‘‘Nature and Function of Fantasy,’’ first contribution to
Controversial Discussions that oppose the students of
Anna Freud and Melanie Klein before an ad hoc commission of the British Psycho-Analytical Society until 1944
(Great Britain)
February 2 – The German Army surrenders in Stalingrad
(USSR)
February 5 – Adolfine (Dolfi) Freud killed by the Nazis in
the Treblinka concentration camp
May 13 – John Rittmeister is guillotined by the Nazis in
Berlin-Plötzensee (Germany)
July 3 – Max Eitingon dies in Jerusalem (Israel)
Psychoanalytical Institute of the Associacion Psicoanalitica de Argentina (APA), the Revista de Pscicoanàlisis
(Arnaldo Rascovsky is the first editor-in-chief), and the
Biblioteca de Psicoanálisis founded (Argentina)
The Palestine Psychoanalytic Society, founded in 1933,
is recognized by the IPA (Israel)
William Alanson White Institute, the New York branch of
the Washington School of Psychiatry, founded by Harry
Stack Sullivan, Clara Thompson, Frieda Fromm-Reichman,
and Eric Fromm, who leave Karen Horney (USA)
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Publication of the New German-English Psychoanalytical
Vocabulary, by Alix Strachey-Sargant, and of the first
volume of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (SE). Twenty-four
volumes are published between 1943 and 1974 (Great
Britain)
Finno-Swedish Psychoanalytic Society dissolved after
the death of Yrjö Kulovesi (Finland–Sweden)
Az ember õsi össztönei Pantheon (The Filial Instinct) by
Imre Hermann published (Hungary)
1944
June 6 – Landing of Allied troops in Normandy (D-Day)
(France)
August 25 – Liberation of Paris (France)
December 30 – Romain Rolland dies in Vézelay (France)
Adelheid L. Koch founds the Grupo Psicanalitico de São
Paulo, and young psychiatrists in Rio found the Centro
de Estudos Juliano Moreira (Brazil)
Sándor Radó is dismissed as Education Director then
stripped from the list of didacticians at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute
Bruno Bettelheim is named director of the Orthogenic
School at the University of Chicago (USA)
The Psychology of Women. A Psychoanalytic Interpretation by Helene Deutsch published. The second volume
appears in 1945
1945
January 15 – The Psychoanalytic Clinic for Training and
Research in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia
University, College of Physicians and Surgeons, founded
by Sándor Radó, who becomes director, with Abram Kardiner, George Daniels, and David Levy. This Clinic is the
first psychoanalytic institution affiliated with the American Psychoanalytic Association to be created in a university and medical school(USA)
January 27 – Karl Landauer dies in the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp (Germany)
April 30 – Adolf Hitler’s suicide, after Benito Mussolini’s
execution on April 24
May 4 – Harald Schultz-Hencke (with Werner Kemper)
founds and becomes the director ofthe Institut für Psychopathologie und Psychotherapie (IPP) , to teach
‘‘neoanalysis,’’ as opposed to classic psychoanalysis
(Germany)
May 8 – Allied victory proclaimed, ending the Second
World War in Europe
August 6 – The first American atomic bomb is dropped
on Hiroshima (Japan)
October – The Grupo Psicanalitico de São Paulo is
accepted provisionally as Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise de São Paulo (SBPSP) by Ernest Jones (Brazil)
October 19 – The Deutsche Psychoanalytische
Gesellschaft (DPG) is recreated (as the Berliner Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft until December 3, 1950) with
Carl Müller-Braunschweig as the first president; Felix
Boehm, his deputy; and Werner Kemper as third member
of the bureau (Germany)
November – The Neederlandsche Vereeniging voor Psychoanalyse (Netherlands Society for Psychoanalysis) is
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recreated. The Amsterdam Institute of Psychoanalysis is
founded in 1946 (Netherlands)
December 1 – The dissolution of the Viennese Psychoanalytical Society is appealed in 1938
The review The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (USA)
created by Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and Ernst Kris
(USA)
The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis by Otto Fenichel
published (USA)
1946
1947
February 16 – A provisional executive committee established for the re-creation of the Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (Vienna Psychoanalytical Society).
President: August Aichhorn (Austria)
April 15 – The Sigmund Freud Copyrights Limited is
established by Freud’s beneficiary executors, Ernst, Martin, and Anna, in order to collect the rights and to distribute them to Freud’s grandchildren (Great Britain)
May 14 – First issue of the journal Psyché, Revue internationale de Psychanalyse et des Sciences de l’Homme
(Psyche, International Review of Psychoanalysis and the
Sciences of Man), created by Maryse Choisy. It is published until 1963 (France)
July 22 – Otto Fenichel dies in Los Angeles (USA)
July 25 – First post-war congress of French language psychoanalysts, in Montreux (Switzerland)
December 24 – Maurice Dugautiez and Fernand Lechat
found the Belgian Association of Psychoanalysts under
the patronage of the Paris Society. It will be recognized
by the IPA in 1947 (Belgium)
The Indian Psychoanalytic Society publishes a journal
entitled Samiksa (India)
The Los Angeles Institute for Psychoanalysis founded
(USA)
Montreal Psychoanalytic Club (or Cercle psychanalytique
de Montréal) founded by Miguel Prados (Canada)
Ernest Jones resigns from his post at the British PsychoAnalytical Society (Great Britain)
The Psychopathology and Psychotherapy Society
founded by Ion Popesco-Sibiu and Doctor Constantin
Vlad (Romania)
The Society for the Study of Psychoanalysis is recreated
by Theodor Dosuzkov, but it will be forced to dissolve in
1950 (Czech Republic)
The Società Psicoanalitica Italiana (SPI) is recreated by
Nicola Perrotti, Emilio Servadio, Cesare Musatti, and
Alessandra Tomasi di Palma di Lampedusa-Wolf Stomersee. The first National Congress of Psychoanalysis is
organized in Rome (Italy)
The American Psychoanalytic Association reorganized
into a ‘‘Board on Professional Standards,’’ responsible
for all the affairs of analytical training, and an ‘‘Executive
Council,’’ responsible for membership and practical problems (USA)
January 10 – Hanns Sachs dies in Boston (USA)
May 9 – Institut für Psychotherapie founded in Berlin by
Felix Boehm (Germany)
November 11 – Ernst Simmel dies in Los Angeles (USA)
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The journal Psyche. Jahrbuch für Tiefenpsychologie und
Menschenkunde in Forschung und Praxis (Annals for
Depth Psychology and Human Sciences, Research and
Practice) founded by Alexander Mitscherlich, Hans
Kunz, and Felix Schottlaender (Germany)
Instituto Brasileiro de Psicanálise (IBP) founded in Rio
de Janeiro to accomodate the arrival of foreign analysts
(Brazil)
The first Greek psychoanalytical group, centered around
the princess Bonaparte, founded by Andreas Embirikos
and Demetrios Kouretas (Greece)
The Norwegian-Danish society recreated by Harald
Schjelderup, Trygve Braatøy, and Hjørdis Simonsen. It
remains active until 1953 (Norway–Denmark)
The Dutch Association of Psychoanalysis founded by
Westerman Holstijn and Van der Hoop (Netherlands)
Anna Freud and her collaborators and the British Psychoanalytic Society reach a common agreement that the
International Journal of Psychoanalysis is the official
mouthpiece of the IPA, but the British Psychoanalytic
Society remains the guardian of the journal and it continues tobe published by a British editor
Wiener Arbeitskreis für Tiefenpsychologie (Viennese
Work Circle for Depth Psychology) founded by Igor Caruso (Austria)
1948
March 2 – Abraham Arden Brill dies in New York (USA)
October 12 – Susan Isaacs-Sutherland dies in London
(Great Britain)
December – Arriving in Rio de Janeiro, Werner Kemper,
analyzed by Carl Müller-Braunschweig, supervised by
Felix Boehm, Otto Fenichel, Jenö Hárnik, and Ernst Simmel, comes to complete the instructional work undertaken by Mark Burke, who arrived on February 2 (Brazil)
The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychoanalyse, Psychotherapie, Psychosomatik und Tiefenpsychologie, an
organization covering all the tendencies of depth psychology (Jungians and Adlerians), founded by W. Bitter
(Germany)
The Revue Française de Psychanalyse (French Review of
Psychoanalysis) begins publication again at the Presses
Universitaires de France (France)
Palestine Psychoanalytic Society becomes the Israel
Psychoanalytic Society (Israel)
The National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP) is founded by Theodor Reik. It becomes official in 1950 (USA)
The journal Psiche founded by Nicola Perrotti (Italy)
1949
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July 15–17 – Sixteenth Congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association, first post-war congress, in
Zurich (Switzerland). President: Ernest Jones, succeeded by Leo Bartemeier: the beginning of alternating
presidents from Europe andNorth America. Affiliation of
the Argentine Psychoanalytical Association (APA) and
the Chilean Association of Psychoanalysis. A provisional
admission for the Deutsche Psychoanalytische
Gesellschaft (DPG) to the IPA is decided. To this date,
twelve societies are affiliated with the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA): New York, Washington-Baltimore, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia-Society, Topeka,
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Detroit, San Francisco, Columbia University, Los
Angeles, Baltimore, and Philadelphia-Association.
October 13 – August Aichhorn dies in Vienna (Austria)
The Basic Neurosis. Oral Regression and Psychic Masochism by Edmund Bergler published (USA)
Trattato di psicoanalisi by Cesare Musatti published
(Italy)
1950
May 4 – Paul Federn, diagnosed with cancer, commits
suicide in New York
May 31 – Johan H.W. van Ophuijsen dies in Detroit
(USA)
June 10 – The Deutsche Psychoanalytische Vereinigung
(D.P.V.) founded by Carl Müller-Braunschweig, followed
by the creation of the Karl Abraham Institut (Germany)
The Society for Psychoanalytic Medicine of Southern
California founded with Franz Alexander, Samuel Eisenstein, Martin Grotjahn, etc.
First World Conference in Psychiatry in Paris organized
by Henri Ey, with the participation of Anna Freud and
Melanie Klein
The British Journal of Delinquency (later The British
Journal of Criminology) founded by Edward Glover (Great
Britain)
Sigmund Freud, Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse,
Briefe an Wilhelm Fließ, Abhandlungen und Notizen aus
den jahren 1887–1902, edited by M. Bonaparte, A.
Freud, and E. Kris, published in London by Imago
(1950a [1887–1902])
Childhood and Society by Erik H. Erikson published
(USA)
Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle toward SelfRealization by Karen Horney published (USA)
1951
August – 17th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Amsterdam (Netherlands). President: Leo Bartemeier. Definitive acceptance of the Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise de São Paulo (SBPSP)
(Brazil) and the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Vereinigung
(D.P.V.) (Germany). Heinz Hartmann is elected president
November 2 – Martha Freud-Bernays dies
December 4 – Beginning of the Mrs. Clark-Williams trial
in Paris; she is accused of the illegal practice of medicine, is acquitted March 31, 1952, but is found guilty in
an appeal in June 1953 in the ‘‘franc symbolique’’
(France)
The Western New England Psychoanalytic Society
founded (USA)
The Rio de Janeiro Society of Psychoanalysis founded by
Alcyon Baer Bahia, Danilo Perestrello, Marialzira Perestrello, and Walderedo Ismael de Oliveira, called the
‘‘Argentines.’’ It is not recognized by the IPA (Brazil)
The Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic (21 Maresfield Gardens, London) founded by Anna Freud in collaboration
with Helene Ross and Dorothy Burlingham (Great
Britain)
Sydney Institute of Psychoanalysis founded by Roy Coupland Winn with Andrew Peto, originally from Hungary
(Australia)
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Maternal Care and Mental Health by John Bowlby published (Great Britain)
1952
June 17 – The Institut de Psychanalyse de Paris (Paris
Institute of Psychoanalysis) founded under the direction
of Sacha Nacht
December 4 – Karen Horney-Danielsen dies in New York
(USA)
Kurt Eissler creates the Anna Freud Foundation to profit
the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and the Hampstead Clinic (USA)
Psychoanalysis, the first journal representing an institution of non-medical training, founded by the National
Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP).
Theodor Reik is the editor-in-chief (USA)
The Instituto di Psicoanalisi de Roma founded by Nicola
Perrotti (Italy)
The Sigmund Freud Archives, a depository in the Library
of Congress, founded in Washington, DC; Kurt Eissler
becomes director (USA)
Ego Psychology and the Psychoses by Paul Federn published (USA)
1953
April 2 – Siegfried Bernfeld dies in San Francisco (USA)
April 15 – Pope Pius XII gives an address through which
the Church recognizes the validity of psychotherapy and
psychoanalysis (Rome)
June 7 – Géza Róheim dies in New York (USA)
June 16 – Juliette Favez-Boutonier, Françoise Dolto, and
Daniel Lagache, followed by Jacques Lacan, resign from
the Paris Psychoanalytical Society and announce the
creation of the French Society of Psychoanalysis, Study
and Freudian Research Group (France)
July 26 – 18th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in London. President: Heinz Hartmann. A committee is formed by Kurt Eissler, Phyllis
Greenacre, Hedwig Hoffer, Jeanne Lampl-de-Groo,t and
Donald Winnicott to judge the application for admission
requested by the French Society of Psychoanalysis
(France). The Norwegian Society’s application is rejected
in part because of the didactic practice of Harald Schjelderup (Norway). The Danish Society of Psychoanalysis
obtains the status of Work Group (Denmark). Werner
Kemper’s Centro de Estudos Psicanaliticos is recognized
as Study Group under the sponsorship of the São Paulo
Society (Brazil)
September 26–27 – Following the 16th Conference of
Romance Language Psychoanalysts, Jacques Lacan
gives his ‘‘Rome Report’’: ‘‘Function and Range of
Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’’ (France)
October 17 – The Canadian Society of Psychoanalysts/
Société des psychanalystes canadiens is dissolved and
replaced by the Société canadienne de psychanalyse/
Canadian Psychoanalytic Society (Canada)
The New Orleans Psychoanalytic Society founded (USA)
Publication of the first volume of Life and Work of Sigmund Freud that Ernest Jones will publish in three
volumes from 1953 to 1957, in London, at Hogarth
Press
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JAPA, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, official mouthpiece of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, founded. John Frosch is the editor-in-chief
for twenty years, assisted by Nathaniel Ross (USA)
1954
June 1 – Official inauguration of the Institute of Psychoanalysis of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society and creation of a Center for Consultation and Psychiatric Treatment (France)
First International Congress of Psychotherapy of the
Group in Toronto (Canada)
1955
May 6 – Henri Flournoy dies in Geneva (Switzerland)
July 26 – Nineteenth Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Geneva (Switzerland). President: Heinz Hartmann. The French Society of Psychoanalysis is not recognized as a society belonging to the
IPA (France). Affiliation of the Sociedade Psicanalitica
do Rio de Janeiro (SPRJ), founded by Werner Kemper,
Kattrin Kemper, Fabio Leite Lobo, Gerson Borsoi, Inaura
Carneiro Leão Vetter, Luiz Guimarães Dahlheim, and
Noemy Rudolfer (Brazil)
September 27 – Under the influence of Willy Baranger,
the Asociación Psicoanalı́tica del Uruguay is founded
The Psychoanalytic Association of New York and the
Michigan Psychoanalytic Association founded (USA)
Cesare Musatti founds the Revista di psicoanalisi, official mouthpiece of the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana
(SPI) (Italy)
Heisaku Kosawa founds the Psychoanalytical Society of
Japan
The Washington Psychoanalytic Institute is accredited
by the American Psychoanalytic Association (USA)
The Association Internationale de Psychologie Analytique (International Association of Analytical Psychology) (AIPA) founded
The Technique of Psycho-Analysis by Edward Glover
published (Great Britain)
1956
May 6 – For the hundredth anniversary of Freud’s birth,
Ernest Jones unveils a commemorative plaque on
Freud’s Maresfield Gardens house, Hampstead (Great
Britain). In Paris, a plaque is placed at the Salpêtrière
and on the façade of the little Latin Quarter hotel, rue Le
Goff, where Freud lived in 1885–1886 (France)
May 6 – The Colombian Psychoanalytical Study Group
founded, with Arnaldo Rascovsky (Colombia)
August 6 – Oskar Pfister dies in Zurich (Switzerland)
The Western New York Psychoanalytic Society founded
(USA)
First issue of La Psychanalyse, review of the French
Society of Psychoanalysis (France)
American Academy of Psychoanalysis founded by Franz
Alexander, R. Orinker, and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann.
Its first president is Janet Rioch Bard (USA)
First Latin-American Congress of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires (Argentina)
Toronto Psychoanalytic Study Circle founded by Alan
Parkin (Canada)
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Primary Love and Psycho-Analytic Technique by Michael
Balint published (Great Britain)
1957
February 27 – Ernst Kris dies in New York (USA)
April 28 – Frieda Fromm-Reichmann dies in Rockville,
Maryland (USA)
July 28–31 – 20th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Paris (France). President: Heinz
Hartmann. Affiliation of the Canadian Psychoanalytic
Society (CPS), the Dansk Psykoanalytisk Selskat (DPS),
and the Asociación Psicoanalı́tica Mexicana (A.P.M.).
Recognized as Study Group: the Luso-Iberian Psychoanalytical Society, patronized by the Swiss Society of
Psychoanalysis (SSP) and the Paris Psychoanalytical
Society (SPP), the Study Group of the Asociación Psicoanalı́tica del Uruguay and the Colombian Psychoanalytical
Study Group. William H. Gillespie is elected president of
the IPA
November 3 – Wilhelm Reich dies in the Lewisburg penitentiary, Connecticut (USA)
The Cleveland Psychoanalytic Society and the Seattle
Psychoanalytic Society founded (USA)
First Latin-American congress of psychotherapy of the
Buenos Aires group (Argentina)
Sydney Institute of Psychoanalysis founded (Australia)
A Research Committee founded by the British PsychoAnalytical Society (Great Britain)
Envy and Gratitude by Melanie Klein published (Great
Britain)
1958
February 11 – Ernest Jones dies in London (Great
Britain)
May 4 – Emil Oberholzer dies in New York (USA)
September 20 – Felix Boehm dies in Berlin (Germany)
October 12 – Carl Müller-Braunschweig dies in Berlin
(Germany)
December 20 – Clara M. Thompson dies in New York
(USA)
The ‘‘Groupe Lyonnais de Psychanalyse’’ founded around
Charles-Henri Nodet within the Paris Psychoanalytical
Society (France)
The Association of Mental Health of the 13th arrondissement in Paris founded by Philippe Paumelle, Serge Lebovici, and René Diatkine (France)
Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research
founded (IPTAR) (USA)
1959
January 11 – Edward Bibring dies in Boston (USA)
July 26–30 – 21st Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Copenhagen (Denmark). President: William H. Gillespie. Affiliation of the Sociedade
Brasileira de Psicanalise de Rio de Janeiro (SBPRJ) (Brazil) and the Sociedad Luso-española de Psicoanálisis
(Spain–Portugal)
The Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Society and the New Jersey Psychoanalytic Society founded (USA)
New York Freudian Society (NYFS) founded under the
name of New York Society of Freudian Psychologists (its
name is changed because of provisions in the law of con-
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firmation in the State of New York concerning psychology) (USA)
1960
April 27 – Official inauguration of the Institut und Ausbildungszentrum für Psychoanalyse und Psychosomatische Medizin (Institute and Training Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychosomatic Medicine) in Frankfurt-amMain (Germany)
May 5 – Maurice Bouvet dies in Paris (France)
September – The French Society of Psychoanalysis
(France) organizes its first international colloquium on
female sexuality in Amsterdam (Netherlands)
September 22 – Melanie Klein-Reizes dies in London
(Great Britain)
Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse founded (Germany)
A coordination committee of the Latin-American Organizations of Psychoanalysis (C.O.P.A.L.) is founded at the
3rd Latin-American Congress of Psychoanalysis, in Santiago, Chile, by the Argentine Societies of Psychoanalysis, from Sáo Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and from Chile
and Mexico. President: Arnaldo Rascovsky (Chile)
The Belgian Association of Psychoanalysts takes the
name of Belgian Society for Psychoanalysis/Belgische
Vereniging voor Pscychoanalyse (Belgium)
Estudios sobre técnica psicoanalı́tica (Transference and
Countertransference) by Heinrich Racker published
(Argentina)
1961
March 17 – The Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis is
officially incorporated in the province of Québec
(Canada)
June 6 – Carl Gustav Jung dies in Küssnacht
(Switzerland)
July 31–August 3 – 22nd Congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association in Edinburgh (Great Britain). President: William H. Gillespie. Elected President:
Maxwell Gitelson. Affiliation of the Sociedad Colombiana
de Psicoanalisis (Colombia) and the Asociación Psicoanalı́tica del Uruguay. The Study Group from Porto Alegre,
patronized by the SPRJ, is recognized (Brazil). The
French Society of Psychoanalysis obtains the status of
Study Group under the sponsorship of an ad hoc committee (France)
August 21 – Marco Levi Bianchini dies in Nocera Inferiore (Italy)
The Centro de investigación y tratamiento Enrique
Racker (Enrique Racker Center of Research and Treatment) founded by the Associacion Psicoanalitica de
Argentina (APA) (Argentina)
The Revista de psicologia y psicoterapia de grupo
founded (Argentina)
1962
February 6 – Edmund Bergler dies in New York (USA)
March 6 – René Laforgue dies in Paris (France)
May 10 – Joan Riviere-Hogson Verrail dies in London
(Great Britain)
July 30 – The International Federation of Psychoanalytic
Societies (I.F.P.S.) founded in Amsterdam by the
Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft, the Sociedad
Psicoanalitica Mexicana, the Wiener Arbeitkreis für Tie-
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fenpsychologie, and the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society (Netherlands)
September 21 – Marie Bonaparte dies in Saint-Tropez
(France)
The Rome Psychoanalytical Center founded by Emilio
Servadio (Italy)
Freud, the Secret Passion, the film by John Huston,
released (USA)
Learning from Experience by Wilfred R. Bion published
(Great Britain)
1963
July 28–August 1 – 23rd Congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association in Stockholm (Sweden).
President: Maxwell Gitelson. Elected President: William
H. Gillespie and Phyllis Greenacre, pro tem. The Study
Group from Porto Alegre is recognized as the Sociedade
Psicanalitica de Porto Alegre (SPPA) (Brazil). Affiliation
of the Colombian Society of Psychoanalysis (Colombia)
1964
March 8 – Franz Alexander dies in Palm Springs, California (USA)
May 25 – The French Study Group founded, organized
into the Psychoanalytical Association of France (APF),
presided over by Daniel Lagache and descended from the
French Society of Psychoanalysis, marking the second
schism of the French psychoanalytical movement
(France)
June 21 – Jacques Lacan founds the École Française de
Psychanalyse (French School of Psychoanalysis), which
will be renamed École freudienne de Paris (Freudian
School of Paris) in September 1964
July 15 – Poul Bjerre dies in Göteborg, in Vårsta
(Sweden)
December 31 – Ronald Fairbairn dies in Edinburgh
(Great Britain)
The Institut und Ausbildungszentrum für Psychoanalyse
und psychosomatische Medizin in Frankfurt-am-Main is
named the Sigmund-Freud-Institut. The first director is
A. Mitscherlich (Germany)
Stig Björk and Veikko Tähkä create the IPA Study Group
that will become the Finnish Psychoanalytic Society
(Finland)
First International Congress of Psychodrama in Paris,
organized by Jacob Moreno (France)
Papers on Psychoanalytic Psychology by Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Rudolf M. Loewenstein published
(USA)
1965
January 19 – French Society of Psychoanalysis (Société
française de Psychanalyse) dissolved (France)
July 25–30 – 24th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Amsterdam (Netherlands). President: William H. Gillespie and Phyllis Greenacre, pro
temp. Elected President: P.J. van der Leeuw. The Psychoanalytical Association of France becomes constituent
Society of the IPA (France). For the first time a Latin
American is elected vice-president of the IPA
The Associaçao Brasileira de Medicina Psicosomática
(ABMP) founded in São Paulo. First president: Danilo
Perestrello (Brazil)
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1966
February 3 – The éditions Gallimard with Jean-Bertrand
Pontalis, the éditions Payot with Michel de M’Uzan and
Marthe Robert, and the Presses universitaires de France
with Jean Laplanche jointly undertake the publication of
the complete works of Freud in French. The editorship
will be granted to J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis on
April 12, 1967 (France)
February 7 – Ludwig Binswanger dies in Kreuzlingen,
canton of Thurgovia (Switzerland)
October 2–3 – The Fédération Européenne de psychanalyse (FEP, European Psychoanalytical Federation)
founded in Paris, under the impetus of Raymond de
Saussure (Switzerland). Honorary President: Anna
Freud. Secretary: Evelyne Kestemberg (France)
The Sociedad Luso-española de Psicoanálisis spawns
the Sociedad Española de Psicoálisis (Spain) and the
Portuguese Study Group (Portugal)
Publication of Opere di Sigmund Freud in twelve
volumes begins under the direction of Cesare Musatti
(Italy)
Écrits by Jacques Lacan published (France)
1967
May 6 – The Associaçao Brasileira de Psicanálise (ABP)
founded, joining four IPA societies into a federation.
First president: Durval B. Marcondes, who has the
Revista Brasileira de Psicanálise republished (Brazil)
July 3 – James Strachey dies in London (Great Britain)
July 24–28 – 25th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Copenhagen (Denmark). President: P.J. Van der Leeuw. The Australian Society of Psychoanalysis, branch of the British Psychoanalytic
Society, gains the status of an IPA Study Group (Australia). A Work Group created in Venezuela
October 9 – Jacques Lacan proposes under the name ‘‘la
passe’’ an enabling process adapted to the Freudian
School of Paris (France)
Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (The Language of Psychoanalysis) by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis published (France)
The Canadian Psychoanalytic Society is organized into
three branches: the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society
(English Québec), called CPS (QE), the Société Canadienne de Psychanalyse (French branch), and the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society (Ontario)
The Los Angeles Institute for Psychoanalysis becomes
the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
(LAPSI) (USA)
Société Médicale Balint founded (France)
The Association des Psychanalystes du Québec (Quebec
Association of Psychoanalysts) (A.D.P.Q.) founded with
reference to Jacques Lacan
The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the
Self by Bruno Bettelheim published (USA)
1968
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October – Serge Leclaire founds the Psychoanalysis
Department at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes,
linked to the Center for the Teaching and Research of
Philosophy. Creation of the U.E.R. of Human Sciences,
clinics at the University of Paris VII by Juliette Favez-
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Boutonier, Jacques Gagey, and Claude Prévost joined by
Jean Laplanche and Pierre Fédida (France)
October 5 – Heisaku Kosawa dies in Tokyo (Japan)
November 26 – Arnold Zweig dies in East Berlin
(Germany)
The Sigmund Freud-Gesellschaft (Sigmund Freud
Society), founded in Vienna, with the support of Harald
Leupold-Löwenthal and Hans Strotzka (Austria)
The Swedish Society for Holistic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (SSHPP), which will belong to the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) in
1972 (Sweden)
An Association of Yugoslav Psychotherapists founded in
Split at the impetus of Stjepan Betlheim (Yugoslavia)
1969
March 17 – The Fourth Group founded—a French language pshychoanalytical organization. President: François Perrier, Secretary: Piera Aulagnier (France)
April 17 – Angélo Hesnard dies in Rochefort-sur-Mer
(France)
July 8 – The Belgische School voor Psychoanalyse/École
belge de psychanalyse (Lacanian) (Belgian School for
Psychoanalysis) founded by Antoine Vergote, Jacques
Schotte, Paul Duquenne, Jean-Claude Quintart. Honorary President: Alphonse de Waehlens (Belgium)
July 30–August 3 – 26th Congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association in Rome (Italy). Subject:
‘‘Recent developments in psychoanalysis.’’ President:
P.J. Van der Leeuw. Elected President: Leo Rangell.
Affiliation of the Società Psicanalitica Italiana (SPI).
Affiliation of the Suomen Psykoanalyyttinen Yhdistys
(SPY, Finnish Psychoanalytic Society) (Finland). The
founding of the European Psychoanalytical Federation
officially recognized
October 12 – Max Schur dies in New York (USA)
December 31 – Theodor Reik dies in New York (USA)
The conference of European psychoanalysts (in English—every two years) founded by the British PsychoAnalytical Society (Great Britain)
The Cı́rculo Psicanalı́tico do Rio de Janeiro founded
(affiliated with the I.F.P.S.) (Brazil)
The French-speaking branch from the Canadian Society
of Psychoanalysis adopts the name Société psychanalytique de Montréal; it is recognized by the IPA in 1972
(Canada)
The journal Topique founded by Piera Aulagnier (France)
1970
April – La Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse (The New
Review of Psychoanalysis) founded by Jean-Bertrand
Pontalis (France)
May 17 – Heinz Hartmann dies in Stony Point, New York
(USA)
May 20 – Hermann Nunberg dies in New York (USA)
June – First annual scientific congress of the French
branch of the Société Psychanalytique de Montréal
(S.P.M.) (Canada)
September 7 – Nicola Perrotti dies in Rome (Italy)
December 14 – Edoardo Weiss dies in Chicago (USA)
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December 31 – Michael Balint (Bàlint, Mihály) dies in
London (Great Britain)
Jean Laplanche founds a Laboratory for psychoanalysis
and psychotherapy and in 1980 institutes a doctorate of
psychoanalysis and psychopathology, University of Paris
VII (France)
The International College of Psychosomatic Medicine
founded (Canada)
The Bulletin Intérieur de l’Association Psychanalytique
de France, created in 1964, becomes Documents et
Débats (France)
La construction de l’espace analytique by Serge Viderman published (France)
1971
January 5 – Annie Reich dies in Pittsburgh (USA)
January 25 – Donald Winnicott dies in London (Great
Britain)
May 1 – First Franco-British Colloquium in le Touquet
(France), co-organized by the British Psycho-Analytical
Society, the Psychoanalytical Association of France, and
the Psychoanalytical Society of Paris
July – Sigmund Freud Museum, 19 Berggasse, inaugurated by Anna Freud, managed by the Sigmund Freud
Gesellschaft (Austria)
July 26–30 – 27th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Vienna, the first in Austria since
1927. Subject: ‘‘The psychoanalytical concept of
aggression: theoretical, clinical aspects and applications.’’ President: Leo Rangell. The Asociación Venezolana de Psicoanálisis (ASOVEP) is affiliated with the IPA
(Venezuela). The Norwegian Society obtains the status of
Study Group (Norway). The Australian Psychoanalytical
Society obtains the status of Provisional Society
(Australia)
October 19 – Raymond de Saussure dies in Geneva
(Switzerland)
November 1 – Mosche Wulff (or Moshe Woolf) dies in Tel
Aviv (Israel)
The Sociedade de Psicologia Clı́nica founded in Rio de
Janeiro. The president is Maria Regina Domingues de
Morais (Brazil)
The Institute of Depth Psychology and Psychotherapy
founded at the Vienna Faculty of Medicine, at Hans
Strotzka’s initiative (Austria)
Lingüı́stica, interacción communicativa y proceso psicoanalı́tico by David Liberman published (Argentina)
Playing and Reality by Donald W. Winnicott published
(Great Britain)
1972
August 10 – Heinrich Meng dies in Basle (Switzerland)
August 16 – Edward Glover dies in London (Great
Britain)
September – In September 1972, the British PsychoAnalytical Society is registered as a Charity No. 264314
(Great Britain)
December 3 – Daniel Lagache dies in Paris (France)
December 24 – Arminda Aberastury, called ‘‘La Negra,’’
dies in Buenos Aires (Argentina)
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December 26 – The Institut de Psychosomatique (Institute of Psychosomatic Medicine) founded by Michel Fain
and Pierre Marty. It is comprised of a center for education and research in psychosomatic medicine (CERP)
(France)
The Scuola freudiana, of Lacanian orientation, founded
by Giacomo Contri (Italy)
The Toronto Psychoanalytic Society (TPS) and the
Ottawa Psychoanalytic Society founded (Canada)
Bulletin de la Fédération européenne de psychanalyse
(European Psychoanalytical Federation) founded. Editorin-chief: Peter Hildebrand (Great Britain), Editorial staff:
Michel de M’Uzan (France), Samir Stephanos (Germany), and Daniel Widlöcher (France)
1973
July 22–27 – 28th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Paris (France). President: Leo
Rangell. Elected President: Serge Lebovici, first French
president of the IPA. Affiliation of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society (APS). The Mendoza Psychoanalytical
Society is recognized as a Study Group
December 16–19 – First international colloquium in
Milan, organized by Armando Verdiglione (Italy)
Centre Psychoanalytique Raymond de Saussure founded
in Geneva (Switzerland)
Le Discours vivant. La conception psychanalytique de
l’affect (The Living Discourse. The Psychoanalytical Conception of the Affect) by André Green published (France)
1974
June 28 – The Escuela Freudiana de Buenos Aires
(EFBA), of Lacanian orientation, founded with Oskar
Masotta and Isodoro Vegh (Argentina)
September 14 – René Spitz dies in Denver, Colorado
(USA)
October 31 – Congress of the Freudian School of Paris in
Rome (Italy)
The Cosa Freudiana, of Lacanian orientation, founded by
Giacomo Contri, Muriel Drazien, Giuseppe Musotto
(Palermo), and Armando Verdiglione (Italy)
Center for the Development of Psychoanalysis founded
(Peru)
Göteborgs Psykoterapi Institut (Göteborg Psychotherapy
Institute) founded by Angel and Dora Fiasché (Sweden)
La jalousie amoureuse by Daniel Lagache published
(France)
1975
July 20–25 – 29th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in London (Great Britain). Subject:
‘‘Change in Psychoanalytic Practice and Exprerience:
Theoretical, Technical and Social Implications’’ President: Serge Lebovici. Affiliation of the Norsk Psykoanalytisk Forening (NPF) (Norway)
September 27 – Werner Kemper dies in Berlin
(Germany)
The Société Belge de psychologie analytique (S.B.P.A.)
(Belgian Society of Analytical Psychology), of Jungian
orientation, with Gilberte Aigrisse founded (Belgium)
A Freud Professorship created at the University College
in London (Great Britain)
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The Antilles Group for Psychoanalytical Research, Study
and Training founded (GAREFP), with Héliane Bourgeois, Luce Descoueyte (Martinique)
The Institute for Psychoanalysis of the Portuguese
Society of Psychoanalysis founded (Portugal)
A Hungarian Study Group founded (Hungary)
Ornicar? founded by Jacques-Alain Miller (France)
L’auto-analyse de Freud et la découverte de la psychanalyse (Freud’s Self-Analysis and the Discovery of Psychoanalysis) by Didier Anzieu published (France)
The Unconscious as Infinite Sets. An Essay in Bi-Logic
by Ignacio Matte-Blanco published (Chile)
La violence de l’interprétation. Du pictogramme à
l’énoncé by Piera Castoriadis-Aulagnier published
(France)
1976
April 14 – Rudolph M. Loewenstein dies in New York
(USA)
July 30 – Sylvia May Payne dies in Tunbridge Wells, Sussex (Great Britain)
The Revista de la Sociedad Colombiana de Psicoanalisis
(Review of the Colombian Society of Psychoanalysis)
founded (Colombia)
The Austrian Society for the study of Child Psychoanalysis, founded in Salzburg (Austria)
The International Freudian Movement founded by
Armando Verdiglione in Milan (Italy)
The review Psychanalyse à l’université created by Jean
Laplanche (France)
1977
July 16 – Enrique Pichon-Rivière dies in Buenos Aires
(Argentina)
July 21–26 – 30th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Jerusalem (Israel). President:
Serge Lebovici. Elected President: Edward D. Joseph.
Affiliation of the Asociación Psicoanalı́tica de Buenos
Aires (A.P.D.E.B.A.) (Argentina). The Portuguese Study
Group Portugais becomes a provisional Society
(Portugal)
August 10 – Grete Bibring-Lehner dies in Cambridge,
Massachusetts (USA)
August 25 – Sacha Nacht dies in Paris (France)
October 27 – Therese Benedek dies in Chicago (USA)
The Biblioteca Freudiana in Barcelona, of Lacanian
orientation, founded with Oscar Masotta (Spain)
A chair of psychoanalysis at the Hebrew University created in Jerusalem. Titular: Joseph Sandler (Israel)
The Psychoanalytisches Seminär Zürich (Zurich Psychoanalytical Seminary) (P.S.Z.), of Lacanian orientation
founded (Switzerland)
1978
The Institute of Psychoanalysis of the Ottawa Psychoanalytic Society founded (Canada)
The CPS/Western Canadian Branch created (Canada)
1979
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February – The Champ freudien (CF) founded by Jacques
Lacan. Director: Judith Miller (France)
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July 27 – 31st Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in New York (USA). Subject: ‘‘Clinical
data in psychoanalysis.’’ President: Edward D. Joseph.
Affiliation of the Asociación Psicoanalitica de Madrid
(Spain) and the Psychoanalytical Association of Buenos
Aires (Argentina)
October 1–5 – Tbilisi Colloquium, at the initiative of L.
Chertok and Philippe Bassine and under the sponsorship
of the Georgian Academy of Sciences (Russia/USSR)
November 8 – Wilfred R. Bion dies in Oxford (Great
Britain)
November 19 – Dorothy Burlingham-Tiffany dies in London (Great Britain)
November 24 – Ralph Greenson dies in Los Angeles,
California (USA)
The Adelaide Institute of Psychoanalysis, a branch of the
Australian Society of Psychoanalysis, founded with Dr.
Harry Southwood (Australia)
Division 39 of the American Psychological Association
founded (USA)
The Asociación Regiomontana de Psicoanálisis
(A.R.P.A.C.) created to service northern Mexico
The Dutch Society of Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy
founded (Netherlands)
The Center for the Development of Psychoanalysis (Peru)
Serie Psicoanalı́tica in Madrid, of Lacanian orientation,
founded by Jorge Alemán (Spain)
1980
January 5 – The Freudian School of Paris dissolved by
Jacques Lacan (France)
February 21 – Jacques Lacan founds the Cause freudienne, which becomes the École de la Cause freudienne,
French School of Psychoanalysis, October 23, 1980
(France)
March 18 – Erich Fromm dies in Locarno (Switzerland)
June 6 – The Federación psicoanalı́tica de América latina
(FEPAL) founded in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). First president: Joel Zac
July 12–15 – Caracas Colloquium of the Champ Freudien, co-organized by Jacques Alain Miller and Diana
Rabinovitch under the auspices of the Atenso de Caracas
and the Paris Department of Psychoanalysis, Paris VIII
(Venezuela)
July 29 – Adelheid Lucy Koch dies in São Paulo (Brazil)
November 3 – The College of Psychoanalysts founded.
President: Dominique J. Geahchan (France)
November 23 – Marianne Kris-Rie dies in London (Great
Britain)
The Sociedad Peruana de Psicoanálisis founded (Peru)
Creation of the Toulousan Group, tied to the Paris Psychoanalytical Society (France)
First translation of a work by Freud, An Introduction to
Psychoanalysis, to be published in Romania
1981
July 20 – Abram Kardiner dies in Easton, Connecticut
(USA)
July 26–31 – 32nd Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Helsinki (Finland). Subject:
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‘‘The first psychic development.’’ President: Edward D.
Joseph. President elect: Adam Limentani. Affiliation of
the Portuguese Society of Psychoanalysis. The Mendoza
Society is promoted to Provisional Society (Argentina)
September 27 – Durval Bellegarde Marcondes dies in
São Paulo (Brazil)
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1982
January 28–30 – First Congress of Armando Verdiglione’s International Freudian Movement, in Rome
(Italy). Subject: ‘‘Culture’’
March 29 – Helene Deutsch-Rosenbach dies in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA)
June – The Association freudienne, becoming thereafter
the Association freudienne internationale, of Lacanian
orientation, founded by Charles Melman (France)
June 5 – South Western Ontario Psychoanalytic Society
founded, sixth section of the Canadian Psychoanalytic
Society (Canada)
June 26 – Alexander Mitscherlich dies in Frankfurt am
Main (Germany)
July 9 – The Centre de Formation et de Recherches Psychanalytiques (C.F.R.P.) (Center for Training and Psychoanalytical Research) founded by Octave Mannoni,
Maud Mannoni, and Patrick Guyomard (France)
July 10–11 – First Psychoanalytical Meetings in Aix-enProvence. Subject: ‘‘Suffering, Pleasure and Thought.’’
Presidents: Jacques Caı̈n and Alain de Mijolla (France)
October – The Bulletin of the Paris Psychoanalytical
Society founded by Michel Fain (France)
October 9 – Anna Freud dies in London at the age of
eighty-six (Great Britain)
October 11 – Creation of a Study Group in Greece, recognized by the IPA (Greece)
October 22 – Paula Heimann-Glatzko dies in London
(Great Britain)
The Revue Belge de psychanalyse (Belgian Review of
Psychoanalysis) founded. Director: Maurice Haber
(Belgium)
Congress of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the
Società Psicoanalitica Italiana (S.P.I.), in the presence
of the president of the Republic Pertini, in Rome (Italy)
1983
July 25–29 – 33rd Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Madrid (Spain). Subject: ‘‘The
psychoanalyst at work.’’ President: Adam Limentani.
Affiliation of the Asociacion Psicoanalitica de Mendoza
(APM) (Argentina). The Hungarian Psychoanalytical
Society becomes a Provisional Society (Hungary)
December – The International Society of the History of
Psychiatry, created in December 1982, adds to its name
‘‘and Psychoanalysis.’’ Directors: Michel Collée, Claude
Quétel, and Jacques Postel (France)
Lima Center of Psychoanalytical Psychotherapies
founded (Peru)
1984
June – The group ‘‘Psychoanalysts for the Prevention of
Nuclear War’’ founded by Hanna Segal (Great Britain)
‘‘Werkstatt für Psychoanalyse und Gesellschaftskritik’’
(Workshop for Psychoanalysis and Social Criticism) created in Salzburg (Austria)
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The bilingual review Psycho-analyse founded by the
l’École Belge de Psychanalyse (Belgian School of Psychoanalysis) (Belgium)
Psychoanalytic Center of California founded by James
Gooch (USA)
L’image inconsciente du corps (The Unconsious Image
of the Body) by Françoise Dolto published (France)
1985
February 6 – Muriel M. Gardiner dies in Princeton, New
Jersey (USA)
March – A public lawsuit is filed by four psychologists
within the framework of an antitrust law against the
American Psychoanalytic Association, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the Columbia University Center for
Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and the International Psychoanalytical Association for ‘‘restrictive practices and monopolies at state and international levels in
the presentation materials and psychoanalytical services
delivered to the public.’’ A negotiated settlement is
reached in October 1988 (USA)
May 20 – Franco Fornari dies in Milan (Italy)
June 25 – Association Internationale d’Histoire de la
Psychanalyse (AIHP-IAHP) (International Association of
the History of Psychoanalysis) founded by Alain de
Mijolla (France)
July 28–August 2 – 34th Congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association in Hamburg (Germany).
Subject: ‘‘Identification and its vicissitudes.’’ President:
Adam Limentani. Elected President: Robert S. Wallerstein. The Peruvian Society of Psychoanalysis will
acquire the status of Provisional Society (Peru)
September 27 – Eugenio Gaddini dies in Rome (Italy)
October 2 – Margaret Mahler-Schönberger dies in New
York (USA)
November 20 – Pieter van der Leeuw dies in Amsterdam
(Netherlands)
The Association des psychothérapeutes psychanalytiques du Québec (Quebec Association of Psychoanalytical Psychotherapists) founded (A.P.P.Q.) (Canada)
The association Le texte freudien founded by Jalil Bennani (Morocco)
The Portuguese Review of Psychoanalysis founded by the
Portuguese Society of Psychoanalysis (Portugal)
1986
March 22 – Inauguration of the new seat of the International Psychoanalytical Association in ‘‘Broomhills’’ by
Adam Limentani, William H. Gillespie, and Robert S.
Wallerstein (Great Britain)
May 6 – The Institut de Psychanalyse and the Société
Psychanalytique de Paris merge into a single society.
President: André Green (France)
July 17 – The second chamber of the correctional tribunal in Milan condemns Armando Verdiglione to four and
a half years in prison. After an appeal, he is released tentatively on February 18, 1987 (Italy)
July 28 – Inauguration of the Freud Museum in London,
by Princess Alexandra of Kent (Great Britain)
October 27 – Herbert Rosenfeld dies in London (Great
Britain)
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The Réseau des cartels, of Lacanian orientation, founded
by François Peraldi (Canada)
The Center for Psychoanalysis and Society founded
(Peru)
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1987
5 April – Jeanne Lampl-de Groot dies in Schiedam
(Netherlands)
May 1–3 – 1st International Meeting of the Association
Internationale d’Histoire de la Psychanalyse (International Association of the History of Psychoanalysis)
(AIHP-IAHP) in Paris. Subject: ‘‘Psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts during the Second World War.’’ President:
Alain de Mijolla (France)
July 26–31 – 35th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Montréal (Canada). Subject:
‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable: Fifty Years
Later.’’ President: Robert S. Wallerstein. Affiliation of
the Psychoanalytical Society of Peru (Peru)
1988
May – The first issue of the Revue internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse published (1988–1993). Editor: Alain de Mijolla
August 25 – Françoise Dolto-Marette dies in Paris
(France)
The Société psychanalytique de Québec founded, branch
of the Société canadienne de psychanalyse – Canadian
Psychoanalytic Society (Canada)
The Bulletin of the Montreal Psychoanalytical Society
founded (Canada)
1989
February 10 – Danilo Perestrello dies in Rio de Janeiro
(Brazil)
March 20 – Cesare Musatti dies in Milan (Italy)
April 1 – Evelyne Kestemberg-Hassin dies in Paris
(France)
June 8 – Masud R. Khan dies in London (Great Britain)
July 30 – Octave Mannoni dies in Paris (France)
July 30–August 4 – 36th Congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association in Rome (Italy). Subject:
‘‘Common bases of psychoanalysis.’’ President: Robert
S. Wallerstein. Elected President: Joseph Sandler.
Affiliation of the Hungarian Society of Psychoanalysis
(Hungary) and the Australian Psychoanalytical Society
(Australia). The New York Freudian Society (NYFS), the
California Psychoanalytical Center, and the Psychanalytical Training and Research Institute (New York) become
Provisional Societies (USA)
August 23 – Ronald Laing dies in Saint-Tropez (France)
September 23 – Worldwide ceremonies for the fiftieth
anniversary of Freud’s death
October – Angel Garma is decorated in Buenos Aires by
the Spanish Ambassador in the name of King Juan Carlos
with the Great Cross of Civil Merit (Spain–Argentina)
October 7 – Ruth Eissler-Selke dies in New York (USA)
October 21 – Homage paid to Wilfred Bion, on the tenth
anniversay of his death, Francesca Bion presides
(France)
October 24 – Phyllis Greenacre dies in Ossining, New
York (USA)
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October 24 – Richard F. Sterba dies in Grosse Pointe,
Michigan (USA)
November 25–26 – 1st Italian-French psychoanalytical
colloquium organized by the Italian Society of Psychoanalysis and the Paris Psychoanalytical Society. Subject:
‘‘Contretransference and transference’’ (France–Italy)
December 15 – The APUI, ‘‘Association pour une
instance,’’ founded by Serge Leclaire, Jacques Sédat,
Danièle Lévy, Lucien Israël, and Philippe Girard (France)
Signing of a compromise bringing the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytic Association to admit qualified American psychologists and non-medical psychoanalysts (USA)
The Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (Viennese
Psychoanalytical Society) belongs to the ‘‘Dachverband
für Psychotherapie’’ (Umbrella Organization for Psychotherapy) and will participate in the ‘‘Psychotherapiebeirat’’ (Psychotherapy Advisory Board) (Austria)
The Sociedade de Psicologia Clı́nica, of Rio de Janeiro,
takes the name of Sociedade de Psicanálise da Cidade
(Brazil)
Mary S. Sigourney Award established. The first laureates
are Jacob A. Arlow, Harold Blum and Otto Kernberg
(USA)
A Forum Brasileiro de Psicanálise founded (Brazil)
The ‘‘Société Algérienne de Recherches en Psychologie’’
(Algerian Society of Research in Psychology) founded by
M.A. Aı̈t Sidhoum, F. Arar, and D. Haddadi (Algeria)
The European Interassociative of Psychoanalysis, of
Lacanian orientation, founded (Europe)
The Psychoanalysis and Culture Foundation created
(Netherlands)
The Iberian Congress of Psychoanalysis founded, biannually gathering the Madrid Psychoanalytic Association, the Spanish Psychoanalytic Society, and the Portuguese Psychoanalytic Society. An Iberian directory of
psychoanalysis in the Castilian language published
(Spain–Portugal)
The review Psychoanalytický sbornı́k created by the
future IPA Czech Study Group (Czech Republic)
1990
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February 15 – The Psychanalytic Association of the
USSR founded in Moscow by Aaron Belkine (Russia)
March 13 – Bruno Bettelheim commits suicide in Silver
Spring, Maryland (USA)
March 31 – Piera Aulagnier-Spairani dies in Paris
(France)
April 7 – Celes E. Cárcamo dies in Buenos Aires
(Argentina)
July 18 – Karl A. Menninger dies in Topeka, Kansas
(USA)
September 2 – E. John Bowlby dies in Skye Ball (Great
Britain)
September 5 – Luisa Gambier de Alvarez de Toledo dies
in Buenos Aires (Argentina)
September 22–23 – A European School of psychoanalysis founded in Barcelona, by Jacques-Alain Miller, E.
Laurent, and C. Soler. It is linked to the Ecole de la
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December – The Association Forum founded by Benedetta Jumpertz, Marcel Manquant, and Guillaume Suréna (Martinique)
The Société d’Études et de Recherches en Psychanalyse
(Society for Study and Research in Psychoanalysis)
founded by Mohamed Halayem (Tunisia)
Romanian Psychoanalytical Society founded (Romania)
1991
March – First colloquium of psychoanalysis in Martinique organized by the association FORUM (Martinique)
July 28–August 2 – 37th Congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association in Buenos Aires (Argentina), first congress in Latin America. Subject: ‘‘Psychic
Change: developments in theory of psychoanalytical
technique.’’ President: Joseph Sandler. La Sociedad Psicoanalı́tica de Caracas is recognized as a Provisional
Society (Venezuela)
September 6 – Robert J. Stoller dies in Los Angeles
(USA)
September 24 – Edward D. Joseph dies (USA)
September 30 – Martin Grotjahn dies in Los Angeles
(USA)
November 3 – Serge Viderman dies in Paris (France)
A Committee for the IPA archives and history founded by
Joseph Sandler
The Polish Society for the Development of Psychoanalysis founded (Poland)
1992
February 1 – World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP)
founded in Paris (France), by Jacques-Alain Miller. It
unites the Escuela del Campo Freudiano of Caracas
(ECF, Caracas, 1985), the École européenne de psychanalyse (EEP, Barcelona-Paris, 1990), the Ecole de la
Cause Freudienne (France, 1981), and the Escuela de la
Orientacion del Campo Freudiano (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1992)
November 1 – The Association de la Cause freudienne
(A.C.F.) founded by Jacques-Alain Miller (France)
The bilingual review Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis/
Revue Canadienne de Psychanalyse founded. Editor-inchief: Eva Lester, of Montreal (Canada)
Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft der Arbeitskreise für Psychoanalyse in Österreich (Scientific Society of work circles for psychoanalysis in Austria) and its journal Texte.
Psychoanalyse. Ästhetik. Kulturkritik, edited by E. List,
J. Ranefeld, G.F. Zeilinger, and A. Ruhs, founded
(Austria)
The journal International Forum of Psychoanalysis
founded by the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (I.F.P.S.)
Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy founded
by Katarzyna Walewska (Poland)
Freudian Praxis of Lacanian orientation founded in
Athens (Greece)
1993
January 29 – Angel Garma dies in Buenos Aires
(Argentina)
June 14 – Pierre Marty dies in Paris (France)
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July 25–30 – 38th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Amsterdam (Netherlands). Subject: ‘‘The psychoanalyst’s mind: from listening to interpretation.’’ President: Joseph Sandler. Elected
President: Horacio Etchegoyen (first South American
president). Affiliation of the Institute for Psychoanalytic
Training and Research of New York (USA), the Monterey
Psychoanalytic Society (USA), the New York Freudian
Society (NYFS) (USA), and the Psychoanalytic Center of
California (USA). The Associazione Italiana di Psicoanalisi (A.I.Psi), created in 1992 by E. Servadio and A. Giannotti (Italy), is recognized as a Provisional Society. The
Asociación Regiomontana de Psicoanálisis (A.R.P.A.C.)
is recognized as an independent affiliated member (Mexico). The Czech Group becomes a Study Group (Czech
Republic)
The Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (W.P.V.,
Viennese Psychoanalytical Society) is recognized as first
training organization in the framework of legislation on
psychotherapy voted upon in 1992 (Austria)
1994
May – The École de Psychanalyse Sigmund Freud (Sigmund Freud School of Psychoanalysis), of Lacanian
orientation, founded (France)
May 12 – Erik Homburger Erikson dies in Cape Cod, Massachusetts (USA)
July 25–26 – First Meeting of the House of Delegates at
the International Psychoanalytical Association in London. President: Henk Jan Dalewijk (Great Britain)
August 8 – Serge Leclaire (Liebschutz) dies in Argentière, Haute-Savoie (France)
October 16 – Espace analytique (Analytical Space)
founded by Maud Mannoni (France)
October 29 – Willy Baranger dies in Buenos Aires
(Argentina)
November 11 – Frances Tustin dies in London (Great
Britain)
Emilio Servadio dies in Rome (Italy)
The École belge de psychanalyse jungienne (E.B.P.J.)
(Belgian School of Jungian Psychoanalysis) founded
(Belgium)
Frankfurter
Psychoanalytische
Institut
founded,
affiliated with the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (Germany)
Sigmund Freud Library opened by the Paris Psychoanalytical Society (France)
1995
January 11 – Ignacio Matte-Blanco dies in Rome (Italy)
February – Société de psychanalyse freudienne (Society
of Freudian Psychoanalysis) founded by Patrick Guyomard (France)
June – The Escola Brasileira de Psicanálise do Campo
Freudiano (E.B.P.), member of the Global Association of
Psychoanalysis, founded in Rio de Janeiro, at the
impetus of Jacques-Alain Miller (Brazil)
July 30–August 4 – 39th Congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association in San Francisco (USA).
President: Horacio Etchegoyen. Elected President: Otto
Kernberg. Affiliation of the Sociedad Psicoanalı́tica de
Caracas (Vénézuela), Sociedad Psicoanalı́tica de Cor-
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doba (Argentina) and of the Los Angeles Institute and
Society for Psychoanalytic Studies (USA). The Sociedade Psicanalı́tica de Recife and the Sociedade Psicanalı́tica de Pelotas are recognized as Provisional Societies
(Brazil)
December 12 – Cyro Martins dies in Porto Alegre (Brazil)
Federation of Independent Psychoanalytic Societies
(FIPAS) founded by independent psychoanalysts of
Southern California (USA)
The psychoanalytical institutes of the Netherlands Psychoanalytic Society and the Netherlands Association for
Psychoanalysis merge into the Netherlands Psychoanalytic Institute (NPI) (Netherlands)
1996
September 30 – Latin-American Association of the History of Psychoanalysis founded by Gilda Sabsay y Foks
(Argentina)
October 17–19 – First European Congress of Psychopathology of the Child and the Adolescent in Venice
(Italy)
1997
July 27–August 1 – 40th Congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association in Barcelona (Spain). Subject: ‘‘Psychoanalysis and Sexuality.’’ President: R. Horacio Etchegoyen. Affiliation of the Italian Association of
Psychoanalysis (Italy). The Porto Alegre Study Group
(Brazil) and the Hellenic Group of Psychoanalysis
(Greece) are recognized as Provisional Societies. Formation of the Polish Psychoanalytical Study Group, the psychoanalytical center of Mato Grosso do Sul à Campo
Grande, and the third group from Buenos Aires that will
form the Argentine Psychoanalytical Society (SAP)
August 20 – Paris Psychoanalytical Society is recognized
for ‘‘public service’’ by a decree published in the official
journal of the French Republic (France)
October – First issue of Psychoanalysis and History. Editor: Andrea Sabbadini (Great Britain)
November 2 – René Diatkine dies in Paris (France)
Archives of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (I.F.P.S.) founded for the history of
psychoanalysis
1998
March 15 – Maud (Magdalena) Mannoni-van der Spoel
dies in Paris (France)
April 3–5 – First Psychoanalytical Conference in South
Africa, organized in Cape Town by the South African Psychoanalytical Society. Subject: ‘‘Change: Psychoanalytic
Perspectives’’ (South Africa)
May 29 – Marion Milner-Blackett dies in London (Great
Britain)
August 14 – Gisela Pankow dies in Berlin (Germany)
October 3 – Foundation of Convergencia, a Lacanian
movement for Freudian psycholanaysis in Barcelona
(Spain)
October 6 – Joseph Sandler dies in London (Great
Britain)
October 14 – Opening of ‘‘Sigmund Freud: Conflict and
Culture,’’ exhibition at the Library of Congress in
Washington (USA)
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1999
February 17 – Kurt Eissler dies in New York (USA)
July 25–30 – 41st Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Santiago (Chile). Subject:
‘‘Affect in theory and practice.’’ President: Otto Kernberg. Affiliation of the Recife Psychoanalytical Society
(Brazil). Recognized as Provisional Societies—the Brasilia Psychoanalytical Study Group, the Study Group of the
Colombian Psychoanalytical Association and the Prague
Study Group. The Romanian Psychoanalytical Study
Group is recognized, as is the Psychoanalytical Study
Group visiting from South Korea.
November 25 – Didier Anzieu dies in Paris (France)
2000
February 2 – Wladimir Granoff dies in Paris (France)
August 12 – Serge Lebovici dies in Marvejols (France)
2001
June 30 – William H. Gillespie dies (Great Britain)
July 22–27 – 42nd Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Nice (France). Subject:
‘‘Psychoanalysis: Method and Practice.’’ President: Otto
Kernberg. Elected President: Daniel Widlöcher. The
Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellshaft is admitted as a
Provisional Society (Germany)
September 11 – Terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington (USA)
December 7 – Moroccan Psychoanalytic Society founded
in Rabat. President: Jalil Bennani (Morocco)
2002
February 9–10 – First Franco-Argentine colloquium in
Paris (France), organized by the Argentine Psychoanalytical Association (APA) and the Paris Psychoanalytical
Society (SPP). Subject: ‘‘The Framework in
Psychoanalysis’’
November 1 – Pierre Fédida dies in Paris (France)
2003
December 27 – Jean Cournut dies in Paris (France)
2004
March 9–14 – 43rd Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in New Orleans (USA). President: Daniel Widlöcher. Elected President: Cláudio Laks
Eizirik
May 21 – Jacob A. Arlow dies in New York (USA)
August 9 – Article 57 of the August 9, 2004 law allows
the use of the title of psychotherapist by ‘‘psychoanalysts
regularly registered in their associations’ directories’’
(France)
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A
‘‘A. Z.’’
See also: Obsessional neurosis; Peru.
‘‘A. Z.’’ is the pseudonym used by the author of
‘‘Tratamiento psicoanalı́tico de un caso de neurosis
compulsiva’’ (Psychoanalytic treatment of a case of
compulsive neurosis), a text published in Peru in 1919
in Revista de psyquiatrı́a y disciplinas conexas (Review
of psychiatry and associated disciplines).
Bibliography
A. Z. (1919). Tratamiento psicoanalı́tico de un caso de neurosis compulsiva. Revista de psyquiatrı́a y disciplinas conexas, II (1), p. 22–25.
Rey de Castro, Álvaro. (1991). Freud y Honorio Delgado:
una aproximación psicoanalı́tica a la prehistoria del
psicoanálisis peruano y sus escuelas. El múltiple interés del
psicoanálisis—77 años después, Talleres de Artes Gráficas
Espino, p. 203–237.
The first account of psychoanalytic treatment ever
published in Spanish, this case history concerned a
thirty-year-old patient with a curious ‘‘intermittent
obsession related to double vision produced by a strabismus resulting from incorrectly performed tenotomies; an
obstinate attachment to the false (unclear and deflected)
image perceived by the eye affected. The subject felt subjectively attracted by this sensation.’’ Having tried in vain
to relieve his malaise in Europe the patient undertook a
course of treatment with the author, who came to the
conclusion that the patient persisted in seeing the false
image in order to avoid confronting the fantasies that
derived from his perverse infantile polymorphism.
Valdizán, Hermilio. (1923). Diccionario de medicina peruana. t. I, Lima, Talleres gráficos del asilo ‘‘Vı́ctor Larco
Herrera,’’ p. 346.
ABANDONMENT
Strictly speaking, the notion of abandonment is not a
psychoanalytic concept. It was initially applied in
situations where very young children were deprived
of care, education, and affective support, and were
neglected by or separated prematurely from their
maternal environment, with no reference to the
causes of this deprivation. From a purely descriptive
point of view, pediatricians and psychologists taking
an interest in child development have long recognized
the somatic and psychic effects of such states of
deprivation.
There is strong evidence to suggest that ‘‘A. Z.’’ was
the dermatologist Carlos Aubry (1882–1996), a physician known to have been so eccentric and unmercenary that he died penniless, having refused to accept
payment from his patients. Valdizán (1923) states in
his Diccionario: ‘‘Apart from his specialty [dermatology], he mastered several psychological disciplines, as
witnessed by his contribution to the Review.’’ Aubry
confined himself to reports and never published
another article in the Review. His thesis (1906) dealt
with the reflex of convergence, and the use of striped
projection to illustrate double vision.
The notion is nevertheless appropriately included
in a dictionary of psychoanalysis, for two reasons.
Firstly, the concept of abandonment is not applied
solely to children, but also to adults who experience
the feeling of abandonment, separation, or bereavement, whether real or imaginary. Secondly, certain
ÁLVARO REY DE CASTRO
1
ABANDONMENT
psychoanalysts very quickly developed an interest in
the mental disorders and disturbances observed in the
emotional development of children subjected to such
traumatic experiences, as well as the possible pathogenic role of the family environment. Abandonment
raises the fundamental problem of object loss and
renunciation of the love object, or the work of mourning. It also calls into question the metapsychological
status of anxiety.
In a primary and passive sense, abandonment refers
to the experience of a state that is imposed by loss or
separation: being or feeling abandoned. In a secondary
and active sense, the complement of the previous one,
it applies to the psychic process that leads a person
to deny the cathected object, separate from it, and
abandon it.
Published in 1950, Germaine Guex’s La Névrose
d’abandon (Abandonment neurosis) contributed
considerably to propagating the notions of the abandonment complex and the abandonment-type personality. Although now dated, this work nevertheless
had the virtue of stressing the influence of disturbances and conflicts occurring during pre-oedipal
phases of psychic development in the causation of certain forms of neurotic character disorders and depression, which Guex related to affective frustration
experienced during childhood, essentially in relation
to the mother. Subjects thus frustrated turn out to be
both affectively insatiable and extremely dependent
on others, so that every separation is a major crisis for
them. Other more recent writers, particularly Otto
Kernberg and Heinz Kohut, have studied narcissistic
personality disorders and borderline states between
neurosis and psychosis from a similar perspective.
They stress the difficulties that arise when the analytic
treatment of these patients reproduces their affective
dependence in the transference, thus rendering the
analysis interminable.
Among clinical work by child psychoanalysts we
have to bear in mind Anna Freud’s and Dorothy
Burlingham’s observations of young children who
were separated from their families during World War
II, as well as René Spitz’s work on the severe consequences of hospitalism and anaclitic depression in
infants. John Bowlby’s study of children’s mourning
led to attachment theory, which is amply developed in
a book that is both a comprehensive survey and a reference, although his views are sometimes closer to psychobiology and behaviorism than to psychoanalysis.
2
Abandonment is also at the root of a certain
number of asocial or delinquent behaviors linked to
educational deprivation and indicating a defect in the
organization of the ego and the superego. On this subject Donald Winnicott referred to the ‘‘antisocial tendency’’ as an alarm signal that is sounded by distressed
children. These problems had already attracted the
attention of some of Freud’s collaborators in the period between the two World Wars. In Austria in the
1920s August Aichhorn initiated an educational
experience in the light of analytic practice and aimed
at children who were victims of exclusion. His book
Verwahrloste Jungend (1925) (Wayward Youth, 1935),
prefaced by Freud, recounts this experiment, which
still retains much of its pertinence.
Psychoanalysis must never underestimate the
importance of objective reality either in theory or
practice, but it owes it to itself to remain especially
attentive to the manifestations of unconscious psychic
reality, to the activity of the representations and fantasies that constitute it, and to its verbal and affective
modes of expression in conscious life. From this point
of view, abandonment or separation anxiety is an
inevitable condition of existence that appears very
early on in the course of psychic development and
whose ongoing influence varies from one individual to
the other, depending on the situations they encounter.
In his second theory of anxiety, as outlined in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926d [1925]), Freud
shows that for the ego, the emergence of this affect
takes on the value of a danger signal, a danger that
may be real or imaginary, but whose prototype is the
threat of castration linked to the development of the
Oedipus complex. Here the ego feels threatened
with the loss of the love object or the loss of the love of
the object.
According to Freud, this fundamental anxiety
expresses the original state of distress (Hilflosigkeit, literally: helplessness) linked to the prematurity of an
individual at the start of life, which renders him or her
completely dependent on another for the satisfaction
of both vital and affective needs. The resulting need to
feel loved will never cease throughout life. This need
seems to be more narcissistic than object related
because through it is expressed a nostalgic desire that
precedes any differentiated object relationship: the
desire to recover, in a fantasied fusion with the mother,
a state of internal well-being and complete satisfaction,
protected from the outside world, free of all conflict,
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A B E L , C A R L (1837 –1 906)
of all ambivalence and all splitting. For Melanie Klein,
the internal feeling of loneliness is born out of the
inevitable dissatisfaction of this aspiration for an
impossible narcissistic completeness, one that takes
the form of a definitively unattainable ideal. However,
the feeling of being alone can also be a source of
satisfaction for the child, marking the acquisition,
through games for example, of a certain degree of
autonomy in relation to the presence of the mother.
Donald Winnicott stressed this capacity to be alone in
the presence of the mother, which he considered to be
a decisive stage in the evolution of the child.
on the crucial importance of the need to be protected
by the father, and on the intensity of the feeling of nostalgia that is directed toward him in his absence. He
considered the identification with the prehistoric
father as a ‘‘direct and immediate identification’’ that
‘‘takes place earlier than any object-cathexis’’ (1923b,
p. 31). Clinical experience of depression both in adults
and children confirms the importance of the feeling of
being abandoned by the father, and of the absence of
the father in the mother’s desire.
Over and above the shock it produces, object loss
initiates a process of intrapsychic work, which Freud
identified as the work of mourning and which results,
in the best cases, in renunciation of the lost object. But
the success of this long and painful process is quite
variable, depending on the individual, the degree of
maturation of the psychical apparatus, and the solidity
of the narcissistic organization. Bereavement or loss
often leave indelible traces on the ego, a sense of being
abandoned is only one of many aspects, since mourning is clinically multifaceted. In his 1915 essay, Mourning and Melancholia (1916–17g [1915]), Freud
compares two responses, in order to better highlight
their differences in relation to the loss of the object
and the ambivalence of the ego with respect to it. In
melancholia, the lost object is neither conscious nor
real: it is a part of the ego, unconsciously identified
with the lost object, which becomes the target for guilt
feelings and self-accusing projections. ‘‘The shadow of
the object fell upon the ego,’’ wrote Freud (p. 249). But
it must be added that all mourning, all loss, all separation, affects the ego at its narcissistic base: being separated from the object is also being deprived of a part of
one’s self (Rosolato, 1975).
See also: Aichhorn, August; Guex, Germaine; Helplessness; Hospitalism; Spitz, René Arpad.
Logically, we should differentiate more between the
work of mourning (with the tragic dimension given by
the death of the object), and the work of separation
(which brings into play the presence, whether real or
imaginary, of a third party separator and does not
mobilize the same affects as mourning). Additionally,
separation, with all the intrapsychic conflicts it gives
rise to, is a normal process that leads to the individuation and autonomy of the child. It is the father, in this
case, or the authority replacing him, who is the third
party separator. Lastly, the problem of separation and
abandonment is not merely a question of vicissitudes
in the primary relation with the mother. Freud insisted
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Bibliography
Aichhorn, August. (1935). Wayward youth. New York: The
Viking Press.
Bowlby, John. (1969). Attachment and loss. London:
Hogarth.
Freud, Sigmund. (1916–17g [1915]). Mourning and melancholia. SE, 14: 237–258.
——— (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
——— (1926d [1925]). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety.
SE, 20: 75–172.
Guex, Germaine. (1950). La Névrose d’abandon: le syndrome
d’abandon. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Klein, Melanie. (1959). On the sense of loneliness. In her
Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963. New
York: The Free Press.
Rosolato, Guy. (1975). L’axe narcissique des depressions. La
Relation d’inconnu. Paris: Gallimard.
Further Reading
Pollock, George H. (1988). Notes on abandonment, loss,
and vulnerability. Annual of Psychoanalysis, 16, 341–370.
ABEL, CARL (1837–1906)
Carl Abel was a German linguist known for his research
on Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic lexicology,
which was published in his Einleitung in ein Aegyptischsemitisch indoeuropeanisches Wurzelwörterbuch (1886).
It was his theory of the ‘‘opposite meanings of primitive words’’ that interested Freud when, after alluding to the idea in the Interpretation of Dreams (1900a),
he wrote an article on the subject ten years later,
3
ABERASTURY, ARMINDA,
KNOWN AS
‘ ‘L A N E G R A , ’’ (1 910 –19 72)
entitled ‘‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’’
(1910e). The theory appeared in Abel’s article ‘‘Über
den Gegensinn der Urworte,’’ which appeared in
Sprachwissenschaftliche Abhandungen, published in
Leipzig in 1885.
Basing his thesis on the fact that a Latin word such as
sacer signified both ‘‘sacred’’ and ‘‘taboo,’’ Abel proposed
a theory of the way vocabulary evolves in languages. For
Abel, a word in its primitive state can have opposite
meanings, which are gradually distinguished through
the progress of the rational intellect. ‘‘When learning to
think about force, we have to separate it from weakness;
to conceive of darkness, we must isolate it from light.’’
For Freud, primitive words mark a stage of symbolization that precedes the separation of opposites
brought on by the reality principle. This cultural phenomenon is comparable to the dream process, which
enables a representational content to assume a value as
the expression of a desire and an antithetical desire.
Consequently, the logic of the primary process is felt
in a cultural formation as fully developed as language.
Is there a linguistic basis to Abel’s theory? Some
eminent linguists such as Émile Benveniste have
claimed the entire theory to be false. If Latin has only
one word for ‘‘sacred’’ and ‘‘taboo,’’ they claim, it is
because Roman culture doesn’t differentiate between
them. It is translation that creates the illusion of opposite meanings. According to Benveniste, the Latin
concept corresponding to the word sacer simply characterizes a field that extends beyond the frontiers of
the human and constitutes the undifferentiated
domain of the sacred and the taboo.
Benveniste’s reasoning is rigorous but it is worth
pointing out that there are rhetorical figures such as
euphemism or antiphrasis designed to create a reversal
of meanings similar to that of primitive words. So
when someone remarks of an idiot ‘‘What a genius!’’,
they assign an antiphrastic value to the word ‘‘genius,’’
which, in conjunction with its primary value, turns the
signifier ‘‘genius’’ into a good example of a primitive
word combining the opposite meanings of ‘‘intelligent’’ and ‘‘stupid.’’ The fact remains, however, that
the rhetorical figure is based on an initial disjunction
of opposite values rather than the confusion that Abel
assigns to his construction. For we can only refer to an
idiot as a ‘‘genius’’ if ‘‘genius’’ initially means genius,
not if the term refers to any unit that incorporates the
meanings of both ‘‘genius’’ and ‘‘idiot.’’ The process
4
works by an enrichment of the opposite meanings
assigned from the outset. It is also possible that the
lack of differentiation that occurs in dreams results in
a conjunction of opposed values that is closer to the
mechanism described above than to any initial blurring, which, according to Abel, is characteristic of the
meanings of primitive words.
LAURENT DANON-BOILEAU
See also: Linguistics and psychoanalysis; Reversal into the
opposite.
Bibliography
Abel, Carl. (1885). Über den Gegensinn der Urworte.
Sprachwissenschaftliche Abhandungen, 313–367.
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
5: 1–338; SE, 5: 339–625.
———. (1910e). The antithetical meaning of primal words.
SE, 11: 155–161.
ABERASTURY, ARMINDA, KNOWN AS
‘‘LA NEGRA,’’ (1910–1972)
The Argentine psychoanalyst Arminda Aberastury was
born on September 24, 1910, in Buenos Aires, and
died there on December 24, 1972, by committing suicide. Because of her dark hair she was affectionately
known as ‘‘La Negra,’’ and it was this name that others
used when they referred to her.
In 1937 she married the psychiatrist Enrique
Pichon-Rivière, a pioneer of psychoanalysis in
Argentina. The couple had three children: Enrique,
Joaquin, and Marcelo. In 1953, she became a training
analyst with the Associación psicoanalı́tica argentina
(APA). She taught for nearly twenty years at the Teaching Institute, where she was the director, and introduced the teaching of child psychoanalysis as part of
the training of the analyst candidate.
She later held the chair of child and adolescent psychology in the School of Philosophy and Literature at
the University of Buenos Aires. In Latin America she
distributed psychoanalytic information to pediatricians, child care workers, teachers, doctors, and pediatric dentists. She corresponded with Melanie Klein,
whom she met in London in 1952. She translated
Klein’s The Psychoanalysis of Children and became a
spokeswoman for Klein’s theories.
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A B R A H A M , K A R L (1877 –1 925)
Aberastury believed that genital libido developed
before the anal stage, leading to the existence of a ‘‘primary genital stage,’’ chronologically situated between
the sixth and eighth month of life, which became a key
theoretical concept for psychoanalysis. The growth of
genital instincts, weaning, teething, the development
of the musculature, learning to walk, the acquisition of
language, the disruption of the mother-child symbiosis were all said to constitute a complementary series
that structured this phase of development, and which
would explain specific symptoms and dysfunctions.
The genital origin of erogenous manifestations was
found in the activity of play. The theory, which
included genital identity and the father in the motherchild relation from the first moments of life, helped
refine Kleinian theory. Aberastury’s ideas on paternity
were published posthumously.
The chair of pediatric dentistry in Buenos Aires
provided Aberastury with an excellent opportunity for
developing and applying her theories. It was here at
the Hospital Británico that she began to make use of
psychodrama and group psychotherapy in her work
with children. Aberastury extended the treatment to
their guardians, basing her methods on her observations of the application of psychoanalysis to groups of
fathers and mothers.
Between 1946 and 1974 the APA review published
twenty-four articles by Aberastury on a wide range of
subjects: infant psychoanalysis; treatment indications;
applied psychoanalysis; the creation of a diagnostic
test, ‘‘El constructor infantil,’’ based on a construction
game familiar to children in Argentina; clinical cases;
transference; music; technique; philosophy; language;
unconscious fantasies; supervision; etc. A year after
her death by suicide, a chronological list of her 145
published works appeared in the APA review (no. 3/4,
1973). Aberastury also published articles in the reviews
of associations in Uruguay, Brazil, and France, as well
as in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and,
in Argentina, in reviews of child and adolescent psychiatry and psychology.
EDUARDO J. SALAS
See also: Argentina; Brazil; Pichon-Rivière, Enrique.
Bibliography
Aberastury, Arminda. (1959). Una experiencia psicodramatica con niños. In E. J. Salas, G. Smolensky, L. Grinberg,
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M. Langer, and E. Rodrigue (eds.), El grupo psicologico.
Buenos Aires: Nova, APA, 1959.
———. (1978). La paternidad, Buenos Aires: Kargieman,
2nd ed., 1985; A. Aberastury, E. J. Salas, A paternidade: Um
enfoque psicanalı́tico.
Aberastury, Arminda, Aberastury, Marcelo, and Cesio,
Fidias. (1967). Historia enseñanza y ejercicio legal del psicoanálisis. Buenos Aires: Bibliografica Omeba.
ABRAHAM, KARL (1877–1925)
Karl Abraham, a German psychoanalyst and doctor,
was born May 3, 1877, and died December 25, 1925, in
Berlin. The son of Nathan Abraham, a businessman,
and Ida Oppenheim, he was the youngest of two sons
in an Orthodox Jewish family. After studying medicine
in Würzburg, Berlin, and Freiburg-im-Breisgau, he
married his cousin Hedwig Bürgner in 1906. They had
two children; his daughter was the well-known psychoanalyst Hilda Abraham.
Abraham began his training in psychiatry in Berlin,
then in Zurich with Eugen Bleuler, where the physician-in-chief was Carl Gustav Jung. It was here that
he became familiar with Freud’s writings. In 1907 he
opened an office in Berlin and, in 1910, founded the
Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis. From 1914 to 1918
he was mobilized as chief physician in a psychiatric
unit. It was during this time that he grew interested in
studying war neuroses. He was president of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) from 1918
to 1925.
A student and friend of Freud, he was a member of
the secret ‘‘Committee’’ from its inception. In 1918, he
received an award in recognition of his work in
analysis. Co-editor of the Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse,
Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, and
Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, he was the analyst
and teacher of Felix Boehm, Helene Deutsch, Edward
and James Glover, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Carl
Müller-Braunschweig, Sándor Radó, Theodor Reik,
and Ernst Simmel.
In addition to his research on collective psychology
(‘‘Dreams and Myths,’’ 1909/1949), Abraham made
important original contributions to the study of the
development of the libido, including Versuch einer
Entwicklungsgeschichte der Libido auf Frund der Psychoanalyse seelischer Störungen (1924) (A Short Study
of the Development of the Libido Viewed in the Light of
5
A B R A H A M , N I C O L A S (1919 –1975 )
Mental Disorders, 1929). Abraham’s starting point was
Freud’s theory of the stages of pregenital organization
(1916–1917). He introduced a differentiation in the
phase of libido development designated by Freud as
oral-cannibalistic by proposing the existence of two
aspects of oral activity—sucking and biting. Based on
this hypothesis, he inferred two different modes of
infantile object relation, incorporation by sucking and
destruction by biting. This last relation was said to
introduce the conflict of ambivalence into the infant’s
life. Starting with this conflict, Abraham interpreted
the ego disturbances of the melancholic adult: the
ambivalence of the instinctual life causes a withdrawal
of libidinal cathexis from the object; the liberated
libido then turns toward the ego, which introjects the
object. Abraham links the psychogenesis of melancholy with the disappointing mother during the early
infantile phase of libido development. If it occurs
before the successful mastery of oedipal wishes, that is,
during the phase preceding the triumph of the narcissistic stage, then an associative link is made between
the Oedipus complex and the cannibalistic stage of
libido development. This would make possible the
consecutive introjection of the two love objects, the
father and mother.
Even before Abraham had begun to study manicdepressive psychosis (from 1916 to 1924), he had
made an important discovery in the research on schizophrenia in Die psychosexuelle Differenz der Hysterie
und der Dementia Präcox (1908) (Psychosexual Differences between Hysteria and Dementia Praecox, 1949):
Disturbances of ego functions are secondary with
respect to the disturbances in the libidinal area. Thus
Abraham could make use of libido theory to understand dementia praecox. In this same work Abraham
introduced the concept of ‘‘autism,’’ which was later
taken up by Eugen Bleuler (1911).
Abraham is one of the founders of psychoanalytic
research on psychoses, on collective psychoanalytic psychology and, with Sándor Ferenczi and Ernst Simmel,
on the psychoanalysis of war neuroses. His principal
work, ‘‘Examination of the Earliest Pregenital Stage of
Libido Development,’’ has continued to stimulate
research in the field down to the present day. The Psychoanalytic Training Institute he created in Berlin has
become a model for other institutes throughout the
world and the current Institute of Psychoanalysis in
Berlin bears his name. Abraham published five books
and 115 articles and made numerous presentations at
6
IPA congresses. His complete works have been collected
and translated into several languages.
JOHANNES CREMERIUS
Work discussed: ‘‘Dreams and Myths.’’
See also: Depression; Germany; Libidinal stage; Libido;
Mania; Melancholia; Visual and psychoanalysis; Secret
Committee; Work of mourning.
Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1949). Dreams and myths: A study in race
psychology. In Selected papers of Karl Abraham, M.D.
(Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey, Trans.). London:
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. (Original work published 1909)
———. (1949). A short study of the development of the
libido viewed in the light of mental disorders. In Selected
papers of Karl Abraham, M.D. (Douglas Bryan and Alix
Strachey, Trans.). London: Hogarth Press and the Institute
of Psycho-Analysis. (Original work published 1924)
Cremerius, Johannes. (1969–1971). Karl Abraham: psychoanalytische Studien. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.
Freud, Sigmund. (1926). Karl Abraham. SE, 20: 277–278.
Grinstein, Alexander. (1968). On Sigmund Freud’s dreams.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
ABRAHAM, NICOLAS (1919–1975)
Nicolas Abraham, a psychoanalyst and philosopher,
was born on May 23, 1919, in Kecskemet, Hungary,
and died on December 18, 1975, in Paris. He came
from an educated family, and his father was a rabbi
and printer. After spending his childhood in Hungary,
he studied philosophy in Paris. He worked in the
Department of Aesthetics of the Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique (French National Center for
Scientific Research) during the 1940s and 1950s and
was trained in analysis at the Psychoanalytic Society of
Paris. He worked closely with Maria Torok, who continued their research activity after Abraham’s death.
Between 1959 and 1975 Abraham’s work contributed
to the renewal of psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Together with Maria Torok he introduced several key
concepts of contemporary psychoanalysis: the family
secret, transmitted from one generation to the next
(theory of the phantom), the impossibility of mourning
following the emergence of shameful libidinal impulses
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in the bereaved before or after the death of someone
(mourning disorder), secret identification with another
(incorporation), the burial of an inadmissible experience (crypt). In The Wolf Man’s Magic Word (1986) and
The Shell and the Kernel (1994), Nicolas Abraham
explored the ravages of trauma and the other enemies
of life, and his discoveries flesh out Freud’s theories and
help expand the limits of analysis.
Abraham’s clinical experience forced him to modify
some of the fundamental assumptions of Freudian
theory (oedipal fantasies, the castration complex, the
death impulse) and isolate hitherto unknown sources
of human suffering. The principle of trauma that
emerges, trauma that arrests spontaneous self-creation
(or introjection in the sense defined by Sándor
Ferenczi in 1909 and 1912), constitutes the fulcrum
around which these discoveries were organized.
Abraham also redirected the focus of classic psychoanalysis, centered on libidinal conflicts, to the possibility of psychic development and discovery that can be
realized at any age, as well as to the obstacles to such
development encountered in catastrophes such as
social shame, war, mourning, racial or political persecution, hate crimes, and concentration camps.
In France, Abraham’s work constituted a third way
between orthodox Freudianism and Lacaniansm. Overcoming various forms of resistance, it has achieved
worldwide recognition and has been translated into
English, German, and Italian; translations into Swedish,
Hungarian, and other languages are currently underway.
His influence can be found in the growing interest of
contemporary psychoanalysis in the transgenerational
point of view and in the analysis of the singular traumas
of the individual within the family environment.
NICHOLAS RAND AND MARIA TOROK
See also: Introjection; Phantom; Torok, Maria; Secret.
Bibliography
Abraham, Nicolas, and Torok, Maria. (1986). The Wolf Man’s
magic word (Nicholas Rand, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1976)
———. (1994). The shell and the kernel: Renewals of psychoanalysis (Nicholas Rand, Trans.). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. (Original work published 1978)
Ferenczi, Sandor. (1968). Transfert et introjection. O.C., Psychanalyse I (Vol. I : 1908-1912, pp. 93–125). Paris: Payot.
(Original work published 1909)
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———. (1968). Le concept d’introjection. O.C., Psychanalyse I (Vol. I : 1908-1912, pp. 196–198). Paris: Payot. (Original work published 1912)
Rand, Nicholas, and Torok, Maria. (1995). Questions à
Freud: du devenir de la psychanalyse. Paris: Les Belles
Lettres.
ABSTINENCE/RULE OF ABSTINENCE
The term ‘‘abstinence/rule of abstinence’’ designates a
number of technical recommendations that Freud stated regarding the general framework of the psychoanalytic treatment. As is the case with the fundamental
rule, these recommendations have two symmetrical
sides, that of the patient and that of the analyst.
The problems posed when acting out takes the
place of remembering led Freud to recommend, ‘‘One
best protects the patient from injuries brought about
through carrying out one of his impulses by making
him promise not to take any important decisions
affecting his life during the time of his treatment—
for instance not to choose any profession or definitive
love-object—but to postpone all such plans until
after his recovery. At the same time one willingly
leaves untouched as much of the patient’s personal
freedom as is compatible with these restrictions, nor
does one hinder him from carrying out unimportant
intentions, even if they are foolish’’ (Freud 1914g,
p. 153). This advice to abstain from all important
decisions was, for a long time, stated at the beginning
of each treatment, even while reflections on the place
and function of ‘‘acts’’ in the course of a treatment, both within and outside the analytic situation, continued to stimulate much theoretical and
practical debate.
Freud described the need for the analyst to observe
abstinence in his article ‘‘Observations on TransferenceLove’’: ‘‘I have already let it be understood that analytic
technique requires of the physician that he should
deny to the patient who is craving for love the satisfaction she demands. The treatment must be carried out
in abstinence. By this I do not mean physical abstinence alone, nor yet the deprivation of everything that
the patient desires, for perhaps no sick person could
tolerate this. Instead, I shall state it as a fundamental
principle that the patient’s need and longing should be
allowed to persist in her, in order that they may serve
as forces impelling her to do work and to make
changes’’ (Freud 1915a, pp. 164–165).
7
A B S T I N E N C E /R U L E
OF
ABSTINENCE
Thus it is after years of psychoanalytic practice that
the notion of abstinence appeared as such in Freud’s
work. The theory of unconscious desire and of the transference had to be elaborated and their application to the
progression of the treatment put to the test in order for
their technical consequences to be recognized. The
transferential demands and the counter-transferential
responses that Freud’s followers made him become
aware of, such as the case of Jung and Sabina Spielrein,
as well as what he then learned about the practice of
‘‘wild analysis,’’ quickly persuaded him to enunciate a
recommendation. His followers subsequently and little
by little transformed the recommendation into a ‘‘principle,’’ and then a ‘‘rule,’’ which became quite rigid.
It is clear that, from the beginning, it was never a
matter of moral prescription, but a technical one that
accorded with the metapsychological demands, particularly the economic ones, involved in the psychoanalytic situation. In the twenties, when Freud and then
Sándor Ferenczi experimented with the ‘‘active technique,’’ frustration (Versagung) resulting from interdictions or injunctions that, it was hoped, would turn the
patient away from modes of satisfaction judged to be
pathological. In 1918, Freud wrote, ‘‘By abstinence,
however, is not to be understood doing without any
and every satisfaction—that would of course not be
practicable; nor do we mean what it popularly connotes, refraining from sexual intercourse; it means
something else which has far more to do with the
dynamics of falling ill and recovering. You will remember that it was a frustration that made the patient ill,
and that his symptoms serve him as substitutive satisfactions. [. . .] Cruel though it may sound, we must see
to it that the patient’s suffering, to a degree that is in
some way or other effective, does not come to an end
prematurely.’’ (Freud 1919a [1918], pp. 162–163) And
Ferenczi continued, ‘‘[. . .] the ‘active therapy’, hitherto
regarded as a single entity, breaks up into the systematic issuing and carrying out of injunctions and of prohibitions, Freud’s ‘attitude of abstinence’ being constantly maintained’’ (Ferenczi, pp. 193–194). It is in
this sense, then, that Rudolph Lowenstein—and also
Anna Freud—explained that while some analysts think
it necessary to prohibit their patients from performing
this or that perverse sexual practice, it would not be
wise to recommend the same to homosexual patients
(Lowenstein).
It was chiefly in the United States that a slippage
took place that turned the recommendation of
8
abstinence into an increasingly restrictive ‘‘rule.’’ Karl
Menninger and Phillip Holzman (1973) even considered it the ‘‘second fundamental rule’’ of psychoanalysis. But the risk of insinuating a moral judgment left
a lingering ambiguity, and proponents of relaxing
the rule argued that some analysts used it to prohibit
their patients from having sexual relations or extramarital affairs.
Over the years, the notion of abstinence came to be
invoked less and less, and it has even been proposed
that analysts speak instead of a ‘‘rule of the reality
principle.’’ Above all, it has been replaced by ‘‘neutrality,’’ a concept not explicitly mentioned by Freud
(Mijolla), and even a ‘‘benevolent neutrality’’ (Stone,
1961) or a ‘‘compassionate neutrality’’ (Greenson;
Weigert 1970). In the evolution of these attitudes, the
mark of Sándor Ferenczi’s important influence on
matters of practice is obvious, since the prescriptions
of abstinence pushed to the extreme were those of the
‘‘active technique’’ and since the frequent tendency of
‘‘benevolent neutrality’’ to drift towards more and
more established ‘‘benevolence’’ of the maternal type
characterized the last years of his practice.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Act, passage to the; Benevolent neutrality; Frustration; Neutrality; Technique with adults, psychoanalytic; Transference love.
Bibliography
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1921) The further development of the
‘‘active technique’’ in psychoanalysis. In Selected Writings.
London: Penguin, 1999: 187–204.
Freud, Sigmund. (1919a [1918]). Lines of advance in
psycho-analytic therapy. SE, 17: 157–168.
———. (1915a [1914]). Observations on transference love
(further recommendations on the technique of psychoanalysis III). SE, 12: 157–171.
Greenson, Ralph R. (1958). Variations in classical psychoanalytic technique. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 29, 200–201.
Loewenstein, Rudolph M. (1958). Remarks on some variations in psycho-analytic technique. International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 39, 202–210.
Mijolla, Alain de. (1998). Le ‘‘conflit thérapeutique’’ et la
‘‘neutralité.’’In G. Diatkine and J. Schaeffer (Eds.), Psychothérapies psychanalytiques (pp. 110–119). Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
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A C T /A C T I O N
ACT/ACTION
The terms ‘‘act’’ and ‘‘action’’ are related, both referring to a form of behavior (motor, verbal, etc.)
intended to modify the environment, either to avoid a
danger or unpleasure, or to satisfy a need or desire.
The term ‘‘act,’’ however, refers primarily to this event
in its uniqueness and effectiveness, whereas ‘‘action’’
designates both a process, which can be more or less
complex and durable, and the result of that process.
These definitions are not psychoanalytic in themselves,
and there is no coherent body of thought in psychoanalysis concerning them, in spite of the rather fragmentary references found in Freud and subsequent
attempts to give these concepts a theoretical status.
The first psychoanalytic use of the term by Freud is
probably his reference to ‘‘specific action,’’ that is, the
behavior that results in the satisfaction of a need
(Manuscript E, 1894, and ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology,’’ 1895, in 1950a). This idea, which he returned
to only intermittently, may seem narrowly behaviorist.
However, even in these early works, Freud gives the
term an entirely different dimension. He writes that
since the infant is incapable of satisfying its own needs,
‘‘specific action’’ by another person is needed, and he
elaborates on what he considers essential to the process: ‘‘If the satisfaction of the need is not satisfied in
this way, it is manifested as desire through hallucinatory satisfaction. But the impossibility of maintaining
this hallucinatory satisfaction in the face of the persistence of the need gives rise to the representation; the
object is born, within the movement of desire, from its
presence-absence.’’ A preliminary version of these ideas
is found in the following comment by Freud that
appears in the ‘‘Project’’: ‘‘The initial helplessness of
human beings is the primal source of all moral motives.’’
Freud would return to and develop these ideas in his
‘‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’’ (1911b), where he attempts to show that,
whenever the reality principle gets the upper hand of the
pleasure principle, ‘‘motor discharge was now employed
in the appropriate alternation of reality; it was converted
into action. Restraint upon motor discharge (upon
action) which then became necessary, was provided by
means of the process of thinking, which was developed
from the presentation of ideas’’(1911b, p. 221).
This idea, whereby thought is a suspension of adaptive perceptual-motor activity, a ‘‘trial activity’’ involving
representations, was in fact familiar to a number of
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authors at the beginning of the twentieth century, as has
been shown by Henri Wallon (1942). It was discussed at
greater length by Freud in the last part of Totem and
Taboo (1912–13a), which he concludes with this quote
from Goethe: ‘‘In the beginning was the deed.’’
Although the topic was not fully developed by Freud,
the terms ‘‘act’’ and ‘‘action’’ appear frequently in his
writings, whether he is discussing failed acts, compulsive
acts, symptoms, repetitive acts (1914g), the suspension
of motor activity during dreams, etc. The prohibition
against action within the analytic situation stimulated,
both during Freud’s lifetime and after, a number of
reflections on the infractions constituted by actings.
Since Freud’s day, there have been many attempts to
understand these issues. Heinz Kohut advanced the
concept of ‘‘action-thought,’’ a concrete thought process halfway between action and thought. Roy Schafer
(1976) attempted to refine metapsychology in terms of
the actions that constituted thought acts. Daniel
Widlöcher (1986) attempted to reformulate it in terms
of ‘‘unconscious presentations of actions’’ that generate thought actions.
Throughout these approaches the reference to
impulse is vague or explicitly eliminated. However,
there are no benefits to this. To understand the problem of action and its relationship with mental activity,
we must take account of representation and fantasy. If
‘‘in the beginning was the deed,’’ (from Goethe’s Faust,
part I, scene 3, quoted by Freud in 1912-13a, p. 161)
this indeed involves understanding the development
and functioning of psychic activity within two closely
related points of view: representations and symbolization processes that terminate in secondary thought,
and the organization of fantasy, where fantasies can be
considered to be ‘‘representations of actions’’ (PerronBorelli, 1997; Perron-Borelli, and Perron, 1997).
ROGER PERRON
See also: Acting out/acting in; Action-thought (H. Kohut);
Reality principle; Specific action; Totem and Taboo.
Bibliography
Perron-Borelli, Michèle. (1997). Dynamique du fantasme.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Perron-Borelli, Michèle, and Perron, Roger. (1997). Fantasme, action, pensée. Alger: Éditions de la Société algérienne de psychologie.
9
ACTING
OUT/ACTING IN
Schafer, Roy. (1976). A new language for psychoanalysis. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Wallon, Henri. (1970). De l’acte à la pensée. Paris: Flammarion. (Original work published 1942)
Widlöcher, Daniel. (1986). Métapsychologie du sens. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Further Reading
Ellman, J., rep. (2000). Panel: The mechanism of action of
psychoanalytic treatment. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 48, 919–928.
Grand, Stanley. (2002). Action in the psychoa situation:
internal & external reality. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 19,
254–280.
Katz, Gil. (1998). Where the action is: the enacted dimension of analytic process., Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 46, 1129–1168.
Ogden, Thomas H. (1994). The concept of interpretive
action. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 63, 219–245.
ACTING OUT/ACTING IN
The term ‘‘acting out’’ corresponds to Freud’s use of the
German word ‘‘agieren’’ (as a verb and as a noun). It
should be distinguished from the closely related concept of ‘‘passage à l’acte,’’ inherited from the French
psychiatric tradition and denoting the impulsive
and usually violent acts often addressed in
criminology.
‘‘Acting out’’ refers to the discharge by means of
action, rather than by means of verbalization, of conflicted mental content. Though there is this contrast
between act and word, both sorts of discharge are
responses to a return of the repressed: repeated in the
case of actions, remembered in the case of words.
Another distinction occasionally drawn is between acting out and acting in, used to distinguish between
actions that occur outside psychoanalytic treatment
(often to be explained as compensation for frustration
brought on by the analytic situation, by the rule of
abstinence, for example) and actions that occur within
treatment (in the form of nonverbal communication or
body language, but also of prolonged silences, repeated
pauses, or attempts to seduce or attack the analyst).
Freud first mentioned acting out in connection
with the case of ‘‘Dora’’ (1905e [1901]), noting with
10
respect to her transference that his patient took
revenge on him just as she wanted to take revenge on
Herr K.: Dora ‘‘deserted me as she believed herself to
have been deceived and deserted by him. Thus she
acted out an essential part of her recollections and
phantasies instead of reproducing them in the treatment’’ (p. 119).
The notion of acting out is closely bound up with
the theory of the transference and its development.
Though Freud treated the transference as the cause of
acting out —and as an obstacle to treatment —in the
Dora case, he subsequently described transference as a
great boon to analysis, provided it could be successfully recognized and its significance conveyed to the
patient. Acting out is thus attributable to a failure of
the interpretive work or to the patient’s failure to
assimilate it. In his paper ‘‘Remembering, Repeating,
and Working-Through’’ (1914g), Freud revisited the
distinction between remembering and acting out:
‘‘The patient does not remember anything of what he
has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory, but as an action; he repeats
it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it’’
(p. 150). The examples that Freud gave here involved
the repetition of feelings (feeling rebellious and defiant, or ‘‘helpless and hopeless’’) that had formerly
been directed at a person or situation in childhood
but that now manifested themselves, either directly or
indirectly (through dreams, silences, and so on), visà-vis the analyst. Freud’s assessment of such instances
of acting out was nuanced, for he realized that they
were at once a form of resistance against the emergence of a memory and a particular ‘‘way of remembering’’ (p. 150).
Inasmuch as acting out occurs outside as well as
inside the analytic situation, Freud went on, ‘‘We must
be prepared to find, therefore, that the patient yields
to the compulsion to repeat, which now replaces the
impulsion to remember, not only in his personal attitude to his doctor but also in every other activity and
relationship which may occupy his life at the time——
if, for instance, he falls in love or undertakes a task or
starts an enterprise during the treatment’’ (p. 151).
Acting out and repeating are ultimately the same process, involving ‘‘everything that has already made its
way from the sources of the repressed into [the
patient’s] manifest personality——his inhibitions and
unserviceable attitudes and his pathological charactertraits’’ (p. 151).
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ACTION-LANGUAGE
All the same, acting out in reality could have grave
consequences, precipitating disasters in the patient’s life
and dashing any hope of cure through psychoanalysis. It
is thus up to the analyst, relying on the patient’s transference-based attachment, to control the patient’s impulses
and repetitive acts, notably by extracting a promise to
refrain, while under treatment, from making any serious
decisions regarding professional or love life. The analyst,
however, must be ‘‘prepared for a perpetual struggle with
his patient to keep in the psychical sphere all the
impulses which the patient would like to direct into the
motor sphere; and he celebrates it as a triumph for the
treatment if he can bring it about that something that
the patient wishes to discharge in action is disposed of
through the work of remembering’’ (p. 153).
In Freud’s thinking, then, acting out was long associated with the transference. ’In An Outline of PsychoAnalysis (1940a [1938]) Freud emphasized the need to
clearly demarcate between ‘‘actualization’’ in the transference from acting out, whether inside or outside the
analytic session: ‘‘We think it most undesirable if the
patient acts outside the transference instead of remembering. The ideal conduct for our purposes would be
that he should behave as normally as possible outside
the treatment and express his abnormal reactions only
in the transference’’ (p. 177).
Many other authors have deployed the notion of
acting out, typically when considering personalities
more inclined to act out than to remember in the context of the transference. Thus Anna Freud (1968) saw
pre-oedipal pathologies in this light, and León
Grinberg hypothesized that acting out is a reaction to
inadequate mourning for the loss of an early object.
Such approaches take acting out to be inappropriate
or even disruptive acts precipitated by the pressure of
unconscious wishes.
———. (1914g). ‘‘Remembering, repeating, and workingthrough (further recommendations on the technique of
psycho-analysis II).’’ SE, 12: 145–156.
———. (1940a [1938]). An outline of psycho-analysis. SE,
23: 139–207.
Grinberg, León. (1968). ‘‘On acting out and its role in the
psychoanalytic process.’’ International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 49, 171–178.
Further Reading
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine. (1990). On acting out. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 71, 77–86.
Eagle, Morris. (1993). Enactments, transference, and symptomatic cure: a case history. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 3,
93–110.
De Blecourt, Abraham. (1993). Transference, countertransference, and acting out in analysis. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 74, 757–774
Gill, Merton M., disc. (1993). On "Enactments": Interaction and interpretation. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 3,
111–122.
Goldberg, Arnold. (2002). Enactment as understanding and
misunderstanding. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 50, 869–884.
Paniagua, Cecilio. (1998). Acting in revisited. International
Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79, 499–512.
Roughton, Ralph E. (1993). Useful aspects acting out: repetition, enactment, actualization. Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, 41, 443–472.
ACTION-LANGUAGE
Freud, Anna. (1968). ‘‘Acting out.’’ International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 49 (2–3), 165–170.
The notion of ‘‘action-language’’ was proposed by
Roy Schafer to refer to a code or group of rules,
within the framework of a conceptualization that
aims to legitimize existence to all conscious or
unconscious activity, and all mental acts capable of
being externalized by means of words or gestures, so
that these mental acts can be related to unconscious
conflicts (slips of the tongue, parapraxes), representations of self and object, bodily fantasies, feelings and
emotions, desires and beliefs, or courses of action
that the subject uses to ‘‘put aside’’ certain ideas or
invest others.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905e [1901]). ‘‘Fragment of an analysis
of a case of hysteria.’’ SE, 7: 1–122.
Action-language involves a strategy (favoring the
use of action verbs and adverbs over nouns, adjectives,
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Abstinence/rule of abstinence; Active technique;
Act, passage to the; ‘‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of
Hysteria’’ (Dora, Ida Bauer); Technique with adults,
psychoanalytic.
Bibliography
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ACTION-(RE)PRESENTATION
and the verbs have and be) for listening to, acknowledging, translating, retranslating, interpreting, and organizing the data or the modalities of action of the agent
or his or her person, that is, the analysand, within the
context of the transference and resistance.
Bibliography
The analysand acts in a conflicted way, whether at
the unconscious, preconscious, or conscious level. He
or she follows actions of thinking or ideas that possess
mental qualities, and verbalizes according to different
narrative registers. According to Schafer, the concept’s
originator, who drew his inspiration from the works of
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jean-Paul Sartre, actionlanguage is an alternative to the traditional, mechanistic terminology of metapsychology, encumbered by
psychoeconomic, spatial, biological, physiochemical,
or anthropomorphic metaphors. Such metaphors,
according to Schafer, are devoid of content, anachronistic, attributive and conducive to fragmentation,
archaic and childish. Terms such as motives, propulsive
energy forces, regulating principles, structures, functions,
instincts, and objects, used by Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysts in a general way, can only very partially
account for the mind’s activities of ideation and
speech (including inner thoughts, associations, and
substitutive formations).
———. (1980). Action language and the psychology of
the self. Annual of Psychoanalysis (Chicago Institute). 8,
83–92.
By contrast, action-language purports to bring,
through the rigorous descriptions of mental acts it
entails, greater clarity and effectiveness to treatment,
in that the causal explanation based on the concrete
and active ‘‘existence’’ of the person ostensibly leads to
a personal recharacterization of his or her psychic
reality. Further, by getting away from notions of the
‘‘mind-machine,’’ action and its language can
supposedly bring us back to the true hermeneutics
that is psychoanalysis. The idea, moreover, is not to
replace or alter psychoanalytic technique, but to find a
metalanguage that is faithful to its origins.
A number of charges (psychologism, personalism,
phenomenological reductionism, disregard of the
unconscious, a flattening of discourse, the inadequacy
of the rules of transcription) have been leveled against
this undertaking ‘‘in the first person,’’ which aims to
provide a foundation for psychoanalysis and to oppose
any reification of the subject.
SIMONE VALANTIN
See also: Act/action; Action-(re)presentation; Interpretation.
12
Schafer, Roy. (1976). A new language for psychoanalysis. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
———. (1978). Language and insight. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Further Reading
Spence, Donald P. (1982). Some clinical implications of
action language. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 30, 169-184.
ACTION-(RE)PRESENTATION
The notion of action-presentation (or action-representation) is based on two Freudian models: on the
one hand, the idea that representation derives from
the failure of hallucinatory wish-fulfillment, developed
in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), and on the
other, the model that establishes the unconscious
‘‘thing-presentation’’ as a mental ‘‘representative’’ of
the instinct, elaborated in ‘‘Repression’’ (1915d) and
‘‘The Unconscious’’ (1915e). Such a grouping of concepts aims to bring out the dynamic functions of
fantasies within the general realm of a theory of representation (Perron-Borelli, 1997).
Action-presentations, which are ubiquitous in
dreams because of the hallucinatory process induced
by the inhibition of motor discharges, are at the core
of fantasmatic organization. Indeed, fantasies cannot
be reduced to object-presentations: They originate in a
dynamic organization that from the outset brings
together intrapsychic processes and, at their most
basic level, an action-presentation and an objectpresentation.
The action-presentation occupies a central position
in the ‘‘fundamental structure of fantasy,’’ the product
of a later and more complex elaboration, that makes
possible the representation of all forms of the subject’s
desire toward the object. This involves a representational structure, made up of three parts (subjectaction-object) and based on an elaboration of the
primal scene, which allows all its variants to be represented. This structure thus takes on the role of a system
of transformations capable of representing the plurality
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A C T I O N -T H O U G H T ( H . K O H U T )
and mobility of desires and the identifications (bisexual) that characterize the oedipal organization.
Within the dynamics of this fundamental structure,
the action-presentation is the pivot point around
which the displacement of objects, as well as the inversion of subject and object positions linked to the
related dynamics of drives and identifications (inversion of active/passive or sadistic-masochistic movements, among others), can be effected.
The role played by action-presentations in fantasies
sheds light on the dynamic links between fantasies
and effective actions (Perron-Borelli 1997; Perron &
Perron-Borelli 1987). This allows for a clearer understanding of behaviors enacted during treatment
(Freudian agieren, or acting out), compulsive behaviors, phobias of impulsive acts, and the like. Such an
approach emphasizes the importance of fantasy elaboration inasmuch as it prepares and makes possible
fulfillments (satisfactions) through action.
This concept of action-presentations, closely linked
to the dynamics of fantasy, can be compared to the
idea of ‘‘unconscious action-presentation’’ used by
Daniel Widlöcher in Métapsychologie du sens (Metapsychology of meaning; 1986). However, this author
adopted a very different theoretical framework. Far
from seeing the action-representation as being articulated with an underlying drive, he seemed to attempt
to erase the very notion of the drive. According to
him, the unconscious is made up of a sort of ‘‘memory
of actions’’ that can only be grasped through the analytic listening process.
The conceptions of Roy Schafer and Heinz Kohut
are even further from the fundamental bases of
Freudian metapsychology. In A New Language for Psychoanalysis (1976), under the label ‘‘action language,’’
Schafer essentially reduced mental processes as a whole
to mental ‘‘activities’’ of representation and speech
that are connotable by action verbs. For its part,
Kohut’s idea of ‘‘action-thought,’’ put forward in The
Analysis of the Self (1971), is the expression of a concrete, creative thought in which action and thought
are conflated.
ROGER PERRON
See also: Act/action; Acting out/acting in; Action-thought
(H. Kohut); Fantasy; Thing-presentation; Wish, hallucinatory satisfaction of a.
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Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams.
Part I. SE, 4: 1–338; The interpretation of dreams. Part II.
SE, 5: 339–625.
———. (1915d). Repression. SE, 14: 141–158.
———. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159–204.
Kohut, Heinz. (1971). The analysis of the self. New York:
International Universities Press.
Perron, Roger, and Perron-Borelli, Michelle. (1987). Fantasme et action. Revue française de psychanalyse, 51 (2),
539–637.
Perron-Borelli, Michèle. (1997). Dynamique du fantasme.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Schafer, Roy. (1976). A new language for psychoanalysis. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Widlöcher, Daniel. (1986). Métapsychologie du sens. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
ACTION-THOUGHT (H. KOHUT)
Action-thought is the expression of a concrete, creative
kind of thought merged with action. This category has
its origin in pioneering experiments that illustrate a
new scientific principle by which psychoanalytic
patients reveal insights they are in the process of
acquiring. In the psychoanalytic context, actionthought is creative—and thus quite distinct from resistance, from acting out, or from the thinking that
replaces memories dismantled by interpretation. The
notion is part of the theory of the autonomous development of narcissism, as worked out by Heinz Kohut
and his followers.
Action-thought was first considered by Kohut in
The Analysis of the Self (1971), where he spoke of a
kind of sublimation presupposing the modification of
archaic narcissistic fantasies. He expanded on the idea
of nonreplicable scientific experiments expressing the
concrete, creative thought of genius in his later work
The Restoration of the Self (1977, pp. 36ff; see also
Koyré, Alexandre, 1968). The notion advanced was
that creation sometimes takes place in such a way that
thought and action are indistinguishable, as when
scientists believe they have gleaned knowledge from
external reality when in fact that knowledge was
already a part of their own mental reality. Kohut
addressed the clinical relevance of action-thought in a
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ACTIVE IMAGINATION (ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY)
letter written on May 16, 1974, in which he recounted
that a patient prone to concrete thought carried out a
meticulous exploration of the analyst’s office; this in
no way involved an expression of childlike curiosity,
but rather of thinking in and through action.
In 1977, when Kohut was proposing a generalized
self psychology, action-thought was a crucial concept
that clearly set his approach to the treatment of narcissistic patients and its termination apart from that of
ego psychology. Returning to the analogy of scientific
discovery and advances in knowledge of reality, Kohut
alluded to the moment when facts could not yet be distinguished from theory since thought and action were
not yet differentiated.
The concept of action-thought was emblematic of
Kohut’s new theory of narcissism, according to which
the patient acted out the stages leading to a new mental
equilibrium dependent on a modification in his or her
narcissism. In the clinical context, this changed narcissism was the vehicle of messages interpretable by the
patient, messages that would not be ignored but could
be transformed. This was a sign of progress, for psychoanalytic treatment could not arrive at change by interpretation alone, but called too for a ‘‘transmuting internalization’’ of the narcissistic functions as assumed and
verbalized by the analyst (Kohut, 1977, pp. 30–32).
Action-thought was thus cardinal for Kohut, who
felt that narcissism was a factor in all creativity, which
he understood to be a positive transformation of some
aspect of the individual’s narcissism. The repair of narcissism—the essential goal in the psychoanalysis of
narcissistic personalities—tended to be seen as the
universal road to therapy. And neurosis itself, Kohut
felt, was at risk of being reduced to narcissistic weaknesses left over from the oedipal period.
AGNÈS OPPENHEIMER
See also: Kohut, Heinz; Narcissism; Self-analysis
Bibliography
Kohut, Heinz. (1971). The analysis of the self. New York:
International Universities Press.
———. (1977). The restoration of the self. New York: International Universities Press.
Koyré, Alexandre (1968). Metaphysics and measurement:
Essays in scientific revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
14
ACTIVE IMAGINATION (ANALYTICAL
PSYCHOLOGY)
Active imagination in Carl Jung’s analytical method of
psychotherapy involves opening oneself to the unconscious and giving free rein to fantasy, while at the same
time maintaining an active, attentive, conscious point
of view. The process leads to a synthesis that contains
both perspectives, but in a new and surprising way.
‘‘The Transcendent Function’’ (1916b [1958]) is
Jung’s first paper about the method he later came to call
active imagination. It has two parts or stages: Letting the
unconscious come up and Coming to terms with the
unconscious. He describes its starting points (mainly
moods, images, bodily sensations); and some of its
many expressive forms (painting, sculpting, drawing,
writing, dancing, weaving, dramatic enactment, inner
visions, inner dialogues). In this early essay he links his
method to work with dreams and the therapeutic relationship. The term ‘‘transcendent function’’ encompasses both the method and its inborn dynamic function that unites opposite position in the psyche.
Jung discovered active imagination out of his own
need for self-healing in a certain period of his life. It all
began with symbolic play: ‘‘I had no choice but
to. . .take up that child’s life with his childish games’’
(Jung, 1962/1966, p. 174). He found that as long as he
managed to translate his emotions into symbolic
images, he was inwardly calmed and reassured. When
he opened to the raw material of the unconscious, he
did not identify with the affects and images, rather, he
turned his curiosity toward the inner world of the imagination. This led to a deep process of renewal, as well
as insights that gave him a new orientation. In the
years that followed, he recommended it to many of his
patients and students. He presents active imagination
as an adjunctive technique, but by linking it to his
symbolic method of dream interpretation and work
with the analytic relationship, Jung laid the groundwork for a comprehensive method of psychotherapy.
Active imagination is a direct extension of Freud’s
free association (Jung, 1929, p. 47). Other related
notions include the transcendent function; the natural
healing function of play and imagination; Sandplay;
active vs. passive attitudes toward fantasy; reductive
and constructive ways to understand the unconscious
content; creative formulation vs. understanding; liberation from the analyst (Chodorow, 1997).
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ACTIVE TECHNIQUE
Jungian analysts hold a wide range of views on
active imagination (Samuels, 1985). For some it is a
peripheral technique not much used anymore. For
others it is the essence and goal of analysis.
JOAN CHODOROW
See also: Amplification (analytical psychology); Analytical psychology.
Bibliography
Chodorow, Joan. (1997). Introduction. Jung on active imagination (pp. 1–20). London: Routledge.
Jung, Carl Gustav. (1916b [1958]). The Transcendant
Function. Coll. Works (Vol. VIII). London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
———. (1929–31). Freud and Jung: Contrasts. Coll. Works
(Vol. IV). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
———. (1966). Memories, dreams, reflections. London: Routledge. (Original work published 1962)
Samuels, Andrew. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians, London-Boston: Routledge.
ACTIVE TECHNIQUE
A method advocated by Sándor Ferenczi starting in
1919, the active technique consisted of formulating to
the patient, at certain moments of stagnation in the
treatment, injunctions or interdictions concerning
his or her behavior in such a way as to provoke tensions within the psychic apparatus, with the aim of
reactivating the process and of bringing to light
repressed material.
Only the patient was encouraged to perform certain
actions. The psychoanalyst remained inactive and
attentive to the emergence of new mnemic material in
the associations of the patient. The process was used
only as an ‘‘adjuvant’’ in order to precipitate the emergence of new associations, the interpretation of which
remained, just as in the classic technique, the principle
task of the analysis.
Impasses with the active technique led Ferenczi,
several years later, to abandon an economic and
authoritarian conception of psychoanalytic treatment
and replace it with neocathartic relaxation and technical elasticity, an approach facilitated by empathy and
benevolence.
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‘‘We owe the prototype of this ‘active technique’ to
Freud himself,’’ wrote Ferenczi in 1919 (p. 157), noting
that at the beginning of the Freud’s work, the cathartic
method was a technique of great ‘‘activity,’’ as much on
the analyst’s part as the patient’s. The idea in those days
was to apply pressure as a way of awakening memories
and precipitating the abreaction of blocked affects. This
approach was succeeded by the technique of free association, a non-directive method founded on the apparently passive listening and receptivity of the analyst.
However, recalled Ferenczi, it was while developing
analytic technique that Freud was led, during the analysis of anxiety hysterias, to require of his patients that
they directly confront the critical situations that gave
rise to their anxieties, not in order to habituate themselves to those situations, but rather to achieve the
‘‘ligature of customary, unconscious paths of discharge
of excitation and the enforcement of the preconscious
cathexis as well as the conscious ones of the repressed
material.’’ (p. 157)
Thus Ferenczi was led, following Freud, to break at
certain points in the treatment with the receptive and
passive attitude of the analyst monitoring the associative material of patients, and to intervene actively at
the level of their psyche.
‘‘The patients, in spite of close compliance with the
‘fundamental rule’ and in spite of a deep insight into
their unconscious complexes, could not get beyond
‘dead ends’ in the analysis until they were compelled
to venture out from the retreat of their phobia, and to
expose themselves experimentally to the situation they
had avoided with anxiety, but, in exposing themselves
to this affect, they at the same time overcame the resistance to hitherto repressed material which now
became accessible to analysis in the form of ideas and
reminiscences’’ (Ferenczi, 1921/1999, p. 189).
‘‘I really meant,’’ Ferenczi continues, ‘‘that the
description of ‘active technique’ should be applied to
this procedure, which does not so much represent an
active interference on the part of the doctor as on the
part of the patient upon whom are imposed certain
tasks besides the keeping to the fundamental rule. In
the cases of phobia the task consisted in the carrying
out of unpleasant activities.’’ (p. 189)
Thus ‘‘[i]n stimulating what is inhibited, and inhibiting what is uninhibited’’ (p. 201), in demanding that
patients renounce certain satisfactions and in advising
15
A C T I V I T Y /P A S S I V I T Y
them to perform certain unpleasant acts, Ferenczi hoped
to provoke an increase in psychic tension, a new distribution within the libidinal economy, and thus to allow
new mnemic material to become accessible, and ultimately to accelerate the course of the analysis.
For Freud, then, the active technique was a kind of
‘‘agent provocateur,’’ the injunctions and the prohibitions serving only as an adjuvant, promoting the repetition that must then be interpreted or reconstructed
in memory.
Later, Ferenczi came to have serious reservations
about the usefulness of the active technique. Badly
applied, or poorly employed by novice analysts, this
method risked exacerbating the patient’s resistances and
hampering the deployment of the transference. It was
liable to reinforce the patient’s masochism by organizing his or her submission (Bokanowski, T. 1994).
Ferenczi specifically questioned the wisdom of an arbitrarily decided date for the termination of the treatment.
So Ferenczi progressively distanced himself, above
all in his critical study, ‘‘Contra-Indications to the
‘Active’ Psychoanalytical Technique’’ (1926/1999), from
an authoritarian orientation of the treatment founded
on frustration and abstinences. He introduced the new
notions of ‘‘elasticity,’’ that is, patience and empathy,
and ‘‘relaxation.’’ He even mentioned (1933/1999) the
aggressive features of the active technique that aimed at
a ‘‘forced relaxation’’ in the patient (p. 296).
It was no longer up to the analyst, but rather to the
patient, to determine the opportune moment when
the treatment had sufficiently progressed to allow him
or her to tackle the renunciation of neurotic satisfactions and the overcoming of inhibitions.
In ‘‘Analysis, Terminable and Interminable’’
(1937c), Freud criticized in the firmest manner any
intervention of the psychoanalyst at the level of material reality for the purposes of moving the analysis
along or of making a negative transference appear artificially when it was not yet manifest.
JEAN-FRANÇOIS RABAIN
See also: Abstinence/rule of abstinence; Character neurosis; Direct analysis; Elasticity; Framework of the psychoanalytic treatment; ‘‘From the History of an Infantile
Neurosis’’ (Wolf Man); Kovács-Prosznitz, Vilma; Mutual
analysis; Sokolnicka-Kutner, Eugénie; Tact; Technique
with adults, psychoanalytic; Termination of treatment.
16
Bibliography
Bokanowski, Thierry. (1994). Ensuite survient un trouble.
In Michéle Bertrand (Ed), Collectif: Ferenczi, patient et psychanalyste. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1994). Contra-indications to the ‘‘active’’
psycho-analytical technique. In Further contributions to the
theory and technique of psycho-analysis (pp. 217–230).
London: Karnac. (Original work published 1926)
———. (1999). The confusion of tongues between adults
and the child (The language of tenderness and of passion).
In Selected writings. (pp. 255–268). London: Penguin.
(Original work published 1933)
———. (1999). The elasticity of psychoanalytic technique.
In Selected writings (pp. 255–268). London: Penguin. (Original work published 1928)
———. (1999). The further development of the ‘‘active technique’’ in psychoanalysis. In Selected writings (pp. 187–204).
London: Penguin. (Original work published 1921)
———. (1999). On forced fantasies. In Selected writings (pp.
222–230). London: Penguin. (Original work published
1924)
———. (1999). Technical difficulties in a case of hysteria. In
Selected writings (pp. 151–158). London: Penguin. (Original work published 1919)
ACTIVITY/PASSIVITY
The terms ‘‘activity’’ and ‘‘passivity’’ were already in use
before Freud. For example, Richard von Krafft-Ebbing
used them to compare sadism and masochism.
Freud initially employed the terms within the framework of the theory of psychosexuality and, more
specifically, with respect to the drives, creating
paired opposites associated with masculine/feminine. He then used these terms in his dynamic analysis of ego as agency.
For both paired opposites, ‘‘Instincts and Their
Vicissitudes’’ (Freud, 1915c) is a key reference. In it
Freud referred to activity/passivity as one of ‘‘three polarities’’ that govern ‘‘our mental life as a whole’’ (p. 133),
along with the pairs ego/outside world and pleasure/
unpleasure. But even in 1896 Freud had already evoked
the polarity of activity/passivity in his theory of seduction, which he based on clinical findings and individual
histories of neuroses. Hysteria, he wrote at the time,
results from ‘‘sexual passivity during the pre-sexual period’’ (1896b, p. 163) that is reacted to by indifference,
contempt, or fear. In contrast, in obsessional neurosis,
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(Zwangsneurose) pleasure is active: the seduced infant
actively, aggressively, repeats an experienced sexual
attack on another infant. This alteration of the sexual
attack experienced by the child from passive to active
can also occur in masturbatory activity.
Freud subsequently modified his views by acknowledging a ‘‘spontaneous’’ infantile sexuality not forcibly
induced by an adult seducer. This was the theme of his
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d). In this
work Freud described libidinal development as proceeding from ‘‘a number of separate instincts and erotogenic zones, which, independently of one another,
have pursued a certain sort of pleasure as their sole
sexual aim’’ (p. 207) and have gradually unified under
genital sexuality, which becomes primary. Therefore,
the ‘‘opposition found in all sexual life clearly manifests itself ’’ within a development stage, whether it be
the second pregenital or anal-sadistic phase. This is an
opposition not between masculine and feminine but
between active and passive. Freud noted, ‘‘The activity
is put into operation by the instinct for mastery
through the agency of the somatic musculature; the
organ which, more than any other, represents the passive sexual aim is the erotogenic mucous membrane of
the anus’’ (p. 198). This association comes into play
during the anal sadistic phase, since, for Freud, earlier
sexual activity, that of oral, or ‘‘cannibalistic,’’ organization, does not yet display these ‘‘opposing currents.’’
Primarily within a clinical framework Freud noted
the opposition of active and passive with respect
to homosexuality as well as the opposites sadism/
masochism and voyeurism/exhibitionism. He wrote
that sexual intent ‘‘manifests itself in a dualistic form:
active and passive.’’ A 1915 addition to the Three Essays
generalized these ideas, designating activity and passivity as ‘‘universal characteristics of sexual life’’ (p. 159).
In ‘‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’’ (1915c) Freud
further elaborated these ideas, which led him from the
use of clinical findings to an analysis of the internal
mechanism of the drive. Every drive is active in itself;
it is a ‘‘piece of activity’’ (p. 122). However, the aim of
the drive, which is always satisfaction, can be achieved
by various means. One way is the ‘‘change from activity to passivity’’ (p. 127). For instance, in sadism/
masochism, the active goal of tormenting and watching is replaced by the passive goal of being tormented,
of being watched. Therefore, three simultaneous or
successive positions of the subject with respect to the
object can result in satisfaction: active, passive (a reverINTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
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sal back to oneself), and ‘‘reflected means’’ (observing
oneself, self-inflicted pain). This flexibility of the
instinctive aims of the drive contrasts with the fixity of
perverse sexuality.
In developing his theory of psychosexuality, Freud
closely linked the pairs activity/passivity and masculine/
feminine, which he sometimes used as synonyms. In
some texts, in fact, Freud’s clinical observations shows
them to be nearly indistinguishable, for example, in the
Wolf Man’s regression from passive desires to masochistic and feminine desires toward his father (1918b
[1914]). Later and in a context less closely associated
with individual clinical analysis, Freud insisted on the
importance of not ‘‘indentify[ing] activity with maleness and passivity with femaleness’’ (1930a, p. 106).
As for the role of active and passive in the theory of
the ego, Freud, in 1915, emphasized that transformations of the drive by repression and reversal protect the
psychic apparatus. These transformations depend on
‘‘the narcissistic organization of the ego and bear the
stamp of that phase. They perhaps correspond to the
attempts at defense which at higher stages of the development of the ego are effected by other means’’ (p. 132).
The transformations between active and passive imply a
narcissistic consistency and a drive that is also no longer
‘‘poorly connected and independent’’ (Freud, 1915c).
After 1920 and his introduction of the structural theory (ego, id, superego), Freud could refer to a passive ego
confronting an id, or a masochistic or feminine ego confronting a sadistic superego (1928b). He then renewed
his study of psychoses, melancholy, and trauma. It was
around this time that Freud introduced the death drive
and its essentially destructive effect through unbinding.
With the notion of unbinding Freud could better distinguish the activity of the drive from its potential for
destructive aggression. The internal organization of sadism/masochism (mastery, sadism, primary and secondary masochism) could then be conceived as protecting
the psyche by binding the death drive (1924c). The repetition compulsion also reintroduces psychic binding
through the interplay of activity and passivity in the face
of trauma. This occurs during the child’s play when the
child ‘‘makes the transition from passivity to activity [in
order to] psychically control her impressions of life.’’
These perspectives are extensively explored in contemporary psychoanalytic work.
SERGE GAUTHIER
17
ACT, PASSAGE
TO THE
See also: Homosexuality; Instinctual impulse; Masculinity/
femininity; Sadomasochism; Turning around.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1896b). Further remarks on the neuropsychoses of defence. SE, 3: 157–185.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
———. (1915c). Instincts and their vicissitudes. SE, 14:
109–140.
———. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile
neurosis. SE, 17: 1–122.
———. (1924c). The economic problem of masochism. SE,
19: 155–170.
———. (1928b). Dostoevsky and parricide. SE, 21:
173–196.
———. (1930a). Civilization and its discontents. SE, 21:
57–145.
ACT, PASSAGE TO THE
A particular kind of action defined by its disruptive and
even criminal character. Whether the aggression characterizing such an act is directed at the self or at others, it is
generally considered psychopathological. In ‘‘passage to
the act’’ it is the idea of ‘‘passage’’ that is important, for it
refers to the relationship between the act and the supposed mental process that prepares for and facilitates it.
The French term passage à l’acte was borrowed by
psychoanalysis from psychiatry and criminology. It is
important that this notion not be confused with that
of acting-out/acting-in, which should be limited to the
framework of the treatment and the dynamics of the
transference. More generally speaking, passage to the
act, like inhibited action and procrastination, raises
the issue of the connection between thought and
action. Freud emphasized on several occasions how
one could be substituted for the other. In obsessions,
for instance, thought replaced action by virtue of a
kind of regression (1909d); in the case of primitive
peoples, by contrast, the act seemed to replace thought
in a way consonant with Goethe’s dictum, ‘‘In the
beginning was the deed’’ (1912–13a, p. 161).
It was not in a philosophical context that the notion
of passage to the act was developed, however, but
rather in connection with the often unpredictable
18
character of certain antisocial and violent acts. What
the word ‘‘passage’’ denoted was the sudden lurch
from a fantasied act to a real act, a shift that would
normally be inhibited by defense mechanisms.
Jacques Lacan drew attention to the way anxiety
was resolved by a passage to the act (1962–63). For
many authors, passage to the act is the effect of a preoedipal mode of psychic functioning dominated by
primary processes, by an inability to tolerate frustration, respect reality-testing, or curb a tendency to
impulsiveness. In this view a weak ego may be responsible for a propensity to pass to the act; but a grandiose
ego, eager to exert omnipotent control over its surroundings, can also be the culprit. The ‘‘act’’ here is
more like a motor discharge than an action intended
to transform reality, which requires the subject to
delay the discharge by means of a thought-process permitting the psychic apparatus to endure tension so
long as release is thus deferred (Freud, 1911b).
Passage to the act concerns the relationship between
the act and its mentalization; it could indeed be
regarded as a near-total exclusion of any mental process from the act. Any understanding of such an act,
which is not assumed but rather presented by the agent
as passively experienced, must depend on an effort of
decipherment (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1987; Balier,
1988). For this reason passage to the act has been
likened to somatization, since both are characterized
by a lack of psychic working-out, even by alexithymia.
Alternatively, it might be argued that passage to the
act does not rely on an absence of mentalization, but
rather on a kind of ‘‘telescoping’’ (Aulagnier, 1975/
2001) of fantasy and reality. In this perspective, far
from being the consequence of a failure of mentalization, the passage to the act results from an overflowing
of the fantasy world into reality because an element of
reality has impinged on the fantasy scenario and
opened a breach enabling the act to externalize it.
It is hard, therefore, to reduce the notion of passage
to the act to a simple causality. Instead, instances of
passage to the act should be defined in terms of the
particular individual involved, and their specific psychodynamic features examined case by case. Thus
schizophrenic and paranoid homicidal passages to the
act present considerable differences, even if both
embody an inadequate attempt to dissipate unbearable
anxiety. A paranoid passage to the act is liable to occur
when the persecuting object is lost sight of and the
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A C T U A L N E U R O S I S /D E F E N S E N E U R O S I S
persecutory system is destabilized (Zagury, 1990). The
passage to the act in borderline conditions depends
rather on a lack of identifications (Bergeret, 2002),
while such acts in adolescents may be fostered by the
emergence of destabilizing instinctual impulses conducive to either excess or asceticism.
If one resists the temptation to simplify the notion,
it appears that passage to the act may have a large variety of etiologies. Meanwhile, the notion clearly belongs
to a very broad philosophical discussion of the relationship between thought and action.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Abstinence/rule of abstinence; Acting out/acting
in; Criminology and psychoanalysis; Thought.
Bibliography
Aulagnier, Piera. (1975). The violence of interpretation: From
statement to pictogram. East Sussex, Philadelphia: BrunnerRoutledge. (Original work published 1975)
Balier, Claude. (1988). Psychanalyse des comportements violents. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Bergeret, Jean. (2002). Le passage à l’acte de l’état limite.In Frédéric Millaud (Ed.), Le passage à l’acte: aspects
cliniques et psychodynamiques (pp. 111–117). Paris,
Masson.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine. (1987). L’acting out: quelques
réflexions sur la carence d’élaboration psychique. Revue
française de psychanalyse, 51, 4.
Freud, Sigmund. (1909d). Notes upon a case of obsessional
neurosis. SE, 10: 151–318.
———. (1911b). Formulations on the two principles of
mental functioning. SE, 12: 213–226.
———. (1912–13a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
Lacan, Jacques. (2004). Le séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse,
1962–1963. Paris: Seuil.
Millaud, Frédéric (Ed.). (2002). Le Passage à l’acte: aspects
cliniques et psychodynamiques. Paris: Masson.
ACTUAL NEUROSIS/DEFENSE NEUROSIS
The distinction between the actual neurosis and the
neurosis of defense was made by Freud very early on in
the context of his theory of the sexual origins of neurosis. In 1898, in an article entitled ‘‘Sexuality in the
Aetiology of the Neuroses,’’ he clearly described these
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two categories of neurosis in terms of both aetiology
and treatment: ‘‘In every case of neurosis there is a sexual aetiology; but in neurasthenia it is an aetiology of a
present-day kind, whereas in the psychoneuroses the
factors are of an infantile nature’’ (1898a, p. 268). This
contrast between actual and infantile sexuality in the
causation of the two kinds of neurosis entailed correspondingly different therapeutic approaches, namely
prophylaxis and deconditoning in the case of actual
neuroses (pp. 275–76) and psychoanalysis in that of
the defense neuroses.
Into the class of actual neuroses fell, chiefly, neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis. Later (1914c, p. 83),
Freud added hypochondria. In his view the distinction
between neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis depended
on the specificity of the sexual noxa in each: ‘‘Neurasthenia can always be traced back to a condition of
the nervous system such as is acquired by excessive
masturbation or arises spontaneously from frequent
emissions; anxiety neurosis regularly discloses sexual
influences which have in common the factor of reservation or of incomplete satisfaction’’ (1898a, p. 268).
The mechanism of actual neurosis was essentially
linked to a disjunction between the somatic sexual
excitation and object representations in the unconscious. This failure of somatopsychic communication
was caused by particular conditions of mental functioning and generally led to symptoms.
The defense neuroses subsumed conversion hysteria, anxiety hysteria (phobic neurosis), and obsessional neurosis. In contrast to the actual neuroses, they
were caused by psychic conflict. In ‘‘The NeuroPsychoses of Defense’’ (1894a), Freud described the
mechanism of these conditions as a disjunction
between ideas and affects. The idea, erotic in character,
underwent repression, whereas the affect had a specific
fate for each type of neurosis: somatic conversion in
hysteria, displacement in obsessional neurosis, and
projection in phobic neurosis.
Freud rounded out his psychodynamic conception
of the defense neuroses in 1906, in ‘‘My Views on the
Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses,’’ describing neurotic symptoms as compromises
between two mental currents: the libidinal current,
determined by the subject’s sexual ‘‘constitution,’’ and
the repression carried out by the ego (1906a, p. 277).
The distinction between actual and defense neuroses has taken on fresh significance in present-day
19
ACTUAL NEUROSIS/DEFENSE NEUROSIS
psychoanalysis as a result of new thinking on psychosomatic disorders. The fact that it corresponds so closely with the distinction drawn by Pierre Marty in his
classification of psychosomatic conditions between
well and badly-mentalized neuroses has led to its
becoming both a model for the economic assessment
of psychosomatic processes and a frame of reference
for the analysis of clinical findings.
In this perspective, the symptoms of actual neuroses
belong to the same instinctual framework as those of
hysteria and, more generally, those of the transference
neuroses. What differentiates them is the specific process affecting sexuality and the relations between the
instincts. This postulate is the foundation of Freud’s
psychosomatic monism and shifts the duality into the
instinctual realm.
The somatic symptoms of actual neurosis express
more or less far-reaching material degradation of
organs and functions. From the psychoanalytical
standpoint, however, we must treat them, along with
Freud, as resulting from the intensification of the
organ’s erotogenic function and from the distortion of
the action of the instinct in its own terms. It is only
logical, if psychosomatic phenomena are to be considered from the standpoint of psychoanalysis, that all
reference to any conceptual framework other than the
instinctual one be excluded from a comprehensive
approach to the somatic symptom or to somatic
illness.
Such an approach must be congruent with the
internal coherence of the psychoanalytic apparatus, a
coherence with three dimensions, clinical, theoretical,
and therapeutic. From the psychic point of view,
which is to say from the point of view of psychosexuality, the organization of the actual neuroses is characterized by an overall incapacity for working matters
out, and this for determinate reasons of both a structural and a developmental kind. This is the reason why
patients suffering from such neuroses have been
excluded from psychoanalysis intervention, the sole
purpose of which for Freud was to uncover the role of
the unconscious in mental life—a point about which
he was categorical. In his twenty-fourth Introductory
Lecture, entitled ‘‘The Common Neurotic State,’’ he
noted that, ‘‘It was more important for me that you
should gain an idea of psycho-analysis than that you
should obtain some pieces of knowledge about the
neuroses; and for that reason the ‘actual’ neuroses,
unproductive so far as psycho-analysis is concerned,
20
could no longer have a place in the foreground’’
(1916–17a, p. 389). Thus the classification of actual
neurosis could not be applied to any mental organization in which psychoanalysis was led to identify
psychic conflicts or defense mechanisms such as
repression—these being firm indications, in Freud’s
eyes, of psychoneurosis.
In his broad conception of the neuroses, however,
Freud included the actual neuroses, clearly defining
their place and according them an important role with
not inconsiderable theoretical consequences: ‘‘A noteworthy relation between the symptoms of the ‘actual’
neuroses and of the psychoneuroses makes a further
important contribution to our knowledge of the formation of symptoms in the latter. For a symptom of
an ‘actual’ neurosis is often the nucleus and first stage
of a psychoneurotic symptom’’ (1916–17a, p. 390).
This view of things opens up a whole area of psychosomatic research; it also provides the theoretical context
for Freud’s notion of somatic compliance.
CLAUDE SMADIA
See also: Conversion; Disorganization; Excitation; Hypochondria; Psychosomatic; Symptom-formation.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1894a). The neuro-psychoses of defence.
SE, 3: 41–61.
———. (1898a). Sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses.
SE, 3: 259–285.
———. (1906a). My views on the part played by sexuality
in the aetiology of the neuroses. SE, 7: 269–279.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
———. (1916–17a [1915–1917]). Introductory lectures on
psycho-analysis. SE, 15–16.
Further Reading
Gediman, Helen K. (1984). Actual neurosis and psychoneurosis.International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 65,
191-202.
Hartocollis, Peter. (2002). "Actual neurosis" and psychosomatic medicine. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83,
1361-1374.
Kaplan, Donald B. (1984). Some conceptual and technical
aspects of the actual neurosis. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 65, 295-306.
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ACUTE PSYCHOSES
ACUTE PSYCHOSES
The notion of acute psychosis as envisaged by psychiatry is situated on the border of psychoanalysis. The
acute psychoses, sudden and severe disorganizations of
the mind, all have in common a disturbance of the relational faculties, a loss of contact with what is commonly
accepted as reality, and a diminishing or absence of
critical abilities with regard to the pathological.
There are multiple different forms of acute psychosis. Among these are melancholic and manic episodes,
which can clinically exist in alternation (hence the framework of manic-depressive psychosis) and which are
associated with Freud’s writings on the ‘‘narcissistic
neuroses’’; acute delusional psychoses, some of which
are linked to the development of chronic psychosis;
and finally, dream-confusion disorders, for which the
possibility of an organic etiology must always be investigated. As varied as they are, these disorders all have
in common the temporal features of an ‘‘attack’’: They
are sudden, uncontrollable, incomprehensible, and
reversible.
Since antiquity, melancholia has referred to a form
of madness characterized by ‘‘black bile’’: dejection,
sadness, spiritual pain, feelings of abjection and guilt
that may be expressed in delusional form, and despair
that may lead to suicide. Emil Kraepelin incorporated
melancholia into manic-depressive psychosis. Karl
Abraham, in his 1912 publication ‘‘Notes on the
Psycho-Analytical Investigation and Treatment of
Manic-Depressive Insanity and Allied Conditions,’’
attempted to apply a psychoanalytic approach to cases
that were ‘‘cyclical’’ (1912/1927, p. 138) in their evolution. His way of envisioning the psychogenesis of the
attack, and his reference to a ‘‘hidden structure’’ and
ambivalence stimulated the thinking of Sigmund
Freud, who had been investigating melancholia as
early as 1895. In a manuscript sent to Wilhelm Fliess
that year, Freud compared it to ‘‘mourning—that is,
longing for something lost’’ (Manuscript G, p. 200). In
1917 he published ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia,’’
where he envisioned melancholia as the pathological
form of mourning. In the work of mourning, the subject is able to gradually achieve detachment from the
lost object; in melancholia, by contrast, the subject
identifies with the lost object and believes him- or
herself to be guilty of its disappearance.
The acute psychoses, and especially attacks of melancholia, owing to their frequent recurrence and
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possible alternation with mania, from the outset presented psychoanalysis with the problem of the relationship between attack and structure. ‘‘Structure’’
implies that no term of the field in question can be
approached without taking into consideration the
terms that are articulated together with it; no single
term takes effect without the others. The three conditions that Freud posited as the origin of melancholia—
loss of the object, ambivalence, and regression of the
libido into the ego—provide the framework of a structure. Whatever may reactivate such a mechanism
around the loss of object provokes another melancholic attack, and Freud explored this ‘‘struggle of
ambivalence’’ (1916–1917g [1915], p. 257) in which
the ego itself becomes carried away in the process of
accusation of the object, or even its ‘‘condemnation to
death.’’ He posited that this process can come to an
end in the unconscious, either through exhaustion or
through exclusion of the object, which is thereafter
deemed worthless. The ego can then revel in the satisfaction of recognizing itself as the best, as superior to
the object. The accumulation of a cathexis that is at
first bound, and then liberated at the end of the melancholic process—the enabling condition for possible
mania—implies regression of the libido to narcissism.
In The Ego and the Id (1923b), he analyzed the ego’s
dependency states, writing: ‘‘If we turn to melancholia
first we find that the excessively strong super-ego
which has obtained a hold upon consciousness rages
against the ego with merciless violence’’ (p. 53). What
dominates the superego here is ‘‘a pure culture of the
death instinct’’ (p. 53). In ‘‘Neurosis and Psychosis’’
(1924b [1923]) he restricted the ‘‘narcissistic neuroses,’’ characterized by withdrawal of the libido onto
the ego, to disorders of the melancholic type.
In order to envisage acute psychoses as a whole, Melanie Klein’s theoretical elaboration must be mentioned.
In 1935 Klein stopped referring to ‘‘developmental
stages’’ and instead began using the term position to
differentiate psychotic anxieties in children from psychoses in adults. In this view, psychosis is seen sometimes as a temporal regression reversible to either the
paranoid or the depressive position, sometimes as the
‘‘fertile moment’’ of a psychosis arrested in such a
‘‘position,’’ and sometimes as a cyclical episode that
can be clinically treated, even if the subject’s anchorage
in such a ‘‘position’’ remains structurally determined.
It should be noted that the various acute psychoses
were the object of a clinical and psychopathological
21
ADAPTATION
synthesis by Henri Ey (in the third volume of his
Études psychiatriques) that often challenges psychoanalysis.
Acute psychosis is an expression of the complexity of
what is happing on different levels in the patient; the
possibility of some severe organic dysfunction cannot be
ruled out, nor can the possibility of a reactive crisis. In
any event, the patient’s acute state requires specific types
of care, and his or her history is essentially done away
with by the urgency of the circumstances. The anguish
of people close to the patient and the team of caregivers
in the face of madness must be taken into account.
Research confirms the effectiveness of a psychotherapeutic approach based on psychoanalytic conceptions associated with traditional methods of treatment of the
acute episode. In the most favorable conditions, such an
approach still makes structural study possible.
MICHEL DEMANGEAT
See also: Mania; Melancholic depression; Organic psychoses; Postnatal/postpartum depression; Psychotic/
neurotic
Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1927). Notes on the psycho-analytical
investigation and treatment of manic-depressive insanity
and allied conditions. In Selected papers on psycho-analysis.
(Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey, Trans.). Hogarth Press:
London. (Original work published 1912)
Ey, Henri. Traité de psychiatrie clinique et thérapeutique.
Paris: E.M.-C., 1955.
Freud, Sigmund. (1916–17g [1915]). Mourning and melancholia. SE, 14: 237–258.
———. (1923). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
Klein, Melanie. (1975). A contribution to the psychogenesis
of manic-depressive states. In The writings of Melanie Klein
(Vol. I, pp. 262–289). London: Hogarth. (Reprinted from
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16 (1935), 145–
174.)
Further Reading
Knight, Robert P. (1945). Use of psychoanalytic principles in
therapy acute psychosis. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 9,
145–154. Anal Sadistic Stage
Shengold, Leonard. (1985). Defensive anality and anal narcissism. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 66, 47–74.
———. (1988). Halo in the sky: Observations on anality and
defense. New York: Guilford Press.
22
ADAPTATION
Adaptation is not part of Freudian vocabulary (it does
not appear in the index of the Standard Edition, for
example). The idea of adaptation, however, is present
throughout Freud’s work. It appears as early as 1895, in
his ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’’ (1950a), when
he discusses the mechanisms of perception, attention
and memory. The idea runs through all of Freud’s subsequent work whenever he discusses the relation
between psychic reality and the ‘‘reality of the outside
world.’’ It is found, for example, in ‘‘Instincts and their
Vicissitudes’’ (1915c) and ‘‘Repression’’ (1915d), when
he writes that dangers that can’t be avoided through
behavioral means are ‘‘rejected toward the interior.’’
Other texts where the concept appears include ‘‘Neurosis and Psychosis’’ (1924b), ‘‘The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis’’ (1924e), and ‘‘An Outline of Psycho-Analysis’’ (1940a). In fact, there are few texts by
Freud where the question of adaptation isn’t found,
even if the word itself rarely appears.
Adaptation and the related theoretical issues are
central to the development of ego-psychology, which
was, for the most part, based on Freud’s structural theory and the work of Anna Freud (1936/1937) and
Heinz Hartmann, author of Ego Psychology and the
Problem of Adaptation (1938/1958). It was in this period that a theorical schism developed, leading to differences in clinical psychoanalytic practice between
those analysts (especially English-speaking) who
adapted this point of view and those who preferred
other options, either along the lines developed by
Melanie Klein and her successors or the rather different approach taken by Lacan and his successors.
Jacques Lacan was, in fact, highly critical of the primacy given to the problems of adaptation in egopsychology. He emphasized that naively establishing
‘‘external reality’’ as a given prior to and outside of
psychic activity is a theoretical absurdity since that
exterior reality is constructed through close interaction with psychic reality itself. He also pointed out the
dangers of an analytical practice in which the analyst,
within the framework of a normative and ‘‘normalizing’’ enterprise, developed mastery, or even a sense of
excessive power, in assuming that his or her own
‘‘adaptation’’ is by definition better than that of the
patient. Whatever one might think of these criticisms
and their rebuttals, there is little doubt that they have
had considerable impact, well beyond the field of
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Lacanian thought, especially in the French-speaking
world. Unfortunately, this has had the effect of
‘‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’’ through
the unjustified condemnation of any psychoanalytic
consideration of the problems of adaptation. These
problems cannot be avoided, however, to the extent
that psychic processes are constantly being adjusted in
terms of their internal equilibrium and modified as a
result of the impact of outside events.
ROGER PERRON
See also: Defense; Ego; Ego Psychology and the Problem of
Adaptation; Individuation (analytical psychology);
Kardiner, Abram; Normality; Pichon-Rivière, Enrique;
Self (true/false).
Bibliography
Canguilhem, Georges. (1989). The normal and the pathological (Carolyn R. Fawcett & Robert S. Cohen, Trans.). New
York: Zone Books. (Original work published 1966)
Freud, Anna. (1937). The ego and the mechanisms of defense.
London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1936)
Freud, Sigmund. (1915c). Instincts and their vicissitudes.
SE, 14: 109–140.
———. (1915d). Repression. SE, 14: 141–158.
———. (1924b [1923]). Neurosis and psychosis. SE, 19:
147–153.
———. (1924e). The loss of reality in neurosis and psychosis. SE, 19: 180–187.
———. (1940a [1938]). An outline of psycho-analysis. SE,
23: 139–207.
———. (1950a [1887–1902]). Extracts from the Fliess
papers. SE, 1: 173–280.
Hartmann Heinz. (1958). Ego psychology and the problem
of adaptation (David Rapaport, Trans.). New York: International Universities Press. (Original work published
1938)
ADDICTION
The Latin addictus refers to a person who is bound and
dependent as a result of unpaid debts. Metaphorically,
this term came to be used for any behavior that results
from a heavy dependence on something, such as a
drug. A number of common substances or those that
can be freely purchased can be used as drugs or
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become addictive substances: medication, alcoholic
beverages, glue, and so on. Psychoanalytically, the
power of a particular addiction depends both on the
unconscious fantasies that underlie the subject’s ingestion, and the substance’s actual chemical effect.
Sigmund Freud refers to addiction in an early paper
on ‘‘Hypnosis’’ (1891d, p. 106), and in a letter to
Wilhelm Fliess of December 22, 1897, he refers to masturbation as the ‘‘primary addiction’’ (1950a, p. 272;
1985c, p. 287). Karl Abraham (1908/1927) studied
alcohol addiction. Sándor Radó (1933) associated
addiction with a regression to childhood. Otto
Fenichel (1945) developed the concept of addiction as
a regression to infantile stages, and his descriptions of
alcohol as a means of diluting the superego are especially interesting. Herbert Rosenfeld (1965) referred to
the manic-depressive signs that underlie addiction,
and connected addiction to pathological narcissism of
the Self. Donald Winnicott (1951/1953) associated
addiction with a pathology of the transitional.
Winnicott’s transitional object, a creation/discovery of
the subject, opens up an intermediary zone of experience, which then expands into play and cultural life,
while the transitional object is disinvested and loses its
meaning. In addiction, this process of opening up and
development is held back, and the transitional object
continues to carry out its original function (counteracting depressive anxiety), in the form of a continuing
disavowal. The transitional object is concretized, is
‘‘fetishized,’’ and becomes susceptible to replacement
by a drug as an object that can be manipulated by the
omnipotent subject, enabling him to deny the separation and the resulting depression.
A number of authors who have studied compulsive
behavior have included a dependence on alcohol or
another substance into their inquiry. Dostoyevsky, in
The Brothers Karamazov, provides a clear description
of the motivations that underlie addictive behavior,
such as sexual dependency and pathological games.
Addiction to a substance is sometimes replaced
with another form of dependence, for example, addictions to food, to sex with prostitutes, to gambling, to
spree-buying, to physical exercise, to web surfing, or
to playing video games (whereby the internal world is
projected onto the characters who fight, kill, love, or
hate on screen). There is also the addiction to pseudoreligious cults, which serves as a substitute for a dependence on and subjugation to drugs. It is important to
note that the other can also become an addictive object
23
ADHESIVE IDENTIFICATION
(McDougall, 1982), serving as a drug might, to fill
holes in the subject’s identity.
DAVID ROSENFELD
See also: Alcoholism; Alienation; Cocaine and psychoanalysis; Dependence; Dipsomania; Freud: Living and Dying;
Passion.
Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1927). The psychological relations between
sexuality and alcoholism. In Selected papers on psychoanalysis, London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published
1908)
Freud, Sigmund. (1891d). Hypnosis. SE, 1: 103–114.
———. (1897a). Infantile cerebral paralysis. (Lester A.
Russin, Trans.). Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami
Press, 1968.
———. (1950a [1887–1902]). Extracts from the Fliess
papers. SE, 1: 173–280.
———. (1985c [1887–1904]). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (Jeffrey M.
Masson Ed. and Trans.). Cambridge, MA, London:
Belknap/Harvard University Press.
Fenichel, Otto. (1945). The psychoanalytic theory of neurosis.
New York: W.W. Norton.
McDougall, Joyce. (1982). The narcissistic economy and its
relation to primitive sexuality. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 18, 373–396.
Radó, Sándor. (1933). The psychoanalysis of pharmacothymia. Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 2, 1–23.
Rosenfeld, Herbert. (1965). Psychotic states: A psychoanalytic
approach. London: Hogarth Press.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena, a study of the first not-me possession.
Collected papers, through paediatrics to psycho-analysis (pp.
229–242). (Reprinted from International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 34 (1951), 89–97.)
ADHESIVE IDENTIFICATION
At very early stages the infant fails to develop a sense
of a containing skin. It can then only gain a sense of
holding together by sticking, in fantasy, to the outside
of objects, giving rise to a form of mimicry which
Esther Bick termed adhesive identification. The concept first appears in a Donald Meltzer publication
(1975).
24
Esther Bick’s infant observation work showed the
skin as a primary object stabilizing the ego in the
paranoid-schizoid position. She described the most
primitive experiences of falling apart in pieces or, even
worse, as a shapeless liquid leaking out. She also
described protective measures that an infant may perform with its body and its perception in order to give a
greater experience of remaining coherent and contained. She noticed various muscular or verbal abilities
which developed precociously as if they were methods
for substituting a second skin over a leaky primary
containing object.
Certain children, however, seem to have been particularly doomed to the experience of leaking, and
almost all emotional experience is felt as a rent in the
containing skin. Such a raw experience of bleeding and
leaking may then be covered by a particular form of
sticking to an object, adhering to it. That person is
then incorporated as the skin that prevents leaks.
One of the consequences is that while the concentration is upon sustaining a complete surface, there is
no sense of depth to the person. He feels literally that
he cannot contain. Ordinary projection and introjection are not possible.
This process gives rise then to a form of objectrelationship in which there is a very shallow attempt at
mimicry of the object, in contrast to an identification in
which the identity of the other person is more richly
carved into the person’s own self. This description of
very early phenomena has been useful in understanding
infantile autism (Meltzer et. al., 1975; Tustin, 1981).
The ‘‘skin ego’’ concept of Didier Anzieu (1985) is a
more versatile notion, being applicable outside the
psycho-analytic setting, in groups and organizations.
Pierre M. Turquet (1975) also used the notion of the
skin as container in large group experience.
The infantile notion of the skin and its deviations
(adhesive identification and the "second skin ’’) can
appear to have reductionist properties, since all phenomena at a later stage can be attributed to experiences at the level of developing the skin boundary. In
addition, there is a problem in that the theories of the
skin and adhesive identification were derived firstly
from a non-psychoanalytic setting (infant observation,
and in group phenomena) so that its status in psychoanalytic work, practice and theory, is disputed.
ROBERT D. HINSHELWOOD
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A D L E R , A L F R E D (1870 –1 937)
See also: Autism; Autistic capsule/nucleus; Dismantlement;
Infant development; Infant observation (therapeutic).
Bibliography
Anzieu, Didier (1989) The skin ego. New Haven-London:
Yale University Press. (Original work published 1985)
Bick, Esther. (1968). The experience of the skin in early
object relations. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,
XLIX, 558–566.
———. (1986). Further considerations on the functioning
of skin in early object relations: findings from infant observation integrated into child and adult analysis. British Journal of Psychotherapy, II, 292–299.
Meltzer, Donald. (1975). Adhesive identification. Contemporary Psycho-Analysis, 11, 289–310.
Turquet, Pierre. (1975). Threats to identity in the large
group. In L. Kreeger (Ed.) The large group (p. 87–114).
London: Constable.
Tustin, Frances. (1981). Autistic states in children. London:
Routledge.
ADLER, ALFRED (1870–1937)
An Austrian physician, psychologist, and psychotherapist, Alfred Adler was born February 7, 1870, in
Vienna and died May 28, 1937, in Aberdeen, Scotland.
The son of a grain merchant, he was raised in Vienna
and received his medical degree in 1895. After opening
his medical practice, he took an interest in social issues
and, in 1902, became part of Sigmund Freud’s circle of
friends. He was one of the most active members of the
group and one of the most original. After creating the
International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) in
1910, he became the head of the Vienna group and,
with Stekel, became co-editor of the Zentralblatt für
Psychoanalyse, founded the same year.
In 1911 he left the IPA with nine other members
because of irreconcilable theoretical differences and
founded the Verein für Freie Psychoanalytische
Forschung (Society for Free Analytic Research), which
he transformed in 1913 into the Verein für Individualpsychologie (Society for Individual Psychology).
After 1914 he was editor (with Carl Furtmüller) of his
own publication, Zeitschrift für Individualpsychologie
(Journal of Individual Psychology), the publication of
which was interrupted in 1916, becoming, in 1923, the
Internationale Zeitschrift für Individualpsychologie
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(International Journal of Individual Psychology). In
1912 he tried to obtain a research position at the University of Vienna, but was refused.
Interested in practice and educational issues in particular, after 1919 he established a number educational
clinics (for teachers, parents, and students), which
served as models for practitioners abroad. In 1929 he
created the first dispensary of individual psychology
(for adults and children). He was also involved in the
training of teachers, for he had worked at the Vienna
teacher’s college since 1924, which brought him closer
to the city’s educators, on whom he exercised considerable influence.
After 1926 he gave lectures throughout Europe and
the United States, initially at Columbia University,
then, after 1933, as professor of medical psychology at
the Long Island College of Medicine in New York, as
well as a consultant at the hospital. To honor him for
his scientific achievements, he was named an honorary
citizen of the city of Vienna in 1930 and was made a
doctor honoris causa in the United States, to which he
had emigrated in 1935, primarily for political reasons.
His two major works are A Study of Organ Inferiority and its Psychological Compensation: A Contribution
to Clinical Medicine (1907) and The Neurotic Constitution (1912/1972), in which he makes a clear break with
Freud. The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology
(1927), Understanding Human Nature (1927), and Die
Technik der Individualpsychologie (1928–1930) were
the result of his many talks, and were intended for a
broader public.
Adler rejected Freud’s theory of the libido and,
with the creation of individual psychology, which was
developed as a new direction in psychotherapy, he
created the first significant schism in the psychoanalytic movement. He considered the individual as a
complete being, including social and sociological
aspects that began with the infant’s feelings of inferiority, compensation, and the search for power and
supremacy, as well as the sense of belonging to a collectivity. Adler considered psychic development to be
the formation of an unconscious life plan, or even a
lifestyle, starting with early childhood, and that later
symptoms had to be taken into account from this
point of view—in this sense Adler’s approach was teleological. As an ego-centered psychology, Adler’s
individual psychology has had its greatest influence
25
ADOLESCENCE
on other psychotherapeutic currents, such as humanist psychology and neoanalysis.
HELMUT GRÖGER
See also: Aggressiveness; Austria; Femininity, rejection of;
Monism; Masculine protest (individual psychology);
Aggressive instinct/aggressive drive; Inferiority, feeling
of; Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society; Wiener
psychoanalytische Vereinigung.
Bibliography
Adler, Alfred. (1927). The practice and theory of individual
psychology. New York: Harcourt Brace.
———. (1927). Understanding human nature (Walter Béran
Wolfe, Trans.). New York: Greenberg.
———. (1928–1930). Die Technik der Individualpsychologie.
München: Bergmann.
———. (1972). The neurotic constitution (Bernard Glueck
and John E. Lind, Trans.). Freeport, N.Y.: Books for
Libraries Press (Original work published 1912).
Hoffman, Edward. (1994). The drive for self: Alfred Adler and
the founding of individual psychology. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Schiferer, H. Rüdiger, Gröger, Helmut, and Skopec,
Manfred. (1995). Alfred Adler: eine Bildbiographie. Mit
bisher unbekannten Original-Dokumenten und zum grössten
Teil unveröffentlichten Abbildungen. Munich-Basel: Ernst
Reinhardt.
ADOLESCENCE
In psychoanalysis, adolescence is a developmental stage,
a key moment during which three transformations
occur: the disengagement from parental ties that have
been interiorized since infancy; the sexual impulse discovering object love under the primacy of genital and
orgasmic organizations; and identification, the impetus
for topographic readjustment and the affirmation of
identity and subjectivity. These transformations begin
with the onset of adolescence, concluding when infantile sexual activity has reached its final form. Adolescence is, therefore, a completion of the process of ego
maturation. It is characterized by the conflict that these
transformations bring about and the ensuing crisis
resulting from the wish for adult sexual activity and the
fear of giving up infantile pleasure.
There is little discussion of the concept of adolescence in Freud’s own writing. However, the term
26
‘‘puberty’’ is frequently found. More than two hundred and fifty references to the concept have been
found in his work, even outside of the Minutes of the
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Referring to the Standard Edition, the majority of entries catalogued for the
word ‘‘adolescence’’ are found in the Studies on Hysteria (1895d) and half of them are by Joseph Breuer.
However, the references do not fully take into account
linguistic issues and the associated problems of translation. For example, in the majority of French translations of Freud’s work, there is frequent reference to the
term ‘‘adolescence.’’
Although adolescents appear among the first cases
of clinical psychoanalysis, such as that of Katharina,
who was eighteen at the time, and especially that of
Dora, most references to the role of puberty from the
perspective of development appear in Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality (1905d). In Some Reflections on
Schoolboy Psychology, (1914f), a text that is often mentioned in connection with adolescence, the problem of
growing up is presented by Freud as an extension of
the oedipal complex. The schoolboys see their teachers
as substitute parents. They transfer to them the
ambivalence of the feelings they once had for their
father. From this point of view, adolescence works
toward a separation from the father.
Although adolescence in Freud and in subsequent
psychoanalytic thought is often presented as an infantile screen-memory, that is, as the formation of a compromise between the repressed elements of infantile
sexuality and the defenses typical of adolescence, it is
also, through the theory of deferred action, an opportunity for new psychic activity, a kind of rebirth in
which the past can only be understood in light of the
present. Human history is understood in terms of its
past, but its past is illuminated in terms of its present,
and, in the case of adolescence, in terms of the traumatic present.
In fact, psychoanalysts have always had, whether
manifestly or latently, a bipolar idea of adolescence.
First, as the occasion of two instinctual currents
through which the adolescent, burdened by the reemergence of infantile impulses on the one hand and
the discovery of orgasm (arising in adolescence) on
the other, must confront oedipal conflicts, the now
realizable threat of incest, and the parricidal and
matricidal feelings as condensations in fantasy of the
aggression associated with all growth: ‘‘growing up is
by nature an aggressive act’’ (Donald Winnicott).
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Second, as an expression of the bipolarity of the ties
between impulse and defense (Anna Freud), between
identification and identity (Evelyne Kestemberg),
between object libido and narcissistic libido (Philippe
Jeammet), and between the ‘‘pubertary,’’ which reflects
the powerful sensual current that no longer recognizes
its goals, and ‘‘adolescens,’’ which reflects the category
of the ideal (Philippe Gutton). This leads contemporary psychoanalysts to consider that the capacity of the
psychic apparatus to perform the work of binding can
be seen as a fundamental indicator of the fact that the
process of adolescence has been harmoniously completed. Dreams and action represent the creative activities of this capacity (François Ladame) whereas
unbinding (Raymond Cahn) is the source of serious
psychic pathology. The enigmatic discrepancy between
the bipolarity of the impulse and the transformational
object (Alain Braconnier) constantly underlies the
analysis of transference and counter-transference during adolescence.
in a way that broadens and extends the notion of crisis
or the process of individuation, as well as their relationship to anxiety and, especially, depression. The
concepts of ‘‘depressive threat’’ and ‘‘self-sabotage’’
help describe, clinically and theoretically, the process
of change specific to the adolescent, whose pathology
reveals the failures and avatars that are so magnificently exemplified in our culture through the heroic
figures of Narcissus, Oedipus, Hamlet and Ophelia,
Electra and Orestes, and, of course, Romeo and Juliet.
There are other theorizations as well: Adolescence
as a ‘‘crisis’’ (Pierre Mâle, Evelyne Kestemberg) or
breakdown (Moses Laufer), as an impasse in the process of development, that is, in the integration of the
sexualized body into the psychic apparatus. These
approaches reveal the difficulties and resistances the
subject experiences in giving up the forms of libidinal
satisfaction in which his infantile body was engaged,
difficulties and resistances that are manifest in the
transference through the representation and acting out
of the ‘‘central masturbation fantasy.’’
Bibliography
Although it is no longer psychoanalytically possible
to consider adolescence in terms of a traditional
genetic psychoanalytic psychology, that is, as the final
stage of development that makes it possible to access
an adult stage, it is still difficult to provide a comprehensive interpretation centered on any given aspect of
adolescence. The psychic impact of puberty determines the remodeling of identification, the expression
of fantasies, and self and object representations. The
psychic impacts of the social and the cultural determine the alterations of these same intrapsychic elements, as well as presenting psychoanalysts with the
problem of addressing the contradiction between a
focus on external objects versus a focus on internal
objects. From the point of view of psychoanalytic practice, the attention given to mental functioning, and to
affects in particular, enables psychoanalysts to understand many of the disturbances found in adolescence
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ALAIN BRACONNIER
See also: Acting out/acting in; Adolescent crisis; Anorexia
nervosa; Blos, Peter; Bulimia; Fairbairn, William Ronald
Dodds; ‘‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’’
(Dora/Ida Bauer); Genital love; Identification; Identity;
Infantile schizophrenia; Mâle, Pierre; Puberty; Screen
memory; Self-representation; Silberstein, Eduard; Suicidal behavior; Transgression; Young Girl’s Diary, A.
Blos, Peter. (1987). L’insoumission au père ou l’effort adolescent pour être masculin. Adolescence, 6 (21), 19–31.
Cahn, Raymond. (1998). L’Adolescent dans la psychanalyse:
l’aventure de la subjectivation. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 130–243.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
Jeammet, Philippe. (1994). Adolescence et processus de
changement. In D. Widlöcher (Ed.) Traité de psychopathologie (pp. 687–726). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Laufer, Moses. (1989). Adolescence et rupture du développement: une perspective psychanalytique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Further Reading
Blos, Peter. (1962). On adolescence. a psychoanalytic interpretation, New York: The Free Press of Glencoe.
———. (1979). The adolescent passage: developmental issues,
New York: International Universities Press.
Emde, Robert. (1985). From adolescence to midlife: remodeling the structure of adult development. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, 33(S), 59-112.
Esman, Aaron. (ed.) (1975). The psychology of adolescence,
essential readings, New York: International Universities Press.
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Hauser, Stuart T. and Smith, Henry F. (1991). The development and experience of affect in adolescence. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, 39(S), 131-168.
Novick, Kerry Kelly and Novick, Jack. (1994). Postoedipal
transformations: latency, adolescence, pathogenesis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 42,143-170.
Sarnoff, Charles. (1987). Psychotherapeutic strategies in late
latency through early adolescence, Northvale, NJ: Aronson.
ADOLESCENT CRISIS
The concept of adolescent crisis is not generally found
in the vocabulary of psychoanalysis. It was not used by
Freud and was not created by any psychoanalyst. In
France the concept gained currency following the success of Maurice Debesse’s La crise d’originalité juvenile
(The crisis of juvenile originality; 1941), which helped
spread and popularize the concept. Subsequently,
authors interested in adolescence, including psychoanalysts, picked up the term for their own uses, supporting it or criticizing it. The initial ambiguity and
lack of precision associated with the term probably
contributed to its success, but also turned it into a
grab-bag of ideas and the source of considerable misunderstanding. It has been used to refer to the culmination of the developmental process at the end of
childhood and the beginning of adulthood, as well as
to the behavioral manifestations and disturbances that
so often occur at this age.
Under the heading of ‘‘adolescent crisis’’ and in the
guise of the assumed originality of adolescents, the most
atypical behavior has been considered ‘‘normal’’ for this
age. This atypical behavior is claimed to be the price
paid for the crisis, which has been compared to a temporary disorganization when the young adolescent leaves
the stable environment of childhood for an as yet uncertain adulthood. Along with this change in environment
must be considered the maturation of the drives, quantitative effects that are said to push the adolescent toward
temporary anarchic behavior before it is channeled into
more stable pursuits. The crisis, understood from its
most obvious expression in a range of boisterous behavioral expressions, is said to be a sign of normality. On
the contrary, the lack of such drama in adolescence
would be a sign of excessive repression and a portent of
a disturbed future. The adolescent would face no psychic
work in making the transition to adulthood.
An alternate approach, based largely on the North
American developmental school, known through the
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work of Peter Blos and Margaret Mahler, sees adolescence as the culmination of a process of maturation.
This developmental approach further suggests that we
use the concept of crisis sparingly. It belongs more to a
romantic vision of adolescence than to any scientific
reality. According to this view, some adolescences
would be pathological, but most, the silent majority,
would not. Follow-up studies of difficult adolescences,
although fragmentary, suggest that the evolution in
adolescence is far from being as favorable as claimed.
Yet the vast majority of adolescences go unnoticed,
without any of the customary clinical or subjective
manifestations of an adolescent crisis.
The psychoanalytic approach to the intrapsychic
changes associated with puberty has developed in several phases. Three main explanatory models have been
proposed, each of which can be seen as a confirmation
of the others. The initial model of change was based
on the first discoveries in psychoanalysis, those associated with Studies on Hysteria (1895d) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a). This model of change
enabled the transition from symptoms to representations as a result of the change in the topographical register from the unconscious to the conscious through
the lifting of repression. This model characterizes the
Freudian approach to adolescence. Action deferred
until puberty actualizes and brings into the field of
consciousness, more or less disguised, the parameters
of infancy and in particular the Oedipus complex,
repressed during the latency period. Adolescence
becomes a repetition of infancy. The second model of
change is based on the displacement of libidinal investment. It was taken up by Anna Freud when she made
mourning the central parameter of the process of adolescence. The third model is a structural change of
personality.
Freud’s view of adolescence is not without ambiguity and seems to alternate between change and continuity, though it leans toward the latter interpretation.
Adolescence is essentially defined by its relation to
infancy. It represents access to the genital stage and is,
in this sense, the culmination of libidinal evolution
(Freud, 1905d). Consequently, it clarifies earlier stages
and gives deferred meaning to certain infantile experiences that have remained suspended and potentially
traumatic until pubertal genital development provides
them their fullest expression.
Little has been said concerning the intrapsychic
transformations of puberty. In these models, the
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understanding of adolescence is filtered through the
understanding of childhood. The advantage of adolescence lies in its ability retrospectively to clarify childhood through the retroactive effect of the two-stage
evolution of human sexuality and to serve as the doorway to adulthood. As a transitional period, it has no
density of its own. The changes of adolescence are seen
only as the continuation of a process begun at the start
of personality development. Adolescence is not so
much a crisis as a culmination of what existed embryonically in the infant.
The real change should be sought within obstacles
to development, that is, in pathology and what Moses
and Eglé Laufer refer to as ‘‘breaks in development.’’
For these authors, the adolescent’s pubescent body
becomes a stand-in for the dangerous incestuous parent. Actualization through transference of this
conflict-ridden oedipal bond enables the unconscious
or preconscious fantasy that structures this bond to be
brought up to date in what the authors refer to as the
‘‘central masturbatory fantasy.’’ They assign this fantasy a key role in the adolescent’s bond with his objects
and his own body—a representative of parental
objects. In accordance with Freudian ideas, the fantasy
is organized during infancy, but the changes to the
body in adolescence are what make it traumatic and
capable of provoking reactions of repudiation and the
various forms of arrested development that can result
from such repudiation.
During the decade since 1995, this conception of
adolescence as the fulfillment and repetition of infancy
has been modified by authors focusing on the specificity of this stage of life. The process of mourning
becomes especially important. Anna Freud was the
first to draw attention to the similarity of adolescence,
emotional disappointments, and periods of mourning.
The adolescent libido must detach itself from the parents so it can focus on new objects, and this results in
mourning for the nursing mother and the infant body.
During this interval between old and new investments,
the unattached libido searches for new objects to invest
in and returns to the adolescent ego, where it leads to
the narcissistic inflation and grandiose fantasies characteristic of this age. Moroseness, biliousness,
moments of uncertainty, even depersonalization and
periods of depression are signs of the more or less durable vacuity of libido investment.
Can adolescence be better understood with respect
to a past that is repeated or fulfilled, or a future to
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which it will be subordinated and that will confer subsequent meaning to it? Or should we rather see it as an
essential stage in development that can be reduced
neither to what came before nor to what will follow?
Does adolescence have an identity of its own, such that
the nature of the changes that affect it imprint a specific mark on the evolution and destiny of the subject? If
so, what is the nature of these changes, and how can
they influence the subject’s course of development?
The most specific change in adolescence is navigating between the dual tasks of integrating a genitally
mature body in society and partaking an autonomy
that appears in this period in life. The effects of puberty on the body modify the adolescent’s relationship
to his drives by giving him, along with a pubescent
body, a means to discharge them. The adolescent
needs autonomy—a distance from earlier objects of
attachment, the parents. Autonomy in turn challenges
the narcissistic assumptions of the subject and serves
to reveal the quality of his internal world, the (secure
or insecure) character of his attachments, and the ability of his ego to take control of functions that have
until then devolved to his parents. The connections
between internal and external reality are questioned
and thus undergo important changes.
Adolescence thus corresponds to a need for psychic
work in the development of every human being—a
need that every individual is confronted with and for
which every society must provide a solution. Here we
see with particular acuity what Freud defined as a
drive, namely a need for work by the psyche owing to
its bond to the somatic. Indeed, the origin of this
excess of psychic work typical of adolescence is the
extra somatic development associated with puberty,
but with the particular features that deferred action
confer upon it. For the adolescent, the image he constructed of himself during childhood vacillates while
he awaits a new cultural and symbolic status. Thus,
aside from the conflicts of identification and the Oedipus complex, the most profound strata of personality
and the self in its initial period of constitution are
summoned and tested during adolescence.
There is indeed a crisis of adolescence in the sense
that, psychically, the subject will be different after puberty. But this crisis always has a form and conclusion
generally conditioned by culture and the familial systems to which each of us belongs. Consequently, an
internal crisis of the psyche is consubstantial with the
somatic impact puberty has on the psyche and with
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the psychosocial impact of adolescent autonomy, but
the external expression of this crisis largely depends on
events that transpired during infancy and on the nature and quality of the current social environment.
The family is capable of promoting or interfering
with this process. A kind of resonance often occurs
between the midlife crisis that parents experience
when their children reach adolescence and the problems faced by the adolescent. Such resonance adds to
the confusion between generations and blurs limits on
behavior for the adolescent. Similar resonance occurs
when the adolescent actualizes the parents’ unresolved
conflicts with their own parents that they then reenact
with their children. Such resonance amplifies conflicts
and contributes to the adolescent’s feeling of being
misunderstood and subject to foreign forces.
External reality appears as a possible mediator capable of reinforcing or weakening the structures of the
psychic apparatus. Its essential role is to make the
growth of object investments associated with the twofold phenomenon of separation from infantile objects
and the resumption of processes of identification narcissistically acceptable. External objects, especially parents, can serve as mediators for internal objects, their
concrete attitudes helping to correct whatever is terrifying or constricting in the internal objects, and thus
helping to nuance and humanize the superego and ego
ideal. They can also create the conditions for pleasure
that can be used and exchanged and that authorizes the
adolescent libidinally to reinvest object ties without
having to become conscious of the importance of those
objects. This resembles the conditions typical of the
transitional objects of early childhood, or what some
authors prefer to call ‘‘transformational objects.’’
Because of their diversity, these external objects,
coupled with visual reminders of the difference
between the sexes, may strengthen a third function that
vacillates and is regression and lack of differentiation.
What is true of parents is also true of the mediator
figures provided by society: teachers, social workers,
friends, ideologies, and religions. These can be temporary supports, offering adolescents a foothold that
preserves their need for investment in a narcissistically
acceptable self-image before they discover their own
way. As with religion and some ideologies, these supports can also provide the adolescent with an outlet
that hides discoveries of infantile fusional needs that
subjugate the individual to an undifferentiated totalitarian relation.
30
If the needs for psychic transformation appear to be
inherent in adolescence, the forms assumed by these
changes are particularly dependent on how society
operates. Thus, in this connection, there is an emphasis the role of the generational crisis and modern
forms of revolt against the father. We can also raise
questions about the impact of a transition from a
society structured around precise operational rules
and explicit prohibitions to a more liberal society. This
transition favors a transition from an adolescence
dominated by the problematic of conflicts associated
with prohibitions and their possible transgression to
an adulthood dominated by the problematic of fear of
dissolution of those ties and of expression of needs of
dependence. Prohibitions, though they can lead to
revolt, lead to misunderstanding the need of dependence. Freedom, together with the requirements of
performance and success, brings to light narcissistic
uncertainties and needs for completeness.
PHILIPPE JEAMMET
See also: Adolescence.
Bibliography
Debesse, Maurice. (1941). La crise d’originalité juvénile.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Freud, Sigmund. (1900). The interpretation of dreams
(Parts 1–2). SE, 4: 1–338; 5: 339–625.
——— (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d [1893–95]). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 1–310.
Jeammet, Philippe. (1994). Adolescence et processus de changement. In Daniel Widlöcher (Ed.), Traité de psychopathologie (pp. 687–726). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Laufer, Moses, and Laufer, M. Eglé. (1984). Adolescence and
developmental breakdown: A psychoanalytic view. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Further Reading
Menninger, Walter W. (1988). Introduction: the crises of adolescence and aging. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 52,190–197.
ADORNO, THEODOR AND FREUD
Any serious history of the Frankfurt School requires that
a major role be accorded to Freud’s significance in the
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development of critical theory. Freudian thought played
a central role in the works of Herbert Marcuse, Max
Horkheimer, and, more recently, Jürgen Habermas. But
none was more influenced by Freud than Theodor
Adorno. In a sense, Adorno was an orthodox Freudian.
He supported instinct theory (Triebtheorie), in contrast
with the ‘‘revisionism’’ of Erich Fromm and Karen Horney, who faulted Freud for biological determinism, and
in contrast with the sociological reductionism of Talcott
Parsons, who wanted to integrate psychoanalysis into a
more comprehensive theory of ‘‘social action.’’ Yet
Adorno also parted ways from Freud in his belief that
Freud tended to collapse external reality into a psychological universe. Even here, however, Adorno remained
surprisingly well disposed toward Freud. Though he
viewed Freud’s psychological atomism as mistaken
because it minimized the importance of social factors,
he considered it to be profoundly correct in that, under
advanced capitalism, humans are reduced to isolated
monads. In a sense, Freud was right even when he was
wrong.
Though Marxism too played a crucial role in the
development of Adorno’s thought, the main features
of his version of critical theory can be said to be
Freudian. Adorno did not lose sight of the fact that
every object is the product of history and that the subject plays an active role in the acquisition of knowledge. This idea clearly fits well with psychoanalytic
thought, which, while inheriting some principles of
nineteenth-century empiricism and materialism, is
fully hermeneutic in its clinical application and
adheres to a nonpositivist conception of truth.
Far from presupposing a neutral, knowing, analyst,
psychoanalysis requires the analyst actively to intervene and holds that objectivity is attainable only intersubjectively. Similarly, in the methodology of critical
theory, the object is observed from an immanent,
interior viewpoint, not from a transcendent perspective like the one adopted by the sociology of knowledge. This is precisely the point of view of psychoanalysis, which aims to make conscious the social
determinants of individual pathologies by seeking
those determinants not in the external world but
rather through the imprint that they leave on the mental and emotional life of the patient.
Finally, a fundamental principle of critical theory is
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ject and object, particular and universal, the individual’s aspirations to happiness and the imperatives of
society. This principle of critical theory closely corresponds with Freud’s idea of an insurmountable conflict between desire and fulfillment, between the
demands of instinct and the requirements of civilization. The foregoing affinities show that both Adorno’s
critique of culture and his theory of personality owe
much to Freudian thought.
Adorno’s critique was based on two psychoanalytic
categories: identification and projection. Through
identification, the individual internalizes the father,
his symbolic substitutes, and, in the final analysis,
society as a whole. In projection, the individual projects onto the external world impulses, emotions, and
ideas. Neither of these mechanisms is intrinsically
pathological. Identification is essential for an individual’s social integration; projection is necessary for the
individual’s acquisition of knowledge, which arises
from assimilating sense data, analyzing it through
internal reflection, and transforming it into ideas
about external reality.
However, all of this changes in the present state of
capitalism or, more generally, in industrialized society.
Whereas in earlier stages of social development, identification allowed individuals a margin of autonomy,
inasmuch as socialization was achieved through the
family and could produce free individuals, now it is
directly accomplished by the social order, by industrialized society, and in accordance with other specialized
demands aimed at producing social consensus.
Similarly, Projection has ceased to be an instrument
for producing useful knowledge of reality because the
same demands for conformity that directly subordinate
the individual to the group have rendered superfluous
the process of inner reflection through which facts about
the world are processed. In consequence, modern
humans project only resentment, destructive instincts,
and inner emptiness, converting the world into a paranoiac social order filled with hostile institutions.
In short, in the case of genuine identification, the
subject internalizes a social model that creates greater
autonomy, while with false identification, typical of
advanced capitalism, individuality is effaced. Likewise,
with real projection, the subject can acquire knowledge
about reality by processing sense data, while with false
projection, the subject perceives a illusory reality portraying his inner emptiness.
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AFTERWARDNESS
Another field that Adorno investigated with help from
Freud was the theory of personality. He elaborated his
ideas in a work he authored with several colleagues, The
Authoritarian Personality (1950), an empirical study that
attempted to explain the correlation between personality
structure and viewpoints concerning social and political
problems. The hypothesis was that subjects with an
authoritarian personality structure, as measured using
psychoanalytic variables, are more likely to profess reactionary political ideas, while nonauthoritarian subjects
are more likely to hold liberal views. To the great surprise
of the authors, the expected correlation did not materialize, because many authoritarian individuals were liberal
and many nonauthoritarian individuals were reactionary.
Adorno proposed two possible explanations for this
anomaly. One was that the sociological environment, a
‘‘general cultural environment,’’ shapes everyone in it,
independently of individual personality structures,
requiring all to embrace the values of the established
order. Adorno’s other explanation, the orthodox psychoanalytic perspective, was that liberal or conservative
authoritarian individuals imperfectly identify with their
fathers, in consequence of which their behavior is at
once submissive yet rebellious, obedient to authority yet
hostile. One is left with either false liberals, whose progressive views are negated by deep-seated destructive
tendencies, or faithless conservatives, who are intrinsically fascist rather than genuine supporters of the status
quo, which in American society includes freedom of
choice and equal opportunity. The reverse is true of
nonauthoritarian individuals. In these individuals, the
oedipal conflict resulted in an accommodating attitude
toward authority. These individuals are liberal in aspiring to authentic change yet conservative in wanting to
defend what is best in the American tradition.
The two components of Adorno’s theory—the critique of culture and the theory of personality—are
transparently complementary. His critique of culture
focused on advanced, postindustrial society and its
mechanisms for stabilizing and reproducing itself on
the cultural and psychological levels. Similarly, at the
core of his theory of personality is the kind of human
being that postindustrial society needs and creates in
order to perpetuate itself. Adorno linked these components using conceptual tools borrowed from Freud.
Perhaps in the early twenty-first century, with
Adorno’s exclusive reference to Freud, such analyses
appear anachronistic in terms of contemporary analytic thought, but even so they show the impressive and
32
continual fecundity of psychoanalysis for better understanding modern and postmodern society.
SERGIO PAULO ROUANET
See also: Marcuse, Herbert; Marxism and psychoanalysis;
Politics and psychoanalysis
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor. (1973). Negative dialectics (E. B. Ashton,
Trans.). New York: Seabury Press.
Adorno, Theodor, with Frankel-Brunswick, Else, Levinson,
Daniel J.; and Sanford, R. Nevitt. (1950). The authoritarian
personality. New York: Harper and Row.
Horkheimer, Max, and Adorno, Theodor. (1972). Dialectic
of enlightenment (John Cumming, Trans.). New York:
Continuum.
AFTERWARDNESS. See Deferred action
AGENCY
The term ‘‘agency’’ denotes a part of the psychic apparatus that functions as a substructure governed by its
own laws, but that is coordinated with the other parts.
In Freud’s work this term first appeared in chapter
VII of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), as a synonym or near-synonym for the term system, which he
had been using for several years: ‘‘Accordingly, we will
picture the mental apparatus as a compound instrument, to the components of which we will give the
name of ‘agencies’ or (for the sake of greater clarity)
‘systems.’’’ (pp. 536–537) The term apparatus, used in
a sense that never changed in Freud’s work, explicitly
gives the psyche a status comparable to that of the
major organic systems (respiratory, circulatory, etc.).
An agency is thus a functional sub-whole, or, in
modern terms, a substructure within an encompassing
structure. This idea clearly came from Freud’s extensive
prior work in neurophysiology and then neurology. If
Freud suggested in this text that the term system was
‘‘clearer,’’ this is doubtless because it was more familiar
to him. Indeed, he had been using it for years, particularly in ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’’ (1950c
[1895]), to evoke this type of functional groupings
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within the nervous system, whose workings he was trying to conceptualize at the time. He posited these systems as ‘‘producing’’ perception, consciousness, memory, and so forth. In the passage cited from The
Interpretation of Dreams, he thus distinguished the
agencies, or systems, of memory and perception (envisioned as being mutually exclusive), and censorship,
but also the agencies that comprise his first topography: the unconscious, the preconscious, and consciousness (or perception-consciousness).
In Freud’s writings from that point on, the terms
agency and system remained close in meaning. However, system tended to be reserved for topographical
distinctions, while agency was used more broadly to
refer to an organization being considered from the
topographic, dynamic, and economic viewpoints in
combination. It is because they are considered in this
way that the id, the ego, and the superego of the structural theory are referred to as agencies rather than as
systems. Freud tended to posit the agencies as being
exclusive: A single phenomenon cannot at the same
time belong to the realm of the id and that of the ego,
for example. By virtue of this very fact, when Freud at
the end of his life came to see the opposition between
conscious and unconscious as being simply a difference in ‘‘quality’’ of certain psychic processes—as
described in ‘‘An Outline of Psycho-Analysis’’ (1940a
[1938])—those two terms were no longer considered
as denoting agencies.
In the conceptual architecture of metapsychology,
the term agency is therefore situated at a level that
makes its definition somewhat uncertain. Béla Grunberger thus generated heated controversy when he
proposed, in Narcissism: Psychoanalytic Essays (1971/
1979), to consider narcissism as an agency having the
same status as the id, the ego, and the superego. Similar controversies arose over the concept of the self as
developed by Heinz Kohut, for example.
ROGER PERRON
See also: System/systemic.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams.
Part I, SE, 4: 1–338; Part II, SE, 5: 339–625.
———. (1940a [1938]). An outline of psycho-analysis. SE,
23: 139–207.
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———. (1950c [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology.
SE, 1: 281–387.
Grunberger, Béla. (1979). Narcissism: psychoanalytic essays.
(Joyce S. Diamanti, Trans.). New York: International Universities Press. (Original work published 1971)
Further Reading
Morrison, K. (1999). Agency, ontology, & analysis: R. Schafer’s hermeneutic conflict. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 22, 203–220.
AGGRESSIVENESS/AGGRESSION
In the strict sense of the term, aggressiveness corresponds to certain fantasies and behaviors that Freud
discovered in the clinical context, but he hesitated at
first to give the term a definition that met the requirements of his own subsequent metapsychological signposts. Only after having shown the importance of
ambivalence in the transference (Freud, 1912b) was he
in a position to think of aggressiveness as a common
relational occurrence, but one without a unique or
even homogeneous origin. Afterward, his position
never changed: he always regarded aggressiveness as
the manifestation in fantasy or symptoms of a combination of hostile and erotic affective currents.
In 1900 Freud without hesitation connected aggressiveness to sadism. In 1905 he added a connection to
masochism, adopting the position of Joseph Breuer.
For Freud, the masculine position in sex led to a degree
of sadistic activity, while the feminine position favored
masochistic passivity. By 1924 this latter view lead to
the hypothesis of a specifically feminine masochism.
However, Freud moderated this preliminary opinion
in a note added to his Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality (1905d) in 1915 after he made the distinction
between a triangular genital position and the phallicnarcissistic position, limited to existential conflicts
between strong and weak.
In 1908 Freud further clarified aggressiveness with
his conception of bisexuality. Moreover, Freud (1914c)
was careful to make clear that he reproached Alfred
Adler for not having taken into account the libidinal
satisfaction linked to aggressiveness, even though it
now seems obvious that Adler’s idea was really more
about primitive violence than aggressiveness, which,
by its nature, appears after sexualization. Thoughts or
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AGGRESSIVENESS/AGGRESSION
behaviors put into motion by aggressiveness require
the person to have an imagination capable of integrating a certain level of ambivalence, while the archaic
functioning of violence described by Karl Abraham is
of a preambivalent nature and involves a more primitive brutality and violence.
The first shift, in 1914, in Freud’s theories involving
drives, objects, aims, and the particular nature of eroticization had an irreversible effect on his view of the
relationship between aggressiveness and narcissism.
Narcissistic objects result from primary identifications
and defensive violence, while with ego objects,
ambivalence causes the person to oscillate between
love and its equally eroticized opposites: aggressiveness, hate, and sadism.
In the case of the ‘‘Wolf Man’’ (1918b), as in the
case of ‘‘little Hans’’ (1909b), Freud connected a child’s
early aggressive manifestations with early attempts at
seduction. In The Ego and the Id (1923b), Freud
described how in authentic aggression, eroticization is
responsible for modifying the nature of primitive hostility, just as the need for tenderness replaces the need
for mastery. In 1925 Freud became interested in the
narcissistic exhibitionism that precedes aggressiveness
in infantile fantasy. The overly precocious genital quality that Freud attributed to the narcissistic, imaginary
phallus by sometimes confusing it with the penis, the
real sexual organ specific to the boy, makes it difficult
to give a more complete description of the genital specificity of aggressiveness. In contrast, it is easier to
describe the early narcissistic forms of hostility that
occur prior to a more commingled (and thus ambivalent) manifestation of the two great strains of the
drives: sexuality and self-preservation.
the child and its environment and easily recognized in
clinical practice. An illustration of this hypothesis is
the notion of ‘‘projective identification.’’ Proponents
of these views have certainly recognized clinically what
derives from a violent instinct of self-preservation and
what belongs to an already object-related libidinized
aggression, even though they imperfectly distinguish
between the two.
The distinction between the dynamics of primitive
instinctual violence and the dynamics of drive pressures giving way to aggressive thoughts or behaviors
can be understood at three levels: the level of the specific origins of drives, the level of the particular history
of the psychogenetic processes in question, and the
level of Freudian metapsychology.
Freud never changed his view on the origin of fantasies or behaviors emanating from aggression. What is
involved is a particular form of the sexual drives
deflected from their primary aim and entangled with
the brutal, hostile primitive impulses. These primitive
impulses thus lose their initial, purely self-protective
aim. The conjunction of these two fundamental
instinctual currents in the service of aggressiveness
thus constitutes a kind of layering of the drives. Such a
layering does not exist in the infant’s original genetic
equipment in its pure state, though violent instincts,
just like the sexual drives, exist in a pure and specifiable state in the basic affective equipment of the
newborn.
Freud did not hesitate, in his theoretical shift of
1932, twelve years after the shift of 1920, to return to
the principles of the first theory of the drives by opposing to the libidinal drives the primitive instincts of
self-preservation, from which he then derived aggressiveness (1933a). In 1930 he made clear that he discerned in the psyche of the child a brutal original
energy that would soon be rapidly sexualized and
bring forth aggressiveness, hate, and sadism. Oral and
anal metaphors thus came to illustrate this two-stage
view of the origin of aggression.
From the psychogenetic point of view, psychoanalytic research has gradually enriched the study of affective development beginning at the pre-oedipal and
pregenital periods. These studies have further clarified
and developed Freud’s views of the origins and organization of narcissism. The (primary and secondary)
narcissistic stages necessarily involve some sort of
objects, but Freud clearly demonstrated that narcissistic objects, focused primarily on a relationship of
power, differ radically from oedipal objects, which
involve dissimilarity, equality, and complimentarity.
For aggressiveness to come into play, an object relationship must develop out of an organized fantasy
arising from the Oedipus complex and genitality.
Aggressiveness is a secondary development, as Freud
conceived of it.
Melanie Klein and her followers insisted on the presence of a precocious affective interaction, one teeming from the first with hostility and mistrust between
From the point of view of conflicts, the classical
Freudian notion topographically places aggressiveness
within the framework of the activities of the ego. From
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an economic point of view, aggressiveness is conceived
as arising in connection with an already genitalized
object. Finally, from a dynamic point of view, aggressiveness occurs when the sexual drives become bound
to brutal, primitive impulses. In this way, the sexual
drive tinges the brutal impulses with pleasure, with the
result that they become sexually perverse and destructive. In a less pathologic course that arises with the
start of the Oedipus complex and is finalized during
adolescence, violent primitive impulses reinforce the
sexual drives in their appropriate purpose in the service of love and creativity. Such is how Freud described
aggressiveness in his elaboration of the concept of
anaclisis.
Aggressive fantasies can involve a simultaneous libidinal satisfaction in attacking an object who represents
(consciously or unconsciously) an oedipal rival,
whereas in narcissistic conditions, the resulting violent
primitive anger (rage) seeks to protect the self without
taking into account the injuries inflicted on one who is
experienced simply as an external threat and not as a
genuine object (other). Confusion in this regard can
be avoided through the use of transference and
counter-transference.
———. (1908). Hysterical phantasies and their relation to
bisexuality. SE, 9: 156–166.
———. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy.
SE, 10: 1–149.
———. (1912b). The dynamics of transference. SE, 12:
97–108.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
———. (1918b). From the history of an infantile neurosis.
SE, 17: 1–122.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18:
1–64.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
———. (1924c). The economic problem of masochism. SE,
19: 155–170.
———. (1933a). New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
Further Reading
Gray, Paul. (2000). Analysis of conflicted drive derivatives of
aggression. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 48, 219-236.
The notion of aggression directed at the self, so
often invoked in clinical practice, implies that an
already eroticized sadism is turned back upon the subject, and not simply that partial or full desexualization
leads to an act of self-punishment.
Fonagy, Peter, et. Al. (1993). Aggression and the psychological self. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 74,
471-486.
JEAN BERGERET
Kernberg, Otto. (1992). Aggression in personality disorders
and perversions, New Haven/London: Yale University
Press.
See also: Adler, Alfred; Anal-sadistic stage; Essential
depression; Conflict; Cruelty; Death instinct (Thanatos);
Depressive position; Envy; Narcissistic rage; Oral-sadistic
stage; Paranoid position; Phobia of committing impulsive acts; Sadism; Sadomasochism; Splitting of the object;
Sublimation; Turning around upon the subject’s own
self; Violence, instinct of.
Fosshage, James L. (1998). On aggression: its forms and
functions. Psychoanalytical Inquiry, 18, 45-54.
Mitchell, Stephen. (1998). Aggression and the endangered
self. Psychoanalytical Inquiry, 18, 21-30.
AICHHORN, AUGUST (1878–1949)
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4: 1–338; 5: 339–625.
An Austrian educator with an interest in psychoanalysis, the pioneer of a new approach to reeducating problem children, August Aichhorn was born July 27,
1878, in Vienna, Austria, where he spent his entire life,
and died October 13, 1949. He was raised, along with a
twin brother who died when Aichhorn was 19, in a
Catholic family of modest means. He became a teacher
and continued his studies at the Technische
Hochschule of Vienna.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
From 1908 to 1918 he was in charge of managing
homes for boys in the Austrian capital. In 1918 he was
Bibliography
Bergeret, Jean. (1984). La violence fondamentale. Paris:
Dunod.
Diatkine, René, (1966). Intervention au 7e séminaire de perfectionnement. Revue française de psychanalyse, 30 (3), pp.
324–344.
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made responsible for setting up an educational center
for delinquent children in an unused refugee camp.
Convinced that the suppression then commonly practiced was not the right approach, and disappointed by
the kinds of psychological training taught at the university, he introduced unorthodox methods, based on
‘‘warm sympathy with the fate of those unfortunates
and was correctly guided by an intuitive perception of
their mental needs’’ (Freud, 1925f). His educational
success caught the attention of Anna Freud, and it is
through her that he discovered psychoanalysis when
he was already past forty. He undertook an analysis
with Paul Federn and, in 1922, became a member of
the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association. When his
experiment in reeducation came to an end, Aichhorn
created, in 1923, educational centers that focused on
psychoanalysis in each of Vienna’s fourteen districts.
He worked in the centers, always at his teacher’s salary,
until his retirement in 1930.
Along with his responsibilities as a re-educator, he
expended tremendous energy in teaching and training.
The conferences at which he discussed his original
approach to problem adolescents are collected in his
book Wayward Youth (1925), with a preface by Sigmund Freud. The book was an international success.
He was invited to Zurich, Basel, Bern, Prague, Berlin,
Stuttgart, and Lausanne. He collaborated in the Revue
de pédagogie psychanalytique (Review of Psychoanalytic Pedagogy), which he co-edited from 1932 on.
Between 1931 and 1932 he directed the small school
created by Dorothy Burlingham. After Freud and his
followers fled the city, Aichhorn continued to train
doctors and psychologists in psychoanalysis and to
organize seminars for education and guidance counselors. Made president of the new Vienna Psychoanalytic
Association in 1946, he continued his work among
educators, whom he exposed to the importance of psychoanalytic training.
Aichhorn opened a new field of activity in
psychoanalysis—social work. He radically renewed the
approach to ‘‘abandoned’’ youth, showing that asocial
phenomena—latent or manifest—had their origin in
the severe lack of social and emotional support experienced during childhood. His ideas on how to use
transference as a therapeutic tool, on the importance
of the individual, both the educator and the delinquent, and on the necessity of giving marginalized
youth a sense of responsibility to help reintegrate them
socially are still relevant. ‘‘Psycho-analysis could teach
36
him little that was new of a practical kind, but it
brought him a clear theoretical insight into the justification of his way of acting and put him in a position to
explain its basis to other people’’ (Freud, 1925f).
JEANNE MOLL
See also: Abandonment; Adolescence; Austria; BurlinghamTiffany, Dorothy; Puberty; Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung; Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische
Pädagogik.
Bibliography
Aichhorn, August. (1951). Wayward youth. London: Imago
Publishing Company.
Cifali, Mireille, and Moll, Jeanne. (1985). Pédagogie et Psychanalyse. Paris: Dunod.
Freud, Sigmund. (1925f [1951]). Preface to Wayward youth.
London: Imago Publishing Company.
AIMÉE, CASE OF
The full title of the doctoral thesis that signaled
Jacques Lacan’s entry into psychiatry was De la psychose
paranoı̈aque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité
(On paranoiac psychosis as it relates to the personality).
The work was dated September 7, 1932, when Lacan
was thirty-one years old.
Readers of the work were uniformly impressed with
the breadth of scientific learning that Lacan displayed.
To Georges Heuyer, who had doubts about the sheer
quantity of bibliographical references, Lacan
responded that he had, in fact, read them all. Furthermore, Lacan claimed to have personally evaluated
about forty cases. And his familiarity with German
texts clearly distinguished his scholarship from the
chauvinism characteristic of the two great schools of
psychiatry of the time. The French school was his
model because of the high quality of its observation
and because of its elegance and precision. But the
Germans supplied Lacan with the doctrinal authority
required by his goal of methodological synthesis.
‘‘Then came Kraepelin’’ (Lacan, 1932, p. 23). Emil
Kraepelin succeeded in imposing differential diagnoses
in the field of the psychoses, where previously the category of paranoia had been extended to every kind of
delusion and cognitive disorder in a way clearly contradicted by observation, despite the fact that paranoia
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was defined very narrowly. Lacan wrote in glowing
terms of Johannes Lange, coauthor of the 1927 edition
of Kraepelin’s Manual of Psychiatry, whose study of
eighty-one cases noted that classical paranoia was
extremely rare, and assigned the curable cases to the
category delineated by Kraepelin. As for ‘‘genuine
paranoia,’’ the question was whether it could be acute,
whether remissions were possible. This was a question
that Lacan asked from the outset (1932) and that
would still preoccupy him twenty-five years later in
‘‘On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of
Psychosis’’ (1959/2004). For Lacan, the work of Robert
Gaupp supplied an affirmative answer to this question.
In short, Lacan endorsed Kraepelin’s inclination
toward a psychogenetic conception of paranoia, and
what Lacan called ‘‘psychogeny’’ became a main theme
of his thesis. Hence Lacan’s harsh criticism of organicism, the constitutional theory, and the ideology of
degeneracy—all then still prevalent in French
psychiatry.
To stymie these tendencies, Lacan chose to speak of
‘‘personality.’’ To solidify this notion, he drew upon
Ernst Kretschmer, Pierre Janet, Karl Jaspers, and,
finally, Eugen Bleuler. Bleuler and the Zurich school
were Lacan’s main route into psychoanalysis from the
psychiatric study of the psychoses. Lacan sought to
relate mental disturbances to personality, as Janet did,
and, like Kretschmer, to explain them in terms of the
individual’s history and ‘‘experience’’ (Erlebnis) (1932,
p. 92), with ‘‘its social and ethical stresses,’’ rather than
by evoking ‘‘congenital defects’’ (1932, p. 243). All this
implied a ‘‘comprehensive’’ approach to psychotics
consonant with the phenomenology of Jaspers. For
this reason, Lacan enlisted the masters of psychiatry
and psychopathology in support the open-minded
approach to mental illness characteristic of his friends
at the journal L’évolution psychiatrique.
Lacan argued that pathological manifestations in
psychosis were ‘‘total vital responses,’’ which, as ‘‘functions of the personality,’’ maintained meaningful connections with the human community (1932, p. 247).
In short, they were meaningful—a realization that
defined the young Lacan’s approach and influenced
the choice of his inaugural case, that of ‘‘Aimée.’’
Aimée was a thirty-eight-year-old woman who,
with ‘‘eyes filled with the fires of hate’’ (1932, p. 153),
had tried to stab the celebrated actress Huguette
Duflos. As a result of this attempted ‘‘magnicide’’ on
April 18, 1931, she was immediately imprisoned.
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Lacan began to see her one month later at Sainte-Anne
Hospital. He reconstructed ‘‘almost the full gamut of
paranoid themes’’ (1932, p. 158): persecution, jealousy, and prejudice for the most part, themes of
grandeur centered chiefly on dreams of escape and a
reformatory idealism, along with traces of erotomania.
Her cognitive functions were unaffected. To this classic
picture, which Lacan established by means of thorough biographical inquiry, Lacan added what he considered a decisive consideration: after twenty days of
incarceration, the patient’s delusional state diminished
dramatically. This development Lacan viewed as evidence of the acute nature of her paranoia. Connecting
Aimée’s criminal act with this remission, he set out to
discover the meaning of her pathology, and with this
in mind he proposed a new diagnostic category: ‘‘selfpunishment paranoia.’’
Aimée also aroused Lacan’s curiosity because of her
attempts at writing. Lacan had already evinced an
interest in the writing of psychotics, and in his thesis
(1932) he published selected passages from ‘‘Aimée’’—
the name being that of the heroine of the patient’s projected novel. Aimée’s writings and the sensational
aspects her case brought Lacan’s work to the attention
of a public well beyond psychiatry. The spirit of the
times saw links among art, madness, and psychoanalysis. The dreams related by André Breton in Communicating Vessels date from 1931, and his exchange of
letters with Freud, which followed the publication of
this book, date from 1932. René Crevel, Paul Éluard,
Salvador Dalı́, Joë Bousquet all echoed Lacan’s thesis.
In 1933, in the first issue of the Surrealist magazine
Minotaure, Dalı́ cited ‘‘Jacques Lacan’s admirable
thesis’’ and praised the thesis of ‘‘the paranoiac
mechanism as the force and power acting at the very
root of the phenomenon of personality.’’ Lacan took
pride in this acknowledgment. In his Écrits (1966), he
described his thesis as merely an introduction to
‘‘paranoiac knowledge’’ (p. 65), an unmistakable allusion to Dalı́’s ‘‘paranoiac-critical method.’’ He never
revised this attitude: as late as December 16, 1975, he
declared, ‘‘Paranoid psychosis and personality have no
relationship because they are one and the same thing.’’
Left-wing philosophers likewise fell under the spell
of Lacan’s book. Paul Nizan, a careful reader of Jaspers,
published a summary of it the communist daily
L’humanité for February 10, 1933; Lacan’s talk of a
‘‘concrete’’ psychology related to ‘‘social reality’’ sufficed to open that particular door. Jean Bernier, in La
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critique social, a journal to the left of the Communist
Party, offered a brilliant reading of Lacan’s thesis,
despite being marred by misunderstandings of psychoanalysis so common among revolutionary critics.
Lacan’s doctoral thesis was significant in another
way too: it was his declaration of allegiance to psychoanalysis. He undertook a personal analysis and trained
under the auspices of the recently established Société
psychanalytique de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic
Society). In his thesis, he hailed ‘‘the scientific import
of Freudian doctrine,’’ the only theory capable of
apprehending the ‘‘true nature of pathology,’’ as
opposed to other methods, which, despite their ‘‘very
valuable observational syntheses,’’ failed to clear up
uncertainties (1932, p. 255). Lacan’s study of the case
of Aimée and his overall view of the psychoses were
thoroughly imbued with Freudian teachings. Thus he
saw the psychogenesis of Aimée’s pathology in light of
the theory of the development of the libido, as
rounded out a few years earlier by Karl Abraham
(1924/1927). And he understood delusion as the
unconscious offering itself to the understanding of
consciousness. ‘‘Ça joue au clair," Lacan reiterated in
his seminar on the psychoses (1981/1993, session of 25
January 1956).
For Lacan, the notion of personality certainly
implied ‘‘a conception of oneself’’ (1932, p. 42), but in
his view this conception was based on ‘‘ideal’’ images
brought up into consciousness. Under the acknowledged influence of Angelo Hesnard and René Laforgue’s
report to the Fifth Conference of French-Speaking
Psychoanalysts in June 1930, Lacan advanced his
hypothesis of psychosis as ‘‘self-punishment’’ under
the influence of the superego. He suggested that a
nosological distinction be drawn for cases where an
element of hate and a ‘‘combative attitude’’ turn back
upon the subject in the shape of self-accusation and
self-depreciation, and concluded by proposing the
category of ‘‘psychoses of the super-ego,’’ to include
contentious and self-punishing forms of paranoia
(1932, p. 338).
The most striking aspect of Lacan’s thesis, in the
context of the time, was the evidence it offered of his
solid Freudian grounding, gleaned in part, no doubt,
from his translation into French, in that same year of
1932, of Freud’s paper ‘‘Some Neurotic Mechanisms in
Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality’’ (1922b
[1921]). What Lacan drew from this important work
underlay his assertion that ‘‘Aimée’s entire delusion’’
38
could ‘‘be understood as an increasingly centrifugal
displacement of a hate whose direct object she wished
to misapprehend’’ (1932, p. 282). At the beginning of
his discussion, Lacan derived a general proposition
from the same source: ‘‘The developmental distance,
according to Freud, that separates the homosexual
drive, the cause of traumatic repression, from the
point of narcissistic fixation, which reveals a completed regression, is a measure of the seriousness of the
psychosis in any given case’’ (1932, p. 262).
The case of Aimée continued to play a part in
Lacan’s life. For one, he had good cause to remember it when, years later, Aimée turned out to be the
mother of one of his patients, the psychoanalyst
Didier Anzieu. Furthermore, the themes explored in
De la psychose paranoı̈aque continued to preoccupy
him in his later work. Most significantly, his resolutely psychoanalytic approach to the psychoses was
confirmed by his defining work of the 1950s (1993,
2004), whose great theoretical import was rivaled
only by what he called ‘‘fidelity to the formal envelope of the symptom’’ (1966, p. 66). This remark
does far more than endorse the precepts of a grand
clinical tradition; it distills certain constants of
Lacan’s thinking. As he adds in the same passage, the
formal envelope of the symptom may stretch to a
‘‘limit where it reverses direction and becomes creative.’’ This was a crucial issue for Lacan throughout
his life, and in many different ways. The culmination
of this concern was his engagement with the work of
James Joyce, which informed his seminar of 1975–
1976 on the ‘‘sinthome’’ (1976–1977). On the same
page of Écrits (p. 66), Lacan, reviewing his own past
itinerary, described what might be considered the
function of the symptom: to keep up, despite the
ever-present risk of slipping, with what he called
‘‘confronting the abyss.’’ Psychosis exemplified such
confrontation, which was why Lacan returned here
to how ‘‘passing to the act’’ may serve to ‘‘fan the
fire’’ of delusion—an original theme explored in his
thesis. How such acts relate to literary creation, the
function of the symptom, and passing to the act
were thus just so many issues first broached in the
case of Aimée.
BERNARD TOBOUL
See also: Anzieu, Didier; Bleuler, Paul Eugen; Évolution
psychiatrique (l’ -) (Developments in Psychiatry); Lacan,
Jacques-Marie Émile; Paranoia.
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Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1927). A short study of the development of
the libido, viewed in the light of mental disorders. In
Selected Papers of Karl Abraham (Douglas Bryan and Alix
Strachey, Trans.). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work
published 1924)
Allouch, Jean. (1994). Marguerite, ou l’aimée de Lacan (rev.
ed.). Paris: E.P.E.L.
Dalı́, Salvador. (1933). Le mythe tragique de l’Angélus de
Millet. Minotaure, 1.
Freud, Sigmund. (1922b [1921]). Some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia, and homosexuality. SE: 18:
221–232.
Lacan, Jacques. (1932). De la psychose paranoı̈aque dans ses
rapports avec la personnalité. Paris: Librairie le François.
———. (1966). Écrits. Paris: Seuil.
———. (1976–1977). Le séminaire XXIII, 1975–76: Le
sinthome. Ornicar? 2–5.
———. (1993). The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 3: The
psychoses, 1955–1956 (Russell Grigg, Trans.). London:
Routledge. (Original work published 1981)
———. (2002). On a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis. In his Écrits: A selection (Bruce Fink,
Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published
1959)
This is the version of the Ajase story Kosawa wrote
in the 1950s, based on the Kanmuiryojukyo. The
themes of the Ajase complex are as follows:
1. A mother’s conflict between her wish for a child
and an infanticidal wish;
AJASE COMPLEX
Heisaku Kosawa visited Sigmund Freud in 1932 and
presented this paper on the Ajase complex. The paper
was entitled ‘‘Two Kinds of Guilt Feelings’’ and subtitled ‘‘The Ajase Complex.’’
The Ajase complex is an original theory developed
by Kosawa, and subsequently expanded by Keigo
Okonogi. Whereas Freud based his Oedipus complex
on a Greek tragedy, Kosawa developed his theory on
the Ajase complex from stories found in Buddhist
scripture. The story of Ajase centers on the Buddhist
concept of reincarnation. Well known to the Buddhist
world, Ajase’s story appears with many variations in
the scriptures of ancient India. Kosawa modeled his
theory on the version of Ajase story appearing in the
Kanmuryojukyo, a Buddhist scripture centering on the
salvation of the mother.
Ajase was the son of a king in India. His mother,
fearing the loss of her youth and beauty, wanted to
bear a child so she could retain her status. A prophet
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told her that a hermit who lived in the forest would be
reborn as the king’s son. The queen, however, wanted
the child as soon as possible and killed the hermit,
who then entered her womb. The child that she bore
was named Ajase. Just before being slain, the hermit
had told the queen that he would be reborn as her son
and curse his father. The queen, fearful of what she
had done, tried to abort and kill the baby, but she
failed and Ajase survived. When Ajase grew up and
learned the secret surrounding his birth, he became
angry with the queen and attempted to slay her, but
was dissuaded from this act by a minister. At that
moment, Ajase was attacked by a severe guilt feeling
and became afflicted with a dreadful skin disease characterized by so offensive an odor that no one dared
approach him. Only his mother stood by and lovingly
nursed him. Despite his mother’s devoted care, Ajase
did not readily recover. Seeking relief, the queen went
to the Buddha and told him of her sufferings.
The Buddha’s teachings healed her inner conflict, and
she returned to continue to care for her Ajase. Eventually, the Prince was cured to become a widely
respected ruler.
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2. Prenatal rancor and matricidal wish in the child,
Ajase. According to the parable of reincarnation,
Ajase is the reincarnation of a hermit whom his
mother had killed. In other words, he hates his
mother for having killed him before his birth.
Prenatal rancor means hatred for the origin
of one’s birth. Prenatal rancor led Ajase to try
to kill his mother when he learned the origin of
his birth;
3. Two kinds of guilt feelings. Ajase was overcome
with strong feelings of guilt after attempting to
slay his mother, and became afflicted with a terrible, painful skin disease characterized by foulsmelling abscesses. Kosawa called this feeling of
guilt ‘‘a punitive guilt feeling.’’ Only his mother’s
forgiveness and nursing brought him back to
health. Kosawa called the feeling of guilt that
Ajase experienced ‘‘a forgiven guilt feeling.’’
KEIGO OKONOGI
39
A L C H E M Y (A N A L Y T I C A L P S Y C H O L O G Y )
See also: Complex; Guilt, unconscious sense of; Guilt,
feeling of; Wish for a baby.
Bibliography
Kosawa, Heisaku. (1931). Two kinds of guilt feelings. The
Ajase complex. Japanese Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 11,
1954.
Kosawa, Heisaku. (1935, March–April). Two types of guilt
consciousness—Oedipus and Ajase. Tokyo Journal of Psychoanalysis, 11.
ALCHEMY (ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY)
Alchemy is a philosophical and chemical ‘‘opus’’ with
roots in ancient times and branches throughout the
world’s cultures. It is both an experimental and symbolic practice, a technical research into the nature of
matter, and an imaginal exercise on the spirit of matter
and its potential for change. It is also a mythopoeic
meditation and a projective method, a moving
Rorschach for the practitioner.
Using its experiments as metaphors, it has sought
an enlivening elixir, a healing panacea, and the transformation of base metal into gold through release
from crude impure ores. This occurs through producing a transmuting agent, itself a transformation from
the prima materia of the common ‘‘philosopher’s
stone’’ into the precious ‘‘stone of the philosophers’’
or ‘‘lapis.’’
Alchemy posits an original unitary energy which
separated in space-time into distinct physical elements, ‘‘falling apart’’ and differentiating in the four
directions. Perceived as transmutable through shared
qualities or correspondences, these elements could
one day be reunited in a reconstituted wholeness.
The dicta—‘‘Return to chaos is essential to the
work,’’ ‘‘Volatize the fixed and fix the volatile,’’ and
‘‘Dissolve and Coagulate’’—express a dialectic process between complements and opposites in analysis
and synthesis.
The alchemists might quicken this process
through their outer intervention in matter and their
interior practice of soul and spirit. The opus is the work
of persons or couples, whose integration or dissociation
are operative. While using common references, it values
the individual and dynamic over the collective and dogmatic. Through the interior change of the adept and his
soror mystica (mystical sister) and the chemical changes
40
in the ‘‘well closed vessel’’ of the retort, the microcosm
and macrocosm affect and reflect each other.
The Freudian psychoanalyst Herbert Silberer first
observed the analogy to transference in the conjoinings and confrontations among sulphurs, mercuries,
and salts, between the ‘‘masculine’’ and ‘‘feminine’’
matter, called king and queen, sun and moon, gold
and silver, day and night, male and female.
Jung cited Silberer in his work on the ‘‘coniunctio’’
(conjunction) of transference and countertransference. In alchemy, Jung found a precursor of depth psychotherapy’s dyadic and interactional model. He came
to understand the psyche, the unconscious, and depth
analysis as alchemical process, the ‘‘stone’’ as transformational consciousness, both a means and the goal of
individuation. He also noted alchemical images in
modern dreams.
BEVERLEY D. ZABRISKIE
See also: Allendy, René Felix Eugène; Archetype (analytical psychology); Goethe and psychoanalysis; Jung,
Carl Gustav; Silberer, Herbert; Transference/countertransference (analytical psychology).
Bibliography
Jung, Carl Gustav. (1946). The psychology of the transference. Collected Works (Vol. XVI). London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
———. (1953). Psychological reflections: An anthology of the
writings of C. G. Jung (J. Jacobi, Ed.). London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
———. (1955–56). Mysterium Conjunctionis. An inquiry
into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in
alchemy. Collected Works (Vol. XIV). London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
ALCOHOLISM
Alcoholism is not a psychoanalytic concept. The most
rigorous definition, following from the basic notion of
dependence, is the one provided by Pierre Fouquet:
‘‘An alcoholic is any man or woman who has lost the
ability to do without alcohol.’’ The word ‘‘alcoholism’’
was introduced by the Swedish physician Magnus
Huss (1849) and mentioned in France by M. Gabriel
(1866) in his medical dissertation. It appears in Freud’s
writings prior to 1900 in association with hysteria and
hypnosis, as a form of ‘‘subjection,’’ a ‘‘morbid habit,’’
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falling somewhere ‘‘between the organic affections and
the disorders of the imagination.’’ Principal occurrences of the word appear in letters to Wilhelm Fliess
(especially that of December 22, 1897), in the attached
manuscript (Draft H., 1895), and especially in the key
text ‘‘Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses’’
(1898a). ‘‘Habit,’’ Freud writes, ‘‘is a mere form of
words, without any explanatory value’’ and ‘‘success
will only be an apparent one, so long as the physician
contents himself with withdrawing the narcotic substance from his patients, without troubling about the
source from which their imperative need for it
springs’’ (p. 276).
It was initially believed (Sigmund Freud, Karl Abraham, Sándor Ferenczi) that alcohol does not create
symptoms but only promotes them, removing inhibitions, and destroying sublimation. The theory of alcohol
addiction (1905d) is summarized in terms of its predominance among men beginning with the onset of
puberty; its relationship to sexuality, and latent homosexuality, already identified as narcissistic and specular
by Viktor Tausk (1913) and Lou Andreas-Salomé
(1912); oral fixation, and autoerotic behavior. Emphasis
later focused on the nature of the defensive process, an
immediately effective means, but one that is too accessible, which is why it is so dangerous (1930a [1929]). The
economic approach to affects was emphasized next—
concepts of alexithymia (McDougall, 1978), instinctual
discharge by the body (‘‘resomatization of affects’’), and
acting out (‘‘dispersion,’’ ‘‘destruction of affects,’’ ‘‘actssymptoms’’), depending on the author—all at the
expense of psychic elaboration.
Alcohol plays the role of a unique substitute object
and a trap, creating a pseudo-reality; the hallucinations
associated with delirium tremens cease with the administration of alcohol. The narcissistic problematic (withdrawal) in fact harbors an autoerotic component and
gives rise to defenses, barriers, or narcissistic prostheses,
such as an overinvestment in work, children, ‘‘friends,’’
etc., and alcohol. The mechanism of splitting into nonalcoholic (common, neurotic) and alcoholic sectors of
the ego has denial as its corollary, but it is a denial that
does not involve the perception of an external reality
(difference of the sexes, castration) but rather the internal perception of the body itself. There exist silent zones,
‘‘matrices of painful, deadly territories that threaten the
unity of the ego’’ (Mijolla and Shentoub, 1973). These
are the parts of the body that lie outside symbolization
and outside language, as described by Jean Clavreul
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(1959). For Paul Schilder and Walter Bromberg (1933),
alcoholism is accompanied by a regression from castration that leads to bodily fragmentation. The alcoholic
short circuit leaves no room for the establishment of
loss, the source of desire, but rather establishes an
ensemble of needs and repetitive acts that are without
meaning. An analogy can be made with pathological
games. Shame or opprobrium are distinguished from
guilt. The superego of an alcoholic is demanding but
‘‘soluble in alcohol’’ (Simmel, 1930). There is no strong
image with which the subject identifies, but identification can occur with someone hated, which can lead to
‘‘self-hatred.’’ The indulgent and demanding mother
who creates insecurity is the object of reverse fantasies
(idealization).
The symbolism of alcohol is that of vital fluids
(blood, ‘‘the blood of the vine,’’ sperm, milk) or
destructive humors (urine, feces), of the breast and the
penis, good and/or bad. This symbolism is present in
all the myths associated with alcohol, from Dionysus
to the Eucharist.
The situation in terms of a psychoanalytic classification is still the subject of controversy. It is a narcissistic disorder, closer to manic-depression and paranoia
than to neurosis, psychosis, or perversion. Its issues
fall within the framework of addiction.
Intolerance to alcohol can be interpreted as a
reaction formation to the excitations that alcohol
promotes, or to the frequently negative attitudes
toward alcoholics, sometimes as extreme as hatred
(Winnicott, D. W., 1947), or even to the most primitive issues of the alcoholic that are awakened in the
therapist. From the standpoint of treatment, it is a
matter of detoxification or social prohibition
(1927c)—‘‘Not all men abandon this toxic supplement
with the same facility’’ (1905c), ‘‘the only effective
remedy is the resolution that draws its strength from a
powerful current of the libido’’—as opposed to involvement of the superego (1966b [1932]). The effectiveness of temperance movements appear to be associated
with libidinal investments ‘‘torn from alcohol’’ and
given expression in exhibitionism, or homosexual and
narcissistic masochism.
There is a double risk of using the term ‘‘alcoholism’’: the risk of turning it into a closed and homogenized entity, or of breaking apart the clinical concept,
reductively assimilating it to various diagnostic classifications (neurosis, psychosis, perversion—fetishism,
41
A L E X A N D E R , F R A N Z G A B R I E L (1891 –1964 )
for example—paranoia, manic-depression, psychopathy, etc.). To compound the problem, concepts such as
homosexuality, orality, ‘‘disappointment,’’ and ‘‘libidinal viscosity,’’ risk serving as facile or even completely
inappropriate explanations.
Freud himself often superimposed the phenomenology of drunkenness and the psychopathology of
alcohol addiction, and even considered the relation of
the alcoholic to his poison as nonconflictual, ‘‘the
purest harmony,’’ and ‘‘an example of a happy marriage’’ (1912d, p. 188). Blind spots with respect to his
own relationship to toxic substances (cocaine,
tobacco) led him outside the field of psychoanalysis
when he postulated a ‘‘toxological theory’’ in psychopathology, which he did not abandon until the Outline
of Psychoanalysis (Descombey, 1994).
There are a number of concepts related to alcoholism: addiction, alcoholic intoxication, alcoholic delirium and jealousy, delirium tremens (Viktor Tausk’s
delirium of action or occupation), alcohol-associated
epilepsy. And it can be asked, as Freud asked about
psychosis, if the terms ‘‘denial’’ and ‘‘repression’’ have
the same meaning with respect to alcoholism as they
do for the psychopathology of the neuroses. The same
question could also be asked about the familiar use of
the concepts of desire and pleasure when it comes to a
clinical practice that is situated ‘‘beyond the pleasure
principle’’ or within the register of need.
Post-Freudian authors who have done substantive
work on alcoholism include James Glover (1938) and
the Kleinians Herbert Rosenfeld (1964) (paranoidschizoid and depressive positions), Sándor Radó
(1933) (pharamacothymia, initial anxiety depression,
pharmacogenic orgasm, addiction crisis), and Michael
Balint (1977) (basic fault). There has also been
renewed interest in the subject in the work of the
French psychoanalysts Jean Clavreul (1959), Alain de
Mijolla and Salem A. Shentoub (1973); the Lacanians
François Perrier (1975), Charles Melman (1976), A.
Rigaud (1976), M. Lasselin (1979), and F. GondoloCalais (1980); as well as Jacques Ascher (1978), Joyce
McDougall (1989), M. Monjauze (1991), and JeanPaul Descombey (1985–1994).
JEAN-PAUL DESCOMBEY
See also: Addiction; Dependence; Dipsomania; Indications and contraindications for psychoanalysis for an
adult.
42
Bibliography
Bromberg, William, and Schilder, Paul. (1933). Alcoholic
hallucinations—castration and dismembering motives.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 14, 206–224.
Clavreul, Jean. (1959). La parole de l’alcoolique. Psychanalyse, 5, 257–280.
Descombey, Jean-Paul. (1985). Alcoolique, mon frère, toi: l’alcoolisme entre médecine, psychiatrie et psychanalyse. Toulouse: Privat.
———. (1994). Précis d’alcoologie clinique. Paris: Dunod.
Freud, Sigmund. (1898a). Sexuality in the aetiology of the
neuroses. SE, 3: 259–285.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
———. (1912d). On the universal tendency to debasement
in the sphere of love. SE, 11; 177–190.
Huss, Magnus. (1849). Alcoholismus chronicus eller kronisk
alkoholsjukdom. Stockholm: n.p.
McDougall, Joyce. (1989). Theaters of the body: a psychoanalytic approach to psychosomatic illness. New York: Norton.
Mijolla, Alain de, and Shentoub, Salem A. (1973). Pour une
psychanalyse de l’alcoolisme. Paris: Payot.
Further Reading
Director, L. (2002). Relational psychoanalysis in the treatment of chronic drug & alcohol abuse. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12, 551–580.
ALEXANDER, FRANZ GABRIEL (1891–1964)
A doctor and psychoanalyst, Franz Gabriel Alexander
was born January 22, 1891, in Budapest, and died
March 8, 1964, in Palm Springs, California. The son of
Bernard Alexander, a Jewish professor of philosophy,
Franz Alexander studied medicine in Göttingen and
Budapest, and specialized in research on the physiology of the brain. Following the First World War, he
moved to Berlin. It was Sigmund Freud who introduced him to psychoanalysis, but he completed his
analytic training with Hanns Sachs in Berlin.
In 1921 he became a member of the German Psychoanalytic Society, an assistant at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, and a training analyst. He undertook a
reformulation of the study of neuroses in his Psychoanalyse der Gesamtpersönlichkeit (Psychoanalysis of the
total personality), which represented the first step
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toward a psychology of the psychoanalytic ego. Together
with Hugo Staub he published a psychoanalytic study
of criminology in 1929, Der Verbrecher und seine Richter
(The Criminal, the judge, and the Public: A Psychological
Analysis, 1956). In 1930 he was invited to the United
States, where he occupied the first University Chair of
psychoanalysis at the University of Chicago. In 1931 he
worked at the Judge Baker Institute in Boston on juvenile delinquency and, in 1932, he founded the Chicago
Psychoanalytic Institute, where he remained director
until 1952. In 1933 he was admitted as a member of the
Chicago Psychoanalytic Society and, in 1938, named
professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois.
Alexander was one of the best known representatives of
medicine seen from the point of view of psychoanalysis.
In 1939, in collaboration with Flanders Dunbar,
Stanley Cobb, Carl Binger, and others, he founded
the review Psychosomatic Medicine. ‘‘According to his
theory on the specific psychodynamic conflicts associated with certain illnesses, a psychosomatic illness
appears whenever there is an encounter between a
certain personality type, predisposed to certain illnesses,
and a specific conflict situation that lends itself to the
formation of specific organic illnesses’’ (Bonin, 1983).
In 1955 he spent a year at the Center for Advanced
Study in Behavioral Science in Palo Alto, California.
Following this year, in 1956, he settled in Los Angeles,
where he was named head of the Psychiatric Research
Department at Mount Sinai Hospital. With support of
the Ford Foundation, he organized a research project
to study psychotherapeutic process by direct observation of patients and therapists. That same year Alexander became cofounder of the American Academy of
Psychoanalysis. He died March 8, 1964, in Palm
Springs, California.
Alexander believed that psychoanalysis was a
branch of psychiatry, and was also convinced of the
efficacy of a shortened course of therapy. Many of his
critics considered the new ideas he introduced into
analytic theory to be reductive.
ELKE MÜHLLEITNER
See also: Allergy; Asthma; Criminology and psychoanalysis; Hungarian School; Psychosomatics; United States.
Bibliography
Alexander, Franz Gabriel. (1927). Psychoanalyse der Gesamtpersönlichkeit; neun Vorlesungen über die Anwendung von
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Freud’s Ich–Theorie auf die Neurosenlehre. Leipzig, Vienna:
Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
———. (1961). The scope of psychoanalysis. Selected papers
of Franz Alexander. New York: Basic Books.
Alexander Franz, and Staub, Hugo. (1956). The criminal, the
judge, and the public: A psychological analysis, (rev. ed.,
Gregory Zilboorg, Trans.). Glencoe, IL: Free Press. (Original work published 1929)
Bonin, Werner F. (1983). Die grossen Psychologen. Düsseldorf, Germany: Econ Taschenbuch.
Grotjahn, Martin. (1966). Georg Groddeck, the untamed
analyst. In Fr. Alexander, S. Eisenstein, M. Grotjahn (eds.),
Psychoanalytic pioneers (p. 308–320). New York-London:
Basic Books.
Hale, Nathan G. (1995). The rise and crisis of psychoanalysis
in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985.
New York: Oxford University Press.
ALIENATION
Inscribed in the opposition between the Same and the
Other, alienation describes the condition of the subject
who no longer recognizes himself, or rather can only
recognize himself via the Other. The philosophical
background of this concept derives from Hegel and
then Marx. Classical psychiatry used the term to classify any mental illness in which the subject no longer
knew who he was. Thanks to Jacques Lacan’s study of
Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, the term no longer refers
only to mental alienation, but retains the meaning it
has in philosophy.
For Lacan, who followed Hegel on this point,
human desire is constituted by mediation: ‘‘Man’s
desire finds its meaning in the other’s desire, not so
much because the other holds the keys to the desired
object, but because his first objective is to be recognized by the other’’ (Lacan, p. 58). Specifically, the
objective is to be recognized by the Other as a desiring
subject, because the first desire is to have one’s desire
recognized. The conclusion is Lacan’s well-known formula: ‘‘Man’s desire is the desire of the Other,’’ which
doesn’t mean that one desires another as object, but
that one desires another desire, and wants to have
one’s own desire recognized by the Other. This is an
echo of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic (a struggle for
pure prestige) where each consciousness wants to be
recognized by the Other without recognizing it in turn
(‘‘each consciousness seeks the death of the other’’).
43
ALIENATION
In this fight to the death, the one who accepts death
in order to win becomes the Master; the other will
become the slave. But the Master is taken in a trap, for
he owes his status to the recognition of a slaveconsciousness. The slave, however, will be liberated by
the Master as his work extracts from things the consciousness of self that was lost in the struggle. The slave
will end up, in the Marxist perspective, transforming the
world in such a way that there is no place for the Master.
Thus the theme of alienation in Lacan refers to what
is called a forced choice, or vel, which is the Latin word
expressing an alternative where it is impossible to maintain two terms at once. The vel is alienating in that it
gives a false choice, a forced choice (‘‘your money or
your life,’’ ‘‘me or you’’). The Master’s freedom, which
must pass through death to attain consciousness of self,
is no freedom. Lacan derived several consequences
from this structure of alternative, particularly in his critique of the Cartesian cogito, by indicating that thought
and being cannot coincide. Thus, ‘‘I am where I do not
think’’ and ‘‘it thinks there where I am not.’’
Piera Aulagnier also took up the notion of alienation,
but even though she borrowed from Lacan the relation
of desire to the Other, her view more closely
approached Freud’s thinking about collective hypnosis
and its relation to the ego ideal. However, she worked in
an entirely different context, refusing to make alienation
one of the givens of human existence, but instead seeing
it as one of the ways the psyche attempts to resolve
conflict. First, she defined the notion of alienation by
its goal, which is ‘‘to strive for a non-conflictual state,
to abolish all causes of conflict between the identifying
subject and the object of identification, between the I
and its ideals’’ (Aulagnier, 1979). Thus she connects
the notion to the aims of Thanatos, as a ‘‘desire for
non-desire’’ and it can then be used in fields as diverse
as collective psychology, passionate love, gambling,
and drug addiction.
Nevertheless, Piera Aulagnier insists that alienation
rests on an encounter between the desire for selfalienation, on the one hand, and the desire to alienate,
on the other. The process of alienation seeks to erase the
tension arising from this difference, whether it involves
a subject that seeks to identify himself with the object
identified, or a subject that wants to bring together the
self image that comes back to him from others and the
others themselves. Thus alienation appears to be a
pathological modality, like neurosis or psychosis, that
attempts to regulate the conflict between identifying
44
subject and the object identified. Whereas the neurotic
differentiates between his self and its idealization and
the psychotic posits the latter as realized in a delusion,
the alienated subject idealizes an other who provides
him with certainty. Unable to make these ideals a spur
to progress, alienation produces a short circuit
through the mediation of an idealized force. Alienation becomes even more effective when the alienated
subject misapprehends ‘‘the accident occurring in his
or her thought’’ (Aulagnier, 1979). It is as though this
subject, once a prisoner, no longer has the objectivity
needed to judge the situation.
In cases where a group feels alienated, not only is a
group of subjects oppressed by a group of masters, but
oppression infiltrates all relationships within the
group. ‘‘Thus whatever the position one may occupy
at the moment, every subject is both a victim and a
potential murderer, given that one could always find
oneself in the opposite position a moment later’’
(Aulagnier, 1979). If Jacques Lacan is indebted to
Hegel, Piera Aulagnier leans on Aldous Huxley and
George Orwell, both of whom revisit the historical
experiences that have left their mark on the twentieth
century, the Holocaust and the gulag.
But how does it happen that the subject chooses
one outcome of alienation, rather than another? Piera
Aulagnier would start from the metapsychological perspective on the conflict between the identifying subject
and the object identified. This conflict is inscribed at
the heart of a pathological relation to the ideal ego and
to the ideal agencies in general. Alienation is characterized (as is psychosis, but in a different way) by an
asymmetry between the I and its object, with no reciprocity between what the one recognizes and what the
other recognizes. Thus a dominant pole is created
(passionate investment in an object, the God-drug,
Chance) by means of which the subject’s response will
be alienated from the object that is seen as invulnerable; conversely the psychotic, who also recognizes the
asymmetry in the relation, is going to try to flee from
it and create outside of it a delusional object of identification that others refuse to recognize.
The notion of alienation as Piera Aulagnier conceives of it allowed for a reconsideration the nosographical categories. She particularly opened up a domain
for renewed investigations on the question of addictions and on the perversions.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
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A L L E N D Y , R E N É F É L I X E U G È N E (1889 –1 942)
See also: Ego ideal; I; Ideology; Imaginary identification/
symbolic identification; Mirror stage; Passion.
Bibliography
Aulagnier, Piera. (1979). Les destins du plaisir: aliénation,
amour, passion. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France
Lacan, Jacques. (2002). The function and field of speech and
language in psychoanalysis. In Écrits: a selection (Bruce Fink,
Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1953)
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1998). Penser la psychose. Une
lecture de l’œuvre de Piera Aulagnier. Paris: Dunod.
Palmier, Jean-Michel. (1969). Lacan. Paris: Éditions
universitaires.
Further Reading
Bychowski, Gustav. (1967). The archaic object and alienation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 48, 384393.
Khan, Masud. (1979). Alienation in perversions. New York:
International Universities Press.
ALLENDY-NEL-DUMOUCHEL, YVONNE
(1890–1935)
A French writer and art critic (under the pseudonym
of Jacques Poisson), Yvonne Allendy-Nel-Dumouchel
was born in Paris on September 3, 1890, and died
there on August 23, 1935.
Alice Yvonne Nel-Dumouchel (she later gave up the
name Alice) married René Allendy, homeopathic doctor and future founding member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, on November 19, 1912. In 1922,
together with her husband, she created the Groupe
d’études philosophiques et scientifiques pour l’examen
des idées nouvelles, at the Sorbonne.
She was coauthor with him of Capitalisme et Sexualité
(Capitalism and sexuality; 1931), a work whose subject
matter touched upon communism and feminism.
Claiming that life is an ongoing, and one-way, adaptation guided by our instincts, the authors affirm that
capitalism intensifies the conflicts between the instincts
of possession and those leading to procreation, that economic concerns increase in importance and are substituted, in the relations between the sexes, for values of a
sentimental nature. ‘‘Woman experiences economic servitude combined with sexual dependence, her illusory
emancipation is added to her responsibilities.’’ Faced
with these difficulties, they stipulate a kind of economic
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regulatory system, national and international, culminating in the abolition of capitalism. As far as the modern
family is concerned, they want to see the State substituted for the father as the economic provider. Their analysis cites both Freud and Engels.
Under the pseudonym of Jacques Poisson, Yvonne
Allendy published a number of articles on the relationship between art and psychoanalysis. Speaking of the
cinema, she affirmed that her subject must include the
new field then of concern to researchers: the unconscious
psychic apparatus, which dominates drama. Allendy
claimed that only the cinema is capable of clearly reproducing the thought-image in all its dizzying rapidity.
In ‘‘Littérature moderne et psychanalyse’’ (April
1923), she makes use of Freud’s methods to clarify
literature, painting, and especially the work of the
avant-garde. Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, Philippe Soupault, and Blaise Cendrars were all examined for their
Freudian symbolism. She suggested that there would
be ‘‘more to gain in expanding our knowledge of
human nature’’ if psychoanalysts were to study Dadaist texts ‘‘than there would be in having professors of
literature explain classical texts.’’
She died in 1935 and her sister Colette became René
Allendy’s companion. Colette ran a gallery of modern
art after the Second World War.
JEAN-PIERRE BOURGERON
See also: Allendy, René Félix Eugène; Cinema and psychoanalysis; Visual arts and psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Allendy, René and Yvonne. (1931). Capitalisme et sexualité.
Paris: Denoël & Steele.
Poisson, Jacques. (1921, April). Vers une nouvelle unité plastique. La Vie des lettres et des arts, IV, 445–448.
———. (1923, April). Littérature moderne et psychanalyse.
La Vie des lettres et des arts, XIV, 71–74.
———. (1925). Cinéma et psychanalyse. Les cahiers du
mois, 16–17, 175–176.
ALLENDY, RENÉ FÉLIX EUGÈNE
(1889–1942)
A French homeopathic doctor and psychoanalyst,
René Allendy was one of the founding members of the
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A L L E N D Y , R E N É F É L I X E U G È N E (188 9 –1942 )
Société psychanalytique de Paris. He was born on February 19, 1889, in Paris; his father was a shopkeeper
from the Isle of Maurice and his mother was from
Picardy. He died in Montpellier on July 12, 1942.
When he was three, he contracted bronchial pneumonia from his nurse and during childhood lived through
a number of often serious illnesses, including
diphtheria complicated by quadriplegia. A student
of the Marist brothers at the Collège Saint-Joseph
in Paris, he completed his study of the humanities at
the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly. He enrolled in the School
of Oriental Languages to learn Russian. Later, he
received a degree in Swedish from the Scandinavian
Language Institute.
After receiving his medical degree from the School
of Medicine of Paris on November 12, 1912 (his dissertation was entitled ‘‘L’Alchimie et la Médicine’’
[Alchemy and medicine]), he married Yvonne NelDumouchel, just seven days later. Until her death in
1935, she remained his constant companion and collaborator. In 1936 he married Colette Nel-Dumouchel,
Yvonne’s sister.
After being mobilized in 1914, he was gassed in
Champagne, later declared tubercular, and given a disability pension. He practiced medicine in Paris at the
Léopold-Bellan hospital and at the tuberculosis prevention clinics run by Hygiène Sociale de la Seine and the
Saint-Jacques hospital, where he provided homeopathic
treatments from 1932 to 1939. With his wife Yvonne he
founded, in 1922, the Groupe d’études philosophiques et
scientifiques pour l’examen des idées nouvelles (Philosophic and scientific study group for the examination of
new ideas) at the Sorbonne, where a number of speakers
from France and other countries spoke on science, art,
and psychoanalysis. He defined the organization’s goals
this way: ‘‘In order that the great movement of contemporary ideas might lead, without impediment, to practical realizations, it is essential to study the meaning of
the future and hasten its spread.’’
neuroses), which appeared with a preface by Professor
Claude. The same year, the review Le Disque vert
published ‘‘La Libido’’ in an issue dedicated to Freud.
He wrote more than thirty articles for homeopathy
journals and was equally productive in the field of
psychoanalysis: Les Rêves et leur Interprétation psychanalytique (Dreams and their psychoanalytic interpretation; 1926),Le Problème de la destinée (The problem
of destiny; 1927), Orientations des idées médicales
(Orientations of medical ideas; 1928), La Justice intérieure (Interior justice; 1931) and La Psychanalyse, doctrine et application (Psychoanalysis: theory and application; 1931). Although he often wrote about unorthodox subjects, his theoretical positions remained
fairly orthodox; he was, however, open to many of
Jung’s ideas, such as that of the collective unconscious.
His book on Paracelsus remains a standard reference
for admirers of the ‘‘accursed doctor.’’ With Yvonne
he published Capitalisme et Sexualité (Capitalism and
sexuality) in 1932.
He was a friend of Antonin Artaud, and he was also
Artaud’s therapist; other patients included René Crevel
and Anaı̈s Nin, who described Allendy in detail in her
Journal. With Edouard Pichon, he drafted the first statutes of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, where he was
secretary from 1928 to 1931. In 1942, in Montpellier,
he dictated his last thoughts on the illness that would
soon take his life. A strange mixture of lucidity and
blindness, these were published in 1944 as the Journal
d’un médicin malade (Journal of a sick doctor).
JEAN-PIERRE BOURGERON
See also: Allendy-Nel-Dumouchel, Yvonne; France; Nin,
Anaı̈s; Surrealism and psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Allendy, René. (1931). La justice intérieure. Paris: Denoël &
Steele.
Analyzed in 1924 by René Laforgue, he practiced
medicine, homeopathy, and psychoanalysis, studied
esotericism and numerology, and published extensively in all these fields. Aside from his private practice,
located at 67, rue de l’Assomption, in Paris, he worked
as a psychoanalyst in the department of Professor
Claude at Sainte-Anne.
———. (1932). La psychanalyse, doctrines et applications.
Paris: Denoël & Steele.
In 1924 he wrote, together with Laforgue, La Psychanalyse et les Nevroses (Psychoanalysis and
Allendy, René, and Allendy, Yvonne. (1931). Capitalisme et
sexualité. Paris: Denoël & Steele.
46
———. (1934). Essai sur la guérison. Paris: Denoël & Steele.
———. (1937). Paracelse, le médecin maudit. Paris:
Gallimard.
———. (1944). Journal d’un médecin malade. Paris: Denoël.
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ALLERGY
Bouvard, Laurent. (1981). La vie et l’œuvre du Dr René
Allendy (1889–1942). Medical dissertation, Paris-Val-deMarne, Créteil School of Medicine.
ALLERGIC OBJECT RELATIONSHIP
The expression allergic object relationship appeared
as the title of a talk given by Pierre Marty in 1957,
published in the Revue française de psychanalyse.
Influenced by the work of Maurice Bouvet, it extends
the psychosomatic approach found in his work, which
remains key for the question of allergies, and entails an
asymptotic model for psychosomatic functioning.
The relationship is characterized by a confusion
between the personality of the patient and that of the
analyst. A striking, if not total, identification sustains
this confusion from the outset. This ‘‘communion’’ (in
the sense almost of a transubstantiation) implies both
identification and projection. The subject inhabits the
object and is inhabited by it. The nature of the
object—human, animal, plant, thing—matters little,
for it is quickly invested as both host and guest. These
patients give the impression and have the feeling of
being sponges, possibly endowed with clairvoyance.
(Zelig, the hero of Woody Allen’s film, is a striking
example.) For Marty, the overlapping of identification
and projection implies that such projection must be
understood primarily as an extension of the limits of
the ego as understood by Paul Federn.
This first step is followed by a lengthier and more
nuanced attempt to modify the object, through which
the subject tries to obliterate the limits between self
and object, always by means of the same two mechanisms: cloaking the object in its own qualities through
an act of ‘‘projection’’ and taking on the qualities of
the object through identification. However, the qualities of the object must stay close to a certain ideal of
the object. So one sees a capacity for object-choice, but
the subject can only detach itself from an object by
identifying with a new object, which leads to the loss
of the previously invested object, but without any pain
of loss or consequent work of mourning.
The very idea of a conflict between identifications is
avoided in the allergic relation. The oedipal situation is
thereby avoided and, when this is impossible, the risk of
triggering a somatic crisis becomes manifest. Each of
the objects individually can be an object of identification, but conflict (for example, oedipal) results in an
interior rift that is avoided by the somatic allergic crisis.
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This account, under the heading of ‘‘the allergic
character,’’ would lead to a more comprehensive conception of psychosomatics, founded on the work of
Pierre Marty, and enabling him to reveal its role in different forms of character splitting. Léon Kreisler
(1980) continued this work in his notion of precocious
appearance. The role played by the parents in the
development of this relationship is more prominent in
his conception than in Marty’s, for whom it is almost a
given. Michel Fain compared the family dynamics
typical of allergics with the constitutional defect discussed in the work of René Spitz: anxiety in the presence of the stranger.
ROBERT ASSÉO
See also: Allergy; Asthma.
Bibliography
Fain, Michael. (1969). Réflexions sur la structure allergique.
Revue française de psychanalyse, 33 (2).
Kreisler, Léon. (1981), L’enfant du désordre psychosomatique.
Toulouse: Privat.
Marty, Pierre. (1958). The allergic object relationship. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39, 98–103.
Szwec, Gérard. (1989). Figure de l’étranger, langage et
régression formelle. Revue française de psychanalyse, 53, 6:
1977–1987.
ALLERGY
Treatment of allergies became a part of psychosomatics, and subsequently psychoanalysis, following
the work of the Chicago School, especially Franz
Alexander and Thomas M. French in 1941. Alexander
and French focused primarily on asthma rather than
cutaneous allergic reactions, but later authors approached these initial studies quite differently. Distancing themselves from the idea of hysterical conversion,
they established a link between psychic conflict and
analogous somatic conflict. With respect to allergy,
they looked for the conflicting elements they considered characteristic. For asthma, these conflicts were
primarily conflicts between infants’ dependence
on their mothers and instinctual demands that
threatened this dependence. The crisis itself was associated with an inhibition of emotional expression,
especially tears.
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ALLERGY
Because these factors were not specific, other
authors returned to classical methods of analysis.
Phyllis Greenacre (1945) insisted that oral sadism can
be masked by streams of crocodile tears; here emotional expression assumes renewed importance in an
interpretive framework. Jacob Arlow (1955) considered an allergic attack to be a manifestation of transference essentially associated with sadistic fantasies of
incorporation. Melitta Sperling (1963) also demonstrated the links between allergies and pregenital
factors. Philip C. Wilson (1968) hypothesized that
transferential acting may be involved. In the end, the
dimension of conversion returned to the foreground.
Michel de M’Uzan (1968) insisted on the need to clarify the formation of somatic symptoms, and he turned
to the notion of psychosomatic structure.
Pierre Marty reinvigorated the concept of allergies
through his description of the allergic character
(1976), which followed his account of the allergic object relation fifteen years earlier. He gave the allergic
character the following traits: absence or avoidance of
aggressiveness, a capacity for identification, absence
or avoidance of conflict, considerable merging with
the other, and projection as a mode of identification.
To describe these traits in turn, absence or avoidance
of aggressiveness gives subjects a socially agreeable
cast, but is based on a weak capacity for negation,
which in turn indicates a weak superego. The capacity
for identification was already included in the allergic
object relation. Merging with the other (absence of
anxiety in the face of the foreign) is also characteristic
of certain forms of primary epilepsy and allergic epilepsy, described by Marie-Thérèse Neyraut-Sutterman.
Projection, described in 1957, becomes a mode
of identification. As a consequence, subjects are
unable to project bad objects or to distinguish good
from bad.
Only when the allergic child is able, through stranger anxiety, to be afraid do allergic mechanisms begin
to diminish. The features above can be found together
in a character neurosis (which Pierre Marty referred to
as a common allergy bundle), or they can appear as
simple, relatively invasive traits that form a more or
less split-off component of the personality, manifested
only during regression (Pierre Marty referred to these
as lateral lines) or deep splitting (parallel lines).
An allergic crisis can be triggered by the overriding
of identificatory possibilities, as when the child is presented with two equally invested objects where the
48
identifications have been kept separate. For Pierre
Marty, a somatic manifestation is seen as a way station
within a regressive movement and not, as in the psychogenetic approach, as the somatic expression of a
traumatic situation. For Michel Fain, the unconscious
of the typical allergic is the seat of the mother’s desire
to have the child regress to a primary narcissistic stage
of feelings of unity with her, a desire that keeps an
entire portion of the ego of the allergic patient in an
embryonic state.
For Marty, these properties and variations result in
distinct therapeutic indications. In typical cases, the
allergic individual is very adaptable, also in the allergic’s relation to the analyst and to analysis. The down
side of this is that there is a risk of an outbreak of
somatic manifestations at the end of treatment. He
therefore recommends psychotherapy as a prophylactic, which can help the patient to recognize unconscious factors and become aware of the danger of certain object relations. Marty believes that medical
treatment is indicated for somatic disorders, and that
analysis and psychotherapy should not be recommended for allergic manifestations.
This conception of an allergic quasi-structure has
led to more recent work by Léon Kreisler (1982),
Michel Fain (1969), and Gérard Szwec (1993), who
have addressed these problems in children.
ROBERT ASSÉO
See also: Allergic object relationship; Asthma.
Bibliography
Alexander, Franz, and French, Thomas M. (1941). Psychogenic factors in bronchial asthma. Washington, DC:
National Research Council.
Arlow, Jacob. (1955). Notes on oral symbolism. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 24, 63–74.
Fain, Michel. (1969). Réflexions sur la structure allergique.
Revue française de psychanalyse, 33 (2).
Greenacre, Phyllis. (1945). Pathological weeping. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 14 62–75.
Kreisler, Léon. (1982). L’économie psychosomatique de l’enfant asthmatique: à propos d’un cas d’asthme grave chez
un préadolescent Psychothérapies, 2 (1), 15–24.
Marty, Pierre. (1976). Les mouvements individuels de vie et
de mort. Vol. 1: Essai d’économie psychosomatique. Paris:
Payot.
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ALMANACH
M’Uzan, Michel de. (1968). Comment on ‘‘Psychosomatic
Asthma and Acting Out,’’ by Ph. Wilson. International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 49 (2–3), 333–335.
Sperling, Melitta. (1963). Fetishism in children. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 32, 374–392.
Szwec, Gérard. (1993). La psychosomatique de l’enfant asthmatique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Wilson, C. Philip. (1968). Psychosomatic asthma and acting
out: A case of bronchial asthma that developed de novo in
the terminal phase. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 49 (2–3), 330–333.
ALLGEMEINE ÄRZTLICHE GESELLSCHAFT
FÜR PSYCHOTHERAPIE
The Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie (General Medical Society for Psychotherapy,
AÄGP) was an organization of physicians headquartered in Germany dedicated to the promotion of psychotherapeutic theory and practice.
Its membership was comprised primarily of young
internists and neurologists concerned with that aspect
of a ‘‘crisis in medicine’’ having to do with a ‘‘materialist’’ university psychiatry beholden to abstract research
and nosology (classification of diseases) instead of the
prevention and treatment of mental disorders. Although
there was some diversity of political and ideological opinion within the AÄGP, the membership by and large
displayed a conservative medical critique of modern
industrial society in general and the democratic Weimar
Republic in particular. The AÄGP also sought to differentiate psychotherapy from neighboring disciplines
inside and outside medicine; there was significant
debate in particular about its relationship to psychiatry.
The AÄGP was founded as an international organization in 1928 with its own journal; its first annual
congress had been held in Baden-Baden in 1926. In
1930 the journal was renamed Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie and was published in Leipzig until 1944.
The society was reorganized in 1934 as a result of
the Nazi seizure of power; a new Internationale Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie in Zurich under
the presidency of Carl Gustav Jung was created along
with the Deutsche Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft
für Psychotherapie under Matthias Heinrich Göring.
In 1940 Göring succeeded Jung; the AÄGP was resurrected as a West German entity in 1948 under psychiatrist and former president Ernst Kretschmer.
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PSYCHOANALYSE
While some individual psychoanalysts were members of the AÄGP, the German Psychoanalytic Society
did not recognize such an organization of ‘‘wild analysts.’’ Although—and because—it was one of the purposes of the AÄGP to unify the schools of thought in
psychotherapy, criticism within it of psychoanalysis,
especially after 1928, was common. The Freudians
who were members of the AÄGP tended to be revisionists like Karen Horney, Georg Groddeck, Wilhelm
Reich, and Harald Schultz-Hencke, or apostates such
as Carl Gustav Jung, Alfred Adler, and Wilhelm Stekel.
In this regard, it was ironic that under National Socialism the society, for largely political reasons but still in
keeping with Freud’s view of the dangers of the medicalization of psychoanalysis, opened its membership
to lay practitioners.
GEOFFREY COCKS
See also: Germany; Göring, Matthias Heinrich; Neopsychoanalysis; Schultz-Hencke, Harald Julius Alfred CarlLudwig.
Bibliography
Cocks, Geoffrey. (1997). Psychotherapy in the Third Reich:
The Göring Institute (2nd rev. ed.). New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers.
Lockot, Regine. (1985). Erinnern und Durcharbeiten: zur
Geschichte der Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie im Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.
ALLOEROTICISM. See Autoeroticism
ALLOPLASTIC. See Autoplastic
ALMANACH DER PSYCHOANALYSE
The first Almanach der Psychoanalyse was published in
1926 by Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag in
Vienna. The job of publishing the Almanach, a highly
effective publicity vehicle, was the first editorial decision made by Adolf Josef Storfer after the departure of
Otto Rank as director of the press. Storfer’s goal was to
supply a kind of budget anthology of psychoanalysis
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ALONE
that would provide an overview of the psychoanalytic
literature.
The Almanach was published once a year from 1926
until 1938, when the Germans entered Austria. There
were thirteen volumes in all, comprising between two
and three hundred pages each; nine thousand copies of
each octavo volume were printed. Each number contained about twenty short articles written by psychoanalysts, scientists, and writers (including Thomas
Mann, Stefan Zweig, and Hermann Hesse), articles that
had previously appeared in the psychoanalytic literature, pages from books published by Internationaler
Psychoanalytischer Verlag, and, in rare cases, unpublished writing. Freud helped support the Almanach by
publishing ‘‘Humor’’ and ‘‘Fetishism,’’ two unpublished texts of his, in 1928. Each volume also contained
portraits of the various psychoanalysts and critiques of
works on psychoanalysis excerpted from newspapers
and the trade press, as well as a list of new publications
by Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
ANDREA HUPPKE
See also: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1927d). Humour. SE, 21: 159–166.
———. (1927e). Fetishism. SE, 21: 147–157.
ALONE. See Capacity to be alone
ALPHA-ELEMENTS
Bion used the term ‘‘element’’ first in Experiences in
Groups (1961), only in very general terms. In A Theory
of Thinking (1962) Bion describes for the first time
(except for an unpublished paper presented at a
scientific meeting of the British Psycho-Analytical
Society) the use of the concept of alpha-function as a
working tool in the analysis of disturbances of
thought: ‘‘It seemed convenient to suppose an alpha
function to convert sense data into alpha-elements
and thus provide the psyche with the material for
dream thoughts and hence the capacity to wake up or
go to sleep, to be conscious or unconscious. According
50
to this theory consciousness depends on alpha function and it is a logical necessity to suppose that such a
function exists if we are to assume that the self is able
to be conscious of itself in the sense of knowing itself
from experience of itself.’’
In this paper he describes how alpha function
converts beta-elements (raw sense data) into alphaelements, and he is particularly concerned with the
differentiation that is established between the unconscious and the conscious. He considers alpha-elements
to be elements necessary for consciousness. By ‘‘consciousness’’ he means specifically self-consciousness,
since beta-elements in a sense are also conscious as raw
perceptions. When the infant’s consciousness is
invaded to an unbearable extent by beta-elements, the
infant is driven to project these outside. When the
beta-elements are transformed into alpha they become
consciously apprehended, and a differentiation is established between the conscious and the unconscious.
The alpha-elements can be consciously experienced,
repressed, symbolized, and further worked on.
In Learning from Experience (1962), Bion gives the
following example:
‘‘If a man has an emotional experience when
asleep or awake and is able to convert it into alphaelements he can either remain unconscious of that
emotional experience or become conscious of it.
The sleeping man has an emotional experience,
converts it into alpha-elements and so becomes
capable of dream thoughts. Thus he is free to
become conscious (that is wake up) and describe
the emotional experience by a narrative usually
known as a dream.’’
Similarly, a person having a conversation converts
the beta-elements into alpha, and thus freed of all the
most primitive ways of functioning, he can have a
rational conversation while not losing touch with his
unconscious. Alpha-elements form what Bion calls a
contact-barrier, the part of the mind in which betaelements are transformed into alpha, and this contactbarrier could be seen as a flexible barrier of repression.
‘‘Alpha-elements comprise visual images, auditory patterns, olfactory patterns, and are suitable for employment in dream thoughts, unconscious walking,
thinking, dreams, contact-barrier, memory.’’
Bion developed his thought in a number of later
writings, particularly in Learning from Experience.
Alpha-elements are a product of alpha function. They
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ALPHA FUNCTION
can be stored and repressed. They undergo further
transformation and abstraction. They are the elements
of dream thought, dream, myth, and conscious
thought. And they form the contact-barrier between
the conscious and the unconscious.
HANNA SEGAL
See also: Alpha function; Beta-elements; Bion, Wilfred
Ruprecht; Contact-barrier; Grid; Infant development;
Learning from Experience; Maternal reverie, capacity for;
Primal, the; Protothoughts; Idea/representation; Symbolic equation; Transformations.
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred R. (1961). Experiences in groups. London:
Tavistock Publications.
Bion, Wilfred R. (1962). Learning from experience. London:
Heinemann.
ALPHA FUNCTION
Wilfred Bion’s work on the ‘‘alpha function’’ was based
on Melanie Klein’s concept of projective identification.
He added a further dimension by suggesting that projective identification is not only an all-powerful fantasy in the infant’s mind, but also its first means of
communication.
Bion discussed the alpha function for the first time
in an article titled ‘‘A Theory of Thinking’’ (1962), but
the idea had already been prefigured in his work. For
example, in ‘‘On Arrogance’’ (1958), he described a
patient who perceived his analyst as someone who
‘‘could not tolerate it’’ (the ‘‘it’’ not being defined)
(1958, p. 146). From this Bion drew the conclusion
that the patient’s means of communication was preverbal and occurred through projective identification
with the primitive id, and that the patient was experiencing the analyst’s insistence on verbalization as an
attack on his means of communication.
In ‘‘Attacks on Linking’’ (1959), Bion described a
patient who as a young child could not contain his
fear of death. He dissociated himself from it and at
the same time from a part of his personality, and
projected it onto his mother: ‘‘An understanding
mother is able to experience the feeling of dread,
that this baby was striving to deal with by projective
identification, and yet retain a balanced outlook’’
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(p. 313). By projecting its terror onto the mother,
the infant makes it into her experience and communicates to her its own distress. This situation is
repeated in analysis. In this study, Bion stressed that
projective identification has a realistic aspect that
can elicit an appropriate response from the mother.
If this response is not forthcoming, the baby’s fear
of death is reinforced and cannot be processed.
In ‘‘A Theory of Thinking,’’ Bion formed the
hypothesis of an alpha function exercised by the
mother when she processes the baby’s projective identification and converts what he calls ‘‘nascent sensory
data,’’ including emotional data, or beta elements, into
alpha elements—the materials of dream thoughts and
conscious thoughts:
It seemed convenient to suppose an alphafunction to convert sense data into alpha-elements
and thus provide the psyche with the material for
dream thoughts, and hence the capacity to wake up
or go to sleep, to be conscious or unconscious.
According to this theory, consciousness depends on
alpha function, and it is a logical necessity to suppose
that such a function exists if we are to assume that
the self is able to be conscious of itself in the sense of
knowing itself from experience of itself (p. 308).
Bion deliberately refrained from giving a definition
of the alpha function, since he could only deduce its elements. He let it be understood that further study of it
was needed. Instead of giving definitions, he described
the process and provided the following model:
the infant, filled with painful lumps of faeces,
guilt, fears of impending death, chunks of greed,
meanness and urine, evacuates these bad objects into
the breast that is not there. As it does so the good
object turns the no-breast (mouth) into a breast, the
faeces and urine into milk, the fears of impending
death and anxiety into vitality and confidence, the
greed and meanness into feelings of love and generosity and the infant sucks its bad property, now translated into goodness, back again. As an abstraction to
match this model I propose an apparatus, for dealing
with these primitive categories of I, that consists of a
container and the contained. The mechanism is
implicit in the theory of projective identification in
which Melanie Klein formulated her discoveries of
infant mentality. (1963, p. 31).
The concept of the alpha function led to that of the
container/contained relationship. The internalization
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ALTER EGO
of the latter provides the elementary thought-thinking
apparatus. The mother’s receptivity to the child’s projective identification is a central factor in this process.
Her receptivity is dependent upon what Bion called
the maternal capacity for reverie—a dreamlike state
whose contents are love for the child and its father.
Deficiencies in maternal reverie or excessive feelings
of omnipotence or envy on the part of the infant can
interfere with the alpha function and the container/
contained relationship. The alpha function is related
to—conjoined with—the shift from the paranoidschizoid position to the depressive position.
HANNA SEGAL
See also: Alpha-elements; Arrogance; Beta-elements; Beta
screen; Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht; Contact-barrier; Hallucinosis; Infantile psychosis; Lack of differentiation; Learning from Experience; Nonverbal communication; Object;
Primary object; Protothoughts; Psychotic panic; Realization; Transformations.
the self, while the mirror affirms the vigor of the self
and its idealization and cohesion. The line of development of the alter ego is important throughout the period that extends from the age of four to ten years;
friendship, the need for someone like us, sometimes
changes into the need for an imaginary companion.
The alter ego is associated with humanity and sexual
identity through self-identification—the father’s true
son. The reverse would be a Kafkaesque world of dehumanizing experiences. When this sector is stopped,
repressed needs remain fixed and are difficult to verbalize because of the shame they arouse. The alter ego
is associated with other needs and narcissistic
transferences. Within this context, the concept of identification loses the specificity it has in Freudian metapsychology in terms of the constitution of the ego.
AGNÈS OPPENHEIMER
See also: Bipolar self; Compensatory structures; Mirror
transference; Narcissistic transference; Self; Twinship
transference/alter ego transference.
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred R. (1967). On arrogance. In his Second
thoughts. London: Heinemann. (Original work published
1953)
Bibliography
Kohut, Heinz. (1971). The analysis of the self. New York:
International Universities Press.
———. (1959). Attacks on linking. International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 40 (5–6) 308.
———. (1977). The restoration of the self. New York: International Universities Press.
———. (1967). A theory of thinking. In Second thoughts.
London: Heinemann. (Reprinted from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 43,(1962) 4–5.)
———. (1984). How does analysis cure? Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
———. Elements of psycho-analysis. London: Heinemann,
1963.
ALTERITY. See Otherness
ALTER EGO
The representation of an other complicit in the subject’s narcissism, or self-object, the alter ego refers to
the narcissistic need of an other similar to the self, a
factor in the development of the self. The term
appeared in the work of Heinz Kohut in 1971 in the
context of alter ego transference, a form of mirror
transference. After 1984, given the autonomy of the
alter ego transference, it appears as a constituent of the
self, along with the grandiose self, the pole of ambitions, and the idealized parental imago, the pole of
ideals. Defined as an arc of tension between the two
poles, the alter ego takes into account the harmony of
52
ALTHUSSER, LOUIS (1918–1990)
Louis Althusser, a French philosopher, was born in
Birmandreı̈s, Algeria, on October 16, 1918, and died
in Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis, Yvelines, France, on October
22, 1990. Born into a family of practicing Catholics,
Althusser’s secondary schooling took place at the
Lycée Saint-Charles in Marseille. He prepared for
the entrance competition to the École Normale
Supérieure (ENS) at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon, where
he was a student of Jean Guitton, then of Jean Lacroix.
He was accepted for admission in 1939 but was mobilized in September and became a prisoner of war. He
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didn’t begin his studies at the ENS until October 1945.
It was in the prison camp that he learned about
communism. Meetings at the ENS, primarily with
Jean-Toussaint Desanti and Tran Duc Thao, gave him
a better understanding of Marxist thought. Althusser
taught philosophy at the ENS until 1980. There he met
Jacques Lacan during the years when Lacan brought
his seminar to the school.
See also: France; Ideology; Marxism and psychoanalysis;
Structuralism and psychoanalysis.
Althusser is known as a chief theoretician of ideology. In Reading ‘‘Capital’’ (1979) he introduced a new
reading of Marx, a ‘‘symptomal’’ reading, which,
through a constructed discourse, is able to redefine the
operating concepts and formal structure of his
thought. This work led him to postulate a break
between the works of the young Marx, where theoretical humanism is still present, and the mature works,
which display a ‘‘theoretical antihumanism.’’
———. (1993). The future lasts forever: A memoir (Richard
Veasey, trans.). New York: New Press.
He criticized the spontaneous ideology that infiltrated so-called scientific discourse and set forth the
foundations of a critical epistemology. One of his most
important texts is ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses’’ (2001). In it he demonstrates the doubling of the subject and the specular structure of every
ideology. Althusser returned to Ludwig Feuerbach’s
theory of the specular relation, Hegel’s theory of recognition, and a theory of guarantees whose origins can
be traced back to Spinoza, but gave them a new interpretation. He also made use of psychoanalytic ideas:
the question of identification and the Lacanian themes
of the split (or barred) subject and alienation from the
Big Other in the specular relation. Althusser used this
theoretical approach to address psychoanalysis. In his
work he also attempted to articulate psychic and social
processes outside the conventional patterns of Freudian and Marxist thought.
In addition, Althusser had direct experience of psychotherapy with a psychoanalyst. Althusser suffered
from serious psychiatric problems, which required his
hospitalization on several occasions. In 1980, in a
moment of dementia, he killed his wife, Hélène. In The
Future Lasts Forever (1993), most of which was written
in 1985, Althusser acknowledges his painful efforts at
understanding carried out after this tragic event.
Althusser trained an entire generation of scholars to
be rigorous and critical in their reading of philosophy.
Throughout the 1970s his influence was considerable
and international in scope.
MICHÈLE BERTRAND
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Bibliography
Althusser, Louis. (1966). Freud and Lacan. In his Writings on
psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan (Jeffrey Mehlman, Trans.).
New York: Columbia University Press. (Original work
published 1964)
———. (2001). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses.
In his Lenin and philosophy and other essays. New York:
Monthly Review Press. (Original work published 1970)
———, and Balibar, Étienne. (1979). Reading ‘‘Capital’’
(Ben Brewster, Trans.). New York: Schocken Books. (Original work published 1965)
ALTRUISM
Freud refers to the concept of altruism approximately
ten times in his work, most often in a social or cultural
context. In ‘‘Thoughts for the Times on War and
Death’’ he writes:
Throughout an individual’s life there is a
constant replacement of external by internal compulsion. The influences of civilization cause an
ever-increasing transformation of egoistic trends
into altruistic and social ones by an admixture of
erotic elements. In the last resort it may be assumed
that every internal compulsion which makes itself
felt in the development of human beings was originally—that is, in the history of mankind—only an
external one. Those who are born to-day bring with
them as an inherited organization some degree of
tendency (disposition) towards the transformation
of egoistic into social instincts, and this disposition
is easily stimulated into bringing about that result.
(1915b, p. 282).
In other cases, Freud uses the term most frequently
against a background of what he called, in an exchange
with Oskar Pfister, his ‘‘joyous pessimism.’’ After
pointing out that except when in love, ‘‘the opposite of
egotism, altruism, does not, as a concept, coincide
with libidinal object-cathexis’’ (1916–17a [1915–17],
p. 418), he added, rather laconically, in Civilization
and Its Discontents, ‘‘the development of the individual
seems to us to be a product of the interaction between
53
ALTRUISM
two urges, the urge towards happiness, which we
usually call ‘egoistic’, and the urge towards union with
others in the community, which we call ‘altruistic’.
Neither of these descriptions goes much below the surface. In the process of individual development, as we
have said, the main accent falls mostly on the egoistic
urge (or the urge towards happiness); while the other
urge, which may be described as a ‘cultural’ one, is
usually content with the role of imposing restrictions’’
(1930a [1929], p. 140).
However, in the third part of The Ego and the
Mechanism of Defence (1936/1937), Anna Freud provides an example of two types of defense, namely,
‘‘identification with the aggressor’’ and ‘‘a form of
altruism.’’ And in connection with the mechanism of
projection, she conceives of ‘‘altruistic surrender’’
(altruistische Abtretung, according to the expression
used by Edward Bibring):
The mechanism of projection disturbs our
human relations when we project our own jealousy
and attribute to other people our own aggressive
acts. But it may work in another way as well, enagling us to form valuable positive attachments and
so to consolidate our relations with one another.
This normal and less conspicuous form of projection might be described as ‘altruistic surrender’ of
our own instinctual impulses in favour of other
people (p. 133).
Using a clinical example, Anna Freud analyzes the
transference of the subject’s own desires to others, a
transference that enables the subject to participate in
the instinctual satisfaction of another person through
projection and identification. In speaking of this process, she refers to Paul Federn’s comments concerning
identification through sympathy.
The section of the book devoted to the study of two
mechanisms of defense is is placed between a chapter
on the preliminary stages of defense—the avoidance of
unpleasure in the face of real dangers (negation
through fantasy, negation through acts and words and
withdrawal of the ego)—and a chapter on the phenomena of puberty and the defenses arising from fear
associated with the intensity of instinctual processes.
To Anna Freud, the mechanisms of identification with
the aggressor and altruism can be conceived as intermediary stages of defense, centered on the transition
from anxieties arising from external dangers to subsequent anxieties arising from internal dangers.
54
This explains the projection inherent in both types
of defense and the role of the superego in the genesis
of altruistic surrender: ‘‘Analysis of such situations
shows that this defensive process has its origin in the
infantile conflict with parental authority about some
form of instinctual gratification’’ (p. 141). Other passages in her work support this view: ‘‘Her early
renunciation of instinct had resulted in the formation
of an exceptionally strong super-ego, which made it
impossible for her to gratify her own wishes. . . . She
projected her prohibited instinctual impulses on
to other people, just as the patients did whose cases
I quoted in the last chapter. . . . In most cases the
substitute has once been the object of envy’’ (pp.
135-36, 136, 141). She also points out that altruistic
surrender is a means for overcoming narcissistic
humiliation.
Finally, for Anna Freud, altruism could involve libidinal impulses as well as destructive impulses and,
moreover, could affect either the realization of desires
or their renunciation. Her analysis of the mechanism
of defense finishes with an approach to its connection
with the fear of death, by examining the bonds
between the hero Cyrano de Bergerac and his friend
Christian. Anna Freud provides a concluding note on
the similarity between the conditions needed to initiate altruistic surrender and those present during the
formation of masculine homosexuality.
Anna Freud’s position was subsequently revisited
with respect to such concerns as the psychodynamics
of anorexic adolescents.
BERNARD GOLSE
See also: Antinarcissism; Burlingham-Tiffany, Dorothy;
Identification with the aggressor; Reaction–formation.
Bibliography
Freud, Anna. (1937). The ego and the mechanisms of defence.
London: Hogarth. (Original work published 1936)
Freud, Sigmund. (1915b). Thoughts for the times on war
and death. SE, 14: 275–300.
———. (1916–17a [1915–17]). Introductory lectures on
psycho-analysis. SE, 15–16.
———. (1930a [1929]). Civilization and its discontents. SE,
21: 64–145.
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Bibliography
Freud, Anna. (1936). A form of altruism. In Writings of
Anna Freud (Vol. 2, pp. 122-134).
McWilliams, Nancy. (1984). The psychology of the altruist.
Psychoanalytic Psychology, 1, 193–214.
Seelig, Bud, et. al. (2001). Normal and pathological altruism.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 49,
933–960.
ALVAREZ DE TOLEDO, LUISA AGUSTA
REBECA GAMBIER DE (1915–1990)
An Argentine doctor and psychoanalyst, Luisa Agusta
Rebeca Gambier de Alvarez de Toledo was born June
13, 1915, in the 9 de Julio section of Buenos Aires,
where she died on September 5, 1990. ‘‘Rebe,’’ as she
was known to her friends, expressed an interest in
medicine in childhood, which led to her later studies
in the capital. She discovered psychoanalysis when
still a student, and became a member of the earliest
psychoanalytic groups in the country, even before the
creation of the Associacón Psicoanalitica Argentina
(APA). Her meeting with Matilde and Arnaldo
Rascovsky, through whom she became familiar with
the field, led to her decision to pursue psychoanalysis
as a career. Although she was not a founding member
of the APA, she took an active part in the activities
of the creators of the Argentine psychoanalytic
movement.
She began her training analysis with Celes Cárcamo
and was officially supervised by Angel Garma and
Enrique Pichon-Rivière. She became a member of the
APA in 1945 with the presentation of her study ‘‘A
Case of Examination Neurosis,’’ and a fellow in 1950
with the presentation of her ‘‘A Contribution to the
Understanding of the Symbolic Meaning of the Circle’’
and ‘‘On the Mechanism of Sleep and Dreaming.’’
In 1946 she contributed to the creation of the first
department of psychoanalytic psychiatry for adolescents at the hospital then known as the Hospicio de las
Mercedes, under the direction of Enrique Pichon-Rivière and Arminda Aberastury. Between 1955 and 1958
she made regular trips to Montevideo, where she gave
seminars and supervised other psychoanalysts, and in
so doing contributed to the formation of the Uruguayan Psychoanalytic Association and helped train its
members.
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TOLEDO, LUISA AGUSTA REBECA GAMBIER
DE
(1915 –1 990)
In 1954 she became a training analyst and, on this
occasion presented her ‘‘Análisis del asociar, del interpreter y de las palabras’’ (The analysis of associating,
interpreting, and words). This study, which became a
classic of psychoanalytic literature, was published in
the Revista de psicoanálisis in 1954 and had longlasting influence on the evolution of the field. The
author saw language as integral to psychoanalysis and
showed how ‘‘the fact of speaking, as an act and independently of the content of the words, satisfies oral,
anal, phallic, and genital libidinal impulses,’’ and that
‘‘by analyzing ‘the fact of associating’ and ‘the fact of
interpreting’ in itself, there arises the primitive identity
of the act, the image, and the object, which is realized
in the act of speaking and listening to the analyst.’’
Later she grew interested in the development of psychoanalytic research involving the use of hallucinogenic drugs. It was during this period that she wrote
‘‘Ayahuasca’’ (1960), which addressed the use of LSD
in certain communities of Upper Peru. She was forced
to interrupt her research when, for reasons beyond her
control, the consumption of LSD was made illegal by
the then current government.
Within the APA she assumed a number of important roles: secretary of the executive committee
(1952–1953), treasurer (1953–1954), and president
(1956–1957). She continued to assume positions of
responsibility within the organization until 1972. Later
in life, she turned her efforts toward providing an analytic space for several of her institutional colleagues.
AUGUSTO M. PICOLLO
See also: Argentina; Language and disturbances of
language.
Bibliography
Alvarez de Toledo, Luisa. (1954). El análisis del ‘‘asociar’’, del
‘‘interpretar’’ y de ‘‘las palabras’’. Revista de psicoanálisis de
la Asociacı́on psicoanalı́tica argentina, XI (3), 267–313.
———. (1960). Ayahuasca. Revista de psicoanálisis de la
Asociacı́on psicoanalı́tica argentina, XVII (1), 1–9.
———. (1996). The analysis of ‘‘associating,’’ ‘‘interpreting’’
and ‘‘words,’’ con comentarios de Janine Puget y Marı́a
Isabel Siquier. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,
LXXVII, 291–322.
Baranger, Madeleine, Baranger, Willy, and Mom, Jorge M.
(1990). Obituario: Luisa Gambier de Alvarez de Toledo.
55
AMAE, CONCEPT
OF
Revista de psicoanálisis de la Asociacı́on psicoanalı́tica
argentina, XLVII (3), 410–413.
Mom, Jorge M., Foks, Gilda, and Suárez, Juan Carlos.
(1982). Asociación psicoanalı́tica argentina 1942–1982.
Buenos Aires: APA
The concept of amae is a concept which derives from
a unique Japanese word amae, a noun form of
amaeru, an intransitive verb. It primarily refers to what
an infant feels toward the mother when it recognizes
and seeks her, hence it is nonverbal to begin with, but
it acquires its first-person dimension when a child
comes to learn the meaning of amae. Amae may be
applied to an adult in a similar situation involving
someone who is supposed to take care of him or her.
It is on the basis of these linguistic facts plus the clinical experience that Takeo Doi arrived at the concept of
amae indicating whatever happens consciously or
unconsciously in a person vis-à-vis a possible caretaker.
Amae corresponds to what Freud (1912d) calls
‘‘the affectionate current,’’ which should combine
with ‘‘the sensual current’’ in love. Also, it should
correspond to the process of identification, since
Freud (1921c) states that ‘‘identification is known to
psychoanalysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person.’’ What is closest in
meaning to amae is ‘‘primary love or passive object
love’’ defined by Michael Balint (1935/1965). Interestingly, he specifically states that ‘‘all European languages. . .are all so poor that they cannot distinguish
between the two kinds of object love, active and passive.’’ Among the empirical studies of infants, the
attachment behavior which John Bowlby focused
upon overlap with the behavior of amae. It is significant that amae is the exact reverse of envy which Melanie Klein emphasized in her thinking of mental life.
The self-object needs defined by Heinz Kohut also
correspond to amae.
Amae thus bridges many important concepts in
psychoanalysis. Its strength lies in the fact that being a
verbnoun it represents something alive, and thus suggests a potential feeling. According to Freud’s earlier
formulation of instincts, amae can be a representative
of the ego instincts.
TAKEO DOI
56
Balint, Michael. (1965). Critical notes on the theory of the
pregenital organizations of the libido. Primary love and psycho-analytic technique. New York: Liveright. (Original
work published 1935)
Bowlby, John. (1969). Attachment and loss. London: The
Hogarth Press.
AMAE, CONCEPT OF
See also: Japan; Tenderness.
Bibliography
Doi, Takeo. (1980). The concept of amae and its psychoanalytic implications. International Review of Psychoanalysis,
16, 349–354.
———. (1991). A propos du concept d’amae. Psychiatrie de
l’enfant, 34, 277–284.
Freud, Sigmund. (1912d). On the universal tendency to
debasement in the sphere of love. SE, 11: 177–190.
———. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
AMBIVALENCE
Ambivalence is the simultaneous presence of conflicting feelings and tendencies with respect to an
object. During the winter meeting of Swiss psychiatrists in Berne on November 26–27, 1910, Paul
Eugen Bleuler described, with respect to schizophrenia, the simultaneous existence of contradictory feelings toward an object or person and, with respect to
actions, the insoluble concurrence of two tendencies,
such as eating and not eating. In ‘‘The Rat Man’’
(1909d) Freud had already indicated that the opposition between love and hate for the object could
explain the particular features of obsessive thought
(doubt, compulsion). In Totem and Taboo (1912–
13a) he adopted the term ‘‘ambivalence’’ proposed
by Bleuler in the text of his conference published in
1911 in the Zentralblatt.
For Freud the term, in its most general sense, designated the presence in a subject of a pair of opposed
impulses of the same intensity; most frequently this
involved the opposition between love and hate, which
was often expressed in obsessional neuroses and melancholy. In 1915, in his metapsychological writings, he
added that it was the loss of the love object that,
through regression, caused the conflict of ambivalence
to appear. In 1920 Karl Abraham emphasized the
intensity of the sadistic fantasy associated with urinary
and digestive functions. In 1924 he extended and
transformed the Freudian schema of the evolution of
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the libido into a complete picture of the development
of the relation to the object along two lines: the partial
or total nature of the investment in the object, and
ambivalence. The precocious oral stage of sucking is
preambivalent, neither love nor hate are felt toward
the object. There follow four ambivalent phases: the
late oral stage, which is cannibalistic and seeks the
total incorporation of the object, the precocious analsadistic stage, which seeks the expulsion and destruction of the object, the late anal-sadistic stage, which
seeks its conservation and domination, and finally the
precocious-phallic genital stage. The final genital
phase of love towards a complete object is
postambivalent.
Bibliography
Freud integrated Abraham’s contributions in the
thirty-second of his New Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-analysis (1933a). Within the oedipal conflict
ambivalence is resolved as a neurotic symptom,
either through a reaction formation or through displacement (1926d). Reformulated in the second theory of instincts, ambivalence becomes part of the
fundamental instinctual dualism: life instinct/death
instinct.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
For Melanie Klein ambivalence was key in formulating a theory of depression. The interplay of introjection and projection, the dialectic of good and bad
objects, and depressive anxiety, signaling the fear of
destroying the maternal object, are the apparent manifestations of the conflict of ambivalence. Together they
constitute the ego and work toward resolving the oedipal conflict.
For Paul-Claude Racamier (1976), while melancholy is hyperambivalent in that it results from an
intense struggle between love and hate, schizophrenia
must be considered as a fundamentally antiambivalent
process, where ‘‘contrary impulses . . . radically split,
fuse separately in a nearly pure state, presenting themselves alternately to the same object or simultaneously
to partial objects that are always distinct and divided.’’
VICTOR SOUFFIR
See also: Bleuler, Paul Eugen; Contradiction; Essential
depression; Doubt; Fusion/defusion; ‘‘Instincts and their
Vicissitudes;’’ Melancholia; ‘‘Mourning and Melancholy;’’ Parricide Phobias in children; Phobia of committing impulsive acts; Object; Obsessional neurosis;
Orality; Oral-sadistic stage; Reaction formation; Schizophrenia; Taboo; Totem/totemism.
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Abraham, Karl. (1927). A short history of the development
of the libido. In Selected papers of Karl Abraham (Douglas
Bryan and Alix Strachey, Trans.). London: Hogarth Press.
(Original work published 1924)
Bleuler, Eugen. (1952), Dementia praecox (Joseph Zinkin,
Trans). New York: International Universities Press. (Original work published 1911)
Freud, Sigmund. (1909d). Notes upon a case of obsessional
neurosis. SE, 10: 151–318.
———. (1912–13a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
———. (1926d [1925]). Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety. SE, 20: 75–172.
Klein, Melanie. (1975). A contribution to the psychogenesis
of manic-depressive states. In The writings of Melanie Klein.
London: Hogarth Press, 1975. (Reprinted from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16 (1975), 145–174.)
———. (1975). The Oedipus complex in the light of early
anxieties. In The writings of Melanie Klein. London:
Hogarth Press, 1975. (Reprinted from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 26 (1945), 11–33.)
Racamier, Paul-Claude. (1976). L’interprétation psychanalytique des schizophrénies. In Encyclopédie médico-chirurgicale. Paris: EMC.
Further Reading
Benedek, Therese. (1977). Ambivalence, passion and love.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 25,
53-80.
Eissler, Kurt R. (1971). Death drive, ambivalence, and narcissism. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 26, 25-78.
Parens, Henri. (1979). Ambivalence: drives, symbiosis—
separation-individuation process. Psychoanalytic Study of
the Child, 34, 385-420.
Schwartz, Charlotte (1989). Ambivalence: relation to narcissism and superego development. Psychoanalytic Review,
76, 511-527.
AMENTIA
Amentia, or confusion, is a state of acute hallucinatory
delirium; it was described with this name by Theodor
Meynert in Leçons cliniques de psychiatrie (1890).
Meynert, who had been a professor of psychiatry
since 1873 at the University of Vienna, believed in an
anatomic-clinical theory of psychiatry and did not
57
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attribute any meaning to the hallucinations that arose
during amentia, considering them merely a disorderly
flow of ‘‘accessory representations’’ from ‘‘cortical
exhaustion’’ and excessive irrigation of subcortical
centers, which were considered to be the seat of sensory impressions.
Freud, faithful to his teacher of 1883, also referred to
the clinical value of the concept of amentia, in spite of
the differences between them (Jones, 1953). He wrote
of ‘‘a fine daydream’’ (Freud, 1916–17f) and, as demonstration of this, a ‘‘hallucinatory psychosis of desire.’’
Although Freud mentioned the concept much earlier (1894a), it is not until his A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams (1916–17f) that he
would see in amentia an element of comparison, with
which to explain the role of belief in the hallucinatory
fulfillment of desire in dreams. The regression of the
preconscious to mnemic images of things invested by
the unconscious would be unable to explain such
belief if, in both cases, the conflict with reality (associated with the functions of consciousness) weren’t
eliminated. Amentia is unlike the dream state, where it
is through the wish to sleep that the subject loses interest in reality. Rather, in the hallucinatory psychosis of
desire, the subject denies a reality that is unbearable
because of the loss it inflicts, and is thus open to the
free play of hallucinatory fantasies.
AUGUSTIN JEANNEAU
See also: Delusion; Metapsychological Supplement to the
Theory of Dreams, A; Meynert, Theodor.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1894a). The neuro-psychoses of defence.
SE, 3: 45–61.
———. (1916–17f). A metapsychological supplement to
the theory of dreams. SE, 14: 222–235.
Jones, Ernest. (1953–1957). Sigmund Freud: Life and work.
London: Hogarth Press.
Meynert, Theodor. (1890). L’amentia ou confusion. In C.
Levy-Friesacher (Ed.), Meynert-Freud ‘‘L’amentia.’’ Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1983.
AMERICAN ACADEMY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
The two major psychoanalytic organizations in the United States, the American Academy of Psychoanalysis
58
(Academy) and the American Psychoanalytic Association (American), now share similar theoretical orientations and are working closely together in the Psychoanalytic Consortium. However, this has not always been
the case.
The Academy was formed as a reaction against perceived thought control efforts by certain officers of the
New York Psychoanalytic Institute, a member of the
American, which demanded conformity to a sharply
restricted view of the intrapsychic libido theory. The
Academy’s orientation was that, in addition to intrapsychic dynamics, biological facts, interpersonal relations, the family, and the broader culture were all
significant in personality development and pathology.
Thus instead of a unitary theory, the Academy
accepted that multiple interacting factors were significant. From its very beginning, the Academy established a democratic and scientific organization, where
divergence, dialogue, and creative growth in psychoanalysis were strongly encouraged.
The split in American psychoanalysis started in
1941, at a business meeting of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, when Karen Horney was disqualified
as a training analyst because she was disturbing the
candidates with her ideas about culture. A number of
analytic institutes split off from the American, and in
1955 Clara Thompson called a meeting of eminent
psychoanalysts. Amongst those present were Franz
Alexander, Abram Kardiner, Jules Masserman, and
Sándor Radó, who all encouraged the formation of
another national psychoanalytic organization where
there would be freedom to exchange ideas in psychoanalysis and with other scientific disciplines. Franz
Alexander (Alexander and Selesnick, 1966), a former
president of the American, stated that the premature
standardization and rigidity of teaching in the
American was too past-oriented and not sufficiently
creative and future-oriented. Psychoanalysis was still a
developing field and the exchange of clinical experience as well as input from science and the humanities
was crucial. Conformity would only stifle the growth
and development of psychoanalysis as a science. Tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity are a necessary
condition for creativity.
The Academy was established in 1956. Under its
constitution, the Academy admits individual members
and not institutes, so as not to interfere with the
freedom of each institute’s jointly determined theoretical approach and politics. The first president of the
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Academy was a woman, Janet Rioch Bard, and many
other eminent medical psychoanalysts, both men and
women, have been elected president since then.
It is interesting that the Academy was similar to the
Kleinian group in England, since both can trace their
origins to Sándor Ferenczi, who maintained the
importance of interpersonal relations and the culture.
Ferenczi focused more on maternal nurturance during
infancy and relationships in childhood. He also
stressed the importance of empathic connection in
treatment, especially with more difficult patients, so as
to undo trauma or deprivation and provide a corrective emotional experience. He also explored the transference/counter-transference relationship between
therapist and patient. Both Thompson and Klein were
analyzed by Ferenczi, who strongly influenced their
approach. Horney (1922) had rejected Freud’s explanation of feminine psychology as due to penis envy
and the castration complex, and she stressed that femininity was inborn, being shaped by interpersonal relations and the culture.
The members of the Academy have made important
contributions not only to individual psychoanalytic
treatment and theory, especially with more troubled
patients, but also in psychosomatics, and family and
group therapy. Current research in ethology and direct
infant observation have validated the importance of an
attuned attachment to the mother during the preoedipal period, and anthropological research has
found that the oedipal conflict is not universal but
culturally variant.
In later years, the American reversed its rigid adherence to a unitary theory and embraced the inclusive
and democratic ideals that were the very foundation of
the Academy. Now both the Academy and the American consider divergent theoretical orientations and
include findings from anthropology, culture, and
group and family therapy.
Freud was an accomplished researcher in the neurosciences and published his laboratory findings. He
was aware that memory was stored in the brain cells
and transmitted through synapses. Freud did attempt
to develop a neurophysiological method in his ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’’ (1950c [1895]), but
not having the technology to integrate the mind and
the brain, he focused on the mind. Part of the problem
in psychoanalysis was that it did not have a hard and
firm scientific foundation. In the resulting search for
certainty, a unitary theory was embraced by classical
analysts to give the illusion of scientific validity. This
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contributed to the split in the psychoanalytic movement in the United States, and the division in England.
However, Freud himself was aware that his metapsychology was weak, and that psychoanalysis was not the
hard science that he had hoped it to become.
Increasingly the technology exists that can allow
one to integrate understandings of the mind and the
brain, especially with imaging techniques. The new
findings of neurobiology will serve to provide a scientific foundation to psychoanalysis, and further help to
bring the psychoanalytic movement together. Thus,
Freud’s hope that psychoanalysis could become a hard
science is still alive; work that reduces the mind/body
split could yet ensure that theory and therapy become
grounded on a firm scientific basis.
Both the American Psychoanalytic Association and
the American Academy of Psychoanalysis have now
continued with similar theoretical orientations concerning biological, intrapsychic, interpersonal, and
cultural factors in personality development and
pathology. However, they have diverged in their methods of sustaining membership. The American has
included psychologists and social workers besides psychiatrists, but has remained wholly psychoanalytic.
The Academy has included psychiatrists with some
analytic training or who are analytically oriented, but
remained medical. Accordingly, the Academy changed
its name to reflect this change to the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry. During the presidency of Samuel Slipp, the Academy was
established as an official Affiliate of the American Psychiatric Association. Now, only the Academy holds its
annual meeting in the same location as the American
Psychiatric Association. Both the American and the
Academy have remained in the Consortium to further
psychoanalysis together, and they continue their
friendly and cooperative relationship.
SAMUEL SLIPP
See also: American Psychoanalytic Association; New York
Psychoanalytic Institute.
Bibliography
Alexander, Franz, and Selesnick, Sheldon T. (1966). The history of psychiatry. New York: Harper and Row.
Horney, Karen. (1922). On the genesis of the castration
complex in women. In H. Kelman (Ed.) Feminine psychology. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967.
59
AMERICAN IMAGO
Rothgeb, Carrie Lee. (1973). Abstracts of the standard edition
of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. New
York: International Universities Press.
AMERICAN IMAGO
Thirty years after Sigmund Freud’s 1909 lectures at
Clark University, the psychoanalytic community in the
United States had grown large enough to support a
psychoanalytic journal focused on culture. American
Imago had its European antecedent in the psychoanalytic journal Imago that was, as Freud tells us, ‘‘concerned
with the application of psycho-analysis to non-medical
fields of knowledge’’ (1926f, p. 269–70). In Felix
Deutsch’s obituary for Hanns Sachs, he writes, ‘‘When
this journal [Imago] was suppressed in Europe in 1938,
Sachs brought it to life again here in the States’’ (1947,
p. 5). Freud wrote to Sachs that he was initially not
pleased with the idea for the journal but that was primarily because it was difficult to ‘‘‘let the light be extinguished completely in Germany’’’ (Gay, 1988, p. 634).
American Imago was first published in Boston,
Massachusetts, in November of 1939. Russell Jacoby
(1983) tells us that Otto Fenichel ‘‘reported in deepest
confidence that. . . Sachs was beginning a new magazine, American Imago. . . charged by Freud to rally the
classical, and now embattled, analysts’’ (p. 126). Sachs
writes, ‘‘when the plan for this periodical was proposed to Freud he greeted it wholeheartedly and consented to become its editor’’ (1939, p. 3).
Hanns Sachs (1881–1947) assumed editorial
responsibilities as publisher and editor, and continued
in that role until close to his death. From 1946 until
1963 George Wilbur (1887–1976) was the publisher
and managing editor. Harry Slochower noted that
Wilbur ‘‘kept the broad and deep channels of applied
psychoanalysis open in the country,’’ and praises
Wilbur’s ‘‘unassuming generosity which . . . saved the
very existence of the journal’’ (1967, p. 287). Harry
Slochower (1900–1991) came to the journal in 1964
and continued as Editor in Chief until his death. He
arranged for the journal to be published by Wayne
State University Press, thus expanding American Imago’s original base in the psychoanalytic community to
a wider academic audience. In 1987 Martin Gliserman
took over editorial responsibility for the journal; he
proposed a new format for the journal and
approached Johns Hopkins University Press which
began publishing the journal in 1991.
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From the very beginning American Imago has been
an interdisciplinary journal that has examined many
fields of study—anthropology, art, film, history, literature, music, philosophy, psychoanalysis, religion,
society, and politics. For its part, psychoanalysis has
served as a prism through which to view a whole range
of cultural works. Thus articles in the journal’s first
volume addressed such diverse subjects as the ritualized
games of verbal insult known as ‘‘the dozens,’’ masochism, a play by Shakespeare, anti-Semitism, and
mythical heroes. The journal has been responsive over
the years to changes in the intellectual climate, and has
broadened its psychoanalytic vision, without ever abandoning its original purpose of understanding culture.
MARTIN GLISERMAN
See also: Imago; Sachs, Hanns.
Bibliography
Deutsch, Felix. (1947). In memoriam—Hanns Sachs 1881–
1947. American Imago, 4 (2), 3–14.
Freud, Sigmund. (1926f). Psycho-analysis. SE, 20: 261–270.
Gay, Peter. (1988). Freud: A life for our time. New York:
W.W. Norton.
Jacoby, Russell. (1983). The repression of psychoanalysis: Otto
Fenichel and the political Freudians. New York: Basic
Books.
Sachs, Hanns. (1939). Editorial note. American Imago, 1 (1), 3
Slochower, Harry. (1967). George B. Wilbur at 80. American
Imago, 24 (4), 287–289.
AMERICAN PSYCHOANALYTIC
ASSOCIATION
Despite Sigmund Freud’s concern about the fate of
psychoanalysis in the United States, it has been the
country where psychoanalysis, as theory and as therapeutic enterprise, has been most successful during its
first century.
Accompanied by Carl Gustav Jung and Sándor
Ferenczi, Freud made his first and only trip to the United States in 1909, visiting Clark University at the invitation of G. Stanley Hall. At that time he received an
honorary doctorate in law for his contributions to
psychology. This visit came at a time of crisis in sexual
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morality following the oppression of Victorian sexuality, a time of change in the structure of American
family life with a move towards smaller families, and
also at a time of crisis in the treatment of nervous and
mental disorders. Facing such pressures, American
psychiatrists found the psychoanalytic focus on the
emotional relations of love and hate among family
members to be revealing and important.
Within ten years of Freud’s visit, psychoanalysis was
broadly accepted in the United States. At first it was
seen as another form of the then-current psychotherapies of suggestion. Its increasing popularity, displacing
other therapies, was a result in part of the public’s welcome of its optimistic view of mental illness, emphasizing environmental causes and its accessibility to
‘‘cure,’’ in contrast to European theories of hereditary
degeneration.
The year 1910 was of great importance to the
history of psychoanalysis. In his paper ‘‘Wild PsychoAnalysis,’’ Freud voiced concern that the use of psychoanalytic notions by those psychoanalytically
untrained could be harmful to patients. To protect the
public, and the scientific integrity of psychoanalysis,
he and his followers founded the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), in which membership
would be available only to those trained in the psychoanalytic method. Those few Americans who were
trained psychoanalysts formed the American Psychoanalytic Association (the American) in 1911. The purpose of the American association, like that of the IPA,
was to promote communication and to define what
constituted a psychoanalyst in order to protect the
public from ‘‘wild analysis.’’ Ernest Jones (who would
become Freud’s first official biographer in the 1950s)
had written to Freud that ‘‘already in America there
are many men exploiting it for financial and other
reasons, whose knowledge of the subject is minimal,
and who only bring discredit on the work. . . . no one
will be elected member of the association unless he has
shown some competence in the work.’’
Freud’s continuing concern led, in 1918, to the
establishment of an Institute for psychoanalytic education and training in Berlin, with Vienna and London
following soon thereafter. These institutes offered a
well thought out curriculum that consisted of instruction in the scientific theory of psychoanalysis, supervision in the treatment of patients using psychoanalytic
methods, and a personal experience of psychoanalysis.
This ‘‘tri-partite’’ form of training came to be the
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model throughout the psychoanalytic world: personal
analysis, psychoanalysis of patients under supervision,
and didactic course work.
That same year also witnessed the publication in
the United States of the Flexner report, a startling
exposé on the absence of standards in medical education. About half of the existing medical schools were
forced to close, and in those remaining, great efforts
were made to exorcise charlatans from therapeutic
activity and guarantee that a medical degree was the
hallmark of proper training and competence. German
and Viennese medicine was prestigious at the time,
and in attempts to upgrade their standards, Americans
looked to them to provide models.
The fields of psychiatry and neurology were also in
their formative stages, and since the American conception of medical science was then similar to that of
Freud’s, that is, a reliance on clinical judgment based
on observations made in the individual case, psychoanalysis brought a degree of respectability to psychiatry. On the other hand, the leaders of analysis in New
York believed that psychoanalysis gained respectability
and prestige from an alliance with medicine and
assured it a serious hearing. The American Psychoanalytic Association was eager to retain this respectability,
and by 1924, under the influence of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and the concerns secondary to
avoiding accusations of quackery, the American had
adopted the requirement that members be physicians.
Freud and most of the European psychoanalysts protested this change. They believed strongly that psychoanalysis did not belong to medicine. Rather they
believed that psychoanalysis was part of a general psychology. The issue of the training of lay analysts was an
issue that would persist.
World War I brought prominence to Freud’s theories
of the irrational and the brutal in human nature. His
methods and their derivatives also proved to be the
most effective then available for the treatment of ‘‘shell
shock.’’ Many psychiatrists subsequently became interested in psychoanalysis as a treatment method, and travel to Europe for psychoanalytic education at one of the
newly established institutes became popular. On their
return, those so trained contributed to the establishment of psychoanalytic societies in several American
cities. This began another chapter in American
psychoanalysis. Freud maintained that although rigorous training was necessary to become a psychoanalyst,
psychoanalytic education and training should be
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AMERICAN PSYCHOANALYTIC ASSOCIATION
available to a wider group, not simply to psychiatrists.
But the Americans held firm, and among those who
had traveled to Europe to train at European institutes,
only the psychiatrists were eligible for membership in
the American Psychoanalytic Association upon their
return. Heated international debate about this policy
followed and continued for decades.
By the 1930s, psychoanalytic societies had been
established in several cities in the United States. However, it was not until 1931 that the first Institute for
Psychoanalytic Education was established. New York’s
was the first, but Chicago, Boston, and BaltimoreWashington followed shortly thereafter. Once established, these institutes were committed to maintaining
the highest possible standards of psychoanalytic education. Thus in 1932, with the reorganization of the
American Psychoanalytic Association as a federation
of constituent societies, a Council on Professional
Training was formed to establish and maintain policies
and standards of teaching, so that psychoanalytic education would maintain some consistency as the various
institutes were established. In 1938, this council published the ‘‘Standards and Principles of Psychoanalytic
Education.’’ Although many revisions have taken
place, this document remains the definitive statement
that guides psychoanalytic education at all constituent
Institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
The model of education continues to be predominant
as the model first established in the first Institute in
Berlin. It is a tri-partite model, which includes a personal analysis, psychoanalysis under supervision, and
class-work. This has been the core training of all subsequent psychoanalytic Institutes (with a total of
twenty-nine by the end of the twentieth century). In
1946 the American Psychoanalytic Association again
reorganized. This time two governing bodies were
established; a Board on Professional Standards became
responsible for all matters of psychoanalytic education, and an Executive Council was established to deal
with membership and practice issues.
The years following the World War II again saw
increased professional status for psychoanalysts, particularly as derivatives of its methods proved to have the
greatest success in treating psychological disturbances
brought on by war combat. Furthermore, at a time
before psychotropic medications became available,
psychoanalysis and its derivative therapies proved
among the most successful methods of treating
many varieties of mental disturbances. As a result,
62
psychoanalysis became highly influential in psychiatric
education and a large number of university psychiatric
residency programs had a psychoanalyst as chairman.
Many have described the years between 1945 and
1965 as the golden years for psychoanalysis in the
United States. Psychoanalysis in Europe had barely survived outside of London, and many European analysts
had found their way to the United States. This brought
a wealth of intellectual energy to American psychoanalysis and interest in the theoretical basis of psychoanalysis enjoyed great popularity. In addition, the patient
pool was large, not only because of the dearth of alternative methods, but also because artists and intellectuals felt that engaging in psychoanalytic treatment
freed their creative minds. The wealth of clinical experiences led to ever-expanding theories to explain the clinical observations. Nathan Hale points out that during
this period the ‘‘Popular images of Freud revealed him
as a painstaking observer, a tenacious worker, a great
healer, a truly original explorer, a paragon of domestic
virtue, the discoverer of a source of personal energy
and a genius’’ (1995, p. 289). All of these attributes
reflected idealized American cultural values. With such
an idealized image of Freud and of psychoanalysis, disillusionment was inevitable. However, one must balance
the valid criticisms of the pretensions of psychoanalysis to be a globally explanatory treatment with the
attendant and inevitable failure of psychoanalysis to
deliver the kinds of idealized expectations that had
been established during this ‘‘golden age.’’
An account of psychoanalysis in the United States
would not be complete without taking into account
the issue that would not go away, that of ‘‘lay analysis.’’
Psychoanalytic education in the United States was limited to psychiatrists from the beginning. In 1957 a provision was made whereby psychologists of exceptional
research talent could gain access to psychoanalytic
education under the proviso that they simply use their
psychoanalytic skills to further their research and not
attempt to treat patients. However, it was not until
1986 that provisions were made to allow certain nonmedical clinicians to gain access to psychoanalytic
training. The American Psychoanalytic Association
has now reached a point where it is striving to define
eligibility for psychoanalytic education on more than
the basis of an academic degree.
There were major ramifications to the exclusionary
policies of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
These policies guaranteed that advancements in the
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field of academic psychology would exclude a consideration of psychoanalytic theory because psychologists
who might have been interested in the integration of
psychology and psychoanalysis were not given access
to psychoanalytic education. This meant that psychoanalysis could not benefit from the research methodology available to psychology, and as very little emphasis
was given to research in medical education until recent
years, psychoanalysis has suffered from the paucity of
research which might have offered some validity or
reliability to its theoretical positions.
Freud’s memorable visit to the United States, the
American Psychoanalytic Association, in the best
Freudian tradition, is once again actively reaching out
to psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health professionals, academics, and the lay public. These new
endeavors have infused the organization with vitality.
With an appreciation of its past, the American Psychoanalytic Association has risen to the challenges of the
new century.
A central event for psychoanalysis in the United
States was a class-action anti-trust lawsuit filed in 1985
by four psychologists. This group alleged that the American Psychoanalytic Association, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the Columbia University Center for
Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and the International Psychoanalytical Association had ‘‘restrained
and monopolized interstate and international trade
and commerce in the training of psychoanalysis and in
the delivery of psychoanalytic services to the public’’
(Schneider and Desmond, p. 322). By 1989, a settlement agreement was approved. The terms of the agreement changed the face of psychoanalysis in the United
States: (1) Psychologists and other qualified non-medical clinicians were eligible to train in the institutes of
the American. (2) Members of the American were permitted to teach in non-American affiliated institutes.
(3) Membership in the IPA was now open to all qualified psychologists and non-medical psychoanalysts. As
a result of these changes the American Psychoanalytic
Association has become a more inclusive organization.
In addition, the American has joined a psychoanalytic
consortium with psychoanalytic colleagues in other
organizations: Division 39 (Division of psychoanalysis) of the American Psychological Association, the
Academy of Psychoanalysis, and the National Membership Committee on Psychoanalysis in Clinical
Social Work. This Psychoanalytic Consortium has
worked jointly on a variety of social and political issues
important to all psychoanalysts, including maintaining the privacy of the psychotherapist-patient relationship, and is working towards the development of a
board to accredit institutes from the entire spectrum
of psychoanalysis, in order to protect the high quality
of psychoanalytic education and psychoanalytic
treatment.
See also: American Academy of Psychoanalysis; Journal
of the American Psychoanalytic Association; Law and
psychoanalysis, Lay analysis.
One hundred years after the publication of the
Interpretation of Dreams, and over ninety years since
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Bibliography
Desmond, Helen, and Schneider, Arnold Z. (1994). The psychoanalytic lawsuit: expanding opportunities for psychoanalytic training and practice. In Robert C. Lane and Murray Meisels (Eds.), A history of the division of psychoanalysis
of the American Psychological Association (pp. 313–335).
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoicates Publishers.
Hale, Nathan G. (1971). Freud and the Americans. New York:
Oxford University Press.
———. (1995). The rise and crisis of psychoanalysis in the
United States. New York: Oxford University Press.
AMNESIA
The notion of amnesia is of neuropathological origin,
but for Freud it was not functional defect in the registering of memories. Rather, he looked upon amnesia
as a symptom resulting from repression, as a phenomenon which could be circumscribed but which was not
a defense mechanism. He compared infantile amnesia
to hysterical amnesia, of which in his view it was the
forerunner, both forms being connected with the
child’s sexuality and Oedipus complex. Amnesia concealed mnemic traces of traumatic events and, more
generally, contents of the unconscious. (When defined
by Freud simply as the normal ‘‘fading of memories,’’
[1893a, p. 9] by contrast, the idea of amnesia belonged
to the psychology of consciousness rather than to the
metapsychology of the unconscious.)
Amnesia was not a psychoanalytical discovery,
but, beginning with his earliest psychoanalytical writings, notably the Studies on Hysteria (1895d), Freud
interpreted it in terms of repression; in the Three
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Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), he extended
the discussion to infantile amnesia.
In the development of Freud’s thought, it was the
neuropathological idea of amnesia that showed the way
to his formulation of repression, even though, structurally speaking, amnesia was a result of repression. The
phenomenon of the absence of a memory prompted
Freud to posit the existence of an unconscious mnemic
trace. Since he did not consider amnesia to be a defense
mechanism, he sought to account for it in another way,
namely by the mechanism of repression. Thus in the
Three Essays, comparing infantile amnesia to the hysterical amnesia that he felt it foreshadowed, he saw
both as the outcome of the repression of sexuality,
especially childhood sexuality, which he described as
polymorphously perverse (‘‘Neuroses are, so to say, the
negative of perversions.’’ [p. 165]).
The patient was ‘‘genuinely unable to recollect’’ the
‘‘event which provoked the first occurrence, often
many years earlier, of the phenomenon in question,’’
which is why it was necessary ‘‘to arouse his memories
under hypnosis of the time at which the symptom
made its first appearance’’ (1893a, p. 3). The lifting of
amnesia was the precondition of the cathartic abreaction of the affects bound to the trauma, the memory of
which had been effaced: this was Freud’s first theory of
the neuroses, namely the theory of the traumatic causality of hysteria.
Amnesia, however, did not in this view succeed in
completely wiping out the memory of the trauma, for
patients suffered from obsessions, from hallucinatory
visions, from what seemed like foreign bodies within
their psyches. So long as no abreaction of affects took
place, a struggle continued to rage between amnesia
and hysterical obsessions, giving rise to ‘‘hypnoid
states’’ of a consciousness riven by conflict. Such states
might range, according to the strength of the repression, from ‘‘complete recollection to total amnesia’’
(1893a, p. 12). In this light, amnesia could be seen as
the ultimate outcome of that defense by means of the
‘‘dissociation of groups of ideas’’ which until 1900
Freud held to be typical of hysteria, and which later
he described as the result of repression (an adumbration of the notion of splitting might also be discerned
here).
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argued that
the forgetting of dreams was not ‘‘a special case of the
amnesia attached to dissociated mental states,’’ for
in all cases ‘‘repression . . . is the cause both of the
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dissociations and the amnesia attaching to their psychical content’’ (1900a, p. 521). As Freud moved from
the theory of traumatic hysteria to the theory of
dreams, therefore, his conception of amnesia evolved
from dissociative splitting to repression.
It was on the basis of the durability of the impression attached to the trauma (concealed by amnesia but
finding expression in symptoms) that Freud hypothesized the existence of an indestructible unconscious
mnemic trace, which helps us understand how, to
begin with, he had conceived of the mnemic trace as a
so-called ‘‘unconscious memory.’’ The German term
‘‘Erinnerungsspur,’’ whose literal meaning is ‘‘memory
trace,’’ covered both the (paradoxical) idea of an
unconscious memory, which is to say a memory that
has succumbed to amnesia, and the idea of an unconscious mnemic trace.
In 1900 Freud asserted that mnemic traces were
indestructible; in 1895 he had observed that impressions associated with traumatic seductions preserved
their sensory intensity and freshness when amnesia
protected them from the wearing-away process that
they would have undergone had they not been buried
in the unconscious. By thus insisting upon the sensory vividness of what amnesia concealed, Freud
depicted a quasi-hallucinatory mode of psychic
representation consonant on the one hand with a
post-traumatic accentuation of impressions that led
in particular to the constitution of ‘‘mnemic symbols,’’ and, on the other hand, with his later theoretical claim that unconscious ideas were necessarily
figurative in nature.
The notion of amnesia, though it cleared the way
for the psychoanalytical notions of the unconscious
and of repression, itself remained a phenomenological
idea belonging to descriptive psychopathology and
marked by the idea of deficiency even if it went beyond
it. While amnesia certainly meant a contraction of
conscious memory that was not attributable to any
functional deficiency of mnemonic fixation, it nonetheless implied a diminution of the capacities of the
ego. The forgetting imposed by amnesia (for it was not
intentional) was the effect of a defense mechanism
that was itself unconscious, namely repression. Such
forgetting was experienced, painfully, as consciousness
of a repression either under way or already completed;
and amnesia could also be the outcome of defense
mechanisms other than repression (projection, splitting, foreclosure).
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AMNESIA
Since new repressions are always in the making,
remembering does not make it possible to lift the
amnesia completely. In ‘‘Constructions in Analysis’’
(1937d), Freud used the same terminology as in 1895
or 1900, but his standpoint had changed. He continued
to think, to be sure, that the aim of analysis, starting,
say, from ‘‘fragments of [the patient’s] memories in his
dreams’’ (p. 258), was to induce remembering, to lift
amnesia. But he now felt that this procedure could
never be total and that it could not even be embarked
upon unless repetition—notably the manifestation of
affective impulses in the transference—was taken into
account. Inasmuch as amnesia continued to obscure
entire aspects of the past, it was impossible ever to
reconstitute that past in its entirety, and the analyst
must be content to (re)construct it on the basis of what
took place during analysis. This is not to say that Freud
abandoned his fundamental historical perspective and
embraced fictions, but simply that he redefined interpretation, independently of amnesia and its removal, as
‘‘probable historical truth’’ (p. 261).
This ‘‘probable’’ truth, as opposed to the whole
truth, belongs to the episteme of modern history. How
can the correctness of a construction be proved? One
aspect of such a proof is connected to the set of problems surrounding amnesia and its lifting: communicating an accurate construction to the analysand may
on occasion cause a temporary aggravation of the
symptoms and the production of ‘‘lively recollections
. . . described [by the patient] as ‘ultra-clear’’’ and
involving not ‘‘the subject of the construction but
details relating to that subject’’ (p. 266).
Infantile prehistory, when the infant can barely
speak, was in Freud’s view affected by amnesia in a very
particular way, and amnesias coming into play in later
years, including hysterical amnesia, were derived from
this primary structural amnesia, the concept of which
brought Freud close to the idea of primal repression.
What appeared as amnesia was indeed sometimes attributable to primal repression. In ‘‘‘A Child Is Being Beaten’’’ (1919e), analyzing an infantile beating-fantasy,
Freud emphasized, apropos of its most important
phase (being beaten by the father), that ‘‘it has never
had a real existence. It is never remembered, it has
never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a construction of analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that
account’’ (p. 185). Here amnesia affects not a forgotten
event but rather a fantasy about which there is no
necessity to claim that it was at one time conscious.
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In such cases the amnesia could be removed only partially, as for example when ‘‘an elaborate superstructure
of day-dreams’’ (p. 190) represented the fantasy in an
indirect way. Here at last the notion of amnesia was
completely absorbed by that of repression.
As noted above, ‘‘amnesia’’ is a term belonging to
phenomenological psychopathology rather than to
psychoanalysis: it refers to the symptom rather than
the cause, and it connotes a lack (a-mnesia), which
places it close to ideas of deficit. With respect to the
psychology of consciousness, it points up the existence
of the unconscious in one of its most spectacular
effects. But if it opens the door to the metapsychological ideas of mnemic traces and repression, its affiliation with phenomenological psychopathology and
cognitive psychology means that it belongs at once to
several disciplines: amnesia is involved with the mnemonic ‘‘recalling’’ of information concerning a traumatic area, but a psychogenic causality does not
exclude a cognitive or neurophysiological one.
Finally, since amnesia is centered entirely on a
reduction of conscious memory, it is not compatible
with the later developments in Freud’s thinking on
constructions in analysis, although it is true that the
accuracy of a construction may bring about the
removal of amnesia—thus tending to confirm that
Freud never completely abandoned the theory of traumatic seduction and the amnesia to which such a
seduction gave rise. In ‘‘Remembering, Repeating and
Working-Through’’ (1914g), Freud argued that the
‘‘fabric of the neurosis’’ itself provided ‘‘compelling
evidence’’ for the reality of events experienced by the
subject ‘‘in very early childhood and . . . not understood at the time’’ (p. 149); in other words, neither the
lifting of amnesia nor even a reconstruction of the past
was required–a proposition that amounts to a radical
refutation of any ‘‘verificationist’’ epistemology. Psychoanalysis is concerned with historical truth, with
infantile and psychic realities lying on a different
plane, ontologically speaking, from amnesia and that
which amnesia conceals, even if the latter can indeed
show us the way to the former.
FRANÇOIS RICHARD
See also: Black hole; ‘‘Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest’’; Forgetting; Infantile amnesia; Lifting of
amnesia; Memory; Mnemic symbol; Mnemic trace/
memory trace; Psychoanalytic treatment; Remembering;
Reminiscence; Repression.
65
AMPHIMIXIA/AMPHIMIXIS
Bibliography
This elaboration resulted from a method of working
by analogies that Ferenczi called ‘‘utraquism’’ (a coinage based on the Latin root uterque, meaning ‘‘both of
them’’ or ‘‘each of them’’), or viewing the same thing
from two opposite perspectives.
impotency is described as ‘‘genital stuttering’’ (p. 9);
‘‘Everything points to the fact that the urethral (i.e.,
ejaculatory) tendency is at work from the beginning,
throughout the entire frictional process, and that in
consequence an unceasing struggle occurs between the
evacutory and the inhibitory purpose, between expulsion and retention, in which the urethral element is
eventually victorious’’ (p. 8). Ferenczi continues:
‘‘[L]et us term such a synthesis of two or more erotisms in a higher unity the amphimixis of erotisms or
instinct-components’’ (p. 9). He describes exchanges
in roles, in cases of diarrhea or nervous retention of
urine: ‘‘[I]n nervous diarrhoea the bowel is inundated
by urethrality: while in urinary retention of nervous
origin the bladder overdoes the inhibition learned
from the bowel’’ (p. 13n). He points out that ‘‘biological science has hitherto taught us nothing about such
[displacement] mechanisms as these. As effecting the
transition to our assumption of organic displacement
and condensation, the psychoanalytic investigation of
hysteria was of service, in that it demonstrated the displacement of ideational energy upon organic activity
and function (conversion) and its retransference back
into the psychic sphere (analytic therapy). . . . Each
organ possesses a certain ‘individuality’; in each and
every organ there is repeated that conflict between
ego- and libidinal interests’’ (p. 82). With regard to
female sexuality, the displacement of clitoral eroticism
by vaginal eroticism is understood in an analogous
way, as a displacement from low to high, as is ‘‘the tendency to blushing (the erection of the entire head) on
the part of the maiden who represses sexual excitement’’ (p. 14). In perversion, there is a mixture of oral,
anal, cutaneous, and visual eroticisms. Further, digressions into the realm of linguistics (the breaks that
separate vowels from consonants being compared to
certain effects of the sphincter) reveal the ambitious
scope of Ferenczi’s project: ‘‘to set forth my phylogenetic theory of genitality in the form of a kind of fairy
tale’’ (1936, p. 252), but also as if ‘‘sexual intercourse
. . . contains a suggestion of mnemic traces of this catastrophe which overtook both the individual and the
species’’ (p. 254).
In the language of science, amphimixia refers to the
fusion of male and female gametes during the process
of sexual fertilization, and in Thalassa it is extrapolated to describe coitus, the moment of the fusion of
eroticisms: the mutual identification of the protagonists during foreplay, followed by the dissolving of the
limits of the participants’ individual egos; sexual
Amphimixia thus enables Ferenczi, in Thalassa, to
complement physiopathology with what he terms a
‘‘physiology of pleasure’’ (p. 83), bioanalysis being
defined as the ‘‘analytic science of life’’ (p. 93). He
emphasizes the significance of regression, noting that the
final agonies of death seem to present ‘‘regressive trends
which might fashion dying in the image of birth and so
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4–5.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
———. (1914g). Remembering, repeating and workingthrough (Further recommendations on the technique of
psycho-analysis, II). SE, 12: 145–156.
———. (1919e). ‘A child is being beaten’: a contribution to
the study of the origin of sexual perversions. SE, 17: 175–
204.
———. (1937d). Constructions in analysis. SE, 23: 255–
269.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1893a). On the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena: preliminary communication. SE, 2: 1–17.
Further Reading
Trewartha, M. (1990). On postanalytic amnesia. Annual of
Psychoanalysis, 18, 153-174.
Wetzler, S. and Sweeney, J. (1986). Childhood amnesia: a
cognitive-psychological conceptualization. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, 34, 663-686.
AMPHIMIXIA/AMPHIMIXIS
Borrowed from the field of embryology and derived
from the Greek (amphi: ‘‘from both sides’’; mixo:
‘‘mixture’’), the term amphimixia refers to the fusion
of gametes during fertilization and was used by Sándor
Ferenczi, beginning in 1924 in Thalassa: A Theory of
Genitality, as a metaphor for the fusion of erotisms, in
order to propose a biology of pleasure.
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render it less agonizing. . . . Death exhibits utero-regressive trends similar to those of sleep and coitus’’ (p. 95).
Finally, he adopts a thoroughly modern viewpoint as he
concludes Thalassa: ‘‘[W]e should . . . conceive the whole
inorganic and organic world as a perceptual oscillating
between the will to live and the will to die in which an
absolute hegemony on the part either of life or of death is
never attained’’ (p. 95).
PIERRE SABOURIN
See also: Thalassa. A Theory of Genitality.
Bibliography
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1968). Thalassa: A theory of genitality
(Henry Alden Bunker, Trans.). New York: Norton Library.
(Original work published 1924)
———. (1936). Male and female—Psychoanalytic reflections on the ‘‘Theory of Genitality’’ and on secondary and
tertiary sex differences. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 5,
249–60.
AMPLIFICATION (ANALYTICAL
PSYCHOLOGY)
Amplification is a part of Jung’s method of interpretation of clinical and cultural material, especially dreams.
Amplification involves the use of mythic, historical,
and cultural parallels in order to clarify, make more
ample and, so to speak, turn up the volume on material
that may be obscure, thin, and difficult to attend to.
Just as the analyst waits for associations to the
dream imagery to reach its personal meanings, so, by
amplification, the analyst enables the patient to reach
beyond the personal content to the wider implications
of her or his material. Thereby, the patient feels less
alone and can locate their personal neurosis within
humanity’s general suffering and generativity.
Amplification is also a means of demonstrating the
validity of the concept of the collective unconscious.
Jung’s early understanding of the collective unconscious was that it consisted of primordial images that
were, to a large degree, consistent across cultures and
historical epochs. As amplification involved the assembly of parallels from diverse sources, it could be
regarded as performing this evidential function.
Present-day Jungian analysts are far less convinced
that universal and eternal images exist.
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Amplification is a kind of ‘‘natural thinking,’’ proceeding by way of analogy, parallel and imaginative
elaboration. In this sense, it may also be seen as a
depth psychological approach to scholarship based on
what is claimed to be the natural functioning of the
mind, which is not linear and orderly.
Jung first introduced the idea in an essay in a collection edited by Freud in 1908, when he stated that he
does not wish the process of interpretation to proceed
‘‘entirely subjectively.’’ In 1935, he spoke of the need to
find ‘‘the tissue that the word or image is embedded
in’’ (Jung, 1968, p. 84). There he makes the claim that
amplification follows a kind of natural ‘‘logic.’’ By
1947, the value of amplification lies in the fact that it
can enable us to reach, by inference, the archetypal
structures of the unconscious mind which, by definition, are unrepresentable in and of themselves, must
be distinguished from their appearance in culture, and
which therefore can only be assessed by means of techniques such as amplification (Jung, 1947). Gradually,
Jung was coming to see amplification more as a technique to be used in a wide variety of contexts and less as
a general principle of mental functioning. Hence,
amplification lies behind the immense spreads of cultural and historical material that Jung lays out for his
readers.
As the related clinical technique of active imagination was refined, amplification acquired a new significance in Jungian clinical theorizing. If sinking down
into the unconscious and recording, often by means of
artistic activity, what was encountered therein was not
to be merely a self-indulgent, aesthetic process, the
role of the ego in amplification was important as a critical agency, not to mention as a bulwark against
psychosis.
The clearest statements of the clinical uses of amplification are found in relation to dreams.
Amplification as a concept also had a marked effect
on the development of analytical psychology as an
institution. If patients were to pursue the parallels to
their personal material in terms of cultural material,
they needed libraries in which to do this. This was one
reason for the creation of analytical psychology
‘‘clubs’’ in urban centers. In the clubs, selected patients
and the analysts could relate on more-or-less equal
terms, in part united by the need for scholarly
resources (Samuels, 1994). The main criticism of
amplification has been that it can make analysis into
much too intellectual a process and sometimes leads
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patients into an inflation whereby they equate their
personal situation with something much greater,
hence not only avoiding the transference but also gratifying omnipotent fantasies (Fordham, 1978, p. 220).
Amplification needs to be discussed in the context
of current debates about interpretation: it is best
located as part of a hermeneutical approach rather
than a causal-positivist one. Recently, the concept has
been extended so as to cover much more of the field of
interpretation than Jung intended (Samuels, 1993).
The ordinary, everyday analytical procedure of interpreting the patient’s material in infantile terms may
also be seen as a kind of amplification, neither hermeneutic nor causal-positivist.
ANDREW SAMUELS
See also: Word association (analytical psychology); Interpretation of dreams (analytical psychology).
Bibliography
Fordham, Michael. (1978). Jungian psychotherapy: A study in
analytical psychology. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley.
Jung, Carl Gustav. (1947 [1954]). On the nature of the psyche. Coll. Works (Vol. VIII). London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Samuels, Andrew. (1993). The political psyche. London and
New York: Routledge.
———. (1994, April). The professionalization of Carl G.
Jung’s Analytical Psychology Clubs. Journal of the Historical and Behavioral. Sciences, XXX, 138–147.
ANACLISIS/ANACLITIC
The idea of anaclisis was introduced by Freud to
describe the original relationship, in the young child,
between the sexual drives and the self-preservative
functions. Arising from a specific site in the organism
(an erotogenic zone), the sexual drives at first prop
themselves on the self-preservative functions, and only
later become independent. The self-preservative function thus sometimes offers its own object to the sexual
drive; this is what Freud calls ‘‘anaclitic object-choice.’’
Like the notion of ‘‘deferred action’’ (Nachträglichkeit), that of ‘‘anaclisis’’ or ‘‘leaning-on’’ or ‘‘propping’’
(Anlehnung) constitutes a major theoretical concept
that always remained latent in Freud’s own work.
Freud devoted no article or complete discussion to it,
68
and the notion lay undeveloped in psychoanalysis up
until the nineteen-sixties (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1967/
1973). An important reason for this inattention is
doubtless the fact that the Standard Edition did not
heed the consistent use of the German word nor translate it in a systematic way; its preferred rendering,
moreover, was the artificial ‘‘anaclisis.’’ It has to be said
that the concept was not identified either, as such, in
Freud’s texts or in German psychoanalysis. Since the
notion was eminently problematical, and since Freud
did not set an example by thinking the matter through,
things were simply left fallow.
The German substantive Anlehnung is derived from
the verb Sich anlehnung, meaning to ‘‘lean on’’ or
‘‘prop oneself on’’ (Laplanche, 1970/1976, p. 15–16).
The term appears regularly in Freud’s work, especially
prior to 1920. What it describes is the support that
sexuality derives, at the beginning, from various functions and bodily zones related to self-preservation: the
mouth, the anus, the musculature, and so on. It is thus
intimately bound up with the Freudian conception of
infantile and adult sexuality as a much-broadened
sphere, far more comprehensive than the genital alone,
and indeed extending to the entire body.
The notion made its appearance in the first edition
of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), and
was further explicated in later revisions of that work. It
occurs for the very first time as a designation for the
way in which anal sexuality is bound to the excretory
function. The most explicit account, however, concerns sucking at the breast: ‘‘The satisfaction of the
erotogenic zone is associated, in the first instance, with
the satisfaction of the need for nourishment. To begin
with, sexual activity attaches itself to functions serving
the purpose of self-preservation and does not become
independent of them until later. . . . The need for
repeating the sexual satisfaction now becomes
detached from the need for taking nourishment’’
(1905d, pp. 181–82). ‘‘At a time at which the first
beginnings of sexual satisfaction are still linked with
the taking of nourishment, the sexual instinct has a
sexual object outside the infant’s own body in the
shape of his mother’s breast. It is only later that the
instinct loses that object. . . . As a rule the sexual
instinct then becomes auto-erotic’’ (p. 222).
According to Freud’s description of the component
instincts, the bodily source, the aim, and the object of
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preservation, and on the other with respect to sexuality. Freud’s account is most explicit apropos of the
object: self-preservation may show sexuality the way to
the ‘‘choice of an object,’’ in which case that choice is
made on the model of one of the people important for
the child’s survival—‘‘the woman who feeds’’ or ‘‘the
man who protects.’’ This ‘‘anaclitic (attachment) type
of object-choice’’ is contrasted, in ‘‘On Narcissism: An
Introduction,’’ with ‘‘narcissistic object-choice,’’ where
the object is chosen on the model of the self (1914c,
pp. 87–90).
The idea of anaclisis contains the seeds of an interesting theory of the genesis of the sexual drive. It proposes that this drive definitely develops on the basis of
an organic factor, namely the self-preservative function, but that it then detaches itself therefrom, so
becoming autonomous, and in the first instance autoerotic, bound to sexual fantasy. This incipient theory
was never worked out by Freud: it was firmly rooted in
his first theory of the drives (which contrasted sexuality and self-preservation), and its integration into the
framework of his ‘‘second dualism,’’ that between the
life and death drives, would have entailed a complete
overhaul of that scheme. Its most troublesome aspect,
however, lies in the assumption that the self-preservative and the sexual drives can be treated as comparable,
as two parallel yet somehow identical processes. For
the very idea of Anlehnung implies to the contrary that
there is an essential disparity here: the sexual drives are
assigned their aims and objects by other processes—by
bodily functions or needs—and this implies that sexuality is initially indeterminate.
What Freud’s introduction, then his abandonment,
of the notion of anaclisis encourages us to do, therefore, is revisit the distinction between the notion of
drive (Trieb) on the one hand, and that of instinct
(Instinkt) or bodily function on the other. There are
three very different ways of approaching such a task.
A first interpretation posits a sort of developmental
parallelism between two types of process, equally biological in nature, as for example nourishment and oral
sexuality. According to this model, the operation of
self-preservation is seen as triggering erotogenic stimulation. This stimulation is then repeated in an
endogenous way (what Freud calls ‘‘sensual sucking’’).
This somewhat mechanical model postulates that the
sources, the aims, and even the objects of the two
kinds of drives are clearly discernible and discrete,
even though, to begin with, they operate in parallel.
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A second approach looks upon anaclisis as the correlate of a kind of hatching process, with infantile
sexuality functioning in two different ways: at a first
moment sexuality props itself upon a bodily function
(nutrition, say) even to the point of becoming indistinguishable from it; then, in a second mode, it separates and becomes at once autonomous, autoerotic,
and of the nature of fantasy. In the course of this complex transformation, the notions of source, aim, and
object undergo a kind of mutation and symbolization.
In the case of nourishment, for instance, the object of
self-preservation is milk, whereas the sexual object is
the breast. From this standpoint, it would be inaccurate to speak of a hallucinatory satisfaction, because
the shift from the need for milk to the incorporation
of the breast is a movement from the order of need to
the order of fantasy and desire.
Thirdly and lastly, it may be objected that this second interpretation is inadequate in that the sexual
drive could not arise from physiological functions by
means, purely and simply, of some mechanism of
‘‘mentalization,’’ some kind of endogenous creation.
Rather, it is arguable that the intervention of a sexual
other—the adult as opposed to the child—is a primordial requirement if symbolization and sexualization is
to take place, if the splitting of sexuality, its binding to
fantasy and its functional autonomy, are to be
achieved. In this view, it is in the context of seduction
that the organic source (the lips, the tongue) comes to
be defined as erotic, that the object (the mother’s erotogenic breast) imposes itself, and that the aim (for
example cannibalistic incorporation) is specified—far
beyond the simple ingestion of nourishment.
JEAN LAPLANCHE
See also: Erotogenic zone; Language of Psychoanalysis,
The ; Narcissism; Object; ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’; Oral stage; Primary need; Primary object; Psychosexual development; Reciprocal paths of influence
(libidinal coexcitation); Sucking/thumbsucking.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
Laplanche, Jean. (1976). Life and death in psychoanalysis
(Jeffrey Mehlman, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press. (Original work published 1970).
69
ANACLITIC DEPRESSION
———. (1993). Le fourvoiement biologisant de la sexualité
chez Freud. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond.
———. (1999). Essays on otherness (Luke Thurston, Philip
Slotkin, and Leslie Hill, Trans.). London and New York:
Routledge.
Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1973). The
language of psycho-analysis (Donald Nicholson-Smith,
Trans.). London: Hogarth Press/Institute of Psycho-Analysis. (Original work published 1967)
ANACLITIC DEPRESSION
The term ‘‘anaclitic depression’’ was coined and promoted by René Spitz. Its first significant mention was in
Spitz’s article on ‘‘Hospitalism’’ (1945). The kindred concepts of hospitalism and anaclitic depression are
described in chapter 14 of The First Year of Life (Spitz
and Cobliner, 1965) in the context of a discussion of
‘‘The Pathology of Object Relations.’’ Spitz might be said
to have opposed both Otto Rank’s thesis of the ‘‘trauma
of birth’’ and the Kleinian idea of the ‘‘depressive position’’ in order to emphasize the study of anaclitic depression, weaning, and the development of the ego.
Spitz’s use of the word ‘‘anaclitic’’ in this connection
is in fact rooted in the Freudian notion of Anlehnung,
or ‘‘leaning on,’’ translated in the Standard Edition as
‘‘anaclisis.’’ The etymological origin of ‘‘anaclisis’’ is
the Greek ana-kleinen, ‘‘to support (oneself) on.’’ The
idea underlying Spitz’s ‘‘anaclitic’’ is thus that of a relational object on which the subject can rely for support in
the course of self-construction and self-differentiation;
the perspective is the same as Freud’s when he said
that object-relationships depended anaclitically on the
satisfaction of self-preservative needs. It will be
recalled, too, that Freud distinguished between two
types of object-choice, the anaclitic and the narcissistic: ‘‘there are two methods of finding an object. The
first . . . is the ‘anaclitic’ or ‘attachment’ one, based on
attachment to early infantile prototypes. The second is
the narcissistic one, which seeks for the subject’s
own ego and finds it again in other people’’ (1905d,
note added in 1915, p. 222n; see also Freud, 1914c,
pp. 87–88).
The anaclitic object plays an important part in
Spitz’s theoretical model of the genesis of the object, a
model taken up in France by such authors as René
Diatkine and Serge Lebovici (1960). It may be defined
as that object which the young child uses for purchase
as he constructs and discovers his ego and as, at the
70
same time and as part of the same progression, he
passes through the three stages described by Spitz: an
objectless stage, a pre-objectal stage, and an objectal
stage properly so called. To characterize this object as
anaclitic is furthermore quite in harmony with the
Freudian notion of anaclisis, for it is through the satisfaction of its self-preservative needs that the baby in
Spitz’s model discovers the object and the object-relationship, a relationship that obtains not in the world
of needs but in the world of wishes.
There can be no doubt that his extremely fruitful
theorizing enabled Spitz, in his time, to propose a
model of the genesis of mental representations that
was at once developmental and metapsychological,
and thus sharply distinct from that of John Bowlby,
who has indeed been taken to task for somewhat
shortcircuiting the issue of mental representations. At
all events, two very different theoretical (and clinical)
approaches to depression in infants have resulted.
For Spitz, such depressions are attributable to emotional deficiency—a partial deficiency in the case of
anaclitic depression (which is reversible), but absolute
in the case of hospitalism (irreversible, at least in principle). Mary Ainsworth (1962; see also Spitz, 1965, p.
267) has reiterated that such situations of emotional
deficiency may be described as ‘‘quantitative’’ in that
they are the outcome of an absence of the anaclitic
object in actual historical reality (i.e., the physical
separation of mother and child).
When the anaclitic object is missing from the relational environment, the child’s instincts, and notably
its aggressive instincts, are turned against the child
itself; it has no external object upon which to focus,
and at the same time no sufficiently stable and differentiated internal representation of the object yet exists.
The danger of anaclitic depression and hospitalism is
thus at its most acute between the ages of one and
one-and-a-half, or in other words between the objectless stage and the fully objectal one.
Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, such psychopathological situations are by no means rare, and
naturally they are very common during times of social
disruption (war, displaced populations, natural disasters, etc.). It is interesting to note, historically speaking, that it was roughly at the same moment, in the
immediate aftermath of World War II, that two things
happened: no sooner had researchers turned their
attention for the first time to the unsuspected abilities
of babies, than René Spitz, Anna Freud, Dorothy
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Burlingham, John Bowlby, and others described
depression, and Leo Kanner autism, in early infancy. It
was as though according babies the ‘‘right’’ to a mental
life of their own immediately entailed the possibility of
their experiencing all the difficulties that inevitably
attend any real mental activity: pain and suffering in
the case of depression, madness in that of autism or
early psychoses.
In more recent times the idea of anaclitic conditions
has been widely questioned, even dismissed, yet it is
still a point of reference for a good many authors, and
there is no denying that it has effectively demonstrated
the importance of the quality of the infant’s relationship to the primary object in the construction of
the ego, in the emergence of a representational capacity, and in the establishment of a psychosomatic
equilibrium.
BERNARD GOLSE
See also: Abandonment; Anaclisis/anaclitic; Hospitalism;
Neurosis; Repetition.
Bibliography
Ainsworth, Mary D. Salter. (1962). The effects of maternal
deprivation: A review of findings and controversy in the
context of research strategy. In Mary D. Ainsworth and R.
G. Andry (Eds.), Deprivation of maternal care. Geneva:
World Health Organization.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
meaning’’—derives from theology. An anagoge is a
mystical interpretation that implies spiritual elevation,
convergence towards a universal symbolic meaning,
and an ecstatic feeling. The notion was promoted by
Herbert Silberer, author of Hidden Symbolism of
Alchemy and the Occult Arts (1914/1971).
Anagogical interpretation relates to the ‘‘functional
phenomenon’’ that Silberer defined on the basis of his
observation of hypnagogic processes. Silberer
described three levels of symbolization: somatic, material, and functional. The ‘‘functional phenomenon’’
pertains to the capacity for symbolic generalization: it
facilitates the shift from ‘‘material’’ symbolization of
the particular contents of thought to a general symbolization, in images, affects, tendencies, intentions, and
complexes that reflect the structure of the psyche.
In psychoanalytic treatment, anagogical interpretation aims at strengthening the tendency to form more
and more universal symbols, whose ethical value is also
reinforced. Silberer claimed that the functional phenomena were bolstered in the course of an analysis.
This idea of interpretation as a generalizing idealization in the here and now is at odds with the Freudian
conception based on the personal dimension, the erogenous zones, and deferred action. Freud recognized
the utility of Silberer’s hypotheses for explaining the formation of ideas and the dramatic character of dreams,
but he criticized his extension of it to the technique of
interpretation (as did Ernest Jones, who likened Silberer’s approach to Jung’s). Freud further rebuked
Silberer for falling prey to the defense mechanisms of
rationalization and reaction-formation.
Lebovici, Serge. (1960). La relation objectale chez l’enfant.
Psychiatrie de l’Enfant 1, 3,147–226.
JACQUES ANGELERGUES
Spitz, René A. (1945). Hospitalism: An enquiry into the genesis of psychiatric conditions in early childhood. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1, 53–74.
See also: Functional phenomenon; Interpretation; Representability; Silberer, Herbert.
Spitz, René A., and Cobliner, W. G. (1965). The first year of
life: A psychoanalytic study of normal and deviant development of object relations. New York: International Universities Press.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4–5.
Jones, Ernest. (1916). The theory of symbolism. Papers on
psychoanalysis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961.
ANAGOGICAL INTERPRETATION
The idea of ‘‘anagogical interpretation’’—a kind
of interpretation which moves, according to the
Robert dictionary, ‘‘from a literal to a mystical
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Silberer Herbert. (1951). Report on a method of eliciting
and
observing
certain
symbolic
hallucinationphenomena. In David Rapaport, Ed., Organization and
pathology of thought. Selected sources (pp. 195–207).
New York: Columbia University Press. (Original work
published 1909)
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ANALITY
———. (1911). Symbolik des Erwachens und Schwellensymbolik überhaupt. Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und
psychopathologische, 3, 621–660.
———. (1971). Hidden symbolism of alchemy and the occult
arts (Smith Ely Jelliffe, Trans.). New York: Dover. (Original
work published 1914)
ANALITY
The term ‘‘anality’’ may refer to the second stage of
libido development, to a feature of the pregenital organization of the libido, to an aspect of sexual life, or to a
salient personality trait. In his letter to Wilhelm Fliess
of November 14, 1897, Freud indicated that by adulthood the regions of the mouth and throat and of the
anus no longer ‘‘produce a release of sexuality’’ (1950a,
p. 279). Their appearance and representation no longer
excite, but instead provoke the disgust associated with
repression. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905d), Freud defined anality as sexual activity in the
child that is anaclitically dependent on another physiological function: defecation. The erogenous zone, the
zone of attachment of the impulse, is in this case the
anal region. This is why certain disturbances of a neurotic origin involve a range of digestive disturbances.
In ‘‘Character and Anal Eroticism’’ (1908b, p. 169),
Freud discerned some specifically anal character traits:
orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy. These traits, in
his view, are the result of the sublimation of anal eroticism. The handling of money, for example, is clearly
connected with an interest in excrement.
In a letter to Dr. Friedrich Krauss (1910f), Freud
spoke of the universal tendency of people to ‘‘dwell
with pleasure upon this part of the body [the anus], its
performances and indeed the product of its function’’
(p. 234). In ‘‘The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis’’
(1913i), Freud distinguishes passivity, fed by anal eroticism, and activity (mastery), which coincides with
sadism. Accentuating this eroticism during the stage of
pregenital organization will, during the genital stage,
leave men with a significant disposition to homosexuality. When he began his fundamental study ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’ (1916–1917g [1915]), Freud
wrote, ‘‘As regards one particular striking feature of
melancholia that we have mentioned, the prominence
of the fear of becoming poor, it seems plausible to suppose that it is derived from anal erotism which has
been torn out of its context and altered in a regressive
sense’’ (p. 252).
72
In Freud’s correspondence with Karl Abraham
(Freud, 1965a [1907–1926]), the study of melancholic
depression was a central theme. Abraham (1927), considered object loss to be an anal process. One form of
behavior specific to melancholic depression is an
impulse for coprophagy (feeding on feces), which is
associated with the oral process typical of introjection
and central to melancholy. Abraham went on to claim
that anal eroticism embodies two diametrically
opposed forms of pleasure. The same opposition can
be seen in sadistic impulses. His distinction between
two anal-sadistic stages—primitive expulsion (a show
of hostility toward the object) and late retention
(including tendencies to dominate)—therefore seems
fundamental. For Abraham, sexual development after
the oral phase went through a second, anal-sadistic,
phase, reinforcing the ambivalence that arose during
the oral-sadistic substage. This phase itself comprises
two substages. The first is characterized by destructive
tendencies, while in the second the subject seeks to
possess and preserve the object. Freud summarized
this approach in his New Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis (1933a).
Melanie Klein (1940) adopted Freud’s and Abraham’s conception of depression and mourning, and
expanded on it. She treated melancholy as associated
with loss of the object and theorized that the archaic
character of some pathologies is signaled by the
mechanisms of projection and splitting. For Klein
(1945), fantasies of emptying the breast and penetrating it to steal its milk, or of attacking it to fill it with
fecal matter, underlay paranoid anxieties. Klein then
describes the mechanism of projective identification,
which is based on earlier work of hers (1955). Through
this mechanism, parts of the self empty out into various objects. In this connection, anality assumes central importance in pregenitality and the capacity for
sublimation.
Donald Meltzer (1966) makes use of the concepts of
the false self and the as-if personality, introduced by
Donald W. Winnicott and Helene Deutsch, in his
investigation of the features of pseudomaturity, which
he associates with anality. Meltzer views anality as a
defense against a relation to the breast, and later
against the total mother-object.
André Green (1973) suggests that anal regression
leads to the destructuring of thought. Primary anality
provokes, attacks, and discharges until a state of blank
psychosis arises. This approach allows Green (1983) to
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ANAL-SADISTIC STAGE
distinguish two forms of narcissism: a narcissism associated with the life instinct and a narcissism associated
with the death instinct (a negative form of narcissism).
DOMINIQUE J. ARNOUX
See also: Activity/passivity; Anal-sadistic stage; Asthma;
Character; Coprophilia; Encopresis; Eroticism, anal; Erotogenic zone; Feces; Gift; Mastery; Modesty; ‘‘Notes
upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’’ (Rat Man); Obsessional neurosis; Partial drive; Pregenital; Psychosexual
development; Sadism; Stage; Three Essays on the Theory
of Sexuality.
Klein, Melanie; Heimann, Paula; and Money-Kyrle, Roger
(Eds.). (1955). New directions in psycho-analysis: The significance of infant conflict in the pattern of adult behaviour.
London: Tavistock Publications.
Meltzer, Donald. (1966). The relationship of anal masturbation to projective identification. International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 47, 335–342.
ANAL-SADISTIC STAGE
Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1927). A short history of the development
of the libido. In his Selected papers on psycho-analysis.
London: Hogarth Press.
Donnet, Jean-Luc, and Green, André. (1973). L’enfant de ça.
Paris: Minuit.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1908b). Character and anal erotism. SE, 9:
167–175.
———. (1910f). Letter to Dr. Friedrich S. Krauss on
Anthropophyteia. SE, 11: 233 ff.
———. (1913i). The disposition to obsessional neurosis: A
contribution to the problem of choice of neurosis. SE, 12:
311–326.
———. (1916–1917g [1915]). Mourning and melancholia.
SE, 14: 237–258.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
———. (1950a [1887–1902]). Extracts from the Fliess
papers. SE, 1: 173–280.
———. (1965a [1907–1926]). A psycho-analytic dialogue:
The letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907–
1926 (Bernard Marsh and Hilda C. Abraham, Trans.). New
York: Basic Books.
———(1985c [1887–1904]). The complete letters of Sigmund
Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (Jeffrey M. Masson,
Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University
Press, 1985.
Green, André. (2001). The dead mother. In his Life narcissism, death narcissism (Andrew Weller, Trans.). New York:
Free Association Books. (Original work published 1983)
Klein, Melanie. (1940). Mourning and its relation to manicdepressive states. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,
21, 125–153.
INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
———. (1945). The Oedipus complex in the light of early
anxieties. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 26,
11–33.
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
The anal-sadistic stage, the second type of organization of libidinal cathexes, instates the anal zone as the
predominant erotogenic zone during the second year
of life. The relation to the object during to this period
is shot through with meanings relating to the function
of defecation (expulsion or retention) and to the symbolic value of feces (given or refused).
Freud saw the conflicts of this stage as defining for
the sadomasochistic object-relationship and its three
characteristic dichotomies: activity/passivity, domination/submission, and retention/expulsion.
The anal-sadistic stage takes form during the second year of life, which is devoted to the mastery of the
object and the development of the ‘‘drive for mastery.’’
Anal erotism, anaclitically attached to the retention or
evacuation of feces, becomes conflicted during this
stage.
The erotogenic zone involved is not confined
exclusively to the anal orifice, but extends to the whole
ano-recto-sigmoidal mucosae and even to the digestive system as a whole and to the musculature responsible for retention and evacuation. The instinctual
object cannot be reduced solely to feces to be retained
within the body or expelled into the outside world, for
during this time the mother and people around her
also function as partial objects to be mastered and
manipulated.
The instinctual aims of this period are twofold: to
gain erotic pleasure linked to the erotogenic zone and
mediated by stools and to explore ways to manipulate
and master the mother, who is now beginning to be
differentiated. ‘‘The child looks upon its stools as a
part of itself that it may either expel or retain (a gradual differentiation between inside and outside) and
73
ANALYSAND
that thus becomes a medium of exchange between
itself and the adult’’ (Golse, 1992).
Freud placed special emphasis on the symbolic
meanings of giving and withholding attached to the
activity of defecation. He showed how anal erotism,
which is linked to both destructive expulsion and
conservative retention, assigns to feces the role of a
part-object that the child can use either to please or to
challenge the mother. ‘‘Defaecation affords the first
occasion on which the child must decide between a
narcissistic attitude and an object-loving attitude. He
either parts obediently with his faeces, ‘sacrifices’ them
to his love, or else retains them for purposes of autoerotic satisfaction and later as a means of asserting his
own will’’ (Freud, 1917c, p. 130). Freud went on to
stress the symbolic equivalence of feces, gifts, and
money. This equivalence was further extended with
the notion of a ‘‘little, detachable part of the body’’
(excrement, the penis, and the baby) that can stimulate
a mucosal passage by entering and leaving it. These
parts, as detachable parts of the body, are symbolically
interchangeable. It is worth noting that even before
describing the anal-sadistic pregenital organization,
Freud had earlier made a connection between certain
character traits in adults (love of order, avarice, and
obstinacy) and the child’s anal erotism (1908b).
Following Freud’s lead, Karl Abraham (1927,
pp. 422–433) proposed to divide the anal-sadistic
stage into two phases on the basis of two contrasting
kinds of behavior with respect to the object. In a first,
expulsive phase, dependent on the musculature, autoerotism is associated with evacuation. This period is
sadistic in the sense that the expulsion of the destroyed
object also acquires the meaning of an act of defiance
toward an adult. A second, retentive phase is passive
and masochistic in character. The instinctual aim
here is mastery of the object, which implies its preservation. This phase is masochistic in that it involves an
active search for pleasure through painful retention and
dilation of the mucous membranes and anal canal.
The anal stage is thus a time of ambivalence par
excellence, when the same fecal object may be either
preserved or expelled, and may thus underpin two
quite different types of pleasure and assume the qualities by turns of a good or bad object.
For Abraham (1924/1927, p. 433), the dividing line
between the first and second phases of the anal stage
correspond to the boundary between psychosis and
neurosis. In his view, in the psychoses the object is
74
expelled and lost, whereas in obsessional neurosis it is
withheld and preserved. In the neuroses, preservation
of the object implies that retention wins out over
expulsion and that ambivalence is resolved, with the
result that there are fewer splits of various kinds. This
underscores the role of an obsessional organization in
maintaining the link to the object.
In The psycho-analysis of children (1932/1975, pp.
144–146), Melanie Klein described anal-sadistic fantasies in which objects (and the subject too, by way of
the law of talion [an eye for an eye]) are attacked by
poisoned or explosive fecal matter.
JEAN-FRANÇOIS RABAIN
See also: Anality; Demand; Imago; Stage (or phase).
Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1927). A short study of the development of
the libido, viewed in the light of mental disorders. In
Selected papers of Karl Abraham, M.D.. London: Hogarth.
(Originally published 1924)
Freud, Sigmund. (1908b). Character and anal erotism. SE, 9:
167–175.
———. (1917c). On transformations of instinct as exemplified in anal erotism. SE, 17: 127.
Golse, Bernard. (1992). Le développement affectif et intellectuel de l’enfant. Paris: Masson.
Klein, Melanie. (1975). The psycho-analysis of children
(Alix Strachey, Trans.; revised by H. A. Thorner). Vol. 2 of
The writings of Melanie Klein. London: Hogarth and
the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. (Originally published
1932)
ANALYSAND
During the earliest days of psychoanalytic practice,
Freud and his students, excited by their discoveries,
put great emphasis on the active role of the psychoanalyst. Even though he showed himself to be less of an
inquisitor than in the Studies on Hysteria, it was the
analyst who intervened, interpreted, ‘‘analyzed,’’ and
the patient was, at least in theory, the person on whom
some form of therapeutic activity was practiced. The
patient was the ‘‘analysand’’ of a psychoanalyst, who
possessed the necessary theoretical knowledge from
having first ‘‘undergone’’ the initiatory experience of
psychoanalysis himself.
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‘‘ANALYSIS OF A PHOBIA IN A FIVE-YEAR-OLD BOY’’ (LITTLE HANS)
British authors were the first to use the gerundive
form ‘‘analysand’’ to refer to the patient in analysis.
The term is found as early as 1925 in the International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis and was regularly used by
English authors before the Second World War. As psychoanalysis developed and spread, and as increasing
emphasis was placed on the transference and countertransference in the dynamics of therapy, the patient
turned out to be at least as, and sometimes more,
active than the analyst. In 1972 Joyce McDougall
created the term ‘‘anti-analysand.’’
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Framework of the psychoanalytic treatment;
Psychoanalytic treatment; Technique with adults,
psychoanalytic.
Bibliography
McDougall, Joyce. (1972). L’anti-analysant en analyse. Revue
française de psychanalyse, 36, 167–206.
ANALYSE QUATRIÈME. See Fourth analysis
‘‘ANALYSIS OF A PHOBIA IN A FIVE-YEAROLD BOY’’ (LITTLE HANS)
This important publication of 1909 was the first case
study in which clinical material, derived directly from
the treatment of a child, was presented as evidence in
support of Sigmund Freud’s theories of infantile sexuality. The somewhat unorthodox treatment was carried out by the child’s father under the ‘‘supervision,’’
mainly by way of letters, of Freud himself.
This case study played a significant role for Freud
in consolidating his new theories concerning infantile
sexuality. While his major findings about the existence of the Oedipus and castration complexes, and
the sexual life and theories of children, had originally
been derived from the analysis of adults, the case of
‘‘Little Hans’’ (as it has come to be called in the psychoanalytic literature) provided the independent
‘‘proof ’’ Freud needed, using clinical material obtained from a child. The case of Little Hans delivered
compelling clinical examples which confirmed many
of the theoretical statements made in the Three Essays
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on the Theory of Sexuality, which Freud had published
in 1905, and which were, at that time, regarded as
scandalous.
Little Hans, whose father had been sending Freud
reports about his son’s interest in sexual matters and
his curiosity about his body and the bodies of others—
an interest centered especially upon the anatomical
differences between the sexes—suddenly developed a
phobia (an infantile neurosis). He refused to leave the
house and go into the street for fear of being bitten by
a horse. The paper ‘‘The Analysis of a Phobia in a FiveYear-Old Boy’’ is the account of the development, the
interpretation, the working through, and partial dissolution of the neurotic conflicts from which the phobic
symptom originated. This first ‘‘child analysis’’ was
conducted, with ‘‘supervision’’ from Freud, by Max
Graf, Hans’s father, an early follower of Freud’s. His
wife, Hans’s mother, had been in analysis with Freud,
while Graf was a participant in the Society’s Wednesday meetings.
Freud had Hans and his father in to see him, and
realized that the details of the appearance of the horse
that so frightened the boy stood in fact for the eyeglasses and moustache of the father. Freud’s revelations
prompted Hans to ask his father, ‘‘Does the Professor
talk to God, as he can tell all that beforehand?’’ (p. 42–
43) Freud indeed played the éminence grise in this
story, and the father reported several times to Freud
that Hans had requested him to convey this or that
fantasy to him, apparently secure in the feeling that
‘‘the Professor’’ would know how to interpret them.
What the case of Little Hans documented were the
now well-known elements of the phallic-oedipal phase
of sexual development. Evident were the high esteem
in which the penis is held by the child as a source of
pleasure; the love of the parent of the opposite sex
and the rivalry with the (otherwise loved) same sex
parent; the pleasures of looking and being looked at;
persistent thoughts about the parents’ sexual activities,
about pregnancy and birth; and jealousy, death wishes,
and castration anxiety.
The case study cannot however be seen simply as a
description of a specific clinical syndrome or as the
extension of analytic technique to children. It also
made clear for the first time, as Anna Freud (1980)
pointed out, the complexity of the child’s emotions
and thinking, and graphically illustrated how inner
conflicts arise through the mutually contradictory
demands of the drives, the developing ego and
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‘‘ A N A L Y S I S T E R M I N A B L E
AND
INTERMINABLE’’
superego structures, and the external world, and how
this process can be accompanied by compromise formations in the form of neurotic symptoms. The paper
documents the arduous task for the still immature ego
of finding compromise solutions to these conflicts.
The publication is also considered to be an important
step in closing the gap between pathology and normality, between psychic health and psychic illness.
The case study of ‘‘Little Hans’’ proved to be the
forerunner of the development of child analysis (in the
work of Anna Freud in Vienna and London and Melanie Klein in Berlin and London) and the direct observation of children.
Freud’s explanation of the outbreak of Little Hans’s
phobia is as follows: the phobic symptom, that a horse
might bite him or fall down, was a compromise formation which was developed in an attempt to solve the
oedipal conflict, with which he was struggling. Hans’s
sexually excited attachment to his mother and his
ambivalent feelings towards his father, whom he loved
deeply, but who stood in his way as a rival for the
reciprocation of love from his mother, gave rise to castration anxiety and the fear of being punished, as well
as to guilt feelings and to repression. The birth of his
sister heightened the conflict as she too was seen by
Hans to be a rival for his mother’s attention and affection. Hans was able quite openly to express his death
wishes towards his sister—but the repression of his
aggressive impulses towards his father strengthened
his castration anxiety and forced him—through the
mechanisms of displacement and externalization—to
create a phobic object which could be avoided. In this
way Hans’s inner conflict was converted into an external danger, which he could escape through flight. He
was thus able to ward off an even greater anxiety, that
of castration. The development of the phobic symptom fulfilled the function of helping to maintain Little
Hans’s psychic balance.
VERONIKA MÄCHTLINGER
See also: Graf, Herbert; Graf, Max; Infantile neurosis;
Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety; Oedipus complex;
Phobias in children; Psychoanalytic Treatment of Children, The.
Source Citation
Freud, Sigmund. (1909b). Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben (‘‘Der kleine Hans’’) Jb. psychoanal. psycho76
pathol. Forsch, I, 1–109; GW, VII, p. 241-377; Analysis of a
phobia in a five-year-old boy. SE, 10: 1–149.
Bibliography
Freud, Anna. (1980). Introduction. In the paperback edition
of The analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy. Frankfurt
am Main: S. Fischer.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1922c). Postscript to ‘‘Analysis of a phobia in a five
year old boy.’’ SE, 10: 148.
‘‘ANALYSIS TERMINABLE AND
INTERMINABLE’’
In response to Rank’s proposal of providing shorter
cures, Freud, using the example of the Wolf Man, makes
the central theme of this article the duration of the treatment and ‘‘the part of the transference which had not
been resolved’’ (p. 218). The problem of the slow progress of an analysis ‘‘leads us to another, more deeply
interesting question: is there such a thing as a natural
end to an analysis?’’ (p. 219). A terminated analysis supposes that two conditions are fulfilled: first, the patient
must be relieved of symptoms, inhibitions, and anxieties, and second, enough of the repressed must be
made conscious and elucidated, and enough of the resistance conquered, so as to banish the risk of repetition.
Three factors affect the length of a treatment: ‘‘the
constitutional strength of the drive,’’ ‘‘traumas,’’ and the
‘‘alteration of the ego’’ (pp. 220–221). Freud indicated
that if the traumatic factor is preponderant, the situation favors progress towards a ‘‘definitively terminated’’
analysis (p. 220). Two factors are responsible for interminable analyses: ‘‘the constitutional strength of the
drive’’ and ‘‘an unfavorable alteration of the ego
acquired in the defensive struggle’’ (pp. 220–221) that
results in a kind of dissociation or restriction of the ego.
To follow dialectical reasoning by opposing a ‘‘terminated analysis’’ to an ‘‘interminable’’ one might not
be of use for theoretical research on the end of analysis.
Too much stubbornness on this point could reinforce
a somewhat ideological position consisting, as Freud
wrote in ‘‘Remembering, Repeating and WorkingThrough,’’ ‘‘in resolving every one of the patient’s
repressions’’ and ‘‘in filling all the gaps in his memory’’
(1914g, p. 220). A failure to achieve this end could
result from the constitutional strength of the drive
being rooted in biology.
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ANALYTIC PSYCHODRAMA
In 1937, the metapsychological model explained
most closely the economic and dynamic aspects of
clinical experience, aspects that had previously eluded
explanations using the notion of opposition of forces.
Thus the end of analysis was described by means of a
much more complex psychic apparatus involving both
the first and second topographies, as well as two classes
of drives that place the ‘‘psychic conflict’’ at the center
of mental functioning.
When drive is mentioned in this late work, it must
be understood in the context of a two-drive model,
whether in its relation to the object or to the ego. The
pressure of the drives is countered by the ego, which
sets up a resistance using various defenses, some of
which, as ‘‘reaction-formations,’’ constitute the louder
aspects of neurosis. Though Freud used the term
‘‘transference-love,’’ Eros is not the only component in
the dynamics of the transference. Various obstacles
face the analysis, with the risk of a negative therapeutic
reaction always on the horizon. These negative developments might be moderate during the analysis only
to flare up at full intensity after its termination.
On the basis of two examples, Freud implicitly
introduced two essential ideas regarding the end of the
treatment. The first concerns what would now be
called the counter-transference in relation to a young
female homosexual. The second idea involves the time
of exploration necessary for the numerous returns of
negative currents.
This article implicitly links the themes of psychic
conflict, failure to achieve completion, the negative,
and counter-transference. Resistance to the loss of the
object and to the constitution of masculine and feminine identifications is grounded in the dynamics of the
binding of the two drives, itself influenced by the
transference and the analyst’s interpretations.
In this work, Freud did not directly raise the issue
of the analysand’s desire to become an analyst,
although he very probably was referring to Sándor Ferenczi when he mentions the belated disclosure of the
negative transference. The remnant of negative transference that is the desire to become an analyst was
made the subject of a study by Jean-Paul Valabrega
concerning analytic training (1994).
The negative current is one working perspective outlined by Freud in this late text. Several subsequent
authors, each in their own way, revisited the question of
the negative. As different as their works might be, one
common point becomes clear, namely that an analysis,
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even in the favorable case of a transference neurosis, confronts the protagonists with the play of binding and
unbinding of the drives and with inevitable negative phenomena. The length of treatment, which has increased
over time, is due, in large part to a wish to analyze the
negative currents, particularly in the transference.
RENÉ PÉRAN
See also: Biological bedrock; Cure; Ferenczi, Sándor;
‘‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’’ (Wolf Man);
Negative therapeutic reaction; Psychoanalytic treatment;
Technique with adults, psychoanalytic; Termination of
treatment; Therapeutic alliance.
Source Citation
Freud, Sigmund. (1937c). Die endliche und die unendliche
Analyse. GW, 16; Analysis terminable and interminable.
SE, 23: 209–253.
Bibliography
Aulagnier, Piera. (2001). The violence of interpretation: from
pictogram to statement (Alan Sheridan, Trans.). East Sussex, Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge. (Original work
published 1975)
Freud, Sigmund. (1914g). Remembering, repeating and
working-through (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II). SE, 12: 145–156.
Green, André. (1999). The work of the negative (Andrew
Weller, Trans.). New York: Free Association. (Original
work published 1993)
Guillaumin, Jean. (1987). Entre blessure et cicatrice. Seyssel:
Éditions Champ Vallon.
Valabrega, Jean-Paul. (1994). La formation du psychanalyste.
Paris: Payot.
Zaltzman, Nathalie. (1986). Baiser la mort, une sexualité
mélancolique. Topique, 38.
ANALYTIC PSYCHODRAMA
There is a distinction to be made between psychodrama, a method of investigating psychic processes by
dramatizing improvised scenes staged and acted by a
group of participants, and ‘‘analytic psychodrama,’’ a
form of analytic psychotherapy that uses a play and its
dramatization as a means of elucidating unconscious
phenomena. In analytic psychodrama the emphasis is
on the interpretative function of the play: a play leader
analyzes transference and resistances. The drama
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ANALYTIC PSYCHODRAMA
presented in the play is an invitation to engage in symbolizing, which is often fragile in the kind of patient
for whom this therapy is intended.
Psychoanalysis is indebted primarily to Jacob Levy
Moreno (1889–1974) for the remarkable insight of
deploying theatrical improvisation and its dramatization in plays in the service of psychoanalysis. He
continually combined his psychiatric training with his
training as an actor to open up new modes of expression that used lively dialogue and developed a rediscovered spontaneity. He anticipated that such a
catharsis would lead to an emotional release, facilitated by body language. Later he moved on to a more
specific study of interpersonal group relations, which
subsequently formed the basis for his theory of roles
and interaction (sociometry).
After the Second World War, interest in theories
about groups and group methods developed rapidly
and found a particularly favorable reception in France.
In the wake of the work of Georges Heuyer in child
psychoanalysis and Mireille Monod in psychodrama,
Serge Lebovici undertook the first analytic psychodramas with children. He based his practice on psychoanalytic findings and thereby instigated the gradual
process by which psychodrama, founded on Moreno’s
theories, became established. Informed by a wealth of
observations, the field of psychodrama then grew and
was extended to adult psychotherapy.
produces, the play resuscitates what is often a deficient
psychic dynamic. The drama enacts and accomplishes
the following:
The dramatization of conflicts. Affect is connected with words and gestures, which allows the
drives to be based in the body.
Access to representability. The drama enacted by
the actors and the interpretation provided by the
play leader facilitate the formulation of otherwise
inexpressible anxieties and thereby suggest representations often containing affects that are painful to the patient’s ego.
Mediation through the play. By reducing the
influence of censorship, the fiction created by the
play lifts certain inhibitions and facilitates access
to unconscious conflicts. The enjoyment of the
play reinforces the subject’s narcissism and his
confidence.
In Great Britain, the Tavistock Clinic was the source
of group therapies, which benefited from Wilfred R.
Bion’s remarkable contribution. In the United States,
group therapy and psychodrama became particularly
fashionable, with the American Society for Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama in New York as its starting base. In Argentina, following the years of repression
under the military dictatorship, psychodrama underwent a new expansion. In particular, an association for
psychodrama and group psychotherapy was founded
there in 1963. Psychodrama also began to emerge in
Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Vietnam, where it remains
strongly characterized by Moreno’s influence.
There are many varieties of psychodrama, which
bears witness that the practice is evolving, creative,
and receptive. There is the form of group psychodrama
in which the theme is one shared by the whole group
and is interpreted accordingly. There are also two
main varieties of psychodrama with individual themes:
individual psychodrama and group psychodrama. In
these latter two types of psychodrama, a patient or
group of patients meets with a team of therapists. In
either case, the theme is always individual, as is the
resulting interpretation. There are three types of
participant in psychodrama: the patient, who chooses
the scene, a character to play, and the roles to be
assigned to the other actors; the other actors, who act
out the suggested scene (their acting has a primarily
interpretative purpose, being closest to the unconscious impulses expressed by the patient); and the play
leader, who does not act but interprets and makes connections between the meaning of the different scenes.
The play leader also assists in the staging and reinforces the setting. To the play leader falls the task of
interpreting the transference.
In practice, an analytic psychodrama is centered
around a theme suggested by a patient, which is acted
out by him and the other participants. Instead of the
free associations used in classical treatment, the
patient is invited to act out and stage everything that
comes to mind with the help of the other actors. Anything can be acted out, though it has to remain in the
realm of the play. Through the reaction that it
Whether the use of analytic psychodrama is indicated depends more on the patient’s mode of functioning than on nosographic categories. Psychodrama is
more often recommended for patients who suffer
from sensory deprivation or rigid defensive procedures, who are deficient in their ability to fantasize, or
who harbor dominant psychotic fears. Furthermore,
since psychodrama was first used in treating child and
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adolescent pathologies, it continues to be the treatment of choice for young patients.
NADINE AMAR
See also: Idea/representation; Moreno, Jacob Levy; Psychotherapy; Symbolization, process of; Technique with
adults, psychoanalytic; Technique with children,
psychoanalytic.
Bibliography
Amar, Nadine; Bayle, Gérard; and Salem, Isaac. (1988).
Formation au psychodrame analytique. Paris: Dunod.
Anzieu, Didier. (1956). Le psychodrame analytique chez
l’enfant. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Gillibert, Jean. (1985). Le psychodrame de la psychanalyse.
Paris: Champ Vallon.
Jeammet, Philippe, and Kestemberg, Evelyne. (1987). Le
psychodrame psychanalytique. Paris: Presses universitaires
de France.
Moreno, Jacob Levy. (1946–1969). Psychodrama (3 vols.).
New York: Beacon House.
———. (1947). The theater of spontaneity: An introduction
to psychodrama. New York: Beacon House.
———. (1959). Gruppenpsychotherapie und Psychodrama:
Einleitung in die Theorie und Praxis. Stuttgart, Germany:
G. Thieme.
ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY
psychology. By the end of this period, the theory
included psychological types, the theory of complexes
and archetypes, the notions of persona, shadow, and
anima/animus, and the individuation process.
Among the factors that have distinguished analytical psychology are: (a) a synthetic/symbolic component in analytic treatment; (b) a view of libido that
includes a broad range of instinct groups, as well as a
theory of culture that sees it based not on sublimation
of sexuality but on symbolic transformation processes
native to the psyche; (c) a notion of the unconscious
that includes strivings toward growth and development, intelligent purpose, and orientation to meaning
rather than narrowly limited to a pleasure orientation
and a drive to tension release; (d) minimization of the
psychosexual stages of development in childhood in
favor of lifelong psychological development.
Technique also contributes important distinguishing features to analytical psychology: (a) while retaining a strong sense of the importance of transference
and regression, Jung placed patients in a chair vis-à-vis
the analyst and asked them to interact and maintain a
dialogue; (b) frequency of sessions is variable from
twice to five times per week, depending on the need;
(c) the personality of the analyst as well as the analyst’s
associations ("amplifications") to dreams and other
unconscious material come into play in a more open
and explicit fashion, and the analyst seeks to be somewhat transparent and self-disclosing of emotional
reactions.
The first written occurrence of the name "analytical
psychology" is in a lecture delivered by Jung to the
Psycho-Medical Society in London on August 5, 1913
(‘‘General Aspects of Psychoanalysis’’). Conceived by
Jung as a general (depth) psychology, the field grew in
size and developed in complexity both during Jung’s
lifetime and after his death in 1961. By 1997 it had
come to embrace some two thousand professional
analysts on five continents.
Already when Jung broke with Freud at the end of
1912 he enjoyed an international reputation and
quickly attracted his own students from many parts of
Europe and the United States. These men and women
typically returned to their countries of origin and
began Analytical Psychology Clubs or similar study
groups in their home cities: London (1922), Paris
(1926), New York (1936), San Francisco (1939), Los
Angeles (1942), Tel Aviv (1958). Interest in Jung’s
ideas was strong also in Berlin, but since many of the
physicians drawn to him were Jewish (Gerhard Adler,
Ernst Bernhardt, Werner Engel, Jean Kirsch, Ernst
Neumann) and fled to the United States, England,
Italy, and Israel during the 1930s, and because of the
Nazi rise to power and the outbreak of World War II,
the founding of a Jungian organization in Germany
was delayed until 1962.
In the years 1907–20 Jung worked out the main outlines of his theory, which set the course for analytical
Gradually these Analytical Psychology Clubs fostered professional analyst societies which, after the
Founded by Carl Gustav Jung, the field of analytical
psychology is the descendent of the ‘‘Zürich School’’
of psychoanalysis which Jung spearheaded while
still the heir apparent to Freud and the first president
of the International Psychoanalytic Association
(1910–1914).
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ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Second World War, began sponsoring training institutes. The Society of Analytical Psychology, London
(1945) led by Gerhard Adler, Michael Fordham, and
Edward A. Bennett founded the first training program.
Next came the Carl Gustav Jung Institute/Zürich
(1948) with Carl A. Meier as President. In the 1960s,
training institutes appeared in many parts of the
world: Italy (1961), New York (1962), Germany
(1962), San Francisco (1964), Los Angeles (1967), and
France (1969). In the following decades, professional
societies and training institutes also developed in Austria, Australia/New Zealand, Brazil, Israel, South
Africa, and many urban centers in the United States.
By 1996 there were twenty-three training institutes in
existence worldwide.
The International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP), founded in 1955 to serve as an international umbrella organization for all professional
analyst groups within the field of analytical psychology, provides a network of communication and collegiality for Jungian analysts throughout the world.
There are presently thirty-two member groups of
IAAP. Every three years the IAAP sponsors a Congress
and publishes the papers presented. The ZürichCongress of 1995 was the thirteenth to be held.
As the field of analytical psychology developed, it
experienced a vigorous display of diversity and polarization. The issue that has most divided it is the same
one that originally caused the rupture between Jung
and Freud: a symbolic, prospective approach to interpretation and clinical practice vs. a reductive one.
Within analytical psychology this has been referred to
variously as the Zurich vs. London, the classical vs.
developmental, or the symbolic vs. clinical tension. In
every version of this debate, the questions revolve
around whether to give more prominence to working
synthetically and symbolically with dreams and other
direct manifestations of the unconscious or to devote
one’s efforts exclusively toward technique and the analysis of personal issues involving early childhood and
developmental traumas, resistance, and transference.
The classical school bases itself centrally on the writings of Jung and his close followers such as Marie
Louise von Franz, Carl A. Meier, and Edward Edinger,
while the developmental school incorporates many
ideas from modern psychoanalysis, particularly object
relations theory. The leading figure of the latter movement was Michael Fordham. The most recent generation of analysts has attempted to synthesize these two
80
opposing trends and to find a balanced approach.
Some have carried out investigations of the character
disorders, dissociative states, and the interactive field
(transference-countertransference). There have also
been movements in recent decades to apply analytical
psychology to the analysis of children and adolescents,
society and politics, art and popular culture, small
groups and large corporate organizations, and marriage and family dynamics.
Scientific studies testing the hypotheses of analytical
psychology continue in many universities and institutes throughout the world. Journals of analytical psychology appear regularly in English, French, German,
Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese. The most
important of these are: The Journal of Analytical
Psychology (London, est. 1955), the Cahiers Jungiens
de Psychanalyse (Paris, est. 1974), and the Zeitschrift
für Analytische Psychologie (Berlin and Zürich, est.
1969).
MURRAY STEIN
Notions: Active imagination (analytical psychology);
Alchemy (analytical psychology); Amplification (analytical psychology); Animus-Anima; Archetype (analytical
psychology); Collective unconscious (analytical psychology); Compensation (analytical psychology); Complex
(analytical psychology); Ego (analytical psychology);
Extroversion/introversion (analytical psychology); Individuation (analytical psychology); Interpretation of
dreams (analytical psychology); Midlife crisis; Numinous
(analytical psychology); Projection and ‘‘participation
mystique’’ (analytical psychology); Psychological types
(analytical psychology); Self (analytical psychology);
Shadow (analytical psychology); Synchronicity (analytical psychology); Transference/counter-transference (analytical psychology); Word association (analytical
psychology).
See also: Belgium; Brazil; France; Germany; Great Britain;
Jung, Carl Gustav; Netherlands; Switzerland, (Germanspeaking).
Bibliography
Dyer, Donald. (1991). Cross-currents of Jungian thought: An
annotated bibliography. Boston-London: Shambhala.
Henderson, Joseph L. (1995). Reflections on the history and
practice of Jungian analysis. In Murray Stein (Ed.): Jungian
analysis. La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Jung, Carl Gustav. (1966). Memories, dreams, reflections.
London: Routledge. (Original work published 1962)
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A N D E R S S O N , O L A (1919 –1 990)
Samuels, Andrew (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians.
London-Boston: Routledge.
This is the dream’s navel, and the place beneath which
lies the Unknown’’ (1900a, chap. 7).
Stein, Murray (Ed.). (1995). Jungian analysis. La Salle, IL:
Open Court.
To this constraint on the ‘‘interpretative frenzy’’ (as
Sándor Ferenczi described it) of some psychoanalysts
was later added a discussion and evaluation of the limits of the effectiveness of psychoanalysis. In ‘‘Analysis
Terminable and Interminable,’’ aside even from the
limits imposed by the resistance of the id, the ‘‘viscosity of the libido,’’ or negative therapeutic reactions,
Freud concluded, ‘‘We often have the impression, in
the case of penis envy and masculine protest, of having
opened a passage through the psychological strata to
‘bedrock,’ and to have thereby completed our work.
Yet it cannot be otherwise, since for the psychic, the
biological indeed plays the role of the underlying bedrock’’ (1937c).
ANALYZABILITY
The concept of ‘‘analyzability’’ appeared late in the
psychoanalytic literature and has two different meanings: One was the classical designation, following the
medical model, concerning ‘‘indications and contraindications’’ of the psychoanalytic treatment; the other
referred to the realization of a limit to interpretation,
that is, the recognition that there is an ‘‘analyzable’’
element and an ‘‘unanalyzable’’ element in what the
psyche produces. It was the abandonment of the strict
medical model and the attempt to take into account
purely psychoanalytic factors that led to the emphasis,
when discussing the progress of an analysis, on the
concept of analyzability. Preliminary interviews are
intended to estimate and, depending on the psychopathology of the patient and his capacity for insight,
orient the choice of therapy toward a conventional
treatment or psychotherapeutic treatment. Some
authors, like Elisabeth Zetzel (1968), have, for example, classified hysterical patients into four categories
based on their ‘‘analyzability.’’ Other authors, especially when discussing borderline patients, have tried
to define precise criteria for prognosis. These include
Otto Kernberg, who feels that the ability to experience
guilt is ‘‘a good prognostic sign in the evaluation of
the ‘narcissistic personality’s’ analyzability’’ (1970).
The majority of authors, however, although they do
not recommend the use of trial treatments as Heinz
Kohut did (1971), following Freud, recognize that the
only way to judge a patient’s receptivity to analysis is
through the process of analysis itself.
The other meaning refers to the limitations of what
can be analyzed. Early in his career Freud put forth the
idea that not everything was subject to interpretation
and that we had to acknowledge the unknown element
in the psychic material studied, even if clinical and theoretical efforts were intended to reduce the impenetrability: ‘‘The best-interpreted dreams often have a passage
that has to be left in the dark, because we notice in the
course of interpretation that a knot of dream-thoughts
shows itself just there, refusing to be unraveled, but also
making no further contribution to the dream-content.
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ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Indications and contraindications of psychoanalysis; Initial interview(s); Preconscious, the; Transference
neurosis; Transference relationship.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4–5.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 216–253.
Kernberg, Otto. (1970). A psychoanalytic classification of
character pathology. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 18 (4), 800–822.
Kohut, Heinz. (1971). The analysis of the self. New York:
International Universities Press.
Zetzel, Elisabeth. (1968). The so-called good hysteric. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 49, 256–260.
Further Reading
Stone, Leo. (1954). The widening scope of indications for
psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 2, 567–594.
Grand, Stanley. (1995). Classic revisited: Stone’s widening
scope of indications for psychoanalysis. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, 43, 741–764.
ANDERSSON, OLA (1919–1990)
A Swedish psychologist and psychoanalyst, Ola
Andersson was born on June 8, 1919, in Luleå, in
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A N D E R S S O N , O L A (1919 –1990)
northern Sweden, where his paternal grandparents
were landowners; he died in Stockholm on May 15,
1990. Andersson wrote two important works that have
served as key references in the literature: his dissertation and an article in which he describes the historical
and social context in which Freud’s patient Emmy von
N. lived.
In 1948 he began an analysis with René de Monchy,
recently emigrated from the Netherlands. When
Monchy left Sweden in 1952, Ola Andersson continued his psychoanalytic training with the Hungarian
psychoanalyst Lajos Székely, who was then living in
Stockholm, at a time when the Swedish Psychoanalytic
Society was riven by internal conflicts. He devoted
himself to research on the history of psychoanalysis
and the translation of psychoanalytic texts. His first
translation was a work by the English psychoanalyst
Charles Berg, Deep Analysis, the Clinical Study of an
Individual Case, which was followed by translations of
Freud over a period of more than thirty years. He
again devoted himself to translation when he contracted cancer at the end of the 1980s.
In December 1962, Andersson defended his doctoral dissertation, ‘‘Studies in the Prehistory of Psychoanalysis: The Etiology of Psychoneuroses and some
Related Themes in Sigmund Freud’s Scientific Writings and Letters, 1886-1896,’’ at the University of
Uppsala. The dissertation covered the period between
Freud’s return to Vienna after his stay in Paris and
meeting with Jean Martin Charcot, and the first
appearance of the word ‘‘psychoanalysis.’’
Andersson insists on the fact that he focused on
studying the origins of Freudianism to avoid interpreting them in the light of future discoveries in psychoanalysis. He noted that he did not take into account
biographical or psychological information about
Freud. His dissertation was written from within the
field of psychoanalysis and treats the evolution of psychoanalytic theory as continuous. He shows how
Freud, in his attempt to explain clinical observation,
formulated ideas that, for the most part, recalled the
Herbartian Vorstellungsmechanik, a dynamic interaction of ideas. Freud himself never overtly acknowledged the influence of Johann Friedrich Herbart.
Before Ola Andersson, researchers like Louise von
Karpinska (1914), Maria Dorer (1932), and Ernest
Jones (1953) had pointed out the similarities between
Herbart’s psychology and psychoanalysis, but he was
the first to show that Herbart’s ideas served as the
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dominant psychological tendency in the academic
milieu in which Freud worked when he was developing
his theory. This dissertation is one of the first attempts
to analyze the historical sources of Freud’s theories
and the circumstances surrounding the birth of
psychoanalysis.
In 1960 Andersson was asked by the Sigmund
Freud Archives in New York to investigate the case of
Emmy von N. and locate any new biographical information about her. The results of his research appeared
in an article that was presented in a talk given to the
International Psychoanalytic Congress in Amsterdam
in 1965, but was not published until 1979 in the Scandinavian Psychoanalytical Review (1979, 2, 5). In the
article Andersson refers to the existing biographies of
those close to Freud’s patients, as well as to interviews
with his children and family members, and personal
documents. Because of the belated publication of the
article, the historian Karl Schib was able to reveal the
name of Emmy von N. for the first time in 1970. She
was Fanny Moser, the widow of a successful manufacturer from Schaffhausen, Switzerland.
Andersson trained with the Swedish Psychoanalytic
Society (Svenska Psykoanalytiska Förening), but his
professional life was for the most part conducted outside the organization. He was never responsible for
training other analysts, even though he was one of the
rare Swedish psychoanalysts to have conducted original research, and his clinical activity appears to have
been limited. During a period when society was concentrating its efforts on the clinical training of psychoanalysts, Andersson was the only one in Sweden
involved in historical research on the origins of
psychoanalysis.
Throughout his life he remained in close contact
with the university, although he played no official role
in the academic training of researchers. His interest
later turned to matters of philosophy, psychology, and
religion as they related to psychoanalysis. Between
1947 and 1980 he worked in a religious institution, the
Stora Sköndal, as a professor of literature, then of psychology. He participated in the activities of another
Swedish psychotherapeutic institution with a strongly
Protestant tradition.
In an article published in 1990 in English by a
member of the Swedish Psychoanalytic Society on the
history of psychoanalysis in Sweden, Andersson was
not mentioned. Nor is he listed in the Swedish Encyclopedia (1989-1996). His son no longer uses his name
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A N D R E A S - S A L O M É , L O U I S E ( L O U ) ( 1861 –1 937)
and there is no tombstone to mark the place where he
was buried. His obituary, which appeared on May 20,
1990, in the largest daily in the region, the Dagens
Nyheter, was written by a Swedish psychoanalyst influenced by the Christian psychotherapeutic tradition
that impregnated Swedish thought throughout the
entire twentieth century.
gave Louise the diminutive ‘‘Lou.’’ Together they read
authors like Baruch Spinoza, whose philosophy helped
structure her research in psychoanalysis. However,
Gillot’s proposal of marriage destroyed their relationship. Her break with Gillot was unequivocal. Lou von
Salomé left for Zurich in 1880, where she studied philosophy, history, art, and theology. She outlined her
approach to God in her Essays.
PER MAGNUS JOHANNSON
See also: Ellenberger, Henri Frédéric; Emmy von N., case
of; Moser-von Sulzer-Wart, Fanny Louise; Sweden.
Bibliography
Andersson, Ola. (1962). Studies in the prehistory of psychoanalysis. Stockholm: Svenska Bokförlaget.
———. A supplement to Freud’s case history of "Frau
Emmy von N.", in "Studies on hysteria, 1895’’. Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 2 (5).
Dorer, Maria. (1932). Historische Grundlagen der Psychoanalyse. Leipzig: Meiner.
Johansson, Per M. (1999). Freuds Psykoanalys, Arvtagare i
Sverige. Göteborg: Daı̈dalos.
Jones, Ernest. (1953–57). Sigmund Freud. Life and work.
London: Hogarth.
ANDREAS-SALOMÉ, LOUISE (LOU)
(1861–1937)
A Russian writer and essayist, Louise Andreas-Salomé
was one of the first practicing psychoanalysts. She was
born on February 12, 1861, in St. Petersburg, Russia
and died February 5, 1937, in Göttingen, Germany.
Louise’s father, Gustav von Salomé (57 years old at the
time of her birth), of German-French origin, was a
general in the service of the tsar. Her mother, Luise
Wilm (38 years old at the time of Louise’s birth), was
from a family of Protestant merchants from Hamburg.
Louise, the youngest of four children (she had three
older brothers) was raised under feudal family conditions and turned out to be a very willful child. She
took refuge in an imaginary world peopled with its
own god and threw off the constraints imposed by her
family. She refused confirmation and, at the time of
her father’s death in 1879, turned her back on religion.
She shared her existential concerns with her first spiritual teacher, Hendrik Gillot (1836–1916), a fascinating
preacher in the Dutch community. It was Gillot who
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When she was 21 she met the philosophers Paul Rée
and Friedrich Nietzsche in Rome, at the salon of
Malwida von Meysenbug. They wanted to formalize
their reciprocal fascination in a working and living community. She replied to Gillot’s exhortations, ‘‘I am certainly going to shape my own life the way I see it, come
what may. . . .’’ This belief led her to take up psychoanalysis at the age of fifty, after an extremely turbulent life.
Lou Andreas-Salomé’s first foray into psychoanalysis was the Neue Quellen; she found new answers to old
questions in her own life, which she had approached
especially through literature, for there are a number of
autobiographical traces in her writings. Shortly after
participating in the 1911 International Psychoanalytic
Congress in Weimar, she went to Vienna to become a
student of Freud’s. In her journal, In der Schule bei
Freud (1912–1913), keen observations of social life
and critical opinions and personal hypotheses on psychoanalysis appeared side by side. Aside from Freud
she was very impressed by Sándor Ferenczi and Viktor
Tausk. It was through Tausk that she was able to make
her first practical observations at the clinic for nervous
disorders in Vienna.
After Vienna, Lou Andreas-Salomé continued to
write to Freud on a regular basis and appears to have
accepted only Freud as the supervisor of her own cures.
After her visit with Freud’s family in 1912, she became
close with Anna Freud, the focal points of their relationship being Freud the psychoanalyst and Freud the
man. They worked together on a subject of common
interest, the Tagtraum-Traumdichtung (daydreamdream poem). Anna Freud’s presentation to the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society for her admission to membership at the society, entitled ‘‘Schlagenphantasie und
Tagtraum’’ (‘‘Beating Fantasies and Daydreams’’; 1922),
was the result of their efforts together and also contributed to Andreas-Salomé’s admission to the society. She
died on February 5, 1937, in her home in Göttingen,
Loufried, where she had lived since 1903 with the
Oriental scholar Friedrich Carl Andreas.
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ANIMAL MAGNETISM
Psychoanalysis marked a turning point in the life of
Andreas-Salomé, who was immersed in contemporary
philosophy, the philosophy of Spinoza, and deeply
affected by the theory of the psychoanalytic unconscious and the libido theory. She devoted herself to
the insoluble conflict of body and soul, the soma and
the psyche, sexuality and the ego, masculine and
feminine—subjects that appeared in all her psychoanalytic writing between 1911 and 1931. Her style, as
exemplified in Narzissmus als Doppelrichtung (1921),
was individualistic—capricious, expressive, and poetic.
With her representation of a narcissism that was
‘‘happy to develop’’ as a ‘‘companion of life that renews
being,’’ she completed her work on primary narcissism
as a developmental phase and narcissism as a pathological form of self-love. She emphasized the concept of
‘‘double direction’’ that was present in Freud’s concept
of the libido but which he had not developed further.
The libido is in the service of the ego instinct and the
‘‘beyond-ego’’ (the death instinct). In this sense she was
ahead of her time. Zum Typus Weib (On the Feminine
Type; 1914) regroups her most important ideas on femininity and psychoanalysis. She introduced the feminine point of view into psychoanalytic discourse and
focused her interest on the difference between the
sexes, a difference that must be considered beyond
individual differences. She emphasized the complementarity of relationships. For Andreas-Salomé an
androgynous image signified a loss rather than a gain
for both sexes. In her essay on femininity she introduced a utopia of feminine culture.
INGE WEBER
See also: Bjerre, Poul; Germany; Narcissism; Tausk,
Viktor.
Bibliography
Andreas-Salome, Louise. (1964). The Freud journal of Lou
Andreas-Salome (Stanley Leavy, Trans.). New York: Basic
Books. (Original work published 1958)
———. (1990), Das ‘‘zweideutige’’ Lächeln der Erotik. Texte
zur Psychoanalyse. Freiburg, Germany: Kore.
———. (1983). Open letter to Freud. Paris: Lieu Commun.
———. (1991). Looking back: memoirs (Ernst Pfeffer, Ed.;
Breon Mitchell, Trans.). Memoirs, New York: Paragon
House. (Original work published 1951)
Freud, Sigmund, and Andreas-Salomé, Lou. (1972).
Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: letters (Ernst
84
Pfeffer, Ed.; William and Elaine Robson-Scott, Trans.).
London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of PsychoAnalysis. (Original work published 1966)
Welsch, Ursula, and Wiesner, Michaela. (1988). Lou
Andreas-Salomé. Vom Lebensurgrund zur Psychoanalyse.
München-Wien-Leipzig: Internationaler psychoanalytischer Verlag.
ANIMAL MAGNETISM
‘‘Animal magnetism’’ is a term popularized by the
Viennese doctor Franz Mesmer. In Mémoire sur la
découverte du magnétisme animal (Propositions concerning animal magnetism; 1779) he defined it as the
‘‘property of the animal body that makes it susceptible
to the influence of celestial bodies and the reciprocal
action of those around it, made manifest by its analogy
with the magnet.’’ He believed that a cosmic fluid
attracted animate beings to one another. He considered poor receptivity to the fluid to be pathogenic, and
the cure consisted in transmission of the fluid.
In Paris, Mesmer enjoyed enormous success. Faced
with a crush of clients, he installed a ‘‘tub,’’ a round
device around which patients sat in a group, and that
was designed to concentrate and redistribute the fluid,
resulting in beneficial convulsions. Mesmerism
claimed to be a scientific discovery as well as a secret
associated with initiation into a group of adepts.
In 1784 two committees appointed by the Académies Royales des Sciences et de Médecine (Royal
Academies of Science and Medicine) drafted a report
for the king on Mesmer’s ‘‘discovery.’’ The astronomer
Jean Sylvain Bailly, reporter of the first committee,
concluded that the fluid likely did not exist, and
he sketched out an explanation in terms of ‘‘imagination’’ and ‘‘imitation.’’ In a secret report, released
after the French Revolution, he noted the sexual
nature of the convulsions, which he compared to
orgasm.
That same year Armand de Puységur, a disciple of
Mesmer, discovered (or rediscovered) that one can
provoke calm crises that resemble the natural somnambulism of certain sleepers. He referred to this as
artificial or induced somnambulism. From this point
onward, magnetized subjects were no longer ‘‘convulsives,’’ but ‘‘somnambulists,’’ as in Puységur’s model.
The somnambulists appeared changed: they uttered
prophecies, showed signs of split personalities, and,
under the influence of the fluid, which was supposed
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to be transmitted by the ‘‘passes’’ of the magnetizer,
exhibited extraordinary signs of ‘‘lucidity.’’ Puységur
and his followers developed a standard form of treatment that differed considerably from what was often
suggested by medical authorities. The magnetized
patient directed the treatment; the magnetizer questioned the patient and let her talk (almost all patients
were female). It was assumed that in a somnambulistic
state the person had self-healing capacities. Magnetism
became a social and cultural phenomenon of considerable importance.
In 1813, in his public lectures, Abbé José Custodio de
Faria claimed that there was no need of a fluid to induce
sleep, since by a simple command, a state of ‘‘lucid
sleep’’ could be brought about in a subject. In 1823 and
1826 the physician Alexandre Bertrand returned to
Bailly’s work on imagination and imitation. He connected Mesmeric phenomena to a traditional psychology of ecstasy, currently understood as a trance. An
opposition was thus established, before the term ‘‘hypnotism’’ became popular, between orthodox fluidic
Mesmeric magnetism and a heterodox psychological
movement represented in France by Faria, Bertrand,
and Joseph Noizet.
In Mesmeric terminology, the ‘‘relationship’’ refers
primarily to the relation between the magnetized
patient and the magnetizer. The literature in the field
mentioned the sexual aspect of the relationship only
rarely and with reticence. Yet love between a magnetizer and a somnambulist did become a distinct theme
in fiction. Animal magnetism even became a kind of
platitude, if we are to believe the article ‘‘Magnetism’’
in Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas: ‘‘An
agreeable subject of conversation that can also be used
to ‘impress women.’ ’’
JACQUELINE CARROY
See also: Hypnosis; Liebeault, Ambroise Auguste; Occultism; Salpêtrière, hosptial; Suggestion.
Bibliography
Darnton, Robert. (1968). Mesmerism and the end of the
Enlightenment in France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ellenberger, Henri F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious: the history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. New
York: Basic Books.
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Flaubert, Gustave. (1954). Dictionary of accepted ideas
(Jacques Barzun, Trans.). Norfolk, CT: New Directions Books.
Mesmer, Anton (1779). Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal. Geneva: P.F. Didot le jeune.
Puységur, Armand Marie Jacques de Chastenet, marquis de.
(1786). Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire et à l’établissement
du magnétisme animal. London: s.n.
Rausky, Franklin. (1977). Mesmer ou la révolution thérapeutique. Paris: Payot.
Roussillon, René. (1992). Du baquet de Mesmer au ‘‘baquet’’
de S. Freud. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
ANIMISTIC THOUGHT
Freud drew the concept of animism from anthropologists such as Herbert Spencer, James George Frazer,
Andrew Lang, Edward Burnett Tyler, and Wilhelm
Wundt, who used it to refer to the tendency, thought
to belong to people in primitive cultures and children,
of attributing a soul to things and thus ascribing an
intentionality to phenomena that would otherwise be
understood in mechanistic causal terms. In psychoanalysis, the concept of animism is inextricably connected with projective mechanisms.
The connection between animistic thought and the
mechanism of projection appears in 1912 in relation to
some details concerning the relation between taboo and
danger. This is a psychic danger because in the consistently applied animistic view of the universe of a person
in a primitive culture, ‘‘every danger springs from the
hostile intention of some being with a soul like himself,
and this is as much the case with dangers which threaten him from some natural force as it is from other
human beings or animals’’ (Freud, 1918 [1917], p. 200).
Freud continued: ‘‘But on the other hand he is accustomed to project his own internal impulses of hostility
on to the external world’’ (p. 200).
The concept of animism is further developed in
Totem and Taboo (1912–1913a), in which it is related
to magic and the omnipotence of thoughts. Here
Freud attributes a world-view to animism, as an intellectual system, in which it is conceived as a vast whole
that starts from a specific point. This first conception
of the universe held by humanity is a mythological
conception that gives way first to the religious and
then to the scientific world-view. Its particular interest
for psychoanalysis lies in its psychological aspect,
85
ANIMUS-ANIMA (ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY)
which is associated with the representation of souls
that populate the universe and which, being separable
from their original material ties, can be transposed
into others. This led Freud on to the common ground
that gave rise to superstition, as well as the belief in the
existence of unconscious determinations or the negation of chance at an individual psychic level. Far from
shying away from this kind of connection, Freud used
it in 1915 as the basis for his justification of the
hypothesis of the unconscious by recalling that consciousness can only ever be attributed to another person by analogy, just as animism confers a similar consciousness to that of the human being on things,
plants or animals. This process of inference, which
Freud designates here by the concept of identification,
also justifies, with reference to the subject himself,
making ‘‘the assumption of another, second consciousness which is united in one’s self with the consciousness one knows’’ (1915e, p. 170). The need to go
beyond animism in order to be able to believe in the
role of chance in external events—that is, in order not
to succumb to superstition—recurs on several occasions in Freud’s work (1933a [1932]), particularly in
relation to the inability to conceive of death as anything other than the result of a murder, whether this is
through incompetence or negligence in the case of a
doctor (Mijolla-Mellor, 1995).
The concept of animism seems to be inextricably
linked with Freud’s philosophical reflection on the different forms of world-view Weltanschauung in particular the religious form that animism precedes and from
which it differs, particularly through its connection
with magic based on the belief in the omnipotence of
thoughts, a belief that is also found in obsessional
neurosis.
Finally, Freud found in animism a foundation not
only for suggestion as a therapeutic technique but for
the form in which it persists in the conduct of the analytic treatment. In this case it concerns a form of animism without a magical act, which is entirely based on
‘‘the overevaluation of the magic of words and the
belief that the real events in the world take the course
which our thinking seeks to impose on them’’ (1933a
[1932], p. 166).
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Certainty; Omnipotence of thought; Primitive;
Projection; Thought; Totem and Taboo.
86
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1912d). On the universal tendency to
debasement in the sphere of love. SE, 11: 177–190.
——— (1912–13a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
——— (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159–204.
——— (1918 [1917]). The taboo of virginity (Contributions to the psychology of love III). SE, 11: 191–208.
——— (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1995). Meurtre familier.
Approche psychanalytique d’Agatha Christie. Paris: Dunod.
Further Reading
Roheim, Geza. (1930). Animism, magic, and the divine king.
London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
ANIMUS-ANIMA (ANALYTICAL
PSYCHOLOGY)
Anima and animus are gender specific archetypal
structures in the collective unconscious that are compensatory to conscious gender identity. Thus, animus
images primarily depict the unconscious masculine in
a woman, and anima images primarily depict the
unconscious feminine in a man.
The notion first appears in print in Carl Gustav
Jung’s Psychological Types, in 1921.
One of the most complex and least understood features of his theory, the idea of a contrasexual archetype, developed out of Jung’s desire to conceptualize
the important complementary poles in human psychological functioning. From his experiences of the
emotional power of projection in his patients and in
himself, he conceived first of the anima as a numinous
figure in a man’s unconscious. Originally, Jung associated anima with mother and animus with father, but
he soon began to identify their roots and effects in a
broader spectrum. By 1925 he considered these concepts the two most comprehensive foundation stones
of the psyche. Anima and animus, Jung says, are
inborn as ‘‘virtual images’’ that acquire form ‘‘in the
encounter with empirical facts which touch the
unconscious aptitude and quicken it to life’’ (Jung,
1928, p. 300). The initial contrasexual content is introjected from the infant’s relationship with the
parental figures.
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A N N A O. , C A S E
Developmentally, then, separation from parental figures as primary objects is followed by the idealizing
identification of anima and animus with figures in the
environment, usually, but not necessarily, persons of the
opposite sex. Subsequently, projections can be withdrawn from their objects and the apperception of
anima/animus as intrapsychic objects made conscious.
At that point anima and animus can act as the ego’s
interface to the collective unconscious. In most clinical
instances, anima and animus figures personify the
struggle between the culture-bound, collective images
of masculine and feminine and the developmental urge
to liberate one’s individuality from collective norms.
OF
——— (1928d [1948]). Instinct and the unconscious. Coll.
Works (Vol. VIII). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
——— (1951). Aı̈on: Researches into the phenomenology
of the self. Coll. Works (Vol. IX). London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Samuels, Andrew. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians.
London-Boston: Routledge.
Tresan, David. (1992). The anima of the analyst. Its development, gender, and soul. In Psychotherapy (pp. 73–110).
Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications.
The concept includes the potential in women
and men to develop both masculine and feminine
elements in themselves. The contrasexual archetypes
fuel the Oedipal predicament. Differentiation
between the parental imagoes and anima and animus projections leads out of the Oedipal fixation.
A narcissistic identification with the contrasexual
figure may result in positive or negative inflation
or, alternatively, deteriorate into a state of flooding
of the ego by unconscious contents.
ANLEHNUNG. See Anaclitic
Critics fault Jung for his confusion of outer life
realities of women and men and the inner world of
anima and animus images; for example, his repeated
assignment of relatedness (Eros) both to anima and to
women, and rationality (Logos) both to animus and to
men. This confusion can lead to the false equation of
culturally acquired elements with inborn male and
female characteristics.
Anna O. was the first case described by Joseph Breuer
in his Studies on Hysteria (1895d). Her real name,
Bertha Pappenheim, was revealed by Ernest Jones in
his 1953 biography of Freud, shocking his contemporaries. When Breuer saw her for the first time toward
the end of November 1880, Bertha Pappenheim, a
friend of Martha Bernays (Freud’s future wife), was
about 22 years old. Her problems had been triggered
when her father, whom she loved deeply, fell seriously
ill. Her symptom was a ‘‘nervous cough,’’ which
Breuer quickly diagnosed as being of hysterical origin.
She soon suffered from other symptoms as well:
squinting, partial paralysis, visual disturbances, and a
lack of feeling in her right arm. She also exhibited
alternating states of consciousness, which drew
Breuer’s attention as a sign of a self-hypnotic condition that he would gradually use for therapeutic
purposes.
BETTY DE SHONG MEADOR
See also: Collective unconscious (analytical psychology);
Projection and ‘‘participation mystique’’ (analytical psychology); Analytical psychology.
Bibliography
Jung, Carl Gustav. (1921). Psychological types. Coll. Works
(Vol. VI). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
——— (1928a [1935]). The relations between the ego
and the unconscious. Coll. Works (Vol. VII). London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
——— (1928b [1948]). On psychic energy. Coll. Works
(Vol. VIII). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
——— (1928c [1948]). General aspects of dream psychology. Coll. Works (Vol. VIII). London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
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ANNA-FREUD CENTER. See Hampstead Clinic
ANNA O., CASE OF
These symptoms were followed by speech disturbances (she could only speak English, then became
mute), which led Breuer to conclude that she was
hiding something and must be made to speak. This
therapeutic insight was followed by an improvement
in her condition, but the death of her father in April
1881 caused a relapse. It was at this time that she
began recounting lengthy stories in a highly dramatic
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A N N A O ., C A S E
OF
tone of voice during her self-induced hypnotic states
in the evening. These were accompanied by violent
affects that highlighted their significance. She referred
to this initial ‘‘catharsis’’ as the talking cure and sometimes as chimney sweeping.
It was most likely during the summer of 1881,
probably in mid-August (although Henri Frédéric
Ellenberger says it occurred during the first months of
1882), that an incident occurred that was to have profound significance on the future of Breuer’s method.
Anna refused to drink liquids, but in her hypnotic
state revealed that she had been disgusted to discover
her lady companion’s dog drinking out of her glass.
When awakened she asked for a glass of water. The
etiological function of the ‘‘cathartic method’’ was
born and Breuer had her identify, for each of her
symptoms, the memory of the ‘‘primitive scene’’ from
which they originated but which had apparently been
forgotten.
Between December 1881 and June 1882, a new
symptom appeared, which led to a renewal of what she
had experienced a year earlier, as indicated by Breuer’s
notes at the time. This ‘‘talking out’’ (1895d, p. 36), as
Breuer referred to it, was not simple, however: ‘‘The
work of remembering was not always an easy matter
and sometimes the patient had to make great efforts.
On one occasion our whole progress was obstructed
for some time because a recollection refused to
emerge’’ (p. 37). Freud was later to draw significant
conclusions about this ‘‘resistance’’ on the part of the
patient.
In 1882, however, Breuer had little understanding of
‘‘transference,’’ and this continued as late as 1895, when
he completed his description of this intelligent, intuitive, and kind woman: ‘‘The element of sexuality was
astonishingly undeveloped in her. The patient, whose
life became known to me to an extent to which one person’s life is seldom known to another, had never been in
love; and in all the enormous number of hallucinations
which occured during her illness that element of mental
life never emerged’’ (1895d, p. 21–22).
In the wake of Breuer’s colorless narrative, a
number of mysteries and legends have grown up
around the circumstances of the rupture of such a
strong affective relationship. In fact, Breuer was apparently called to her bedside the very evening they said
goodbye to one another after the conclusion of the
treatment. She was in the midst of a hysterical crisis
88
and pretended to be giving birth ‘‘to Doctor Breuer’s
child.’’ Ernest Jones writes that Breuer was ‘‘fled the
house in a cold sweat. The next day he and his wife left
for Venice to spend a second honeymoon, which
resulted in the conception of a daughter; the girl
born in these curious circumstances was nearly sixty
years later to commit suicide in New York’’(Jones,
1953, Vol. 1, p. 148).
In fact, historical research has shown that this story
is false. Anna O. was hospitalized in the clinic of
Kreuzlingen in July 1882 at Breuer’s request. She was
suffering from neuralgic pains of the trigeminal nerve,
which had led Breuer to administer increasingly strong
doses of morphine, from which she eventually had to
be weaned. We know that Bertha Pappenheim, even
though Breuer was no longer her physician, was gradually healed and devoted her life and her writing after
1895 to helping young Jewish girls, single mothers,
and orphans. She was one of the first ‘‘social workers’’
and her work earned her the admiration of everyone
who knew her until her death on May 28, 1936.
As for Breuer, that summer he and his wife he did
not escape to Venice but spent their vacation in
Gmunden, near the Traunsee in Austria. Their daughter Dora was born on March 11, 1882, three months
before the end of Anna O.’s treatment. But such
legends die hard and the detractors of Freud and psychoanalysis continue to make use of them.
Breuer continued to care for ‘‘nervous’’ patients
and described his method of treatment to his young
protégé Freud on November 18, 1882, and again in
July 1883. This was the point of departure for the etiological research that Freud, somewhat disillusioned by
Jean Martin Charcot’s lack of interest in the story, was
unable to begin until nearly ten years later.
In his ‘‘On the History of the Psycho-analytic
Movement’’ (1914d), Freud, who always reported that
the origins of psychoanalysis lay in ‘‘J. Breuer’s cathartic method,’’ (in 1910a, for example), spoke of the
transference aspect that, until then, had been
neglected: ‘‘Now I have strong reasons for suspecting
that after all her symptoms had been relieved Breuer
must have discovered from further indications the
sexual motivation of this transference, but that the
universal nature of this unexpected phenomenon
escaped him, with the result that, as though confronted by an ‘untoward even’, he broke off all further
investigation’’ (1914d, 12).
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A N N É E P S Y C H O L O G I Q U E , L ’-
On June 2, 1932, in a letter to Stefan Zweig, Freud
gave further details about the end of Anna O.’s treatment while reminiscing about Breuer: ‘‘Asked what
was wrong with her, she replied: ‘Now Dr. B.’s child is
coming!’ At this moment he held in his hand the key
that would have opened the ‘doors to the Mothers,’
but he let it drop. With all his great intellectual gifts
there was nothing Faustian in his nature. Seized by
conventional horror he took flight and abandoned the
patient to a colleague.’’
The story of Anna O. has always been a source of
contention. In 1895 it was published, primarily to
demonstrate that the cathartic method, dating from
1881–1882, preceded the research published by Pierre
Janet. In 1953 it was used by Jones to demonstrate
Freud’s courage and scientific creativity compared to
Breuer’s presumed cowardice. Following the research
of Henri Frédéric Ellenberger and Albrecht Hirschmüller, the real history is better known, and while the
romanticized presentation of therapy can no longer
escape the notice of the psychoanalytic community, it
still contains traces of Freud’s later thinking. In any
event, the distortions of writing do not justify believing, as the detractors of psychoanalysis such as Mikkel
Borch-Jacobsen would have us do, that Breuer and
Freud were charlatans and Bertha Pappenheim was
simply a ‘‘fraud.’’
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Breuer, Josef; Cathartic method; Five Lectures
on Psycho-Analysis; Studies on Hysteria; Hypnoid states;
Pappenheim, Bertha.
Bibliography
Edinger, Dora. (1963). Bertha Pappenheim: Leben und Schriften.
Frankfurt: D. Edinger.
Ellenberger, Henri F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry.
New York: Basic Books.
———. (1972). ‘‘L’histoire d’Anna O.’’: Étude critique avec
documents nouveaux. In Médecines de l’âme. Paris: Fayard,
1995. (Reprinted from L’évolution psychiatrique, 37 (4),
693–717.)
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies on
hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
Freeman, Lucy. (1972). The story of Anna O. New York:
Walker.
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Hirschmüller, Albrecht. (1978). Physiologie und Psychoanalyse in Leben und Werk Josef Breuers. Bern-Stuttgart: Hans
Huber.
Jones, Ernest. (1953–1957). Sigmund Freud. Life and work.
London: Hogarth.
ANNÉE PSYCHOLOGIQUE, L’L’Année psychologique (AP) is the leading French
review of scientific psychology. It was founded in 1894
by Henri Beaunis and Alfred Binet to publish the
research activities conducted in the Sorbonne’s psychology laboratory. Henri Beaunis was a physiologist
and a representative of the School of Nancy. Alfred
Binet was a psychologist and worked for seven years
with Dr. Féré under Jean Martin Charcot (on animal
magnetism, fetishism, and hysteria). He soon succeeded Beaunis as the head of the laboratory and the
review.
The review went through three main periods:
1894–1911 (the date of Binet’s death); 1912 to the end
of the Second World War, when it was under the direction of Henri Piéron; and from the liberation of Paris
until today, under the direction of Paul Fraisse. It was
only during the first period, under Binet’s editorship,
that psychoanalysis featured prominently in the
review, at a time when references to the subject were
practically nonexistent in France. The principal center
of interest then shifted to experimental psychology.
The review consists of three sections: original papers,
comments and reviews, and bibliographies.
Alfred Binet, a friend of Édouard Claparède and
J Larguier des Bancels, both Swiss, became interested
in psychoanalysis early in his career through his relation to psychopathology and forensic psychology.
But he didn’t read German. In 1908, he commissioned Carl Gustav Jung to write an article on psychoanalysis, ‘‘L’analyse des rêves’’ (The analysis of
dreams), which appeared in the 1909 issue of the
AP. However, in a letter to Freud, Jung qualified
the article as an ‘‘insignificant, superficial thing.’’ In
1912 there appeared an article by Alphonse Maeder
entitled ‘‘Sur le mouvement psychoanalytique’’
(On the psychoanalytic movement). This much
longer article acknowledged the development of a
Freudian school that had renewed psychiatry and
psychoanalysis.
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ANNIHILATION ANXIETIES
In the AP under Pieron’s direction, after 1912, psychoanalysis played a minor role, and was relegated to
reviews of publications by Freud and Jung, written by
Pieron. The tone is generally critical. As for the young
French psychoanalytic movement, it was ignored by
the AP. Following the liberation, Paul Fraisse replaced
Henri Pieron as the editor-in-chief, reinforcing its
experimental bias. After 1949 the term ‘‘psychoanalysis’’ simply disappeared from the bibliographic entries
listed in the publication.
ANNICK OHAYON
See also: Maeder, Alphonse E.
Bibliography
Binet, Alfred, and Féré, Charles. (1887). Animal magnetism.
New York, D. Appleton and Company.
Jung, Carl G. (1909b). The analysis of dreams. Coll. Works
(Vol. IV). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Maeder, Alphonse. (1912). Über die Funktion des Traumes
(mit Berücksichtigung der Tagesträume, des Spieles, usw.).
Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische
Forschungen, IV.
Ohayon, Annick. (1994). Lectures de la psychanalyse dans
L’Année psychologique de Piéron, 1913–1945. Actes du XIIe
Congrès annuel de Cheiron Europe. p. 263–270.
ANNIHILATION ANXIETIES
In annihilation anxieties, the basic danger involves a
threat to psychic survival, experienced as a present
menace or as an anticipation of an imminent catastrophe. The experience entails fantasies and/or feelings of helplessness in the face of inner and/or outer
dangers against which the person feels he can take no
protective or constructive action.
The construct derives from Freud’s 1926 view of a
traumatic situation where the person is faced with a
quantity of stimulation that he/she cannot discharge or
master, a failure of self-regulation. The experience of
overwhelmed helplessness has much in common with
Jones’ aphanisis, Klein’s psychotic anxiety, Schur’s
primary anxiety, Winnicott’s unthinkable anxiety,
Bion’s nameless dread, Stern’s biotrauma, Frosch’s
basic anxiety, Little’s annihilation anxiety, and Kohut’s
disintegration anxiety. Derivatives of underlying annihilation anxieties are fears of being overwhelmed,
destroyed, abandoned, mortified, mutilated, suffocated
90
or drowned, of intolerable feeling states, losing mental,
physical or bodily control, of going insane, dissolving,
being absorbed, invaded, or shattered, of exploding,
melting, leaking out, evaporating or fading away.
Annihilation experiences and anxieties are universal
in early childhood, where psychic dangers are regularly
experienced as traumatic. Eight related ideational contents are seen to comprise the major dimensions of
annihilation anxieties: fears of being overwhelmed,
of merger, of disintegration, of impingement, of loss of
needed support, of inability to cope, of concern over
survival, and of responding with a catastrophic mentality. Pathological annihilation anxieties are a consequence and correlate of psychic trauma, ego weakness,
object loss, and pathology of the self. They can be consequential for the process of psychoanalytic therapy
and may influence resistance, transference, and countertransference in a given treatment. Symptoms,
thought patterns, affect states, and behaviors are especially resistant to change when they are defending
against such anxieties.
The concept is especially relevant to psychoses, borderline and narcissistic character pathology, psychic
trauma, nightmares, anxiety states and phobias. Annihilation anxieties under various names are mentioned
widely in the psychoanalytic literature, but there has
been insufficient systematic exploration of interrelationships with psychic trauma, ego weakness and deficit, regression, hostility, depression, transference, and
countertransference.
MARVIN HURVICH
See also: Anxiety.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1926d [1925]). Inhibitions, symptoms
and anxiety. SE: 20: 77–175.
Hurvich, Marvin. (1989). Traumatic moment, basic dangers,
and annihilation anxiety. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 6,
309–323.
Little, Margaret. (1960). On basic unity. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41, 377–384.
Stern, Max. (1951). Anxiety, trauma, and shock. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 20, 179–203.
Winnicott, Donald. (1974). The fear of breakdown. International Review of Psychoanalysis, 1, 103–107.
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ANOREXIA NERVOSA
ANOREXIA NERVOSA
The term ‘‘anorexia nervosa’’ was coined by William
Gull in 1873. Although the term has existed for little
more than a century, the clinical description of the
syndrome is much older. Among other works, we can
find a description in Avicenna in the eleventh century,
and we have no difficulty recognizing it in Richard
Morton’s 1694 account of ‘‘nervous consumption.’’
The first complete description in terms identical to
those of Gull can be found in an article written by
Dr. Louis Victor Marcé in 1860.
The classic clinical picture of anorexia brings
together three factors: weight loss of more than 10 percent, amenorrhea, and the absence of a manifest melancholic or delusional mental disturbance. But the
emphasis has changed from these classic symptoms to
more specific symptoms, such as a confused body
image, denial of being thin, desperate desire to be thin,
and fear of putting on weight. Also, two major types of
anorexia nervosa have been distinguished: purely
restrictive forms and forms associated with bulimic
episodes accompanied by weight monitoring, selfinduced vomiting, and excessive use of laxatives and
diuretics. Anorexia nervosa frequently occurs during
adolescence, especially among females (ten girls for
every one boy). It affects between 1 and 2 percent of
the female adolescent population.
Without ever dealing specifically with eating disorders,
Freud did in fact establish all of the perspectives—hysteria,
melancholia, and ‘‘actual’’ neurosis—around which the
pathological manifestations of anorexia can be understood
metapsychologically. As a hysteria, anorexia involves a
double polarity: oral fixations of the libido serve as a point
of regression, and sexual fantasies become oral and are
then repressed. As a melancholia, anorexia involves melancholy over the issue of object loss and a loss of instinctual
needs. Freud speaks of an anesthesia that leads to melancholic thinking, which opens up a research path related to
the next perspective. As an ‘‘actual’’ neurosis, anorexia
poses a threefold question about the importance of the
current situation, of somatic and infrarepresentational
factors, and of the inadequacy of the ego and capacities
for working matters out.
Melanie Klein and her students have stressed the
importance of archaic fantasies of sadistic devouring,
destruction, and poisoning in anorexia. Psychoanalysts
dealing specifically with eating disorders initially
considered them to be primarily a symptom and took
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little interest in the organization of the personality.
But because of the complexity of cases and the frequent severity of the evolution of the disorder, the
pathology of the personality assumed a growing
importance in their work. The Göttingen symposium,
organized by J. E. Meyer and H. Feldmann (1965),
recognized anorexia nervosa as having a specific structure and viewed it not so much as an attempt toward
compromise formation but rather as an attempt to
deal with psychotic failures in the organization of the
ego by reestablishing the mother-child unit.
Evelyne Kestemberg et al. (1974) have provided a
remarkable description of the specific modes of the
regression and instinctual organization in anorexia.
This organization is characterized by recourse to a primary erogenous masochism in which pleasure is
linked directly to a refusal to satisfy a need. Pleasure
does not accompany the feeling of having something
inside oneself; rather, anorexia eroticizes not satisfying
a vital need. Similarly, relationships become dominated by pleasure in their being not satisfied. The
hedonization of refusal becomes the guardian of the
feeling of being or existing in one’s own right, corporeal activity and the body being thus liberated from all
external holds. The most complete form of this hedonization of refusal is ‘‘hunger orgasm.’’
Different studies stress the importance of the
dependence/autonomy conflict and the fundamental
vulnerability of anorexics. This vulnerability is associated with powerful passive desires and, as a consequence, a constant fear of intrusion, particularly an
invasion of the body by the object on which these
desires depend. To pose the problem in terms that
highlight the paradox of anorexia: anorexics destroy
themselves to prove their own existence. The destructive effect is not sought after for its own sake, and in
this respect anorexia is not a suicidal behavior,
although it can be seen as the result of unleashing
aggression and turning against the self an incorporation fantasy of an object experienced as destructive for
the self. Anorexia is the consequence of using a physiological need indispensable for survival to preserve a
feeling of autonomy. In doing so—and this is the
second paradox—anorexics find themselves in fact
more dependent on an environment from which they
sought to free themselves. By making refusal the
instrument of their liberation, they alienate themselves
from the object of the refusal, which they can neither
lose nor interiorize.
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AND
PSYCHOANALYSIS
The anorexia-bulimia tandem leads to questions
about whether a problem of dependence underlies
other behaviors grouped under the label ‘‘addictive
behaviors’’: drug addiction, alcoholism, pathological
gambling, and shopping, as well as abuse of psychotropic drugs and kleptomania. The fragile narcissistic
bases of such addicts makes their object relations difficult to manage, because these object relations become
too exciting and too dangerous. Addiction to products
or behavioral practices offers addicts a need-satisfying
relational substitute that is always accessible and which
they believe they can control, while in fact they fall
into its grip.
The eating disorder represents a substitute for the
object whose loss could plunge these patients into a collapse. This attempt to find a substitute object in addictive behavior represents a perverse organization of a
relationship to the object in which the object is not
recognized as having its own desires and differences,
but is acknowledged only for purposes of narcissistic
reassurance. An analogy exists among these patients’
relationship with food, their relationship with their
own bodies, and their object relations, as well as their
modes of emotional investment in general.
Family-therapy approaches illustrate the sensitivity
of these patients to the influences of their environment. These eating disorders can be seen as existing at
an intersection between individual psychology, family
interactions, the body in its most biological aspect,
and society in general. An essentially mental disorder
may thus have grave somatic consequences, and these
consequences may in turn affect the anorexic’s psychic
state and thus contribute to maintaining the disorder.
Addictive behaviors raise questions about the type
of society in which we live, particularly with the
increase in the frequency of these disorders accompanying the increase in consumerism in our societies.
PHILIPPE JEAMMET
See also: Adolescence; Autistic capsule/nucleus; Bulimia;
Flower Doll: Essays in Child Psychotherapy; KestembergHassin, Evelyne.
Bibliography
Agman, Gilles; Corcos, Maurice; and Jeammet, Philippe.
(1994). Troubles des conduits alimentaires. In Encyclopédie
medico-chirurgicale (Psychiatrie vol., fasc. 37-350-A-10).
Paris: Encyclopédie medico-chirurgicale.
92
Brusset, Bernard. (1998). Psychopathologie de l’anorexie
mentale. Paris: Dunod.
Kestemberg, Evelyne; Kestenberg, Jean; and Decobert,
Simone. (1972). La faim et le corps: une étude psychanalytique de l’anorexie mentale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
Venisse, Jean-Luc (Ed.). (1991). Les nouvelles addictions.
Paris: Masson.
Further Reading
Aronson, Joyce K. (ed.) (1993). Insights in the dynamic psychotherapy of anorexia and bulimia: An introduction to the
literature. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Freedman, Norbert, et. al. (2002). Desymbolization: concept
& observations on anorexia & bulimia. Psychoanalysis and
Contemporary Thought, 25,165-200.
Sours, John. (1980). Starving to death in a sea of objects: the
anorexia nervosa syndrome. New York: Jason Aronson.
Thoma, Helmut. (1967). Anorexia nervosa. New York: International Universities Press.
Wilson, Charles, Hogan, C., and Mintz, Ira. (1985). Fear of
being fat: the treatment of anorexia and bulimia (2nd ed).
Northvale, NJ: Aronson.
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. (1993). Feminism and psychoanalysis: in the case of anorexia nervosa. Psychoanalytical Psychology, 10, 317-330.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Anthropology, a term common to the European languages, has several meanings, ranging from the theological—the expression of divine things in human
terms—to the modern—the study of humanity as a
unit, including an examination of its biological, psychic, and social nature, as well as mankind’s historical
and prehistorical development. During Freud’s lifetime, the term acquired new connotations through the
expansion of anthropological research, by both AngloAmerican and European researchers.
The word ‘‘anthropology’’ was not part of Freud’s
vocabulary any more than ‘‘sociology,’’ which Freud
integrated (Sozial-, oder Massenpsychologie) with
psychoanalysis. His avoidance of the terms is significant. In the case of anthropology he used the German
Geisteswissenschaften, literally the ‘‘sciences of mind,’’
and enumerated the domains in which psychoanalysis
was pertinent: the explanation of the ‘‘major cultural
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institutions,’’ exogamy, the construction of the state,
law, the social order, art, morality and moral awareness, religion. He also refers to research on myths,
tales, and legends, cultural history and development,
linguistics and ethnology, the history of the development of the human species—in fact, the principal subjects of anthropology.
Freud’s justification of the relevance of psychoanalysis to these fields was systematized after the publication of Totem and Taboo (1912–13a). In ‘‘The Claims
of Psycho-analysis to Scientific Interest’’ (1913j), there
is a lengthy explanation of this, an idea that was
further developed by Freud in his later writings
(1914d, 1923a, 1924f, 1925d, 1926e, 1933a). Initially a
medical specialization concerned with neurotic symptoms, the status of psychoanalysis changed with the
publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a).
‘‘The analysis of dreams gave us an insight into the
unconscious processes of the mind and showed us that
the mechanisms which produce pathological symptoms are also operative in the normal mind. Thus psychoanalysis became a depth-psychology and capable as
such of being applied to the mental sciences’’ (1923a,
p. 253). Moreover, psychoanalysis, which is the science
of the genesis of psychic formations, is the basis for all
psychology, ‘‘since nothing that men make or do is
understandable without the co-operation of psychology, the applications of psychoanalysis to numerous
fields of knowledge, in particular to those of the mental sciences, came about of their own accord’’ (1933a,
p. 145).
In 1907 Freud found a resemblance between compulsive activities and religious practices (1907b) and
compared the phenomenology of rituals with a shared
etiology of conflict. In 1913 he postulated the identity
of the ‘‘dynamic source’’ that generated ‘‘the psychic
behavior of isolated individuals and societies’’ (1913j).
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c)
and later in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a
[1929]), Freud showed how the instinctual dynamic of
groups is the same as that of individuals, and excluded
any ‘‘herd instinct.’’ This identity enabled psychoanalysis to be applied to (or implied in) the explanation of
cultural formations and allowed researchers to exploit
the profound analogy between individual psychic formations and cultural formations.
The fundamental analogy is that of the ‘‘two wishes
which combine to form the Oedipus complex coincide
precisely with the two principal prohibitions imposed
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by totemism (not to kill the tribal ancestor and not to
marry any woman belonging to one’s clan)’’ (1923a, p.
253). Here Freud’s research makes a direct reference to
anthropology.
All the central concepts of psychoanalysis are
related to anthropology and to group psychology
because of their intrinsic relation to individual psychology, the family being the intermediate term. Aside
from the Oedipus complex and ritual, the ego, ego
ideal, and superego are derived from this, as are identification and defensive formations, which are associated with education and culture, especially inhibition and sublimation.
The study of myth, religion, and society extended
Freud’s work, primarily through the writings of Otto
Rank, Theodor Reik, and Géza Róheim. Later, American cultural anthropology made use of the psychoanalytic point of view, although in diluted form. As
anthropology evolved and became more interdisciplinary, psychoanalysis became one of its key referents.
In France, authors such Georges Devereux, Roger
Bastide, and Bernard Juillerat are examples of this
interrelation. In Tristes Tropiques (1955), Claude LéviStrauss insisted on the decisive role played by the discovery of Freud’s theories in his training as an
ethnologist.
According to Freud, psychoanalysis discovered universal psychic processes; moreover, it possesses explanatory and not purely descriptive capability. Critics of
the relevance of psychoanalysis for anthropology have
attacked both aspects of its explanatory powers. In fact
the articulation of knowledge through field studies is
as complicated as it is in the case of metapsychology
and therapeutic methods. However, Freud provided us
with a way to move forward in Moses and Monotheism
(1939a [1934–38]), his masterful analysis of Jewish
and Christian monotheistic cultures.
MICHÈLE PORTE
See also: Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry; Civilization
(Kultur); Collective psychology; Devereux, Georges
(born György Dobo); Ethnopsychoanalysis; Malinowski, Bronislaw Kaspar; Mead, Margaret; Mythology
and psychoanalysis; Phylogenesis; Primitive; Psychoanalysis of Fire, The; Racism, anti-Semitism, and psychoanalysis; Róheim, Géza; Sociology and psychoanalysis, sociopsychoanalysis; Taboo; Totem and Taboo;
Transcultural.
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ANTICATHEXIS
Bibliography
Bertrand, Michèle, and Doray, Bernard. (1989). Psychanalyse
et Sciences sociales. Paris: La Découverte.
Freud, Sigmund. (1923a). The libido theory. SE, 18:
255–259.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
———. (1939a [1934–38]). Moses and monotheism. SE, 23:
7–137.
Muensterberger, Werner. (1970). Man and his culture: psychoanalytic anthropology after ‘‘Totem and Taboo.’’ New
York: Taplinger.
Further Reading
Devereux, George. (1952). Psychiatry and anthropology:
some research objectives. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic,
16,167–177.
Kardiner, Abraham. (1961). Psychoanalysis and anthropology. Science and Psychoanalysis, 4, 21–27.
LaBarre, Weston. (1961). Psychoanalysis in anthropology.
Science and Psychoanalysis, 4, 10–20.
Muensterberger, Warren.(Ed.). (1969). Man and his culture:
psychoanalytic anthropology after ‘‘Totem and Taboo.’’ London: Rapp & Whiting.
Roheim, Geza. (1950). Psychoanalysis and anthropology. New
York: International Universities Press.
Wallace, E. (1983). Freud and anthropology: a history and
reappraisal. Psychological Issues. Monograph 55. New York:
International Universities Press.
ANTICATHEXIS
Counter-investment—translated as anticathexis in the
Standard Edition—is a particular mode of investment
used by the ego for defensive purposes. The term is
used to designate the dynamic defensive role of certain
cathexes and to take into account the economic
dimension of repression.
The term first appeared in The Interpretation of
Dreams: ‘‘There then follows a defensive struggle—for
the Pcs. in turn reinforces its opposition to the
repressed thoughts (i.e., produces an ‘anticathexis’)’’
(1900a, p. 605). The counter-cathected elements are
the ‘‘repressed thoughts’’ mentioned in the letter to
94
William Fliess of February 19, 1899. Thus Freud’s conception of repression includes the idea that a counterposition, an investment against, must be set up to keep
the undesirable idea in the unconscious. The material
that is cathected in order to support repression may
consist of an idea linked to the repressed idea, which
has thus remained relatively easily accessible to the
association of ideas, or it may consist of more remote
mental or motor elements. The latter case involves
‘‘reaction formations’’ such as those observed in the
character neuroses.
The mental energy deployed in the anticathexis is
libido that has been reclaimed by a withdrawal of
cathexis from other psychic formations; the pleasure
that the realization of a repressed desire might provide
is rendered impossible, but the preservation of equilibrium between forces limits the quantity of free energy
and implies a form of pleasure that favors the maintenance of the defensive system. Meanwhile, the restrictions on the libido that are involved in anticathexis
have a mental cost since they restrict the subject’s
thoughts or activities.
Gradually, Freud granted the role of organizing
counter-cathexes to the ego: ‘‘[When] certain ideas . . .
[are] cut off from consciousness, we must, on the
psycho-analytic view, assume that these ideas have
come into opposition to other, more powerful ones,
for which we use the collective concept of the ‘ego’’’
(1910i, p. 213). He also pointed out the role of ‘‘setting
up an ideal’’ as one of the ego’s conditions for
repression (1914c).
The theory of anticathexis was taken up again in
Freud’s metapsychology and in Inhibitions, Symptoms,
and Anxiety (1926d [1925]). There he emphasized that
the constant pressure of the drives necessitated a continuous counter-pressure. In ‘‘The Unconscious’’
(1915e), he assigned to anticathexis not only the role
of maintaining this counter-pressure, but also the task
of organizing the permanent point of reference that is
the prerequisite of all repression (i.e., ‘‘primal repression’’): ‘‘Anticathexis is the sole mechanism of primal
repression. . . . It is very possible that it is precisely the
cathexis which is withdrawn from the idea that is used
for anticathexis’’ (1915e, p. 181).
PAUL DENIS
See also: Cathexis; Defense mechanisms; Desexualization;
Economic point of view, the; Narcissistic defenses;
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Primal repression; Psychic energy; Reaction-formation;
Repression.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE:
4–5.
———. (1910i). The psycho-analytic view of psychogenic
disturbance of vision. SE: 11: 209–218.
———. (1915e). The unconscious. SE: 14: 159–204.
———. (1926d [1925]). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety.
SE: 20: 75–172.
Rouart, Julien. (1967). Les notions d’investissement et de
contre-investissement à travers l’évolution des idées freudiennes. Revue française de psychanalyse, 31 (2), 193–213.
ANTICIPATORY IDEAS
The term Erwartungsvorstellungen is generally translated
as ‘‘anticipatory ideas,’’ although this term does not
reflect ‘‘Erwartung’’’s connotations of waiting, expectancy, or hope. It refers to the hypotheses that the analyst communicates to the patient to incite him or her to
pursue in greater depth the interpretation of unconscious content; in this sense, the term is sometimes
accompanied by the qualifying adjective conscious.
In 1901, in his analysis of the dream-work, Freud
invoked this notion when he proposed that secondary
revision operates upon the contents of a dream just as it
does upon any other content, by apprehending it via
anticipatory ideas. But in 1909, this idea assumed its
proper place in interpretive analytic work and refuted the
accusation of suggestion that was beginning to be made
about the method. In ‘‘Analysis of a Phobia in a FiveYear-Old Boy,’’ Freud wrote: ‘‘In a psycho-analysis the
physician always gives his patient (sometimes to a greater
and sometimes to a lesser extent) the conscious anticipatory ideas by the help of which he is put in a position to
recognize and to grasp the unconscious material. For
there are some patients who need more of such assistance
and some who need less; but there are none who get
through without some of it’’ (1909b, p. 104).
The following year, in ‘‘The Future Prospects of
Psycho-Analytic Therapy,’’ Freud further explained:
‘‘The mechanism of our assistance is easy to understand: we give the patient the conscious anticipatory
idea [the idea of what he may expect to find] and he
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then finds the repressed unconscious idea in himself
on the basis of its similarity to the anticipatory one.
This is the intellectual help which makes it easier for
him to overcome the resistances between conscious
and unconscious’’ (1910d, pp. 141–142). In ‘‘The
Dynamics of Transference,’’ Freud emphasized the
hope that characterizes anticipation or waiting: ‘‘If
someone’s need for love is not entirely satisfied by reality, he is bound to approach every new person whom
he meets with libidinal anticipatory ideas. . . . th[e]
transference has precisely been set up not only by the
conscious anticipatory ideas but also by those that have
been held back or are unconscious’’ (1912b, p. 100).
Freud’s last mention of this notion is found in two
passages of his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
(1916–1917a [1915–1917]). First, in the lecture
‘‘Transference,’’ where he emphasized the participation
of intelligence in the process of becoming aware, Freud
wrote: ‘‘There is no doubt that it is easier for the
patient’s intelligence to recognize the resistance and to
find the translation corresponding to what is repressed
if we have previously given him the appropriate anticipatory ideas. If I say to you: ‘Look up at the sky!
There’s a balloon there!’ you will discover it much
more easily than if I simply tell you to look up. . . . In
the same way, a student who is looking through a
microscope for the first time is instructed by his teacher as to what he will see; otherwise he does not see it
at all, though it is there and visible’’ (p. 437). Thus, the
mechanism of suggestion is clearly involved in guiding
patients. However, in the next lecture, ‘‘Analytic Therapy,’’ Freud emphasized the difference between this
technique and suggestion: ‘‘After all, his conflicts will
only be successfully solved and his resistances overcome if the anticipatory ideas he is given tally with
what is real in him. Whatever in the doctor’s conjectures is inaccurate drops out in the course of the analysis; it has to be withdrawn and replaced by something
more correct’’ (p. 452).
The necessity for anticipatory ideas to be appropriate to the patient’s reality was underscored by Ferenczi
in his paper ‘‘On Forced Phantasies’’ (1924): ‘‘When we
interpret the patient’s free associations, and that we do
countless times in every analytical hour, we continually
deflect his associations and rouse in him expected
ideas, we smooth the way so that the connections
between his thoughts so far as their content is concerned are, therefore, to a high degree active. . . . The
difference between this and the ordinary suggestion
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simply consists in this, that we do not deem the interpretations we offer to be irrefutable utterances, but
regard their validity to be dependednt on whether
thay can be verified by material brought forward from
memory or by means of repetition of earlier situations’’
(pp. 71-72).
Although the notion of anticipatory ideas did not
reappear in Freud’s later writings, the idea of constructions was closely dependent upon it. In ‘‘Constructions
in Analysis,’’ he wrote: ‘‘The analyst finishes a piece of
construction and communicates it to the subject of the
analysis so that it may work upon him; he then constructs a further piece out of the fresh material pouring
in upon him [and] deals with is [sic] in the same way’’
(1937d, p. 260), adding, ‘‘We do not pretend that an
individual construction is anything more than a conjecture which awaits examination, confirmation or
rejection’’ (p. 265).
Thus, there were many safeguards against the
excesses of analysts who were overly sure of the absolute accuracy of their interpretations. The dynamic
relationship between analyst and patient that Freud
highlighted here is that of a jointly undertaken search
that, to be sure, presupposes a ‘‘historical truth’’ to be
discovered, but with the reminder that this investigation is based on approximations whose limits are
sometimes impossible to go beyond and must thus be
accepted. It is this idea that Serge Viderman carried to
its logical conclusion in his work on the ‘‘construction
of the analytic space’’ (1970).
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: ‘‘Constructions in Analysis’’; Idea/representation;
Interpretation.
Bibliography
Ferenczi, Sándor (1960). On forced phantasies: Activity in
the association-technique." In his Further contributions to
the theory and technique of psycho-analysis. London:
Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1924)
Freud, Sigmund. (1901a). On dreams. SE, 5: 629–685.
———. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy.
SE, 10: 1–149.
———. (1910d). The future prospects of psycho-analytic
therapy. SE, 11: 139–151.
———. (1912b). The dynamics of transference. SE, 12:
97–108.
96
———. (1916–1917a [1915–1917]). Introductory lectures
on psycho-analysis. SE, 15–16: 1–463.
———. (1937d). Constructions in analysis. SE, 23:
255–269.
Viderman, Serge. (1970). La Construction de l’espace analytique. Paris: Denoël.
ANTILIBIDINAL EGO/INTERNAL SABOTEUR
Fairbairn’s thinking on psychic structure began in 1929,
with a critical study of Freud’s ideas about the superego
(Fairbairn, 1929/1994b), and developed into his mature
object-relations theory (1954), modifying the Freudian
model. In Fairbairn’s revision (1952/1994a) of Freud’s
concepts of endopsychic structure (1923), the term
‘‘antilibidinal ego’’ refers to the split-off and repressed
ego-structure related to the rejecting object. In his earlier work it developed from his ideas about the superego
and was termed the ‘‘internal saboteur.’’
According to Fairbairn, the early unitary ego, rather
than seeking pleasure, seeks relationships (intimacy)
with the external object. Actual environmental failure
(which in ideal circumstances maintains integration of
the ego) leads to compensatory internalization of the
object. The object is then defensively split into three
objects. The unrepressed (central) ego, partly conscious
and attached to the ideal object, represses the other two
objects, the exciting (libidinal) object and rejecting
(antilibidinal) object, together with the aspects of the
ego related to them (the libidinal ego and antilibidinal
ego, known as subsidiary egos). These repressed objects
are termed ‘‘bad objects’’ and are unavailable for real
object relations.
Fairbairn named the resulting situation the ‘‘basic
schizoid position,’’ a term later taken up by Melanie
Klein (1946/1952). The antilibidinal ego, attached to
the rejecting object and unrelentingly hostile to the
libidinal ego, reinforces the central ego in its repression
of the libidinal ego. The degree of psychopathology
depends on these splits, the amount and strength of
central ego remaining, and the many possible patterns
of internal relationships. Fairbairn saw disturbance as
being due to the return of repressed bad-object experience to consciousness. Fairbairn’s dynamic structure,
which differs from that of Freud, is wholly objectrelated. The concept of the schizoid position is fundamental to his thinking about the many possible
variants of psychopathology. The elaboration of the
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antilibidinal ego as differing from the superego,
together with the theory of a psychic structure made
up of many conflicted ego-object relationships, allows
a flexibile technical approach.
This thinking has been influential in Britain, most
notably on the Independent Group, and on selfpsychologists and intersubjective theorists in the
United States.
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SCHIZOPHRENIA
from the libido. This, it seemed to them, was necessary
in order to account for the ubiquity of narcissism in
mental life. But this was not the opinion of Francis
Pasche, who chose to reintroduce a duality, or even a
dialectic, into the concept of narcissism itself (1965).
Fairbairn, Ronald. (1954). An object-relations theory of the
personality. New York: Basic Books.
Both narcissism and antinarcissism were characterized for Pasche by an object and a direction. The object
was the same for both: the ego. The direction, however,
was not the same: centripetal for narcissism, centrifugal for antinarcissism. Antinarcissism could be thought of as a centrifugal investment, in which the subject
tends to be divested of the self, to give up their own
substance and reserves of love, and to do this independently of any economic factors. In this sense, antinarcissism is actually a manifestation of Thanatos, that
is, of unbinding separation and dispersion, but not of
aggressiveness.
———. (1994a). Endopsychic structure considered in terms
of object relationships. In his Psychoanalytic studies of the
personality. London: Tavistock Publications with Routledge and Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1952)
There is a striking convergence between Francis
Pasche’s conception of antinarcissism and what Sándor Ferenczi called, in his final writings, the ‘‘altruistic
drive’’ (1949, fragment dated 24 August 1930).
———. (1994b). What is the superego? In David E. Scharff
and Ellinor Fairbairn Birtles (Eds.), From instinct to self:
selected papers of W. R. D. Fairbairn, Vol. 2, Applications
and early contributions. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
(Original work published 1929)
André Green’s work on narcissism is also germane
here. Even if Green’s negative narcissism does not correspond precisely to Pasche’s antinarcissism, the two
notions are akin.
JENNIFER JOHNS
See also: Fairbairn, William Ronald Dodds; Quasiindependence/transitional stage.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1923). The ego and the id. SE: 19: 19–27.
Grotstein, James, and Rinsley, Donald (Eds.). (1994). Fairbairn and the origins of object relations. London: Free Association Books.
Klein, Melanie. (1952). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms.
In Joan Riviere (Ed.), Developments in psycho-analysis.
London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis.
(Original work published 1946)
See also: Narcissistic neurosis; Pasche, Francis Léopold
Philippe; Psychoanalytic family therapy;
Bibliography
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1949). Notes and fragments (1930–32).
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 30, 231–242.
Pasche, Francis. (1965). L’anti-narcissisme. Revue française
de psychanalyse. XXIX, 5–6: 503–518; reprinted in À partir
de Freud, Paris: Payot, 1969.
ANTINARCISSISM
The concept of antinarcissism was proposed by Francis
Pasche in 1964. The context was a theoretical debate
seeking initially to define narcissism and then to
describe its role in psychic development.
The difficulties, complexities, and, for some, the
aporias of narcissism led to two antithetical choices.
Some abandoned the notion of primary narcissism,
giving a fundamental role to the primary objectrelation (this was true of the English school, Michael
Balint, and John Bowlby). Others, like Paul Federn
and Béla Grunberger, were led to separate narcissism
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ANTI-OEDIPUS: CAPITALISM AND
SCHIZOPHRENIA
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, was originally intended
to be the first volume of a two-volume work. The second volume, which was supposed to be entitled Schizoanalysis, never appeared under that title but was
instead ‘‘replaced’’ by A Thousand Plateaus.
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At the time of its publication in 1972, Anti-Oedipus
had an explosive impact. In a state of high excitement,
and still shaken by the events of May 1968, the French
intelligentsia greeted this work by a renowned philosopher and an antiestablishment psychoanalyst as a revolutionary brick through the window of psychoanalysis.
Deleuze said of his collaboration with Guattari, ‘‘We
don’t work together, we work between the two of us’’.
The Oedipus complex, which psychoanalysts
describe as a fundamental and unavoidable step in the
psychic structuring of the healthy child, was denounced by the authors as an ‘‘impasse.’’ The unconscious
was a production, a fabrication, a flow. Accordingly,
there was no such thing as a desiring subject, but
rather flows of desire that are independent of and that
traverse the subject. These points of traversal of desire,
this flow, exists in opposition to lack, to the Law.
‘‘Lack (manque) is created, planned, and organized
through social production.’’ Being essentially revolutionary, desire is the enemy of capitalist society, which
psychoanalysis defends and protects.
The family is the first source of the work of repression operating in the flow of desire: ‘‘The family is
thus introduced into the production of desire, and
from earliest childhood it will effect a displacement of
desire, an unheard-of repression.’’ All of capitalism’s
efforts—and those of psychoanalysis—will go toward
trying to maintain these flows of desire and ‘‘reterritorializing’’ them by imposing limits; on the interior, Oedipus, on the outside, as ‘‘the absolute limit of
every society’’ (p. 266), schizophrenia: ‘‘The Oedipal
triangle is the personal and private territoriality
that corresponds to all of capitalism’s efforts at social
reterritorialization’’ (p. 266).
The ‘‘schizo-analysis’’ invented by the authors is
defined as ‘‘a whole scouring of the unconscious, a
complete curettage’’ (p. 311). The thesis of schizoanalysis proposes that desire is a machine, in fact,
interconnected machines—‘‘desiring-machines.’’ This
assemblage of machines represents the real and constitutes the production of desire. Psychoanalysis is
described as a belief in a structural ensemble of the
symbolic and the imaginary that Deleuze and Guattari
characterize as a mythical belief. They radically challenge the Oedipus complex and accuse psychoanalysis
of ‘‘beating down all the connections, the entire
arrangement’’ because it ‘‘hates desire, hates politics.’’
The two authors reject the idea of any psychic reality:
‘‘There is only desire and the social, and nothing else.’’
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Schizo-analysis, with its schizophrenic process, a ‘‘political and social psychoanalysis’’ proposes to ‘‘undo the
expressive oedipal unconscious, which is always artificial, repressive and repressed, and mediated by the
family, to gain access to the immediate productive
unconscious.’’
The authors are careful to distinguish between
schizophrenia as a structure and the schizophrenic as
an entity. The latter is sick from the oedipalization that
society attempts to impose upon him, but he represents the emblematic figure of the revolutionary, who
is in a position to say, ‘‘Oedipus? Never heard of it’’ (p.
366). The schizophrenic process is revolutionary; its
goal is to ‘‘show the existence of an unconscious libidinal investment of socio-historical production.’’ Here,
schizo-analytic production is the opposite of psychoanalytic expression.
Proponents of antipsychiatry, in particular Ronald
D. Laing, proved to be valuable allies to Deleuze and
Guattari. In effect, madness is described not so much
as a collapse but rather as a breakthrough. The goal of
schizo-analysis is to enable the flows, to ‘‘tirelessly
undo/defeat the egos and their assumptions.’’ and it
‘‘makes no distinction in nature between political
economy and libidinal economy.’’
In taking as their model the schizophrenic process
and contrasting it with the oedipalized neurotic process, the authors constructed a seductive theory that
was in keeping with its era. Marxist and structuralist
elements are discernible. What are now referred to as
‘‘the events of May ’68’’ had not yet been entered into
the history textbooks and the collective memory. The
metaphor of schizophrenia, stretched to the limit by
Deleuze and Guattari, was resonant in the context of a
breakdown in the political order and the family. The
disillusionments that followed are well known.
It is somewhat surprising to note that in the very
extensive index of proper names in Anti-Oedipus,
Sophocles is not mentioned once. This is of course
indicative of the authors’ genuine intent to separate
Oedipus as a psychic structure from Oedipus as a dramatic myth. It is the former, structural aspect of Oedipus that is fundamental to all civilizations. It is this
Oedipus that is targeted by the authors, and not the
dramatic figure of antiquity.
Indeed, Anti-Oedipus today appears as an antidramatic text, to be read as a comedy deriding capitalism and glorifying a schizophrenia invented and
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amplified through the joint writing of a philosopher
and a psychoanalyst engaged in critical reflection
designed to challenge the bourgeois ideology of their
era.
SYLVIE GOSME-SÉGURET
See also: France; Oedipus complex; Philosophy and psychoanalysis; Schizophrenia.
Source Citation
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. (1977). Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and schizophrenia. (Robert Hurley, Mark Seem,
and Helen R. Lane, Trans.). New York: Viking. (Original
work published 1972)
Bibliography
Deleuze, Gilles, and Parnet, Claire. (1977). Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Press, 1987.
Lecourt, Dominique. (2001). The mediocracy: French philosophy since the mid-1970s. (Gregory Elliott, Trans.).
London-New York: Verso. (Original work published 1999)
Le Goff, Jean-Pierre. (1998). Mai 68, l’héritage impossible.
Paris: Le Découverte.
ANTISEMITISM. See Racism, anti-Semitism, and
psychoanalysis
ANXIETY
Anxiety is an unpleasurable affect in which the individual experiences a feeling of danger whose cause is
unconscious. Freud had already begun considering the
problem of anxiety in his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess at the very start of his psychoanalytic work
(1950a [1887–1902]). His subsequent efforts were
more and more systematic as he developed two successive theories of anxiety.
In both of Freud’s theories of anxiety a fundamental
role is played by an absence of discharge, and hence
of instinctual satisfaction. In his first account, the
sexual instinct, undischarged, was described as being
transformed explicitly into anxiety by a seemingly biological mechanism (1895b [1894]). Somatic sexual
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excitation with the help of sexual ideas thus could
not develop into psychic libido. However, sexual
representations could be repressed, and their attendant
excitation either diverted toward somatic outlets, so
giving rise to hysterical conversion symptoms or, alternatively, redirected into the substitute representations
typical of anxiety hysteria or phobic neurosis.
In Freud’s second theory of anxiety, set forth in
Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926d [1925]),
unsatisfied instincts were not explicitly evoked. In this
account, anxiety as a signal is developed by the ego as a
defensive measure against automatic anxiety. The
infant’s biological and mental immaturity does not
enable it to confront the increase in tension arising
from the enormous amounts of instinctual excitation
that it cannot discharge and satisfy. This generates a
state of distress that is traumatic for the newborn, triggering automatic anxiety. The infant gradually comes
to understand that the maternal object can put an end
to this state of affairs. It is then that the loss of the
mother is experienced as a danger, and this experience
constitutes anxiety as a signal.
When the newborn begins to perceive its mother, it
is unable to distinguish temporary absence from
enduring loss; thus from the moment the mother is
lost sight of, the baby behaves as if it is never going to
see her again. Repeated experiences of satisfaction
have created this object, the mother, which, as need
arises, is intensely cathected in a way that might be
described as nostalgic. From this moment on, in
Freud’s view, object-loss provokes psychic pain, while
anxiety is the reaction to the danger associated with
that loss. Sadness arises whenever reality-testing forces
an acknowledgment that the object has been lost. In its
various forms, object-loss becomes the prototype of
later anxieties, which Freud lists as: anxiety at the loss
of the love of the object, castration anxiety, and anxiety
at the loss of the love of the superego.
The novelty of this theorization derives, on the one
hand, from the genetic notion according to which
anxiety is tied to the fear of re-experiencing very early
human states of distress, and on the other hand, from
the fact that these states are associated during early
infancy with various fantasies about the maternal
object, and later with fantasies concerning other
objects, including the father (castration anxiety or
anxiety at the loss of the love of the superego). The
close connection thus posited between anxiety
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ANXIETY
and ideation is radically at odds with Freud’s first
theory of anxiety.
attempt by the ego to overwhelm the introjected and
attacked object with guilt.
Anxiety always occupied a central place in the work
of Melanie Klein, first of all with respect to technique,
and secondly in terms of theory. She stated repeatedly
that her chief technical principle was that interpretation must focus on the point of maximum anxiety.
Equilibrium between the life instincts and the death
instincts was fundamental to Klein’s understanding of
the different forms of anxiety and the fantasies that
expressed them. In her earliest writings, she associated
anxiety and its related inhibitions with sexual conflicts
of childhood bound up with the Oedipus complex. At
the same time, however, she was struck by the scope of
aggressive fantasies in young children, especially during what she called the phase of maximal sadism. She
gradually came to view the child’s aggressiveness
towards the mother’s body and its fantasy contents
(penis, baby, feces, etc.) as responsible for an anxiety
based on the fear of the reciprocal aggression it could
provoke. The danger intrinsic to anxiety was thus seen
as the result of the subject’s excessive aggressiveness.
After introducing the ‘‘paranoid-schizoid position’’
(1946), which she contrasted with the depressive position as a type of psychic functioning, Melanie Klein was
able to develop a systematic theory of anxiety and guilt
(1948). The theory relied primarily on Freud’s concept
of the death instinct, which Klein had adopted. In this
view, anxiety was provoked by the danger with which
the death instinct threatened the organism. Klein spoke
of anxiety about ‘‘annihilation’’ and ‘‘fragmentation’’
with reference to very primitive terrors triggered by the
inner working of the death instinct and with reference to
the paranoid anxiety generated by persecutory objects
or by the primitive superego. In this sense fragmentation
anxiety may be considered a very archaic precursor of
castration anxiety.
Although to begin with Klein’s theory leaned heavily on Freud’s Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety,
from 1935 on, and especially after 1940, with the gradual working out of the concept of the ‘‘depressive
position,’’ she assigned object-loss a central role. This
implied a change in the conceptualization of anxiety,
which acquired a depressive character: anxiety was
now seen as expressing ‘‘pain,’’ which for Klein included both suffering and sadness in Freud’s sense.
Anxiety states were engendered by lived experiences of
object-loss that were more or less definitive and
irreversible.
In the face of maternal frustration, Klein contended,
the sense of an internal threat created by the death
instinct reinforces the projection of destructive impulses
by the primitive ego of the paranoid-schizoid position.
As a consequence the breast as ‘‘bad’’ part-object
becomes the source of ‘‘paranoid’’ or persecutory anxiety. Another portion of the death instinct is used by the
ego in the form of aggression to attack the persecutory
object. Introjection of both the persecutory breast and
the persecutory penis is the foundation of the primitive
superego, which is at first difficult to distinguish from
internal persecutory objects since it provokes very
intense persecutory anxiety (fear of fragmentation). This
very early superego, in spite of its aggressiveness, strives
to protect the libidinal bonds that the ego is meanwhile
forming with good or idealized objects, which are
experienced as the source of life.
Since experiences of loss were closely associated with
the damage wreaked in fantasy by aggressive impulses,
painful feelings were accompanied by feelings of
conscious or unconscious guilt. This guilt generally
tended to remain unconscious because of the great
importance it assumed for the subject, who attributed
an all-powerful destructiveness to his own aggression.
The ego would then turn to radical (psychotic, manic,
or depressive) defenses, which also made it difficult for
painful feelings to gain access to consciousness. On the
other hand, the more real the guilt, the more vigorously
it would be supported by the ego, clearing a path to
consciousness by way of feelings of sadness. A basic
exception to this rule were the strong guilt feelings manifested by melancholics, whose self-reproach masked an
As progress is made, with the help of libidinal
instincts, toward the successful integration of aggression, fantasies arise, characteristic of the early stages of
the Oedipus complex, involving part-objects in the
process of being made whole: the mother’s stomach
and its fantasized contents (penis, baby, feces, etc.). If
such objects provoke psychotic persecutory anxieties,
these will manifest themselves clinically as the outcome of a defensive transformation of intolerable depressive anxieties produced under pressure from an
overly aggressive primitive superego. In fact, as Klein
indicated in her last writings, the paranoid-schizoid
and depressive positions act simultaneously, whether
in the service of defense or of integration. In clinical
work, this is reflected in the coexistence of paranoid
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and depressive anxieties; one or the other will prevail,
depending on which position is predominant in the
patient.
During the various steps in the integration of the
depressive position, a whole range of depressive anxieties is encountered, as distinguished by the particular
fantasies that attend the loss of the libidinally
cathected object in each type of case (Palacio Espasa,
1993). Thus whenever fantasies of catastrophic
destruction come to the fore and the damage is experienced by the subject as irreparable because of the great
force of his aggression, as he perceives it, the intensity
of the ensuing guilt makes the pain and sadness hard
to bear. The ego can only resort to psychotic defenses
that transform these disastrous depressive anxieties
into persecutory anxieties.
responsible for the loss of the object’s love may be projected onto the other parent, who then becomes a
rival. An oedipal situation is thus created, along with
the various conflicts, directly or indirectly expressed,
that characterize the Oedipus complex.
In short, as the intensity of depressive anxieties
decreases, the Oedipus complex comes to the fore
thanks to the transformation of depressive conflict
into a variety of neurotic conflicts that generate castration anxiety. In neurosis, however, along with castration anxiety intense depressive anxieties (especially
guilt) may continue to exist with respect to the oedipal
parents—more complete objects, often neglected in
the literature on neurosis. Such anxieties may indeed
occasion significant regression back toward depressive
conflict.
Where fantasies of destruction are less significant,
and the subject’s aggressiveness is experienced as less
destructive, fantasies of the death of libidinally
cathected objects may be prevalent. The ego can then
use its store of libido, which it experiences as limited,
as a massive barrier to any manifestation of aggression.
This arouses intense feelings of guilt, and hence of
responsibility for fears of death or of object-loss.
The ego tends to defend itself against such painful
depressive affects either in manic fashion, through
identification with idealized and intact objects, or else
by melancholic means, such as identification with the
dead or destroyed aspects of objects.
In psychoanalytic theory castration anxiety is closely bound up with the Oedipus complex. For Freud
castration is one of the primal fantasies. In his view of
childhood sexuality, the Oedipus complex makes its
appearance during the stage of phallic primacy, which
means that castration anxiety is rather similar in the
two sexes. Because of the overvaluation of the phallus,
the child does not recognize the female sex as such and
considers it to be the result of castration. In Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety Freud sees castration as
one loss, on the level of genital sexuality, in a series of
object-losses: the loss of the mother’s breast, the loss of
the contents of the intestines, and so on.
When fantasies of loss of the object’s love predominate, they center on rejection or abandonment by the
object. Death fantasies are less intense and are experienced as more easily reversible because of the greater
libidinal capacity available to the ego of subjects in this
category. Under these circumstances the ego has a
whole panoply of neurotic defenses at its disposal.
These include the retroactive denial of the ill
consequences of the subject’s aggression and reactionformations against aggression of a typically obsessiveneurotic kind. By means of phobic displacement and
symbolization, a predominance of libidinal impulses
facilitates the transformation of the conflict provoked
by the loss of the object’s love into a triangular conflict
in which fantasies of exclusion become more prominent. Given well-integrated instinctual relationships
with two highly cathected parental imagos, the experienced object-loss may be reduced to that of the
loss of the incestuous object’s exclusive love. On the
other hand, the dangerous aggressiveness deemed
For Melanie Klein castration anxiety develops as a
fear of reprisal for the child’s oedipal rivalry with the
parent of the same sex. In boys this becomes an anxiety
about the loss of the penis at the hands of a vengeful
father; in girls it becomes an anxiety about attacks
against her own belly by the persecuting maternal
object. From this theoretical standpoint, castration
anxiety appears as a form of punishment for the manic
and narcissistic fantasies constructed by the young
child as protection against its feelings of exclusion
from the sexual and genital relations of the parents, to
which it does not have access because of its biological
immaturity. The infant then takes possession in fantasy of the idealized sexual attributes of the parent of
the same sex, who thus becomes a rival, and imagines
it is the exclusive recipient of the love of the parent of
the opposite sex. Such a fantasy position can only generate castration anxiety, if for no other reason than
that it derives from the infant’s apprehension of its
own biological immaturity as a mutilation.
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101
ANXIETY
AS
SIGNAL
Separation anxiety appears when the subject experiences separation as a more or less irreversible objectloss. In the descriptions given by Margaret Mahler, the
very young infant manifests separation anxieties after
the fifth or sixth month, and they become especially
significant between 15 and 18 months of age, during
the rapprochement subphase of the separation-individuation (Mahler et al.). During this time the baby
experiences real despair, feelings close to the nascent
melancholy that Klein describes as occurring at the
height of the depressive position. The presence of the
external mother is essential, for her internal image is
experienced as very much under threat from the
child’s aggressive fantasies, perceived by the child as
massive and highly destructive. Only after the age of
two or three, during the phase of object constancy,
does the child become able little by little to overcome
separation anxiety; by then it can retain an inner mental representation of the mother that is cathected for
the most part by libidinal impulses.
Anxiety in the presence of actual danger, or ‘‘realistic anxiety,’’ is a somewhat paradoxical concept employed by Freud in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety,
where (as we have seen) he views anxiety as arising
from a felt danger from within occasioned by objectloss. Freud himself resolves the ambiguity when he
asserts, in discussing apparently external dangers such
as the loss of the object’s love, or castration anxiety,
that ‘‘the loved person would not care to love us nor
should we be threatened with castration if we did not
entertain certain feelings and intentions within us.
Thus such instinctual impulses are determinants of
external dangers and so become dangerous in themselves’’ (p. 145). In other words, all realistic anxiety is
also anxiety tout court, and not simply fear of an external danger, for it always arouses an internal threat.
This idea is crucial, of course, to the Kleinian concept
of the depressive position, where every outside loss is
accompanied by an experience of the loss of internal
objects. Primitive experiences of loss are reactivated by
the real loss, so that the working-through of such early
internal losses is a prerequisite if objects lost in the
outside world are to be successfully mourned.
FRANCISCO PALACIO ESPASA
See also: Abandonment; Annihilation anxiety; Anxiety
dream; Aphanisis; Claustrophobia; Counterphobic;
Defense; Ego; Fear; Hypochondria; Hysteria; Inhibitions,
Symptoms, and Anxiety; ‘‘Neurasthenia and Anxiety
10 2
Neurosis’’; Nervous Anxiety States and their Treatment;
Nightmare; Paranoid-schizoid position; Phobias in children; Primitive agony; Quota of affect; Seminar, Lacan’s;
Signal anxiety; Specific action; Stranger, fear of; Substitutive formation; Trauma of Birth, The.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1895b [1894]). On the grounds for
detaching a particular syndrome from neurasthenia under
the description ‘‘anxiety neurosis.’’ SE, 3: 87–115.
———. (1926d [1925]). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety.
SE, 20: 87–172.
———. (1950a [1887–1902]). Extract from the Fliess
papers. SE, 1: 173–280.
Klein, Melanie. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
———. (1948). On the theory of anxiety and guilt. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 29, 113–123.
Mahler, Margaret S., Pine, Fred, and Bergman, Anni. (1975).
The psychological birth of the human infant. New York:
Basic Books.
Palacio Espasa, Francisco. (1993). La pratique psychothérapique avec l’enfant. Paris: Bayard.
Further Reading
Hurvich, Marvin. (1997). ‘‘The ego in anxiety’’ & ‘‘Addendum to Freud’s theory of anxiety’’. Psychoanalytic Review,
84, 483–504.
———. (2000). Fear of being overwhelmed and psychoanalytic theories of anxiety. Psychoanalytic Review, 87, 615–
650.
Roose, Stephen P. , and Glick, Robert. A. (Eds). (1995).
Anxiety as symptom and signal. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic
Press.
ANXIETY AS SIGNAL. See Signal Anxiety
ANXIETY DREAM
A dream may be so charged with anxiety that the dreamer can escape only through waking. Sometimes the
dreamer is then amazed by the disparity between the
intensity of emotion and the apparent banality of the
dream itself. This is the classic ‘‘anxiety dream.’’ Freud
offered a detailed analysis of such a dream in his case
history of the ‘‘Wolf Man’’ (1918b [1914]).
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A N Z I E U , D I D I E R (1923 –1 999)
Freud often returned to the problem of anxiety
dreams, because, as he wrote in The Interpretation of
Dreams, ‘‘It does in fact look as though [they] make it
impossible to assert as a general proposition . . . that
dreams are wish fulfillment; indeed they seem to
stamp any such proposition as an absurdity’’ (1900a,
p. 135). Freud’s answer to the puzzle about anxiety
dreams holds fast to the basic principle of dreamformation: that even when the content of the dream
is clearly distressing, its latent content involves fulfillment of a wish.
———. (1907a [1906]). Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s
‘‘Gradiva.’’ SE, 9: 1–95.
From this point of view, Freud analyzed one of
Dora’s dreams (1905e [1901]), a dream of Norbert
Hanold in Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘‘Gradiva’’
(1907a [1906]), a dream of ‘‘Little Hans’’ (1909b), and
most noteworthy, the wolf dream of Sergeı̈ Pankejeff,
the ‘‘Wolf Man’’ (1918b [1914]). Freud returned at
length to this thesis in the chapter on wish fulfillment
in Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916–
1917a [1915–1917]).
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
With respect to recurrent anxiety dreams in cases of
traumatic neuroses, Freud altered his views somewhat
in ‘‘Revision of Dream Theory,’’ chapter 29 of New
Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933a
[1932]), where he asserted, ‘‘A dream is an attempt at
the fulfillment of a wish. . . . In certain circumstances a
dream is only able to put its intention into effect very
incompletely, or must abandon it entirely. . . . While
the sleeper is obliged to dream, because the relaxation
of repression at night allows the upward pressure of
the traumatic fixation to become active, there is a failure in the functioning of his dream work, which would
like to transform the memory-traces of the traumatic
event into the fulfillment of a wish’’ (p. 29). Although
Freud did not highlight the change in this text, the
fundamental revision to his theory of dreams perhaps
came earlier, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g
[1914]).
ROGER PERRON
See also: Anxiety; Dream.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4: 1–338; 5: 339–625.
———. (1905e [1901]). Fragment of an analysis of a case of
hysteria. SE, 7: 1–122.
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———. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy.
SE, 10: 1–149.
———. (1916–1917a [1915–1917]). Introductory lectures
on psycho-analysis. SE, 15–16.
———. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile
neurosis. SE, 17: 1–122.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1–
64.
Further Reading
Eissler, Kurt R. (1966). A note on trauma, dream, anxiety,
and schizophrenia. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 21,
17–50.
ANXIETY HYSTERIA. See Hysteria
ANXIETY NEUROSIS. See ‘‘Neurasthenia and
‘Anxiety Neurosis’’’
ANXIETY SIGNAL. See Signal anxiety
ANZIEU, DIDIER (1923–1999)
French psychoanalyst and professor of psychology
Didier Anzieu was born July 8, 1923, in Melun and
died on November 25, 1999, in Paris.
His parents, who worked for the post office, met in
Melun, where Didier Anzieu spent his childhood and
part of his adolescence. A younger sister died at birth.
His parents’ intense investment in Didier, especially on
the part of his mother, Marguerite, who became seriously depressed after the stillbirth of her daughter
(she herself was a ‘‘survivor,’’ her sister having died
when she was a child), led to alternations between ‘‘superimposed layers of care’’ and feelings of
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abandonment that would mark Anzieu’s life and work.
His mother’s illness and subsequent treatment in a
psychiatric hospital further distanced him from her;
he was raised by his maternal aunt, who later moved in
with her brother-in-law.
His close, secure, and warm relationship to his
father sustained him throughout his childhood and
entrance into adult life. He began his secondary school
studies in Melun, followed by Paris, where he met
Zacharie Tourneur, with whom he edited Pascal’s Pensées. After the École Normale Supérieure and his studies in philosophy, he turned to psychology, which he
taught, along with Daniel Lagache, at the Sorbonne,
before continuing his academic career in Strasbourg
(1955–1964) and Paris (1964–1983). In 1957 he completed his oral defense for the doctoral degree, the subject being Freud’s self-analysis and its role in the invention of psychoanalysis.
Before he became a psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu
worked as a clinical psychologist. His involvement in
psychology led him through several fields of study:
psychodrama, dermatology, projective methods, and
Rorschach methods, in which he specialized. He made
use of the dynamics of Lewinian groups in creating, in
1962, an association—CEFFRAP, the Centre d’études
françaises pour la formation et la recherche active en
psychologie—through which he set up the first French
experiments in group psychoanalysis and group psychodrama. Anzieu’s various activities supported a brilliant academic career alongside his work as an editor
and creative writer (short stories, essays, drama).
As a psychoanalyst, Anzieu’s life intersected his personal history, his psychoanalytic history, and the history of the French psychoanalytic movement. His
mother, Marguerite Anzieu, had been treated by
Jacques Lacan, who had used her treatment as the
basis for his medical dissertation De la psychose paranoı̈aque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (On Paranoiac Psychosis in Its Relations with the Personality),
published in 1932, in which she is known simply as
‘‘Aimée.’’ Didier Anzieu began psychoanalysis with
Lacan in 1949. After four years of fruitful work, their
relationship became problematic when Lacan asked
him to remain silent about how therapy was being
conducted. Anzieu continued his training (1953) with
Daniel Lagache, Juliette Boutonier, and Georges Favez.
He participated in the foundation of the French Psychoanalytic Association when it was formed in 1964
following the break with Lacan, and assumed a num10 4
ber of responsibilities within the association (he was
its vice-president).
Anzieu’s psychoanalytic writing can’t be separated
from his other writing, his activity as a psychoanalyst,
or his interests. It is both varied and indivisible, always
informed by the uncertainties of psychology, literature, and the psychoanalysis of intersubjective bonds.
In his psychoanalytic practice, Anzieu always
claimed to be an orthodox analyst, but he was also
careful to modulate the mechanism and technique of
interpretation according to the treatment needs of the
individual patient. As he refined his theoretical understanding through clinical activity, he highlighted the
transformations needed in the object of interpretation
(the ‘‘archaic’’) and in the handling of a reliable and
flexible framework that harmonized with the specific
transferences generated by the pathologies of the primal. He gave increasing attention to these areas of
practice, which were supported by his contacts with
the Anglo-American school (Melanie Klein, Wilfred R.
Bion, Donald W. Winnicott, Esther Bick). He was also
interested in the unconscious formations and processes involved in group bonds and the work of creation. A statement written in 1975 expresses his fundamental position: ‘‘The question is not to repeat what
Freud found when faced with the crises of the Victorian era, but to find a psychoanalytic response to mankind’s malaise in the civilization in which we live.
Work such as that of psychoanalysis needs to be done
wherever the unconscious arises, standing, seated or
lying down; individually, in a group or in a family,
wherever a subject can allow his anxieties and fantasies
to speak out to someone who is supposed to listen to
them and is likely to help him understand them.’’
Anzieu’s worldwide recognition is largely due to his
scrupulous approach to clinical and theoretical work
and his intellectual freedom in searching for innovative tools. He renewed the understanding of selfanalysis and dream interpretation, primordial models
for what he would later theorize as the work of creation and processes of thought.
He introduced new concepts into psychoanalytic
theory. With the important concept of the ‘‘skin ego’’
(1985/1989), he referred to ‘‘a figuration the child’s
ego makes use of during the precocious phases of
its development to represent itself as an ego containing
psychic contents based on its experience of the
surface of his body.’’ This concept inaugurated several
research projects on psychic interfaces and envelopes,
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on the dual prohibition of touching, on formal signifiers and their normal and pathological transformations. These investigations gave rise to a theory of
thought processes and a conception of the work in
which the dual polarity of creation and destruction is
affirmed.
Didier Anzieu made use not only of clinical psychoanalysis but literature (Pascal, Julien Gracq, Alain
Robbe-Grillet, Samuel Beckett) and the visual arts as
well (Francis Bacon) to bring to light the traces of the
body in writing, drama, and painting. Finally, through
his work on individual and group psychoanalytic psychodrama, he enriched the instruments derived from
psychoanalysis by proposing a new outlook on the
operation of the unconscious in groups.
RENÉ KAËS
Work discussed: Freud’s Self-Analysis.
Notions developed: Heroic identification; Skin ego.
See also: Aimée, case of; Analytic psychodrama; Body
image; France; Group analysis; Lacan, Jacques-Marie
Émile; Literature and psychoanalysis; Nouvelle Revue de
psychanalyse; Paradox; Protective shield; Psychic envelope; Psychoanalytic family therapy; Psychological tests;
Self-analysis; Skin; Thought.
Bibliography
Anzieu, Didier. (1959). L’autoanalyse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
———. (1989). The skin ego (Chris Turner, Trans.). New
Haven-London: Yale University Press. (Original work published 1985)
———. (1987). Some alterations of the ego which make
analyses interminable. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 68 (1), 9–20.
———. (1989). Beckett and Bion (Juliet Mitchell, Trans.).
International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 16 (2), 163–170.
———. (1979). The sound image of the self. International
Review of Psycho-Analysis, 6 (1), 23–36.
Kaës, René. (1994). Les voies de la psyché, hommage à Didier
Anzieu. Paris: Dunod.
APHANISIS
The term ‘‘aphanisis’’ merits an entry in Laplanche
and Pontalis’s The Language of Psychoanalysis, where
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its principal definition is as follows: ‘‘Term introduced
by Ernest Jones: the disappearance of sexual desire.
According to Jones aphanisis is the object, in both
sexes, of a fear more profound than the fear of
castration.’’
It was in 1927 that Ernest Jones called upon this
concept in his work on the precocious development of
feminine sexuality. Etymologically the term comes
from the Greek aphanisis, which refers to an absence of
brilliance in the astronomical sense, to disappearance
or becoming invisible (of a star for example).
Jones applied this concept in a psychoanalytic sense
in seeking to account for the disappearance of sexual
desire in light of the castration complex; at the same
time, he stressed that in his view there was no strict
correlation between castration and the disappearance
of sexuality: ‘‘many men wish to be castrated for,
among others, erotic reasons, so that their sexuality
certainly does not disappear with the surrender of the
penis.’’ (1927, p. 439–440)
In other words, the concept of aphanisis, according
to Jones, was much broader than that of castration,
and if the two notions sometimes appeared to merge,
it was only because the figure of castration was in
some way emblematic of the suppression of sexual
desire, for which it supplied a concrete (but in fact
inaccurate) representation.
Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) observe that in
women the fear of aphanisis is discernible beneath the
fear of separation from the loved object, which is consistent with the fact that Jones introduced the notion
apropos of feminine sexuality.
While Sigmund Freud described the psychosexual
development of the boy along phallocentric lines,
Jones, for his part, tried to describe the sexuality of the
young girl not by exclusive reference to penis envy
(Penisneid), but as a sexuality having direct aims and
modalities of its own. And it is precisely aphanisis,
prior to the castration complex, that can furnish a
kind of common basis for the sexual development of
both sexes.
About thirty years after Jones introduced it, in
1963, John Bowlby took up the concept of aphanisis
again in his critical review of separation anxiety. He
made aphanisis one of the possible bases for understanding this developmental phenomenon. The disappearance of the object in fact confronts the infant
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APHASIA
with the fear of no longer being able to focus its
instinctual impulsive movements, and thus with the
risk of losing the very possibility of the pleasure of
desire as well.
Today the concept of aphanisis as such is little used
in the context of metapsychological work; it has
doubtless been relegated to the background by the
redoubtable expansion of the theory of attachment.
BERNARD GOLSE
See also: Annihilation anxiety; Femininity; Jones, Ernest;
Object a; Phallus.
Bibliography
Bowlby, John. (1961). Separation anxiety: A critical review
of the literature. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry,
1, 251–69.
Ernest, Jones. (1950). Early development of female sexuality.
In Papers on psychoanalysis. London: Bailliere, Tindall and
Cox. (Original work published 1927)
Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1967). The
language of psychoanalysis. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
APHASIA
Aphasia, a word proposed by Armand Trousseau to
replace the term ‘‘aphemia,’’ created by Paul Broca,
refers to language disturbances that arise from specific cerebral lesions, most often in the cortex. Between
1861 and 1865, when the dispute ended concerning
the question of determining whether the cerebral
cortex operated as a unit or as a collection of separate elements, Paul Broca showed, through a series of
anatomical and clinical observations, that the
destruction of the left side of the base of the third
circumvolution of the frontal lobe in a right-handed
subject who until then was able to speak normally
led to the loss of articulate language. The subject was
unable to express himself using a sequence of words
or phrases.
In 1874 Carl Wernicke extended the field of
research by describing two other types of aphasia, all
caused by a lesion in the left hemisphere: sensory
aphasia from damage to the posterior areas of the
second and third circumvolution of the cortex, and
conduction aphasia, arising from the disconnection of
10 6
the bundles connecting this region to the base of the
third circumvolution of the frontal lobe. Afterwards,
the disturbance identified by Broca would be known as
‘‘motor aphasia.’’ Later Wernicke identified two other
types of aphasia: ‘‘motor transcortical aphasia’’ and
‘‘sensory transcortical aphasia.’’
By the end of the nineteenth century, three separate
approaches to the problem had been developed. Some
researchers, such as Jean Martin Charcot and Joseph
Grasset, increased the number of types of aphasia;
others, like Alfred Vulpian, and later Pierre Marie,
renewed the ‘‘unitarian’’ position; the third group, following the important work by Jules Déjerine, demonstrated through the use of clinical and anatomical
arguments that the nature of the aphasia would change
with the nature and location of the lesion. For example, frontal lesions seemed to primarily affect speech
production, posterior lesions seemed to affect speech
recognition, and the destruction of the cortex resulted
in disturbances of internal language, which affected
the subject’s autonomy.
Sigmund Freud’s work on aphasia, published in
1891, accepts the work of Paul Broca but questions
Wernicke’s research, which Freud criticizes for being
excessively schematic and lacking in clinical observations. Freud did not question the relationship of language function with the brain but was cautious
about hastily assigning specific locations to specific
functions. Although he accepts that certain clinically
based forms of aphasia—‘‘verbal aphasia,’’ ‘‘asymbolic aphasia,’’ ‘‘agnosic aphasia’’—can be used to
localize the cortical lesion with certainty (which was
later confirmed by neurosurgery during the First
World War), he refused to extrapolate from pathology to physiology and deduced a cerebral concept of
the normal operation of language, with a critical
position that was far removed from the scientism
that is often attributed to him in this field. In the
descriptive sections of his work, Freud distinguished
between the representation of words and the representation of things, and their links with auditory
images, visual images, and the motor images at work
in these phenomena.
GEORGES LANTÉRI-LAURA
See also: Brain and psychoanalysis, the; Language and disturbances of language; memory; Thing-presentation;
Word-presentation.
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Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1891b [1953]), On aphasia (A critical
study) (E. Stengel, Trans.). New York: International Universities Press.
Hécaen, H. and Lantéri-Laura, Georges. (1977). Évolution
des connaissances et des doctrines sur les localisations cérébrales. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.
———. (1989). Les fonctions du cerveau. Paris: Masson.
Lantéri-Laura, Geoerges. (1993). Histoire de la phrénologie.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Further Reading
Miller, Laurence (1991). On aphasia at 100: the neuropsychodynamic legacy of Freud. Psychoanalytic Review, 78,
365-378.
Rizzuto, Anna-Marie. (1990). Origin of Freud’s concept of
object representation: ‘‘On Aphasia.’’ International Journal
of Psychoanalysis, 71, 241-248.
APPLIED PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE
INTERACTIONS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
Aside from being a theory of the unconscious, psychoanalysis as a method is used as an investigative tool in
a wide variety of fields, the treatment of neuroses
being only one among many. The term applied psychoanalysis is often used to refer to fields other than psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, particularly literature,
art and culture. The term is therefore likely to have a
range of accepted meanings that is either very broad,
as in the case of collective phenomena, or narrowly
restricted, as in the case of individual works of art.
The idea of application, to the extent that it presupposes use outside a field of origin, has often been criticized for introducing the risk that psychoanalysis will
be used abstractly or mechanistically. This was certainly not the opinion of Sigmund Freud, who felt that
most psychoanalytic concepts were buttressed by the
great myths and works of literature, such as Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, Michelangelo’s Moses, and
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which he mentioned in his letter
to Wilhelm Fliess on October 15, 1897. Freud’s later
writings made use of the work of Wilhelm Jensen, Dostoevsky, and others. There are also numerous references
to Goethe woven into the fabric of his thought. In this
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gation of what it means to be human. This proximity of
culture and psychoanalysis also has the effect of
mitigating the field’s association with medicine, which
was indeed one of Freud’s objectives.
Freud’s writings are interspersed with texts that are
not specifically about psychopathology but contribute
to its development indirectly. Jokes and their Relation
to the Unconscious (1905c), ‘‘Psycho-Analysis and the
Establishment of the Facts in Legal Proceedings’’
(1906c), Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘‘Gradiva’’
(1907a [1906]), ‘‘Obsessive Actions and Religious
Practices’’ (1907b), all written over a period of two
years, reveal the variety of fields to which Freud
applied the psychoanalytic method. More generally,
psychoanalysis appears to embrace the fields of both
individual therapy and collective phenomena, although we cannot speak of applied psychoanalysis in the
latter case. Examples include Totem and Taboo (1912–
1913a), Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
(1921c), ‘‘The Acquisition and Control of Fire’’
(1932a[1931]), and Moses and Monotheism (1939a
[1937–1939]). Given the importance of these texts and
their theoretical richness, ‘‘applied psychoanalysis’’ in
the broad sense loses its meaning.
An especially rich and frequently examined field is
the psychoanalysis of works of literature and the plastic arts. When it turns its attention to the artist or
author, the psychoanalytic approach is not really far
removed from its psychotherapeutic role. Freud himself emphasized the proximity between the case study
and the novel, asserting that his case studies could be
read as novels (1895d) and that novelists knew more
about the unconscious than psychoanalysts.
Yet, the matter is not quite as simple as it appears.
Although studying an author’s biography is relevant
for understanding his or her writing, such an examination should not be reduced to a form of pathography.
Isidor Sadger was referred to as a bungler (Nunberg
and Federn,1962–75) and Max Graf, supported by
Freud, pointed out that an author’s neurosis does not
explain his work. In ‘‘Creative Writers and Day-dreaming’’ (1908e [1907]), Freud shifted his focus to the
question of the author’s creativity with the hypothesis
of a relation between the daydream and the themes of
literary creation. He also questioned the nature of the
reader’s pleasure.
In 1912 the review Imago, published by Freud with
the help of Otto Rank and Hans Sachs, printed articles
on psychoanalysis applied to works of art, but even
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earlier, in 1910, Freud’s study of Leonardo da Vinci
(1910c) had shown the protean nature of this type of
psychoanalytic investigation. This was a study of a ‘‘childhood memory’’ of da Vinci’s, and the earliest impressions
of his life; it also provided an occasion to develop the theory of sublimation in its various versions, along with a
new approach to male homosexuality.
Freud’s paper on da Vinci is a good example of the
impossibility, when referring to research devoted to a
work of art (The Virgin, Infant Jesus, and Saint Ann)
and its author, of limiting oneself to a single ‘‘application’’ of the psychoanalytic method. This, with all the
risks it entails (mistaking the kite for a vulture), is
creative because it directs toward the analysis of the
work of art hypotheses and intuitions that could have
come into being elsewhere or differently, blending episodes of therapy with a self-analytic approach (Freud’s
fantasy relationship with Leonardo).
Conversely, Freud’s study of Michelangelo’s Moses
(1914b) ignored the facts of the artist’s life. The interpretation is based on the feelings of the viewer, Freud
in this case, and his understanding of the Bible. He
explicates the work using the same method used for
dreams, teasing out what is hidden or secret by means
of details that are barely visible. Freud does not sharply
distinguish between interpretation of the work of art
and reconstruction of the author’s fantasies, and when
he turns to Jensen’s Gradiva (1907a [1906]), it is only
as an afterthought that he questions the author about
the actual existence of a young girl with a club foot
whom the author was supposed to have known in
childhood.
The term ‘‘applied psychoanalysis’’ does not seem
to be appropriate when we consider that for Freud—as
for many psychoanalysts like Karl Abraham, Otto
Rank, Wilhelm Stekel, Max Graf, Theodor Reik, and
Fritz Wittels—it was not a question of demonstrating
that the psychoanalytic method could be used outside
the context of therapy (Laplanche proposed the
expression, ‘‘extramural psychoanalysis’’), but of
developing hypotheses concerning this method within
a field of research other than therapy.
Aside from the psychoanalysis of works of art,
Freud highlighted the interest of psychoanalysis
(1913j) not only for psychology but for the other
sciences. By ‘‘interest’’ he meant the implications—
being in (inter-esse)—of psychoanalysis for the other
sciences, which can make use of psychoanalysis as a
means of self-enrichment and even self-analysis. Thus
10 8
linguistics could draw on dreams and symbols for the
study of language, philosophy could make use of the
psychography of philosophers, and biology could borrow the opposition between ego instinct and sexual
instinct to identify the opposition between an immortal germ plasma and isolated individuals. Similarly, the
history of civilization could make use of the psychoanalytic approach to myth to help explain religion.
Nearly fifteen years later, in The Question of Lay
Analysis, Freud wrote, ‘‘As a ‘depth psychology,’ a theory of the mental unconscious, it can become indispensable to all the sciences which are concerned with
the evolution of human civilization and its major
institutions such as art, religion, and the social order.
It has already, in my opinion, afforded these sciences
considerable help in solving their problems. But these
are only small contributions compared with what
might be achieved if historians of civilization, psychologists of religion, philologists and so on would agree
themselves to handle the new instrument of research
which is at their service. The use of analysis for the
treatment of the neuroses is only one of its applications; the future will perhaps show that it is not the
most important one’’ (1926e, p. 248).
Of course it is not necessarily the case that the benefit of psychoanalysis for the sciences is a one-way process. Just as the ‘‘application’’ of psychoanalysis outside
therapy leads to discoveries that affect therapy through
a deepening of theory and method, it benefits psychoanalysis to be questioned by the sciences with which it
interacts. The ‘‘interactions of psychoanalysis’’
(Mijolla-Mellor, S. de) highlight the fact that it is impossible to focus psychoanalysis on a specific domain
without the validity of its own methodology being
questioned in turn. Such interactions assume the pursuit of a renewed epistemological investigation of the
value of the psychoanalytic method and its ability to
encounter other logics. This not only provides new
insight into the field of application but also helps clarify the essential nature and potential for growth of psychoanalysis itself. The principal reason for this fecundity lies in the ability of psychoanalysis to allow itself to
be questioned, and enriched, by, the fields of inquiry
toward which it is directed.
Here, the cultural object or scientific discourse itself
may exhibit a certain resistance (much like a patient)
because they function according to their own logic and
presuppositions, which in principle acknowledge no
unconscious dimension. To introduce this dimension
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into other domains means that the psychoanalyst
must become newly aware of this object suspending
the work of interpretation and, above all, questioning
its ability not only to account for the facts in question
but also for the way in which they are viewed and
cathected.
and psychoanalysis, sociopsychoanalysis; Spinoza and psychoanalysis; Structuralism and psychoanalysis; Surrealism
and psychoanalysis; The Life and Works of Edgar Allen Poe;
Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Twenty-Eighth President of the
United States; Totem and Taboo; Training of the psychoanalyst; Visual arts and psychoanalysis.
The multidisciplinary interactions of psychoanalysis
thus require an ongoing epistemological investigation of
major importance, and which risks being undermined if
psychoanalysts limit their inquiry to the therapeutic
situation alone. This perspective is epistemological
first and foremost, opening up the possibility of borrowing other models and allowing for conceptual
fusion; but it also shows up the abiding (at times) specificity of fields of knowledge, and even their impermeability—and hence the limits of these interactions.
Bibliography
The common goal of research in the field of ‘‘interactions with psychoanalysis’’ is an awareness not only
of the impact of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious
on the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) but also of
the effects of models specific to those domains on psychoanalysis itself, as theory and as method, whenever
it attempts to ‘‘interact.’’
———. (1907a [1906]). Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s
‘‘Gradiva.’’ SE, 9: 1–95.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
Freud, Sigmund. (1887–1904). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, Ed. and Trans.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Cambridge, Mass, and London:
The Belknap Press, 1985.
———. (1905c). Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. SE, 8.
———. (1906c). Psycho-analysis and the establishment of
the facts in legal proceedings. SE, 9: 99–114.
———. (1907b). Obsessive actions and religious practices.
SE, 9: 117–127.
———, (1908e [1907]). ‘‘Creative writers and day-dreaming.’’ SE, 9: 143–153.
———. (1910c). Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his
childhood. SE, 11: 59–137.
———. (1912–1913). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: ix–161.
See also: American Imago; Anthropology and psychoanalysis; Christians and Jews: A Psychoanalytical Study;
Cinema (criticism); Cinema and psychoanalysis; Civilization (Kultur); ‘‘Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific
Interest’’; Criminology and psychoanalysis; Delusions and
Dreams in Jensen’s ‘‘Gradiva’’; Don Juan and the Double;
‘‘Dream and Myth’’; École Freudienne de Paris; Ethnopsychoanalysis; Ethology and psychoanalysis; Hard
sciences, psychoanalysis and the; Freud, the Secret Passion; Goethe and psychoanalysis; Hamlet and Oedipus;
History and psychoanalysis; Imago, Zeitschrift für die
Anwendung der Psychanalyse auf die Geistesiwissenschaften; Law and psychoanalysis; Leonardo da Vinci and a
Memory of his Childhood; Linguistics and psychoanalysis;
Literary and artistic creation; Literature and psychoanalysis; Moses and Monotheism; ‘‘The Moses of Michelangelo’’; Myth of the Birth of the Hero, The ; Mythology and
psychoanalysis; Pedagogy and psychoanalysis; Psyché,
revue internationale de psychanalyse et des sciences de
l’homme; Psychoanalysis of Fire, The; Psychoanalytic
Bewegung, Die; Psychobiography; Psychohistory; Psychology and psychoanalysis; Racism, anti-Semitism, and
psychoanalysis; Sartre and psychoanalysis; Schiller and
psychoanalysis; ‘‘Seventeenth-Century Demonological
Neurosis, A’’; Shakespeare and psychoanalysis; Sociology
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———. (1913j). The claims of psycho-analysis to scientific
interest. SE, 13: 163–190.
———. (1914b). The Moses of Michelangelo. SE, 13: 209–
236.
———. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18: 67–143.
———. (1926e). The question of lay analysis. SE, 20: 179–
250.
———. (1932a [1931]). The acquisition and control of fire.
SE, 22: 183–193.
———. (1939a [1937–1939]). Moses and monotheism:
Three essays. SE, 23: 1–137.
———. (1950a). Extracts from the Fliess papers. SE, 1: 173–
280.
Nunberg, Hermann and Federn, Ernst. (1962–1975). Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (December 4,
1907 session). New York: International University Press.
Further Reading
Baudry, Francis. (1984). Essay on method in applied psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 53, 551–581.
109
APPRENTI-HISTORIEN
ET LE
M A Í T R E - S O R C I E R ( L ’ - ) [ T H E A P P R E N T I C E H I S T O R I A N
Esman, Aaron. (1998). What is "applied" in "applied" psychoanalysis?. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79,
741–756.
Gehrie, M.J. (1992). Panel: Methodology of applied psychoanalysis: key issues. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 40, 239–244.
APPRENTI-HISTORIEN ET LE MAÍTRESORCIER (L’-) [THE APPRENTICE
HISTORIAN AND THE MASTER SORCERER]
This book’s title and subtitle indicate its essential argument. The I is the apprentice historian, the psychological space in which identifications or delusional statements are worked out. According to Aulagnier, two
questions have inspired her writings, including this
book: the function of the I as the builder of its own
libidinal history; and the relationship between this I
and the analytic approach, where the concept of ‘‘the
repressed’’ is of central importance.
The master sorcerer is another name for the id, for
the psychological place where primal and primary processes write a story without words. In some cases, the
subject may experience the ‘‘telescoping’’ of an event, a
fantasy, and an identification in such a way that the
subject is ‘‘stuck with’’ an identification which he is
unable to assume, and yet finds it impossible to repress
the fantasy. The task of analysis is to seek out the event
that marked the infantile psyche, to bring to light how
the irruption of affect contributed to fixing the identification in the subject’s mind and worked to impede
repression. The I can then replace this lived/lost
moment with a history of the identification that
makes sense of the subject’s present life and makes an
investment in his future possible.
The first part of Aulagnier’s book presents the cases
of Philippe and Odette, focusing on their relationships
to time. Philippe is a young, delusional, psychotic
patient who was treated by Aulagnier, initially during
his hospitalization and later in her home, with the idea
of undertaking an analytic treatment. Odette is a
woman of about forty who elected to undergo analysis
(which lasted five years) to help her in her struggle
against what she called ‘‘dehumanization crises.’’
Aulagnier presents four versions of Philippe’s
history: that of Philippe himself, which embodies a
delusional causality that brings about ‘‘temporal
11 0
AND
THE MASTER SORCERER]
indifferentiation’’ and seeks to exculpate his parents;
that of the parents, who deny the role they have played
in Philippe’s life; the version that Aulagnier develops
based on the preceding two histories, and on her own
suspended theoretical attention; and, finally, the history that evolves within the therapeutic relationship.
Behind the claim of Philippe and his mother, that
he ‘‘had a wonderful childhood,’’ the analyst clearly
discerns the annihilation of a birth. When the therapist
suggests that the future is not decided in advance,
Philippe responds: ‘‘I can’t tell the difference between
the past and the future. I just don’t understand all
these dichotomies: past/present, life/death, present/
future.’’ Aulagnier believes that in trying decathect her
child, the mother has ‘‘roboticized’’ her relationship
with him. This is reflected in the leitmotiv of Philippe’s
delusions: ‘‘We are all robots.’’ He has been forbidden,
he says, to see his birth. This evokes the prohibition
against conceptualizing the mother’s desire with
regard to that birth. ‘‘My father has always been a
brother to me,’’ says Philippe. In other words, the
paternal function has always been a blank in his
history.
The act of eating a San Pedro cactus (Trichocereus
pachanoi), which marks Philippe’s entry into a delusional episode, causes him to meet ‘‘the unspeakable.’’
His fantasy is to incorporate ‘‘a power close to that of
God,’’ but this idea opens the way to a characteristic
primal metabolization. He acts out a pictogram: He
incorporates and ‘‘autolyzes’’ the stone maternal
breast, giver of indistinguishable ‘‘life-death’’; ‘‘his
bones and his thoughts’’ disintegrate, and he selfdestructs and destroys the forbidden core that is the
cactus/breast. The autolysis actualizes the decathexis
that will satisfy both his mother’s desire, and his own.
Odette, for her part, substitutes ‘‘bodily perceptions’’ for what she should have borrowed from her
mother’s discourse to construct the first paragraphs of
her history. For lack of an ear capable of hearing her
mother’s words, her I was unable to metabolize into
ideational representations those representatives of the
suffering body that the psyche then metabolized
instead into pictograms and fantasies. Her delusional
causality is an attempt to fill the void created by the
discourse of the spokesperson. To reconstruct her history and account for the events that have marked her,
Odette invokes a single causal factor, ‘‘the abjection of
the father’’—a father whose powers of maleficent
desire she idealizes. She then constructs an analytic
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theory for herself, apparently ‘‘the equivalent of a
split-up delusional theory’’ that is compatible with the
discourse of her environment.
In the second part of her book, Aulagnier proposes
a theoretical outline of the process of identification.
She expands and refines the concept of potentiality as
elaborated in her earlier works. While psychotic potentiality is characterized by the conflict between the
‘‘Identifying I’’ and the ‘‘Identified I,’’ neurotic potentiality involves the relationship between the I and its
ideals; polymorphous potentiality, when it becomes
manifest, leads to symptoms such as love relations or
alienating relations, certain forms of somatization,
and the like. In this theoretical scheme, T0 corresponds to the birth of the infant, T1 to the emergence
of the I, and T2 to the conclusive moment when the I
makes a compromise with reality; this compromise
determines the type of potentiality. Potentiality is thus
a specific organization that under certain circumstances moves from the potential to the manifest.
Faced by an idea that is ‘‘unthinkable and impossible to take on,’’ and that is evoked by a particular
book, Philippe eats the cactus and plunges into a delusional state. Similarly, the revelation of ‘‘the magic of
analytic knowledge about desire’’ confronts Odette
with an unbearable discovery, the analyst becoming
for her an idealized, all-powerful mother. Aulagnier
uses the expression ‘‘encounter effect’’ to refer to this
type of catalyzing cause that prompts a conflict of
identification to pass from the potential to the manifest state.
By way of conclusion, Aulagnier shows how George
Orwell’s fictional world in 1984 prefigures her theories
of repression and of the process of identification.
What Orwell calls ‘‘doublethink’’ is meant to produce
a kind of repression within the subject that destroys
ideas, consuming them utterly. The objective is to strip
the I of all confidence in its own thinking. The subject
is alienated, for he has internalized the mechanism of
repression, but it is Big Brother who decides what the
repressed object is. This mutilation serves to provide
an idealized figure for repression in the psychotic
patient: its function is to prevent the revealing of nonrepressed elements active in the mother’s psyche. It
thus serves an entity that is external to the subject,
whereas in neurosis repression is imposed by the I’s
own thinking. The neurotic forbids him- or herself to
desire the forbidden, but the psychotic suffers an
external prohibition on the thinking of non-repressed
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thoughts. The I’s power of thinking is inhibited in neurosis, whereas in psychosis it is damaged.
In short, Aulagnier’s hypothesis of a ternary system
of representational activity, and the notion of potentiality, profoundly transform and reinvigorate the Freudian understanding of possible mental organizations.
GHYSLAIN CHARRON
See also: Aulagnier-Spairani, Piera; Autohistorization;
I; Identificatory project; Schizophrenia.
Source Citation
Aulagnier, Piera. (1984). L’Apprenti-historien et le Maı̂tresorcier. Du discours identifiant au discours délirant. (The
apprentice historian and the master sorcerer: From the discourse of identification to the discourse of delusion).
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Bibliography
Aulagnier, Piera. (2001). The violence of interpretation: From
pictogram to sttatement. (Alan Sheridan, Trans.). East Sussex, Philadelphia: Brunner/Routledge. (Original work published 1975)
———. (1979). Les destins du plaisir. Aliénation, amour, passion. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
ARCHAIC
Archaic is the term used in psychoanalysis to refer to
an aspect of the psyche that was organized in the distant past and which contrasts with a new or more
evolved organization. The term is used in two specific
senses. For Freud the term served essentially to refer to
a phylogenetic heritage that involved a way of thinking
(1933a [1932]), the requirement of a superego
(1923b), or an anxiety associated directly with a prehistoric reality. Freud’s theoretical advances did not
affect the nature of the archaic understood in this
sense. For Melanie Klein the archaic increasingly refers
to that which is not reworked by the development of
the depressive position, becoming a synonym of sorts
for the pregenital.
These two meanings of the archaic do not always
intersect. Freud saw in our phylogenetic heritage
something underlying the id, a kind of strata of the
psyche whose influence on the remainder of the psyche
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ARCHAIC MOTHER
was only partial or nonexistent. Through the superego,
the ego draws on the experiences of the past stored
in the id (1923b). But as far as the magical functions
of thinking were concerned, Freud considered the
resurgence of an ancient mode of communication
such as telepathy, which operated in communities of
insects and which can still be actualized in crowds
(1933a [1932]). One form of ‘‘archaic’’ thinking,
Freud claimed, can still be found in dreams, specifically their symbolism. He also associated a number of
infantile desires, including oedipal desires, with a
‘‘phylogenetic heritage.’’ In 1925 Freud noted that the
horror of incest and the reality of castration imposed
by a leader on his rivals date back to prehistoric times
(1925j).
This concept of the archaic is not found in Melanie
Klein, for whom the term was far more important
than it was for Freud. For Klein the term is always
associated with ontogenesis. As Klein’s work reached
its maturity, the term came to refer to the anxieties
and defenses that crystallized during the formation of
the paranoid–schizoid position (1946). The archaic is
therefore contrasted with what it is not: the binding
associated with the constitution of the depressive
position.
What place can be given to the archaic within a conception of psychic life in which everything is a reworking of something else? Doesn’t the activity of deferred
action bar access to those so-called archaic strata of
the psyche? This brings up the question of the association between the archaic and the actual or present.
André Green (1982) situates the problem of the observation of the archaic within this context. This observation can only be illusory because the archaic always
appears to us in a transformed state. Whether or not
this involves regression, ‘‘what is brought to the surface is not the faithful record of a prehistory,’’ wrote
Green. Putting aside the wish to lift the veil on certain
occasions, as Freud suggested with his metaphor of
archeological excavations that would allow us to discover buried strata of psychic life, wouldn’t it be possible to assign to the archaic an influence ranging from
what is most proximate to what is untouchable by
definition, for in order to reach it we would have to
return to the zero point of time and space, to what is
most distant? This would revitalize the interest in
direct observation of the infant, which is currently
burdened with the reputation of being an observation
of the archaic.
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Jean-Michel Petot (1982), in his study of the archaic
in the work of Melanie Klein, warns of the confusion
between the ‘‘deep’’ and the archaic. For regressing to
an archaic state that would otherwise need to be
addressed in actuality is equivalent to creating a field
of psychic depth that only the work of mourning associated with the depressive position can be used to bind
and, consequently, put in perspective. In this sense the
archaic could be said to be contemporaneous with
temporal creation itself.
CLÉOPÂTRE ATHANASSIOU-POPESCO
See also: Archaic mother; Idealizing transference; Identification; Myth of origins; Nonverbal communication;
Operational thinking; Phylogenetic Fantasy, A: Overview
of the Transference Neuroses; Pictogram; Prehistory; Primal repression; Primitive; Projection and ‘‘participation
mystique’’ (analytic psychology); Self-object; Telepathy;
Totem and Taboo.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 12–59.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 5–182.
Green, André. (1982). Après-coup, l’archaı̈que. Nouvelle
revue de psychanalyse. 26, 197.
Klein, Melanie. (1975). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. In The writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. III, 1946–1963,
pp. 1–24). London: Hogarth Press, (Reprinted from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 27 (1975), 99–110.)
Petot, Jean–Michel. (1982). L’archaı̈que et le profond dans la
pensée de Melanie Klein. Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse
26, pp. 253–272.
ARCHAIC MOTHER
In the Kleinian constellation over which she presides,
the archaic mother is the fantasy mother of the first
few months of the infant’s life—the paranoid-schizoid
phase. Omnipotent and phallic, she fulfills and
frustrates in equally radical measure. She is the key
figure in the early stages of the Oedipus complex, and
her breast, an object split into a good, nourishing
breast and a bad persecutory one, is her generic attribute. It is the target of the ambivalent libidinal and
sadistic oral drives of the infant in search of unlimited
satisfaction, a satisfaction that, inevitably, will never be
achieved.
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ARCHAIC MOTHER
Beyond such epistemological considerations, the
idea of the archaic mother points up a persistent psychoanalytical paradox: the fact that we mourn for
origins that are inaccessible yet somehow open to retroactive attempts to reveal them. This figure embodies
an archaism with the extraordinary ability to ‘‘conjure
up the beginning while simultaneously revealing its
absence’’ (Assoun, 1982). The primal mother escapes
our grasp yet holds us in thrall.
The notion of the archaic is a semantic point of
convergence for several Freudian concepts. It is closely
related, for one thing, to the ‘‘primal’’—to all those
terms in Freud’s writings that begin with the prefix
‘‘ur-’’: Urszene (the primal scene), Urphantasien (primal fantasy), Urverdrängung (primal repression),
Urvater (primal father). And it is akin to the stratigraphical and archaeological metaphors of which Freud
was so fond.
Melanie Klein used the adjective ‘‘archaic’’ only
once, but made frequent use of ‘‘früh’’ or ‘‘early’’
(Petot, 1982). The idea of the archaic mother was
introduced in connection with Klein’s theses on the
early stages of the Oedipus complex in boys and girls
(1928). Apropos of the early oral stage of the oedipal
conflict, Klein described a ‘‘paranoid-schizoid position’’ characterized by the relationship to partobjects, by the splitting of the ego (an ego lacking in
maturity) and of the object, by persecutory anxiety,
and by schizoid mechanisms. The breast of the
archaic mother was a structuring factor here. Frustrated in their attempts to attain that breast, both
girls and boys were prompted to abandon the quest
and embrace the wish for oral satisfaction by means
of the father’s penis. Introjection of the good and
bad breast of the good and bad mother was thus
replaced by introjection of the good and bad penis of
the good and bad father. The parents became the
first models not only for internal protective and
helpful figures but also for internal vengeful and persecutory ones; these first identifications by the ego
constituted the foundations of the superego. Some of
the superego’s most important traits, both its loving/
protective and its destructive/devouring sides, were
derived from the earliest identifications with the
mother.
Klein’s followers developed these ideas, notably that of
projective identification in infants (Bion, 1962; Meltzer,
1992); their exploration of childhood psychoses
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went in the same direction (Tustin, 1972; Meltzer,
1975).
The archaic mother is part of a long mythological
tradition stemming from the fecund and savage Earth
Mother of ancient Greek cosmogony. In psychoanalysis the theme is discernible, for example, in the sea
‘‘abandoned in primeval times’’ of Ferenczi’s Thalassa
(1924, p. 52), in Freud’s phylogenetic explanation of
primal fantasies (1915f, p. 269 and n.), or in the ‘‘biological bedrock’’ of the ‘‘repudiation of femininity’’
(Freud, 1937c, pp. 250–52).
If the ‘‘archaic’’ is forever generating meaning in the
unconscious without ever manifesting itself as a perceptible cause, it is the task of metapsychological speculation to offer an account of this phenomenon. The
aforementioned psychoanalytical ‘‘mythologies’’ may
indeed be said to respond to an ‘‘epistemic imperative’’
(Assoun, 1982). At the same time, however, any psychoanalytical view of the archaic, which is inseparable
from the discussion of ‘‘deferred action’’ (q.v.), can
achieve legitimacy only by eschewing the naı̈vety of the
Freudian archaeological metaphor: the ‘‘archaic
mother’’ of an excavated past does not amount to a
restoration of the original.
Recently the analysis of borderline conditions has
highlighted the notion of an analyst who does not
represent the mother but instead is the omnipotent
mother. This figure is the object of a transference that
is ‘‘both archaic and a defense against the archaic’’
(Green, 1982).
At present, clinical work on the psychoanalysis of
origins has an important part to play in the study of
parenthood. In the contexts of infertility, perinatal
psychopathology, or transgenerational mental transmission, the consideration of the structural outcome
of parental conflict with the archaic (grand-) mother
has given this concept a new lease on life (Bydlowski,
1997).
SYLVAIN MISSONNIER
See also: Breast, good/bad object; Oedipus complex,
early; Paranoid-schizoid position; Real, Imaginary, and
Symbolic father; "Vagina dentata," fantasy of.
Bibliography
Assoun, Paul Laurent. (1982). L’archaı̈que chez Freud: entre
Logos et Anankè. Nouvell revue de psychanalyse, 26, 11–44.
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THE
METAPHOR
OF
Bydlowski, Monique. (1997). La dette de vie : itinéraire psychanalytique de la maternité. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France.
Bion, Wilfred R. (1967). A theory of thinking. In Second
thoughts. London: Heinemann. (Reprinted from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 43, (1962) 4–5.)
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1968). Thalassa: A theory of genitality.
(Henry Alden Bunker, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.
(Original work published 1924)
Freud, Sigmund. (1915f). A case of paranoia running counter to the psycho-analytic theory of the disease. SE, 14:
261–272.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 209–253.
Green, André. (1982). Après-coup, l’archaı̈que. Nouvelle
revue de psychanalyse,26, 195–216.
Klein, Melanie. (1975). Early stages of the Oedipus conflict.
In Love, guilt and reparation and other works, 1921–1945.
London: Hogarth/Institute of Psycho-Analysis. (Reprinted
from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 9, (1928)
167–180.)
Meltzer, Donald. (1975). Adhesive identification. Contemporary Psycho-Analysis, 11, 289–310.
———. (1992). The claustrum. An investigation of claustrophobic phenomena. Karnac Books.
Petot, Jean-Michel. (1982). L’archaı̈que et le profond dans la
pensée de Melanie Klein. Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse,
26.
Tustin, Frances. (1972). Autism and childhood psychosis.
London: Science House.
ARCHEOLOGY, THE METAPHOR OF
Archeology, the study of artifacts from the past, is relevant to psychoanalysis in the sense that an analogy can
be established between the search for a collective past
and the search for an individual past. Freud himself
uses the metaphor of archeology in his Delusions and
Dreams in Jensen’s ‘‘Gradiva’’ (1907a). His description
of the structure of hysteria as a building of several
dimensions, containing at least three strata (‘‘The Psychotherapy of Hysteria’’ in Studies on Hysteria, 1895d),
even though it refers to an archival case, also evokes
the work of the archeologist: The order of discovery is
reversed, with the most primal matter being the most
deeply buried (‘‘Saxa loquuntur,’’ 1896c).
Freud was very interested in archeological research
(Schliemann’s excavation of Troy, for example) and
11 4
the collected artifacts, many of which decorated his
office and which he frequently showed to his patients
(The Rat Man, 1909d) as signs of the preservation of
traces of a past that had become unconscious. More
profoundly, we find that the methods of the archeological dig and those of psychoanalytical investigation
have followed a similar evolution, consisting in shifting the focus of interest from a privileged object that
will be excavated to a gradual discovery of the terrain
(stratigraphic method), through which it is possible to
trace the thread of history back to its origins step by
step. Interest in these vestiges, which constitute ‘‘a history without a text’’ (André Leroi-Gourhan), intersects the work of reconstruction that takes place during analysis (Freud, 1937c). Similarly, the interest in a
missing element (doubt in the dream, foreclosed elements in psychosis) evokes this preservation-throughabsence that archeologists experience in what they call
‘‘ghost sites’’ (Mijolla-Mellor, 1993).
The archeological metaphor is present throughout
Freud’s work (1911f) and underlines the similarity with
the work of therapy as well as the differences, especially
since the working conditions of the psychoanalyst, and
his or her ability to bring back old emotions through
transference, are better than those of the archeologist.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Archaic; Archaic mother; Model; Memories.
Bibliography
Bernfeld-Cassirer, Suzanne. (1951, June). Freud and archaeology. American Imago, VIII, 107–128.
Flem, Lydia. (1982). L’archéologie chez Freud : destin d’une
passion et d’une métaphore. Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, 26, pp. 71–94
Freud, Sigmund. (1896c). The aetiology of hysteria. SE, 3:
186–221
———. (1907a [1906]). Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s
‘‘Gradiva.’’ SE, 9: 1–95.
———. (1909d). Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis.
SE, 10: 151–318.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 209–253.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies in hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1993). Le ‘‘bon droit’’ du criminel. Topique, 52, 141–161.
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ARCHIVES
ARCHETYPE (ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY)
The scientific hypothesis of the archetype was proposed by Jung as an innate formal element that structures the psyche at its most basic levels. In itself
psychoid and therefore anchored in reality beyond the
psyche (in ‘‘spirit’’ or nous, the non-biological mind),
the archetype is responsible for coordinating and organizing the psyche’s homeostatic balance and its programs for development and maturation. Essentially
there is one master archetype, the self, which defines
the skeletal form of human wholeness.
The archetype itself is not available directly to
experience—only its images and created patterns can
become manifest and subject to experience by the psyche. These archetypal images are potentially unlimited
in number and variety. They are embedded in the universal patterns of myth, in religious symbols and ideas,
and in numinous experiences; they are also often
represented in symbolic dreams and in altered states of
consciousness. Within the psyche, archetypal images
are linked to the (five) instinct groups, giving them
direction and potential meaning. Like the archetype,
the instincts are psychoid and rooted in reality beyond
the psyche itself (in the physiological base of the psyche, the body). Archetypal images and instinctual
impulses, united within the psyche, together make up
the collective unconscious, the primordial psychosomatic basis of all psychic functioning.
Jung first used the term ‘‘archetype’’ in 1919. This
was preceded by several years of speculation on primordial images and impersonal dominants. The
implications of the archetypal hypothesis were developed by Jung himself and by his many students over
subsequent decades in numerous case studies and
investigations of myth, religion, and esoteric practices,
especially alchemy. As the field of analytical psychology has grown and developed, the notion of the archetype and the role of archetypal images in psychological
functioning and development have assumed a central
role and have become the most distinctive feature of
this school of psychoanalysis. Archetypal psychology,
led by James Hillman, is a later offshoot of analytical
psychology.
Jung himself found important connections between
archetypal theory and the work of such ethologists as
Konrad Lorenz who studied innate patterns of animal
behavior and discovered innate releasing mechanisms.
There are also parallels to be drawn between archetypal
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patterns and the innate mental schemas described in
cognitive psychology. Recent findings of innate human
patterns in neuropsychiatry and sociobiology also suggest confirmation of the hypothesis of the archetype.
Some leading thinkers in analytical psychology have
found close similarities between the theory of archetypal images and Kleinian notions of unconscious
phantasy.
Criticisms of the archetypal hypothesis have come
from many quarters. As an essentialist position, it has
drawn fire from social constructionists who argue that
human nature is infinitely malleable and defined more
importantly by social and material conditions than by
innate propensities. It has also drawn criticism from
clinicians for whom the personal conflicts and traumas
inflicted in childhood define the universe of therapeutic concern. For Jung and his adherents, however, the
archetype has been seen as the source of healing and as
the guide to potential wholeness of the individual.
MURRAY STEIN
See also: Amplification (analytical psychology); AnimusAnima (analytical psychology); Imago; Mother goddess;
Numinous (analytical psychology); Self (analytical
psychology); Symbolization, process of; Synchronicity
(analytical psychology); Transference/counter-transference
(analytical psychology).
Bibliography
Jung, Carl G. (1935b [1954]). Archetypes of the collective
unconscious. Coll. Works (Vol. IX, Part I). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Neumann, Erich. (1955). The great mother: An analysis of the
archetype. London: Routledge.
Stein, Murray. (1996). Practicing wholeness. New York:
Continuum.
Stevens, Anthony. (1982). Archetypes: A natural history of the
self. London: Routledge.
ARCHIVES DE PSYCHOLOGIE, LES
Les archives de psychologie was founded in 1902 by
Théodore Flournoy and Édouard Claparède. Though
the review was eclectic and devoted itself to all aspects
of psychology, principal areas of interest were psychic
phenomena, the psychology of normal and abnormal
children, and psychopathology.
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Théodore Flournoy was then a professor of experimental psychology in the Department of Science at the
University of Geneva. He was interested in obscure
phenomena disdained by official science: genius, mysticism, metapsychic phenomena. Édouard Claparède,
his assistant, had an interest in psychopedagogics.
From the beginning of the century until World
War I, the review played a pioneering role in spreading
an awareness of psychoanalysis throughout Frenchspeaking countries. Psychoanalytic publications in
German were regularly printed and analyzed. Many original articles were directly related to Freudian theory,
including the work of Alphonse Maeder, Paul Menzerath, Pierre Bovet (then codirector of the Institut
Jean-Jacques Rousseau), Paul Ladame, and Carl Gustav
Jung. After Freud and Jung split in 1913, the review
refused to take a stance between the two camps.
Upon the death of Théodore Flournoy in 1920, the
review obtained the help of Jean Piaget, who reinforced the focus on child psychology and applied psychology. After 1930 the review devoted almost no
space to psychoanalysis.
ANNICK OHAYON
See also: Claparède, Édouard; Flournoy, Théodore;
Piaget, Jean.
Bibliography
Bovet, Pierre. (1913). Un rêve expliqué. Archives de psychologie, 13, 380–383.
Maeder, Alphonse. (1907). Essai d’interprétation de quelques rêves. Archives de psychologie, 6, 354–375.
Menzerath, Paul. (1912). Contribution à la psycho-analyse.
Archives de psychologie, 12, 372–389.
Piaget, Jean. (1923). La pensée symbolique et la pensée de
l’enfant. Archives de psychologie, 18 (72), 273–304.
ARGENTINA
Argentina is unlike other Latin American countries in
that its population is in large part the result of the massive European immigration that took place beginning
in the late nineteenth century. Between the last decades
of that century and with the global economic crisis of
1930, the country experienced increased prosperity.
During that interval, the cultural climate was infused
with a number of avant-garde intellectual currents.
11 6
Psychoanalysis in Argentina can be broken down
into five periods: 1) the pre-institutional period, 2) the
pioneer period, 3) the institutional period, 4) the crisis
of the seventies, and 5) the present.
After 1922, and during the pre-institutional period,
Spanish translations of the first volumes of Freud’s
complete works began to appear in Argentina,
although translations in other languages were known.
As early as 1910, however, Freud’s ideas about infantile
sexuality, free association, and psychoanalysis had
been presented in Buenos Aires by the Chilean doctor
Germán Greve (quoted by Freud in The History of the
Psychoanalytic Movement) during the International
Congress of Medicine and Hygiene, and the Peruvian
Honorio Delgado had published articles on psychoanalysis in several prestigious medical journals.
In 1922 Enrique Mouchet, who had been professor
of experimental psychology and physiology for two
decades in the Department of Philosophy and Literature at the University of Buenos Aires, made psychoanalysis part of his syllabus, although he was critical of
it. In 1923 the Spanish doctor Gonzalo Lafora gave a
number of talks on psychoanalysis at the school of
medicine. In February 1930, two recognized psychiatrists left for Vienna to visit Freud: Gregorio Bermann
and Nerio Rojas, who would later publish a report of
his meeting in the widely circulated daily La Nación.
During the thirties, inexpensive editions of Stefan
Zweig’s biography of Freud were printed, as well as a
ten-volume series of popularizations of Freud entitled,
Freud Made Easy, carelessly edited (pseudonymously)
and containing long passages from the Spanish translation of Freud’s works.
The journal Critica regularly published a column
on psychoanalysis devoted to the interpretation of
dreams. In 1936 one of the most serious literary
reviews in the country, Sur, paid homage to Freud; the
review Psicoterapia also devoted an issue to the founder of psychoanalysis. A group of writers invited Freud
to move to Argentina. Jorge Thenon, a self-taught psychoanalyst, received a letter from Freud, to whom he
had sent his thesis, ‘‘Psicoterapia comparada y psicogénesis’’ [Comparative Psychotherapy and Psychogenesis], in which Freud encouraged him to continue his
work for future publication in an international psychoanalytic review. The letter appeared in La Semana
médica in 1933.
In 1938 the arrival of the Hungarian psychologist Béla
Székely in Argentina helped to spread psychoanalytic
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ideas along with the use of tests, especially Rorschach
tests. During that same decade, Enrique Pichon-Rivière and Arnaldo Rascovsky discovered Freud’s work;
they devoted themselves to its study and its clinical
application. Pichon-Rivière formed a working group
with Arminda and Frederico Aberastury; Rascovsky,
with his wife Matilde Wencelblat, Luisa Gambier (later
Luisa Alvarez de Toledo), Simon Wencelblat, Teodoro
Shlossberg, Flora Scolni, Alberto Tallaferro, and Guillermo Ferrari Hardoy.
In 1939, two psychoanalysts from Europe, the Argentine Celes Cárcamo, member of the Paris Psychoanalytic
Society, and the Spaniard Angel Garma, member of the
German Psychoanalytic Association, joined Rascovksy’s
and Pichon-Rivière’s groups. Celes Cárcamo had been a
friend of Pichon-Rivière for years. Angel Garma, who
had wanted to leave Spain for Argentina, had met
Cárcamo in Paris. A decision was made to found a
psychoanalytic association as soon as a sufficient number of analysts could be brought together. Luisa Alvarez
de Toledo, Luis Rascovsky, Guillermo Ferrari Hardoy,
and Alberto Tallaferro began analysis with Cárcamo,
while Arnaldo Rascovsky, Enrique Pichon-Rivière, and
Arminda Aberastury started with Garma. The patients
who were analyzed by Cárcamo were supervised by
Garma and vice versa.
On December 15, 1942, Cárcamo, Garma, Ferrari
Hardoy, Pichon-Rivière, Rascovsky, and Marie Langer
founded the Asociación Psicoanalı́tica Argentina
(APA), which marked the debut of the institutional
period. Marie Glas de Langer, who had sought refuge
in Uruguay in 1938, settled in Buenos Aires in 1942.
Analyzed by Richard Sterba, she had been trained at
the Vienna Institute of Psychoanalysis but, to complete
her clinical work, she underwent a control analysis
with Celes Cárcamo. Shortly after it was founded, the
association received the provisional approval of Ernest
Jones, then president of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). The APA was recognized as a
member society of the IPA at the Zurich Congress, in
August 1949.
In July 1943, the first issue of the Revista de psicoanálisis appeared, and that same year the publisher Biblioteca de Psicoanálisis went into operation. This
began a process of rapid expansion of the discipline
both inside and outside Argentina. Therapists from
throughout Latin America arrived eager for training,
there were many foreign visitors, and Argentinian
analysts traveled to present their work in other
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countries throughout the Americas and Europe. In
1953, the association had more than 68 members in all
categories.
Angel Garma, who was analyzed by Theodor Reik
and undertook his control analysis with Otto Fenichel,
had an interest in a number of fields and in all of them
he left his personal mark. He discussed Freud’s theory
of hallucinations in 1931, generalized the hypothesis
of the traumatic genesis of dreams, and promoted psychoanalytic research and treatment in the field of psychosomatic disturbances. Celes Cárcamo was analyzed
by Paul Schiff and had his control analysis with
Rudolph Loewenstein and Charles Odier. He was
interested in philosophy, religion, art, and especially
therapy, and through his personal prestige and integrity helped introduce psychoanalysis to different social
and professional milieus. During his early years, his
writings primarily focused on psychoanalytic technique and psychosomatics.
The analysis of psychosis became a focus of interest
through the impetus of Enrique Pichon-Rivière, along
with Arnaldo Rascovsky’s research on mania. PichonRivière emphasized the ‘‘single illness’’ theory and proposed a psychopathology that centered on a central
pathogenic kernel or ‘‘fundamental depressive situation.’’ Rascovsky, in his work on fetal psychism, introduced the hypothesis of a prenatal maniacal position,
prior to the introduction of the paranoid-schizoid
position by Melanie Klein.
Arminda Aberastury and Elisabeth Goode de
Garma specialized in the psychoanalysis of children
and adolescents, basing their work on the theoretical
contributions of Melanie Klein. Increasing demand
and theoretical interest in this type of therapy helped
stimulate the growth of group psychoanalysis. The
work of Marie Langer, León Grinberg, and Emilio
Rodrigué stands out in this field. The personality and
the ideas of these pioneers affected the tenor of their
theoretical work. There was a strong Freudian influence, of course, but Otto Fenichel, Hermann Nunberg,
Wilhelm Reich, Paul Federn, and Melanie Klein were
read as well.
Other important work was done by Marie Langer on
femininity and by Luisa Alvarez de Toledo in her
research on ‘‘association’’ and ‘‘interpretation,’’ which
contributed to the interest in language, a subject later
taken up by David Liberman. Heinrich Racker
made significant contributions to the study of the
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instrumental value of countertransference (concomitant with the work of Paula Heimann in Great Britain).
The tentative return to democracy in 1958, which
coincided with one of the most brilliant moments in
the contemporary history of the University of Buenos
Aires, provided a favorable framework for the activity
of new generations of psychoanalysts. It was during
this period that there arose the personalities and ideas
that would, to a large extent, define the identify of
what came to be known as the ‘‘Argentinian school.’’
Alongside the work of Rascovsky, Garma, Pichon-Rivière, and Racker, the names of León and Rebeca Grinberg, Willy and Madeleine Baranger, Jorge Mom, Jorge
Garcı́a Badaracco, Mauricio Abadi, Edgardo Rolla,
Fidias Cesio, José Bleger, David Liberman, Joel Zac,
Horacio Etchegoyen, Salomón Resnik, Luis Chiozza,
Isidoro Berenstein, and many others gained local and
international recognition.
The dominant theoretical trends revolved around
English authors, primarily Melanie Klein and her closest collaborators: Paula Heimann, Hanna Segal, Susan
Isaacs, and later Donald Meltzer, Wilfred Bion, and
Herbert Rosenfeld. When Klein’s influence reached
its peak, there were four dominant trends: dogmatic
Kleinians, critical Kleinians (Baranger), those who
deepened and extended her work (Grinberg, Bleger,
Liberman, Etchegoyen, Zac), and those who responded to her theories with a refreshing (non-Lacanian)
return to Freud.
During this period, the first non-IPA schools of psychoanalysis appeared, founded by members of the APA,
to meet the growing demand for training and the limited opportunities for admission provided by the Association. Another important event that occurred at this
time was the introduction of psychoanalysis in hospitals
throughout Argentina. Also, during this ten-year period, a school of psychology was created in Buenos Aires.
Psychoanalysis played a major role in the curriculum
and a number of qualified psychoanalysts were on the
staff. The school produced a large number of clinical
psychologists. After 1986 they were able to join the APA
once it removed the restriction that required practitioners of psychotherapy to be medical doctors.
The seventies were a period of increased tension.
Changes around the world had repercussions in the
country generally and on the psychoanalytic movement in particular. Passionate debates within the
psychoanalytic community prevented any kind of consistent intellectual progress. During this confused
11 8
period, a number of well-known analysts (Marie Langer, Diego and Gilou Garcı́a Reynose, among others)
left the APA and founded the Plataforma and Documento movements. Other forms of psychotherapy
competed for the market of available patients, whose
numbers continued to increase rapidly. This was
somewhat muted by the economic inflation and the
increasing social and individual malaise. Antagonisms
among psychoanalysts concerning institutional attitudes and psychoanalytic training grew steadily, culminating in the schism that would divide the Argentine
Psychoanalytic Association and give birth, in 1977, to
the Asociación Psicoanalı́tica de Buenos Aires
(APDEBA), officially recognized the same year by the
IPA during its Congress in Jerusalem.
It was at this time that Jacques Lacan’s ideas entered
the sphere of Argentinian psychoanalysis. These ideas
rallied legions of partisans, not only because of their
inherent interest but because of the anti-institutional
orientation that Lacan embodied within the range of
the then current warring ideological positions. Lacan’s
followers were soon clamoring for positions in hospitals, universities, and on the pages of the leading
reviews. The particular language used by Lacanians
made it difficult to confront them or even exchange
ideas on the basis of an alternate terminology, which
effectively curtailed the traditional intellectual pluralism that had been the norm within psychoanalytic
organizations.
At the time there were five psychoanalytic institutions affiliated with the IPA: two in Buenos Aires (APA
and APDEBA) and three in the cities of Mendoza,
Córdoba, and Rosario. Unlike the previous periods,
psychoanalysis now had to struggle for its identity and
avoid being diluted in a complex and confusing
‘‘world of psych.’’ A number of non-IPA teaching facilities were established, but the level of teaching was
inconsistent. In spite of the changing, and unfavorable,
cultural context, which contrasted sharply with the
climate of the previous periods, the output of the
majority of psychoanalysts was considerable, the local
associations remained consistently productive, with an
abundance of publications of high quality, and Lacanian organizations were highly active, demonstrating
the persistent vitality of the discipline in the country.
Psychoanalysis in Argentina was influenced by global
trends. Willy Baranger, initially influenced by the ideas
of Enrique Pichon-Rivière, engaged in a critical examination of key concepts in psychoanalysis, from Melanie
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A R L O W , J A C O B (1912 –2 004)
Klein to Jacques Lacan. Because of the lucidity of his
approach, Baranger’s work became a key focus of psychoanalytic thought in Argentina, and has remained
valid for the second generation of practitioners.
An indigenous line of thought focused on method
soon developed in Argentina. It was based on the technical work of Heinrich Racker and its greatest representative was Horacio Etchegoyen, who perfected it
through his many innovative contributions to the theory of psychoanalytic technique and his marked interest in the epistemological aspects of the discipline.
Another local current came into prominence during
the eighties and favored a diversification of practice in
the psychoanalytic approach to group, family, and
couples therapy. There was considerable interest in the
social aspects of psychoanalysis, which led to the
development of more committed positions among
psychoanalysts and a psychoanalytic approach to
social phenomena of violence. Developments in the
field of psychosis, the diversification of applied psychoanalysis, and work in the field of psychosomatics
reflect the range of contributions of contemporary
psychoanalysis in Argentina.
ROBERTO DORIA-MEDINA JR.
SAMUEL ARBISER
MOISÉS KIJAK
Bibliography
Aberastury, Arminda, et al. (1967). Historia enseñanza y ejercicio legal del psicoanálisis. Buenos Aires: Omeba.
Cucurullo, Antonio, et al. (1982). La psychanalyse en Argentine. In Roland Jaccard (ed.), Histoire de la psychanalyse,
vol. II: 395–444. Paris: Hachette.
Mom, Jorge (1982). Asociación psicoanalı́tica argentina
1942–1982. Buenos Aires: A.P.A.
Vezzetti, Hugo (1996). Aventuras de Freud en el paı̀s de los
argentinos. Buenos Aires: Paidós.
Wender, Leonardo, et al. (1992). Argentina. In Peter Kutter
(Ed.), Psychoanalysis international, a guide to psychoanalysis throughout the world (vol. 2). Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt:
Frommann-Holzboog.
ARLOW, JACOB (1912–2004)
Jacob A. Arlow, American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was born September 3, 1912 in New York, where
he died May 21, 2004.
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The youngest of three children, he was raised in
modest circumstances in Brooklyn, New York. Subject
to frequent childhood illnesses, he spent much time in
reading and reflection. With his encyclopedic knowledge and superb intellectual endowment, he found his
way to Freud’s writings in his adolescence. Graduating
from New York University at the age of twenty, he then
earned his M.D., also from NYU. While in the United
States Public Health Service, training in psychiatry, he
planned his study of psychoanalysis at the New York
Psychoanalytic Institute. He was appointed a training
and supervising analyst soon after his graduation in
1947. In 1960 he was elected president of the American
Psychoanalytic Association and was elected Chairman
of its Board of Professional Standards from 1967–
1969. From 1963 to 1967 he served as treasurer of the
International Psychoanalytic Association.
Jacob Arlow’s teaching, presentations, lectures, seminars, and writing illuminated the different areas of
psychoanalytic theory, technique, and applied analysis.
His teaching was known for its clarity, consistency,
and the force of his ideas. Emphasizing methodology
and the importance of evidence, he advocated the
objective marshaling and organizing of data after careful listening and contemplation. Arlow emphasized
the close correlation of observation and inference with
critical evaluation. His analytic ideas were lucidly
expressed with attention to sound and silence, with
apt metaphor. He regarded metaphor as central to
clinical psychoanalysis. Arlow had an intense interest
in the arts and humanities, and published many relevant psychoanalytic papers. Well versed in Jewish history, he was fluent in biblical Hebrew, a student of the
Bible and its psychoanalytic interpretation.
The scope and depth Arlow achieved in his work
are remarkable. He was the author of more than two
hundred papers and a classic volume on structural theory, co-authored with Dr. Charles Brenner. He is
regarded as one of the architects of American ego psychology, extending the concept of ego functions far
beyond defense as originally formulated. Affects and
moods were not simple drive derivatives, but had
important regulatory functions, already indicated by
Freud in the concept of signal anxiety.
In his later work he demonstrated a growing interest in psychoanalytic developmental theory. He contributed importantly to the psychoanalytic concept
of unconscious fantasy and its clinical application.
For Arlow unconscious fantasy was a compromise
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ARMAND TROUSSEAU CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL
formation, which encompassed elements of both the
internal world and external reality, including identifications with external objects. Unconscious fantasies
could undergo alteration during different developmental phases, which would then effect changes in
symptoms and character. Transference and countertransference could best be understood in terms of their
underlying unconscious fantasies. Arlow’s papers
included significant expositions of myth and the interrelationship of myth and culture. Myth was described
as not only related to infantile unconscious fantasy,
but also as a facilitator of the child’s fitting into the
particular cultural society in which he was reared.
children was first recognized in the wake of the events
of May 1968. We must not forget that prior to this
time, young children were systematically strapped into
their beds except for very limited visiting hours for the
family. Generally speaking, very little attention was
paid to the consequences of physical suffering, separation from the family, and the illness itself. The work of
the pediatricians, psychologists and psychiatrists in
Trousseau hospital—accompanied by important
though less global actions in other French hospitals—
introduced radical reforms in the way children were
received, the quality of their stay and most of all in
terms of consideration for hospitalized children.
Arlow’s original contributions have left a permanent influence and in many respects transformed
North American psychoanalytic theory and technique.
It was indeed in this hospital that the humanization
of pediatrics first blossomed and flourished, before
being given concrete form in official decrees (Bulletin
officiel, 1983, ‘‘Child hospitalization, Ministry for
Social Affairs and National Solidarity, decree no.
83–24 of August 1, 1983’’, special issue no. 83/89b).
Actions such as no longer strapping children into their
beds, opening hospital sections up to parents, designating the first rooms for mothers, training maternity
staff to inform and support parents after the birth of a
handicapped child, the prevention of maltreatment,
and the creation of a school inside the hospital all
served to transform treatment.
HAROLD P. BLUM
See also: Allergy; Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association; Ego psychology; New York Psychoanalytic
Institute; Silence; Therapeutic alliance.
Bibliography
Arlow, Jacob A. (1961). Ego psychology and the study of
mythology. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 9, 371–393.
———. (1962). Conflict, regression and symptom formation. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 44, 12–22.
———. (1969). Unconscious fantasy and disturbances of
conscious experience. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 38, 1–17.
———. (1979). The genesis of interpretation. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, Supplement, 27, 193–
206.
Arlow, Jacob A., and Brenner, Charles (1964). Psychoanalytic
concepts and the structural theory. New York: International
Universities Press.
ARMAND TROUSSEAU CHILDREN’S
HOSPITAL
The Armand Trousseau Children’s Hospital is a symbolic landmark in the treatment of suffering children,
whether from physical or psychical problems. Since
the late 1960s, Trousseau has witnessed the birth and
development of a massive movement to humanize
hospital treatment for children. It is arguable that the
necessity for parental presence close to hospitalized
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Simultaneously, this collaboration between pediatricians, psychologists and psychiatrists gave rise to the
notion of liaison psychiatry and thus the presence in
almost every pediatrics department of psychologists
and child psychiatrists. The metapsychological markers
introduced by psychoanalysts contributed in a specific
and important manner to defining this clinical field.
It is no accident that Françoise Marette Dolto conducted a psychotherapy consultation unit for trainee analysts at Trousseau from 1940 to 1978. Her presence left a
deep and lasting mark, although we must bear in mind—
and this is by no means the least of the paradoxes—that
this consultation unit was never a part of the psychiatric
department: the premises were simply lent to her and she
was never paid by the hospital. All of the movements
initiated at Trousseau to improve the conditions governing
child hospitalization and treatment link up, at least
symbolically, with her combat for the recognition of
children as subjects in their own existence.
FRÉDÉRIQUE JACQUEMAIN
See also: Dolto-Marette, Françoise.
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ARROGANCE
Bibliography
Dolto, Françoise. (1989). Autoportrait d’une psychanalyste.
Paris: Le Seuil.
Lelong, Marcel, and Lebovici, Serge. (1955). Problèmes psychologiques et psychopathologiques posés par l’enfant à
l’hôpital. Archives françaises de pédiatrie, XII (2), 349–367.
Rapoport, Danièle. (1972). Le rôle des psychologues dans les
services de pédiatrie. In Henri Pieron, Ed., Traité de psychologie appliquée (pp. 149–182). Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France.
Soulé, Michel, and Lebovici, Serge. (2003). La connaissance
de l’enfant par la psychanalyse. Paris, Presses Universitaires
de France.
ARPAD. See Little Arpad the boy pecked by a cock
ARROGANCE
In the course of psychoanalyzing psychotic patients,
Bion came across a series of invariant clinical phenomena that seemed to characterize the psychotic personality. In 1958, he presented the paper ‘‘On Arrogance,’’
in which he noted that the psychotic patients he was
analyzing seemed to demonstrate a constantly conjoined yet mysteriously dispersed triad of phenomena:
arrogance, curiosity, and stupidity. Bion was able to formulate that the root cause of this syndromic cluster of
phenomena was ultimately due to a failure on the part
of the psychotic patient to have had at his disposal as
an infant a mother who was able or willing to tolerate
his projective identifications into her. This theme of
the unavailability of a receptive mother to tolerate her
infant’s projective identifications was to be carried
through in two successive papers, ‘‘Attacks on Linking’’
and ‘‘A Theory of Thinking.’’ Ultimately, it became the
pivotal alteration of Klein’s concept of intrapsychic
projective identification into intersubjective projective
identification and the foundation for Bion’s later theories of alpha function and container/contained.
Bion found that, in these patients, the triad of curiosity, stupidity, and arrogance was initiated clinically
by the revival in the analysis of the presence of an
obstructive object, which represented the psychotic
infant’s projection-rejecting (part-object) mother in
addition to her hostility and the infant’s hostility. As
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an internalized hybrid, it becomes a formidable,
archaic superego, which attacks the infant’s normal
curiosity; is arrogant (because of the projective identification of omnipotence); and conveys stupidity
because of its hatred of curiosity. Bion states that
where the life instincts predominate, pride becomes
self-respect, whereas when the death instinct predominates, pride becomes arrogance.
The fact that the triad is mysteriously dispersed, and
therefore unsuspected as belonging together, is evidence,
according to Bion, that a psychotic disaster had taken
place. The analytic process itself, which seeks to learn
more, constitutes the stimulus for curiosity. Bion states,
‘‘The very act of analyzing the patient makes the analyst
an accessory in precipitating regression and turning the
analysis itself into a piece of acting out’’ (Bion, 1967, p.
87). The features that characterize the transference are
references to the appearance of the analyst and the analysand’s identification with him in terms of being ‘‘blind,
stupid, suicidal, curious, and arrogant.’’(Bion, p. 88).
What takes place is a hateful attack by this obstructive
superego against the ego, either in the analysand or, by
projective identification, in the analyst. Thus, either the
analyst and or the analysand are targets of the obstructive
object’s hateful attacks.
Since the aim of analysis is the pursuit of truth
(curiosity), the truth-pursuing analyst is considered to
have a capacity to contain the discarded, split-off portions of the analysand’s psychotic self, including the
obstructive object and its destructive effects. This
capacity becomes the target for envious and hateful
attacks. In short, as Bion summarizes:
What it was that the object could not stand
became clearer . . . where it appeared that in so far as
I, as analyst, was insisting on verbal communication
. . . I was felt to be directly attacking the patient’s
methods of communication [i.e., projective
identification].
Bion further summarizes that in some patients the
denial to the patient of a normal employment of projective identification precipitates a disaster through
the destruction of an important link. Inherent in this
disaster is the establishment of a primitive superego
which denies the use of projective identification.
JAMES S. GROTSTREIN
See also: Alpha function.
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AS IF PERSONALITY
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred R. (1967). On arrogance. In his Second
thoughts (pp. 87–88). London: Heineman.
AS IF PERSONALITY
In 1934, and again in 1942, Helene Deutsch described
what she called the ‘‘as if ’’ (als ob) personality type.
She was referring to individuals who leave other people with an impression of inauthenticity, even though
they seem to enjoy ‘‘normal’’ relations with those
around them and even though they complain of no
disorder. They appear perfectly well adjusted, and are
even capable of a certain warmth, but in a number of
circumstances they betray a lack of emotional depth.
This phenomenon does not correspond to a type of
repression but rather to a ‘‘real loss of object cathexis.
The apparently normal relationship to the world corresponds to a child’s imitativeness and is the expression of identification with the environment, a mimicry
which results in an ostensibly good adaptation to the
world of reality despite the absence of object cathexis’’
(1942, p. 304).Their creations are, on observation, ‘‘a
spasmodic, if skilled, repetition of a prototype without
the slightest trace of originality" (p. 303). ‘‘Another
characteristic of the ’as if ’ personality is that aggressive
tendencies are almost completely masked by passivity,
lending an air of negative goodness, of mild amiability
which, however, is readily convertible to evil" (p. 305).
In the course of psychoanalytic treatment their
behavior may seem to indicate excellent cooperation and
a certain progress, until the analyst realizes that nothing
is actually happening, that the patients have changed
nothing in their lives. Although ‘‘a strong identification
with the analyst can be used as an active and constructive
influence’’ (ibid.), these patients often develop a
‘‘vocation’’ to become psychoanalysts themselves.
Deutsch classified such personalities as ‘‘depersonalized’’ and associated them with schizoid-type behavior, insisting that there was a schizoid psychotic core
behind their pseudo-normality. They were later classed
as ‘‘borderline states’’ presenting ‘‘narcissistic disorders’’ or, according to Heinz Kohut, ‘‘disorders of the
Self.’’ Links have also been established between ‘‘as if ’’
personalities and the notion of a ‘‘false Self ’’ developed
by Donald W. Winnicott (1962/1965), or Phyllis
Greenacre’s studies of ‘‘the imposter’’ (1958). Masud
Khan related the etiology of ‘‘as if ’’ personalities to the
12 2
failure of the superego or the absence of a personal
ideal ego, suggesting that although these subjects give
the impression of being psychopathic or immoral
‘‘they have a very highly organized ego-ideal and all
their attempts are to approximate to its demands"
(1960, p. 435).
In any event, Deutsch’s initial description corresponds to a reality that continues to be confirmed in
clinical experience as in everyday life.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Autistic capsule/nucleus; Blank/nondelusional
psychoses; Depersonalization; Deutsch-Rosenbach, Helene;
Imposter; Lie; Normality.
Bibliography
Deutsch, Helene. (1934). Über einen Typus der Pseudoaffektivität (‘‘Als ob’’). Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 20.
———. (1942). Some forms of emotional disturbance and
their relationship to schizophrenia. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 11.
Greenacre, Phyllis. (1958). The impostor. Psychoanalytic
Quarterly, 27 (3), 359–382.
Khan, Masud. (1960). Clinical aspects of the schizoid personality: Affects and technique. International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 41, 430–437.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1965). Ego distortion in terms of
true and false Self. In The maturational processes and the
facilitating environment (pp. 140–152). London: Hogarth
and the Institute for Psycho-Analysis. (Original work published 1962)
ASSOCIATION PSYCHANALYTIQUE DE
FRANCE
The Association psychanalytique de France (APF)
was created in 1964 as a result of dissension within
the Société française de psychanalyse (SFP) over the
training of future psychoanalysts and the recognition
of the APF by the International Psychoanalytic Association. Two factions evolved within the association.
One of them, which became a majority in the SFP in
November 1963, was led by Daniel Lagache, Juliette
and Georges Favez, Wladimir Granoff, Didier
Anzieu, and René Pujol, along with the five sponsors
of the July 1963 motion (Jean-Louis Lang, Jean
Laplanche, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Victor Smirnoff,
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and Daniel Widlöcher). The group was recognized by the
International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) as the
only ‘‘French Study Group.’’ On June 9, 1964, the association filed its bylaws, and was, after the dissolution of the
SFP in January 1965, recognized as a member society of
the IPA. It then had ten accredited members, 18 associates,
and about 30 students. In December 1999, in addition to a
guest member and eleven honorary members, there were
34 accredited members, 27 members, and more than 180
trainee analysts, including ten who would soon be eligible for membership.
The association’s general orientation was described
in two talks given by Daniel Lagache in 1964 and 1965,
and again by Victor Smirnoff in 1977. The association’s
objectives can be found in the policy statements published each year in Documents et Débats, the association’s journal. These can be summarized as: freedom of
expression in scientific discourse without concern for
any narrowly construed form of orthodoxy, a rejection
of dogmatism or any ‘‘overarching’’ authority; a heterodox approach to theoretical sources, leading to the
coexistence of several trends in clinical psychology,
dynamic psychology, Lacanian thought (exclusive of
training), philosophy, and the work of Freud; the
periodic revision of ‘‘classical’’ positions in psychoanalysis, even those not deeply rooted in psychoanalysis,
especially through a rereading of Freud in the light of
current understanding; an openness toward other
disciplines and especially toward the various branches
of the humanities; and periodic consideration of the
relations of the institution to its various categories of
members, including trainee analysts.
APF training is one of the most important features
of the association. The reasons for the split were
obviously not restricted to the questionable practices
of certain members or a leadership dispute, and fundamental modifications concerning recruitment and
training turned out to be essential. These issues have
been an ongoing element within the APF since its
inception and were concretized in the reforms of
1969–1971, which were finally completed in 1978.
They can be summarized as follows: elimination of the
training analyst under institutional control and elimination of the group of training analysts, and complete
separation between institutional bodies and personal
analysis. Regardless of where the original analysis
occurred, this separation was appreciated by the members of the training committee before whom candidates for admission appeared as trainee analysts; once
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accepted, they were allowed to participate from the
outset in scientific and teaching activities. The
approval of controlled analyses was a joint effort of the
members of the training committee, since they alone
were authorized to do so, acceptance into the program
(including participation in classes) being the responsibility of the members’ council. The candidate was then
asked to present a paper before being accepted as a
member, which was submitted to a vote by the
members.
This system, which did not comply with the customary practices issued by the IPA (in the ‘‘French’’
system, members alone are responsible for training),
has always been a topic of discussion and is currently
oriented toward the conditions of supervision and the
paper. It should also be pointed out that trainee analysts participate at every level of the life of the institution and are represented, separately and independently
of the training committee, on all the committees, and
even participate in the association’s administrative
affairs. There is also a welcoming and study group for
new candidates.
Teaching, which is under the supervision of an ad
hoc committee, is not separate from the association’s
scientific and research activities. It consists primarily
in conferences and discussions, group activities, periodic meetings to discuss clinical issues or technique,
and research groups. It is not mandatory and is not
subject to individual control. Members can participate
in these activities as soon as they are accepted into the
program. In 1999 there were 32 groups or seminars
open to trainee analysts; a number of full members
were participants as well.
Scientific activities, also under committee control,
consist (in addition to the research groups mentioned
above) in monthly meetings often focused on an
annual topic, two annual colloquia (the ‘‘Entretiens,’’
formerly the ‘‘Entretiens de Vaucresson’’), and two
annual days reserved for active members and also
involving a specific subject. There are also a number of
Open Sessions, such as the current ‘‘Soirées de l’APF’’
(three per year), and APF participation in a number of
French, European, and International colloquia, two of
which, the Congress of French Languages and the
Journées Occitanes, are organized with the assistance
of the APF.
Five issues of the Bulletin intérieur de l’A.P.F. were
published between 1964 and 1969. This was followed
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ASTHMA
by Documents et Débats, which ran from October 1970
to December 1999, that is, 52 issues. A periodical
newsletter and annual report on the activities of the
association are also published. The APF has no journal
of its own but its members are active participants in
the publication of several specialized journals: the
Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, created in 1970 by
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Psychanalyse à l’université, created in 1975 by Jean Laplanche, L’Écrit du temps, and
L’Inactuel by Marie Moscovici, Le fait de l’analyste by
Michel Gribinski. In addition to reprinting Jean
Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis’s The Language
of Psycho-Analysis, the association supervised the
translation of the complete works of Sigmund Freud,
published by Presses Universitaires de France (PUF)
under the direction of Jean Laplanche and André
Bourguignon, with the collaboration of Pierre Cotet
and François Robert (in progress; the final work will
comprise 21 volumes). Member publications appear in
collections edited by a member of the APF in the following series: Bibliothèque de Psychanalyse, published
by PUF under the direction of Jean Laplanche; Connaissance de l’Inconscient, published by Gallimard
under the direction of Jean-Bertrand Pontalis; and
Psychismes and Inconscient et Culture, published by
Dunod under the direction of Didier Anzieu.
Although relatively small in size and with little
desire for expansion or control, the APF remains
ambitious in its goals and open to new ideas. Its headquarters and secretariat are located at 24 Place
Dauphine in Paris. It is here that the association’s
councils and committees meet and where the association’s library, containing some four thousand volumes
and documents, is housed.
JEAN-LOUIS LANG
Bibliography
Arfouilloux, Jean-Claude. (1989). La formation dans la S.F.P.
et dans l’A.P.F. Malaise dans la culture analytique. Revue
internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse, 2, 343–368.
Lagache, Daniel. (1986). Adresses présidentielles. In Oeuvres
(Vol. VI. La folle du logis, la psychanalyse comme science
exacte, pp. 149–158). Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
Mijolla, Alain de. (1995). Splits in the French psychoanalytic
movement between 1953 and 1964. In R. Steiner and
J. Johns (Eds.), Within time and beyond time (pp. 1–24).
London: Karnac, 2001.
12 4
Smirnoff, Victor. (1977, April). Intervention. Documents et
Débats, 13, 17–22.
ASTHMA
Due to its frequent association with psychoaffective
symptoms, asthma is considered a classic psychosomatic disorder. The Hungarian-American analyst
Franz Alexander was an early proponent of psychosomatic medicine, and during the 1940s he and Thomas
French applied the ‘‘specific emotion theory’’ to try to
establish a link between the onset of asthmatic attacks
and emotional conflicts. Their research suggested that
pregenital instinctual desires, experienced as threatening to the dependent mother-child dyad, could give
rise to bronchial symptoms, noting that breathing is the first independent post-natal physiological
function. It is possible to view the infant’s double
separation from the mother—biological and psychoaffective—as reviving the Freud-Rank birth trauma
debate. A generation later in 1963, research by Peter
Hobart Knapp suggested that allergic diathesis was a
necessary precondition to developing symptoms, and
offered as possible triggering mechanisms either hysterical conversion or conflicts of oral incorporation
expressed through the respiratory apparatus.
In France, Pierre Marty, one of the founders of the
Ecole de Psychosomatique de Paris, theorized that
asthma, like other allergic manifestations, arises from
a specific type of object relationship that involves a
form of profound and almost instantaneous mimetic
identification that includes a projective movement
identifying object with subject. The difficulty of maintaining such a state of confused fusion either produces
some accommodation or, in the case of an intractable
object, creates a distance from the object that may
be considered at once symbolic and real. The separation from the object whose own characteristics are too
distant from, or independent of, the subject, occurs
without the work of mourning. The asthmatic attack
breaks out during conflict between two objects, both
equally invested but themselves in conflict. The asthmatic attack externalizes and diverts internal psychological destruction.
ROBERT ASSÉO
See also: Allergy; Psychosomatic.
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ATTACHMENT
Bibliography
Alexander, Franz, and French, Thomas M. (1941). Psychogenic factors in bronchial asthma. Washington, DC:
National Research Council.
Bauduin, Andrée. (1985). L’asthme bronchique, aspects dynamiques et psychanalytiques. Revue médicale de Liège, 90 (22).
Fenichel, Otto. (1953). The collected papers of Otto Fenichel.
First and second series (H. Fenichel and D. Rapaport, Eds.).
New York: Norton.
Knapp, Peter H. (1989). Psychosomatic aspects of bronchial
asthma. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
ASTHMA IN CONTEMPORARY MEDICINE
AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
post-Kleinian perspective; she describes asthma as one
of a number of disorders that in some cases may be
viewed as arising from persistent primitive mental
states in the context of what Esther Bick terms ‘‘adhesive identification.’’
JOHN GALBRAITH SIMMONS
See also: Asthma; Adhesive identification; Psychosomatic.
Bibliography
Fenichel, Otto. (1945). The psychoanalytic theory of neurosis.
New York: Norton.
Gregerson, M. Banks. The curious 2000-year case of asthma.
Psychosomatic Medicine, 62, 816–827.
A fairly uncommon disease in 1900, a century later
asthma represented a growing international health problem. Although the early psychosomatic models
proposed by Alexander, Fenichel, and other first and
second generation analysts were eventually supplanted,
numerous research efforts in a variety of disciplines
have failed to develop a comprehensive understanding
of the disorder. Although asthma is treatable as a
chronic condition, it remains poorly understood.
Mitrani, J. (1993). ‘‘Unmentalized’’ experience in the etiology and treatment of psychosomatic asthma. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 29 (2), 314–342.
The original psychoanalytic research into asthma
in American medicine represents a historical point of
reference in subsequent reviews of the literature.
But from a medical point of view, its specific hypotheses
could not be easily refined for further research, while
typology of the disorder itself changed considerably. In
the mid-twentieth century Hans Selye’s holistic concept
of stress created grounds for a macrocosmic explanation
that ultimately proved valuable, if unquantifiable. At
the same time, investigations into the physiology,
immunology, and genetics of asthma all yielded significant, though sometimes conflicting, results. Although
this research helped create a pharmacological armamentarium for palliative treatment, studies in all these
areas only reinforced the hypothesis that psychological
factors play significant roles in asthma, which continues
to qualify as a psychosomatic disorder. In this context,
psychoanalysis remains a plausible treatment for reducing symptomatic attacks and alleviating frequently
comorbid conditions, such as anxiety and depression,
as do other modalities, including relaxation therapy,
hypnosis, and other types of psychotherapy.
The term attachment is used in contemporary scientific literature in four distinct senses: a form of behavior
whose goal is to maintain proximity to the other person (smiles, vocalization, tears, approach behavior);
the bonds of attachment that are related to the affiliation between parents and children; the system of
attachment, in which the child’s goal is to seek proximity with the attachment figure and obtain an internal
feeling of security; and, finally, relationships that
involve the offer of attention, emotional availability,
and the search for comfort in parent-child relations.
More recent psychoanalytic conceptualizations of
asthma include work by Judith Mitrani (1993) from a
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Wright, R. J., Rodriguez, M., and Cohen, S. (1998). Review
of psychosocial stress and asthma: an integrated biopsychosocial approach. Thorax, 53, 1066–1074.
ATTACHMENT
Attachment is a behavioral control system of biological origin, which involves the use of the attachment
figure by the child as a ‘‘secure base’’ from which it can
explore the environment. In John Bowlby’s theory, the
form assumed by the child’s attachment is based on its
actual interactive experiences with its attachment figures and not with the fantasies they arouse. These feelings of security or insecurity (anxious attachment,
resistant attachment, avoidance attachment, disorganized attachment) about the parental figures are organized during the first year of life in the form of an
‘‘internal model of work’’ that will give rise to stable
forms of reaction in the face of distress and novelty.
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ATTENTION
From the start of the twentieth century, the medical
literature was cognizant of the effects of the lack of
maternal care of infants (Chapin, 1916; Spitz, R., 1945).
In 1951 Bowlby wrote a monograph on maternal care
and mental health. In 1959 Harlow, working with primates, provided experimental proof of the independence
of attachment and the satisfaction of physiological
needs. This led Bowlby to propose, in 1969, the concept
of ‘‘attachment behavior’’ and to emphasize its importance for normal development. Bowlby’s student Mary
Ainsworth proposed the experimental paradigm of the
‘‘strange situation,’’ which could be used, in the laboratory or at home, to study the reactions of infants over a
year old to the presence of a stranger, followed by a short
separation and reunion. It was used to classify attachment behavior with either of the parents into types:
secure attachment (type B) against various insecure
attachments (anxious-avoidant, or type A; anxiousresistant, or type C; and disorganized, or type D). The
work of Mary Main focused on describing parents’ speech
about their children and in classifying it into coherent,
avoidant, involved, or disorganized types. Longitudinal
studies show a clear correlation between the speech category of the parent most directly involved with the child
and the type of attachment formed by the child. The relation appears clearly during experiences of absence and
abuse and the phenomenon of disorganized attachment.
Attachment is not a psychoanalytic concept; it is
part of ethology. However, the concept was developed
and applied within the context of psychopathology
and the study of infant development by a psychoanalyst, a leading member of the British Society of Psychoanalysis, who had been responsible for training for
many years. To the great regret of its inventor, the concept of attachment, although it underwent considerable development in the field of developmental
research, was not extensively used in clinical practice,
at least, not until recently. Of course, the concept of
attachment clashes with the classical theory of anaclisis. It is also true that from the point of view of attachment theory, infantile sexuality is of little importance
and the emphasis is on the real and repeated experiences of early childhood. However, contemporary psychoanalysts would be wrong to neglect this essential
dimension of human relations, important because of
its development in the first year of life, the formation
of the different styles of attachment described by Main
and observable after the first year of infancy in Ainsworth’s ‘‘strange situation,’’ as well as the persistence of
attachment in adolescent and adult life. Attachment
12 6
theory clarifies the development of early parent-infant
relations and the modes of organizing representations.
Finally, there is remarkable convergence between the
concept of attachment and psychoanalytic theory in the
work of John Bowlby and Mary Main on the transgenerational transmission of styles of attachment through
the consistency of parents’ speech concerning their own
infancy. Starting from the ‘‘secure base’’ represented by
the analyst, the patient can explore the disturbances in
his earliest relationships and eliminate their continuation in his interpersonal relations and their transmission to his own children through the expression, in
narrative form, of his emotional experience, which is
re-expressed in the transference. The concept of attachment assumes its place in psychopathology as a tool for
analyzing early development and exploring its structure
in the psychoanalytic experience.
ANTOINE GUÉDENEY
See also: Abandonment; Amae, concept of; Anaclisis/
anaclitic; Aphanisis; Bowlby, Edward John Mostyn;
Ethology and psychoanalysis; Individual; Infant development; Infantile neurosis; Maternal; Maternal care; Primary need; Sucking/thumbsucking; Tenderness.
Bibliography
Ainsworth, Mary; Blehar M.C.; Waters E.; et al. (1978), Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange
situation, Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Bowlby, John. (1969). Attachment and loss (Vol. 1). London:
Hogarth Press.
———. (1988). A secure base: Clinical applications of attachment theory. London: Routledge.
Holmes, J. (1993). John Bowlby and attachment theory. London: Routledge.
Main, Mary, Kaplan, N., Cassidy, Jude. (1985). Security in
infancy, childhood and adulthood: A move to the level of
representation. Monographs of Society for Research in Child
Development, 50 (1–2), 66–104.
Spitz, René. (1945). In R. S. Eissler, (Ed.), The psychoanalytic
study of the child (Vol. I). New York: International Universities Press.
Chapin, H.D. (1916). A scheme of state control for dependent infants. Medical Record, 84, 1081–1084.
ATTENTION
The word ‘‘attention’’ comes from the Latin attention,
itself derived from attendere, which means ‘‘to turn
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ATTENTION
one’s mind towards’’—to turn one’s mind or perhaps
one’s senses. In any case, the term is currently very
ambiguous, and all the more so since it is used in different senses by researchers and clinicians referring to
quite varied epistemological horizons.
perceived by the x neurons but as hypercathected by
an energy issuing from the Y neurons. He made attention capable of expectation in that it was responsible
for apprehending indications of quality from perception and thus anticipating cathexis by wishes.
In France, Didier Houzel has made the most careful
study of the concept in recent years, notably in relation
to infant observation. According to this author, if the
function of attention is only rarely mentioned in
the psychoanalytic literature, it is in part due to the
ambiguity it evokes and also in part because attention
is traditionally linked to consciousness without there
ever existing any clear definition of a possible unconscious attention.
Thus Freud distinguished ‘‘ordinary thought,’’
directed toward the search for an object of satisfaction,
and ‘‘observing thought’’ (1950c [1895], p. 363) which
is turned more towards the internal world than the
external and is supported by the function of attention.
According to him, attention has one valence directed
toward the interior, or the intrapsychic world, and it is
this centripetal attention that allows neuronal facilitations that would be impossible with only centrifugal
attention.
Freud mentions attention for the first time in his
book On Aphasia (1891b), where he discusses divided
attention (geteilte Aufmerksamkeit): ‘‘When I read proofs
with the intention of paying special attention to the letters and other symbols, the meaning of what I am reading escapes me to such a degree that I require a second
perusal for the purpose of correcting the style. If, on the
other hand, I read a novel, which holds my interest, I
overlook all misprints and it may happen that I retain
nothing of the names of the persons figuring in the book
except for some meaningless feature or perhaps the
recollection that they were long or short, and that they
contained an unusual letter such as x or z. Again, when I
have to recite, whereby I have to pay special attention to
the sound impressions of my words and to the intervals
between them, I am in danger of caring too little about
the meaning, and as soon as fatigue sets in I am reading
in such a way that the listener can still understand, but I
myself no longer know what I have been reading. These
are phenomena of divided attention which are of particular importance here’’ (pp. 75–76).
Freud thus attributed to attention an ability to forge
links between different components of the sensory data
constitutive of the word, distancing himself from localizationist theories of aphasia. In this linking function of
attention, one can see the precursor of what would later
come to be called ‘‘suspended attention’’ of the analyst
and its crucial characteristic of non-selectivity, which is
an important component of technique.
It was in the Project for a Scientific Psychology
(1950c [1895]) that Freud proposed an actual theory
of attention. Having distinguished between Y neurons
sensitive to quantities of excitation and x neurons sensitive to qualities of excitation, he defined attention as
a hypercathexis of the indications of quality that are
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In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), he assigned
attention the task of transmitting psychic material
from the preconscious system to the conscious system,
thus giving a certain primacy to continuous attention.
In 1911, he specified the dynamic character of attention in his article, ‘‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’’: ‘‘A special function was
instituted which had periodically to search the external
world in order that its data might be familiar already if
an urgent internal need should arise—the function of
attention. Its activity meets the sense-impressions half
way, instead of awaiting their appearance’’ (1911b,
p. 220). He was here underscoring the active aspect of
the function of attention.
Freud returned to the question of attention yet again
in ‘‘Recommendations to Physicians Practising PsychoAnalysis’’ (1912e), where he defined ‘‘evenly-suspended
attention’’ as the desirable attitude of the analyst during
the session. This attitude, which certainly puts less
strain on the analyst, is justified mainly on the grounds
that non-selectivity toward clinical material, as the
counterpart for the analyst of the rule of free association
for the patient, promotes a more direct contact between
the ideational worlds of the two participants.
Wilfred Bion extended the concept of attention
beyond sensory reality and applied it to psychic reality, a
direction that Freud had indicated in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. This theme is central to Bion’s book Attention and Interpretation (1970), in which he described
attention as the matrix within which the diverse elements of mental life come to be united and combined.
Thus the Bionian perspective is highly dynamic.
Moreover, on the interpersonal level, Bion described
the ‘‘mother’s capacity for reverie’’ (Bion, 1967, p. 116),
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A U B R Y W E I S S , J E N N Y (1 903 –19 87)
referring to the ‘‘function’’ by which, thanks to her processes of attention, capacity, and transformation, the
mother helps the child to render his or her environment
thinkable so that the child will be progressively able to
integrate it into its own ‘‘apparatus for dealing with
thoughts’’ (Bion, 1962, p. 83). What is fundamentally
involved is a work of detoxification that makes it possible for the child to metabolize (on the digestive model
of the psyche) protopsychic materials that are at first
unusable by the child alone.
Maternal attention represents a first step towards
and an essential precondition for the work of transformation that Bion referred to as equally important
to his experimental paradigm, which was that of analytic treatment, and especially the treatment of psychotic
adults. He recommended that analysts be without
‘‘memory and desire’’ (1970, p. 31), which is certainly
not to be taken literally, but aims to create in the
analyst a particular state of attention and perhaps,
according to Houzel, an unconscious state of
attention.
The most recent work in the field of early childhood
analysis, especially that of the post-Kleinians, places
more and more emphasis on attention as the cornerstone of the therapeutic process.
BERNARD GOLSE
See also: Active imagination (analytical psychology);
Cathexis; Conscious processes; Dismantling; Framework
of the psychoanalytic treatment; Free association; Evenlysuspended attention; Fundamental rule; Grid; Hypercathexis; Infant observation (therapeutic); Learning from
Experience; Perception-consciousness (Pcpt.-Cs.); ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology, A’’; Psychoanalytic treatment; ‘‘Recommendations to Physicians Practising
Psycho-Analysis’’; Sudden involuntary idea; Thoughtthinking apparatus.
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred R. (1970). Attention and interpretation. London: Tavistock Publications.
———. (1962). Learning from experience. London: Tavistock Publications.
———. (1967). Second thoughts. New York: Aronson.
Freud, Sigmund. (1911b). Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning. SE, 12: 213–226.
———. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4–5.
12 8
———. (1891b). On aphasia: A critical study. (E. Stengel,
Trans.). New York: International Universities Press, 1953.
———. (1912e). Recommendations to physicians practising
psycho-analysis. SE, 12: 109–120.
AUBRY WEISS, JENNY (1903–1987)
Jenny Aubry Weiss, a physician in the Hospitals of Paris
and French psychoanalyst, was born on October 8, 1903,
in Paris, where she died on January 28, 1987. She was
born into an upper-middle-class family; her mother was
Jewish and her father Protestant. She studied medicine
and interned with Clovis Vincent, was an assistant with
Georges Heuyer, and, in 1939, was the second woman to
be appointed as a physician in the Hospitals of Paris. In
1928 she married Alexandre Roudinesco, a pediatrician,
with whom she had three children. She later divorced
Roudinesco and married Pierre Aubry in 1952.
In 1939 she became a physician at an institute for
gifted children (the first in France). She accepted a
number of Jewish children and hired a number of
Jewish personnel, saving them from the concentration
camps. She prepared certificates of tuberculosis for
young men likely to be sent to the forced labor camps
in Germany. In 1944 she received the Medal of the
Resistance. She was head of the pediatrics department
of the Ambroise Paré Hospital in 1946, of the polyclinic on the Boulevard Ney in 1952, and of the pediatrics
department of the Hôpital des Enfants Malades from
1956 to 1968. She met Anna Freud in 1948 and began
psychoanalysis with Michel Cénac, Sacha Nacht, and
Jacques Lacan, whose loyal supporter she remained
during the sectarian battles of 1953 and 1963.
An excellent clinician, she realized quite early in her
professional life that psychoanalytic insight can help
to understand the development of children and their
illnesses. Convinced of the importance of interactions
between mother and child, mother and father, and
parents and children, and of the key role played by the
mother-child-father relationship, she was able to verbalize children’s suffering and help their parents make
sense of their physical and psychic disturbances. The
publications, films, and papers she produced bear witness to this, as do her many innovations in the hospital, where she managed to create a pleasant and
friendly environment within a recreational framework.
She persevered in her efforts to create positions for
kindergarten teachers and educators, and she included
psychoanalysts on her staff.
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A U L A G N I E R - S P A I R A N I , P I E R A (1923 –1 990)
In 1948 she appointed a teacher for her young
patients and studied dyslexia. She brought psychoanalysts to the school for gifted children. She initiated a
research program on the lack of maternal care with John
Bowlby, and she formed a team with Myriam David to
observe and establish analytic cures for children assigned
to her department (Dépôt d’enfants de parents de Rosan).
In 1950 she created a specialized family-placement
service so that children under her care could benefit
from a family environment and analysis.
Through the World Health Organization, she helped
found, in July 1950, the first Guidance Center for Children in Soissons, France. In 1952, together with Odile
Lévy-Bruhl and Raymonde Bargues, she studied children in the hospital day-care center and their entry into
a preschool setting. In 1954 she was asked by the World
Health Organization to study abandonment and child
development in Africa. At the Hôpital des enfants
malades, with Raymonde Bargues, Ginette Raimbault,
Anne-Lise Stern, and René Tostain, she trained pediatricians and nurses to be sensitive to the needs of children
and parents, and established a psychoanalytic practice.
From the hospital administration she obtained approval
for parents to visit from noon to 8:00 p.m.
After her retirement to Aix-en-Provence in 1968,
she helped promote psychoanalysis in southeast
France. In 1971 she organized and introduced the
meeting of the École freudienne de Paris (Freudian
School of Paris). After the death of Pierre Aubry in
1972, she returned to Paris, where she resumed her
psychoanalytic practice, served as a training analyst,
and remained an active participant in the École freudienne de Paris until its dissolution in 1980.
MARCELLE GEBER
See also: France; Technique with children, psychoanalytic.
Bibliography
Aubry, Jenny. (1983). Enfance abandonnée. Paris: ScarabéeMétailier.
Bargues, René. (1964) Les nourrices d’un placement familial
curatif des carences affectives graves de la première
enfance. Évolution psychiatrique, 3.
Lévy-Bruhl, Odile, and Aubry, Jenny. (1956). L’adaptation à
l’école maternelle. Enfance, 1.
Roudinesco, Jenny, Trélat, Jean, and Trélat, M. (1949). Étude
de quarante cas de dyslexie d’évolution. Enfance, 1.
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Roudinesco, Jenny; David, Myriam; Nicolas, J.; et al. (1952).
Réactions immédiates des jeunes enfants à la séparation
d’avec leur mère. Courrier du C.I.E., 2–3, 66–78, 131–142.
AULAGNIER-SPAIRANI, PIERA
(1923–1990)
A physician, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, Piera
Aulagnier-Spairani (formerly Castoriadis-Aulagnier)
was born on November 19, 1923, in Milan, Italy, and
died on March 31, 1990, in Paris.
She studied medicine in Rome, her early medical
calling marked by her sustained focus on clinical practice. In 1950 she moved to France, where she completed her studies in psychiatry.
She trained in psychoanalysis with Jacques Lacan
from 1955 to 1961. As his student, she joined ranks
with him when he was expelled from the Société française de psychanalyse (French Society of Psychoanalysis) in 1963, and she was among the psychoanalysts
who first formed the École freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris) in 1964. True to her personal
standards of rigor, she later resigned from that organization when she found herself in disagreement with
Lacan’s positions on the training of psychoanalysts.
In 1969, immediately after her break with Lacan,
along with François Perrier, Jean–Paul Valabrega, and
other analysts, she founded the Fourth Group of the
O.P.L.F. (Organisation psychanalytique de langue française [French-language psychoanalytic organization])
in which she remained a central figure, although it was
never her wish to impose a hierarchical structure
within the group.
Throughout these tumultuous years, she was
known for her independent–mindedness and the calm
in debates that led her to abstain from participating in
vain polemics. However, her reserve was never synonymous with indifference. Her concern about the risk
of conformity that threatens psychoanalytic and
indeed other societies led her to denounce that tendency in 1969, when she wrote, ‘‘the audacity and
genius needed to transgress accepted wisdom do not
guarantee that the transgressors will be able to pass on
to their heirs the ability to dismantle the barrier that
has been broken through.’’
This spirit was reflected in her activity in the two
she successively founded at the Presses Universitaires
de France: L’Inconscient, with Jean Clavreul and Con129
AUSTRALIA
rad Stein in 1967–1968, and then Topique, beginning
in 1969. In both publications, pluralism and respect
for the authors’ thought always won out over issues of
institutional affiliation.
Daily clinical practice and the ongoing pursuit of
her writing were intimately linked for Aulagnier. In
1975, while she was married to Cornelius Castoriadis,
her first book, The Violence of Interpretation: From
Pictogram to Statement (under the name Piera Castoriadis-Aulagnier) was published by the Presses Universitaires de France. This work became an obligatory
reference for those who felt the need, based on the clinical treatment of psychosis, to reexamine Freudian
metapsychology. Two other books, published under
the name Piera Aulagnier, followed: Les Destins du plaisir. Aliénation, amour, passion (1979; The destiny of
pleasure: Alienation, love, passion) and L’Apprentihistorien et le maı̂tre sorcier. Du discours identifiant au
discours délirant (1984; The apprentice historian and
the master sorcerer: From the discourse of identification
to the discourse of delusion); these books also found a
broad readership. The long series of articles written
beginning in 1961, most of them published in Topique,
the revue she headed from its founding in 1969, were
collected and reprinted in Un interprète un quête de sens
(An interpreter in search of meaning; 1986).
All are indebted to Aulagnier for a new approach
not only to psychosis, but also a new theory of representation that considers the psychotic’s relationship to
discourse. Beyond this, she established an entirely new
theorization of the I and the conditions in which it
comes into being. Her conceptual inventions emerged
in close connection with clinical practice and under
strict critical self-scrutiny, leaving those who knew her
with lasting impressions of her tireless and passionate
interest in the fundamental issues not just of psychoanalysis, but of human experience.
AUSTRALIA
Sigmund Freud wrote his short paper ‘‘On Psychoanalysis’’ in response to an invitation from Andrew Davidson, the Secretary of the Section of Psychological
Medicine and Neurology for the Australasian Medical
Congress in Sydney in September 1911. Papers by Carl
Jung and Havelock Ellis were also presented. Ernest
Jones was another distinguished early contributor, for
he personally read a paper at the Australasian Medical
Congress in 1914 entitled ‘‘Some Practical Aspects of
Psychoanalytic Treatment.’’
Two notable Australian figures who accepted
Freud’s challenge to develop the study of psychoanalysis were Paul Greig Dane and Roy Coupland Winn,
who practiced between the two world wars. Before the
World War I (1914–1918) a Presbyterian clergyman,
Donald Fraser, had lectured on psychoanalysis in Sydney, but Dane appears to have been the first physician
to become a wholehearted and consistent exponent of
Freud’s early theories in the careful use of catharsis and
abreaction after the war. Paul Dane’s interest in psychological methods of treatment was stimulated by the
work of earlier pioneers such as John William Springthorpe and Clarence Godfrey. Dane was one of the first
in Australia to use hypnosis and abreactive techniques.
He also introduced group therapy for returned soldiers
His interest stemmed from contact with Joan Riviere in
England. Dane, although not an analyst himself, was the
first chairman of the Melbourne Institute for PsychoAnalysis and was intimately associated with its foundation and early history. Dane died in 1950.
Siegfried Fink, an associate member of both the
Swiss and the British Psycho-Analytical Societies,
worked in Sydney until his death in the 1960s. Fink
was thus a contemporary of both Dane and Winn. He
was one of the founding councilors of the Sydney
Institute for Psychoanalysis.
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1998). Penser la psychose. Une
lecture de l’oeuvre de Piera Aulagnier. Paris: Dunod.
Roy Coupland Winn, after serving with great distinction in World War I, returned to the medical staff
of Sydney Hospital and after several years went to
London to continue medical and psychiatric training,
becoming an associate member of the British PsychoAnalytical Society and later a full member. Back in
Sydney, for several years he was Honorary Physician at
Sydney Hospital but in 1931 he resigned and went into
full-time psychoanalytic practice.
Troisier, Hélène. (1998). Piera Aulagnier. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
Winn was thus the first full-time analyst in Australia.
Later, when Clara Lazar-Geroe came to Australia from
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: École freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of
Paris); France; Inconscient, L’; Interpretation; Pass, the; Psychanalyse et les nevroses, La; Topique; Viderman, Serge.
Bibliography
13 0
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Hungary and began to train analysts at the Melbourne
Institute, Winn was very supportive. He joined the
Board of Directors of the institute, a position that he
held until his death in 1961. In 1951 he had made a
generous endowment in founding the second training
institute in this country, the Sydney Institute of Psychoanalysis, with Andrew Peto, also from Hungary, as
training analyst (Graham, 1965).
Clara Lazar Geroe, the first Australian training analyst, arrived in Melbourne on March 14, 1940. She
received her training in medicine in Prague. Her psychoanalytic training in Budapest naturally was in the
school of Sandor Ferenczi, her training analyst being
Michael Balint.
At the International Psychoanalytical Congress in
Paris in 1938, Ernest Jones suggested that Hungarian
analysts seeking emigration might consider New Zealand and Australia. Negotiations regarding New Zealand
failed. ‘‘However, in Melbourne and Sydney some
influential people, among them Bishop Burgman, Paul
Dane, M. D. Silberberg, Reginald S. Ellery, and Roy
Coupland Winn, reacted positively to the idea of an
analyst coming to Australia. Their enthusiasm, and the
enterprise of Paul Dane particularly, carried the day.
After much negotiation, Geroe, with her family, settled
in Melbourne to become Australia’s first training analyst working at the newly formed Melbourne Institute
for Psychoanalysis. She had been appointed as a training analyst by the British Psycho-Analytical Society of
which she was a member’’ (Graham, 1980).
The founding of the first institute was made possible by a generous gift from Lorna Traill. The first meeting was held in the home of Hal Maudsley, a central
figure in the history of psychiatry in Australia. The
institute was opened at 111 Collins Street, Melbourne,
by Judge Foster on the birthday of its benefactor,
Lorna Traill, on October 10, 1940. The first Board of
Directors included Paul Dane, Norman Albiston, Reginald S. Ellery, P.Guy Reynolds, and A.R. Phillips. There
were two psychoanalysts on the Board, Ernest Jones of
London and Roy Coupland Winn from Sydney. Geroe
started her work with the institute and in private practice early in 1941. She conducted a large seminar for
twenty to twenty-five doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, educationists, probation officers, and others.
The traditional small seminar method was followed
for candidates in training, both medical and nonmedical. Geroe also organized many other seminars
for groups of teachers, kindergartens, and parents for
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discussion of their special problems with infants and
children. The Institute Clinic catered to patients who
could not afford private analytical fees; Geroe’s Child
Guidance Clinic developed a close liaison with the
Children’s Court clinic. Geroe lectured for many years
in the Psychology Department of the University of
Melbourne and to students taking the Diploma of Psychological Medicine. She was appointed Honorary
Psychoanalyst at Royal Melbourne Hospital—certainly
the first appointment of this type in Australia.
The first medical student to go into training in
Australia was Frank Graham, who started with Winn
in 1939, then began training with Geroe in 1941. The
first psychiatrist or medico to train was A.R. Phillips
and the first lay analyst Janet Nield.
Early on, psychoanalysts qualified or in practice in
Australia were all members or associate members of the
British Psychoanalytical Society. They formed ‘‘The
Australian Society of Psychoanalysts,’’ a sort of unofficial
branch of the British Society but having no independent
status. Harry Southwood and Frank Graham were the
first to graduate in Australia in this way as associate
members of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.
In 1966 the British Society suggested that this
interim arrangement should be formalized by an
Australian application to the International Psychoanalytical Association for Study Group status. At the IPA
Congress at Copenhagen in 1967, with the support of
the British Society, the Australian Study Group was
established under the direction of an international
Sponsoring Committee. At this stage, there were
twelve Australian psychoanalysts, members of the
Study Group, who were appointed direct members of
the IPA. They were: O.H.D. Blomfield, R.A. Brookes,
Clara Lazar Geroe, Frank W. Graham, I.H. Martin, R.
Martin, J. Nield, D. O’Brien, V. Roboz, Rose Rothfield,
H.M. Southwood, and I. Waterhouse.
Of the seven members of the IPA Sponsoring Committee, Fanny Wride (chair), Adam Limentani, Ilse
Hellman, Lois Munro, and Leo Rangell all visited
Australia at various times and helped with clinical and
structural development. The other members of the
Sponsoring Committee were Maria Montessori and
M. Mitscherlich-Nielson.
In Vienna, in July 1971, the IPA at its business meeting accepted the recommendation of the Sponsoring
Committee and raised the status of the Study Group
to that of Provisional Society. After the requisite two
years as a Provisional Society, the Australian Psycho131
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analytical Society was admitted as a Component
Society of the International Psychoanalytical Association at the IPA Congress in Paris in 1973. The constitution of the third Institute in Adelaide in 1979
represented the fruition of many years of dedicated
and determined work by Harry Southwood. Assistance
by the IPA was required in relation to the coordination
of training in the three centers. The IPA appointed
two Site Visiting Committees. The first in 1980 (Drs.
Joseph, McLaughlin, Moses) and the second in 1987
(Dr. Cooper, Prof. Sandler.)
Over the years, Australian analysts have been
encouraged and stimulated by working visits by distinguished colleagues—the outstanding ones in the
sixties being Michael Balint and Enid Balint. Other
influential invited visitors included Betty Joseph, Edna
O’Shaughnessy, Sydney Klein, and Anne-Marie
Sandler.
Apart from these visits, the isolation of the Australian Society has been mitigated by the fact that many
members completed their initial training with the British Society or have spent long periods in London for
further analysis, supervision, or seminar work. Nonmedical analysts have played an important part in the
growth and development of psychoanalysis. From the
beginning psychoanalysis has been viewed as a separate discipline in its own right.
In the 1990s, a widening of the field of activity of
the Australian Psychoanalytical Society has involved
contributions by the society or its members to university teaching (at MA and PhD levels) and open seminars. There is a growing list of publications and public
lectures by members. The Freudian School of Melbourne and The Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis
in the Freudian Field are devoted to the Lacanian
approach in Melbourne. There is an active school of
Self-Psychology (Heinz Kohut) based in Sydney. Graduates of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis
(Karen Horney) have played an active role in developing psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the Psychotherapy Association of Australia.
O. H. D. BLOMFELD
Bibliography
Blomfield, O.H.D. (1986). Psychoanalysis in Australia. Journal of the International Association for the History of Psychoanalysis., 2, 9–11.
Brett, Judith. (1998). Clara Lazar Geroe. In Australian dictionary of biography. Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press.
Brett, Judith, Gold, Stanley, and Geroe Clara. (1982, September). Psychoanalysis in Australia. MEANJIN, 41 (3),
339–357.
Psychoanalysis has had a marked influence in many
areas, most particularly in child psychiatry and social
work. Following the lead of Paul Dane in the treatment of ex-servicemen in the Commonwealth Repatriation Department, Frank Graham introduced
psychoanalytically oriented group therapy at the
Royal Melbourne Hospital in 1950 and later inspired
the formation of the Australian Association of Group
Psychotherapists.
———. (1980). Clara Lazar-Geroe. An Obituary. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, p. 603.
In the academic world, some departments of psychology have psychoanalysts on the staff or maintain a
working contact with psychoanalysts, as do several
departments of philosophy, sociology, and politics; the
law has been less influenced. The first publicly advertised senior position on the medical staff of a major
teaching hospital for a psychoanalyst was established
largely through the efforts of William Orchard at
Prince Henry’s Hospital Melbourne, in about 1970.
Frank Graham was the first appointee. Another
appointment of this kind was Janet Nield as Honorary
Psychotherapist (1953–71) at The Royal Alexandra
Hospital for Children in Sydney.
The history of psychoanalysis in Austria is practically
indistinguishable from that of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society until the end of the Second World War.
The group known as the Wednesday Psychological
Society, which met regularly after 1902 in Freud’s
apartment, later renamed itself the Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung (Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society) and was admitted as a regional group into
the International Psychoanalytical Association, which
had just been founded. In 1911, following the defection of its first president, Alfred Adler, Freud
assumed the presidency. When Carl Gustav Jung
and the members of the Zurich society left the
13 2
Graham, Frank W. (1965). Obituary: Dr. Roy Coupland
Winn. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, p. 616.
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psychoanalytic movement, Vienna became the sole
center of influence.
After a period of inactivity caused by the First
World War, the society resumed its activities and, with
its youngest members playing an important role,
quickly established a treatment facility in 1922 and a
training institute in 1924. Only in 1936, after years of
migration, was the Vienna society able to take possession of the premises at Berggasse 7, where it was
housed along with its training institute, treatment
facility, and publishing house.
Between 1934 and 1938 Austria developed politically into an authoritarian Catholic state. Although
most members of the society had shown themselves
to be sympathetic to the Social-Democrats, its
administration made a conscious decision to abstain
from politics. On March 14, 1938, the day after German troops entered Austria and after a number of
analysts had already left the country, the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society held its last meeting. Members
unanimously decided that those who felt threatened
should leave Austria, and that the society’s headquarters would be transferred to wherever Freud
happened to be. With the exception of Alfred Winterstein and August Aichhorn, the 68 active and honorary members and approximately 36 candidates left
the city. Freud left with his family on June 4, 1938.
Between 1938 and 1945 a branch of the Deutsches
Reichsinstitut für psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie (State Institute for Research in Psychology and Psychotherapy), directed first by Aichhorn
and then by Begsattel, was established in Vienna.
Under Aichhorn’s presidency a group of analysts and
psychologists attempted to free themselves of the
command of the Reichsinstitut. In 1944 this secret
group had 14 training candidates, 7 of whom later
became psychoanalysts.
Following the fall of National Socialism and the end
of the Second World War, Austrian analysts did two
things during the period of reconstruction: first, they
reconstructed the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and
got it readmitted to the International Psychoanalytical
Association, and second, they attempted to bring into
the fold analysts and organizations that, under the title
of depth psychology, held orientations considered
marginal or unorthodox.
The inauguration of the new Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society took place in 1946, with August Aichhorn as
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president. With assistance from Anna Freud, international recognition followed shortly, although it would
take decades before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
made any significant contact with the world psychoanalytic movement. After Aichhorn’s death in 1949,
Alfred Winterstein became the new president, a post
he held until 1957. Under the direction of Wilhelm
Solms-Rödelheim, the society continued to grow. The
1971 International Psychoanalytic Congress, held in
Vienna, helped solidify the society’s renewed links to
international psychoanalysis.
Meanwhile, the Austrian and international student
movement grew, and there was renewed interest in
psychoanalysis generally. The Sigmund Freud
Gesellschaft (Sigmund Freud Society), founded in
1968, together with the sociopsychiatrist Hans
Strotzka and the cofounder of the Sigmund Freud
Society Harald Leupold-Löwenthal, did much to make
psychoanalysis better known to the population at
large. Hans Hoff, professor of psychiatry, also helped
establish this receptive climate.
Between 1972 and 1974 the presidents of the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society included Alois Becker, Harald
Leupold-Löwenthal, Peter Schuster, Wolfgang Berner,
and Wilhelm Burian. Krista Placheta became president
in 1998. As of 2005, Christine Diercks was president of
the society.
In 1986 the society moved to new offices at Gonzagagasse 11. As of 1988 the society had seventy members
and approximately a hundred candidates, more than the
number of members in the former Vienna society. With
the post-1968 generation of psychoanalysts came a
relaxation of the older, authoritarian climate of discussion and a broader range of issues. Two central themes
for the society in the 1980s were anti-Semitism inside
and outside the field of psychoanalysis and its history
during and after the war. In addition, the society held
debates on the relation between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. These discussions led to a training seminar
on psychoanalytic psychotherapy, which became an integral part of the general training program.
In 1989, at the annual meeting of the Vienna
society, the assembled members voted, by a margin of
one vote, to join the Dachverband für Psychotherapie
(a supervisory organization), and later it voted to join
the Psychotherapiebeirat (Psychotherapy Advisory
Committee). In 1993 the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society was legally recognized as a training organization for psychotherapy and was a leader in this field.
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From 1945 Igor Caruso, an important representative of the various groups associated with psychoanalysis, worked to make psychotherapy more accessible to
a greater portion of the population. During the years
following the war, he and the discussion circle of
which he was a member succeeded in creating a psychoanalytic organization that remained in operation
for a number decades. Known as the Österreichische
Arbeitskreise für Tiefenpsychologie (Austrian Working
Group on Depth Psychology) and later renamed the
Österreichische Arbeitskreise für Psychanalyse (Austrian Working Group on Psychoanalysis), it initiated
throughout the country a series of teaching and clinical initiatives that were Freudian in orientation.
In 1947 Caruso created the Wiener Arbeitskreise
für Tiefenpsychologie (Vienna Working Group on
Depth Psychology), an autonomous scientific community composed primarily of physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, and theologians, most of whom
were close in age. The first candidates were trained
privately and without any specific professional
requirements, since the group defined itself primarily
as a venue for scientific discussion. For this reason
an increasing number of members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society participated in these discussions,
although some of them found the intellectual climate
overly imbued with Catholicism. Because of the
working group’s unorthodox approach, the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society was forced to define strict
boundaries between the two organizations at the
start of the 1950s. These boundaries may have led
the Vienna working group, whose training guidelines
were largely those used by psychoanalytic societies
having a strictly Freudian orientation, to introduce a
more formal and systematic structure for itself. The
Vienna working group and the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society differed in ideological orientation. In
place of psychological analysis, the Vienna working
group aimed at an existential synthesis in the form
of a universal humanity, blended different trends in
depth psychology, and harked to Jung rather than
Freud.
With the 1952 publication of Caruso’s book Psychoanalyse und Synthese der Existenz (Existential Psychology:
From Analysis to Synthesis, 1964), the working group’s
program became more focused. After 1953 there
were no explicit references to Jung’s depth psychology
and increasingly specific references to psychoanalysis.
‘‘Psychoanalysis’’ was initially understood in its techni13 4
cal sense, and the human aspect inherent in Freudian
theory and its offshoots was enlarged in the direction
of a personal psychoanalysis.
Caruso’s book was translated into six languages,
and thus served to spread his ideas internationally,
especially in South America, where his ideas where
well received. In fact, a number of South American
candidates received their training in Vienna. Another
example of cross-border activity is the 1954 Brussels
symposium on the ‘‘Psychology of the Individual,’’
attended by some forty psychoanalysts from several
European countries. Presenters included Jacques
Lacan, who gave a talk on the internal dialectics of the
person in the theory and technique of psychoanalysis.
As a result of his talk, Lacan became a corresponding
member of the Vienna Working Group on Depth Psychology, a status he maintained until his death.
Theoretically, the working group focused on the
concept of symbols and attempted to find a connection between Freudian ego psychology and personal
philosophical concepts. There were increasing interdisciplinary attempts to bridge psychiatry, ethology,
sociology, group dynamics (especially that of Raoul
Schindler), and psychoanalysis. This expansion
resulted in the founding, in Innsbruck in 1958, of the
International Secretariat of the Working Groups on
Depth Psychology, which was replaced in 1966 by the
Internationale Föderation der Arbeitskreise für Tiefenpsychologie (International Federation of Working
Groups on Depth Psychology) because of the growing
number of participant associations.
During the 1960s different attempts to found a
second world association, independent of the orthodox International Psychoanalytical Association, were
made at the instigation of the German Psychoanalytic
Association. Caruso and his working groups rebuffed
these attempts in spite of the number of exchanges
and conferences within the Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft psychoanalytischer Gesellschaften (International Working Group of Psychoanalytic Societies),
founded in 1962 in Amsterdam. At this time the theoretical orientation of the working groups moved
further and further away from fundamental theological concepts of Catholicism. There were increasing
references to the Freudian foundations of psychoanalysis and greater emphasis on the psychosociological
aspects of the field, which resulted from a growing
interest in thinkers like G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx,
and Herbert Marcuse. In 1972, when Caruso
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obtained the psychology chair at the University of
Salzburg, a number of circles and working groups
were formed outside Vienna, and these helped spread
awareness of psychoanalysis throughout Austria. In
addition to the Linz Circle, created in 1958, these
included groups for the study of depth psychology
launched in Graz and Linz in 1973 and in Salzburg
in 1974, followed by the foundation of the Austrian
Society for the Study of Child Psychoanalysis in Salzburg in 1976.
This gathering trend toward orthodoxy found concrete expression when the Vienna Working Group on
Depth Psychology renamed itself the Vienna Working
Group on Psychoanalysis in 1988. Shortly thereafter all
the other depth psychology groups followed its example. Until 1992 these groups were all governed by the
Directorate of Austrian Working Groups, which was
replaced in 1992 by the Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft
der Arbeitskreise für Psychoanalyse in Österreich
(Scientific Society of Working Groups for Psychoanalysis in Austria). This society produced the journal Texte:
Psychoanalyse, Ästhetik, Kulturkritik, the only (quarterly) Austrian journal on psychoanalysis, edited by E.
List, Johannes Ranefeld, G. F. Zeilinger, and August
Ruhs. Because the society met IPA standards, which the
working groups had followed since 1970, it asked to be
admitted to the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1997, with Ranefeld as president. A commission
of inquiry was established in October 1998.
Between 1985 and 1990 an interdisciplinary group of
Viennese scientists, in collaboration with the Institut
culturel français, organized a two-year international
seminar entitled ‘‘Psychoanalysis and Structuralism:
Freud and Lacan,’’ which included some of the best
known representatives of the Lacan school. This
resulted in the formation of the Neue wiener Gruppe/
Lacan-Schule, composed of an ‘‘aesthetic’’ section
(under the direction of Walter Seitter) and a ‘‘clinical’’
section (under the direction of August Ruhs). It organized regular interdisciplinary conferences, usually
followed by one or more publications.
In 1984 a group of students founded the Werkstatt
für Psychoanalyse und Gesellschaftskritik (Workshop
on Psychoanalysis and Social Criticism) in Salzburg.
Until 1996 the organization refused to accept any form
of orthodoxy or dogmatism and insisted on maintaining a political focus. The Werkblatt, the organization’s
publication, is still published, although the organization itself no longer exists.
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In 1967 Eric Pakesch, a student of Caruso, created a
chair of medical psychology and psychotherapy in the
Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz . At the suggestion of
Hans Strotzka, a popular psychoanalyst and sociopsychiatrist, the Institute of Depth Psychology and Psychotherapy was founded in 1971 within the School of
Medicine of the University of Vienna. It was intended
to house psychoanalysis along with the other generally
recognized schools of psychotherapy in a single facility. Eventually, psychoanalysis became its primary
focus, and in the current university depth psychology
clinic, run by Marianne Springer-Kremser, all practitioners use psychoanalysis or depth psychology, with
the exception of one practitioner who uses systemic
family therapy. A psychoanalytic focus can also be
found at the university institutes of medical psychology (and psychotherapy) in the universities of Graz,
Innsbruck, and Vienna (directed by W. Pieringer, G.
Schüssler, and G. Sonneck, respectively). The Psychology Institute of the University of Klagenfurt, under the
direction of Professor J. Menschik-Bendele, also has a
strong psychoanalytic orientation.
Legislation on psychoanalysis instituted in 1992
had important repercussions for the field of psychoanalysis in Austria, for it drastically reduced the
autonomy of psychoanalytic societies in their training
activities and therapeutic practices. Psychoanalysis
became recognized as equivalent to other therapeutic
practices, so it had to comply with the general training
program for psychotherapists. Before becoming a psychoanalyst, candidates had to complete a two-year
program required for all forms of psychotherapy.
Since health insurance recognized only some psychoanalytic treatments and reimbursement was partial,
the five principal Viennese psychoanalytic and depthpsychology associations decided to create a parent
organization in 1997 to make special agreements with
insurers for long-term psychoanalytic treatment. For
the first time in the history of psychoanalysis in Austria, member and nonmember associations of the
International Psychoanalytical Association worked
together in an organization to promote their mutual
interest. Thanks to the concerted efforts of these societies, the Viennese municipal health service began to
offer analyses for fifty citizens, without restriction as to
duration or the frequency of treatment. Sixty years after
Vienna’s Ambulatorium shut down under Nazi administration, this treatment center reopened in 1999 and
represented another sign of reawakened interest in psychoanalysis. Finally, plans for the Wiener Arbeitskreis
135
AUTISM
für Psychaonalyse to join the IPA moved forward
when it was granted study group status in 2003.
development of communication with others beginning
in earliest infancy.
Another important parent organization for psychoanalysis is the Sigmund Freud Society and Sigmund
Freud Museum at Berggasse 19 in Vienna. The society,
founded in November 1968 with the help of Anna
Freud, succeeded in creating a museum where Freud
had his consulting room. In addition to supporting
research into the history of psychoanalysis and its
founders, the society holds discussions on important
contemporary clinical, sociocultural, and therapeutic
issues in a spirit of interdisciplinary cooperation.
Harold Leupold-Löwentahal, president of the Society
from 1976 to 1998, was succeeded by Johannes Schülein, who presided until 2003, and Dieter Bogner. The
library, with 25,000 volumes, represents one of the
major collections of its kind in Europe and includes
archives with over 50,000 records of all kind. Since
1997, at the instigation of American artist Josef
Kosuth and Austrian art dealer Peter Pakesch, the
Sigmund Freud Society has acquired a collection that
demonstrates the influence of psychoanalysis on contemporary art. In 2003, under director Inge ScholzStrasser—albeit against the wishes of many Viennese
psychoanalysts—the museum turned into a private foundation. This event led to a noticeable coolness between
the administration and the city’s psychoanalytic societies.
The word was introduced into the psychiatric
vocabulary by Eugen Bleuler in 1911 in his description
of schizophrenia. However, a hint of it could be
detected as early as 1907 in the correspondence
between Freud and Jung: ‘‘Bleuler still misses a clear
definition of autoerotism and its specifically psychological effects. He has, however, accepted the concept for
his Dem[entia] pr[aecox] contribution to Aschaffenburg’s Handbook. He doesn’t want to say autoerotism
(for reasons we all know), but prefers ‘autism’ or
‘ipsism’’’ (Freud and Jung, p. 44–45).
AUGUST RUHS
Bibliography
Caruso, Igor A. (1964). Existential psychology: from analysis
to synthesis (Eva Krapf, Trans.). New York: Herder and
Herder. (Original work published 1952)
Huber, Wolfgang. (1977). Psychoanalyse in Österreich seit
1933. Vienna: Geyer.
Parth, Walter. (1998). Vergangenheit, die fortwirkt. Texte:
Psychoanalyse, Ästhetik, Kulturkritik, 2, 61–75.
Reichmayr, Johannes. (1994). Spurensuche in der Geschichte
der Psychoanalyse. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.
AUTISM
Autism has had two meanings. The first, historically
associated with schizophrenia, refers to the investment
of a person’s psychic energy in his or her own delusions, which prevents the person from investing in the
outside world. The second refers to an absence of
13 6
Bleuler, who very early on took an interest in
Freud’s work, did not accept his libido theory, and this
was the reason for the amputation that produced the
word autism from autoerotism: to distance it from the
libidinal significations of the latter term, while keeping
the former’s Greek root, auto, meaning ‘‘self.’’ For
Bleuler, the autism of schizophrenia is a shutting-in of
the subject in an impenetrable, incommunicable
world, closed in on itself, made up of unorganized
delusional elements to which all the subject’s disposable mental energy is attached.
In 1943, Leo Kanner adopted the term to describe
‘‘early infantile autism,’’ a syndrome associated with
problems of communication and social behavior, as
well as serious developmental disturbances of mental
functioning, most notably of imagination
Psychoanalytic research bearing upon infantile autism led to significant advances in the understanding of
the beginnings of psychic life. From the genetic point
of view, for example, infantile autism corresponds to
a stage of psychical development to which the child
regresses or remains fixated. In research with normal
infants after her initial studies of autistic children,
Margaret Mahler placed autism on a developmental axis
that progresses from birth to ‘‘separation-individuation.’’
Donald Winnicott attributed the genesis of autism to
maternal care, particularly the ability to protect the
infant from inconceivable anxieties: a feeling of disintegration, being unable to stop falling, lacking relation
to its own body, and having no orientation. Bruno
Bettelheim defined the ‘‘extreme situation’’ that set
the baby on the path to becoming autistic as a feeling
that it could not act in a manner favorable to itself,
but that every action on its own part could only be
unfavorable because of a ‘‘mutuality’’ between the
child and its mother.
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AUTISM
From the structural point of view, autism is
governed by a structure that establishes mental functioning. The students of Jacques Lacan developed the
concept in this direction by relating it sometimes to
the concept of ‘‘foreclosure’’ (Piera Aulagnier and
Maud Mannoni), sometimes to ‘‘jouissance’’ (Éric
Laurent), and sometimes to the ‘‘topology of the subject’’ (Rosine and Robert Lefort).
From a dynamic point of view, it was possible to
explore infantile autism in terms of the transference
and counter-transference. In 1975, Donald Meltzer proposed a model articulated around three concepts: ‘‘the
dismantling of the ego,’’ ‘‘the bidimensionality of the
object relation,’’ and ‘‘the adhesive identification.’’ Dismantling is a splitting of the ego along the lines of
articulation of the different sensorial modalities, so the
autistic child never concentrates feelings on the same
object, and stimuli received is never synthesized. The
world, perceived in this way, is without depth or volume
and is reduced to a juxtaposition of sensations. Bidimensionality is a mode of relation to a libidinal object,
established in a world without depth. It is a relation of
surface to surface, a binding with an object not experienced as having an interior. Adhesive identification is
the result of bidimensionality: the self identifies itself
with the object on the surface, owning to no more interior space than the object itself. This prevents mental
communication necessary to the development of
thought.
Later, Meltzer proposed a model based on the theory of ‘‘aesthetic conflict.’’ He suggested that the fetus,
at the end of pregnancy, is eager to exercise its senses
but receives only the most filtered stimuli in utero.
Birth would be experienced as liberation and as something marvelous because of the abundance of sensorial
stimulation. The impact would be experienced as an
intense aesthetic experience that would at the same
time be a source of anxiety because of the vivid contrast between the infant’s overabundant awareness of
the qualities of the object’s surface and complete misrecognition of the object’s interior. Occasionally, the
impact of the aesthetic object would be so intense as to
force the infant to withdraw into infantile autism.
Frances Tustin has emphasized a fantasy of discontinuity, which the autistic infant experiences physically
as the tearing away of a part of its own substance. So
long as it lacks the experience that makes possible symbolization, an infant would seem to require the illusion
of continuity between its body and the object upon
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which its drives are satisfied. The autistic infant imagines a catastrophic rupture in this continuity that takes
the form of a fantasy of mouth-tongue-nipple-breast,
experiencing a damaged breast and torn-off nipple
that leaves the mouth a black hole inhabited by tormenting objects. To protect itself from the pain caused
by this black hole, the autistic infant constructs the
delusion of merging with the environment that
abolishes any separation or space, any difference or
alterity. To maintain these delusionary autistic objects,
concrete objects are not manipulated for use value or
symbolic value, but solely for the surface sensations
that they offer, giving the illusion of continuity
between body and environment. By means of his or
her own secretions (tears, saliva, urine, feces) and
autistic objects, the subject creates what Tustin called
‘‘autistic forms,’’ which are cutaneous or mucous with
nebulous, unstable contours. The autistic subject
procures these as a salve to minimize pain and as protection from the exterior world. But these autistic
forms cannot be shared with others or identified with
objects in the external world. The autistic child uses
sensitivity to stimuli to protect himself or herself from
the external world; Frances Tustin calls this ‘‘perverse
self-sensuality.’’
DIDIER HOUZEL
See also: Adhesive identification; Autistic capsule/
nucleus; Autistic defenses; Bettleheim, Bruno; Black hole;
Bleuler, Paul Eugen; Child analysis; Developmental disorders; Dismantling; Empty Fortress, The; Infantile psychosis; Infantile schizophrenia; Psychoses, chronic and delusional; Schizophrenia; Self-mutilation in children;
Symbiosis/Symbiotic relation; Tustin, Frances.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund, and Jung, Carl G. (1974a [1906–13]). The
Freud-Jung letters: the correspondence between Sigmund
Freud and C. G. Jung (William McGuire, Ed.; Ralph
Manheim and R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton: Princeton
University Press Press.
Meltzer, Donald, and Williams, Meg Harris. (1988). The
apprehension of beauty. Perth: Clunie Press.
Meltzer, Donald, et al. (1975). Explorations in autism. Perth:
Clunie Press.
Tustin, Frances. (1977). Autism and childhood psychosis.
London: Hogarth. (Originally published 1972)
———. (1981). Autistic states in children. London: Routledge.
137
AUTISTIC CAPSULE/NUCLEUS
Further Reading
Gaddini, Renato. (1993). On autism. Psychoanalytical
Inquiry, 13,134–143.
Gergely, G. (2000). Reapproaching Mahler: autism, symbiosis, splitting, libidinal object. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 48, 1197–1228.
Guntrip, Harry. (1973). Science, psychodynamic reality, and
autistic thinking. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 1, 3–22.
Ogden, Thomas H. (1989). On the concept of an autisticcontiguous position. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 70, 127–140.
AUTISTIC CAPSULE/NUCLEUS
The term ‘‘autistic capsule’’ (or ‘‘autistic nucleus’’) was
proposed by Frances Tustin to describe a split part of
the personality that has encapsulated archaic depressive anxieties such as the fear of collapse, liquefaction,
falling, a black hole, or amputation of a body part,
within a system of autistic-like defenses. Sensation
objects and sensation forms, experienced as part of the
subject’s own body, serve to blot out bodily anxieties.
The notion of an autistic capsule appeared in
Frances Tustin’s first book, Autism and Childhood
(1972), in the chapter entitled ‘‘Systems of Pathological Autism,’’ where she refers to an ‘‘isolated pocket . . .
of encapsulation’’ (p. 85). This construct enabled her
to follow the development of a number of children
who appeared normal but suffered from neurosis and
later showed a variety of disorders: ‘‘phobias, sleeping
difficulties, anorexia nervosa, elective mutism, some
skin troubles, some psycho-somatic disorders, some
learning difficulties, some speech disorders, and some
forms of delinquency’’ (p. 85). She also argued that the
autistic capsule exits ‘‘in the character structure of
some relatively normal individuals,’’ as revealed by
rigid splits, superficial identifications, and an exaggerated need for control (p. 85). The superficial aspect
of autistic encapsulation, also developed by Donald
Meltzer (1975) and related to the notion of adhesive
identity described by Esther Bick (1986), has comparable aspects in the ‘‘as if ’’ personality described by
Helene Deutsch (1942) and the ‘‘false self ’’ personalities described by Donald Winnicott (1965). Tustin
thought that ultimately such autistic capsules exist in
minimal form in all individuals and that they are
responsible for regressive tendencies toward inertia,
13 8
similar to the regression toward an inanimate state
associated with the death instinct in Freud’s theory.
The ‘‘de-encapsulation’’ process, Tustin emphasized, is
likely to give rise to manic-depressive swings.
In Autistic Barriers in Neurotic Patients (1986) and
The Protective Shell in Children and Adults (1990), Tustin
described the autistic capsule in neurotic adult patients
in greater detail, using her own case histories, notably
that of an anorexic adolescent girl. Her description of
motifs of vampirism and a system of communicating
vases is congruent with the findings of the French investigators Evelyne Kestemberg, Jean Kestenberg, and Simone
Decobert in La faim et le corps: une étude psychanalytique de l’anorexie mentale (Hunger and the body: a
psychoanalytic study of anorexia nervosa; 1972). This
book also contains contributions from other psychoanalysts, notably Sydney Klein and David Rosenfeld,
who developed the theme of autistic phenomena in
their own work. Sydney Klein (1980) emphasized how
autistic phenomena in neurotic patients lead to thinness and superficiality. Rosenfeld (1993) studied how
certain types of drug dependency and psychosomatic
illnesses have some autistic aspects.
GENEVIÈVE HAAG
See also: Autism; Autistic defenses; Breakdown; Black
hole; Tustin, Frances.
Bibliography
Bick, Esther. (1986). Further considerations on the functioning of skin in early object relations: findings from infant
observation integrated into child and adult analysis. British
Journal of Psychotherapy, 2, 292–299.
Deutsch, Helene. (1942) Some forms of emotional disturbance and their relationship to schizophrenia. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 11, 301–321
Kestemberg, Evelyne; Kestenberg, Jean, and Decobert,
Simone. (1972). La faim et le corps: une étude psychanalytique de l’anorexie mentale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
Klein, Sydney. (1980). Autistic phenomena in neurotic
patients. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 61 (2),
395–401.
Meltzer, Donald, Bremner, John, Hoxter, Shirley, Weddell,
Doreen, and Wittenberg, Isca. (1975). Explorations in autism. Perth, Scotland: Clunie Press.
Rosenfeld, David. (1993). Autisme: des aspects autistiques dans la pharmacodépendance et dans les maladies
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‘ ‘A U T O B I O G R A P H I C A L S T U D Y , A N ’ ’
psychosomatiques. Journal de la psychanalyse de l’enfant,
20, 168–188.
Tustin, Frances. (1972). Autism and childhood psychosis.
London: Hogarth.
———. (1986). Autistic barriers in neurotic patients.
London: Karnac Books.
———. (1990). The protective shell in children and adults.
London: Karnac Books.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1965). Ego distortion in terms of
true and false self. In his Maturational processes and the
facilitating environment (pp. 140–152). London: Hogarth
and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. (Original work published 1962)
Bibliography
Fraiberg, Selma. (1982). Pathological defenses in infancy.
Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 51 (4), 612–635.
Kanner, Leo. (1973). Childhood psychosis, initial studies and
new insights. Washington, DC: Winston.
Mahler, Margaret. (1968). On human symbiosis or the vicissitudes of individuation. New York: International Universities Press.
Meltzer, Donald. (1975). Adhesive identification. Contemporary Psycho-Analysis, 11, 289–310.
Tustin, Frances. (1972). Autism and childhood psychosis.
London: Hogarth.
———. (1981). Autistic states in children. London:
Routledge.
AUTISTIC DEFENSES
Further Reading
The term ‘‘defense’’ is not generally associated with
autistic states. However, manifestations of the ‘‘body
ego’’ (Freud) that have as their function the avoidance
of anxiety are ‘‘autistic defenses.’’ They give rise not
only to ‘‘autistic phenomena’’ (‘‘objects,’’ ‘‘gestures,’’
‘‘languages,’’ etc.) that are inseparable from the sensations that they cause, but also to a devitalization of the
outside world.
Cohen D. , and Jay, S. M. (1996). Autistic barriers in the psychoanalysis of borderline adults. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 77, 913–934.
Leo Kanner (1943) is credited with the discovery of
early childhood autism. Without explicitly using the
term ‘‘defense,’’ he described a certain number of primary manifestations (sameness, self-sufficiency, selfabsorption, and inaccessibility) that could be said to
have a defensive function. In lieu of the term ‘‘autistic
defense’’ (which implies a relatively organized ego),
Margaret Mahler (1968) proposed the term ‘‘maintenance mechanism’’; Frances Tustin, (1972, 1981)
‘‘autistic maneuvers’’; and Fraiberg (1982) ‘‘defense
reactions.’’ The autistic ‘‘defenses’’ are thought to
result from the self-induced sensuality of the autist
and his or her exclusive focus on bodily sensations and
rhythms (Tustin). Frances Tustin spoke of ‘‘autistic
objects,’’ ‘‘autistic contours,’’ and ‘‘encapsulation.’’
Donald Meltzer referred to ‘‘dismantling,’’ and Freiberg to ‘‘avoidance’’ and to ‘‘freezing.’’
Mitrani, J. L. (1992). The survival function of autistic manoeuvres in adult patients. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 73, 549–560.
The analysis of autistic ‘‘defenses’’ leads to that of
the psychic function of the body ego on the border
between somatic and mental.
After a brief reference to his childhood, he directs his
attention to a discussion of his teachers: Ernst Wilhelm
von Brücke, Theodor Meynert, and especially Jean
Martin Charcot. Considerable space is given to Josef
Breuer and hypnosis, relatively little to Wilhelm Fliess.
ELSA SCHMID-KITSIKIS
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Gomberoff, M. and Gomberoff, L. (2000). Autistic devices
in small children in mourning. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 81, 907–920.
Kilchenstein, M., and Schuerholz, L. (1995). Autistic
defenses and the impairment of cognitive development.
Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 59, 443–459.
‘‘AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STUDY, AN’’
Freud’s autobiography appeared in Die Medizin der
Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen (Today’s medicine:
autobiographies), published in Leipzig in 1925. In the
introduction Freud recalls that in 1909 he had outlined
the development of psychoanalysis at Clark University
in Massachusetts and in 1914 published a history of
the psychoanalytic movement (1914d). Realizing that
his life history is part of the origins of psychoanalysis,
Freud wrote, ‘‘I will have to try to find a new way of
blending subjective and objective exposition, somewhere between biography and history.’’
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The major discoveries—the concept of psychic reality,
infantile sexuality, resistance, repression, dream interpretation—are described and condensed so he can
focus on a discussion of psychoanalysis’s relationship
with other fields and, therefore, the history of the psychoanalytic movement and its conflicts (including his
with Carl Gustav Jung). The end of the book is devoted
to the applications of psychoanalysis: religion, ethnology, mythology, pedagogy, and so on, illustrating the
importance Freud gave to this aspect of his theory.
The identification of Freud with psychoanalysis
limits the field of historical investigation in terms of
both Freud’s biography and the history of psychoanalysis. However, this method of personal exposition is
familiar to him and is, in the majority of his works, an
intrinsic part of the theoretical exposition, if not an
apodictic strategy. Following his break with Wilhelm
Fliess, Freud was cautious about the charge of plagiarism and priority of discovery. It is possible to conclude
that this point of view limits an understanding of the
dialectics of influence, the recognition of cryptomnesia, and more generally the reliance on another’s
hypotheses to advance one’s own.
The truth, as Freud wrote, is fragmentary, and historical narrative is more like a legend than a ‘‘family
romance.’’
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Autobiography.
Source Citation
Freud, Sigmund. (1925d [1924]). Selbstdarstellung. Die
Medizin der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, 4, Leipzig,
p. 1–52; GW, 14: 31–96; An autobiographical study. SE, 20:
7–70.
writing that describes the life of a particular individual. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, autobiography is of interest as the story told by the patient
to the analyst and to himself.
Autobiography in the modern sense began as a form
of confession (Saint Augustine), even though there are
memoirs in classical literature (Xenophon’s Anabasis,
Julius Caesar’s Gallic wars). Such introspective works
can be considered attempts at self-analysis before the
psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious. In 1925
Freud wrote An Autobiographical Study, in which the
story of his own life merges with that of the creation of
psychoanalysis. According to Freud, biographical truth
does not exist, since the author must rely on lies, secrets,
and hypocrisy (letter to Arnold Zweig dated May 31,
1939). The same is true of autobiography. From this
point of view, it is interesting that Freud framed his theoretical victory and the birth of psychoanalysis in terms
of a psychological novel.
The function of autobiography is to use scattered
bits of memory to create the illusion of a sense of continuity that can hide the anxiety of the ephemeral, or
even of the absence of the meaning of existence, from a
purely narcissistic point of view. This story constitutes
a narrative identity (Ricoeur, 1984–1988) but is selfcontained. In contrast, the job of analysis is to modify,
indeed to deconstruct, this identity through interpretation. Because the analyst reveals repressed content,
he is always a potential spoiler of the patient’s autobiographic story (Mijolla-Mellor, 1988).
Although autobiography has been of greater interest
to literature (Lejeune, 1975) than to psychoanalysis, a
number of psychoanalysts (Wilfred Bion and Marie
Bonaparte, among others) have written autobiographies, thus confirming the link between the analyst’s
pursuit of self-analysis and autobiographical reflection.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1914d). On the history of the psycho-analytic movement. SE, 14: 1–66.
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1990). Autobiographie de la psychanalyse. Le Coq-Héron, 118, 6–14.
Rey, Jean-Michel. (1984). Freud et l’écriture de l’histoire.
L’Écrit du temps, 6, 23–42.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: ‘‘Autobiographical Study, An’’; Jung, Carl Gustav;
Literature and psychoanalysis; ‘‘Psychoanalytic Notes on
the Autobiography of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia paranoides)’’; Memoirs of the future.
Bibliography
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Freud, Sigmund. (1925). An autobiographical study. SE,
20: 1–74.
As a literary genre, autobiography, narrating the story
of one’s own life, is a variation of biography, a form of
Lejeune, Philippe. (1974). Le pacte autobiographique.
Paris: Seuil.
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AUTOEROTICISM
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1988). Suvivre à so passé. In
L’autobiographie. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
———. (1990). Autobiographie et psychanalyse. Le CoqHéron, 118, pp. 6–14.
Ricoeur, Paul. (1984–1988). Time and narrative (Kathleen
McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1985)
AUTOEROTICISM
The term ‘‘autoeroticism’’ refers to behaviors designed
to obtain sexual satisfaction without the intervention of
another person (the most obvious example being masturbation). However, the term is often understood
more broadly, given the Freudian conception of psychosexuality, according to which many different physical
pleasures take on the value of sexual satisfaction. Genitals are not necessarily involved. By extension, the same
can be said of certain psychic activities (reading, according to popular wisdom, is a ‘‘solitary vice’’). ‘‘Alloeroticism,’’ a less common term, refers by contrast to sexual
satisfaction obtained with the help of another person.
Sigmund Freud, who took the terms from Havelock
Ellis, appears to have used them for the first time in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, dated December 9, 1899: ‘‘The lowest sexual stratum is auto-erotism, which does without
any psychosexual aim and demands only local feelings of
satisfaction. It is succeeded by allo-erotism (homo- and
hetero-erotism) but it certainly also continues to exist as
a separate current’’ (Freud, 1950a, p. 280).
According to this initial definition, autoeroticism
would appear first but would never disappear. Freud
clarified his thought in Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality (1905d) and then in later footnotes. He considered sucking to be a fundamental activity: ‘‘The
child’s lips, in our view, behave like an erotogenic
zone, and no doubt stimulation by the warm flow of
milk is the cause of the pleasurable sensation. The
satisfaction of the erotogenic zone is associated, in the
first instance, with the satisfaction of the need for
nourishment’’ (p. 182). In 1915 Freud added: ‘‘To
begin with, sexual activity attaches itself to functions
serving the purpose of self-preservation and does not
become independent of them until later . . . The child
does not make use of an extraneous body for his sucking, but prefers a part of his own skin because it is
more convenient, because it makes him independent
of the external world, which he is not yet able to control’’ (1905d, p. 182). This is one of Freud’s most
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important claims—infantile sexuality develops by
making use of a function essential for life, from which
it later detaches itself.
This autoerotic satisfaction is not required for every
object cathexis, however, since, through this detachment, the child frees itself from its first object, the
breast, which is the vehicle of a hallucinatory satisfaction and the subsequent disappointment that leads to
the birth of the first representations.
‘‘On Narcissism; An Introduction’’ (1914c) enabled
Freud to take this a step further. When the child constitutes itself as an ‘‘object’’ for its own satisfaction, it is no
longer a question of drive satisfaction, as in autoerotic
activity, located in a given erotogenic zone, but rather of
the beginning of the unification of drive and object: ‘‘the
hitherto dissociated sexual instincts come together into a
single unity and cathect the ego as an object’’ (1912–13a,
p. 89). This unifying movement then acts on another
person during the initial ‘‘object choices’’ that will govern
all later sexual life. Freud would later refine these views
and provide an overview of the process in a 1923 article
on infantile genital organization (1923e).
Autoeroticism, therefore, characterizes an early
phase of psychosexual development. However, as Freud
acknowledged in his 1899 letter to Fliess cited above,
it continues to ‘‘subsist,’’ as many common clinical
findings demonstrate. It also plays a major role in a
number of disorders; in psychoses it can appear invasive
(Gillibert, Jean, 1977), as shown in the case of Daniel
Paul Schreber (Schreber, 1903/1988; Freud, 1911c), or
deficient (Botella, César, and Sára, 1982). In this area as
in so many others, the diagnostic dimension and the
psychogenetic dimension are complementary.
ROGER PERRON
See also: Infant development; Narcissism; Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality.
Bibliography
Botella, César, and Botella, Sára. (1982). Sur la carence autoérotique du paranoı̈aque. Revue française de psychanalyse,
46 (1), 63–80.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
——— (1912–13a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
——— (1950a). Extracts from the Fliess papers. SE, 1:
173–280.
141
AUTOHISTORIZATION
Gillibert, Jean. (1977). De l’autoérotisme. XXXVII Congrès
des psychanalystes de langues romanes. Revue française de
psychanalyse, 41, 5–6.
Schreber, Daniel Paul. (1988). Memoirs of my nervous illness.
(I. Macalpine and R. Hunter, Trans.). Cambridge: Harvard
University Press (Original work published 1903).
AUTOHISTORIZATION
The I is constituted by the discourse it builds about
itself, its self-assigned task being to transform the fragmentary elements of its past, whether they come from
itself or from other people, into a historical construction. The difference between memory and history
involves the sequencing of facts to meet two requirements: first of all, that of imparting a feeling of temporal continuity, and in addition, simultaneously,
endowing this historical construction with a power of
causal explanation with regard to the future (MijollaMellor, Sophie de, 1998). The I thus figures, according
to the title of Piera Aulagnier’s L’Apprenti historien et le
maı̂tre sorcier (The apprentice historian and the master
sorcerer; 1984), as an ‘‘apprentice historian’’ faced
with the ‘‘master sorcerer’’ constituted by the id.
Autohistorization is the only way the subject can
grasp the notion of time, which can only make sense
to the subject in relation to his or her own desires and
self-perceptions: ‘‘The process of identification is the
hidden side of the work of historicization that transforms the unfathomable entity of physical time into
human time, that replaces irrevocably lost time with a
time that speaks it,’’ writes Aulagnier.
This history is that of the I’s relationship to its
objects: a libidinal history, and a history that can only
target the I indirectly, through the Other. From temporality to memory to history there occurs an unfolding movement, the construction that the I must effect
in order for its existence to make sense.
In Aulagnier’s view, we are ‘‘historians whose quest
always founders on an ‘already-there’ about ourselves
or others that resists our efforts to elucidate it.’’ This
human inevitability forces the I to take possession of
this preexisting ‘‘elsewhere’’ and to include it within
itself; to do this, the I must rely on the accounts of
other people who provide it with an affirmation that
what it is and what it was are identical, and at the same
time give elements of information on this issue. This
gives rise to the question of what happens when others
fail to transmit to the subject the ‘‘first paragraphs’’ of
an individuals personal history and prehistory.
14 2
In L’Apprenti-historien et le maı̂tre sorcier, Aulagnier
develops the notion of ‘‘nonhistory’’ in the schizophrenic. In these cases, the mother exerts on the infant’s
psyche an action of repression so powerful that it will
render impossible even the revealing of non-repressed
material (and, as it happens, inculcate a desire for
death as well) that is present and active within the
mother’s own psyche. Hence the attempted delusional
reconstruction that would enable the subject to do
without this contribution from the mother: ‘‘The fantasy of self-engenderment that is present in certain
forms of psychosis can most often be decoded, on
close inspection, as a fantasy that gives the subject the
power to engender not just his or her own past, but all
past, not just his or her own origins, but all origins.’’
Aulagnier’s entire theory on psychosis, contrary to
monolithic interpretations (such as foreclosure in the
Name of the Father, double bind, and so on) reflects, as
did Sigmund Freud’s work, a perspective that is essentially historical, focusing on singular events. What she
demonstrates here concerns the consequences of prohibition on memory, and thus the work of autohistorization without which the I cannot come into being.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Apprenti-historien et le maitre sorcier (L’) [The
apprentice historian and the master sorceror]; Family
romance; Psychic temporality.
Bibliography
Aulagnier, Piera. (1984). L’Apprenti-historien et le maı̂tre sorcerier. Du discours identifiant au discours délirant. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1998). Penser la psychose. Une
lecture de l’oeuvre de Piera Aulagnier. Paris: Dunod.
AUTOMATISM
Properly speaking, ‘‘automatism’’ is not a concept, but
rather a term that, like the adjective ‘‘automatic’’ or
the adverb ‘‘automatically,’’ has several definitions. It
can mean ‘‘mental operations or activities without the
involvement of the will, activities rendered automatic
by habit, regularity in the completion of certain acts,
or a set of involuntary activities or impulses’’ (LantériLaura, 1992).
The term ‘‘automatism’’ refers to an activity carried
out without the participation of the will. Once the
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AUTOMATISM
activity is triggered, it becomes a mechanism that
functions by itself. This notion of automatism, derived
from the philosophic and medical traditions, provided
the eighteenth century with a model, though reductionist, for global and hegemonic knowledge of the
physical and biological worlds and, in the biological
world, for human behavior. (La Mettrie published
Man a Machine in 1746.) Later, because of advances in
chemistry that revealed very different levels of organization in the two worlds, the model of automatism
seemed on the contrary to control only vegetative life,
corresponding to the autonomic nervous system, and
involved only one part of the life functions, that of
muscular mechanics. In this era, a simultaneously
morphological and functional opposition was conceived between a less automatic superior level and a
more automatic inferior level.
From John Huglings Jackson’s work on epilepsy in the
nineteenth century emerged a highly elaborated representation of the function and dysfunction of the central
nervous system and the discovery of a specific attack—
related to lesions—on the automatisms in question.
Thus a disorganization of a hierarchical structure suppressed a function and freed what the suppressed
function had previously controlled—one automatism
disappeared and the other remained uncontrolled.
This notion of an automatism proper to the functioning of the central nervous system found several
examples in the field of psychiatry, for instance, the
work of Valentin Magnan and his notion of impulse,
that of Jules Seglas defining the relation between verbal
hallucinations and aphasias, the psychological automatism of Pierre Janet, and finally the mental automatism of Georges de Clérambault and the work of Henri
Ey, which was greatly influenced by John H. Jackson.
What is involved is a definition of automatism that
situates it as mechanism that is ‘‘under control.’’ It
becomes pathogenic and pathological as soon as such control ceases. Meanwhile, there emerges another definition
of automatism that situates it instead on the side of the
creative force, of a more lively and original inspiration.
The word automatisch appeared very rarely in
Freud. In one of its earliest occurrences (the case of
Dora, 1905e [1901]), it is apparent that he is borrowing vocabulary that is not his own: ‘‘I give the name of
symptomatic acts to those acts which people perform,
as we say, automatically, unconsciously, without
attending to them, or as if in a moment of distraction’’
(p. 76). Then, in the metapsychological texts, the word
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is used in three limited senses: a) the regulation of
(unconscious) automatic processes by the pleasure
principle (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920g); b) socalled ‘‘automatic’’ anxiety when it is a question of the
origin or the ‘‘automatic’’ appearance of anxiety (Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, 1926d); and occasionally, c) the process of repression (1926d).
The noun Automatismus, ‘‘automatism,’’ is also very
rarely found in Freud’s works. When Freud refers to it in
Inhibition, Symptoms, and Anxiety in relation to the process of repression, he prefers the term ‘‘compulsion to
repeat’’: ‘‘The new impulse will run its course under an
automatic influence—or, as I should prefer to say, under
the influence of the compulsion to repeat. It will follow
the same path as the earlier repressed impulse, as if the
danger-situation that had been overcome still existed’’
(p. 153). In the New Introductory Lectures (1933a
[1932]), the term is directly connected to the principle of
pleasure-unpleasure, in a sense essentially based on the
(automatic) mode of regulation of unconscious processes, but that merges with anxiety and repression.
The term was used more frequently by Jacques
Lacan, specifically starting in the fifties, when, under
the influence of cybernetics, the question of automatons was on his mind. And so pure automatism
became an essentially psychotic phenomenon.
Today the term, still being enriched by new mathematical models, could clarify for us a certain mode of
the functioning of mental processes.
PASCALE MICHON-RAFFAITIN
See also: Compulsion; Janet, Pierre; Letter, the; Repetition
compulsion; Subconscious; Trauma.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905e [1901]). Fragment of an analysis of
a case of hysteria. SE, 7: 1–122.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE,
18: 1–64.
———. (1926d). Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety. SE,
20: 75–172.
———. (1933a). New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
Lantéri-Laura, Georges. (1992). Psychiatrie et connaissance.
Paris: Sciences en situation.
La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. (1746). Man a machine. La
Salle, IL: Open Court Classics, 1912.
143
AUTOPLASTIC
AUTOPLASTIC
‘‘automagnetization’’ had reinforced (or supplanted)
various forms of ‘‘magnetism.’’
The terms ‘‘autoplastic’’ and ‘‘alloplastic’’ serve to distinguish changes internal to the subject from work carried out on the external world. Sándor Ferenczi proposed the word ‘‘autoplastic’’ in an article on hysterical
materialization (1919/1926). Citing Freud’s description
of hysteria as a caricature of art, Ferenczi added, ‘‘Hysterical ‘materializations’ . . . show us the organism in its
entire plasticity, indeed in its preparedness for art. . . .
The purely ‘autoplastic’ tricks of the hysteric [may well
be] prototypes, not only for the bodily performances of
‘artists’ and actors, but also for the work of those creative artists who no longer manipulate their own bodies
but material from the external world’’ (p. 104).
At the end of the century, a theoretical and practical debate ensued that both galvanized and divided
the various schools of hypnotism. What was the real
agent in the process of suggestion: the hypnotist, or
the subject, who often relinquishes power to him
without realizing it? For those who believed the latter, the effectiveness of the suggestion was thought
to depend on a self-suggestibility associated with
hysterical tendencies (Jean Martin Charcot, Pierre
Janet), or the ‘‘will’’ of the subject (a position put
forward by Joseph Delboeuf [1831–1896], an independent disciple of Hippolyte Bernheim). In 1888–
1889, basing his theory on the work of Charcot,
Freud showed that some suggestive experiences
could be interpreted in terms of an ‘‘encouragement
to autosuggestion.’’ In 1892–93, he proposed the
notion of a ‘‘counter-will.’’ In 1895 Joseph Breuer
insisted that self-hypnotic states were a symptom of
hysteria and a process of self-medication and selfhealing carried out in the presence of the therapist.
The cathartic talking cure occurred during these
states of self-hypnosis.
Freud adopted these terms when clarifying the similarities and the differences between neurosis and psychosis (1924e). ‘‘Expedient, normal’’ behavior, he
wrote, combines features of both disorders, for it ‘‘disavows the reality as little as does a neurosis, but . . .
then exerts itself, as does a psychosis, to effect an
alteration of that reality.’’ But it ‘‘does not stop, as in
psychosis, at effecting internal changes. It is no longer
autoplastic or alloplastic’’ (p. 185).
These seldom used notions might arguably serve a
useful purpose in describing the analytic process: in
their asymmetrical way, the two protagonists in treatment are engaged in an unending struggle between
changing the other and effecting internal change.
Following in the tradition of Nancy school, the
pharmacist Émile Coué (1857–1926) popularized the
use of autosuggestion to govern one’s own behavior.
His disciple Charles Baudouin suggested that a synthesis be attempted between Coué’s theories and
psychoanalysis.
STEVEN WAINRIB
JACQUELINE CARROY
See also: Hysteria.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1924e). The loss of reality in neurosis and
psychosis. SE, 19: 180–187.
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1926). The phenomena of hysterical
materialization: thoughts on the conception of hysterical
conversion and symbolism. In his Further contributions to
the theory and technique of psycho-analysis. London:
Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1919)
AUTOSUGGESTION
Autosuggestion was popularized by the French ‘‘Nancy
school.’’ By the first half of the nineteenth century,
methods of self-medication and self-healing known as
14 4
See also: Baudouin, Charles; Qu’est-ce que la suggestion?
(What is the suggestion?); Suggestion.
Bibliography
Cuvelier, André. (1987). Hypnose et suggestion: De Liébeault
à Coué. Nancy, France: Presses Universitaires de Nancy.
Delboeuf, Joseph. (1993). Le sommeil et les Rêves et autres
textes. Paris: Fayard. (Originally published in 1885)
Duyckaerts, François. (1992). Joseph Delboeuf, philosophe et
hypnotiseur. Paris: Synthélabo.
Freud, Sigmund. (1888–1889a). Preface to the translation of
Bernheim’s Suggestion. SE: 1: 71–85.
———. (1892–1893a). A case of successful treatment by
hypnotism. SE: 1: 115–128.
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BACHELARD, GASTON (1884–1962)
Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher, was born on
June 27, 1884, in Bar-sur-Aube and died in Paris on
October 16, 1962. He held a Ph.D. in philosophy and
was a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et
Politiques. His career was far from ordinary. He was
born into a family of modest means and began his
professional life as a temporary employee in the postal
service. In 1919 he became a teacher of physics and
chemistry at the Bar-sur-Aube grammar school and
prepared for his degree in philosophy, which he
obtained in 1922. In 1927 he defended his doctoral
dissertation and was appointed a professor of philosophy in 1930 at the University of Dijon and later at the
Sorbonne (1940–1955). He received the Grand Prix
National des Lettres in 1961.
His work is divided between considerations of the
scientific mind, rationalism and the need for truth,
and reflections on the imagination, daydreams, and
poetry. Psychoanalysis, as Bachelard understood it,
could serve as a link between these two approaches
and, at times, there are echoes of a Jungian approach
in his work.
In 1938 he produced La Formation de lÕesprit scientifique: Contribution à une psychanalyse de la connaissance objective and The Psychoanalysis of Fire. The
word psychoanalysis was pivotal; the study of fire
paved the way for a discussion of the epistemological
problem of heat and thermodynamics. Bachelard
introduced a powerful and disturbing poetics. For
him the scientific mindÕs idea of the unconscious
could be understood not on the basis of dreams but of
reverie, that is, fantasies organized into complexes. By
grasping the link between electrical fire and sexual fire,
he develops the idea that dream-like values are an
obstacle to true understanding and that it is necessary
to engage in repression, a voluntary intellectual act of
inhibition, which brings with it resistance, defense,
and rupture. Psychoanalysis serves as a source of
inspiration, it enables us to understand the formation
of the scientific mind as an activity that is always
subject to revision, not by a purely logical subject but
by a superego animated by a rationalist tension that
makes sublimation a positive and necessary factor
and, in contrast to Freud, one that is also a joyful
activity.
In working to frame Freudian concepts within a
dialectic structure, Bachelard attempted to substitute a
fecund surveillance of the mind for a repetitive and
neurotic censorship. He was thus led to distinguish
two types of knowledge: common knowledge and
scientific knowledge, which consists in the repression
of the former. For Bachelard, psychic conflict and
resistance were ideas that could be used to conceive of
truth as an error that has been rectified.
BachelardÕs work found an echo in both the philosophy of the sciences and in literary criticism. But it is
to Jacques Lacan that we must turn to fully assess what
Bachelard attempted to introduce: the idea of a science
whose subject is science.
ROGER BRUYERON
See also: France.
Bibliography
Bachelard, Gaston. (1964). The psychoanalysis of fire (Alan
C. M. Ross, Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press. (Original work
published in 1938)
145
B A G I N S K Y , A D O L F (18 43 –19 18)
———. (1968). The philosophy of no; a philosophy of the new
scientific mind (G. C. Waterston, Trans.). New York: Orion
Press. (Original work published in 1940)
richness of his various activities; as an editor he was
especially attentive to the psychic disturbances of
childhood.
———. (1969). The flame of a candle (Joni Caldwell,
Trans.). Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute Publications, c1988.
———. (1972). L’Engagement rationaliste. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
JOHANN GEORG REICHENEDER
See also: Institut Max-Kassowitz.
Bibliography
BAGINSKY, ADOLF (1843–1918)
Adolf Baginsky, a German pediatrician, was born May
22, 1843, in Ratibor (formerly in Upper Silesia,
modern-day Poland) and died May 15, 1918, in Berlin.
Baginsky came from a large family of Jewish shopkeepers. He studied medicine in Berlin and Vienna,
and obtained his diploma in Berlin on May 7, 1866.
His dissertation was on the risks of cesarean birth. He
specialized in pediatrics and, in 1872, settled in Berlin
as director of a free clinic for children, the Johannisstrasse. In 1877 he founded the Central-Zeitung für
Kinderheilkunde (Central Journal of Pediatrics),
which, in 1879, became the Archiv für Kinderheilkunde
(Archives of Pediatrics).
He was assigned to a teaching position in 1882 after
publishing a work on pediatrics as an autonomous specialization, but, outside of a few courses on pediatrics
given during his vacations, his university position was
precarious. Cofounder and, after 1890, director of
the Kaiser- und Kaiserin-Friedrick-Kinderkrankenhaus
(The Emperor and Emperess Friedrich Pediatric Hospital) in Berlin-Wedding, which he ran until April 1,
1898, he was named associate professor in 1892, then
held the chair in 1907.
Following a period of study in Paris, Sigmund
Freud spent the month of March 1886 at the Baginsky
clinic, where he acquired a good understanding of
childrenÕs diseases in order to prepare for his work as
‘‘sector head’’ in the first public institution for childhood diseases in Vienna.
BaginskyÕs work is extremely varied, ranging from
medical care for sick children to initiatives for socio–
medical prevention (including open air schools, educational medicine, and milk distribution). His work
bears the mark of a profound humanitarian ideal.
Although his religious beliefs became an obstacle to
his academic career, he remained actively engaged in
the Jewish community. His research reflects all the
14 6
Bonomi, C. (1994). Why have we ignored Freud the
‘‘Paediatrician?’’ Cahiers psychiatriques genevois, Special
Issue, 55–99.
Reicheneder, J. G. (1994). Freud in Berlin 1886. Luzifer–
Amor, 7, 7–16.
Schlossmann, A. (1919). Nachruf auf Adolf Baginsky. Arch.
Kinderheilkunde, 67, 1–6.
Zlocisti, T. (1913). Adolf Baginsky. Ost und West. 561–564.
BAK, ROBERT C. (1908–1974)
Robert C. Bak was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst,
born in Budapest, October 14, 1908, and died in New
York, September 15, 1974. Bak was the third son of a
rich Jewish family. His father was a farm manager.
After graduation in a high school of science, Bak
enrolled in the medical university, and received his
degree in 1933.
He was trained in psychoanalysis by Imre Hermann.
Following his emigration from Budapest to New
York in 1941, he worked as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. In 1947 he became a training analyst and
soon after a leading figure of the New York Psychoanalytical Institute. He conducted courses and
seminars.
In 1959 he became president of the Study Committee. He was president of the New York Psychoanalytical
Society from 1957 to 1959, and guest-professor at the
Albert Einstein Medical University. He conducted lecture tours in Italy, Denmark, and Switzerland for several years.
His early publications fuse psychoanalytical theory
with the contemporary concept of psychiatry. He treated the great Hungarian poet Attila József for schizophrenia. The afterlife of the communist poet and of
the young psychiatrist who had emigrated to the United States became closely intertwined in the ensuing
fifty years of Hungarian psychoanalysis, in which Bak
played a salient role, not exempt from ideological
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distortions. He wrote several articles on the poetÕs
pathology. In his last paper (1973) he again analyzed
the poetÕs suicide from the point of view of his ‘‘progressive withdrawal from the object and repeated
attempts to reestablish and recathects objects by being
in love.ÕÕ
BALINT GROUP
He maintained professional contact with Imre
Hermann until his death, but he was also influenced
by Heinz HartmannÕs theory, and worked together
with Phyllis Greenacre, Edith Jacobson, and Margaret
Mahler. From the beginning he was engrossed in an
in-depth exploration of the psyche through the phenomenology of psychopathology and the reality distortions manifest in psychoses and perversions. He
pointed out the significance of early heat-orientation
in schizophrenic symptom-formation. In addition to
sadomasochistic libido, he also showed the presence of
an overt and neutralized form of the aggression
instinct in paranoia and perversions (1956). He traced
the common origin of perversion fantasies back to
phallic mother-image, and, in addition to the destabilization of reality, assigned an important role to the
giant mother-image that Hermann had assumed for
him (1968). He wrote about 25 studies in Hungarian,
German, and English.
A dozen practitioners are brought together once a
week for two hours under the direction of one or two
analysts who receive honoraria and ensure the rules
under which the group functions. A doctor reports, as
spontaneously as possible, a case from his practice that
poses a problem. Participants and leaders then help
the presenter, by means associations, questions, and
interpretations, to elucidate the difficulties in the presenterÕs relation with the patient.
His work continues to exert a profound influence
on the study of psychoses and perversion, and represents the traditions of the Hungarian school.
HUNGARIAN GROUP
See also: Hungarian School.
Bibliography
Bak, Robert. (1941). Temperamentur-Orientierung und
Überfliessen der Ichgrenzen in der Schizophrenie. Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie, Neurochirurgie und Psychiatrie,
46, 158–177.
———. (1953). Fetishism. Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, 1–2, 285–297.
———. Aggression and perversion. In Sándor Lorand
(Ed.), Perversions: psychodynamics and therapy (pp.
231–240). New York: Random House, 1956.
———. (1968). The phallic woman: The ubiquitous fantasy,
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 23, 16–36.
———. (1973). Being in love and object loss. International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 54, 1–8.
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The Balint group is a group method of training doctors, generalists or specialists, in the doctor-patient
relationship. This method was developed by Michael
Balint and Enid Albu starting in 1945.
The aim is to sensitize the doctor to transference
and counter-transference in the ‘‘retroactive action’’ of
the consultation, to give the doctor psychotherapeutic
qualities, and thus to achieve a ‘‘considerable though
limited change in the doctorÕs personality’’ to enable
the doctor to better understand and help patients
(Balint, 1957, p. 121).
Between 1949 and 1954 Balint and Albu elaborated
and tested the method, by trial and error and by reminiscences, at the Tavistock Clinic in London, after Balint
took up the Family Discussion Bureau seminar directed
by Enid Albu (whom he would later marry). This seminar of case discussions trained social workers treating
cases of marital problems. To define the link between client and social worker, Balint modified the case presentations, doing away with written and read reports in favor
of oral presentations without notes, in order to maximize
the conditions for counter-transference. This method,
applying the fundamental rule, but always referred to a
third party (the patient), was similar to Hungarian
supervised analysis, centered on counter-transference.
The results were so impressive that when the
National Health Service wanted to give doctors training
in psychology, Michael Balint proposed the ‘‘Tavistock
Method.’’ Tested from 1950 to 1953, with volunteers
recruited by The Lancet, it became a training and
research method. French analysts who went to London
to be trained soon renamed it the ‘‘Balint group.’’
The Balint movement, launched in the 1960s, is
organized on the institutional level. Several national
associations have been created: The Balint Medical
Society of France (1967), The Balint Society of Great
147
B Á L I N T , M I C H A E L ( B Á L I N T [B E R G S M A N N ], M I H Á L Y ) ( 18 96 –197 0)
Britain (1969), and others in over twenty countries,
including Italy (1974), Germany, Belgium, and Russia
(1994). On the international level, the European
Council recognized the Balint Federation as a nongovernmental agency. As of 2004, the work of the Balints
continued, with training in Balint groups, colloquia,
and national and international conferences.
MICHELLE MOREAU RICAUD
See also: Hungarian School; Main, Thomas Forrest;
Raimbault, Émile.
Bibliography
Balint, Michael. (1957). The doctor, his patient, and the illness. New York: International Universities Press.
Balint, Michael, and Balint, Enid. (1961). Psychotherapeutic
techniques in medicine. London: Tavistock.
Balint, Michael, Balint, Enid, Gosling, Robert, and Hildebrand, H. Peter. (1979). Le médecin en formation: La
sélection et l’évaluation des résultats dans un programme de
formation destiné à des médecins de famille. Paris: Payot.
(Original work published 1966)
Moreau Ricaud, Michelle (2000). Michael Balint: Le renouveau de lÕécole de Budapest. Toulouse, France: Érès.
BALINT, MICHAEL (BÁLINT [BERGSMANN],
MIHÁLY) (1896–1970)
Hungarian physician and analyst Michael Balint was
born in Budapest on December 3, 1896, and died in
London on December 31, 1970.
He was the son of a Jewish general practitioner
(Dr. Bergsmann) from a Budapest suburb. In the
course of his brilliant university career (he earned qualifications in neuropsychiatry, philosophy, chemistry,
physics, and biology), he met Alice Székely-Kovács, an
anthropology student, who became his wife in 1924.
After World War I, he held various positions in
Budapest, and then in 1921, left for Berlin to undergo
analysis with Hanns Sachs at the same time as Alice.
He occupied various positions in the Psychoanalytic
Institute, the Institute for Organic Chemistry of the
Royal Academy of Berlin, as well as the Charité Hospital medical clinic. It was towards the end of his
twenties, with the aim of better integrating in society,
that he changed his name from the Jewish-sounding
14 8
Bergsmann to the more ‘‘Hungarian’’ Balint, just as
Sándor FerencziÕs father (born Fraenkel) had done.
Dissatisfied with their analyses with Hanns Sachs, the
Bálints returned to Budapest to finish with Sándor Ferenczi. Michael Balint subsequently became FerencziÕs
student, friend, and successor, as well as his literary
executor. In 1931, he was made deputy director of the
Psychoanalytic Polyclinic in Budapest under Ferenczi,
becoming its director after FerencziÕs death.
In January 1939, under the pressure of anti-Semitism,
the Bálints emigrated to Manchester, England. Six months after their arrival, Alice Balint died. During World
War II, Bálint taught medicine and science and began
a private practice in psychoanalysis. From 1942–1945,
he directed the Centers for Child Guidance in North
East Lancaster and Preston. From 1942–1945, he was
an honorary psychiatry consultant at Manchester
Northern Hospital, and in 1945, psychiatrist at the
Center for Child Guidance in Chiselhurst, Kent.
That same year, he set himself up in London as an
analyst. There he again took up his project of placing
psychoanalysis in the service of general practitioners,
this time in collaboration with Enid Albu (herself an
analyst), whom he married in 1950. From 1950–1953,
he was the scientific secretary of the British Psychoanalytic Society. An admired teacher and supervising
analyst, he employed the Hungarian method of
training, that is, he himself supervised the first case
of candidates he had analyzed. From 1950–1961, he
was a psychiatric consultant at the Tavistock Clinic,
and from 1957, a visiting professor of psychiatry at
the University College of Cincinnati in the United
States. From 1961–1965, he was honorary assistant to
the department of psychological medicine at the
University College Hospital in London where he directed post–graduate training seminars. In 1968, he
was elected president of the British Psychoanalytic
Society.
BalintÕs psychoanalytic writings possess a remarkable coherence. He progressively developed his ideas
from 1924 until they reached their ultimate form in
his last work The Basic Fault (1968). In addition to the
notion of the basic fault, Balint also introduced the
concepts of primary love (1930–1935) in Primary Love
and Psychoanalytic Technique (1952), and of benign
and malignant regression in Thrills and Regressions
(1959). He questioned the existence of primary narcissism and emphasized the contradictions in FreudÕs
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elaborations on it (‘‘Critical Notes on the Theory of
the Pregenital Organization of the Libido,’’ 1935). He
coined the term ‘‘ocnophile’’ to describe personalities
that feel the need to cling to objects and the term ‘‘philobatism’’ to characterize those who dread obstacles
and seek out open spaces that are free of them (1959).
He distinguished three mental zones: the oedipal zone,
involving three persons, where conventional language
holds sway; the zone of the basic fault, involving two
persons, where conventional language is no longer current; and the zone of creation, where the subject is
alone and creates only out of the self (1968).
BalintÕs other major effort was his educational
training work with general practitioners. His first article dealing with this subject dates from 1926: ‘‘On the
Psychotherapies, for the Practicing Physician’’ (Therapia 5, Budapest). His major work in this area is The
Doctor, His Patient and the Illness (1955).
The theoretical work of Michael Balint stands in
direct relation to the clinic and constitutes a remarkable tool for psychoanalytic practitioners. The technique that he elaborated for use by general practitioners
resulted in the creation of ‘‘Bálint Groups’’ and ‘‘Bálint
Societies’’ that utilize this mode of training.
Finally, Balint is responsible for the preservation
and promotion of the work of Sándor Ferenczi, for
whom he was literary executor. It was Balint who
transcribed FerencziÕs Clinical Diary, which he then
translated into English, and who also made the first
transcription, during the 1950s, of FerencziÕs correspondence with Freud.
Michael Balint published ten books (of which five
were coauthored) and 165 articles. The Balint Archives
are housed in the department of psychiatry in the University of Geneva.
JUDITH DUPONT
Notions developed: Basic fault; Benign/malignant regression; Primary love.
See also: Balint group; Balint-Szekely-Kovács, Alice;
Ego-libido/object-libido; Great Britain; Hungarian
School; Hungary; Medicine and psychoanalysis; Tavistock Clinic.
Bibliography
Balint, Michael. (1964). The doctor, his patient and the illness
(2nd ed.). London: Pitman Medical Publishing.
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———. (1968). The basic fault: therapeutic aspects of regression. London: Tavistock Publications.
Faure, Franck. (1978). La doctrine de Michael Bálint. Paris:
Payot.
Haynal, André. (1988). The technique at issue: Controversies
in psychoanalysis: From Freud and Ferenczi to Michael
Bálint. London: Karnac.
Moreau Ricaud, Michelle. (2000). Michael Bálint: Le renouveau de l ÕÉcole de Budapest. Paris: Erès.
BALINT-SZÉKELY-KOVÁCS, ALICE
(1898–1939)
Hungarian psychoanalyst and anthropologist Alice
Balint-Székely-Kovács was born in Budapest on June
16, 1898, and died in Manchester on August 19, 1939.
She was the eldest daughter of Vilma Kovács, herself
an analyst and student of Sándor Ferenczi. Both Alice
and Michael Balint were also his students. Alice Balint
had a brilliant career as a student in Budapest. One of
her classmates was Margrit Schönberger, who became
well known under the name of Margaret Mahler. Then
she pursued university studies in mathematics and
anthropology.
From 1921 to 1924, she resided in Berlin with
Michael Balint, her future husband. Both were in
analysis with Hanns Sachs and participated in the
activities of the Psychoanalytic Association of Berlin.
Dissatisfied with their analyses, they returned to Budapest and finished their training with Sándor Ferenczi.
Alice Balint was very active in the Psychoanalytic
Association of Budapest. A child analyst at the Psychoanalytic Polyclinic of Budapest, she also maintained a
private practice of children and adults. She gave lectures for parents that later appeared in the pedagogy
journal Gyermeknevelés (Child Education). In 1939 the
Balint family emigrated to Great Britain and established themselves in Manchester. Alice Balint died
there suddenly at the end of August 1939.
Her work comprises a series of articles and one
book. Her articles deal with ethno-psychoanalysis
(‘‘Mexican War Hieroglyphs,’’ ‘‘The Father of the
Family’’), psychoanalytic theory (‘‘Love for the Mother
and Mother Love,’’ ‘‘On Repression’’) and pedagogy.
Her book, called A Gyermekszoba pszichológiája (The
Psychoanalysis of the Nursery), was translated into
several languages.
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B A R A N G E R , W I L L Y (1922 – 1994)
Alice Balint died too young, leaving behind a body
of work qualitatively modest, but of great originality,
that still waits to be better known and used.
JUDITH DUPONT
See also: Balint, Michael; Hungary; Primary love.
Bibliography
Balint, Alice. (1953). The psycho-analysis of the nursery.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
———. (1965) Love for the mother and Mother Love. In
Michael Balint, Primary love and psycho-analytic technique. London: Tavistock Publications.
———. (1990). Anya és gyermek (Mother and child) (2nd
ed.). Budapest: Pantheon.
BARANGER, WILLY (1922–1994)
A psychoanalyst with a degree in philosophy, Willy
Baranger was born on August 13, 1922, in Bône,
Algeria, and died on October 29, 1994, in Buenos
Aires.
He spent his childhood in Paris, where he continued his studies until he obtained his baccalaureate
diploma in 1939. After moving to Toulouse because of
the war, he completed his education with the PCB and
received a degree in philosophy. He married Madeleine
Coldefy and prepared for his doctorate in philosophy,
which he received in 1945.
After teaching in France for a year, he left for
Buenos Aires as a professor of philosophy at the Institut Français dÕÉtudes Supérieures. He began his psychoanalysis with Enrique Pichon-Rivière and soon
completed his theoretical and practical training. In
December 1954 a group of Uruguayan doctors and
psychologists asked him to assume responsibility for
training analysis and teaching in Montevideo. The
Asociacı́on Psicoanalı́tica del Uruguay was officially
formed on September 27, 1955. It was recognized as a
study group at the international congress held in Paris
in 1957 and as an affiliate of the International Psychoanalytic Association at the congress of Edinburgh in
1961.
The Revista uruguaya de psicoanálisis, which is still
in print, published its first issue in May 1956. Willy
Baranger was a constant presence at the Latin
15 0
American congresses of psychoanalysis since their
inception in Buenos Aires in 1956 and, in 1960, at the
congress held in Santiago, Chile, he worked with his colleagues to create COPAL, the Coordinating Committee
for Latin American Psychoanalytic Organizations, of
which he was president in 1975–1976. In 1966 Baranger
returned to Buenos Aires, where he resumed his teaching activities. He was part of the sponsorship committee of the Peruvian group that, once recognized as an
affiliate of the International Psychoanalytic Association, named him an honorary member. In December
1993 he received the Mary S. Sigourney prize.
Baranger published four books: Problemas del
campo psicoanalitico, with Madeleine Baranger (1969),
Posicı́on y objeto en la obra de Melanie Klein (1971),
Aportaciones al concepto de objeto en psicoanálisis
(1980), and Artesanias psicoanaliticas (1994).
Some of his many articles touch upon literature and
philosophy. His work on epistemology defends the
idea that psychoanalysis must formulate its own criteria of validation, different from those used by the
exact sciences. He also studied the problem of ideology
and its relation to idealized objects. His emphasis on
the object is expressed in his Posicı́on y objeto en la obra
de Melanie Klein. This ‘‘objectology’’ depends on the
willingness to structure any theoretical elaboration of
the psychoanalytic situation as a fundamental given.
The concept of the psychoanalytic situation as a
‘‘dynamic field’’ leads to an unconscious bipersonal
fantasy of the session, in which transference and countertransference are extracted from a situation that possesses its own dynamism and outcomes, aside from the
specific contributions of the analyst and analysand.
For example, a ‘‘bastion’’ is a resistance produced in
the psychoanalytic field by the unconscious collusion
of the analyst and the analysand, which immobilizes
the process.
Willy BarangerÕs work is generally well known and
recognized in Latin America, but much less so in Europe, with the exception of Italy, where a selection of
his work was published in 1990 as La situazione psicoanalitica come campo bipersonale (The Psychoanalytic
Situation as a Bipersonal Field).
MADELEINE BARANGER
See also: Argentina; Federacı́on psicoanalı́tica de América
Latina; Uruguay.
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Bibliography
Baranger, Madeleine, Baranger, Willy, and Mom, Jorge.
(1983). Process and non-process in analytic work. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 64, 1–15. (Original work
published 1982)
Baranger, Willy. (1971). Posición y objeto en la obra de Melanie Klein. Buenos Aires: Kargieman.
Baranger, Willy, and Baranger, Madeleine. (1969). Problemas
del campo psicoanalı́tic. Buenos Aires: Kargieman.
Wilfred R. Bion (1961) uses the term basic assumption
to designate that which, fundamentally, the individual
must assume in order to be part of a group. Basic
assumptions come into play at the unconscious,
pathic, and affective levels.
Competing with the model of the work (W) group,
which is focused on a task and puts into effect the
secondary processes of rational thought and ‘‘realitytesting,’’ group activity is based on three basic assumptions that are discernible in the affective tone of the
relations of group members among themselves and
with their leader. The basic assumption of dependency
(baD) lends cohesion to the group by means of supporting the assumption that nourishment, protection,
knowledge, and life can come only from the wisdom
of a leader who is omnipotent and omniscient, akin
to a magician. The basic assumption of fight/flight
(baF) brings individuals together around the violent,
excitation-saturated feeling that the salvation of the
group and its individual members depends on the fact
that their leader will enable them to identify, and then
successfully fight or flee, a specific enemy either within
or outside the group. The basic assumption of pairing
(baP) enables the group to come together as such
through the membersÕ sharing of an implicit, mysterious hope, sparked by the assumption that a couple
will give birth to a messiah, a new guide, a new idea, or
a new theory or ideology.
These basic assumptions are states of mind—all of
them sexual in the final analysis—associated with
the characters in the oedipal situation (including the
Sphinx); they emerge as secondary formations from
an extremely primitive scene that is played out at the
level of part-objects, and which is associated with
psychotic anxieties and with the mechanisms of splitting and projective identification inherent in the
OF
BERNARD DEFONTAINE
See also: Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht; Group analysis.
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred R. (1961). Experiences in groups. London:
Tavistock Publications.
Freud, Sigmund. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
BASIC ASSUMPTION
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schizoid-paranoid and depressive positions posited by
Melanie Klein.
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Grinberg, León, Sor, Dario, and Tabak de Bianchedi, Elizabeth. (1977). Introduction to the work of Bion: groups,
knowledge, psychosis, thought, transformations, psychoanalytic practice (Alberto Hahn, Trans.). New York: J.
Aronson. (Original work published 1973)
Klein, Melanie. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
Pines, Malcolm (Ed.). (1985). Bion and group psychotherapy.
London: Routledge.
BASIC FAULT
The term basic fault refers to the structural deficiency
in the personality of subjects who during their early
stages of development formed certain types of object
relations—which later become compulsions—to cope
with a considerable initial ‘‘lack of adjustment’’
between their psychobiological needs and the care provided by a ‘‘faulty’’ environment devoid of understanding. The effects of the basic fault on a personÕs
character structure and ‘‘psychobiological dispositions’’ (which may predispose that person to certain
illnesses) are only partially reversible.
Michael Balint developed this concept in The Doctor, the Patient, and the Illness (1957), as a result of his
research with physicians in the area of psychosomatic
disorders. Additionally, in ‘‘The Three Areas of the
Mind’’ (1958), Balint developed the notion of the
‘‘basic fault zone’’ to situate therapeutic processes
relating to states of regression in certain patients. This
became the source for his metapsychological theorization, in The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression (1968), of ‘‘zones of the psychic apparatus,’’ which
included a critique of Sigmund FreudÕs notion of ‘‘primary narcissism’’ and new considerations on the
handling of regression.
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BASIC NEUROSIS, THE—ORAL REGRESSION
AND
PSYCHIC MASOCHISM
Certain patients (those with schizoid personalities,
narcissistic states, or addictions, for example) are
unable to tolerate the frustrations of classical treatment and are largely inaccessible to interpretation.
The therapeutic relationship thus requires modifications in technique to open up to analysis the interpersonal psychic processes inherent in the ‘‘basic fault
zone.’’
This ‘‘zone’’ of the human psyche (which may be
the ego) is unquestionably more primitive than
both the ‘‘area of the Oedipus conflict’’ (Balint,
1968, p. 28) (prevalent in classical treatment) and
the ‘‘area of creation’’ (p. 29). The processes that
take place there are characterized by:
1. An exclusively ‘‘two-person’’ relationship, where
only the patientÕs needs count;
2. A dynamic force other than conflict (proper to
the oedipal zone): that of an anxiety that drives
the patient to perpetuate old models of object
relations that now indicate maladjustment, such
as behaviors that are ‘‘ocnophilic’’ (desperately
clinging to objects) or ‘‘philobatic’’ (attempts at
self-sufficiency by keeping well away from supposedly dangerous objects); this dynamic also
drives the patient to establish a harmonious relationship with his or her environment (‘‘primary
love’’);
3. The prevalence of nonverbal processes or language usage that is nontypical of adults.
A kind of ‘‘psychological mothering’’ makes it possible to avoid reproducing the traumatic situation in
treatment; object relations, rather than interpretation,
provide the therapeutic leverage. Regression, which is
in part linked to the analystÕs responses, can be therapeutic (‘‘benign’’) if it is aimed at producing recognition of previously unacknowledged needs rather than
satisfying them. Certain soothing forms of satisfaction
(libidinal and physical contact) help sustain the therapeutic relationship. Reestablishing the primary love
relationship allows the basic fault, once it has been
recognized, to heal. It is said to be ‘‘neutralized’’ when
the patient can let go of his or her compulsive object
relations.
This theoretical model is especially relevant to the
treatment of borderline cases; it is used in the framework of focal therapies and in situations addressing
combined psychological, medical, and social considerations (psychotherapeutic aspects of medical treatment,
15 2
family planning consultations, and other such contexts). It sustains the fundamental metapsychological
and clinical issues.
Inseparable from a conception of the psyche as a
product of interpersonal relations—in particular, the
ego as a ‘‘corporeal entity’’ (Freud)—and from a theory of treatment that makes use of regression, the
‘‘basic fault’’ has been subject to the criticisms that are
usually made against any approach that aims at partial
reparation: the risk of erotization, the risk of nondissolution of the transference, and so on. Balint viewed
such criticisms as manifestations of anxiety on the part
of analysts. Subsequent work has indicated that this
conception of an early distortion in the ego should
also take into account the pathogenic processes stemming from the patientÕs family and cultural contexts.
Focus on the nonverbal should not allow the underestimation of the crucial role that language and signifiers
(just as much as their deficiencies or dysfunctions)
play in the constitution of the ego.
CORINNE DAUBIGNY
See also: Balint, Michael; Benign/malignant regression;
Hungarian School; Libido; Primary love.
Bibliography
Balint, Michael. (1952). Primary love and psycho-analytic
technique. London: Hogarth.
———. (1958). The three areas of the mind. Theoretical
considerations. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 9,
328–340.
———. (1959). Thrills and regressions. London: Hogarth.
———. (1964). The doctor, his patient, and the illness (2nd
ed.). London: Pitman Medical Publishing. (1st edition
published 1957)
———. (1968). The basic fault: therapeutic aspects of regression. London: Tavistock.
BASIC NEUROSIS, THE—ORAL REGRESSION
AND PSYCHIC MASOCHISM
‘‘A most original thinker and prolific writer,’’ in this
book Bergler compiled the results from his 130 published papers and 6 books based on 22 years of clinical
experience. Renowned for his research on oral neurosis, he discovered there is but one ‘‘basic neurosis’’—
repressed masochistic attachment to the fantasied earINTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
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liest ‘‘bad mother’’; later neuroses ‘‘reformulating’’
oral masochistic material represent ‘‘rescue stations’’;
psychic masochism (PM), the unconscious pursuit of
‘‘pleasure in displeasure,’’ forms the core of oral regression. Thus, neurotic equals psychic masochist. Neurotics cling to and repeat misery, in itself indicating PM.
PM unconsciously ‘‘sugarcoats’’ and ‘‘neutralizes’’
pain; but consciously pain remains, felt in symptoms
and personality distortions.
To FreudÕs ‘‘genetic picture’’ of PM (megalomania
unavoidably offended by perceived frustration of
libido; fury; helpless aggression rebounding; libidinization of guilt), Bergler worked out and added the
‘‘clinical picture.’’ He named it the ‘‘mechanism of
orality’’:
1. Unconscious provocation or misuse of ‘‘refusal’’;
casting others as ‘‘bad, refusing mother.’’
2. Retaliation for the alleged ‘‘injustice’’ by pseudoaggressively fighting in righteous indignation.
OF
ETHNOPSYCHIATRY
for tortureÕs sake’’) as the ‘‘real master of the personality,’’ requiring constant appeasement. Daimonion (the
punitive part of SE) uses the ego ideal to torture the
ego; also that punishment is masochized. Psychic
masochism is disguised from the superego by two
defensive alibis (in the five-layer structure of neurotic
symptoms and traits). In the normal, the fifth layer is
antimasochistic; in neurosis, the final layer ‘‘smuggles
in’’ masochism in self-damaging symptoms. Hence,
neurotics cannot be helped unless their PM is analyzed. Eighteen further books detail his later discoveries. Growing numbers of adherents are confirming
the accuracy and clinical value of his work.
MELVYN I. ISCOVE
See also: Bergler, Edmund; Masochism; Neuroses.
Source Citation
Bergler Edmund. (1949). The basic neurosis—oral regression
and psychic masochism. New York: Grune and Stratton.
3. Self-pity then unconsciously enjoyed.
With this base, every clinical entity incorporates a
unique ‘‘specific additional factor’’; 27 clinical pictures
with case illustrations substantiate this. Psychic masochists unconsciously want refusal, rejection, humiliation, defeat. The genuine ‘‘wish to get’’ of infancy is
now a defense. They believe they want normal
pleasure, but a person ‘‘who unconsciously runs after
disappointment cannot be consciously happy.’’ All
neurotic aggression is ‘‘pseudoaggression,’’ promoting
self-damage. Neurotics shift the blame outside, mostly
to parents; this Bergler named the ‘‘basic fallacy,’’
which must be shown to be a fallacy.
Applying these ideas, Bergler advocated new clinical
solutions, such as talking at length to patients to counteract their projection of ‘‘bad refusing mother’’ (facilitating analysis), and more active analyzing, to unearth
and interpret all repressed masochistic data and repetitions. He added theory regarding transference/love,
creativity, working through, masturbation, moneyneurosis, fashion, gambling, homosexuality, and
humor. Bergler deduced mechanisms of cynicism,
hypocrisy, criminosis; described and/or named alysosis,
middle-age revolt, confusionism, 22 visual neuroses,
writerÕs block, psychogenic aspermia, counterfeit-sex,
and ‘‘pseudo-moral connotation of neurotic symptoms’’ (ironization of teachings to prop up each
symptom). He identified the superego (SE) (‘‘torture
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Bibliography
Bergler, Edmund. (1989). The superego. Madison, CT:
International Universities Press. (Original work published
1952)
———. (1982). Counterfeit-sex. New York: Grune and Stratton. (Original work published 1958)
———. (1992). Principles of self-damage. Madison, CT:
International Universities Press. (Original work published
1959)
———. (1993). Curable and incurable neurotics. Madison,
CT: International Universities Press. (Original work published 1961)
———. (1969). Selected papers of Edmund Bergler, M.D.,
1933–1961. New York: Grune and Stratton.
Jaffe, Daniel. (1986). Review of the revolt of the middle-aged
man. Money and emotional conflicts, and the psychology
of gambling. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 67,
507–509.
BASIC PROBLEMS OF ETHNOPSYCHIATRY
Dedicated to Marcel Mauss and with a preface by
Roger Bastide, the essays in Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry were published between 1940 and 1967 in
American anthropology, psychiatry, criminology, and
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B A U D O U I N , C H A R L E S (1 893 –19 63)
psychoanalysis reviews (American Anthropologist,
Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, Journal of Criminal
Psychopathology). The author provided additional
commentary for some of the texts at the time of their
publication.
In spite of the diversity of the topics, the collection provides insight into the sources of DevereuxÕs
thought, his experiences as an ethnologist among the
Mohave Indians of California and the Sedangs Moi
of Vietnam, as well as his research on sociology and
mythology. These included the definition of ethnopsychiatry as a reference frame for clinical work and
research in psychiatry; the qualification of the concepts of ethnic personality and its disorders (sacred,
typical, idiosyncratic); the status of culture in psychological disturbances such as psychosis, neurosis,
somatic disturbance, deviance; and the additional
possibilities of functional and cultural disturbances.
For example, in ‘‘A Sociological Theory of Schizophrenia’’ Devereux analyzes the effects of modern
societies on the disorientation and dysphoria of its
members.
The author draws the attention of psychiatrists,
psychoanalysts, and anthropologists to the reciprocity
of oedipal conflicts between adult and child and to the
presence in some societies of models of conventional
misconduct that can be used directly in private and
‘‘negativist’’ fantasies. Devereux also reiterates the
importance of diagnosing any antisocial ‘‘warning
symptoms’’ in disturbed individuals, even those who
are least obvious, not as a function of existing norms
but as a function of their singularity and distance from
culture and the materials it offered them.
For Georges Devereux culture was an interior
experience and a way of ‘‘living experience.’’ Through
his methodology, based on the complementarity of
psychological and sociological data, and his theoretical
opposition to any form of cultural relativism in the
explanation of mental disorders—he believed in the
mental unity of human beings—the role of psychoanalysis in ethnological research has been established.
Through its coherence and scholarship, DevereuxÕs
work provides unique support for the use of ethnopsychiatry in the investigation of culture.
SIMONE VALANTIN
See also: Anthropology and psychoanalysis; Devereux,
Georges; Ethnopsychoanalysis; Individual; Transcultural.
15 4
Source Citation
Devereux, Georges. (1980). Basic problems of ethnopsychiatry
(Basia Miller Gulati and George Devereux, Trans.).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
BAUDOUIN, CHARLES (1893–1963)
Charles Baudouin was born July 26, 1893, in Nancy,
France, and died on August 25, 1963, in Geneva,
Switzerland
During his career, he was a Swiss psychoanalyst and
Privatdocent at the University of Geneva (1920), founder of the International Institute of Psychagogy and
Psychotherapy (1924), director of the review Action et
Pensée (Action and Thought) (1931), Chevalier of the
Legion of Honor in Paris (1950), and associate professor at the University of Geneva (1962).
His father had a career in the French military as
a non-commissioned officer in the public health service, and his mother came from a family of middleclass shopkeepers in the German-speaking area of
Lorraine. Baudouin studied philosophy in Nancy,
where he received his degree in 1912. He was a professor of philosophy at the school of Neufchâteau in the
Vosges. In 1915 he traveled to Geneva, attracted by the
success of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, where
he taught. He wrote his doctoral dissertation, entitled
Suggestion et Autosuggestion, at the University of Geneva in 1920.
Baudouin underwent three different analyses: One
in 1917 with Dr. Carl Picht, a Jungian analyst, another,
a training analysis, with Charles Odier, between 1925
and 1926, and a third with another Jungian, Tina
Keller. Fluent in both French and German, Baudouin
read the work of Freud and the first psychoanalysts
early in his career. He met Freud in Vienna in 1926. In
1929 Baudouin applied for membership in the Société
Psychanalytique de Paris, but his request was rejected
because of pressure from Henri Flournoy, who insisted
that he would join the organization only upon condition that Baudouin not be admitted.
Baudouin spent much of his career trying to reconcile the work of Jung, Freud, and Adler. His earliest
work was devoted to suggestion and hypnosis. He later
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developed an interest in literature and the relation
between psychoanalysis and education. BaudouinÕs literary output throughout his career was considerable.
He wrote a Carnet de route in sixteen volumes (1910–
1939), only some of which were published. These notebooks provide valuable commentary concerning the
psychoanalytic atmosphere prevalent at the time.
Carnet VI (October 1918–December 1921) is entitled,
‘‘When the Child Appears.’’ His first book was Suggestion and Autosuggestion (1920). His most important
publications include Études de psychanalyse (1922),
QuÕest ce que la suggestion? (1924), Le Symbole chez
Verhaeren (1924), Psychanalyse de l Õart (1929), La
Mobilisation de l Õénergie (1931), LÕÂme enfantine et la
psychanalyse (1931), La Psychanalyse (1939), Psychanalyse et Victor Hugo (1943), LÕÂme et l ÕAction (1944),
De l Õinstinct à l ÕEsprit (1950), Y a–t–il une science de
l Õâme? (1957), Psychanalyse du symbole religieux
(1957). He also wrote a novel, Christophe le passeur
(1964).
BaudouinÕs work merits greater attention from
modern historians and psychoanalysts. His concerns
and fields of interest are often directly relevant
to contemporary psychoanalysis. He is a precursor in
a number of fields (art, education, suggestion, and
hypnosis). Baudouin did not adhere to orthodox
Freudianism and turned to Jung and Adler for the
theoretical elements that he felt were relevant for
clinical work.
MIREILLE CIFALI
See also: Autosuggestion;
(French-speaking).
Suggestion;
Switzerland
Bibliography
Baudouin, Charles. (1920). Suggestion et autosuggestion.
Neuchâtel-Paris: Delachaux and Niestlé.
———. (1924). Qu’est-ce que la suggestion? Introduction
à la psychologie de la suggestion et de l’autosuggestion
Neuchâtel-Paris: Delachaux and Niestlé.
———. (1931). L’Âme enfantine et la psychanalyse.
Neuchâtel-Paris: Delachaux and Niestlé.
———. (1957). Psychanalyse du symbole religieux. Paris:
Fayard.
Cifali, Mireille. (1990). De quelques remous helvétiques
autour de l’analyse profane. Revue internationale de la
historie de la psychanalyse. 3, 145–157.
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Roudinesco, Élisabeth. (1986). La Bataille de cent ans. Histoire de la psychanalyse en France (Vol. 2). Paris: Le Seuil.
BAUER, IDA (1882–1945)
Ida Bauer, alias Dora, is the subject of FreudÕs famous
case history on an adolescent (Freud, 1905).
Her father, Philip Bauer, who became a rich textile
industrialist, was born in 1853 in Pollerskirchen. Her
mother, Katherina or Käthe (née Gerber), was born in
1862 in Königinhof, a village that, like her husbandÕs
birthplace, was located in the eastern part of Bohemia.
Shortly after marriage, the Bauers had their only two
children, both born in Vienna: Otto, born on September 5, 1881; and Dora, November 1, 1882. Contrary to
his sister, whose reputation stemmed solely from her
patienthood, Otto achieved eminence as the parliamentary leader and foreign minister of the First Austrian
Republic, as its chief Marxist theorist, and as secretary
to the Austrian Social Democratic WorkerÕs Party.
After contracting tuberculosis, the wealthy Philip
moved with his family in 1888 from Vienna to B—,
FreudÕs designation for Merano, a Tyrolean resort
town that is presently in Italy and situated four hundred kilometers to the southwest of Vienna. In Merano
the Bauers befriended another resident couple, designated by Freud as Herr and Frau K, the letter pronounced in German the same way as the last syllable of
their real married name, Zellenka. Hans Zellenka and
his wife Peppina (née Heumann) had two young children, Otto and the congenitally ill Klara, both born in
1891. Although afflicted herself with bouts of tussis
nervosa and aphonia, Dora would care for both her
sick father and the Zellenka children.
In 1894 Philip became even more sick. Nursed by
Peppina, Philip then started a long liaison with her.
DoraÕs conflicts were aggravated by that liaison and
also by two traumata that she suffered at the hands of
Hans. Although she consulted Freud once in 1898,
Dora did not go into treatment with him until the earlier part of October 1900; she abruptly terminated
treatment nearly three months later, on the last day of
the year. In 1903 she married Ernst Adler, who, not
succeeding as a musician, went to work for her father.
Summoned by DoraÕs physician, Felix Deutch visited
the bedridden patient in 1923; reportedly she suffered
from almost paranoid behavior and found all men
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BEDWETTING
detestable. (DoraÕs one son, Kurt Herbert, won fame as
the director of the San Francisco Opera Company.)
In a fateful twist of history, Dora and Peppina later
became friends; both were partners as bridge masters
during the 1930s when the card game was the craze in
Vienna. Because of her brother OttoÕs Marxist affiliation, the Nazis sought Dora in the late 1930s, and she
hid in PeppinaÕs home. Dora emigrated to Paris, and
then to New York where she died.
PATRICK MAHONY
See also: ‘‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’’
(Dora/Ida Bauer).
Bibliography
Decker, Hannah. (1991). Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900.
New York: The Free Press.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905e [1901]). Fragment of an analysis of
a case of hysteria. SE, 7: 1–122.
Loewenberg, Peter. (1985). Decoding the past: The psychohistorical approach. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Mahony, Patrick. (1996). Freud’s Dora: A historical, textual,
and psychoanalytic study. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Rogow, Arnold. (1978). A further note to Freud’s ‘‘Fragment
of an analysis of a case of hysteria’’. Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, 26, 311–330.
Society]), and Father Bruno de Jésus–Marie (Carmelite
studies), the Association Internationale dÕÉtudes MédicoPsychologiques et Religieuses (International Association
of Medico-Psychological and Religious Studies) to promote the understanding of psychoanalysis within the
Catholic church. During the early sixties, he created in
France, together with Andrée Lehmann, Abby Marc
Oraison, and Father Albert Plé (Dominican, director of
the Supplément), the Association Médico-Psychologique
dÕAide aux Religieux [Medico-Psychological Association
for Assistance to the Clergy], which provided members
of the clergy with access to psychoanalysis and a better
understanding of its possibilities.
He was a member of the Société Française de Psychanalyse (French Psychoanalytic Society), the École
Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris), and
was close to Jacques Lacan. Throughout this period he
was also the editor of the Jesuit publication Études, for
issues of morality, psychology, and psychoanalysis.
Through his writing and numerous personal associations, Beirnaert exercised considerable influence on
improving relations between psychoanalysis and the
Catholic church. He wrote a number of articles on psychoanalysis, ethics, and the interrelation of psychoanalysis and Christianity.
JACQUES SÉDAT
See also: France; Religion and psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
BEDWETTING. See Enuresis
Beirnaert, Louis. (1966). Expérience chrétienne et psychologie.
Paris: L’Épi.
———. (1986). Aux frontières de l’acte analytique. Paris:
Le Seuil.
BEIRNAERT, LOUIS (1906–1985)
Louis Beirnaert, a French Jesuit and psychoanalyst, was
born on April 2, 1906, in Ascq and died on April 30,
1985, in Paris. Beirnaert became a Jesuit in 1923. An
almoner for law students during the Second World
War, he took part in a resistance network and went
underground. After the war he became a professor of
dogmatic theology (1947–1951). He began his analysis
with Daniel Lagache and became an analyst himself.
In 1953 he founded, together with Father Charles
Durand (Geneva), Doctor Charles Nodet (Société
psychanalytique de Paris [Paris Psychoanalytic
15 6
BELGIUM
There were signs of interest in Belgium for Freud and
BreuerÕs research on hysteria as early as 1894. References can be found in DallemagneÕs Dégénérés et déséquilibrés (Degeneracy and Mental Imbalance), but this
appears to be an isolated case (Berdondini, N., 1987).
During the twenties, a few attempts were made to
introduce young psychiatrists to psychoanalytic concepts, but there was vehement opposition from the old
guard. In literature a special issue of Disque vert
appeared in 1924, entirely devoted to Freud. The
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Belgian authors included Georges Dwelshauwers,
André Ombredane, and Henri Michaux. In his later
writing, Franz Hellens, director of the publication, was
also sympathetic to the work of Carl Gustav Jung. At
the University of Louvain, following the initiative of
the future cardinal Mercier, several professors took an
interest in Freudian theory and established individual
critical positions because of the emphasis placed on
sexuality. The Jesuit J. Maréchal was also influential in
promoting early acceptance of psychoanalysis.
In the midst of these still limited signs of interest,
there emerged the figure of an educator from Gand,
Julien Varendonck (1879–1924), who had the good
fortune to meet Freud and become one of his students.
He underwent a training analysis with Theodor Reik
and spent 1923 in Vienna to continue his education.
Upon his return to Gand, he opened his own office
and was made a member of the Dutch Society of Psychoanalysis shortly before his premature death on
June 11, 1924. In 1921 he published an important
monograph entitled La psychologie des rêves éveillés
(The Psychology of Daydreams), with a preface by
Freud. Anna Freud translated the first part of the
book. Unfortunately, because he was unable to find
any students or an analysand with whom he could
continue his research, his initiative remained stillborn.
The foundations of psychoanalytic practice were
established by two Belgian pioneers, Maurice Dugautiez
(1893–1960) and Fernand Lechat (1895–1959). The
beginnings of psychoanalysis in Belgium reflect
FreudÕs own solitary struggle during the first decade of
the twentieth century. A closed and poorly informed
medical establishment—the organic approach dominated psychiatry at the time—and a public opinion
that remained hostile because of sectarian prejudices,
explain why FreudÕs work had to wait for the arrival of
two idealists who remained far outside the conventional sphere of training before psychoanalysis could
take hold in the country. Both men were self–taught,
curious and passionate individuals, who first met in
1933. Their encounter was the prelude to years of
fruitful collaboration that enabled a psychoanalytic
organization to gain a foothold in Belgium.
In spite of the dramatic context in which it
occurred, another fortuitous event took place in 1933
or thereabouts. A Viennese Jew, Dr. Ernst Hoffman, a
disciple of Freud and a brilliant student of Sándor Ferenczi, settled in Anvers to escape Nazi persecution.
Dugautiez and Lechat, together with Mrs. Lechat, who
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was primarily interested in working with children,
took advantage of HoffmanÕs providential appearance
and began a training analysis with him. Unfortunately,
Hoffman was arrested in 1942 and sent to a concentration camp. He never returned, and the nascent Belgian
psychoanalytic movement suddenly lost its leader.
Beginning in 1936 Dugautiez and Lechat began
undergoing supervised analyses under the supervision
of Dr. Leuba and Marie Bonaparte. They were authorized to practice on their own in 1939; Mrs. Lechat
began working with children at this time. After the war
ended, both of them applied for membership in the
Paris Psychoanalytic Society and were authorized, in
1946, to conduct training analyses and supervise their
own studentsÕ first analyses.
On December 24, 1946, they founded the Association des Psychanalystes de Belgique (Association of
Belgian Psychoanalysts) with Dr. Leuba as honorary
president. They were sponsored by the Psychoanalytic
Society of Paris. Doctor Ernest Jones, president of the
International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), had
encouraged this initiative. In 1947 the association,
with the sponsorship of Marie Bonaparte, was
accepted for membership in the IPA. The standing of
the young organization was made more secure in 1948
with the organization, in Brussels, of the eleventh Conférence des Psychanalystes de Langue Française [(Conference of French-speaking Psychoanalysts). During
the twelfth conference, in 1954, Fernand Lechat presented a report on ‘‘The Principle of Security.’’ There
were three further meetings in Brussels: in 1958, in
1972 (when a report was given by Danièle Flagey,
entitled ‘‘Intellectual Inhibition’’), and in Liege, in
1986, with a report by Andrée Bauduin, ‘‘On the
Preconscious.’’
In 1953, Dr. Thérèse Jacobs Van Merlen, who had
returned from her training in Paris with Sacha Nacht,
Serge Lebovici, and René Diatkine, joined Dugautiez
and Lechat. A stream of new members joined the association: Flagey, Bourdon, Vannypelseer, Drappier,
Luminet, Pierloot, Labbé, Darmstaedter, Duyckaerts,
and later, Watillon and Godfrind. The association has
continued to grow since then. In 1960 the name was
changed to the Société Belge de Psychanalyse (Belgian
Psychoanalytic Society), also known as the Belgische
Vereniging voor Psychoanalyse.
The society continued to grow, with the addition of
a teaching committee, an enlarged administrative
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office, and an ethics committee. In addition to
bimonthly meetings and working groups, the entire
society met every two years for a colloquium. The
Revue belge de psychanalyse, with Haber as its first
director, was founded in 1982. The review made the
societyÕs ideas accessible to a much broader public.
There was also a membersÕ Bulletin, created in 1977.
Some twenty years after the creation of the current
Belgian Psychoanalytic Society, various activities were
established by psychoanalysts who had returned home
from abroad and who were, for the most part, associated with the University of Louvain. These individuals either could not, or would not, become a part of
the existing society. Most of them had met in Paris
between 1955–1960, where they followed the activities
of the French Psychoanalytic Society, which was then
run by Daniel Lagache and Jacques Lacan, with the
assistance of Juliette Boutonier, Françoise Dolto, and
Georges Favez. Following a break in 1953 with the
Paris Psychoanalytic Society, in 1964 the French Psychoanalytic Society experienced new upheavals with
the departure of Lacan and the creation of the École
Freudienne. Although some activities of the new Belgian group began in 1964, the official foundation of
the École Belge de Psychanalyse (Belgische School
voor Psychoanalyse) did not take place until 1969,
under the impetus of Professors Jacques Schotte and
Antoine Vergote.
LacanÕs influence was decisive within the school, to
the extent that its establishment can be considered an
implicit extension of the situation in France. This allegiance to Lacanian positions, at least on the part of
some, became problematic when the dissolution of the
École Freudienne by Lacan led to divisions that subsequently gave rise to numerous offshoots, including
Questionnement Psychanalytique (Psychoanalytic
Questioning) and the Association Freudienne de Belgique (The Freudian Association of Belgium). These
various groups are the result of the differences encountered concerning the importance of Lacanian ideas, in
terms of setting and training, and more generally in
terms of the theoretical corpus. Unlike the Belgian Psychoanalytic Society, these associations were not part of
the IPA, some even took pride in their separatist
stance. In 1984 the École Belge de Psychanalyse began
publishing a bilingual review, Psychoanalyse.
There were also Jungian psychoanalysts working in
Belgium. The Société Belge de Psychologie Analytique
15 8
(Belgian Society of Analytic Psychology), or SBPA, was
founded in 1975. The majority of its members had
been analyzed by Gilberte Aigrisse (1911–1995), who
was trained in Geneva by Charles Baudouin. In 1994
some members of the SBPA left the organization
to found a new group known as the École Belge de
Psychanalyse Jungienne (Belgian School of Jungian
Psychoanalysis), or EBPJ.
ANDRÉ ALSTEENS
Bibliography
Bauduin, Andrée. (1987). Du préconscient. Revue française
de psychanalyse, 51, 449–538.
Berdondini, Nadine. (1987). L’introduction de la psychanalyse en Belgique: 1900–1947. Louvain-la-Neuve, reprinted
1995.
Flagey, Danièle. (1973). L’inhibition intellectuelle. Revue
française de psychanalyse, 36, 717–798.
Lechat, Fernand. (1955). Du principe de sécurité. (rapport).
Revue française de psychanalyse, 19 (1–2), 11–101.
BELIEF
Belief is the condition of holding a thing to be true or
probable, giving credit to a person or an idea, giving
credence to or having faith in a story. In this last sense
belief is related to theology and economy. The believer
is situated in a religious system in which he adopts a
certain number of convictions, accepts a series of dogmas and makes this credo a guideline for living. Belief
may have to do with clinging to a truth or belonging
to a church or a party. The believer is also indebted to
the person or persons, parents or teachers or others,
who provide the material for belief, and possess a
capital of confidence and a stock of responses,
encouraging or obliging the believer to borrow from
them models of reasoning and types of solutions.
The theme of belief is directly addressed by Sigmund Freud in a note accompanying a letter to Wilhelm Fliess dated May 31, 1897. There, belief is
described as a phenomenon belonging entirely to the
ego system (consciousness), without any unconscious
equivalent. The topic had already been addressed
indirectly in chapter 12 of the Studies on Hysteria
(1895d), belief there being associated with superstition
(p. 250).
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B E N E D E K , T H E R E S E (1892 –1 977)
It may seem paradoxical to speak of belief in the
context of psychoanalysis. Freud described himself as
nonbeliever and made no secret of his atheism. But
precisely this external position with respect to unproven truth made him see belief as an anomaly that
needed to be explained. Influenced by the positivism
and scientism of his time, he considered belief to be a
relic of childhood. He thus placed himself within the
tradition of Auguste Comte, who believed that the
individual and humanity as a whole both went
through a childish stage with theological and military
characteristics. He considered that the church and the
army were the two social institutions responsible for
perpetuating this stage. The reference to childhood
here is bound up with the role of the father: God is the
father of believers, who are all brothers; likewise
the commander-in-chief is the father of soldiers, who
are all comrades. The belief in salvation or victory is
thus vital for maintaining the sense of family.
For Freud the concept of belief is inseparable from
childhood theories of sexuality that continue to be
held by the individual or by society. The little boy
believes that women (and therefore his mother) have a
penis. Society believes that the child has no sexuality.
Belief is always associated with a disavowal of reality.
The renunciation of belief is then an educational task
and a psychological struggle, both liable to encounter
much resistance. Psychoanalytic treatment cannot
itself dispense with belief, for the transference, which
reactivates infantile processes, demands that the
patient lend credence to the analystÕs words even
though these do not belong to the realm of demonstrable truth. The better to remove the need for belief,
therefore, psychoanalysis is obliged temporarily to
replace one belief by another.
Differing attitudes regarding belief broadly coincide
with the major splits in psychoanalysis and the schisms
that have marked its history. In the early days, there
was a ‘‘left’’ psychoanalysis, centered around Alfred
Adler and the Social Democrats, which believed in
popular revolution and the possibility, within a new
political system, of eliminating alienation in both the
social and the psychiatric senses of the word. A ‘‘right’’
tendency, meanwhile, epitomized by Carl Gustav Jung,
believed in a metamorphosis of the soul and an internal unification of man that could heal all dislocations
of being and all fissures in the ego. Freud was suspicious of all such beliefs, and his clinical experience
tended to make him pessimistic about the possibility
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of separating belief from illusion. He saw the need to
believe as a powerful means of mobilizing the instincts
and manipulating the unconscious: so loath were man
and society to consent to what Max Weber called the
disenchantment of the world that they continually felt
the need to believe in the unbelievable, to hope against
all hope in some distant paradise or in glorious
tomorrows.
Skepticism did not in FreudÕs view mean a refusal of
values. Values were indeed necessary for the progress of
culture and its corollary, the renunciation of the immediate satisfaction of instinctual impulses. The values of
civilization called nonetheless for a truly critical scrutiny that held fast to one most important principle: to
fear no truth no matter how painful it might be.
ODON VALLET
See also: Future of an Illusion, The; Illusion; Occultism;
Omnipotence of thought; Paranoia; Psychoses, chronic
and delusional; Science and psychoanalysis; Superego.
Bibliography
Dolto, Françoise. (1996). Les évangiles et la foi au risque de la
psychanalyse. Paris: Gallimard.
Freud, Sigmund. (1927c). The future of an illusion. SE, 21:
5–56.
——— (1930a [1929]). Civilization and its discontents. SE,
21: 64–145.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2.
BENEDEK, THERESE (1892–1977)
Therese Benedek, a Hungarian psychoanalyst, was
born in Budapest on November 8, 1892, and died in
Chicago on October 27, 1977. She received her medical
diploma from the University of Budapest in 1915. She
underwent five months of analysis with Sándor Ferenczi, then in 1918 settled, along with her husband
Tibor, in Leipzig. From 1920–1923 she completed her
analytic training at the newly established Berlin Institute, where she attended seminars and conducted analyses under the supervision of Karl Abraham and Max
Eitingon. A partisan of ‘‘developmental psychoanalysis,’’ Benedek followed FerencziÕs recommendation for
flexibility during therapy.
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B E N I G N /M A L I G N A N T R E G R E S S I O N
In 1933 she emigrated with her husband and their
two children to the United States. In 1936 Franz Alexander offered her an administrative position at the
Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis, where he was the
director. Here she participated actively in research on
psychosomatic medicine for effective coordination of
somatic and psychotherapeutic therapies, and published an article on the functions of the sexual apparatus and their disturbances. This study investigated the
interaction between organic (hormonal) factors and
the psychosexual economy in sexual disturbances by
showing their close interdependence.
In 1949 she was one of the first psychoanalysts to
speak of the mother-child dyad in terms of emotional
symbiosis, insisting on a transgenerational reading
of interaction during infancy. Ten years later, in
Parenthood as a Developmental Phase, she referred to
the interpersonal process that formed the basis of the
mother-child interaction as a ‘‘transactional spiral,’’
which took place through the reciprocal identifications
and introjections between mother and child.
DELPHINE SCHILTON
See also: Germany; Hungarian School; Parenthood.
Bibliography
Benedek, Therese. (1949). The psychosomatic implications
of the primary unit: mother-child. American Journal of
Orthopsychiatry, 19, 642–654.
———. (1956). Psychobiological aspects of mothering.
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 26, 272.
———. (1959). Parenthood as a developmental phase.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 7, 389–
417.
———. (1973). Psychoanalytic Investigations: Selected
Papers. New York: Quadrangle Books.
BENIGN/MALIGNANT REGRESSION
The notion of benign versus malignant regression
comes from Michael BalintÕs book Thrills and Regressions (1959); he distinguished two types of regression
that can appear during analysis. The benign form is
minor, temporary, and reversible; the other, malignant
form is major, serious, lasting, or even irreversible.
The former brings with it beneficial, therapeutic
effects; the latter is pathogenic and can potentially
16 0
result in insurmountable problems for the patient and
the analysis.
Regression, discovered very early on by Sigmund
Freud in its topographical, temporal, and formal
aspects as a defense mechanism and therapeutic support, suddenly appeared as a threat to the patient and
to treatment. Generations of analysts thus came to
dread it. Balint took up this issue at the point at which
Freud and then Sándor Ferenczi had left off, and
between 1932 and 1960 he created this notion, which
aimed to change analystsÕ attitude toward this
phenomenon.
Balint no doubt used the terms benign and malignant with reference to the work of Otto Warburg, his
former boss at the Berlin Charity Hospital, on tumors,
for which Warburg won the Nobel Prize in 1931. The
analogy is found in surgical techniques. This clinical
distinction goes beyond the theoretical positions and
techniques of Freud and Ferenczi. Freud recommended that regression be overlooked in analytic technique and saw it as a therapeutic support, but he
advised analysts to maintain a degree of distance. Ferenczi used it and even provoked it (trance states) for
therapeutic ends, and, during the 1930s, carried away
by theoretical fervor, he conducted his ‘‘great experiment.’’ He devoted himself completely to his patients
and responded to their impassioned demands with
small gratifications; he also gave the patients extra sessions on demand, day or night, including during
vacations.
The experiment elicited FreudÕs ‘‘massive condemnation’’ (Freud, Letter to Ferenczi, December 13, 1931),
which Balint called ‘‘unfair and not very productive’’
(1968). Balint reassessed FerencziÕs approach during
his continuation, after 1933, of FerencziÕs unfinished
analyses; this enabled him to understand his predecessorÕs errors. The question arose as to whether he
should return to the former techniques with these
patients or rather, as he had begun to, derive a new
evaluation of their object relations and make a prognosis of the transference (massive or non-massive) in
order to adapt the treatment accordingly.
He then elaborated a differential diagnostic between
two syndromes he called ‘‘Cluster A and Cluster B’’
(1968) with their respective constant characteristics:
mutual trust or its absence, demands that were either
moderate or insatiable, the inclusion of addictive states
or none, and so on. To avoid ‘‘the appearance of a
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B E R G E , A N D R É (1902 –1 995)
malignant form of regression,’’ he advocated the development of adapted analytic techniques: The ‘‘discreet’’
(not omnipotent or needlessly intrusive) analyst must
create the secure, permissive atmosphere that the
patient needs, as well as the time needed for regression
and what he called a ‘‘new beginning.’’ This notion,
linked to his theory of the ‘‘basic fault,’’ is unquestionably the one that in BalintÕs corpus has had the greatest
influence among analysts.
MICHELLE MOREAU RICAUD
See also: Basic fault.
Bibliography
Balint, Michael. (1959). Thrills and Regressions. New York:
International Universities Press.
———. (1968). The basic fault: Therapeutic aspects of regression. London: Tavistock Publications.
Freud, Sigmund, and Ferenczi, Sándor. (1992–2000). The
correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi (Eva
Brabant, Ed., and Peter T. Hoffer, Trans.). Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.
BERGE, ANDRÉ (1902–1995)
A French physician and psychoanalyst, André Berge
was born on May 24, 1902, in Paris and died on October 27, 1995, in Neuilly-sur-Seine.
Although Berge did not know him, President Félix
Faure was his maternal grandfather and there is
little doubt that this played a role in BergeÕs choices
later in life. He grew up with two brothers in a freethinking, upper-middle class, Catholic family
with extensive social connections. His mother,
Antoinette Félix-Faure, was a childhood friend of
Marcel Proust. His father, René Berge, was a mining
engineer, his uncle a perpetual secretary of the French
Academy, his aunt a founding member of the ‘‘Ligue
Fraternelle des Enfants’’ and a student of Maria
Montessori. His secondary education took place at
the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, where he primarily studied literature. He published novels before founding,
with his brother François, Les Cahiers du mois, in
1924, the year of his marriage to Geneviève Fourcade,
with whom he had six children. A book of memoirs,
Réminiscences (1977), described the events of the first
half of his life.
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In 1930 Berge participated in the foundation of the
École des Parents, where he remained vice-president
practically for the remainder of his life. He subsequently became interested in psychoanalysis. In 1939
he decided to undergo therapy with René Laforgue
and, after joining the ‘‘Club des Piqués’’ consisting of
LaforgueÕs analysands, became close with Juliette
Favez-Boutonier, Françoise Marette (later Françoise
Dolto), and Georges Mauco. He decided to study
medicine, which he continued during the Occupation,
and focused on child psychiatry with an emphasis on
psychoanalysis with Professor Georges Heuyer. Berge
earned an M.D. in 1946, he became an associate member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society) that same year. He was named a
full member in 1948.
In 1946 Berge joined the staff of the newly created
Centre Psychopédagogique Claude-Bernard, founded
by Georges Mauco. He became head of the medical
section the following year, remaining director for
twenty-six years, until 1973. In 1965 he founded the
Association pour la Réadaptation des Infirmes
Mentaux (APRIM) [Association for the Rehabilitation
of the Mentally Disabled], was president of the Fédération Internationale pour lÕÉducation des Parents et
des Éducateurs [International Federation for the Education of Parents and Educators] (1973–1979), president of the Montessori Association of France, and a
teacher at the Institut de Psychologie from 1961 to
1971. His many activities in international and national
organizations, and his many articles assured him a
place among the leading educators in the field of child
psychoanalysis.
It was in this capacity that, between 1950 and 1952,
he became involved in the trial of Margaret ClarkWilliams—a psychologist who had been accused of
practicing medicine without a license—defending her
right to practice psychoanalysis. His subsequent participation in the French psychoanalytic movement was
somewhat unique. Even after the 1953 split, for several
years he remained a member of the two rival societies,
the Société psychanalytique de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society) and the Société française de Psychanalyse
(French Society for Psychoanalysis), founded by
Daniel Lagache, Françoise Dolto, and Jacques Lacan,
his former analyst. Berge was at the time an editor of
the review Psyché, founded by Maryse Choisy in 1947,
several of whose contributors were also members of
the French Society for Psychoanalysis.
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B E R G G A S S E 19, W I E N I X
While efforts were being undertaken to integrate
the French Society for Psychoanalysis within the International Psychoanalytic Association, he became a victim of an error on the part of the negotiators and was
named, along with Jacques Lacan and Françoise Dolto,
as one of those whom the international authorities
wanted to exclude from the list of educators. After the
mistake was rectified, he joined the non-Lacanians and
created the Association Psychanalytique de France
(Psychoanalytic Association of France). Berge was president from 1969–1970 but, faithful to his unique status of ‘‘dual membership,’’ was, in 1965, also elected an
associate member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society,
which he had been forced to quit shortly before.
Aside from Les Psychothérapies (1968), Berge is the
author of a number of articles, talks, and books on
psychopedagogy, of which he was one of the leading
promoters in France. These were anthologized in
André Berge: écrivain, psychanalyste, éducateur (1995).
In 1936 his book LÕÉducation familiale was recognized
by the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.
Other books followed, including Le Métier des parents
(1956), LÕEnfant au caractère difficile (1970), and La
Sexualité d Õaujourd Õhui (1970). Berge outlined the
course of his life in a series of interviews with Michel
Mathieu in 1988; in spite of blindness, he remained
lucid and active until his death.
Didier Anzieu, in his preface to André Berge: écrivain, psychanalyste, éducateur, referred to his work as
‘‘protean’’ and praised the ‘‘flexible, open-minded, and
rigorous approach that varied with the individual and
the context of the exchange. This provided him with
direct, rapid insights and the ability to transcribe them
with simplicity in clear and convincing language, with
less dependence on theory.’’
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
———. (1988). De l Õécriture à la psychanalyse, entretiens
avec M. Mathieu. Paris: Clancier-Guénaud.
———. (1995). André Berge: Écrivain, psychanalyste, éducateur. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.
BERGGASSE 19, WIEN IX
In September 1891 Sigmund Freud, with his wife
Martha and his children Mathilde, Martin, and Oliver,
moved into a newly constructed building, Berggasse
19, in ViennaÕs ninth district. Built according to
plans by Alexander Stierlin, the building was perfectly
suited to its surroundings, consistent with the architecture of the Gründerzeit (founders) style, which
changed the face of Berlin, Vienna, and Paris. There
were fourteen apartments in the building, all of them
sumptuous.
FreudÕs family occupied the first floor, and it was
there that Ernst, Sophie, and Anna were born. In 1896,
because of a lack of space, Freud rented an office on
the floor below since the apartment opposite his was
occupied by his sister Rosa Graf and her children. It
wasnÕt until 1908, when Rosa and her family moved
out, that Freud moved into the apartment where he
saw patients and received his friends, and which was
later catalogued by the photographer Edmund Engelman. He left the apartment in 1938, bringing with him
his furniture, his collection of antique objects, and his
personal belongings.
After 1908, FreudÕs family occupied the entire first
floor. During the 1930s, Dorothy Burlingham, born
Dorothy Tiffany, moved into the second floor while
her children were undergoing analysis with Anna
Freud. She became friends with Anna and later her
close collaborator.
Paris:
In 1902 a small group, known as the Wednesday
Society, began meeting in the apartment at Berggasse
19; it was the first psychoanalytic discussion group. It
was there as well that Freud met with his colleagues—
many of whom he considered friends—including
Sándor Ferenczi, Max Eitingon, and Ernest Jones,
along with writers and intellectuals. It was in his office
there that Freud wrote the majority of his work.
———. (1970). LÕenfant au caractère difficile. Paris:
Hachette.
Since the turn of the century, Freud had surrounded
himself with his collection of antique objects, continuously enriched, initially by the purchases he himself
made during his trips to Italy and then by those of his
See also: Centre psychopédagogique Claude-Bernard;
Clark-Williams, Margaret; France; Société française de
psychanalyse.
Bibliography
Berge, André.
Montaigne.
(1936).
LÕéducation
familiale.
———. (1968). Les psychothérapies. Paris: P.U.F.
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B E R G L E R , E D M U N D (1899 –1 962)
friends and colleagues, especially Emanuel Loewy, a
professor of archeology. At the end of his life, FreudÕs
collection contained some two thousand, five hundred
objects. He got great enjoyment out of the collection,
especially when his cancer prevented him from traveling. When he and his family were forced to flee the
country, the apartment was rented and all traces of his
presence in it disappeared.
The building has housed the Sigmund Freud
museum since its opening in 1971, in the presence of
Anna Freud, operated by the Sigmund Freud Society.
The museum occupies the entire first floor of the
building that remained the Freud family residence for
nearly fifty years. But it was only with the opening of
the museum that the building, which receives nearly
forty thousand visitors a year, has assumed its rightful
place in the cultural life of Europe.
INGRID SCHOLZ-STRASSER
See also: Austria; Freud, Sigmund Schlomo; Sigmund
Freud Museum; Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung.
cruelty, unconscious masochism, and the importance of
the pre-oedipal oral mother-attachment. Hitschmann
spoke of his ‘‘extraordinary talent for the specialty of
psychoanalysis . . . his command of the entire subject
matter, his scientific acumen and literary erudition.’’
Considered ‘‘one of the few original minds among the
followers of Freud,’’ Bergler presented his main ideas
in The Basic Neurosis, in which he summarized his
massive original contribution to the field.
Throughout his considerable body of written work,
lucid case summaries in each book reveal clinical brilliance and a highly effective analytic technique. His own
writing, as well as productive collaborations with
Jekels, Eidelberg, Winterstein, and Hitschmann,
included works on theory and technique. The Edmund
and Marianne Bergler Psychiatric Foundation, in New
York City, was established by Mrs. Bergler to preserve
and perpetuate his work. It holds title to his working
correspondence, many more articles, another two
dozen complete books in English or German, as well
as hundreds of drafts of papers and books, and will be
a lasting resource.
Bibliography
Engelman, Edmund. (1993). Berggasse 19, Sigmund Freud’s
home and offices, Vienna, 1938, the photographs of Edmund
Engelman. New York: Basic Books.
MELVYN L. ISCOVE
See also: Superego; Unconscious, the.
Leupold–Löwenthal, Harald, Lobner, Hanz, and ScholzStrasser, Inge. (1994). Sigmund-Freud Museum Katalog.
Vienna: Christian Brandstätter.
Bibliography
BERGLER, EDMUND (1899–1962)
Bergler, Edmund. (1949). The basic neurosis. Oral regression
and psychic masochism. New York: Grune and Stratton.
———. (1969). Selected papers of Edmund Bergler, M.D.,
1933–1961. New York: Grune and Stratton.
Edmund Bergler, a major Freudian theoretician and
clinician, was born in Austria on July 20, 1899, and
died in New York City on February 6, 1962. Bergler
received his medical degree from the University of
Vienna in 1926, and married Marianne Blumberger in
1929. He served on the staff of FreudÕs clinic in Vienna
from 1927–1933, and was an assistant director there
from 1933–1938, when he moved to the United States.
A prolific speaker and writer, he published nearly three
hundred papers and twenty-four books, as well as lecturing and giving interviews.
———. (1989). The superego. Madison, WI: International
Universities Press.
BerglerÕs contribution to psychoanalytic thought was
remarkable. He extended and made clinically usable
several of FreudÕs later concepts, including superego
Hitschmann, Eduard, and Bergler, Edmund. (1936). Frigidity in women. Washington, New York: Nervous and Mental
Disease Publishing Company.
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———. (1982). Counterfeit-sex. New York: Grune and
Stratton.
———. (1992). Principles of self-damage. Madison, CT:
International Universities Press.
———. (1993). Curable and incurable neurotics. Madison,
CT: International Universities Press.
163
BERLIN PSYCHOANALYTIC INSTITUTE
BERLIN PSYCHOANALYTIC INSTITUTE. See
Berliner Psychoanalytisches Institut
BERLIN PSYCHOANALYTIC POLYCLINIC. See
Berliner Psychoanalytische Poliklinik
BERLINER PSYCHOANALYTISCHE
POLIKLINIK
When the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute opened the
first psychoanalytic polyclinic on February 14, 1920, it
became the institutional model for bringing together
the functions of therapy, research and training in one
unit.
The Berlin Psychoanalytic Polyclinic fulfilled one of
the functions of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute
(polyclinic, teaching, course commission, treasury,
and subsidies). The polyclinic committee consisted of
Max Eitingon (reception of patients and treatment
indications), Ernst Simmel (experience treating war
neuroses) and Karl Abraham (President of the Berlin
Association). Situated since 1928 at Wichmannstrasse
10 (with five consultation rooms and a library), the
polyclinic was the property of Max Eitingon. In 1928
five assistants were treating between ten and twelve
patients.
The antinomy creating tensions between therapy
(continuing analysis in difficult cases) and teaching
(giving ‘‘easy cases’’ to trainee analysts) led to the
development of controlled analyses and technical
seminars (no more than six participants and constant personal contact with the training analyst).
Training analyses were not paid for. Members of the
German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG) had to treat
at least one case from the polyclinic. Fees: the
patient’s own maximum; about two thirds of the
patients were economically challenged and were
treated free of charge. Sometimes health insurance
funds paid part of the costs (psychologists: three
Reichsmarks, physicians: five Reichsmarks). The
average duration of treatment was about two hundred hours (in four or five weekly sessions of forty–
five minutes).
In spite of the pressure from patients on the polyclinic’s waiting list, ‘‘short therapies’’ were rejected as
16 4
‘‘failures.’’ What Freud had prophesied in Budapest
that ‘‘the large–scale application of our therapy will
compel us to alloy the pure gold of psychoanalysis,’’
did not apply, according to Eitingon ‘‘because we have
no other metal to make such an alloy.’’ In eight and a
half years there were 1,600 demands for cures, 640 of
which were implemented. An average of 72 cases were
treated per year at the polyclinic between 1920 and
1930 by 94 therapists, 60 of whom were API members.
In spite of growing recognition from public authorities, the reaction from professional psychiatrists and
psychologists was one of distrust because of the question of ‘‘lay analysis.’’
In 1929 there were polyclinics in Vienna, London,
Budapest and Paris. Following the forced elimination of Max Eitingon by the Nazis, Felix Boehm
became President of the DPG in 1933 and director
of the polyclinic. In 1935 the name of the polyclinic
had to be changed by official order to ‘‘Ambulatorium.’’ The demand for treatment nevertheless
remained constant. Following the forced expulsion
of Jewish psychoanalysts from the DPG (December
1935) and their emigration, many courses of treatment were interrupted. The seventeen remaining
‘‘Aryan’’ analysts (February 1937) were still conducting forty-two analyses. With the creation of the
Deutsches Institut für Psychologische Forschung und
Psychotherapie (Göringinstitut) in May 1936, other
methods of treatment were introduced and the organization was divided into four departments (diagnostics, training support, criminal psychology,
assessment and catamnesis). Financing was provided
by the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF; the German
Work Front), the Reichsforschungsrat (RFR; the
Reich’s Research Council), the city of Berlin, the
Reichsluftfahrtministerium (the Reich’s Ministry for
Aviation) and health insurance funds. The goals
pursued before the Nazis took over: ‘‘to enable psychoanalysis to penetrate the working classes’’ with
the specific aim of effecting a profound change in
people, were replaced at the Göring Institute by
‘‘the capacity to work.’’
After the war Harald Schultz-Henecke and Werner
Kemper founded the Zentralinstitut für psychogene
Erkrankungen on March 1, 1946, with the support of
individual insurance companies and pension schemes
(VAB), offering a therapy financed by the state with
psychoanalysts who were employed full–time, whether
physicians or non–physicians. With the reorganization
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of health insurance funds in 1958 it became the Institut für psychogene Erkrankungen (‘‘Institute for Psychogenic Affections’’ for the Berlin general health
insurance fund [AOK]). The trend toward short therapies and the separation from analytic training institutes meant there was no longer any functional continuity with the polyclinic. Both the DPG and the
DPV instituted schools for transmitting psychoanalysis and psychotherapy without monthly wage–earning
collaborators.
REGINE LOCKOT
See also: Abraham, Karl; Alexander, Franz Gabriel;
Berliner Psychoanalytische Poliklinik; Eitingon, Max;
Fenichel, Otto; Germany; ‘‘Lines of Advance in PsychoAnalytic Therapy’’; Sachs, Hanns; Simmel, Ernst; Technique with adults, psychoanalytic; Training analysis; Training of the psychoanalyst
Bibliography
Collectif. (1930). Zehn Jahre Berliner psychoanalytisches
Institut (1930). Wien: Internationaler psychoanalytischer
Verlag.
Freud, Anna. (1929). Korrespondenzblatt des Internationalen psychoanalytischen Verlags. Internationale Zeitschrift
für Psychoanalyse, 25 (4), 509–542.
Göring, Matthias H. (1942). Jahresbericht 1941 des
Deutschen Instituts für psychologische Forschung und
Psychotherapie und Hinweise anläßlich der Mitgliederversammlung am 28.3.1942. Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie,
14 (1–2), 62–77.
Lockot, Regine. (1985). Erinnern und Durcharbeiten: zur
Geschichte der Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie im Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.
BERLINER PSYCHOANALYTISCHES
INSTITUT
The Berliner Psychoanalytisches Institut (Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, or BPI), so named on February
20, 1922, included a polyclinic, a training institute
(with lectures, case study seminars, and training and
control analyses), a curriculum committee, and a
treasury and finance office.
As early as 1919 Max Eitingon and Ernst Simmel
proposed that the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society
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establish a clinic offering free analytic treatment to
those otherwise unable to afford it. This was a desiratum for Freud (1919a), and by the next year a training
institute for such a clinic opened, with Simmel as
director and Eitingon as owner, funded by an annual
budget of about 16000 RM.
Located at 29 Potsdamerstrasse, the institute was
managed by Ernst Freud. When it opened on February 14, 1920, it included lecture rooms, offices for
consultation, and a library. Karl Abraham was in
charge of the first courses. In the autumn of 1928, the
institute moved to larger quarters at 10 Wichmannstrasse.
To counter the growing popularity of ‘‘wild analysis’’ and courting respectability in the eyes of the medical establishment, regulations were developed during
1923–1924 that governed acceptance of candidates
(after three preliminary interviews), decided on the
curriculum and role of training and control analyses,
and also ruled on formal membership admissions.
Medical studies (even if unfinished) were demanded
of analysts-in-training; pedagogical studies were
required for child analysts. Non-physicians in Germany enjoyed relative freedom to practice therapy.
Thanks to Felix Boehm, the treasury was subsidized by
members of the institute and money was available to
support candidates. The monthly cost of training ranged from 200 to 300 RM.
Analytic training began with a didactic analysis (six
months minimum) with indications as to treatment
decided by the analyst-in-training committee. Theoretical teaching was the responsibility of the training
analyst. After at least two semesters of theoretical studies, the candidate undertook at least two years of
practical work at the polyclinic; this period would
come to be known as ‘‘control’’ or ‘‘supervision’’ and
was followed by transition to autonomous clinical
work with approval of the training committee. Hanns
Sachs described the training experience as a ‘‘novitiate’’ that was run like a ‘‘technical seminary.’’ Reacting
against regimentation, a group of rebellious young
analysts founded what became known as the ‘‘Kinderseminar’’ (ChildrenÕs Seminar).
The institute also trained non-therapeutic analysts
who were permitted to attend all but technical courses
on treatment. Members of groups from Frankfurt,
Stuttgart, Leipzig, and Hamburg attended workshops
and conferences at the BPI.
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B E R M A N , A N N E (1 889 –19 79)
In 1930, ninety-four therapists worked at the BPI,
sixty of whom belonged to the International Psychoanalytic Association (which then totaled four hundred).
The Prussian-like hierarchical structure was criticized
by Siegfried Bernfeld as damaging to psychoanalysis.
The BPI acquired a reputation for rigidity that was
exported through emigration and escape from Germany during the Nazi era. A detailed report published
in 1930 on the instituteÕs tenth anniversary allows a better understanding of the training system that would
become the basis for standards set by the International
Psychoanalytic Association (Colonomos).
Institutes modeled after the Berlin Psychoanalytic
Institute were soon founded in Vienna, London,
Budapest, The Hague, Frankfurt, New York and
Chicago, and Paris (in 1934 and again in 1954). Other
institutes in the United States based on the BPI were
established in Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Topeka,
San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Seattle,
Denver, and New Orleans.
A wave of voluntary emigration brought Melanie
Klein and Walter Schmideberg to Britain, and Franz
Alexander, Jenö Hárnik, Sándor Radó, Karen Horney,
and Hanns Sachs to the United States. Among the
most influential of some seventy-four analysts and
candidates-in-training obliged to leave Germany were
Siegfried Bernfeld, Max Eitingon, Otto Fenichel,
Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Reik, and Ernst Simmel.
The number of students at the BPI, some two-hundred twenty-two strong in December 1931, declined
steeply after the National Socialists came to power,
with only thirty-nine in attendance in December 1933;
the number of analytic candidates fell from thirty-four
in the fall of 1932 to eight in July 1934. The demand
for treatment remained constant, however. In 1935
there were still fourteen analysts in Germany. A series
of state interventions, forced resignation of Jewish
analysts, and concessions made by the remaining
‘‘Aryan’’ analysts, including the ‘‘aryanization’’ of the
directorate, damaged the institute from without and
drained it from within. Both the treasury and committee meetings, as well as conceptual terminology of psychoanalysis, came under state control. The BPI was
renamed the German Institute of Psychoanalysis, and
all the instituteÕs assets were transferred ‘‘on loan’’ to
the German Institute for Psychological Research and
Psychotherapy (Göringinstitut, or Göring Institute),
founded in 1936.
16 6
After the war, in 1950, the Karl Abraham Institute,
established in association with the German Psychoanalytic Association (DPV) and directed by Carl MüllerBraunschweig, renewed the tradition of the BPI.
REGINE LOCKOT
See also: Abraham, Karl; Alexander, Franz Gabriel; Berliner Psychoanalytische Poliklinik; Eitingon, Max; Fenichel, Otto; Germany; ‘‘Lines of Advance in PsychoAnalytic Therapy’’; Sachs, Hanns; Simmel, Ernst; Technique with adults, psychoanalytic; Training of the
psychoanalyst.
Bibliography
Bernfeld, Siegfried. (1984). Über die psychoanalytische Ausbildung. Psyche, 38, 437–459.
Colonomos, F. (Ed). (1985). On forme des psychanalystes:
rapport original sur les dix ans de lÕInstitut psychanalytique
de Berlin, 1920–1930. Paris: Denoël.
Eitingon, Max. (1924). Bericht über die Berliner psychoanalytische Poliklinik—Juni 1922–März 1924, VIIIer
Internationalen psychoanalytischen Verlags-Kongress.
Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, X (2), 229–241.
Freud, Sigmund. (1919a). Lines of advance in psycho-analytic therapy. SE, 17: 157–168.
BERMAN, ANNE (1889–1979)
Anne Berman, a French pharmacist, was the personal
secretary of Marie Bonaparte and a translator of psychoanalytical works. She was born March 23, 1889,
and died April 25, 1979. After her dissertation, ‘‘La
Famille des Boraginacées’’ (The Family of Boraginaceae), was completed, she worked in the laboratory of
Dr. Toulouse at the Sainte–Anne hospital until 1924.
That year the Souffron pharmacy on 54, rue de Miromesnil went up for sale. She bought the pharmacy,
where she worked for several years. She was a pharmacist delegate to the Chambre Syndicale and, on May
22, 1928, was accepted as a member of the Soroptimists, an organization founded in California in 1921
with the goal of recruiting women who excelled in
their profession.
After undergoing analysis with Marie Bonaparte,
she became her secretary. She was accepted as the first
member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society on January
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B E R N A Y S , M I N N A (1865 –1 941)
10, 1927. She administered the secretariat of the Institut de Psychanalyse (Psychoanalysis Institute) from its
inception in 1934.
She translated several of FreudÕs work including
Psychoanalytic Procedure, An Outline of Psychoanalysis,
the first two volumes of Ernest JonesÕs Life and Work of
Sigmund Freud, Anna FreudÕs The Ego and the MechanismÕs of Defense, andThe Birth of Psychoanalysis, Letters
to Wilhelm Fliess.
At the time of BermanÕs death, Serge Lebovici
wrote, in the Revue française de psychanalyse: ‘‘A tireless reader, a musician who was especially fond of
Wagner, Annette remained a close friend of the psychoanalysts of her generation and was able, because
of this, to contribute to a history of the birth of psychoanalysis in France. In spite of her discretion, we
will remember her as among those who did the
most to spread the knowledge of FreudÕs work in
France.’’
JEAN-PIERRE BOURGERON
See also: Bonaparte, Marie Léon; Borel, Adrien Alphonse
Alcide; France; Revue française de psychanalyse; Société
psychanalytique de Paris and Institut de psychanalyse
de Paris.
Bibliography
Lebovici, Serge. (1979). Anne Berman. Revue française de
psychanalyse, 43 (3), 476.
BERNAYS-FREUD, HANNA. See Freud, Sigmund
(siblings)
BERNAYS-FREUD, MINNA (1865–1941)
The younger sister (by four years) of Martha Bernays,
Sigmund FreudÕs wife, Minna Bernays was born June
18, 1865 (June 16 according to some sources), in
Hamburg and died February 13, 1941 in London. She
was the youngest of seven children, the daughter of
Jewish businessman Berman Bernays (1826–1879) and
Emmeline Philipp (1830–1910). Three children died
while still young—Fabian, 1857, Michel, 1857–1859,
and Sara, 1858–1859—the eldest brother (Isaak, 1855–
1872) died at the age of seventeen from a bone infection presumed to be of tubercular origin. The father
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was the third son of the rabbi (chacham) Isaak Bernays
(1793–1849). Both of his brothers were distinguished
men: Jacob (1824–1881) was a philologist and Michael
(1834–1897) was an expert on literature. The mother
was from a well-to-do family, originally from Sweden
on the fatherÕs side, and from Hamburg on the
motherÕs side.
When Minna was four years old, in 1869, the
Berman family moved from Hamburg to Vienna after
the father finished serving a four–year jail sentence
for bankruptcy fraud. In Vienna, Berman Bernays
worked as a secretary for the economist Lorenz von
Stein and as a writer for the Zentralblatt für Eisenbahnen und Dampfschiffart (Rail and Steamship Transport
Journal). Nothing is known about Minna BernaysÕs
childhood and education. When her father died
in December 1869, she was brought up by her mother
and Sigmund Pappenheim, the father of Bertha
Pappenheim, the woman made famous by Breuer as
Anna O.
In 1882–1883 Minna spent several weeks in Sicily
because of pulmonary tuberculosis. On February 18,
1882, at the age of seventeen, she became engaged to
Ignaz Schönberg, a student in the philosophy department at the University of Vienna, who was studying
with Georg Bühler, the orientalist. Schönberg received
his doctorate on May 12, 1884, and was appointed to
the Indian Institute at Oxford, a position that had
been offered to him by Monnier Williams, the editor
of a Sanskrit dictionary. He contracted tuberculosis,
however, and had to resign his position in February
1885, and broke off his engagement to Minna in June.
After leaving Great Britain in August, he returned to
Meran, near Vienna, where he spent the winter. He
died in early February 1886, in Vienna.
From 1883 to 1895 Minna Bernays spent most of
her time in Hamburg with her mother, who was ill.
For short periods of time she worked as a companion
and childrenÕs tutor; she also participated in a workshop for manual crafts, like the one run by FreudÕs
sister Rosa. In November 1885 she spent a few months
with Freud (November 29, 1895, according to Wilhelm
Fliess). In March 1896 she obtained a position in
Frankfurt (March 7, 1896), but in June she quit and
moved in permanently with her sisterÕs family; she remained here for the rest of her life, except for the brief
periods of time she spent away on holiday or for health
reasons.
167
B E R N F E L D , S I E G F R I E D (189 2 –1953 )
In MarthaÕs absence she ran the house, took care of
the children, cooked, and made handicrafts. She served
as host to FreudÕs guests and students, handled some
of his correspondence, played mahjong and tarot with
him, and corrected his manuscripts.
In 1887 Freud undertook a voyage of several days,
or several weeks, with Minna to various resorts and
rest homes in Bavaria and northern Italy. They traveled
by foot, by coach, and by train, visiting the southern
Tyrol and the Engadine, while FreudÕs wife rested with
the children. In general, FreudÕs vacations with his
wife were less adventurous. Minna often accompanied
FreudÕs children on their summer vacations to Berchtesgaden, Reichenhall, or Aussee.
Unlike Martha, Minna remained close to Jewish traditions. She was the only member of the family who
refused to be cremated. Few traces of her personal
papers remain. But the Sigmund Freud Museum in
London houses several examples of handicrafts made
by her.
ALBRECHT HIRSCHMÜLLER
See also: Berggasse 19, Wien IX; Freud-Bernays, Martha.
Bibliography
Billinsky, John M. (1969). Jung and Freud: The end of a
romance. Andover Newton Quarterly, 62, 2, 39–43.
In May 1938, a few weeks before Freud, Martha,
and Anna, Minna emigrated to Great Britain, for,
unlike her sister, she had retained her German citizenship. She died there three years later from heart
disease.
Freud, Sigmund. (1960a). Letters of Sigmund Freud, 1873–
1939 (Ernst L. Freud, Ed.; Tania and James Stern, Trans.).
London: Hogarth Press.
According to descriptions of her from letters and
personal recollections, Minna was an intelligent
woman with a lively personality and a sense of humor,
who read German and English. On occasion she could
be highly sarcastic and inaccessible, caustic at times,
with a kind of Germanic stiffness. She was often ill, and
suffered from migraines, digestive, cardiac, and eye
problems. Her tuberculosis required additional treatment in 1900.
Freud, Sigmund, and Ferenczi, Sándor. (1999–2000). The
correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi (Eva
Brabant, Ernst Falzeder, and Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch,
Eds.; Peter T. Hoffer, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap/
Harvard University Press.
Sigmund FreudÕs relationship to Minna Bernays
has given rise to considerable speculation (see the
Freud-Ferenczi correspondence of December 16,
1912). In 1957 Carl Gustav Jung stated in an interview that Minna had mentioned a sexual relationship between her and Freud (Billinsky, J. M., 1969),
but JungÕs claim has little credibility. Similarly, the
attempts to find proof in the Interpretation of
Dreams or the Psychopathology of Everyday Life of
intimacy between Freud and Minna are not convincing (Swales, P., 1982). The remaining correspondence, approximately two hundred letters from different periods between 1882 and 1938, provide no
indication of such a relationship. The letters do
demonstrate the existence of a strong bond between
them, which Freud confirmed to Marie Bonaparte,
telling her that at the time of his relative isolation,
Wilhelm Fliess and Minna Bernays were his only
friends.
BERNFELD, SIEGFRIED (1892–1953)
16 8
———. (1985). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to
Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904 (Jeffery M. Masson, Ed., Trans.).
Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press.
Swales, P. J. (1982). Freud, Minna Bernays, and the conquest
of Rome. New light on the origins of psychoanalysis. New
American Revue, 1–23.
An Austrian philosopher and psychoanalyst, Siegfried
Bernfeld was born March 7, 1892, in Lemberg, the
capital city of Galicia, and died April 2, 1953, in San
Francisco. Bernfeld distinguished himself in the extent
of his knowledge, the originality of his ideas, and his
qualities as an educator. A prolific and exacting writer,
he was also an outstanding teacher, admired by his students and respected by his colleagues. Freud said he
considered him the most gifted of his students and
disciples.
His parents lived in Vienna but his mother
returned to her hometown to give birth to her first
child. In 1910 Bernfeld completed his studies at the
Gymnasium and entered the University of Vienna,
where he obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy, while also
studying psychoanalysis, sociology, education, and
biology. All branches of knowledge held an interest
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B E R N F E L D , S I E G F R I E D (1892 –1 953)
for Bernfeld, who was also involved in contemporary political issues. A lucid and passionate left–wing
Zionist, he was active in political struggles while he
was a university student.
Impregnated with the ideas of psychoanalysis and
Marxism, Bernfeld founded, in 1919, the Kinderheim
Baumgarten, where nearly three hundred Jewish children, refugees from Poland, were housed. His first
book, published in 1921, examined this short, intense
period of his life.
In 1925 he published two important works on
infant psychology and education. Psychologie des Säuglings (Infant Psychology) is a well–known work that
makes use of psychoanalysis and drive theory to
develop a new psychology of the infant. Sisyphos is a
critique of the idealist notion of education and comes
down strongly in favor of a non–authoritarian system,
one that respects the life of the instincts and the needs
of the student.
Attracted by the fame of Max EitingonÕs institute,
Bernfeld traveled to Berlin in 1926. There he underwent analysis with Hanns Sachs and rapidly won the
admiration of his students. While there he studied the
scientific foundations of psychoanalysis and, returning
to his first love, biology, researched the theory of
instincts. At the end of his Berlin period, he contrasted
his position (as a Freudian and Marxist) with that of
Wilhelm Reich in two important articles, and wrote an
essay on interpretation.
In Der Begriff der ‘‘Deutung’’ in der Psychoanalyse
(The Concept of ‘‘Interpretation’’ in Psychoanalysis),
Bernfeld described the concept of interpretation with
the tools of the scientific method, something he shared
with Moritz Schlick and Hans Reichenbach. He
distinguished several types of interpretation. ‘‘Final’’
interpretation attempts to penetrate the unconscious
intentional context in which a determinate psychic
production that appears to be isolated from any context can be situated. ‘‘Functional’’ interpretation takes
account of the value of a specific psychic fact. ‘‘Reconstruction,’’ an instrument of psychoanalytic science,
concretely reconstructs an old psychic process.
Because there is a consistent relation between the psychic event and its traces, reconstruction can discover
the genetic connection that is continuously repeated
through impulse and desire. In this way psychoanalysis
is raised to the rank of a natural science to the extent
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that it provides an explanation for personal psychic
events on the basis of certain laws.
The approach to psychoanalysis as a science of
traces is based on the leading theories of the field: free
association, transference and resistance, which inhibits
the formation of missing unconscious connections
(Bernfeld returns to this subject in 1941 in The Fact of
Observation in Psychoanalysis, a work that exercised
considerable influence on his disciples in California,
especially Edward M. Weinshel).
With the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the
imminent ascent of Hitler to power, Bernfeld realized
that he could no longer remain in Germany. He left
Berlin and, after a brief stay in Vienna, went into exile
in France in 1932.
Little is known about BernfeldÕs life in France.
Apparently, he was not well received by the Paris Psychoanalytic Society. He settled in the south of France,
where he met Suzanne Cassirer–Paret, who became his
third wife and an important collaborator. In 1936 Siegfried and Suzanne decided to leave France and, in
answer to Otto Fenichel and Ernst SimmelÕs invitation,
emigrated to California in 1937. In San Francisco
Bernfeld resumed his teaching activities and wrote,
together with his wife, a series of articles that can be
considered the point of departure for ‘‘Freudology.’’
These include a documented study on the Helmholz
School (1944) and a 1946 essay in which Bernfeld discovers that the enigmatic character in ‘‘Screen Memories’’ (Freud, S., 1899) is no other than Sigmund
Freud himself. There followed several articles on
FreudÕs early scientific work, his studies on cocaine,
and, together with his wife, an article on the childhood
of the founding father of psychoanalysis and his first
years in practice. Bernfeld died in 1953 while he and
his wife were preparing other articles on FreudÕs life.
R. HORACIO ETCHEGOYEN
See also: Lehrinstitut der Wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung; Marxism and psychoanalysis; North America;
Screen memory; Wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung; Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Pädagogik.
Bibliography
Bernfeld, Siegfried. (1921). Kinderheim Baumgarten. Bericht
über einen ernsthaften Versuch mit neuer Erziehung. Berlı́n:
Jüdischer Verlag.
169
B E R N H E I M , H I P P O L Y T E (184 0 –1919 )
———. (1929). The psychology of the infant. New York:
Brentano.
hysteria, he gave a favorable assessment of the Studies
on Hysteria.
———. (1925). Sisyphos, oder die Grenzen der Erziehung.
Vienna: Internationaler psychoanalytischer Verlag.
According to Bernheim, hypnosis is only a particular
case of the psychological phenomenon of suggestion.
Psychotherapy—a term Bernheim popularized—
incorporated the power of language, the doctorÕs influence on the patient, and the effect of the patientÕs
mind on his body. Bernheim argued for a therapy of
and by the mind, which could cure nervous illnesses
and suppress or calm the symptoms, even the causes,
of organic disease. He seems to have been a flexible
and eclectic therapist, passing when necessary from
authoritarianism to insinuation, sometimes even
refusing to give orders to his patients.
———. (1932). Der Begriff der ‘‘Deutung’’ in der Psychoanalyse. Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie, 4, 448–497.
Ekstein, Rudolph. (1968). In Fr. Alexander, S. Eisenstein, M.
Grotjahn (Eds.), Psychoanalytic pioneers. New York,
London: Basic Books.
BERNHEIM, HIPPOLYTE (1840–1919)
A professor of ambulatory health care at the department of medicine in Nancy, Hippolyte Bernheim was
born in Mulhouse on April 27, 1840, and died in Paris
on February 2, 1919. He studied medicine in Strasbourg
and, when he received his degree in 1870, during the
Franco-Prussian war, he decided to practice in France.
In 1879 he was offered the chair of ambulatory medicine at the then-new department of medicine in Nancy.
Around 1882, in spite of his initial reticence, he agreed
to visit Ambroise LiebeaultÕs ‘‘clinic.’’ Convinced of the
efficacy of LiebeaultÕs methods, Bernheim began to use
hypnosis on some of his patients, generally working
with people suffering from a variety of infectious diseases. In 1884 he published a scathing attack on the Salpêtrière: hysteria and hypnosis were no more than cultural phenomena aroused by the power of suggestion.
Bernheim now became the spokesman of a new
school that was internationally recognized. In his private practice he saw neurotic patients from all over
Europe. In spite of his personal admiration for Jean
Martin Charcot, his position was deepened and further
radicalized in two books translated by Freud, De la
suggestion et de ses applications à la thérapeutique (Suggestion and its Therapeutic Applications) (1886 and
1888) and Hypnotisme, suggestion, psychothérapie
(Hypnotism, Suggestion, Psychotherapy) (1891 and
1903). The prevalence of BernheimÕs position seems to
have exhausted itself by the end of the century. Charcot himself, at the end of his life, in La foi qui guérit
(The Faith that Heals) (1892), appears to have moved
closer to the position of the school of Nancy. However,
in Nancy, Bernheim felt isolated. He distanced himself
from Liebeault, his hypnosis practice began to disintegrate, and his support for Dreyfus aroused considerable anti–Semitic hostility. After retiring in 1910
Bernheim moved to Paris. In 1913, in a book on
17 0
Shortly before the July 1889 Congress on Hypnotism held in Paris that year, Sigmund Freud came to
see Bernheim in Lorraine. In a letter to August Forel,
Bernheim referred to Freud as a ‘‘charming young
man.’’ In 1888 however, Freud had turned to Charcot
for support in criticizing Bernheim. After 1889 Freud
would make use of some of BernheimÕs ideas to distance himself from Charcot, but he continued to
remain critical of the theory of suggestion promulgated by the school of Nancy. Freud later recalled how
forcefully certain experiments of 1889, involving the
recall of memories originating during hypnosis, had
struck him. Reading the text published in 1890 after
his trip to Lorraine, the ‘‘insightful’’ clinician from
Nancy may also have left Freud with the nucleus of an
idea for the treatment of the ‘‘psyche,’’ or ‘‘soul,’’ and
an interest in the magic of words.
JACQUELINE CARROY
See also: Autosuggestion; Cäcilie M., case of; Hypnosis;
Liebeault, Ambroise Auguste; Negative hallucination;
Suggestion; Translation.
Bibliography
Bernheim, Hippolyte. (1903). Hypnotisme, suggestion, psychothérapie (2nd ed). Paris: Fayard, 1995.
Blum, J.-L. (1986). La vie d’Hippolyte Bernheim, 1840–1919
(pp. 103–117). Paris: Frénésie.
Carroy, Jacqueline. (1988). L’école hypnologique de Nancy.
I: Liébeault, Beaunis, Liégeois et Delbœuf. II: Bernheim,
Charcot et Freud, le Pays lorrain. Journal de la Société
d’archéologie lorraine et du Musée historique lorrain, 2–3,
108–116; 159–166.
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BETA-SCREEN
Delboeuf, Joseph. (1885). Le Sommeil et les Rêves. Paris:
Félix Alcan; Le Sommeil et les Rêves et autres textes. Paris:
Fayard, 1993.
Freud, Sigmund. (1890a). Psychical (or mental) treatment.
SE, 7: 283–302.
BETA-ELEMENTS
In his paper, ‘‘A Theory of Thinking’’ (Second
Thoughts, 1967, pp. 100–120), Wilfred Bion speaks of
raw sense-data and of ‘‘inchoate elements’’ which have
to be transformed into alpha-elements by alpha functions. That description is the precursor of what he was
to call later beta-elements. He first uses the term betaelements in Learning from Experience: ‘‘If alphafunction is disturbed and therefore inoperative the
sense impressions of which the patient is aware and
the emotions which he is experiencing remain
unchanged. I shall call them beta-elements. In contrast
with the alpha-elements the beta-elements are not felt
to be phenomena, but things in themselves’’ (p. 6).
Bion often speaks of beta-elements, raw senseimpressions, and raw emotional data. Beta-elements
are very concrete. They are felt as bad internal ‘‘things’’
which can be dealt with only by expulsion. He emphasizes that the beta-function emotions are also experienced as physical objects.
This is an extension of KleinÕs view that the infant
experiences hunger as a bad internal breast that has to
be expelled. It is important to keep this in mind,
because otherwise some of BionÕs statements may
seem contradictory, because he speaks of sense data
that have to be expelled, but on many occasions he
refers to the fear of death (hardly a sense-datum),
which has to be expelled and projected into the breast.
But for the infant at that stage, hatred and fear are
experienced as bad objects. The experience is confused
with the object responsible for the experience. In Elements of Psycho-Analysis (1963), Bion provides the following model: ‘‘[The infant] . . . filled with painful
lumps of faeces, guilt, fears of impending death,
chunks of greed, meanness and urine, evacuates these
bad objects into the breast that is not there. As it does
so the good object turns the no-breast (mouth) into a
breast, the faeces and urine into milk, the fears of
impending death and anxiety into feelings of love and
generosity . . . The mechanism is implicit in the theory
of projective identification in which Melanie Klein formulated her discoveries of infant mentality.’’
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Beta-elements can be dealt with only by expulsion.
They are not material for thought, but underlie actingout, hallucinations, and delusions. When betaelements are projected into the mother they can be
transformed into alpha-elements, which are elements
of dream and thought, by the alpha-function. The
nearest clinical approximations to raw beta-elements
are bizarre objects. Beta-elements do not combine
with one another in an integrated way, but they can
become accumulated. When this happens the contactbarrier becomes a beta-screen. Unlike alpha-elements,
beta-elements are saturated: they are not open to
change by new impressions, and therefore not open to
reality-testing. They can be only transformed by alpha
function.
HANNA SEGAL
See also: Alpha function; Alpha-elements; Bion, Wilfred
Ruprecht; Concept; Contact-barrier; Grid; Learning from
Experience; Maternal reverie, capacity for; Object; Primary object; Primal, the; Protothoughts; Psychotic panic;
Idea/representation; Reverie; Symbolic equation;
Transformations.
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred R. (1962). Learning from experience. London,
Heinemann; New York: Basic Books.
———. (1963). Elements of psycho-analysis. London:
Heinemann.
———. (1967). Second thoughts. London: Heinemann.
BETA-SCREEN
Bion first mentioned a beta-screen in his description
of the contact-barrier in Learning from Experience
(pp. 17–23, 1962). A beta-screen forms when there is a
deficiency in alpha-functioning and beta-elements
replace the contact-barrier.
When a beta-screen is formed there is no communication between the conscious and unconscious.
Rational thought up to a point can exist, but cut off
from emotional meaning. A beta-screen forms an
impenetrable barrier. It is a defense against any meaningful emotional experience. As the beta-screen is
composed of beta-elements which lend themselves to
projective identification, it also manifests itself in a
bombardment directed both against the alpha171
B E T T E L H E I M , B R U N O (1903 –1 990)
functioning of the patient himself and against any
external object susceptible to arousing meaningful
feelings. In analysis, the patient bombards the analyst
with confused fragmentary material imbued with violence and directed against the analystÕs attempt to get
in touch with an emotionally significant experience.
HANNA SEGAL
See also: Beta-elements; Contact-barrier.
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred R. (1962). Learning from experience. London:
Heinemann; New York: Basic Books.
———. (1963). Elements of psycho-analysis. London:
Heinemann.
BETTELHEIM, BRUNO (1903–1990)
The psychoanalyst and educator Bruno Bettelheim was
born in Vienna on August 28, 1903, and died on
March 13, 1990, in Silver Spring, Maryland.
The son of a wood merchant from the assimilated
Jewish middle class, Bettelheim had to give up his studies when his father died of syphilis. He was twentythree and remained scarred by his fatherÕs ‘‘shameful’’
death. He returned to his studies in philosophy ten
years later and in February 1938 was one of the last
Jews to earn a doctorate at the University of Vienna
before the Anschluss. His thesis was entitled ‘‘The Problem of Beauty in Nature and Modern Esthetics’’ and
was supervised by the famed Karl Bühler, director of
the Institute of Psychology and a pioneer of Sprachtheorie (theory of language).
In 1930 Bettelheim had married a schoolteacher
who was a disciple of Anna Freud, but he was
unhappy. He saw reflected in his wifeÕs eyes the ugliness that had obsessed him since he first saw it in his
motherÕs eyes. In 1936 he entered analysis with
Richard Sterba, then secretary of the Vienna Society
and the only non-Jew on its Committee. At the time of
the Anschluss, Sterba abruptly abandoned all his
patients, preferring exile to the risk of being called
upon by the Nazis to rid the society of Jews.
When Bettelheim was arrested by the Gestapo on
May 29, 1938, he was thus in the midst of his analysis.
The ten and a half months he spent in Dachau, and
17 2
later in Buchenwald, had a decisive influence on him.
To escape madness, he studied the effects of the camps
on the other prisoners, the prison guards, and himself.
Whenever he could, he shared his observations with
Paul FedernÕs son Ernst.
Bettelheim was liberated on April 14, 1939, and
arrived in the United States three weeks later. He had
lost everything. His wife left him. His first job was to
devise a test for evaluating knowledge in the plastic
arts that is still in use today. Between 1941 and 1944 he
taught art history, German literature, and psychology.
Above all, he sought to publish the article on the concentration camps that he had been working on since
his release.
Rejected several times on the grounds that it was
nonobjective or ‘‘anti-German,’’ the article finally
appeared in October 1943 in the journal of the Harvard psychology laboratory. ‘‘Individual and Mass
Behavior in Extreme Situations’’ is a study of the
deportees that makes particular use of Anna FreudÕs
concept of ‘‘identification with the aggressor.’’ In 1945,
General Eisenhower had the article distributed to
American officers in Europe, who were ill-prepared for
the opening of the concentration camps.
In 1960 Bettelheim returned to this text in The
Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, the first
book in which he made a connection between his
experiences in the camps and the Freudian-inspired
‘‘milieu therapy’’ he established at the University of
ChicagoÕs Orthogenic School, of which he became
director in 1944. This connection can be summarized
as follows: Having witnessed mentally sound people
go insane because of the effects of the camps, Bettelheim attempted to remedy the problems of severely
disturbed children by creating an environment that
was totally responsive to their needs and symptoms.
This approach remained BettelheimÕs trademark and
established the reputation of his school worldwide.
In 1973 Bettelheim retired to California. He conducted seminars, supervised therapists in training,
wrote, and was a sought-after lecturer. In 1984, the
death of his second wife, who was also from Vienna
and had borne him three children, plunged him into a
deep depression that he struggled against for another
six years, pursuing his activities despite health problems. After the publication of Freud Õs Vienna and
Other Essays in January 1990, he moved to a retirement
home near Washington, D.C. Two months later, he
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committed suicide by ingesting barbiturates and, to
ensure that he would not be ‘‘saved,’’ putting a plastic
bag over his head. Fifty-two years earlier, on the same
night, the Nazis had entered Austria to the cheers of a
crowd shouting ‘‘Death to the Jews.’’
Bettelheim was a good storyteller and popularizer
of FreudÕs ideas, and his books sold very successfully.
He recounted his clinical experience in three books
about the Orthogenic School, Love Is Not Enough: A
Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Children (1950),
Truants from Life (1955), and A Home for the Heart
(1974), and in The Empty Fortress (1967), which studies three cases of autism. With regard to theory, he
was a maverick. He initially conceived of his school as
‘‘putting FreudÕs concepts into action.’’ He then distanced himself from Freud to flirt with culturalism in
Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male
(1954). After moving closer to the ego psychology that
predominated at the Chicago Institute headed by
Franz Alexander (The Informed Heart), he returned to
Freud by way of the self-psychology advocated by his
friend Heinz Kohut (The Empty Fortress), and he
ended up writing a long polemical essay denouncing
the ways in which Freud had been betrayed by his English translator, James Strachey (Freud and ManÕs Soul,
1983). A careful reading of Surviving and Other Essays
(1979), a collection of BettelheimÕs writings on Nazism, gives a glimpse of the painful self-analysis by
which he continued, first in the camps and then for
the rest of his life, the work that had been interrupted
by the Anschluss.
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976), a study of the role of fairy
tales on the development of the unconscious, is BettelheimÕs best-selling book. He also wrote a book on education in the kibbutzim, The Children of the Dream
(1969), and many other works on childrenÕs education
(Dialogues with Mothers, 1962; A Good Enough Parent,
1987; and numerous articles).
BettelheimÕs suicide was immediately followed by a
furious scandal, with former patients and students
denouncing him as a liar, a brute, and a despot who
was all the more hypocritical because he had preached
respect for children. Beyond what it reveals about the
confusion ensuing from the suicide of such a man, this
scandal is interesting because it goes to the heart of
BettelheimÕs clinical genius: an almost infallible intuition about what causes a child to suffer and the ability
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to confront his patientÕs most destructive impulses. He
often compared his role to that of a lightning rod,
attracting lightning and thus proving that it had not
killed anyone—not even him.
Too often catalogued as a specialist in autism,
Bettelheim was above all a master teacher who continually succeeded in getting the therapists under his
supervision and the educators in his school to recognize the part of themselves that was put at risk by their
patientsÕ madness. That said, his depictions of the
most disturbed students in his school, including some
autistic patients, were so vivid, so focused on what
these children were doing—and not on their deficiencies, as was common practice—that his work had a
decisive influence on the way young psychotic patients
are treated in psychiatric hospitals around the world.
NINA SUTTON
See also: Autism; Ego; Empty Fortress, The; Infantile
schizophrenia.
Bibliography
Bettelheim, Bruno. (1960). The informed heart: Autonomy in
a mass age. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
———. (1990). FreudÕs Vienna and other essays. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
Bettelheim, Bruno, and Karlin, Daniel. (1975). Un autre
regard sur la folie. Paris: Stock.
Jurgenson, Geneviève. (1973). La Folie des autres. Paris:
Robert Laffont.
Pollak, Richard. (1997). The creation of Dr. B.: A biography of
Bruno Bettelheim. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Raines, Theron. (2002). Rising to the light: A portrait of
Bruno Bettelheim. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Sutton, Nina. (1995). Bruno Bettelheim: The other side of
madness (David Sharp, Trans.). London: Duckworth.
BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
Beyond the Pleasure Principle was presented by Freud
as the ‘‘third step in the theory of drives.’’ The essay,
which introduced the dynamic of the life and death
impulses was ‘‘in gestation’’ on March 17, 1919. On
May 12, Freud spoke with Sándor Ferenczi, stating
‘‘Not only have I completed Beyond the Pleasure
173
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THE
PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
Principle, which IÕll have recopied for you, but I have
also returned to that little trifle on the uncanny
and attempted . . . to provide a YA basis for group
psychology.’’ On April 2, he spoke of the essay to Lou
Andreas-Salomé: ‘‘Where am I with my Metapsychology? First of all, itÕs not yet written. . . . But if I live
another ten years . . . I promise to add other contributions. One of the first of this kind will be contained in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle.’’ The suffering of his
friend Anton von Freund, whom Freud visited every
day in the autumn of 1919, followed by the death of
FreudÕs daughter Sophie in January 1920, interrupted
the work. Completed between May and July, it was
published in December. Chapter 6 was added in 1920
(Grubrich-Simitis, 1993) and, between 1921 and 1925,
three subsequent editions came out, with a modified
text. These were soon translated into English, Spanish
(1922), and French (1927).
Returning to his metapsychological writings of
1915, Freud introduced the ‘‘pleasure principle,’’
which he related to FechnerÕs principle of stability. The
evocation of traumatic neurosis, childrenÕs games,
repetition during the transference, and fate neurosis
suggested a ‘‘more primitive,’’ ‘‘more elementary,’’
‘‘more instinctual’’ tendency than the pleasure principle, independent of it and manifested by the repetition
compulsion.
Unconvinced by his clinical studies, Freud introduced the ‘‘speculation that often looks far afield’’
(chapter 4). The topography and functions of the
Pcs.-Cs, system were examined from the classical point
of view, using the Studies on Hysteria (1895d) and The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) as references. The
protective shield function enabled him to define
trauma from the vantage point of psychic economy
and introduce the function of binding psychic energy
that relates to the repetition compulsion.
Chapter 5 continued along these lines, then the
referent changed: ‘‘But how is the predicate of being
ÔinstinctualÕ related to the compulsion to repeat? At
this point we cannot escape a suspicion that we may
have come upon the track of a universal attribute of
instincts and perhaps of organic life in general. . . . It
seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in
organic life to restore an earlier state of things which
the living entity has been obliged to abandon under
the pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, it is a
kind of organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the
17 4
expression of the inertia inherent in organic life.’’ The
essay continued to pursue this theme. Extrapolation
from this led to the death instinct: the initial state of
living being is inanimate matter deprived of energy,
and the death instincts tend toward its reestablishment; the pleasure principle is at their service; the
instincts of self-preservation too, because they tend to
reestablish an earlier state.
The regressive and conservative functions of the
sexual drives and their primal existence were less easy
to analyze. An extensive investigation of biological
research on death and reproduction followed (chapter
6), in which Freud equated the ego instincts with the
death instincts, and the sex instincts with the life instincts. The myth related by Aristophanes in the
Symposium led Freud to develop the hypothesis that,
initially, living substance was ‘‘continuous.’’ Eros
attempts to reestablish this continuity by combining
gametes. The death instinct, however, disunites organisms to achieve its goal, and instinctual conflict is
established.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle created, through the
use of an instinctual dualism that had been missing
since the introduction of narcissism, a space for stylization of considerable dimension; its substrate is inanimate matter and living substance; its dynamics
involve the primary tension in living things, external
forces likely to be integrated, and internal tendencies
leading to the reestablishment of an earlier state. In
actual terms this space is ‘‘sufficient’’ for stylizing all
the modes of stability of dynamic processes: from strict
identity to instability, and including the flexible stability of living things. Freud incorporated earlier metapsychological investigations into his essay, and he
provided Ferenczi with a pathway to future research.
In addition to Group Psychology and the Analysis of the
Ego (1921c), Beyond the Pleasure Principle served as a
conduit to The Ego and the Id (1923b), FreudÕs ‘‘second
topographic point of view.’’ The relationship between
the death instinct, hatred, and the destructive instinct
led to their eventual reassessment and an analysis of
sadomasochism. Beyond the Pleasure Principle served
as an essential element and organizing principle for
Freudian psychoanalysis.
Because it was difficult, the essay was often poorly
received and misunderstood. This attitude was typified
by Ernest Jones (1953–57, III), unlike that of Sándor
Ferenczi, who had anticipated the theme in 1913. The
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death drive has either been rejected or reduced to
destructive drives (Melanie Klein), or made to serve as
a justification for a structuralist viewpoint (Jacques
Lacan). Jean Laplanche (1970) highlighted the problems and paradoxes in the essay, including the chiasmus that transforms the sex drives, disturbing and
pathogenic, into Eros, lifeÕs only safeguard.
The ‘‘inherent thrust toward organic life, to the
reestablishment of an earlier state,’’ can be separated
into various dynamics and types of stability through
the use of qualitative dynamics (Porte, 1994), and
through them we can better understand the aptness
of FreudÕs questions and the magnitude of his
efforts.
MICHÈLE PORTE
See also: Automatism; Death instinct (Thanatos); Drive/
instinct; Eros; Fort-Da; Fusion/defusion; Fusion/defusion of instincts; Life instinct (Eros); Masochism; Moral
masochism; Nightmare; Pleasure/unpleasure principle;
Primary masochism; Repetition compulsion; Symbolic,
the; Trauma.
DE
M A D R I D ( F R E U D , S. , O B R A S C O M P L E T A S )
contemporary with the German publication of the
Gesammelte Schriften (1924–1934), the Spanish edition was the first complete translation of FreudÕs work
abroad. Freud himself was surprised that a Madrid editor, José Ruiz-Castillo, would want to publish his work
in Spanish. At this time the Spanish population was
small and the cultural level relatively undeveloped. In
fact the initiative for the project was taken by a wellknown Spanish intellectual, José Ortega y Gasset, who
had introduced German scientific and philosophic
ideas to the Spanish public through the review Revista
de Occidente . At his suggestion the publication rights
were purchased in 1917, but Europe was then at war;
all correspondence for the project and the initial
proofs had to be sent by diplomatic courier. The first
volume, with a preface by Ortega y Gasset, appeared in
1922, and seventeen additional volumes were published by 1934. If we are to believe the letter sent by
Freud to his translator, Luis López-Ballesteros y de
Torres, on May 7, 1923, he was very agreeably surprised by this version.
Jones, Ernest. (1953–57). Sigmund Freud: Life and work.
London: Hogarth Press.
Its characteristics need to be considered in relation
to its function within the Spanish historical context,
which was then in the throes of a cultural and literary
renewal. This explains why López–BallesterosÕs translation was written in elegant Castilian and was highly
literary, which significantly enlarged its readership.
However, the translation, although it allowed Spanish
readers to familiarize themselves with FreudÕs thought,
lacks any sense of consistency. The primary reason is
the absence of any systematic conceptual approach,
made worse by the repeated literary and moralizing
interjections of the translator, who exercised a certain
degree of liberty in his work. There were also a number
of omissions of words and sometimes of entire sentences, which considerably altered the original
meaning.
Laplanche, Jean. (1970). Vie m en psychanalyse. Paris:
Flammarion.
JOSÉ GUTIÉRREZ TERRAZAS
Source Citation
Freud, Sigmund. Jenseits des Lustprinzeps. Leipzig-ViennaZurich (1920). GW, 13, 1–69; Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 7–64.
Bibliography
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1913). Le développement du sens de la
réalité et ses stades. Oeuvres completes. Psychanalyse (Vol.
2, pp. 51–64; J. Dupont, M. Viliker, Trans.). Paris: Payot,
1970.
Porte, Michèle. (1994). La dynamique qualitative en psychanalyse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
BIBLIOTECA NUEVA DE MADRID (FREUD, S.,
OBRAS COMPLETAS)
The Biblioteca Nueva de Madrid was the first publishing house to print a Spanish language edition of the
‘‘complete works’’ of Sigmund Freud; it was referred to
as such even though it has never been finished. Nearly
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See also: Spain.
Bibliography
Garcia de la Hoz, Antonio. (1985). Freud en castellano.
Libros, 36, 3–9.
Lázaro, J. (1991). Las Traducciones al español de Freud:
Historia y crı́tica, actas del IX congreso de historia de la
medicina. Saragossa: Prensas Universitarias y Ayuntamiento de Saragossa.
175
B I B R I N G , E D W A R D (1894 –1959)
Ruiz-Castillo Basala, José. (1972). El Apasionante mundo del
libro. Memorias de un editor. Madrid: Ediciones de la
Revista de Occidente.
Vezzetti, Hugo. (1911). Freud en langue espagnole. Revue
internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse, 4, 189–207.
His obsessive character pushed him to undertake such
exhaustive research in the literature that it blocked his
own analytic output . . . that is why his literary legacy is
so limited compared to his knowledge and the richness
of his thought’’ (Sterba, R., 1982).
Villarreal, Inga. (1992). Spanish Translations of Freud.
Translating Freud. New Haven/London: Yale University
Press.
BIBRING, EDWARD (1894–1959)
A Jewish doctor and psychoanalyst, Edward Bibring
was born April 20, 1894, in Stanislau, in Galicia, and
died in Boston on January 11, 1959. He obtained the
equivalent of his B.A. in Czernowitz and went on to
study history and philosophy. After his military service
during the First World War, during which he was a
prisoner in Russia, he studied medicine in Vienna. His
interest in psychoanalysis was stirred by the Vienna
Seminar on Sexology, created in 1919 by Otto Fenichel
for medical students. It was here that Bibring met his
future wife, Grete Lehner.
In 1922, Bibring obtained his diploma in medicine
at the University of Vienna and the same year was
accepted for training by the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society. He underwent analysis with Paul Federn, and
in 1925 became an associate member and in 1927 a full
member of the society. He served in a number of positions: treasurer from 1928 to 1938, successor to Paul
Schilder as head of the psychosis section in 1929 at the
psychoanalytic clinic, and replaced Eduard Hitschmann as director of the clinic in 1932. After 1934,
Bibring was a teaching analyst and supervisor in
Vienna, secretary of the education committee for the
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and a co-editor of the
Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse.
In May 1938, following the Anschluss and the rise
of National Socialism in Austria, Bibring and his wife
Grete emigrated to Great Britain. There he became a
member and teaching analyst of the British PsychoAnalytical Society and was one of the editors of the
Gesammelte Werke Sigmund Freuds. In February 1941,
following an invitation from Tufts Medical College to
teach, he and his wife left for Boston. He became a
member and training analyst of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and was its President from 1947 to 1949.
He practiced psychiatry at Beth Israel Hospital.
In his memoirs, Richard Sterba wrote of Bibring
that ‘‘He had difficulties expressing himself in writing.
17 6
ELKE MÜHLLEITNER
See also: Altruism; Lehrinstitut der Wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung; Therapeutic alliance; Working-off
mechanisms; Wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung.
Bibliography
Bibring, Edward. (1936). Zur entwicklung und problematik
der triebtheorie. Imago, 22, 147–176.
———. (1950). Considerations in the establishment of
training facilities. Bulletin of the American Psychoanalytical
Association, 6, 36–40.
———. (1954). Psychoanalysis and dynamic psychotherapies. Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association,
2, 745–770.
Mühlleitner, E. (1992). Biographisches lexikon der psychoanalyse (die mitglieder der psychologischen MittwochGesellschaft und der Wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung
1902–1938). Tübingen: Diskord.
Sterba, R. (1982). Reminiscences of a Viennese psychoanalyst.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
BIBRING-LEHNER, GRETE (1899–1977)
A doctor and psychoanalyst, Grete Bibring-Lehner was
born in Vienna on January 11, 1899, and died August
10, 1977, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was the
daughter of Viennese Jewish parents, business people
and members of the Jewish intellectual bourgeoisie.
She attended a girlsÕ school where she studied the
humanities, including psychology, which led to her
discovery of Freud. She began her studies at the
department of medicine of the University of Vienna in
1918 and participated in the 1919 working group
formed by Otto Fenichel to study sexuality and psychoanalysis, the Vienna Seminar on Sexology. Among
the students in this seminar were several future analysts, including Wilhelm Reich and Edward Bibring,
whom she married in 1921.
Through her participation in the seminar, BibringLehner was able to attend meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Upon completing her medical
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studies in 1924, she went on to specialize in neurology
and psychiatry. She became a member of the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society in 1925. She completed her
personal analysis with Hermann Nunberg while she
was finishing her medical studies. She was one of the
first students of the Vienna Training Institute, founded
in 1925. Bibring-Lehner worked at the psychoanalytic
clinic, gave presentations on the technique of therapy,
and, after 1934, was a member of the education committee of the Vienna Association. Her first work on
psychoanalysis, ‘‘The Phallic Phase and its Disturbances in Young Girls,’’ was published in 1933 in the
Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Pädagogik.
After the Germans entered Austria, she migrated
with her family in May 1938 to Great Britain and
became a member of the British Psycho-Analytical
Society. In 1941 the family left for the United States,
where Bibring-Lehner became a member and training
analyst with the Boston Psychoanalytic Society. She
taught psychoanalytic psychology at Simmons College
School of Social Work in Boston. In 1946 she joined
the administrative staff of the psychiatric division of
Beth Israel Hospital. She was named professor of
psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in 1961.
She received a number of professional and academic distinctions. In 1955 she was elected president
of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society. From 1959 to
1963 she was vice president of the International Psychoanalytic Association and, in 1962, became president. In 1968 The Teaching of Dynamic Psychiatry was
published, of which she was the general editor. Her
research on pregnancy and mother-child relationships
provided an important contribution to womenÕs
psychology.
ELKE MÜHLLEITNER
See also: Lehrinstitut der Wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung; Parenthood; Wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung.
Bibliography
Bibring-Lehner, Grete. (1933). ‘‘Über die phallische Phase
und ihre Störungen beim Mädchen.’’ Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Pädagogik , 7, 145–152.
———. (1968) ‘‘Teaching of dynamic psychiatry. A reappraisal of the goals and techniques.’’ In The teaching of psychoanalytic psychiatry. New York: International University
Press.
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Mühlleitner, Elke. (1992). Biographisches lexikon der psychoanalyse (die mitglieder der psychologischen MittwochGesellschaft und der Wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung
1902–1938). Tübingen: Diskord.
Sterba, Richard. (1982). Reminiscences of a Viennese psychoanalyst. Detroit: Wayne University Press.
BICK, ESTHER (1901–1983)
Esther Bick, a physician and psychoanalyst, was born
of orthodox Jewish parents in 1901 near Kraków,
Poland, and died on July 20, 1983, in London. Her
maiden name remains unknown. Her friends referred
to her as Nusia. Unable to study medicine in Poland
because of the many restrictions on Jews, she moved to
Vienna, where she worked with Charlotte Buhler on
the experimental observation of young twins. It was
during this period of her training that the foundations
were established for her later work in psychoanalysis.
Having refined a methodology for the objective observation of infants (time studies, quantitative descriptive
analysis), she continued to formalize a new method of
observation that was able to take into account the subjective and emotional environment of the child,
together with the experience of the observer.
Her marriage is difficult to date precisely and
appears to have been short-lived. Following GermanyÕs
annexation of Austria on March 12, 1938, Esther Bick
reached London, where she became a student of Melanie Klein. Martha Harris indicates in the obituary she
wrote for BickÕs death that her brother and the rest of
her family died in concentration camps and that only
one of her nieces escaped the holocaust. This niece
later moved to Israel, although Bick did not learn of
this until the 1950s.
During the Second World War, Bick worked in a
nursery in Manchester, where she began an analysis
with Michael Balint. She completed her analytic studies in London, while working at a child guidance
clinic in Middlesex with Portia Holman. In 1949 she
joined the Tavistock Clinic, where John Bowlby asked
her to provide a training course for future analysts.
There she developed her method of infant observation,
which encouraged observers to watch and listen to
infants during their early development and focused on
in-depth analysis of the capacity for attention and psychic transformation. It was also during this period that
she began a second analysis with Melanie Klein.
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B I G R A S , J U L I E N J O S E P H N O R M A N D (1 932 –19 89)
Esther Bick wrote little, but what she did write was
influential and is intentionally situated within what
has customarily been referred to as the post-Kleinian
movement. She noted the importance of the skin
during infant relations (this opened the way to an
entire field of research on the establishment of psychic
envelopes and, in France, to the work of Didier
Anzieu on the skin ego). She was also interested in
the observation of infants from a psychoanalytic perspective. BickÕs methodology for infant observation
has been integrated into the training of child analysts,
and even of some adult analysts, in several countries
(Great Britain, Belgium, Italy). In France, the issue is
more controversial, especially regarding the status of
observed material compared with conventional analytic material. Some applications of her method have
been developed not only for training but also for therapeutic purposes.
In any case, the rigor of BickÕs methodology,
together with her sense of ethical conduct, have had a
profound influence on child psychologists since the
1970s. Her work has drawn their attention (along with
that of some adult psychologists as well) to the more
archaic levels of functioning and the earliest stages of
mental development in the infant. In France, BickÕs
ideas have been taken up by authors like Geneviève
Haag and Didier Houzel, who trained with Bick.
BickÕs two great passions throughout her life were
psychoanalysis and Israel, and she placed her hopes in
both of them. Bick ceased clinical practice in 1980.
BERNARD GOLSE
See also: Adhesive identification; Body image; Infantile
psychosis; Infant observation; Infant observation (therapeutic); Object; Psychic envelope; Skin.
Bibliography
Bick, Esther. (1964). Notes on infant observation in psychoanalytic training. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,
45, 558–566.
———. (1968). The experience of the skin in early object
relations. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 49, 558–
566.
Haag, Michel, and Haag, Geneviève. (1995). LÕobservation
des nourrissons selon Esther Bick (1901–1983) et ses applications. Information psychiatrique, 1, 7–17.
17 8
Harris, Martha. (1983). Esther Bick, 1901–1983. Journal of
Child Psychotherapy, 9, 101–102.
Harris, Martha, and Bick, Esther. (1987). Collected papers of
Martha Harris and Esther Bick. Perthshire, U.K.: Clunie
Press for Roland Harris Education Trust.
BIGRAS, JULIEN JOSEPH NORMAND
(1932–1989)
A Canadian psychiatrist and training analyst, Julien
Bigras was born February 12, 1932, in Laval, Quebec,
and died May 10, 1989, in Montreal. He spent his
childhood at the family farm and studied medicine
and psychiatry at the University of Montreal; he completed his psychoanalytic training at the Paris Psychoanalytic Institute.
A member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society
(1963) and the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society
(1954), and a training analyst, he maintained a psychoanalytic practice, directed a seminar, published the
review Interprétation (Montreal) and two collections
of books in Paris and Montreal, and collaborated on
Études Freudiennes (Denoël, Paris) and Patio (Paris).
He also ran a seminar at McGill University (1983–
1989) and participated in the Clinical Lacanian Forum
in the United States.
He published ninety-one articles, twenty-six chapters in anthologies, and eleven works of fiction including LÕEnfant dans le grenier (1977), Le Psychanalyste nu
(1979), Kati of course (1980), Ma Vie, ma folie (1983),
and La Folie en face (1986).
He was a great admirer of Donald Woods Winnicott, Harold Searles, and Sándor Ferenczi because of
their lack of dogmatism and their clinical freedom of
expression during transference. Madness, incest, the
therapeutic use of stories, and transference and violence associated with the psychoanalyst were common
themes throughout his work. BigrasÕs research led him
to ask two fundamental questions: 1) Is violence necessary for access to the unconscious, does it provide the
only opportunity for the analysand and for the psychoanalyst/analysand to rediscover or recreate a new
and singular maternal language, a primal language, the
only one that can produce the fecundity of being? 2) Is
the violence of the psychoanalyst (the unanalyzed in
all of us) an expression of the otherÕs desperate cry to
be heard, a limiting transference situation in which the
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one who is best able to hear this cry would be his own
patient? Can writing or any other form of creative art
provide confirmation, and pick up the thread where
the analysand or the analyst left off?
ÉLISABETH BIGRAS
See also: Canada; Études Freudiennes; Interprétation; Société psychanalytique de Montréal (Psychoanalytic Society
of Montreal).
Bibliography
Bigras, Julien. (1977). LÕenfant dans le grenier. Paris:
Hachette.
———. (1979). La folie en face. Paris: Robert Laffont.
———. (1979). Le psychanalyste nu. Paris: Robert Laffont.
———. (1980). Kati of course. Paris: Mazarine.
———. (1983). Ma vie, ma folie. Paris-Montréal: MazarineBoréal Express.
BINDING/UNBINDING OF THE INSTINCTS
Binding is the mechanism whereby the free-flowing
energy of the primary processes becomes attached to
ideas, thus giving instinct a representative within the
psychic agencies. In this way, instinctual excitation
seeking an object is gradually tamed by the ego, and
ideas are linked to one another and then maintained
in a relatively stable state. This mode of functioning,
characteristic of the secondary processes, enables the
work of thinking to take place. Unbinding, on the
other hand, is the abrupt retransformation of bound
energy into free energy seeking discharge. Binding and
unbinding are thus two essential economic aspects of
the work of the psyche.
Freud first used the notion of binding in October
1895, in ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’’ (1950c),
proposing ‘‘the hypothesis of what is, as it were, a
bound state in the neurone, which, though there is a
high cathexis, permits only a small current,’’ and asserting that ‘‘the ego itself is a mass like this of neurones
which hold fast to their cathexis—are, that is, in a
bound state’’ (p. 368). At this time, on his way to discovering the unconscious, Freud was seeking to understand the surging up of elements that did not belong
to the egoÕs thought processes: ‘‘If a passage of thought
comes up against a still untamed mnemic image of this
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INSTINCTS
kind, then its indications of quality, often of a sensory
kind, are generated, with a feeling of unpleasure and
an inclination to discharge, the combination of which
characterizes a particular affect, and the passage of
thought is interrupted.. . . What is it, then, that happens to memories capable of affect till they are tamed?
. . . Particularly large and repeated binding from the
ego is required before this facilitation to unpleasure
can be counterbalanced’’ (pp. 380–381).
At the dawn of psychoanalysis, Freud was seeking to
explain how the energy of the primary process could
be held in check and yet at the same time continue to
procure pleasure and be used in the construction of
the ego. In ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology,’’ the
notion of binding was given its full place, since it helps
establish a level of relative constancy in the ego. By
contrast, instinctual excitation, when it is too strong,
threatens the ego with unbinding.
Freud made a brief comment in ‘‘Formulations on
the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’’ (1911b):
‘‘Thinking was endowed with characteristics which
made it possible for the mental apparatus to tolerate
an increase of stimulus while the process of discharge
was postponed. It is essentially an experimental kind
of acting, accompanied by displacement of relatively
small quantities of cathexis together with less expenditure (discharge) of them’’ (p. 221). Later in ‘‘Instincts
and Their Vicissitudes’’ (1915c), Freud emphasized, ‘‘A
particularly close attachment of the instinct to its
object is distinguished by the term ÔfixationÕ ’’ (p. 123).
In ‘‘The Unconscious’’ (1915e) he emphasized the
opposition between ‘‘two different states of cathectic
energy in mental life: one in which the energy is tonically ÔboundÕ and the other in which it is freely mobile
and presses towards discharge’’ (p. 188).
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), in
revamping his earlier instinctual dualism, Freud took
traumatic neurosis as one of several bases for the new
opposition between the life and death instincts. In this
context, ‘‘it would be the task of the higher strata of
the mental apparatus to bind the instinctual excitation
reaching the primary process. A failure to effect this
binding would provoke a disturbance analogous to a
traumatic neurosis; and only after the binding has
been accomplished would it be possible for the dominance of the pleasure principle (and of its modification, the reality principle) to proceed unhindered’’
(pp. 34–35).
179
B I N S W A N G E R , L U D W I G (1881 –1 966)
In his paper ‘‘Negation’’ (1925h), Freud added a
new element: ‘‘The general wish to negate, the
negativism which is displayed by some psychotics, is
probably to be regarded as a sign of a defusion of
instincts that has taken place through a withdrawal of
libidinal components’’ (p. 239).
Finally, in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940a
[1938]), Freud condensed his ideas by making binding
and unbinding the two essential features of his theory
of the instincts: ‘‘[We] have decided to assume the
existence of only two basic instincts, Eros and the
destructive instinct. . . . The aim of the first of these
basic instincts is to establish ever greater unities and to
preserve them thus—in short, to bind together; the
aim of the second is, on the contrary, to undo connections and so to destroy things’’ (p. 148).
Although the fundamental idea of binding and
unbinding underwent gradual clarification as FreudÕs
research advanced, it gained a new coherence with his
last theory of the instincts. In particular, it now shed
light on fixation as a reponse to excess binding after an
unbinding that flooded the psychic apparatus. One
problem remained unsolved, however, namely the differences, in economic terms, between unbinding and
failure of binding. Unbinding resulted from an active
process that Freud plainly related to Thanatos (the
death instinct), whereas the failure of binding seemed
to be more passive, perhaps a result of a limit on available libidinal energy.
Lastly, free association seems to be based on more
or less effective instances of the binding and unbinding
of ideas among themselves and of ideas and effects.
Such binding and unbinding in turn determine the
nature of the transference.
PIERRE DELION
See also: Fusion/defusion.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1911b). Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning. SE, 12: 213–226.
———. (1915c). Instincts and their vicissitudes. SE, 14:
109–140.
———. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159–204.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1–64.
———. (1925h). Negation. SE, 19: 235–239.
18 0
———. (1940a [1938]). An outline of psycho-analyses. SE,
23: 144–207.
———. (1950c [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology.
SE, 1: 281–387.
BINSWANGER, LUDWIG (1881–1966)
Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss psychiatrist, was born on
April 5, 1881, in Kreuzlingen, Thurgau, Switzerland,
where he died on February 7, 1966. In Kreuzlingen he
was director of clinical psychiatry at Bellevue Sanatorium, an internationally renowned institution founded
by his grandfather. Binswanger took over responsibilities in 1910 from his father, passing them on to his
own son in 1956.
He spent his school years in Constance, Germany,
and studied medicine in Lausanne, Heidelberg, and
Zurich. In 1906 he obtained the position of assistant
at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich, directed by Eugen Bleuler. In 1907 he defended his doctoral dissertation on association tests before Carl
Gustav Jung.
Binswanger devoted his life to psychiatry and the
search for new therapeutic treatments. His father had
introduced a revolutionary method for running the
clinic, according to which the ‘‘doctorÕs family will also
assist in treating the patient.’’ The entire institution
became, in effect, an extended family presided over by
a patriarch. Ludwig Binswanger was raised in a world
where ‘‘the fatherÕs teachings were the absolute law.’’
He developed an interest in psychoanalysis at the
Burghölzli Clinic, where the medical staff included
some of the leading psychoanalysts of the time (Karl
Abraham, Max Eitingon, Franz Riklin, and Hermann
Nunberg). Jung was the director. In 1907 he met with
Freud (‘‘his most important human experience’’) in
the company of Jung. This led to other meetings and a
thirty-year friendship, as shown by their lengthy correspondence. Although Freud had difficulties, recognized by Freud himself, in maintaining friendships
with people who did not share his ideas, and although
they had different attitudes toward fundamental
aspects of psychoanalysis and its potential uses, they
enjoyed an extended friendship. This friendship was
based on an understanding of mutual expectations:
Freud hoped to break down the wall separating official
psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and Binswanger sought
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to fight for the acceptance of a new theory under
FreudÕs paternal control.
Binswanger wrote nearly a hundred articles and
books. He wrote reports of analyses (‘‘Versuch einer Hysterie Analyse,’’ 1909; ‘‘Analyse einer Hysterischen Phobie,’’
1911) and methodological criticisms of psychoanalysis
like Die drei Grundelemente des wissenschaftlichen
Denkens bei Freud (The three fundamental elements of
FreudÕs scientific ideas; 1921). In Grundformen und
Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins (Fundamental forms
and the recognition of human being-in-the-world;
1953), Binswanger attempted to define existential
analysis as an empirical science involving an anthropological approach to the individual essence of being
human.
Over the years BinswangerÕs contributions to psychoanalysis were marked by an increasing reserve, as
shown in his introduction of psychoanalytic therapy
as an element of institutional care. In 1907 his uncle,
Otto Binswanger, a professor of psychiatry in Jena,
presented him with a hysterical patient, Irma, for analysis, which he undertook on the basis of his reading
alone. He treated a number of other patients who
required institutional care, including some of FreudÕs
patients. His beginnerÕs enthusiasm was soon subject
to setbacks as a result of his lack of rigor. He concluded, ‘‘Ten years of effort and disappointment have
been the price to pay to be able to recognize that only a
select number of our institutional patients can benefit
from analysis.’’
Binswanger began to subject psychoanalysis to a
methodological and critical analysis. He began by
attacking the methodology of general psychology and
then attempted an epistemological criticism of psychoanalysis itself. He made use of Edmund HusserlÕs
phenomenology and the hermeneutics of Wilhelm
Dilthey and Friedrich Schleiermacher. For him, the
link between FreudÕs scientific method and clinical
psychiatry is a shared reduction of human existence to
a schema or system. In his new approach, human existence is necessarily human, and the task for existential
analysis is to describe the fundamental orientations of
that existence.
After Martin HeideggerÕs Being and Time, Binswanger underwent a second transition from phenomenology to phenomenological ontology and switched from
a methodological approach to an anthropological approach. For Heidegger, Daseinanalytik (existential
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analysis of being in the world) consists in describing
the structure of human existence as such. BinswangerÕs
Daseinanalyse attempted to contrast the natural
sciences, which treat the human being as a ‘‘system of
organic functions,’’ with a phenomenological methodology that attempted to explore humanityÕs
subjective existence in its totality and that looked at
the individual as a being present in the world, a being
responsible for its own existence from within. To
help the patient, the therapist engages with the
patientÕs primal world and how the patient is present
in the world. Mental illnesses are ‘‘modifications of the
fundamental structure and structural bonds of the
being-in-the-world as transcendence.’’ Therapy does
not consist in ‘‘an attempt, starting with the ego,
to enable the organism to connect with another
through language, but makes language itself its starting
point.’’
Daseinanalyse, as practiced by Binswanger, Medard
Boss, Henri F. Ellenberger, and Rollo May, maintained
a distance from the theory and practice of Freudians.
Freud himself acknowledged, ‘‘We are unable to establish a dialogue between us.’’
RUTH MENAHEM
See also: Hirschfeld, Elfriede; Phenomenology and psychoanalysis; Psychoanalytic epistemology; Schizophrenia; Switzerland (German-speaking).
Bibliography
Binswanger, Ludwig. (1920). Psycho-analysis and clinical
psychiatry. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 1 (3),
357.
———. (1953). Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen
Daseins (2nd ed.). Zurich, Switzerland: Niehans.
———. (1957). Sigmund Freud: Reminiscences of a friendship (Norbert Guterman, Trans.). New York: Grune &
Stratton. (Original work published 1955)
———. (1971). Introduction à l Õanalyse existentielle (Jacqueline Verdeaux and Roland Kuhn, Trans.). Paris: Minuit.
Fédida, Pierre. (1986). Le contre-transfert en question. Psychanalyse à l ÕUniversité, 11 (41), 19–30.
Freud, Sigmund, and Binswanger, Ludwig. (1992 [1908–
1938]). The Freud-Binswanger Correspondence, 1908–1938
(Arnold J. Pomerans, Trans.). New York: Other Press,
2003.
181
BIOLOGICAL BEDROCK
Lantéri-Laura, Georges. (1963). La psychiatrie phénoménologique: Fondements philosophiques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
BIOLOGICAL BEDROCK
In the last paragraph of ‘‘Analysis Terminable and
Interminable’’ (1937c), Freud wrote: ‘‘We often have
the impression that with the wish for a penis and
the masculine protest we have penetrated through all
the psychological strata and have reached bedrock
[gewachsener Fels: ‘‘the living rock’’], and that thus our
activities are at an end. This is probably true, since, for
the psychical field, the biological field does in fact play
the part of the underlying bedrock’’ (p. 252).
As a limit imposed upon psychoanalytical treatment, which is brought to a halt by its inaccessibility
to psychic working over, the biological level played a
complicated and ever-present motor role in FreudÕs
work. By 1894 he had already introduced three important notions related to this frontier: libido, or psychical
sexual energy transmuted from somatic energy; conversion, or the hysterical mechanism of transformation
of psychic libidinal energy into somatic innervation;
and the sexual instinct, the earliest attempt to conceptualize such ‘‘phase shifts’’—whether continuous or
sporadic—between the body and the mind.
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d),
what Freud called ‘‘that part of the theory . . . which
lies on the frontier of biology’’ (p. 133)—the theory of
the instincts—created the dynamic frame of reference
in which psychic morphogenesis could be grafted onto
the underlying biology of onto- and phylogenesis. And
in his preface to the third edition (1914) of the Three
Essays, Freud added: ‘‘I must, however, emphasize that
the present work is characterized not only by being
completely based upon psycho-analytic research, but
also by being deliberately independent of the findings
of biology. . . . Indeed, my aim has rather been to discover how far psychological investigation can throw
light upon the biology of the sexual life of man. . . .
there was no need for me to be diverted from my
course if the psycho-analytic method led in a number
of important respects to opinions and findings which
differed largely from those based on biological considerations’’ (p. 131). Both the interdependence and the
relative autonomy between the mental and the biological were thus affirmed.
18 2
In fact Freud drew attention to infantile sexual
activity before its organic correlates were discovered—
the word hormone came into use in 1905. He specified
the two developmental biological traits responsible
for the singular ubiquity of sexuality in human mental
life, namely prematurity and the latency period. Freud
inferred that humans were descended from a species
that reached sexual maturity at the age of about
five; this conclusion, which is confirmed by current
paleo-anthropology, relates the Oedipus complex
to the ‘‘bedrock’’ of the biological development of
the species.
Another point of contact between the mental and
the biological lay in mnemic phenomena, in memory
traces and their transmission. As Freud wrote in The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), ‘‘Dreams and neuroses seem to have preserved more mental antiquities
than we could have imagined possible; so that psychoanalysis may claim a high place among the sciences
which are concerned with the reconstruction of the
earliest and most obscure periods of the beginnings of
the human race’’ (p. 549). The life and death instincts,
another interface with the ‘‘bedrock,’’ were the basis of
a hypothetical biology centered on the diversity of the
stabilizing mechanisms of living beings—on their ability to internalize external factors and to regularize and
convey them on the biological and the mental levels
simultaneously. In short, Freud was proposing a kind
of Lamarckianism revisited whose necessity would one
day be acknowledged by official science: ‘‘For incalculable ages mankind has been passing through a process
of evolution of culture,’’ he wrote to Albert Einstein,
which ‘‘is undoubtedly accompanied by physical
alterations; but we are still unfamiliar with the notion
that the evolution of civilization is an organic process
of this kind’’ (1933b [1932], p. 214).
Penis envy and castration fears were paradigmatic
of the complicated, intrinsic causal relationship
between the mental and the biological. The unique
narcissism of human beings, along with the ideal individual and collective forms to which it gave rise, was
likewise, by virtue of prematurity, closely bound up
with biology.
The transition between soma and psyche lies at the
core of FreudÕs work. His theory of the instincts is the
conceptual instrument that makes it possible to examine this zone without falling prey to neurophysiological reductionism or to the dichotomies of idealism.
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B I O N , W I L F R E D R U P R E C H T (1897 –1 979)
This set of problems has often been avoided since
Freud. It may not be strictly necessary to confront it as
a practical matter in treating neuroses, but it is surely
essential to do so if we wish fully to understand the
dynamics of mental functioning. There are many ways,
however, to evade the issue, and to maintain the
ancient split between soma and psyche: neglecting or
rejecting the theory of the instincts (like the British
school); confining that theory to an exclusively clinical
realm (Melanie Klein), or to an exclusively structural
one that ignores the economic dimension (Jacques
Lacan); or suppressing FreudÕs biological work on fantasies (Gantheret). The diametrically opposite approach,
a neopositivist reading of FreudÕs work as a ‘‘biogenetic fable’’ (Sulloway), has the same result. On the
other hand, some biologists with a more nuanced epistemology (Jean-Didier Vincent, Alain Prochiantz)
have been reassessing the dynamic point of view in
their discipline in a way that restores its relevance to
the Freudian position, which a certain number of psychoanalysts (such as those concerned with the earliest
mother-child bonds and with psychosomatic illnesses)
have never abandoned.
MICHÈLE PORTE
See also: ‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’; Castration complex; Femininity; Penis envy; Phylogenesis; Real
trauma; Termination of treatment.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4–5.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
———. (1933b [1932]). Why War? (Einstein and Freud).
SE, 22: 195–215.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 209–253.
Gantheret, François. (1975). Quelques éléments de recherche
sur la place du biologique dans la théorie psychanalytique.
Psychanalyse à l ÕUniversité, 1 (December 1), 97–104.
Sulloway, Frank J. (1979). Freud, biologist of the mind. New
York: Basic.
Further Reading
Silverstein, Barry. (1985). Freud’s psychology and its organic
foundation: Sexuality and mind-body interactionism. Psychoanalytic Review, 72, 199–228; 203–228.
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BION, WILFRED RUPRECHT (1897–1979)
Wilfred Ruprecht Bion was born at Mattra (United
Provinces, India) on September 8, 1897, and died in
Oxford (Great Britain) on November 8, 1979.
The first eight years of BionÕs life were spent in
India, where his father was a civil engineer. In 1905
Bion was sent to school in England, where he remained
for ten years before taking up military service. While
he read history at QueenÕs College, Oxford, (1919–
1921) he became curious about FreudÕs writings and
later furthered his interest in psychology by reading
medicine at University College Hospital, London
(1924–1930), where he won the Gold Medal for Surgery and the Silver Medal for Diagnostics. He entered
analysis with John Rickman in 1938, being forced to
terminate by the outbreak of World War II. During the
war, as a military psychiatrist, he initiated a new
approach to group therapy. He entered analysis with
Melanie Klein in 1945, and qualified as an associate
member of the British Psychoanalytical Society in
1950.
Bion came from a Protestant missionary family,
Swiss Calvinist of Huguenot origin on his fatherÕs side
and Anglo-Indian on his motherÕs. This religious
background, combined with the fact that the family
was isolated from other Europeans for extended periods, meant that the small boy was in close contact with
two very different cultures. Experiences of contrast
and opposition, but also of mediation and love
between two worlds formed a background to, and a
basis for, BionÕs later theories regarding what it may
mean for an individual to be both a member of his
group and in contrast or opposition to it at the same
time.
This experience was reinforced by the carnage of
World War I: he joined the Royal Tank Regiment
(1916–1918) where he was awarded the Distinguished
Service Order, the Legion dÕHonneur (chevalier) and
was mentioned in dispatches. Although distant from
psychoanalysis, these experiences nurtured his understanding of terror, awe, dependence, love, hatred, and
hatred of understanding and knowledge; this latter
helped in his deep contact with psychotic patients.
He held several appointments in public positions:
Secretary (1933–1939) and then Chairman (1946) of
the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society
(BPS); Chairman of the Executive Committee, Tavistock Clinic, London (1945); Director of the London
183
BIPOLAR SELF
Clinic of Psychoanalysis (1956–1962) and President of
the British Psychoanalytical Society (1962–1965). He
continued as an active member of the Executive of the
BPS, and as Chairman of The Melanie Klein Trust,
until he left for California in January 1968. He taught a
great deal in Latin America during the last decade of
his life before his return to England in 1979 a few
months before his death. In 1978 he became an honorary member of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society
and in 1979 an Honorary Fellow of the A. K. Rice
Institute.
city; Preconception; Protothoughts; Psychotic panic; Psychotic part of the personality; Realization; Relations
(commensalism, symbiosis, parasitism); Selected fact;
Thought-thinking apparatus; Transformations; Vertex.
BionÕs main contributions to psychoanalysis belong
to the fields of psychoanalytical technique and epistemology, with particular reference to the process of
thinking. He approached this latter subject from different viewpoints (vertices): that of the group; of the
psychotic, schizophrenic or borderline patient; and
that of the individual thinker, ‘‘genius’’ or not, who has
to deal with the pressure of attacks, from within and
without, due to hostility towards both the thinking
process and the resulting thoughts. The principal
concepts he developed are those of ‘‘reverie based on
free–floating attention’’, ‘‘alpha-function,’’ which Bion
himself felt could replace the Freudian theory of primary
and secondary processes, alpha- and beta-elements, container and contained, and ‘‘reversed perspective.’’ His
writing is commonly considered challenging, particularly the trilogy A Memoir of the Future (1975, 1977,
1979/1991). His other most important publications
are Experiences in Groups (1961), Four Servants (1977)
and Attention and Interpretation (1970).
Bibliography
BionÕs influence in the field of group psychotherapy
and the development of more or less closely related
group techniques was both very rapid and widespread.
In the field of psychoanalysis, despite the fact that his
thinking is firmly rooted in that of Freud and Klein,
his innovative ideas and theories engendered a great
deal of controversy, and were hardly accepted until the
1970s.
PARTHENOPE BION TALAMO
Work discussed: Learning from Experience.
Notions developed: Alpha function; Arrogance; Attention;
Basic assumption; Beta-elements; Beta-screen; Bizarre
object; Catastrophic change; Concept; Contact-barrier;
Container-Contained; Dream-like memory; Grid; Group
phenomenon; Hallucinosis; Invariant; Linking, attacks
on; Love-Hate-Knowledge (L/H/K links); Maternal reverie, capacity for; Memoirs of the future; Negative capa18 4
See also: Autobiography; Birth; Emotion; Fusion/defusion;
Great Britain; Group analysis; Group psychotherapies;
Infant development; Internal object; Infans; Negative,
work of the; Non-verbal communication; Primary object;
Primal, the; Protective shield; Reverie; Second World War:
The effect on the development of psychoanalysis; Selfanalysis; Splitting; Symbolic equation; Tavistock Clinic.
Bion, Wilfred R. (1961). Experiences in groups. London:
Tavistock Publications.
———. (1962). Learning from experience. London: Heinemann; New York: Basic Books.
———. (1963). Elements of psycho-analysis. London:
Heinemann.
———. (1965). Transformations: Change from learning to
growth. London: Heinemann.
———. (1967). Second thoughts. London: Heinemann.
———. (1970). Attention and interpretation. London:
Tavistock Publications.
———. (1991). A memoir of the future, Vol. I, the dream.
London: Karnak Books.
———. (1991). A memoir of the future, Vol. II, The past presented. London: Karnak Books.
———. (1991). A memoir of the future, Vol. III, The dawn of
oblivion. London: Karnak Books.
Grinberg, León, Sor, Dario, Tabak de Bianchedi, Elizabeth.
(1977). Introduction to the work of Bion: Groups, knowledge,
psychosis, thought, transformations, psychoanalytic practice.
(Alberto Hahn, Trans.). New York: Jason Aronson.
———. (1993). New introduction to the work of Bion. Northvale, NJ; London: Jason Aronson.
Grotstein, James S. (1981). Do I dare disturb the universe?.
Beverly Hills, CA: Caesura Press.
Pines, Malcolm, (Ed.). (1985). Bion and group psychotherapy.
London: Routledge.
BIPOLAR SELF
The bipolar self is made up of two components: the
grandiose self, that of mirroring or ambitions; and the
idealized parental imago, that of both idealization and
ideals. The two poles are linked together by a tension
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BIRTH, DREAM
arc, the alter ego. First appearing in Heinz KohutÕs The
Restoration of the Self (1977), the bipolar self was the
hallmark of a new metapsychology: generalized self
psychology.
The two constituent poles of the self are formed in
response to the degree of the receptivity of caregivers
to the subjectÕs narcissistic needs. The grandiose self
acquires its strength through the responses of the self
objects to mirroring needs, and the idealized parental
imago by means of responses that enable fusion.
Together both sectors are a source of strength to the
self. Each pole is a possibility, a potential for the self.
One pole can compensate for the other, and the self
will be fragile only if both poles have been thwarted.
When its earliest needs have not been responded to,
the infant turns to a less rejecting source. In such a
case, it is this second source that will be activated and
worked through in the transference, leaving the earliest
traumas in the dark. Anything that has been resolved
or surmounted will not be examined in analysis. Developments that are no longer the result of conflict are
seen as a natural process if narcissism is taken to be a
given.
OF
Psychoanalysis (1916-17a [1915–17]), in which he
speaks of the ‘‘separation’’(SE, 15: 397) of birth.
This is the theme that Wilfred Bion developed in
Caesura (1975) when he made birth the paradigm for
all psychic discontinuity, which means that experiences lived through before the caesura must be capable
of being retranscribed in a psychically assimilable form
after the caesura. Taking a more genetic point of view,
other authors have applied the term ‘‘psychic birth’’ to
the moment when children become conscious of their
individuation and the separation between them and
their libidinal objects (Mahler, Margaret, 1975; Tustin,
Frances, 1981).
DIDIER HOUZEL
See also: Constitution; Dream symbolism; Infant development; Infant observation; Infant observation (therapeutic); Infantile psychosis; Intergenerational; Maternal;
Memoirs of the future; Myth of the Birth of the Hero, The;
Narcissistic elation; Parenthood; Postnatal/postpartum
depression; Premature-Prematurity; Primary love; Reversal into the opposite; Seduction; Sexual theories of children; Social feeling (individual psychology); Trauma of
Birth, The.
AGNÈS OPPENHEIMER
Bibliography
See also: Grandiose self; Idealized parental imago; Kohut,
Heinz; Self psychology.
Bion, Wifred R. (1975). The grid and Caesura. Rio de
Janeiro: Imago.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams.
Part I. SE, 4, 1–338.
Kohut, Heinz. (1977). The restoration of the self. New York:
International Universities Press.
———. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. Part II. SE,
5: 339–625.
———. (1984). How does analysis cure? Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
———. (1916-17a [1915–17]). Introductory lectures on
psycho-analysis. Parts I and II. SE, Part I, 15; Part II, 16.
BIRTH
Mahler, Margaret, Pine, Fred, and Bergman, Anni. (1975).
The psychological birth of the human infant. New York:
Basic Books.
Birth is the prototype for all discontinuities in the relation between a mind and its objects. Otto RankÕs The
Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909) introduced this
theme into psychoanalytic literature.
In the same year Freud took an interest in dreams
of birth in an addendum to The Interpretation of
Dreams (1900a). Birth, as a passage from intra-uterine
life to extra-uterine life became for him ‘‘the first
experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety’’ (SE, 5: 525, note 2). He
returns to this theme in Introductory Lectures on
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Tustin, Frances. (1981). Autistic states in children. London:
Routledge.
BIRTH, DREAM OF
The dream of birth is a dream that depicts, generally in
a transposed way, the birth of the dreamer or, in
women, the act of giving birth.
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud
classed this type of dream among the ‘‘typical dreams,’’
185
BISEXUALITY
but this classification appeared only with his addenda
to later editions. In an addition made in 1909, he
wrote: ‘‘A large number of dreams, often accompanied
by anxiety and having as their content such subjects as
passing through narrow spaces or being in water, are
based upon phantasies of intra-uterine life, of existence in the womb and the act of birth’’ (p. 399). He
also reported, in a note dating from 1909, Carl G.
JungÕs opinion that, in women, dreams of having teeth
pulled signified childbirth (pp. 387–88, note 3). He
cited the dream of a young man ‘‘who, in his imagination, had taken advantage of an intra-uterine
opportunity of watching his parents copulating’’
(pp. 399–400). In subsequent addenda he analyzed the
dream of a young woman which expressed her fear of
(and wish for) the loss of her virginity and the birth of
the baby that would result, as well as several other
dreams with this meaning reported by Otto Rank and
Karl Abraham. In 1919, he added to the 1909 note
cited above Ernest JonesÕs observation that what the
pulled tooth and childbirth had in common was the
meaning of ‘‘separation of a part of the body from the
whole’’ (pp. 387–88, note 3). Accordingly, the dream
of birth can be linked to the theme of castration.
As with most of the other ‘‘typical dreams,’’ there is
hardly any further discussion of this type of dream in
FreudÕs work, and the later literature is limited, despite
the fact that such dreams are often encountered in
clinical work.
ROGER PERRON
See also: Birth; Castration complex; Dream; Myth of the
Birth of the Hero, The.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4–5: 1–625.
BISEXUALITY
The notion of bisexuality—according to which all
human beings simultaneously possess both masculine
and feminine sexual dispositions—was introduced
into psychoanalysis by Freud.
It should be noted that the notion of bisexuality
has always existed, as witness its mention in most
18 6
religions. The idea of a primeval divine couple that
is demonstrated by myths and rituals of human
androgyny, is based on the existence of a supreme
androgynous divine being from whom the couple are
separated (Eliade, 1964).
The idea of bisexuality was already present in philosophical and psychiatric literature at the end of the
1880s, but its importance within the psychoanalytic
movement begins with the influence of Wilhelm Fliess.
In 1901, convinced of the scope of psychical bisexuality,
Freud informed Fliess of a project that unfortunately
did not see the light of day: ‘‘My next book, as far as I
can see, will be called ÔBisexuality in ManÕ’’ (1950a, p.
334).
Freud based his theory on anatomical and embryological data: ‘‘a certain degree of anatomical hermaphroditism occurs normally. In every normal male or
female individual, traces are found of the apparatus of
the opposite sex’’ (1905d, p. 141). This observation
resulted in his conception of an ‘‘originally bisexual
physical disposition [that] has, in the course of evolution, become modified into a unisexual one, leaving
behind only a few traces of the sex that has become
atrophied.’’ But he did not apply this conception to the
psychical domain: ‘‘It is impossible to demonstrate so
close a connection between the hypothetical psychical
hermaphroditism and the established anatomical one’’
(p. 142).
Freud did not give these biological facts the same
scope as did Fliess, who believed that the psychic
mechanism of repression has a biological foundation.
For Freud, it is not the apparent anatomical sex that
represses the opposite sex: ‘‘I am only repeating what I
said then in disagreeing with [FliessÕs] view, when I
decline to sexualize repression in this way—that is, to
explain it on a biological grounds instead of on purely
psychological ones’’ (1937c, p. 251).
Throughout his career, Freud emphasized the
importance of bisexuality in mental phenomena:
‘‘[W]ithout taking bisexuality into account I think it
would scarcely be possible to arrive at an understanding of the sexual manifestations that are actually to be
observed in men and women’’ (1905d, p. 220). Nor
would it be possible to understand the conflicts that
result from it: ‘‘In order to explain why the outcome is
sometimes perversion and sometimes neurosis, I avail
myself of the universal bisexuality of human beings’’
(1950a, p. 179). And it was through the analysis of the
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psychoneuroses that Freud found confirmation of the
‘‘postulated existence of an innate bisexual disposition
in man’’ (1908a, p. 165–166).
Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that there were some
hesitations in his considerations of this question. In
1923, he attributed the difficulty of disentangling the
problem of object choice in the first sexual period to
‘‘the triangular character of the Oedipus situation and
the constitutional bisexuality of each individual’’
(1923b, p. 31). Thus he suggested that bisexuality is
independent of the processes of identification. Next he
argued that identification with the father or mother is
the result of the oedipal situation and is strictly linked
to bisexuality, because the identifications are simultaneously masculine and feminine. However, when he
saw the childÕs ambivalence toward its parents as
deriving from an origin other than identification, he
insisted on the weight of innate bisexual dispositions:
‘‘It may even be that the ambivalence displayed in the
relations to the parents should be attributed entirely to
bisexuality’’ (p. 33). On the one hand, then, the notion
of bisexuality makes it possible to explain, in both
boys and girls, the oedipal identifications with the parent of the opposite sex, thus feeling the Oedipus complex from any form of determinism. But on the other
hand, if bisexuality does not have a biologicalanatomical origin, the question of its origin remains
obscure: Is it a consequence of anatomy? The result of
identifications with both parents? FreudÕs answer,
especially around the time of The Ego and the Id, was
that bisexuality was an intrinsic aspect of sexual differentiation itself.
Be that as it may, the concept is constantly invoked
and continuously used in day-to-day psychoanalysis.
The role played by bisexuality in the different stages
of psychosexual development helps to determine the
various modalities of the subjectÕs attachment to
objects.
It must also be emphasized that even if Freud never
abandoned the notion of psychical bisexuality, he
considered the difficulty in connecting the concept to
the theory of drives as a serious lacuna in psychoanalytic theory. Thus the ‘‘theory of bisexuality is
still surrounded by many obscurities’’ (1930a [1929],
p. 106).
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standing of the ideas of masculinity and femininity.
For as Freud warned us, to give any new content or
attach any mental qualities to the concepts of masculine and feminine only gives way to anatomy or to convention: ‘‘The distinction is not a psychological one’’
(1933a [19320, p. 114). This indicates that as long as a
satisfactory psychoanalytic definition of masculine
and feminine cannot be found, the notion of bisexuality ‘‘embarrasses all our enquiries into the subject and
makes them harder to describe’’ (1940a [1938],
p. 188).
PAULO R. CECARELLI
See also: Aggressiveness/aggressiveness; Dark continent;
Cryptomnesia; Femininity; Femininity, refusal of;
Homosexuality; Masculinity/femininity; Object, choice
of/change of; Pregnancy, fantasy of; Sex and Character;
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Bibliography
Eliade, Mircea. (1963). Patterns in comparative religion.
(Rosemary Sheed, Trans.). New York: World.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1908a). Hysterical phantasies and their relation to
bisexuality. SE, 9: 156–166.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
———. (1930a [1929]). Civilization and its discontents. SE,
21: 57–145.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 209–253.
———. (1940a [1938]). An outline of psycho-analysis. SE,
23: 139–207.
———. (1950a). The origins of psycho-analysis: Letters to
Wilhelm Fliess, drafts and notes: 1887–1902 (Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris, Eds.). London: Imago
Publishing, 1954.
Further Reading
Elise, Diane. (1998). Gender repertoire: body, mind and
bisexuality. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 8, 353–372.
Ferraro, Fausta. (2001). Vicissitudes of bisexuality: crucial
points, clinical implications. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 82, 485–500.
187
BIZARRE OBJECT
Grossman, Gary (reporter). (2001). Contemporary views of
bisexuality in clinical work. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 49, 1361–1378
(eds.). (1952). Developments in psycho-analysis. Hogarth.
Reprinted in The Writings of Melanie Klein, t. III, 1946–
1963. (1975). London: Hogarth, pp. 1–24.
Smith, Henry. (2002). On psychic bisexuality. Psychoanalytic
Quarterly, 71, 549–558.
BJERRE, POUL (1876–1964)
BIZARRE OBJECT
The term bizarre object was coined by Wilfred Bion
(1957) to denote a distinctive kind of object existing in
the world of the psychotic. By violent projection of
unwanted psychic elements, the psychotic personality
constructs its universe of bizarre objects. This world is
different from the world of part objects containing
projections that constitutes the normal world of the
paranoid schizoid position as described by Melanie
Klein (1946).
The psychotic personality uses a form of splitting
and projective identification that is not merely excessive but different, in the aspects of the psyche, especially those ego and superego functions which lead to
awareness of reality, are split off, fragmented, and violently expelled into the external world. In this way a
hostile conglomerate is formed of aspects of objects
with fragments of the psychic apparatus and internal
objects. In ‘‘The Differentiation of the Psychotic from
the Non-psychotic Personalities’’ (1957), Bion gives
examples: ‘‘If the piece of personality is concerned
with sight, the gramophone when played is felt to be
watching the patient; if with hearing, then the gramophone when played is felt to be listening to the patient.
The object, angered by being engulfed, swells up, so to
speak, and suffuses and controls the piece of personality that engulfs it: to that extent the particle of personality has become a thing’’ (p. 51). And he concludes:
‘‘The consequences for the patient are now that he
moves, not in a world of dreams, but in a world of
objects which are ordinarily the furniture of dreams.’’
EDNA O’SHAUGHNESSY
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred. (1957). Differentiation of the psychotic from
the non-psychotic. International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
38, 206–275.
Klein Melanie. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 27, 99–110. Republished in M. Klein, P. Heimann, S. Isaacs, and J. Riviere
18 8
A doctor, writer, sculptor, and psychotherapist, Poul
Bjerre was the first Swede to develop an interest in
Freud and psychoanalysis. He was born in Göteborg
on May 24, 1876, and died in Vårsta on July 15, 1964.
Bjerre was the son of a Danish businessman and spent
his early life in Göteborg, on the west coast of Sweden,
where his father had moved his business. Poul Bjerre
was the oldest child; his younger brother Andreas, an
eminent criminologist, was a professor of criminal law
at the University of Dorpats (Lithuania). He committed suicide in 1925.
In 1905 Bjerre married his sister-in-lawÕs mother.
They had no children. His wife, sixteen years his elder,
had three children from a previous marriage. In 1906 she
fell ill and their marriage remained essentially platonic.
In 1907, after his wifeÕs death and the completion of
his medical studies, Bjerre took over the Stockholm
practice of Otto Wetterstrand, a renowned European
specialist in hypnosis. Although Bjerre never really
abandoned hypnosis, he soon took an interest in psychoanalysis. In December 1910 he traveled to Vienna to
meet Freud but the meeting was disappointing. As he
was to describe later, he perceived Freud as being cold
and distant. His meeting with Alfred Adler was more
fruitful, however, and he always felt closer to Jung and
Adler, without considering himself anyoneÕs protégé.
In 1911 Bjerre introduced psychoanalysis to a meeting of the Order of Swedish Doctors. His presentation,
which was judged too long for publication in the Swedish medical review Hygiea, appeared in Psyke a year
later, together with articles from other researchers in
psychology. However, Bjerre maintained a critical attitude toward psychoanalysis. In 1913 he stated that the
conscious mind was more important than the unconscious and criticized Freud during the international
congress held in Munich. On several subsequent occasions he expressed satisfaction for having distanced
himself early from Freud. At the Munich conference,
however, Freud introduced him to Lou AndreasSalomé, with whom he had a brief but stormy and
passionate affair.
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BLACK HOLE
When Bjerre introduced psychoanalysis to Sweden
in 1924 in an early publication, he included articles
not only by Freud but by Adler, Jung, and Alphonse
Maeder as well. He concluded the book with one of his
own articles in which he explained the evolution of
psychoanalysis based on his own research.
Bjerre wrote throughout his life. He wrote a biography of Nietzsche in 1903 and translated from several
languages. He was interested in the personality of the
celebrated industrial magnate Ivan Kreuger and
studied the influence of HitlerÕs ideas on psychoanalysis. In an article published in 1934 he claimed that the
three fundamental works of psychotherapy were LiebeaultÕs Le Sommeil provoqué, FreudÕs Interpretation of
Dreams, and HitlerÕs Mein Kampf. He had dealings
with Jewish and non-Jewish doctors alike and felt that
the psychoanalytic movement was pro-Semitic in the
same way that Hitler was anti-Semitic. Although he
became interested in German culture at a young age,
he was not a defender of Nazism.
Six years after the foundation of the Finno-Swedish
Psychoanalytic Society in 1940, Poul Bjerre established
a psychotherapeutic organization whose administrative
directors shared a partial rejection of Freudian theories.
Like the other members of the society, Bjerre felt that
Freud laid too much stress on the sexual life of the individual and the role of the unconscious, to the detriment
of the conscious mind. Moreover, Freudian psychoanalysis was too intellectual and placed too much importance on dream analysis instead of appreciating its
curative value and understanding that every individual
naturally harbors so-called psychosynthetic conciliatory
forces. Early in his career he had, for example, believed
that paranoia could be cured by convincing the patient
of its absurdity by means of rational arguments, while
he maintained the conviction that hypnosis was the best
and most effective psychotherapeutic method.
Bjerre never underwent analysis. He could not
understand psychoanalysis as a whole and did not
practice it. However, he played an essential role in the
development of psychoanalysis in Sweden. The majority of Swedish psychoanalysts have, at one time or
another, referred to his introduction to FreudÕs
theories.
PER MAGNUS JOHANSSON
See also: Sweden.
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Bibliography
Bärmark, Jan, and Nilsson, Ingemar. (1983). Poul Bjerre,
‘‘Människosonen.’’ Stockholm: Natur och Kultur.
Johansson, Per M. (1999). Freuds psykoanalys, arvtagare i
Sverige. Göteborg, Sweden: Daı̈dalos.
BLACK HOLE
Frances Tustin introduced the idea of black holes in her
Autistic Barriers in Neurotic Patients (1986). The term
was chosen by analogy with ideas in modern astrophysics, which has discovered zones of extraordinary density in the universe that are probably related to the
condensation and fusion of several stars. Once formed,
such hyperdense zones are thought to exert a sort of
attraction upon other stars, which are thus at risk of
plunging into the core of these vast concentrations of
matter, which swallow them up and strip them of all
individuality. It is not hard to see how the metaphor of
a ‘‘black hole of the psyche’’ can help explain, or at
least help us picture what happens at the core of the
psyche of autistic children.
Indeed Tustin had already elaborated on a notion
first proposed by Sydney Klein (1980), that of ‘‘autistic
islands.’’ And, most significantly, in her first book, Autism and Childhood Psychosis (1972), she had painstakingly recounted the case of John, who had described to
her, on emerging from autism, what he himself called
‘‘the black hole w/ the mechant piquant.’’ What John
was striving to verbalize in this way was all the pain
and suffering he had felt on the occasion of far too
brutal and premature a separation between the breast
and the nipple, this at a time when nipple and mouth
are inextricably conjoined (as described, albeit in a
different way, by Piera Aulagnier, with her ‘‘complementary zone-object’’). Naturally it is less a physical
separation that is involved here than a mental one—or
even, to be quite precise, the inscription in the psyche
of the process of separation.
If, for one reason or another, this process turns out
to be impossible or impeded, the child is liable to feel
as if a part of him- or herself has been cut off.
This traumatic organization of the psyche leaves
its mark in the shape of ‘‘autistic islands’’ which fail
to become integrated into the cycles of deferred
effects and historical time: Their massiveness and their
intensity, in autistic children, are an obstacle to their
189
B L A C K E T T - M I L N E R , M A R I O N (1 900 –19 98)
becoming part of mental functioning, and they end up
serving as pathological poles of attraction for a whole
variety of psychic elements which accrete within their
sphere of influence and thus become incapable of dispersing in a manner at once orderly and differentiated.
that consists of allowing oneÕs hand to wander freely
over the paper in order to see what it produces. The
drawings thus produced represent not only external
objects but also the structure of oneÕs own feelings and
thoughts.
In the wake of Frances Tustin, the post-Kleinian
tendency in psychoanalysis has made wide use of the
concept of the black hole, extending it to nonpsychotic
subjects in whom autistic islands are possible even if
in such cases they are less significant and less serious
in their implications.
She began to train as an analyst in the 1940s while
also becoming an enthusiastic painter. She was analyzed by Sylvia Payne, qualified in 1943 and began to
practice in London. The Hands of the Living God,
published in 1969, is one of MilnerÕs most remarkable
contributions as a psychoanalyst. It is the complete,
marvelously well-written and illustrated story of the
treatment of a very ill patient, a moving account of the
way in which she communicated her emotions
through the medium of drawing whenever words
failed her. In the meantime in 1952 she published an
article on ‘‘the role of illusion in the formation of symbols,’’ in which she does not limit the meaning of the
word symbol to a defensive function (Ernest Jones)
but stresses its creative potential. She insists on the
function of a ‘‘malleable’’ environment in the process
leading to recognition of the world outside oneself.
She developed the idea of a ‘‘medium’’ between the
reality created by oneself and external reality: a sort of
modeling clay for the mind, the intermediary between
representation and figuration, a malleable substance
by means of which impressions are transmitted to
the senses and with which we can give shape to our
fantasies. Patients model their own creative process
through therapists, who recognizes as well in themselves an inside and an outside, a part that is separate
and another that is a part of the patient.
BERNARD GOLSE
See also: Autism; Autistic capsule/nucleus; Breakdown.
Bibliography
Klein, Sydney. (1980). Autistic phenomena in neurotic
patients. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 61 (2),
395–401.
Tustin, Frances. (1972). Autism and childhood psychosis.
London: Hogarth; New York: Science House. Reprinted,
London: Karnac, 1995.
———. (1986). Autistic barriers in neurotic patients.
London: Karnac.
BLACKETT-MILNER, MARION (1900–1998)
Marion Blackett-Milner, a British psychoanalyst, was
born in London in 1900 and died there on May 29, 1998.
Born into a scientific family—her brother Patrick
Blackett won the Nobel Prize for physics—she first
took an interest in education after graduating as a psychologist from the University of London. In 1938 she
wrote a book based on her research in educational
child psychology, The Human Problem in Schools. She
married Dennis Milner in 1927 and gave birth to a son
in 1932.
Her first book, A Life of OneÕs Own, published under
the name Joanna Field, appeared in 1934. It was in
fact her diary, beginning in 1926, in which she
recounted in a remarkably authentic style her observations and discoveries about herself. Her future destiny is
already discernible in this autobiographical work. It was
followed by two other autobiographical books: An
Experiment in Leisure, in 1937 and, fifty years later,
EternityÕs Sunrise in 1987. In 1950 she published On Not
Being Able to Paint, in which she develops a method
19 0
Her theories about the separability of the object
complement Donald WinnicottÕs work on the transitional object and the creativity of the baby. In her last
work, The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men. Forty-Four
Years of Exploring Psychoanalysis, published in 1987,
she sums up her principle observations and her articles
on the relationship between psychoanalysis and
creativity.
On May 29, 1998, Marion Milner died in her
London home at the age of ninety-eight, while working on another publication. She contributed to our
understanding of the mechanisms of symbolization
and interpenetration between the subjective and objective world both in art and psychoanalysis, and deepened our knowledge of the processes by means of
which the psyche is born of the soma, and of the way
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B L A N K /N O N D E L U S I O N A L P S Y C H O S E S
in which we really learn to live and communicate with
our bodies. Masud Khan used to say that Milner had
‘‘an inexhaustible reserve of energy for living, working,
writing, and painting.’’ She was extremely original and
inventive in her own self and in her thinking, as well as
being a member of the Independent Group of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. She was passionate
about esthetics, creativity in art and analysis, and the
role of symbolism in the thinking process. Both her
autobiographical and psychoanalytical writings constitute, as Harry Guntrip said about Winnicott, with
whom she was very close, ‘‘the natural expression of
[her] personality.’’ In it she manifested a total commitment to exploring the inner world and the farthest
reaches of the being, at the frontier of the Self and
non-Self.
DIDIER RABAIN
See also: Representation of affect visual arts and
psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Milner, Marion. (1969). The hands of the living god. New
York: International Universities Press.
———. (1987). The suppressed madness of sane men. Fortyfour years of exploring psychoanalysis. London, New York:
Tavistock Publications.
Parsons, Michael. (1990). Marion MilnerÕs Ôanswering activityÕ and the question of psychoanalytic creativity. International Review of Psychoanalysis, 17, 4.
Rayner, Eric. (1991). The independent mind in British psychoanalysis. London: Free Association Books.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1988). Winnicott studies. The journal
of the Squiggle Foundation. A celebration of the life and work
of Marion Milner. London: The Squiggle Foundation.
BLANK/NONDELUSIONAL PSYCHOSES
Blank psychosis is defined as a psychosis with no readily
identifiable clinical manifestation, where analysis
alone affords access to a psychotic care: a nuclear
structure that is the source of possible psychotic development without necessarily producing actual
symptoms.
Jean-Luc Donnet and André Green (1973) introduced the notion of blank psychosis, based on a
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psychoanalytic session with a patient, ‘‘Z,’’ conducted
in a general psychiatry department.
As early as 1911, Eugen Bleuler had distinguished
‘‘simple schizophrenia’’ and ‘‘latent schizophrenia,’’
and his notions of ‘‘schizoid’’ and ‘‘schizothymia’’ had
already raised the issue of the boundaries of psychosis.
Psychoanalysis first considered the internal boundaries of psychosis in order to fathom its outer limits.
Helene Deutsch described the ‘‘as if ’’ personality in
1934, and as early as 1939 Maurits Katan studied
‘‘prepsychosis’’ in his work, ‘‘A Contribution to the
Understanding of Schizophrenic Speech.’’ Since Otto
KernbergÕs 1967 book Borderline Conditions and
Pathological Narcissism, the study of prepsychosis has
often been combined with that of borderline states.
Rather than a syndrome, blank psychosis evokes a
structure that is not manifest. It can be mistaken for a
depressive state with a configuration that is difficult to
pinpoint, for a borderline state, or it can refer to psychotic development without obvious signs. Consistently nuclear, it corresponds to three parameters
according to the ‘‘princes’’ description: a) oedipal
organization remains triangular, but the two parent
figures are identified according to their good or bad
character rather than the masculine/feminine opposition; b) object relations bring internal objects into
play; c) the subject is torn between good objects and
bad objects, and between the good ego and the bad
one, on account of the objects being driven back into
the ego.
Unlike psychosis, the role of the external objects in
blank psychosis shows that the subject continues to
cathect reality, which is doubly inscribed, even as
projection considerably modifies the subjectÕs apprehension of it. However, there are strictly speaking no
delusions, in the sense of either persecution by the bad
object or protection by the good object.
‘‘Empty’’ or ‘‘paralyzed’’ mental functioning of thought
results from an active decathexis that is attributed to
‘‘the destructive drivesÕ attack on the binding processes
in so far as they are a function of consciousnessÕs
awakening to reality’’ (Kernberg, 1975).
The description of blank psychosis has had an effect
comparable to the impact, in the 1970s, of the ‘‘borderline’’ category, linked to the expansion of a North
American clinical tradition. The extension of psychoanalytic practice to the treatment of psychosis, and the
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surprises generated by this work, have motivated
further interest. During the 1960s, Kernberg participated in a long-term study of forty-four difficult cases
treated by psychoanalysts at the Menninger Clinic.
When psychosis was triggered after several years in the
same analytic situation, Kernberg considered such
cases to involve ‘‘borderline patients’’ whose ‘‘ego is
better integrated than in psychotics except where close
human relations are concerned’’ (1975). With regard
to both the triggering and the stabilization of psychosis, he focused less on biological continuity than on
the structural continuity of the egoÕs defensive reactions, from a perspective informed by the work of
Anna Freud. He sought to understand the negative factor that undermines the egoÕs consistency to a point of
critical instability: ‘‘All defensive mechanisms also contain the germ of the egoÕs destruction’’ (Kernberg,
1975). Numerous studies of borderline states have
similarly focused less on symptoms than on prepsychotic ‘‘personalities,’’ their degree of consistency—
albeit paradoxical—or their narcissism.
Meanwhile, Jacques Lacan, faithful to the ‘‘formal
envelope of the symptom,’’ demonstrated the importance of ‘‘elementary phenomena’’ (Lacan, 1993, p. 14)
in the prepsychotic phase: intuitions, echoes, words,
forced gestures, and the like, all of these intermittent
and erratic. In the course of the interview, ‘‘eclipses’’
or ‘‘blanks’’ (or even memorization) in the patientÕs
speech mark an impasse or confusion with regard to
the signifier. Lacan unfailingly examined the sudden
appearance of any neologism or surface manifestation
of the ‘‘kernel of dialectical inertia’’(p. 22). His criticism of Maurits Katan focused on the reconstruction
of the ‘‘prepsychotic’’ phase, and the confusion of
levels—imaginary, symbolic, and real—and also on
the confusion between ‘‘understanding’’ and ‘‘imagining’’ in KatanÕs account. In LacanÕs view, KatanÕs and
innumerable other conceptions of ‘‘borderline states’’
had made naı̈ve use of FreudÕs notions regarding
the ego (the second topography) and his text ‘‘The
Loss of Reality on Neurosis and Psychosis’’ (1924).
The ‘‘sinthomatic’’ structure described by Lacan in
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III, The Psychoses
(1955–1956) opened new perspectives on the psychotic kernel, as did Piera AulagnierÕs work on ‘‘psychotic
potentiality.’’
MICHEL DEMANGEAT
19 2
See also: Anality; Borderline conditions; Dead mother
complex; Intergenerational.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1924). The loss of reality in neurosis and
psychosis. SE, 19: 180–187.
Kernberg, Otto. (1975). Borderline conditions and pathological narcissism. New York: Aronson.
Lacan, Jacques. (1966). Écrits. Paris: Seuil.
———. (1993). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III, the
psychoses (1955–1956). (Jacques-Alain Miller, Ed. and Russell Grigg, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1998). Penser la psychose. Une
lecture de l Õoeuvre de Piera Aulagnier. Paris: Dunod.
BLANTON, SMILEY (1882–1966)
An American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Smiley
Blanton was born in 1882 in Unionville, Tennessee,
and died on October 30, 1966, in New York. A patient
of Freud, his Diary of My Analysis with Freud appeared
in 1971. Born in the South into a family of strict Presbyterians, he studied medicine at Cornell University,
became an M.D. in 1914, and was trained in psychiatry
by Dr. A. Meyers at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore. After serving in World War I, he received a
degree in neurology and psychological medicine from
the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in London in 1922–23.
He taught at the University of Minneapolis, where
he had created the first child guidance clinic associated
with a public school; then, in 1927, created a nursery
school at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Two years later he moved to New York City, intending
to practice psychoanalysis. Through George Amsden,
who was leaving to be analyzed by Sándor Ferenczi, he
replaced Clinton McCord, who had just finished his
analysis with Freud.
The first period of the analysis began on August 31,
1929, in Berchtesgaden, where Freud spent his vacations.
Blanton later described his first meeting with Freud: ‘‘A
small, frail and graying man suddenly appeared and
moved toward me to greet me. Although he seemed
older than in the photographs I was familiar with, I
recognized the silhouette that approached me to be that
of Freud. Cigar in hand, he spoke to me almost timidly.’’
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Blanton took great care in recording FreudÕs
remarks, which were frequent and lengthy; Freud also
provided numerous suggestions on analytic technique,
avoided interpreting his patientÕs colitis, asked him
not to write down his dreams, and added, ‘‘For an analyst not to relate his dreams, now thatÕs a sign of serious resistance!’’ He would soon involve him in his
research concerning ShakespeareÕs identity.
to me as dynamic, alert, and lucid as ever.’’ But, Freud
confided to him, ‘‘At my age itÕs natural that one thinks
of death. Those who think about death and talk about
it are those who are not afraid, while those who are
afraid neither think about it nor talk about it.’’ Blanton
added, on September 5, 1938, ‘‘In reading these pages,
it will become apparent that the professor spoke often
to me of death.’’
From September to the end of October, Blanton followed Freud to the Schloss Tegel clinic in Berlin, and
then resumed his analysis in Vienna. He was again
forced to interrupt his analysis at the end of April
when Freud went to the Sanatorium Cottage of Vienna
and then to Berlin for treatment of his heart problems.
At the end of BlantonÕs analysis, on May 30, Freud provided him with a letter of recommendation to Ernest
Jones: ‘‘I would like to introduce you to Dr. Smiley
Blanton. He is a pleasant man, especially interested in
the orientation of children (Vassar College). He has
undergone six months of personal analysis with me; I
think he will return home a sincere believer in PsA.’’
Later in his career, Blanton collaborated with Norman Vincent Peale in establishing the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry. They opened the
Religio-Psychiatric Clinic at the Marble Collegiate
Church on lower Fifth Avenue, where free assistance
was offered to people suffering from emotional disturbances such as anxiety and depression. The clinic also
trained clergymen of all denominations to help people
deal with their emotional difficulties. Blanton and
Peale wrote several books together, most notably their
first collaboration, Faith Is the Answer: A Pastor and a
Psychiatrist Discuss Your Problems.
Five years later, in August 1935, Blanton had a
further two weeks of analysis with Freud, who was
then at his vacation home in Grinzing. Freud accepted
payments before the sessions began by saying, ‘‘I accept
them on account. If I happen to die before the fortnight
is over, they will be returned to you!’’ During the analysis Freud spoke about Ferenczi and technique—Blanton
was now seeing patients of his own—signed a copy of
the Interpretation of Dreams for him, and, when Blanton left on August 17, after expressing his wish to
return the following year, responded, ‘‘I regret that I
cannot promise I will be here . . . .’’
However, two years later, on August 1, 1937, Blanton was again in Grinzing with Freud. He described
him as ‘‘more alert and more dynamic than he was two
years ago . . . His hearing remains poor, but no more
than it was two years ago.’’ While planning a trip to
London, their discussion turned to phenomena that
Freud was skeptical of, such as parapsychology, ‘‘with
the exception of telepathy, whose existence is possible
and which deserves to be studied.’’
In London, on August 30, 1938, Blanton saw Freud
for a final week of therapy that lasted until September
7, the day before Freud was scheduled for a new operation. Blanton resumed his habit of recording his
dreams and investigating the resistance that occurred
during their interpretation. As for Freud, ‘‘he appeared
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ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Face-to-face situation; Neutrality/benevolent
neutrality; Psychoanalytic treatment; Religion and psychoanalysis; Weltanschauung.
Bibliography
Blanton, Smiley. (1971). Diary of my analysis with Freud.
New York: Hawthorn.
BLEGER, JOSÉ (1923–1972)
An Argentine doctor, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst,
José Bleger was born in 1923 in Santiago del Estero,
Argentina, and died on June 20, 1972, in Buenos Aires.
He was one of the most original of the Argentine
school of psychoanalysts. Through his psychiatric
research he investigated psychotic phenomena, an
interest that was to become the focus of all his later
work. He was intimately familiar with the work of
Karl Marx and an active militant in the Argentine
communist party; he studied psychoanalysis with
Enrique Pichon-Rivière.
Bleger conceived of the human being as a social
being and affirmed the necessity of questioning the way
in which the individual isolates and separates himself
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from others rather than the way in which he unites with
others and socializes. An overview of these ideas is presented in his Psicoanalisis y dialéctica materialista, published in 1958. Ronald Fairbairn was deeply influenced
by this theory, and it was through Fairbairn that Bleger
was able to confirm that object relations determine the
intensity and nature of anxiety as well as defensive strategies and tactics.
——— (1966). Psycho-analysis of the psycho-analytic frame.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 48 (4), 511–519.
It is in Simbiosis y ambigüedad, published in 1967,
that Bleger describes his most important theoretical
concepts and their development. Here, in his psychoanalytic research, Bleger for the first time confronts
the subject of symbiosis, generally following Kleinian
positional structures. He describes an object that, for
this primitive position, he describes as ‘‘agglutinated’’
by fusional anxieties and defenses that correspond to
the so-called ‘‘glischrocaric’’ position. He initially
attributed these anxieties and defenses to the ‘‘psychotic part’’ described by Wilfred Bion, but he then characterized them as increasingly undifferentiated. This
led him to conceive of a step prior to the paranoidschizoid position described by Melanie Klein.
Paul Eugen Bleuler, a Swiss professor of medicine,
holder of the chair of psychiatry at the University of
Zurich and director of the university psychiatric clinic
of Burghölzli in Zurich (1898–1927), was the son of
Johann Rudolf Bleuler and Pauline Bleuler-Bleuler.
Born April 30, 1857, near Zurich, he died July 15,
1939. Bleuler came from a family of well-to-do farmers. He went to several schools, then studied medicine
in Zurich, graduating in 1881. From 1881 to 1884 he
was an assistant physician at the university psychiatric
clinic of Waldau-Bern. From 1884–1885 he went to
Paris to study with Charcot and then to London and
Munich, where he studied with Gudden. From 1885 to
1886 Bleuler worked as an assistant physician to
August Forel at Burghölzli. From 1886 to 1898 he was
director of the psychiatric clinic of Rheinau-Zürich,
finally assuming the position formerly held by Forel in
Burghölzli in 1898, where he remained until 1927.
Psychoanalytic psychopathology changed fundamentally in this theory, which Bleger reformulated in
his work on schizophrenia, autism, mania, melancholy,
perversion, addiction, and psychosomatic illnesses. The
analytical technique concerning the framework, split
interpretation, and timing varies depending on the
form of the intervention and its participation in the
phenomena of restitution.
Bleger also conducted research in the fields of institutional psychology, family psychology, and group
phenomena. The problem of Judaism in the USSR
turned him into an active militant in favor of the Jewish question and the international political aspects of
the denial of freedom. He died prematurely in Buenos
Aires at the age of forty-nine, at a time when his work
was on the point of reaching its fullest expression.
SUSANA BEATRIZ DUPETIT
See also: Argentina; Framework of the psychoanalytic
treatment; Group psychotherapies; Individual; Individuation (analytical psychology).
Bibliography
Bleger, José. (1958). Psicoanalisis y dialectica materialista.
Estudio sobre la estructura de psicoanalisis. Buenos Aires:
Paidos.
19 4
——— (1967). Simbiosis y ambigüedad; estudio psicoanalı́tico. Buenos Aires: Editorial Paidós.
BLEULER, PAUL EUGEN (1857–1939)
His first scientific contact with Freud occurred in
1892, during his work on aphasia. In 1896 Bleuler
prepared a favorable report on Breuer and FreudÕs
work, Studien über Hysterie (Studies on Hysteria, 1895).
The first correspondence with Freud took place in 1898.
In 1900 Bleuler asked his assistant, Carl Gustav
Jung, for a report on the Interpretation of Dreams
(1900) for the clinic. Extensive correspondence between
Freud and Bleuler did not begin until 1904, however.
Moreover, it was through JungÕs work and therapeutic
success, between 1900 and 1909, that Bleuler came to
appreciate the possibilities and usefulness of Freudian
psychoanalysis. His liberal attitude and open-mindedness only make sense when we consider the influence of
August Forel, who saw himself as the vehement defender of hypnotherapy, a man open to a dynamic, scientific, and public comprehension of psychic pathologies
(Forel himself was a violent critic of Freudian ideas).
BleulerÕs publications between 1906 and 1911 reveal his caution—not entirely uncritical—regarding
FreudÕs work. In 1907, under his direction, the Freudian
Association of Zurich was founded at his clinic. Through
his work and attitudes, Bleuler unleashed a storm of
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scientific criticism, especially in German and Swiss psychiatric circles. He also had to withstand personal
attacks from those close to him, including Forel and
Constantin von Monakow. Additionally, there was pressure from Freud and Jung who, impelled by tactical
interests, wanted to secure his active participation in the
Zurich regional branch of the International Psychoanalytic Association. These efforts came to a head during a
meeting between Freud and Bleuler in December 1910
in Munich. BleulerÕs ambivalence, often hinted at and
now out in the open after Freud read his article ‘‘Die
Psychoanalyse Freuds’’ (FreudÕs psychoanalysis; 1911),
can be explained by the number of constraints that
impeded his desire for knowledge and his critical scientific mind. Bleuler was unable to overcome these conflicts
and after eleven months he gave up his position. With
his ‘‘Kritik der Freudischen Theorien’’ (1913), he lost his
position in the orchestra of Freudian science. That same
year he, along with Jung, gave up his responsibilities in
psychoanalytic circles. Unlike Jung, Bleuler maintained a
distant but polite relationship with Freud.
BleulerÕs scientific contribution to psychoanalysis is
modest. But the scope of his influence, which should
not be underestimated, is largely based on his political
and medical activities. Through his personality and
responsibilities, Bleuler opened the doors of international scientific discourse to Freud and psychoanalysis. ‘‘After this it was impossible for psychiatrists
to ignore psycho-analysis any longer. BleulerÕs great
work on schizophrenia (1911), in which the psychoanalytic point of view was placed on an equal footing
with the clinical systematic one, completed this success’’ (Freud, 1914d, p. 28)
BERNARD MINDER
See also: Ambivalence; Autism; Burghölzli Clinic; Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse; Jung, Carl Gustav; Paired opposites; Schizophrenia; Switzerland (German-speaking);
Word association.
———. (1913). Die Kritik der Freudschen Theorie. Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychisch gerichtliche
Medizin, 52 (5), 665–718.
Freud, Sigmund. (1914d). On the history of the psychoanalytic movement. SE, 14: 7–66.
BLOC—NOTES DE LA PSYCHANALYSE, Le
Created in 1981 by Mario Cifali, its director, Le Bloc–
Notes de la psychanalyse, published by Éditions Georg,
in Geneva, is a Freudian review affiliated with the
work of the seminar of the Cercle Freudien. There is a
relation between LacanÕs 1975 conference in Geneva
before the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society—Raymond de
Saussure center—and the creation of the review. It was
further promoted by Serge LeclaireÕs suggestion to
found a study center for psychoanalysis in Geneva.
The center was intended for young people with sufficient background to investigate Freudian ideas. Jenny
Aubry, Roger Lewinter, François Perrier, George
Dubal, Michel de Certeau, Mireille Cifali, Monique
Schneider, Françoise Dolto, and Conrad Stein all gave
their approval to the initiative.
Along with theoretical and clinical articles written
by psychoanalysts from the various schools, Le BlocNotes de la psychanalyse has presented unpublished
historical documents. These include the correspondence between Freud and Otto Rank concerning the
book The Trauma of Birth (issue 10) and the interview
between Max Graf, the father of ‘‘Little Hans,’’ and
Kurt Eissler (issue 14). Three issues of the review
were particularly sought after by readers: ‘‘Éducation,
médicine, place de la psychanalyse’’ (issue 7), ‘‘Les
traumatismes psychiques’’ (issue 12), and ‘‘Le père’’
(issue 13).
MARIO CIFALI
Bibliography
Bleuler, Eugen. (1892). Zur Auffassung der subcorticalen
Aphasien. Neurologisches Zentralblatt, 18, 562–563.
BLOCH, JEAN-RICHARD (1884–1947)
———. (1896). Buchanzeige über Breuer-Freuds ‘‘Studien
über Hysterie.’’ Münchner medizinische Wochenschrift, 22,
524–525.
Jean-Richard Bloch was a writer, historian, and socialist propagandist. He founded the socialist review
LÕeffort in Poitiers in 1910, collaborated with the publisher Frédéric Rieder, and edited the newspaper Ce
soir with Louis Aragon. He was the first French editor
to publish articles of a psychoanalytic nature.
———. (1911). Dementia præcox, oder die Gruppe der
Schizophrenien. Aschaffenburg, Handbuch der Psychiatrie.
Leipzig: n.p.
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B L O S , P E T E R (1 904 –19 97)
Born in Paris into a Jewish family that had
settled in Auxerre (Yonne) in the eighteenth century, he studied history at the Sorbonne (with
Charles Seignobos), received his teaching degree in
1907, and was appointed to the lycée in Lons-leSaulnier, then in Poitiers (1909). He collaborated
with Gaston Thiesson and Dr. René MorichauBeauchant, his friend for many years, in producing
LÕeffort, a ‘‘journal of struggle and ideas.’’ MorichauBeauchant was the psychology and psychiatry editor
for the review.
In LÕeffort Bloch presented Morichau-BeauchantÕs
very first article on psychoanalysis, ‘‘LÕinconscient et la
défense psychologique de lÕindividu’’ (The unconscious and the psychological defense of the individual;
1910), published a year before his ‘‘Le rapport affectif
dans la cure des psychonévroses’’ (The affective relationship in the treatment of psychoneuroses; 1911).
He later published three additional articles by this
same author. A reader of Freud, Bloch himself wrote
an article entitled ‘‘La mort dÕŒdipe’’ (The Death of
Oedipus), followed by two novels, La nuit Kurde
(1925; A Night in Kurdistan, 1931) and Sybilla (1935),
where the influence of analysis is obvious. Writing La
nuit Kurde had a therapeutic effect on its author: ‘‘I
have to complete my work. . . . I have overcome my
neurasthenia, my apprehension; I have taken back possession of my ego.’’
MICHELLE MOREAU RICAUD
See also: Morichau-Beauchant, Pierre Ernest René.
Bibliography
Bloch, Jean-Richard. (1912). Lévy: Premier livre de contes.
Paris: Gallimard.
———. (1918). . . . et compagnie. Paris: Gallimard. (Reprinted 1997.)
———. (1931). A Night in Kurdistan (Stephen HadenGuest, Trans.). New York: Simon and Schuster. (Original
work published 1925)
———. (1931). Destin du siècle: Essais pour mieux comprendre son temps. Paris: Rieder. (Reprinted, Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1996.)
Morichau-Beauchant, René. (1910). LÕinconscient et la
défense de la vie. LÕeffort, 1.
———. (1911). Le rapport affectif dans la cure des psychonévroses. Gazette hôpitaux, 84 (14), 1845–1849.
19 6
BLOS, PETER (1904–1997)
A German psychoanalyst with a degree in education
and a PhD in biology, Peter Blos was born February 2,
1904, in Karlsruhe (Germany), and died June 12, 1997,
in Holderness, New Hampshire (United States). BlosÕs
childhood and adolescence were marked by the
spiritual influence of his father, a doctor drawn to
GandhiÕs ideas. Early in life he became a friend of Erik
Homburger, who later became the psychoanalyst Erik
Erikson. Blos studied education at the University of
Heidelberg to become a teacher, and then obtained a
doctorate in biology in Vienna.
During the 1920s, he was introduced to Anna
Freud, who asked his help in creating a school for children undergoing analysis. The project was supported
and encouraged by Eva Rosenfeld and Dorothy
Burlingham, a friend of Anna Freud, whose children
attended the small school. Blos invited Erik Homburger to join him there. Within the Vienna psychoanalytic circle August Aichhorn exerted considerable
intellectual influence on Blos, which strongly affected
his psychoanalytic training. Blos entered psychoanalysis through teaching, while giving his work an orientation and sensitivity influenced by spirituality.
To escape the rise of Nazism, Blos fled Vienna in
1934 for the United States, where he settled in New
Orleans. There he was hired as a teacher in a private
school, before leaving for New York, where he continued his analytic training. According to Aaron H.
Esman, he became a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, becoming a special member in 1965
and then a supervisor and trainer. As a teacher he introduced, in 1972, a course on delayed adolescence, which
he discontinued in 1977. He continued his clinical practice and did some teaching at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center as cofounder of the Association of Child
Psychoanalysis. When he retired from professional life,
he spent his time writing poetry and fiction, playing the
violin, and practicing carpentry in his country home in
Holderness, New Hampshire. He died there at the age
of ninety-three, by the side of his second wife.
Of his four published books, it is On Adolescence: A
Psychoanalytic Interpretation that led to his national
and international recognition. This book, supported by
his extensive clinical experience with adolescents, picks
up the thread of an idea that Sigmund Freud failed to
develop. Freud identified the beginning and end of the
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process of puberty, largely ignoring the intermediary
stages. Blos decided to elucidate the various stages of
development of the personality, from latency to postadolescence. His goal was to present a unified theory
of adolescence, a necessary first step in introducing
an adolescent-specific psychopathology and psychotherapeutic technique. Five years later he developed a key concept, inherited from the work of Margaret Mahler, the ‘‘second individuation process.’’
Here, the emphasis is on the importance of renegotiating the separation with the parentsÕ imagos during
adolescence. The author emphasizes the importance
of gaining access to regression, which, contrary to
what occurs in the case of the infant and the adult, is
tied to the ego.
The second individuation process is what made
Blos well-known. His theoretical and clinical approach
to the gradual development of the personality, delinquency, and the problems of the ego (superego, ego
ideal, integrative capability) also made a significant
contribution to understanding adolescence. In the
United States he is considered an eminent specialist, a
forerunner of child and adolescent analysis, who
trained several generations of analysts in adolescent
psychotherapy.
FLORIAN HOUSSIER
See also: Adolescence; Adolescence crisis; Hietzing
Schule/Burlingham-Rosenfeld School.
Bibliography
Blos, Peter. (1962). On adolescence: A psychoanalytic interpretation. New York: The Free Press.
———. (1967). The second individuation process of
adolescence. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 162–186.
———. (1978). The concept of acting out in relation to the
adolescent process. In E. Rexford (Ed.), A developmental
approach to the problem of acting out (p. 153–174). New
York: International Universities Press.
——— (1985). Son and father. New York: The Free Press.
Eisman, Aaron H. (1997). Obituary of Peter Blos. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 78, 813–814.
BLUSHING, FEAR OF. See Erythrophobia
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In psychoanalysis, body image is the mental representation one has of oneself, which gradually develops in
each individual. The body image encompasses fantasies, especially unconscious fantasies, and also
involves the environment. The body is one of the
subjects Freud dealt with most frequently. In several
of his papers, he referred to the constitution and
development of the erogenous zones, their representations and importance in the formation of the body
image.
The body image is constantly being created and
recreated. Caresses and the first affectionate contacts
with the people who surround the child during infancy
are responsible for molding the body image, and
return to the child the image of his own body through
containment and eye contact. This is a dialectic process, in which the environment also plays a role. Piera
Aulagnier (1991) says that to transform a sensitive
region of the body into an erogenous zone, the physiologically sensitive reaction is not enough: time and
subjective interrelation are required for the signs of
somatic life to become signs of psychic life. In his work
on the mirror phase, Jacques Lacan (1949/2004)
describes a mechanism of identification that is established through the transformations that occur in
infants when presented with a reflection: The mirror
offers a tempting image of comprehensive unity, representing what is felt to be a precarious and fragmented
self. It was Esther Bick (1968) who, on the basis of clinical material, studied the development of the concept
of the skin and its relationship with introjection and
projective identification. Didier Anzieu (1985) calls
moi-peau (skin-ego) the image of the ego the infant
uses in the course of the early phases of his development to represent himself as an ego, on the basis of
experiences connected with the body surface.
Various models or clinical hypotheses, such as the
neurotic body image, and the primitive-psychotic body
image, may be postulated on the basis of clinical psychoanalytical work. The neurotic body image, closer to
the notion of normalcy, is the unconscious mental
representation of the skin, complete and whole, which
envelops and contains warmly. This skin represents the
motherÕs and fatherÕs support and warmth, which are in
turn the basis for the containment of the self and the
limits of the body image. Conversely, in the model of
the primitive-psychotic body image, there is no notion
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of skin, but instead the notion of fluid as the nucleus of
the primitive-psychotic body image. Thus, there is only
a vague psychological notion of a wall that contains
vital fluids, or blood, and fantasies of bleeding, or
‘‘emptying out’’ of those vital fluids. Sometimes this
emptying out is linguistically expressed in a fast, uncontrolled speaking style.
This means that the primitive-psychotic concept of
the body breaks through and invades what up to then
was a different type of mental functioning. These
experiences may be expressed through words or
through body language, as in psychosomatic disorders.
Some patients may have hypochondriac ideas related
to the primitive-psychotic body image, such as alleged
blood infections, leukemia or hemophilia.
Some concepts related to body image are: hypochondria, body fragmentation, delusions of denial of
parts of the body (known as CottardÕs delusion), and
somatic delusion. Hypochondria based on the psychotic primitive body image may lead to suicidal accidents.
DAVID ROSENFELD
See also: Anorexia nervosa; Bulimia; Demand; Depersonalization; Imaginary identification/symbolic identification;
Mirror stage; Object a; Puberty; Schilder, Paul Ferdinand;
Self-image; Tube-ego; Want of being/lack of being.
Bibliography
Anzieu, Didier. (1985). The skin ego. New Haven-London:
Yale University Press.
Aulagnier, Piera. (1991). Un interprète en quête de sens. Paris:
Payot.
Bick, Esther. (1968). The experience of the skin in early
object relations. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,
49, 558–566.
Lacan, Jacques. (2004). The mirror stage as formative of the
I function, as revealed in psychoanalytic experience. In his
Écrits (pp. 3–9; Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1949)
Rosenfeld, David. (1992). The psychotic aspects of the personality. London-New York: Karnac Books.
Further Reading
Greenacre, Phyllis. (1953). Certain relationship between
fetishism and the faulty development of the body image.
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 8, 79–98.
19 8
Meissner, William W. (1997). The self and the body: The
body self and the body image. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 20, 419–448.
———. (1998). The self and the body: III. The body image
in clinical perspective. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary
Thought, 21, 113–146.
BOEHM, FELIX JULIUS (1881–1958)
German physician, a specialist in neurological and mood
disorders, psychoanalyst and president of the German
Psychoanalytic Association (DPG), Felix Boehm was born
in Riga on June 25, 1881, and died in Berlin on September
20, 1958. Remembered more as a practical psychotherapist than as a theorist, Boehm was an ‘‘Aryan’’ member of
the psychoanalytic community during the Nazi era.
BoehmÕs father, Paul, was an industrialist originally
from Fürstenwalde; his mother, Luise, née Zelm, was
the daughter of merchants. His brother, Paul Boehm
(1879–1951) took over his fatherÕs business, while
Edgar Boehm (1889–1922) became an architect in Berlin. All three brothers were associated with the ‘‘Rubonia Clique,’’ a group of Baltic Germans, and so became
acquainted with Alfred Rosenberg, who would become
the principal ideologist of National Socialism and was
ultimately sentenced to death at Nuremberg.
Boehm studied engineering in Munich before pursuing medical studies in Geneva, Freiburg im Breisgau,
and Munich. Among his teachers were F. von Müller,
Emil Kraepelin, and Ernst Cassirer. He was analyzed
by a Polish student of Freud, Eugenia Sokolnicka, and
became a member of the Munich regional group of the
International Psychoanalytical Association in 1913. In
1914 he married B. E. Welsch, with whom he had three
children. Enlisting as volunteer doctor during the First
World War, he was promoted to chief physician and
served as a psychiatric expert in a war tribunal held in
Germersheim.
In 1919 Boehm settled in Berlin and began an analysis with Karl Abraham, taking a doctorate in 1922, with
a thesis on ‘‘Two Cases of Delirium by Arteriosclerosis.’’ He taught at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute
from 1923 to 1933, set up scholarships at the Institute,
and collaborated with the newly founded Berlin Psychoanalytic Polyclinic. Boehm placed his daughters
into a prophylactic psychoanalysis with Melanie Klein.
In 1928 he began studies in ethnology and worked with
Eckhard von Sydow, a philosopher and art historian.
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After HitlerÕs accession to power and the NazisÕ immediate efforts to discredit psychoanalysis, Max Eitington
resigned as president of the DPG and Boehm, viewed by
Freud as ‘‘so-so,’’ took his place. Viewing his role as ‘‘savior
of psychoanalysis,’’ he served as president of the DPG from
1933 to 1936 and as director of the Berlin Psychoanalytic
Institute. He advocated harsher racial laws and expelled
Jews from the DPG in December 1935. The next year
Boehm was appointed to the administrative board of the
German ReichÕs Institute for Psychological Research and
Psychotherapy (Göringinstitut); however, despite his cooperation with the National Socialist authorities, he was no
longer allowed to conduct didactic analyses.
Beginning in 1939, Boehm directed a research team
that investigated homosexuality, always one of his
main interests, and undertook a follow-up study of the
instituteÕs polyclinic patients. From 1941 to 1945, as
health officer and expert in service to the Wehrmacht,
Boehm took part in sentencing to death ‘‘malingerers,’’
deserters, and homosexuals.
After the war, in 1947 Boehm was one of the founders of the Institut für Psychotherapie, and in 1949 he
was appointed director of instruction and training
policy for educational psychology. In 1950 Boehm
became president of the reconstituted DPG which, to
his considerable disappointment, was refused admission to the International Psychoanalytic Association.
REGINE LOCKOT
See also: Berliner Psychoanalytiche Poliklinik; Berliner
Psychoanalytisches Institut; Deutsches Institut für Psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie (Institut
Göring); Germany; Phallic woman.
Bibliography
Bibring, Grete. (Ed.). (1951). Report on the 17th International Psychoanalytical Congress. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 33, 249–251.
Boehm, Felix. (1978). Schriften zur Psychoanalye. Munich:
Ölschläger.
Cocks, Geoffrey. (1985). Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The
Göring Institute. New York: Oxford University Press.
BONAPARTE, MARIE LÉON (1882–1962)
Marie Bonaparte, a French psychoanalyst, founding
member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, and
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princess of Greece and Denmark, was born on July 2,
1882, in Saint-Cloud, France, and died on September
21, 1962, in Saint-Tropez. She was the only daughter
of Prince Roland Bonaparte (great nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte) and Marie-Félix Blanc (who died a
month after her birth). In 1907 she married Prince
Georges of Greece and Denmark, with whom she had
two children, Eugénie and Pierre.
The melancholic preoccupation of her writings
attests to her state of mind. René Laforgue wrote in a
letter to Freud that she suffered from an obsessive neurosis that did not affect her intellect but slightly
disturbed her mental equilibrium. Bonaparte herself
wrote, ‘‘At times I have the sensation of catastrophe.
I wish an unknown star would destroy the planet.’’
Dissatisfied with her life, she found solace in her
imagination.
In 1924 Bonaparte published a collection of stories,
Le Printemps sur mon jardin (Spring in my garden).
Using the pseudonym A. E. Narjani, she wrote an article describing clitoral surgery entitled, ‘‘Considération
sur les causes anatomiques de la frigidité chez la
femme’’ (Consideration of the anatomical causes of
frigidity in women). Later, the disappointments of her
sexual and emotional life were reflected in her symbolic novel Les glauques aventures de Flyda des Mers
(The sad adventures of Flyda des Mers).
Although she gave expression to her adult problems
in her novels and essays, her other writings described
the vicissitudes of her childhood. Raised by a nurse,
she filled her childÕs world with imaginary characters
whose adventures she described in small notebooks
with black covers she called her ‘‘Bêtises’’ (Whimsies).
Around the time of her fatherÕs death on April 14,
1924, she rediscovered them. On her fatherÕs
nightstand she found a copy of FreudÕs Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916–1917a [1915–17]).
Bonaparte began an analysis with Freud on September 30, 1925. She used her childhood writing to reinforce her creative work. In 1939 she began to publish
facsimiles of her childhood writings together with her
psychoanalytically informed commentaries on them.
As a result of her work with Freud and the friendship
and confidence that developed between them, Bonaparte soon became his representative in the French
psychoanalytic world, which was then being organized.
In 1926, with the help of Eugenie Sokolnicka, René
Laforgue, Rudolph Loewenstein, René Allendy,
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B O N A P A R T E , M A R I E L É O N (18 82 –196 2)
Edouard Pichon, and others, she founded the Société
psychanalytique de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic
Society). As FreudÕs advocate, she firmly resisted the
psychiatrists of Saint-AnneÕs Hospital, who were
drawn to a form of French psychoanalysis swept clean
of ‘‘Germanic slag.’’
She translated several of FreudÕs works, including
Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood
(1910c), An Autobiographical Study (1925d [1924]),
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905c),
The Future of an Illusion (1927d), ‘‘Prospectus for
ÔSchriften zur angewandten SeelenkundeÕ’’ (1907), and
some of his papers on metapsychology.
BonaparteÕs research on applied psychology,
society, war, criminality, and female sexuality were
published in the Revue francaise de psychanalyse,
which she founded with René Laforgue, Angelo Hesnard, and Edouard Pichon. In the first issue of the
journal, Bonaparte published her paper ‘‘Le cas de
Mme Lefebvre,’’ which describes the oedipal crime of a
woman who murders her pregnant daughter-in-law.
The paper also affirmed BonaparteÕs opposition to and
condemnation of the death penalty.
BonaparteÕs two volume study of Edgar Allan
Poe appeared in 1933. She divided his life and
work into distinct cycles, which may be seen in her
life as well. She characterized these cycles as cycles
of the mother: the living-dead mother, the landscape mother, the murdered mother; and as cycles
of the father: the revolt against the father, the conflict with consciousness, and passivity toward the
father.
Anna and Sigmund Freud translated her book
Topsy: The Story of a Golden-Haired Chow, illustrated
with photographs taken by her daughter, Eugénie, into
German. In June 1938, with the assistance of the
American ambassador William Bullitt, Bonaparte
helped Freud and his family leave Nazi Austria. During
World War II, between 1941 and 1944, Bonaparte lived
in Cape Town, South Africa, where she wrote articles
about the myths of warfare.
Her talks at the Institut de psychanalyse de Paris
(Paris Institute for Psychoanalysis) and her articles
were published in the Revue française de psychanalyse
and, after the war, were collected into several volumes:
Psychanalyse et biologie (Psychoanalysis and biology;
1952), Introduction à la théorie des instincts (Introduction to the theory of instincts; 1951), Psychanalyse
20 0
et anthropologie (Psychoanalysis and anthropology;
1952).
In Female Sexuality (1951/1953) she compared the
libidinal evolution of the sexes. After a shared anal
phase of passivity toward the mother, the young girl
experiences a temporary phallic phase toward the
mother, followed by a second (cloacal and phallic)
phase of passivity toward the father. The final genital
phase is passive and is accompanied by a relative
exclusion of the phallus and affirmation of the
vagina. Bonaparte insisted that the father had an
important and beneficial role to play in the quality
of the love expressed toward the daughter. When a
young woman fails to make the transition from clitoral sadism to vaginal masochism in her sexual
development, there are two types of alloplastic adaptation available: the Halban-Narjani operation, which
involves surgically moving the clitoris toward the
vagina, and psychoanalysis, which alone is capable of
relaxing the young womanÕs intense fixation on the
phallic clitoris.
During the 1950s, as vice president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Bonaparte
defended Margaret Clark-Williams, who was accused
of illegally practicing medicine, and tried to save the
life of Caryl Chessman, who had been condemned to
death in the United States. Through her generosity a
library and institute of psychoanalysis were created in
1954 in Paris. During the schism within the Société
psychanalytique de Paris in the 1950s, she supported
Sacha Nacht, though without much optimism, in his
dispute with Jacques Lacan.
The first two volumes of her memoirs, Derrière les
vitres closes (Behind closed doors) and LÕappel des sèves
(The call of life), were published in 1953. Prince
George of Greece, her husband and ‘‘old companion,’’
died on November 25, 1957. In 1959 she presented her
final paper, ‘‘Vitalisme et psychosomatique’’ (Vitalism
and psychosomatics) to the Twenty-First International
Psychoanalytic Congress. She died on September 21,
1962, of leukemia in Saint-Tropez, where she maintained her summer home, Le Lys de Mer, named after
the plant.
JEAN-PIERRE BOURGERON
See also: Autobiography; Berman, Anne: Congrès des psychanalystes de langue française des pays romans; France;
Gesammelte Werke; Revue française de psychanalyse; Société
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BOOK
psychanalytique de Paris and Institut de psychanalyse de
Paris.
Bibliography
Bertin, Célia. (1982). Marie Bonaparte, la dernière Bonaparte. Paris: Perrin.
———. (1982b). Marie Bonaparte, a life. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Bonaparte, Marie. (1949). The life and works of Edgar
Allan Poe, a psycho-analytic interpretation (John Rodker,
Trans.). London: Imago Pub. Co. (Original work published
1933)
———. (1951). Introduction à la théorie des instincts; De la
prophylaxie infantile des névroses. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
———. (1952). Psychanalyse et anthropologie. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
———. (1952). Psychanalyse et biologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
———. (1953). Female sexuality (John Rodker, Trans.).
New York: International Universities Press. (Original work
published 1951)
Bourgeron, Jean-Pierre. (1993). Marie Bonaparte et la psychanalyse à travers ses lettres à René Laforgue et les images
de son temps. Geneva: Champion-Slatkine.
———. (1997). Marie Bonaparte. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
BONNEUIL. See École Experimentale de Bonneuil
What is remarkable about The Book of the It is,
first, the content and, second, the presentation. Groddeck highlights the new concepts introduced by
psychoanalysis: the infantile, the Unconscious, primary processes, sexuality. He defends the position of
Fredrich Neitzsche in Beyond Good and Evil on
public discussion of humanityÕs many perverse tendencies. He describes the illnesses of the body and of
the mind as products of the It. He thus opens up a
‘‘space for illness’’ (Chemouni, 1984), a place where
the individual It deploys itself under the constraint of
symbolizations and associations and where analytic
treatment can begin to unfold between the analyst and
the patient.
The whole of The Book of the It is an analytic experience, a game that stimulates with its clinical illustrations, reflections, and fragments of self-analysis that
Groddeck uses to involve the reader in the dialog. The
individual is controlled by the all-powerful It, the
role of the body and mind being to express It. There
is nothing we can say about the It; we cannot grasp it
theoretically; we can know it only through its accomplishments.
Freud used the concept of It in his metapsychology,
and ego psychology enlarges its theoretical scope. Only
in the course of the last few decades we have begun to
understand and appreciate the significance of GroddeckÕs original contribution to psychoanalysis.
HERBERT WILL
GroddeckÕs Book of the It, first published in 1923 by
the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, was a
great success. It was followed by a second and third
edition in 1926 and 1934. Translations exist in Dutch,
Swedish, English, French, Italian, Spanish, and
Japanese.
The Book of the It is written in the form of an epistolary novel. The fictional author of the letters is the psychoanalyst Patrick Troll, and the fictional addressee is
a lady who wishes to learn, in a playful manner, about
psychoanalysis. Groddeck wanted to present his 1916
OF
IT, THE
and 1919 conferences and psychoanalytic concepts in a
popular work. He wrote the letters in 1921 and sent
them to Freud, whose response was very encouraging
(‘‘Their style is fascinating; their tone musical, clever,
and impertinent’’). At the request of the reading committee, Groddeck made some cuts, though with some
reluctance.
BOOK OF THE IT, THE
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See also: Id; Groddeck, Georg Walther; Psychosomatic.
Source Citation
Groddeck, Georg. (1923). Das Buch vom Es: Psychoanalytische Briefe an eine Freundin. Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag; München: Fischer Taschenbuch,
1984. The Book of the It. Washington: Nervous and Mental
Disease Publishing Co., 1928. The Book of the It: Psychoanalytic Letters to a Friend (V. M. E. Collins, Trans.). New
York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1950.
201
BORDERLINE CONDITIONS
Bibliography
Chemouni, Jacquy. (1984). Georg Groddeck, psychanalyste de
l Õimaginaire: psychanalyse freudienne et psychanalyse groddeckienne. Paris: Payot.
Lewinter, Roger. (1990). Georg Groddeck: Studien zu Leben
und Werk. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.
Mannoni, Maud. (1979). La théorie comme fiction: Freud,
Groddeck, Winnicott, Lacan. Paris: Le Seuil.
Roeder von Diersburg, Egenolf. (1961). Georg GroddeckÕs
Philosophie des Es. Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung,
15, 131–138.
Roustang, François.
Paris: Minuit.
(1976).
Un
destin
si
funeste.
Will, Herbert. (1985). Freud, Groddeck und die Geschichte
des ‘‘Es.’’ Psyche, 150–169.
BORDERLINE CONDITIONS
The nosological concept of borderline conditions (or
states) arose from what was defined in the Englishlanguage literature as ‘‘borderline personality organization,’’ a term used to refer to a wide range of patients
whose symptoms could not be explained in terms of
either neurosis or psychosis.
There are three common misconceptions concerning borderline conditions to be avoided if their dynamics are to be understood, the first two of which
arise from the term itself:
that they exist at the ‘‘borderline’’ of neurosis or
psychosis or constitute a transition between the
two, when in fact they are neither pre-psychoses
nor severe neuroses;
that they are transitory ‘‘states’’ because of the
various forms in which they can manifest within
one individual. Otto Kernberg (1975) prefers to
use the term ‘‘borderline organization’’ because,
as Daniel Widlöcher (1979) emphasizes, this is an
unstable condition existing within a stable
structure;
finally, that the wide variety of clinical manifestations eliminates any need to define the fundamental psychodynamics that these conditions
have in common.
The borderline condition is more than a pathology
that consists more often in manifest behavior than
20 2
internal suffering and in an attitude of object-dependency that, depending on the level of mentalization,
can range from drug addiction to violent passages to
the act in the ‘‘psychopathic’’ subject. This disorder
can produce a wide range of visible manifestations,
including extraordinary lapses of consciousness, an
‘‘as-if ’’ mode of existence with loss of feeling, and an
indefinable state of inefficacy. This range nevertheless
stems from the same narcissistic rationale, the same
archaic reaction, and a similar way of establishing the
required defenses in the outside world.
The narcissistic component of the borderline condition restricts the experience of conflict to its traumatic
impact. The Oedipus complex is overcome without
having been resolved (Bergeret); however, the narcissistic disorder is neither a depression nor a form of
neurotic or psychotic decompensation experienced as
an object loss. This in no way detracts from the archaic
nature of the need, the intolerance of frustration, the
intensity of the rage, or the violence of the reaction.
Accordingly, the pregenital quality of the need
becomes a threat to an object that is absolutely necessary but has become frightening through projection—
an object both that needs protection and from which
protection has to be sought.
In the context of such a risk and this overwhelming
atmosphere, the borderline patient actively strives to
deal with reality rather than to negotiate the drive.
Given the impossibility of dissociating the affect from
the representation in a way that would enable repression and displacement to occur, and in the absence of
an internal object that would be the guarantor of
subtle difference, everything is organized in the external world so as to secure the object. Accordingly, this
demonstrates the radical choice that the subject has to
make in using the denial of the reality that he is able to
perceive but not cathect to avoid any conflict. This
subject also deploys splitting and—to avoid any internal conflict between love and aggression—completely
separates good from bad in the external world or
intensely idealizes the object on which he cannot rely.
The concept of omnipotence provides the key to a
better understanding of a wider range of manifestations in borderline conditions, including that which
characterizes the deeper disorder beneath the neurotic
exterior, which ranges from unstable behavior to antisocial reactions and also extends from childish personalities and depressive tendencies to what is described
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BOREDOM
as narcissistic perversion. Heinz Kohut (1971) classified the megalomania in borderline conditions as one
of the ‘‘archaic narcissistic configurations’’ that exist in
the Self, which is considered not as an agency of the
psychic apparatus but at the very least as a structure in
which the representations retain a degree of autonomy
in relation to the rest of the life of the drives.
In sum, the borderline condition remains an
entirely external striving that results from an incapacity to tolerate internal ambivalence, which produces
both the economy of depression at the internal level
and the economy of delusion at the external level.
AUGUSTIN JEANNEAU
Knight, Robert P. (1953). Borderline states. Bulletin of the
Menninger Clinic, 17, 1–12.
Meissner, William. (1984). The borderline spectrum. Differential diagnosis and developmental issues. New York/London:
Jason Aronson; New York: International Universities Press.
Searles, Harold. (1986). My work with borderline patients.
Northvale, NJ: Aronson.
BOREDOM
Boredom is a state of malaise, close to anxiety, characterized by a feeling of emptiness. Its origin is attributed
to objects that the subject claims are boring, in other
words, odious (inodiosus) in the etymological sense of
the word.
See also: Abandonment; Act, passage to the; As if personality, the; Character neurosis; Dependence; Developmental disorders; Narcissistic injury; Narcissistic neurosis;
Negative therapeutic reaction; Prepsychosis; Psychoanalytical nosography; Psychotic/neurotic; Transference
hatred.
Boredom (languor, neurasthenia) was one of the
dark humors of ancient medicine (boredom was associated with the spleen, and melancholy, with the liver).
It became the ailment of the era during the Romantic
period, as typified by Françpois-René de Chateaubriand in René and The Genius of Christianity (part 2,
book 3).
Bibliography
Sigmund Freud did not see boredom as a specific
symptom. He noted that the idleness of young women
created a state of reverie dissociated from reality and
susceptible to hysteria (1895d). But he saw their lassitude as normal, since other objects cannot occupy the
place of the primitive lost object, the penis (1910h).
Sándor Ferenczi in ‘‘Névrose du dimanche’’ (1919/
1974) saw a link between the development of anxiety
and the absence of exterior censure associated with a
need to work.
Bergeret, Jean. (1975). La dépression et les états limites. Paris:
Payot.
Kernberg, Otto F. (1975). Borderline conditions and pathological narcissism. New York: Jason Aronson.
Kohut, Heinz. (1971). The analysis of the self. New York:
International Universities Press.
Misès, Roger. (1990). Les Pathologies limites de l’enfance.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Widlöcher, Daniel. (1979). Preface to O. Kernberg, Les troubles limites de la personnalité. Toulouse: Privat.
Further Reading
Abend, Sander, Porder, Michael, and Willick, Martin.
(1983). Borderline Patients: Psychoanalytic Perspectives.
New York: International Universities Press.
Freud, Anna. (1956). The assessment of borderline cases. In
Writings (Vol. 5, pp. 301–314). New York: International
Universities Press.
Gabbard, Glen. (2001). Psychodynamic psychotherapy of
borderline personality disorder. Bulletin of the Menninger
Clinic, 65, 41–57
Fonagy, Peter. (2000). Attachment and borderline personality disorder. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 48, 1129–1146.
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With the introduction of the notion of the withdrawal of libidinal cathexis, psychoanalysis provided
significant insight into the concept of boredom. Without libidinal cathexis, one loses drive and an ability to
make demands, except for a need for a change associated with a miraculous arrival of an object that
would again give life to oneÕs activities. This feeling of
a loss of interest in things is, in fact, a loss of libido.
Otto Fenichel assimilated boredom with a type of
depersonalization in which the subject feels that he
must do something but does not know what. Heinz
Kohut pointed out the link between the analystÕs boredom and the feeling of exclusion that the patient provokes in him by withdrawing emotionally. Ralph
Greenson saw boredom as a defense against fantasy
activity or as a result of oneÕs unconscious perception
of oneÕs resistance.
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B O R E L , A D R I E N A L P H O N S E A L C I D E (1 886 –19 66)
The analysis of boredom reveals a kind of phobicobsessional fluctuation between withdrawal of libidinal
cathexis and ardent desire driving impulsive acts that provide an outlet (Mijolla-Mellor, 1985). As with inhibition,
boredom is not simply a lack of movement but a pointless
stagnation, to which is added an enduring hatred of time.
It is a defense against a phobic anxiety over a primary, but
undifferentiated, investment in objects.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Depersonalization; Decathexis; Mirror transference; Narcissistic transference; Time.
Bibliography
Fenichel, Otto. (1951). On the psychology of boredom. In
Selected papers of Fenichel. New York: W. W. Norton.
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1974). Difficultés techniques dÕune analyse dÕhystérie. Oeuvres complètes (Psychanalyse, Vol. 3).
Paris: Payot. (Original work published 1919)
———. (1974). Névrose des dimanches. Oeuvres complètes
(Psychanalyse, Vol. 3). Paris: Payot. (Original work published 1919)
Freud, Sigmund. (1910h). A special type of choice of object
made by men. SE, 11: 163–175.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies in hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
Greenson, Ralph R. (1967). The technique and practice of
psychoanalysis. New York: International Universities Press.
Kohut, Heinz. (1974). The analysis of the self (M. A. Lussier,
Trans.). New York: International Universities Press. (Original work published 1971)
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1985). La trame phobique de
lÕennui. Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, 32, 173–184.
BOREL, ADRIEN ALPHONSE ALCIDE
(1886–1966)
Adrien Borel, a French psychiatrist, was born March
19, 1886, at 80 rue Bonaparte in Paris, and died September 19, 1966, in Beaumont-lès-Valence. The only
son of a doctor from the Ardèche in southern France,
Borel studied in Privas and Lyon. He joined the army
for three years but gave up his commission after a year.
After moving to Paris to study medicine, he became an
intern in 1908 and a doctor of medicine in 1913. An
20 4
auxiliary surgeon during the First World War, he was
seriously wounded by a piece of shrapnel on March 1,
1915. After a brief stay in Aisnay-Le-Château, he
settled in Paris.
Part of the staff of LÕÉvolution psychiatrique, created
in 1925, he was a committed member of the Annales
Médico-Psychologiques, to which he was accepted in
1923 and made a full member in 1931. It was here that
he met Professor Briand, Georges Heuyer, Gilbert
Robin, and others. A participant in Henri ClaudeÕs
working group at Sainte-AnneÕs Hospital, he was one of
the twelve founding members of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society),
founded in 1926, and its president from 1932 to 1934.
He participated in several meetings but made few
references to psychoanalysis and none at all after the
1940s. He did not join the small group of analysts that
came together in Paris during the Occupation.
He had a lengthy and important affair (until 1940)
with Annette Berman, the secretary of Princess Marie
Bonaparte, and it was she who became his principal
point of contact with the world of psychoanalysis. Borel
himself never underwent analysis and after a few sessions
with several patients, including the writers Georges
Bataille and Michel Leiris, who publicized his name as
a therapist, he quickly abandoned analytic practice.
In 1940 he married Blanche, one of his former
patients, a woman whose identity always remained
ambiguous among his colleagues and friends. He never
introduced her as his wife in the world he frequented
and never involved her in his professional affairs.
His first research effort, his medical thesis (1913),
was devoted to organic and neurological theory. He
investigated several of the methods available at the
time, except the psychoanalytic method, to alleviate
mental suffering, which was his major concern. His
last article was about lobotomy (LÕÉvolution psychiatrique, 4, 1949). He worked in several hospitals (SainteAnne, Bichat) and in a number of private psychiatric
clinics, where he met ‘‘aesthetes,’’ drug addicts, and
individuals for whom public hospitals were out of the
question.
Interested in artists and writers, painters, and ‘‘creative’’ individuals in general, Borel participated with
René Allendy in the Groupement dÕÉtudes Philosophiques et Scientifiques pour lÕExamen des Tendances
Nouvelles (Philosophic and Scientific Study Group for
the Examination of New Trends) in 1922. He wrote a
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great deal, but much of his writing was destroyed. He
published no more than a handful of pages in his own
name, generally co-signing his work with other
authors, primarily Claude. He wrote one work jointly
with Robin, Les Rêveurs éveillés (Éditions Gallimard,
collection ‘‘Bleue,’’ 1925).
An extremely gentle man, according to Bataille, cordial and corpulent, BorelÕs energy often resulted in a
loss of temper and disagreements with others. Protective, good-natured, and paternal, he had many points
in common with the character of the Curé de Torcy, a
role he played at the age of sixty-four in Robert
BressonÕs film Diary of a Country Priest. He died
September 19, 1966, of a cerebral hemorrhage at his
summer home in Beaumont-lès-Valence.
NADINE MESPOULHÈS
See also: Berman, Anne; Claude, Henri Charles Jules;
Congrès des psychanalystes de langue française des pays
romans; France; Société Psychanalytique de Paris and
Institut de psychanalyse de Paris; Surrealism and
psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Borel, Adrien. (1934). La pensée magique dans lÕart. Revue
française de psychanalyse, 7, 1, 66–83.
———. (1934). LÕexpression de lÕineffable dans les états psychopathiques. L’Évolution psychiatrique, 3, 35–53.
———. (1935). Les convulsionnaires et le diacre Pâris.
L’Évolution psychiatrique, 4, 3–24.
———. (1940). La folie de Hitler est-elle celle de lÕAllemagne? Les Nouvelles littéraires, 6, 1.
BORNSTEIN, BERTA (1899–1971)
Child psychoanalyst Berta Bornstein was born in 1899
in the Austro-Hungarian city of Krakau (today
Kraków, Poland), and died on September 5, 1971, in
Maine in the United States.
Shortly after her birth, BornsteinÕs parents settled in
Berlin, where her father was an engineer. The eldest of
four children, she had one sister and two brothers.
As a young educator of handicapped children (Fürsorgerin) in Berlin, Bornstein was just twenty years old
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when she began analytic training with Hans Lampl
and Edward Bibring. She participated in the child
seminar directed by Otto Fenichel from 1924 to 1939
at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, and by 1929
was working closely in Vienna with Anna Freud.
BornsteinÕs loyalty to both Fenichel and Anna Freud
never wavered. She lived in Berlin, Vienna, Prague
and, after leaving Europe shortly before War World II,
in New York.
Bornstein brought innovative techniques to child
psychoanalysis. She emphasized the precocity of children and so was able to reduce the time required to
win their confidence. In her view, psychoanalysis of
children ought to proceed by way of analysis of the
defenses. ‘‘The introductory phase of child analysis
was dropped when Berta Bornstein developed the analysis of defenses,’’ stated Anna Freud in 1971 (Blos,
1974, p. 36).
Bornstein pioneered a new understanding of
latency. She revealed the dynamics of defense mechanisms and the progressive claims of identification and
sublimation. Bornstein was opposed to the widespread
view that latency is an ‘‘ideal’’ period during which
instinctual conflicts do not exist. She suggested that
latency could be divided into two stages: from five and
half to eight years of age, and from eight to ten. The
common factor is development of the superego as it
struggles against incestuous and pregenital wishes
expressed through masturbation. The first phase of
latency, Bornstein believed, is favorable for
psychotherapy.
Bornstein wrote only a few papers, but her clinical
cases are models of technical and theoretical clarity.
BornsteinÕs last analytic work, concerning ‘‘Frankie,’’ a
child of five-and-a-half years with symptoms of phobia, insomnia, and urine retention, would be validated
in a follow-up analysis of the patient as an adult, conducted and presented by Samuel Ritvo in 1965. She
was a widely admired teacher who taught not only at
the New York Psychoanalytic Institute but also at
the Menninger Clinic and Yale University. She was a
member of both the New York Psychoanalytic Society
and the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Society. The
name of her younger sister, Steffi, is frequently mentioned in accounts of the history of psychoanalysis; she
was also a child analyst but died prematurely, in Prague, in 1939.
SIMONE VALANTIN
205
B O S E , G I R I N D R A S E K H A R (1886 – 1953)
See also: Lehrinstitut der wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung; New York Psychoanalytic Institute; Primary
identification.
Bibliography
Blos, Peter. (1974). Berta Bornstein 1899–1971. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 29, 35–38.
Bornstein, Berta. (1935). Phobia in a two-and-a-half year
old child. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 4, 93–119.
———. (1945). Clinical notes on child analysis. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1, 151–166.
———. On latency. (1951). Psychoanalytic Study of the
Child, 6, 279–285.
———. (1953). Masturbation in the latency period. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 8, 65–78.
tic therapeutic technique, primarily aimed at cognitive
change, which was based on his theory of ‘‘opposite
wishes’’ (1933).
As he was the founder-president of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society and someone who conducted
most of the training analyses, BoseÕs idiosyncratic
technique came to characterize the therapeutic style of
most Indian psychoanalysts. BoseÕs contribution,
however, was less in the doubtful value of his new technique but in his emphasis on the role of culture in psychoanalysis. He did not uncritically accept the universalist premises of psychoanalysis, but engaged with
Freud in a lively correspondence where he pointed out
some of the cultural variations in psychoanalytic concepts, such as castration anxiety, which he had
encountered in his Indian patients. His other great
contribution was organizational in that he laid the
foundations of psychoanalysis in India and placed the
Indian Psychoanalytic Society on a sound footing
through the thirty-one years of his presidency and
until his death.
BOSE, GIRINDRASEKHAR (1886–1953)
Indian psychoanalyst and physician Girindrasekhar
Bose was born in 1886 and died in 1953. He was the
founder of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society.
Bose, the youngest of nine children, was the son
of a chief minister of a minor princely state in British India and a mother who was a poet. After finishing school, he studied chemistry in CalcuttaÕs Presidency College and then joined the Medical College
where he received his medical degree in 1910. He
was married at the age of seventeen to Indumati,
who bore him two daughters. He was greatly interested in yoga, magic, and hypnotism and in fact
used hypnotic therapy in his medical practice during
his early years and also occasionally after he became
a psychoanalyst.
While practicing, as a doctor, Bose studied psychology in the newly opened department of psychology at
Calcutta University. Appointed lecturer at the age of
31, after he finished his MasterÕs degree in two years,
he made psychoanalysis compulsory for all students of
psychology. His doctoral thesis, Concept of Repression
(1921) in which he blended Hindu thought with
Freudian concepts and which he sent to Freud, led to a
correspondence between the two men and to the formation of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society on
January 22, 1972. He developed his own overly didac20 6
SUDHIR KAKAR
See also: India.
Bibliography
Bose, Girindrasekhar. (1933). A New Theory of Mental Life.
Indian Journal of Psychology, 37–157.
Hartnack, Christiane. (1990). Vishnu on FreudÕs Desk: Psychoanalysis in Colonial India. Social Research, 57 (4), 921–949.
Indian Psychoanalytical Society. (1955). Special Issue on
Bose. Samiksa.
Kakar, Sudhir. (1997). Encounters of the psychological kind:
Freud, Jung and India. In Culture and Psyche: Psychoanalysis and India. New York, Psyche Press.
BOSTON PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY
AND INSTITUTE
Psychoanalysis in Boston dates from 1906, when James
Jackson Putnam published the first paper in English
on the treatment of hysteria by ‘‘FreudÕs method of
psycho-analysis.’’ In 1909, Putnam met Ernest Jones, a
Welshman then living in Canada, at Morton PrinceÕs
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house, where Boston psychiatrists regularly met to
discuss the current psychotherapies of suggestion.
Jones was a vigorous spokesman for Freud, and with
PutnamÕs growing enthusiasm for psychoanalysis,
both men took part in the annual meeting of the
American Therapeutic Society, opened by Morton
Prince. Putnam spoke on FreudÕs discoveries about the
childhood origins of adult neuroses, and Jones firmly
differentiated psychoanalysis from all the psychotherapies of suggestion. He emphasized the difference
between the hypnotistÕs domination of his subject and
the analystÕs use of free-association, ‘‘in almost every
respect the reverse of treatment by suggestion.’’
This meeting marked the high point of the psychotherapy movement, welcoming psychoanalysis as if
it were another form of suggestive therapy. Its importance was soon overshadowed in September 1909 by the
Clark University Lectures at Worcester, Massachusetts,
where G. Stanley Hall, an experimental psychologist
and friend of William James, had invited many notable
scientists to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of
Clark. Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung. Sándor
Ferenczi, Jones, and Abraham Arden Brill all attended.
Brill had studied analysis in Zürich with Jung in 1908,
where he met Jones, and together they had visited
Freud. At Clark, Freud delivered his Introductory Lectures, his only address to the general public, and was
invited by Putnam to visit their family camp after the
meetings.
Thus Putnam developed a close friendship with
Freud, reflected in their lively correspondence, and he
and Jones proselytized widely for the cause of psychoanalysis. Jones persuaded him to found the American
Psychoanalytic Association in 1911, and Putnam was
its first president. (Shortly before, Brill had founded
the New York Psychoanalytic Society.) Putnam established the first of several Boston Psychoanalytic
Societies in 1914, which met weekly until his death in
1918.
PutnamÕs successor was Isidor Coriat, who reestablished the Boston Psychoanalytic Society in
1924–1928, and again in 1930. He was the only Freudian analyst in Boston during the period after PutnamÕs death, leading an eclectic group of men and
women analyzed by Freud, Jung, Otto Rank, and Paul
Schilder.
During this era, Americans were obliged to travel
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trained analysts, led by Ives Hendrick, arrived in Boston
from Vienna and Berlin. They sought to create an institute, modeled on the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute,
that provided full analytic training, with analyses, seminars, and supervised control-cases. The first traininganalyst was Franz Alexander, who came to Boston in
1930 and returned a year later to found the Chicago
Psychoanalytic Institute. In Boston, Alexander was succeeded by Hanns Sachs, a leading training-analyst from
Berlin, but not a physician. This created conflicts with
HendrickÕs new constitution, which rejected non-M.D.s
for training, and required approval by an Admissions
Committee, rather than by the individual analyst. After
a stormy period of reorganization, half the membership
resigned, to allow ten properly analyzed members to be
approved by the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Boston became a constituent Society in 1933, and in
1947 a Society/Institute, called the BPSI.
The original members were mostly Americans, with
a few Canadians, until the arrival of Felix and Helene
Deutsch in 1935. They were part of the great intellectual migration, fleeing from Nazi domination in
Germany in 1933 and Austria in 1938. Within the vast
influx of refugee artists, scholars, and scientists that
transformed American cultural life, the émigré analysts formed a small but influential group. They most
nearly resembled the architects of the avant-garde
Bauhaus and the pioneer nuclear physicists, who
seemed to represent new specialties, already sought
after in Boston.
The European analysts were welcomed everywhere
by eager colleagues and by their former analysands. In
the Boston Institute, as its membership tripled over
the next ten years, the refugees soon outnumbered
their native American colleagues. Unlike other American cities with refugee analysts from all of Europe,
most of BostonÕs analysts were Viennese. This occurred
because the Deutsches were friends of Jenny and
Robert Waelder, the next to arrive. The Waelders
obtained an academic post for Edward Bibring,
accompanied by his wife Grete, and Mrs. Beata Rank
joined the DeutschesÕ circle. Lucie Jessner was the only
non-Austrian refugee who completed her analytic
training there.
As the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute became Europeanized, local American institutions were influential
in the distribution of analysts within the community.
The pioneer analyst Clarence Oberndorf had first
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noted the tendency for American analysts to hold
positions in institutions. They worked in hospitals,
medical schools, and schools of social work, in marked
contrast to FreudÕs isolation from academic medicine.
By 1949, ninety percent of Boston analysts held institutional posts of some kind, often working in research
teams with non-analysts.
Another local tradition was BostonÕs unusual number of institutions devoted to children, including
nineteenth-century protective agencies and the Home
for Little Wanderers. The Judge Baker Guidance Center dated from 1917, and the new J. J. Putnam ChildrenÕs Center from 1943, founded by Marian Putnam,
the daughter of BostonÕs first analyst, and Beata Rank
from FreudÕs Viennese circle. Created for the study
and treatment of preschool children, the Putnam Center came to specialize in the long-term treatment of
childhood autism. Child analysts were soon established in other clinics and all the university teaching
hospitals. Thus Boston became an important center
for training in child psychotherapy.
In two other American specialties, psychosomatic
medicine and general hospital psychiatry (consultationliaison psychiatry), Boston analysts played important
parts. Stanley Cobb, chief of psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and a founding
member of the BPSI, established the first department
of psychiatry in a general hospital in 1935. He taught
interns and medical students how to understand their
medical and surgical patients, as well as psychiatric
patients, a tradition his successor Erich Lindemann
continued with his medical students. Cobb welcomed
refugee analysts to the MGH and invited Felix Deutsch
to collaborate in psychosomatic research. Deutsch, like
Franz Alexander in Chicago, expanded psychosomatic
research into a major specialty, far beyond its limited
scope in Vienna.
After the Second World War, there was a great
increase in the demand for psychoanalytic training,
partly prompted by physicians returning from military
service. They had been exposed to great numbers of
psychiatric casualties and taught psychoanalytic methods of treatment, like the ‘‘abreaction’’ therapy of
Grinker and Spiegel. This demand for psychiatrists
was supported by a corresponding increase in government funds for psychoanalytic training and research.
The next twenty years was a halcyon era for psychoanalysis in Boston. The Institute increased from a few
20 8
dozen members in the 1930s to over one hundred
active and affiliate members in 1974 and more than
two hundred by the beginning of the twenty-first century. All the chiefs of psychiatry in hospitals and medical schools were analysts, and psychiatry was a popular
specialty for young physicians. For some residents psychoanalytic training was accepted as the next step in
academic advancement.
The high tide in analysis began to ebb in the
late 1960s, during the Vietnam War, with cuts in
federal support for analytic training and research. The
number of suitable patients for psychoanalysis began
to dwindle, both for analysts and for candidates with
supervised cases. Within the BPSI there was dissatisfaction among candidates and younger analysts, who
resented the impersonality of training and the dictatorship of the Education Committee. An experiment
with a deanship proved unsuccessful, and its termination by the Education Committee provoked violent
protests as high-handed and autocratic.
A period of strife followed, with attempts to create
a better balance between the functions of the Institute
and the Society. The conflict seemed to be between traditionalists and reformers, but the crucial issue was
resentment over the limited access to training-analyst
status. From 1973–1974, five training analysts proposed to secede from the Institute, while retaining
their membership in the Society. Their aims were
vague, but they emphasized the creation of a smaller
group, free from committee work and bureaucratic
rules, with a more intimate atmosphere for intellectual
discussion. The new Psychoanalytic Institute of New
England, called PINE, was recognized by the American
Psychoanalytic Association in 1991.
In spite of fears that Boston was too small for two
institutes, and that the new institute would graduate
many unqualified training-analysts, PINE proved
successful. Both institutes have flourished, and a third
Boston institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis (MIP) was founded by clinical psychologists.
All institutes have faced the continuing decline in
suitable patients and the recent loss of traditional psychiatric institutions, like the Massachusetts Mental
Health Center. In spite of these unfavorable changes in
the economic and cultural support for psychoanalysis,
as well as changes in clinical psychiatry and medicine
itself, the number of applicants for analytic training
has diminished relatively little. The BPSI has even
expanded in terms of outreach to the community,
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public lectures on cultural topics, and elective courses
for non-analysts on psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
The viability of analytic training seems partly sustained by offering supervision in long-term psychotherapy, while dynamic teaching in medical
schools has been declining. And the scientific and
intellectual life of the analytic community remains
lively and attractive, in contrast to the increasingly
organic orientation of current clinical psychiatry, with
its emphasis on drugs and the genetic etiologies of
mental illness.
SANFORD GIFFORD
Bibliography
Gifford, Sanford. (1978). Psychoanalysis in Boston: Innocence
and experience. In G. E. Gifford Jr. (Ed.), Psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and the New England medical scene, 1894–1944
(pp. 325–345). New York: Science History Publications.
Grinker, R. R., and Spiegel, J. P. (1934). War neuroses in
North Africa, the Tunisian campaign September–May 1943.
New York: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation.
Hale, Nathan G. Jr. (1971). Freud and the Americans: The
beginnings of psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–
1917. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. (1971). James Jackson Putnam and psychoanalysis.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Rosenzweig, Saul. (1992). The historic expedition to America
1909: Freud, Jung and Hall the king-maker. St. Louis, MO:
Rana House.
BOUNDARY VIOLATIONS
Boundary violations in psychoanalysis refer to the
egregious and potentially harmful transgressions of
the analytic frame that represent exploitation of the
patientÕs vulnerable position.
While the most widely discussed boundary violation is sexual relations between the analyst and the
patient, nonsexual boundary violations are common
as well. These may include such phenomena as soliciting donations from oneÕs patient, entering into a
business transaction with oneÕs patient, excessive selfdisclosure of the analystÕs personal problems, and
breaking the patientÕs confidentiality.
Maintaining professional boundaries should not
be construed as a call for rigidity. Indeed, a flexible
analytic frame is necessary to respond to patients with
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varying needs, conflicts, and deficits. The elasticity of
the frame reflects not only the patientÕs specific needs,
of course, but also the analystÕs subjectivity. Moreover,
there are situations in which a break of the frame may
be a helpful departure from the usual boundaries.
Gutheil and Gabbard have referred to these instances
as boundary crossings rather than violations.
In addition, counter-transference enactments are inevitable to some extent, and the differentiation between a
useful enactment and a boundary violation is sometimes
ambiguous. A useful enactment generally involves an analyst who has caught himself or herself in the midst of the
enactment before it escalates to the point of becoming a
serious violation. Also, the capacity of both patient and
analyst to analyze the incident may determine whether a
particular behavior is destructive or productive. Finally,
enactments that are repetitive and unresponsive to the
analystÕs own self-analytic efforts are more likely to be
harmful than those that are subjected to self-analytic
scrutiny and prevented from recurring.
The concept of boundary violations is a relatively
recent addition to the psychoanalytic literature, although
the early history of psychoanalysis was replete with such
violations. While Sándor Ferenczi was analyzing Elma
Palos, he professed his love for her and ultimately
referred her to Freud for analysis. Ernest JonesÕs common-law wife, Loë Kann, was a former patient of his.
Margaret Mahler acknowledged in her memoirs that she
had been sexually involved with her analyst, August
Aichhorn. Many of these instances were ignored; if they
did come to light within psychoanalytic institutes, the
solution was often to send the analyst back for more analysis rather than to take any form of disciplinary action.
With the rise of the womenÕs movement, female
patients became more assertive in expressing their
sense of having been exploited by male analysts (cases
of sexual boundary violations most commonly involve
a male analyst and a female patient), and some form of
reparation was often demanded.
Gutheil and Gabbard first attempted to delineate the
concept of boundary violation and boundary crossings
in a 1993 article. Subsequently, Gabbard and Lester
argued that preservation of professional boundaries not
only protects the patient from harm, but also serves to
create ‘‘the analytic object,’’ which is an amalgam of the
transference object and the new object jointly created by
the subjectivities of analyst and patient.
Critics of the new emphasis on boundary violations
have expressed concern that such limits may constrict
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the spontaneity of the analyst. Rigidity might prevent
the analyst from engaging the patient. Attention to
boundaries, however, does not promote coldness or
rigidity in the analytic relationship. The intent is exactly
the opposite. Professional boundaries define the parameters of the analytic relationship so that the patient
can interact in an atmosphere of safety that includes
an analyst who can be warm and spontaneous.
Another concern expressed about the concept of
professional boundaries is that sexual boundary violations are committed by predatory analysts with severe
psychopathy or antisocial personality disorders. Other
analysts, the argument goes, need not concern themselves with boundaries because they are essentially
ethical. Systematic studies of analysts who have had
sexual and nonsexual boundary violations with
patients, however, suggest that many who have otherwise been ethical and honest may be susceptible to falling in love with the patient and transgressing boundaries at a time in their lives when they are under great
personal stress. Hence there is a strong argument for
teaching constructs like professional boundaries and
boundary violations to all analysts.
GLEN O. GABBARD
See also: Abstinence/rule of abstinence; Collected Papers
on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects; Counter-transference; Dependence; Psychoanalytic treatment; Transference love; Trangression.
Bibliography
Gabbard, Glen O. (1995). The early history of boundary violations in psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, 43, 1115–1136.
Gabbard, Glen O., and Lester, Eva. (1995). Boundaries and
boundary violations in psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books.
Gutheil, Thomas G., and O. Gabbard, Glen O. (1993). The
concept of boundaries in clinical practice: Theoretical and
risk-management dimensions. American Journal of Psychiatry, 150 , 188–196.
BOUVET, MAURICE CHARLES MARIE
GERMAIN (1911–1960)
A French psychoanalyst, Maurice Charles Marie Germain Bouvet was born August 14, 1911, in Eu (Seine21 0
Maritime) and died on May 5, 1960, in Paris. His
father, a graduate of the École Polytechnique and a
career officer, married while he was stationed in
Clermont-Ferrand. It was here that Bouvet completed
his secondary education and his medical studies. He
did his internship between 1931 and 1932.
After arriving in Paris he was appointed a resident
in 1936, a doctor at a psychiatric clinic in 1939, and
made head of clinical services under Professor LaignelLavastine in 1940. In 1942 he served as doctor and
interim director of the psychiatric hospital in Moisselles and was transferred to a hospital in Clermont in
the Oise region of France from 1943 to 1945.
Because of his fragile health, Bouvet began to
experience problems with his vision by 1940, which
resulted in near blindness. During the Occupation he
began a teaching analysis with Georges Parcheminey,
soon followed by supervised analyses with John Leuba
and Sacha Nacht. He became a member of the Paris
Psychoanalytic Society in 1946 and was made a member on November 16, 1948. For a number of years
Bouvet served as treasurer and vice president, before
becoming president in 1956. During the period prior
to the 1953 split in the society, Bouvet felt that liberalization of the organization was needed. However,
possibly because of the analysis he was conducting
with Daniel Lagache, Bouvet decided to remain neutral. He subsequently decided to remain within the
society, primarily because of his medical background.
His publications had attracted notice as early as
1948. In November 1952, he was reporter for the XV
Conférence des Psychanalystes de Langues Romanes,
whose topic was ‘‘The Ego in Obsessive Neurosis:
Object Relations and Defense Mechanisms.’’ In 1954
he published ‘‘La cure-type’’ (The standard cure) in
the Encyclopédie médico-chirurgicale, there describing
the distinction between ‘‘transference resistance’’ and
‘‘resistance to transference.’’ In that same article
Bouvet expressed his fidelity to Freud, indicating
that interpretation must adhere closely to the behavior of the ego. The following year Jacques LacanÕs
article ‘‘Les variantes de la cure’’ (Different forms of
therapy) seemed to supply a rebuttal to Bouvet, the
only theoretician in the Paris Psychoanalytic Society
who could take advantage of his growing reputation.
He returned to the problems of therapy during the
Twentieth International Psychoanalytic Congress,
which took place in Paris in July 1957, with a report
on ‘‘Les variations de la technique (Distance et
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variations)’’ [Variations in technique: Distance and
variations].
Lacan maintained his critical stance while Bouvet promoted ‘‘object relations’’ in 1952 and completed his
study of the subject in ‘‘La clinique psychanalytique. La
relation dÕobjet’’ (Clinical practice in psychoanalysis:
Object relations), published in La Psychanalyse aujourd Õhui (1959). For Bouvet the object relation represents ‘‘a flow of drive energy, a movement controlled
and directed by the ego toward external objects.’’ He
described the various aspects of object relations and
their pathological states, such as phobias, obsessions,
psychoses, and perversions, emphasizing the regression
to oral or anal object relations in ‘‘pregenital’’ subjects
with ‘‘weak’’ egos. He established a ‘‘distance relation’’
between the subject and its objects, which becomes
greater as these are transformed by projection.
Bouvet studied these mechanisms in detail, especially
in the context of obsessive neurosis, and described the
states of depersonalization that occur whenever the
patient is unable to defend himself through isolation
because of the uncontrollable violence of his affects and
the predominant anal-sadistic projection that characterizes such patients. This was the theme of the XXI Congrès des Psychanalystes de Langues Romanes in April
1960: ‘‘Dépersonnalisation et relation dÕobjet.’’ Unfortunately the decline in his health prevented Bouvet from
presenting the article, which was read by Pierre Marty.
Afflicted with malignant hypertension and respiratory
failure, he died on May 5, at the age of forty-nine.
The analyst of André Green, Michel de MÕUzan,
François Perrier—and even, for a short while, of Maryse Choisy—he was remembered through the creation
of the Prix Maurice Bouvet in 1962; his publications
were collected and published in 1968. As Michel de
MÕUzan wrote in his introduction, ‘‘For many Michel
Bouvet was a master, but a discreet master, who was as
demanding in the affirmation of his knowledge as he
was in his sense of freedom. Nothing demonstrates
this better than the way his ideas were transmitted.’’
Although he is not widely remembered today and
his concepts of the object relation and standard cure
have assumed negative and outmoded connotations in
France (unlike the United States), he remains a key figure in the theoretical and clinical fields he investigated
throughout his life.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
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See also: Congrès des psychanalystes de langue française
des pays romans ; Depersonalization; Object; Psychoanalytic treatment; Société psychanalytique de Paris and
Institut de psychanalyse de Paris.
Bibliography
Bouvet, Maurice. (1968). Œuvres psychanalytiques, 2, Résistances, transfert. Paris: Payot.
Green, André. (1960). L’œuvre de Maurice Bouvet. Revue
française de psychanalyse, 24 (6), 685–702.
Hommage à Maurice Bouvet. (1960). Revue française de psychanalyse, 24 (6), 675–720.
Sauguet, Henri. (1960). La carrière de Maurice Bouvet.
Revue française de psychanalyse, 24 (6), 679–683.
BOWLBY, EDWARD JOHN MOSTYN
(1907–1990)
An English psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Edward
John Bowlby was born February 26, 1907, in London
and died September 2, 1990, in Skye Ball, Great Britain. His childhood was divided between an urban life
in London, where he was raised by nannies, and vacations in the countryside with his family. In 1938 he
married Ursula Hongstaffs, a musician, with whom he
had four children. He began his medical studies in
1929 in London and entered into analysis with Joan
Rivière. He worked as a psychiatrist at the London
Child Guidance Clinic until the war, when he joined
the army. After the war Bowlby joined the Tavistock
Clinic, where he served as director of the childrenÕs
center from 1950 to 1972. As Donald WinnicottÕs
secretary at the British Psychoanalytical Society from
1956 to 1961, he organized training sessions and
research activities. From 1950 to 1972 he was a mental
health consultant for the World Health Organization.
In 1980 he was named professor of psychoanalysis at
University College in London.
Bowlby studied psychoanalysis in order to become a
child psychoanalyst. His first supervised psychoanalysis
with Melanie Klein in 1937 soon revealed a fundamental difference between them: For Bowlby the environment and its role were not sufficiently accounted for in
KleinÕs theories. Based on his highly original clinical
training (he worked with handicapped and institutionalized children) and his sensitivity to the function of the
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mother-child bond and the environment, he developed
the position that the instinct for preservation is as
important as that of sexuality and that the mother-child
bond is independent of infantile sexuality.
His admission to the British Psychoanalytical
Society, which was then (in 1940) torn by the struggles
between Kleinians and supporters of Anna Freud, is
important. Bowlby acknowledged his connection to
Anna Freud while regretting her refusal to accept the
reality of trauma. In 1958, for the appearance of his
article ‘‘The Nature of the ChildÕs Tie to his Mother,’’
Bowlby proposed a revision of metapsychology: abandonment of the theory of anaclisis, abandonment of
the economic point of view, emphasis on the dynamic
point of view, and definition of the unconscious as the
interiorization of interpersonal experiences. He was
criticized and rejected by the Psychoanalytical Society
with unusual severity. Deeply wounded by the reaction
of his peers, he gradually withdrew from the Society,
and turned to other scientific activities then in vogue
(ethology, cybernetics, and systems theory). He
worked for more than twenty years on his book on
attachment. It was only after 1981 that he was asked to
return to analysis and develop the clinical and psychotherapeutic implications of his theory.
BowlbyÕs work had a tremendous impact on public
health especially, in providing a better understanding of
the effects of separation on young children, and the prevention of these effects. He also made numerous contributions to social science: contributions to developmental psychology and psychiatry, especially the roles of
security, reciprocity, intersubjectivity, and the interpersonal development of thought in the young child; contributions to the understanding and management of
borderline states; theorization of so-called non-specific
factors in psychotherapy, and treatment of so-called
‘‘inaccessible’’ families subject to multiple risks.
NICOLE GUÉDENEY
See also: Abandonment; Aphanisis; Attachment; Great
Britain; Maternal care; Primary need; Psychoanalytic
Study of the Child, The; Schur, Max; Stranger; Tavistock
Clinic; Tenderness.
Bibliography
Bowlby, John. (1944). Forty-four juvenile thieves: Their
characters and home life. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 25, 1–57; 207–228.
21 2
———. (1951). Maternal care and mental health. Geneva:
World Health Organization Monographs.
———. (1969). Attachment and loss (Vol. 1). London:
Hogarth Press.
Eagle, Morris. (1995). The developmental perspectives of
attachment and psychoanalytic theory. In S. Goldberg,
R. Muir, J. Kerr (Eds.), Attachment theory. Social, developmental and clinical perspectives (pp. 123–153). Hillsdale,
NJ-London: The Analytic Press.
Holmes, Jeremy. (1993). John Bowlby and attachment theory.
London: Routledge.
BRAIN AND PSYCHOANALYSIS, THE
The effort to establish the relationships between psychological functioning, the organization of the apparatus that implements it, and the working and structure
of the brain, is an issue that has been raised continually
since the beginnings of psychoanalysis. Psychic activity
that arises wholly independent of the brain itself is
inconceivable. The question is whether we can identify
specific cerebral mechanisms and structures that could
be said to govern those characteristics of mental functioning that psychoanalysis has discovered.
This means viewing psychoanalysis in the context
of a much more general problem, that of the relationship and interaction between mind and brain. Freud
was confronted with this question long before he
developed an interest in psychopathology and the psychotherapy of hysteria. His work on aphasia (1891b) is
part of what has been rightly described as a neuropsychological tradition (Pribram and Gill).
In the early 1890s, thanks to the anatomicopathological methods introduced by Paul Broca, it was
shown that the function of language resulted from
independent mechanisms that could be altered in isolation and that such specific alterations were tied to
relatively localized lesions. This work, especially that
of Carl Wernicke, confirmed the existence of cerebral
localizations and the ‘‘modular’’ nature of the mechanisms involved in the exercise of particular functions.
Freud, anticipating the findings of much later neuropsychology, went on to criticize the exaggeratedly
modular approach involved in this conception of the
brain and proposed a more comprehensive and functionalist view of cerebral activity according to which
the ‘‘centers’’ identified would participate in carrying
out their respective functions.
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In 1895, in what is known as his ‘‘Project for a
Scientific Psychology,’’ a work that remained unfinished and was later abandoned, and which was to have
been titled ‘‘Psychology for Neurologists,’’ Freud proposed a structural and functional model based on the
recently recognized concept of the neurone to describe
brain functions in relation to mental activity. Like
many others at the time (Gauchet), he was careful
to conceive of mental activity independently of
consciousness, and attempted to base his picture of
psychic functioning on the model of the brain. That
picture already bore the imprint of FreudÕs own
metapsychology, especially with respect to the assimilation of consciousness to an internal perception, the
dissociation between perception and memory traces,
the priority of ‘‘hallucinatory’’ representation over reality, and in other facets.
Freud soon abandoned any pretensions to constructing a model of the brain likely to account for the features
of mental life revealed by psychoanalysis. This abandonment was strictly methodological, however, and throughout his work he firmly maintained the idea that brain
mechanisms must ultimately determine these features.
On several occasions, in fact, he risked drawing parallels
between cerebral and metapsychological models.
Subsequently, and especially during the last four
decades of the twentieth century, the considerable progress made in understanding the brain has not failed
to invite speculation among psychoanalysts. Hemispheric laterality, cortical-subcortical dissociation,
individualization of the limbic circuit, experiments
with self-stimulation leading to the isolation of structures of positive and negative reinforcement (pleasure–
unpleasure), humoral transmission systems, and so on,
have resulted in research and the construction of models involving a distinct parallelism.
This immediately raises several questions. No one
contests the need to postulate the existence of cerebral
mechanisms, but does it follow that we need them to
identify the symbolic structures (language, social structures, etc.) that influence mental development? Clearly
every particular aspect of mental life can be explained
by some form of psychological determinism, but what
can be said about the functions of dreaming, in particular its function as a guardian of sleep? Will we ever establish any strict isomorphism between brain functions
and mental functions? All such questions are still open.
More generally, a distinction may usefully be drawn
between those who believe that the psychoanalytic
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conception of mental life can help us understand the
workings of the brain and those who feel that this
understanding must involve reducing the complexity
of observed mental activities to elementary cognitive
mechanisms. This debate affects psychoanalysts and
philosophers as well as specialists in brain physiology.
DANIEL WIDLÖCHER
See also: Hard science and psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1891b [1953]). On aphasia (a critical
study) (E. Stengel, Trans.). New York: International Universities Press.
———. (1950c [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology.
SE, 1: 281–387.
Gauchet, Marcel. (1992). L’Inconscient cérébral. Paris: Le
Seuil.
Pribram, Karl H., and Gill, Merton M. (1976). Freud’s ‘‘project’’ reassessed. London: Hutchinson.
BRAZIL
Psychoanalysis aroused strong resistance when it first
appeared in Brazil, provoking different reactions in
different milieux. Salvador-born Julian Moreira
(1873–1933) was the first to speak of Freud, in 1899.
In 1903 he was appointed director of the national hospital for the insane in Rio de Janeiro, where he settled
for the rest of his life. An innovative psychiatrist with
an international reputation, he invited his disciples
and collaborators to study psychoanalytic ideas. In
1914 Jenserico Aragão de Souza Pinto published ‘‘On
Psychoanalysis. Sexuality in the Neuroses.’’ Two conferences in 1919 awoke the interest of future psychoanalysts: Franco da RochaÕs ‘‘On delusion in general’’
(at São Paulo) and ‘‘Psychology of a neurologist—
Freud and his sexual theories’’ by Medeiros e Albuquerque in Rio de Janeiro.
In the 1920s, physicians in São Paulo and Rio sometimes criticized psychoanalysis in a Manichean fashion: on the one hand it was labeled charlatanesque
while being enthusiastically hailed on the other. It
must also be said that psychoanalytic ideas arrived at a
time of great effervescence that saw the publication of
‘‘modernist’’ literary reviews and the Semana de Arte
Moderna in 1922. Influenced by the European
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avant-garde, this atmosphere facilitated the acceptance
of psychoanalytic ideas in São Paulo.
It was there that Durval Marcondes published several articles and Osorio Cesar wrote about the artistic
productions of the mentally ill. Among Juliano
MoreiraÕs disciples in Rio, Antonio Austregesilo produced somewhat superficial work but others, such as
Neves Manta, Carneiro Ayrosa, and Murilo de Campos, were doing more important work, and Deodato
de Morais was busy producing his excellent book A
psicanálise na Educacao (1927), while J. P. PortoCarrero continued to work on many books and
articles.
Again in Rio but outside MoreiraÕs entourage, Henrique Roxo was quoting Freud as early as 1905 but he
proved to be very organicistic in his views. During the
1930s Aloysio de Paula wrote on applied psychoanalysis and Gastão Pereira da Silva, a physician and journalist, contributed to propagating psychoanalytic
ideas. Mauricio de Medeiros, who occupied the chair
of psychiatry in the 1950s institution, supported the
psychoanalytic approach.
Although born at Alagoas, Arthur Ramos, physician
and psychiatrist, was considered to be a citizen of
Bahia. His thesis Primitivo e locura (1925) was widely
commented on and, between 1930 and 1932, he studied FreudÕs work with a small group. He settled in
Rio in 1934. A professor of anthropology and ethnography, he became a renowned specialist on Africa and
wrote some psychoanalytic works. At Porto Alegre in
1924, João Cesar de Castro wrote Concepcao Freudiana
das Psiconeuroses and in France Martim Gomes published Les Rêves (1928). Ulisses Pernambucan came
under the influence of Juliano Moreira while studying
medicine in Rio. He went on to become a pioneer of
social psychiatry in Brazil and considered psychoanalysis as the subtlest means of penetrating the human
mind.
In 1927 Marcondes founded the first Sociedade brasiliera de psicanálise in São Paulo. Although it had no
training section it was nevertheless recognized by the
International Psychoanalytic Association with a view
to propagating FreudÕs ideas. In 1928 Marcondes gave
his blessing to the setting up of a subsidiary branch in
Rio (V. Rocha, Marcondes, and Porto-Carrero).
Thanks to MarcondesÕs persistent pressure on Ernest Jones, the Jewish German psychoanalyst Adelheid
L. Koch, who had been analyzed by Otto Fenichel,
21 4
emigrated to São Paulo with her husband in 1936, and
in 1937 began to analyze Durval Marcondes, Darcy
Mendonça Uchôa, Virginia Bicudo, Flavio Dias, and
Frank Philips, soon to be joined by three more
patients. Because she was the only qualified analyst,
she singlehandedly conducted analyses, gave seminars
and acted as supervisor. The first São Paulo Grupo psicanalı́tico, which she founded in 1944 with her first
analysands, was provisionally accepted in 1945 as the
Sociedade brasileira de psicanálise de São Paulo
(SBPSP). It received definitive recognition at the
Amsterdam Congress (1951).
The early days in Rio de Janeiro were not so easy.
Dissatisfied with the official teaching of psychiatry, a
group of young physicians founded the Centro de
estudos Julian Moreira in 1944 and envisaged two possible hypotheses for the formation of a future psychoanalytic group: either to invite training analysts or
seek training elsewhere. Intense correspondence with
foreign analysts bore no fruit. Thus, from 1945 to
1947, Alcyon Baer Bahia, Danilo Perestrello, Marialzira
Perestrello, and Walderedo Ismael de Oliveira began
training at the Asociación Psicoanalı́tica Argentina
(APA) with analysts who had qualified in Berlin, Paris,
Vienna, and Buenos Aires.
In 1947 the Instituto brasileiro de psicanálise was
founded in Rio in order to facilitate the legal arrival of
foreign analysts. Mark Burke, analyzed by James Strachey and a member of the British Psycho-Analytic
Society (BPS), arrived in February 1948. He was
followed in December 1948 by Werner Kemper, a
German psychoanalyst analyzed by Carl MüllerBraunschweig and who had worked during World
War II in the Göring Institute before joining the DPG
(Deutsche Psycoanalytische Gesellschaft). They both
commenced training analyses almost immediately. In
the beginning Burke and Kemper worked in collaboration with each other but in 1951 they separated amidst
serious mutual reproaches. Kemper was expelled from
the institute and, along with his analysands, founded
the Centro de estudos psicanalı́ticos.
The four physicians who had gone to Buenos Aires
returned between 1949 and 1950, both Perestrello and
Walderedo having become associate members of the
APA. Three groups were then formed: ‘‘the Argentineans,’’ BurkeÕs group, and KemperÕs group. The
‘‘Argentine’’ group formed no alliances with either of
the other two. When Burke suddenly left Brazil before
his group had completed their training, three of his
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students left for London and the others completed
their supervisions at São Paulo.
During the 1953 international conference in London, KemperÕs group was recognized as a study group
under the sponsorship of the SBPSP, and as the Sociedade psicanalı́tica do Rio de Janeiro (SPRJ) at the 1955
international conference in Geneva. Its founders
included seven full members (Werner Kemper, Kattrin
Kemper, Fabio Leite Lobo, Gerson Borsoi, Inaura
Carneiro Leão Vetter, Luiz Guimarães Dahlheim,
Noemy Rudolfer) and four associate members.
Three Brazilians arrived from London in 1954 and
1956 (two of them as associate members of the BPS).
They became known as ‘‘the English.’’ After a series of
agreements and disagreements, the ‘‘Argentineans,’’ the
‘‘English,’’ and the ‘‘Burkians’’ finally accepted the
sponsorship of São Paulo and were recognized as
study groups at the Paris congress in 1957. The founders were the full members A. A. Bahia, D. Perestrello,
and Walderedo I. de Oliveira (of the APA) and Henrique Mendes (SBPSP), with, as associate members,
Decio Sobres de Souza and Edgar Guimarães de
Almeida (of the BPS), M. Perestrello (APA), Mario
Pacheco de Almeida Prado (SBPSP), and three physicians who were finishing their training at São Paulo.
At the Copenhagen congress in 1959, the group was
recognized as the Sociedade brasileira de psicanálise
do Rio de Janeiro (SBPRJ), with fourteen founders
from different backgrounds: the eight previously mentioned, along with Luiz L. Werneck, Joáo Côrtes de
Barros, and Pedro Ferreira (already qualified with the
SBPSP), M. T. Lyra (associate member of the BPS),
Inaura Carneiro Leáo Vetter and Zenaira Aranha
(SPRJ), analyzed by Kemper. In Rio Grande do Sul,
Mario Martins, Zaira Martins (1945), and José
Lemmertz (1947) began their analytic training with
the APA. The Martins couple returned in 1947 and
Lemmertz in 1949. They qualified a few years later.
During the Edinburgh congress in 1961, the Porto
Alegre study group was accepted under the sponsorship of the SPRJ. And the Sociedade Psicanalı́tica de
Porto Alegre (SPPA) was recognized at the Stockholm
conference in 1963 with, as founders, the three previously mentioned members, along with Cyro Martins
(APA), Celestino Prunes, and Ernesto La Porta (SPRJ),
together with José Maria Santiago Wagner (already in
training at Porto Alegre). In 1946 Iracy Doyle Ferreira
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ing she spread the contributions of Harry Stack
Sullivan, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Abram
Kardiner. Around 1950 she started several training
analyses and, in 1952, founded the Instituto de Medicina Psicológica (IMP), which received WAIP authorization in 1953.
On May 6, 1967, the Associacão Brasileira de Psicanálise (ABP) was founded with a view to uniting the
four societies recognized by the IPA in order to foster
and provide assistance for future core and study
groups and to publish a joint review. In 1975 the ABP
created the Recife psychoanalytic core group and the
Pelotas core group in 1987. Having met all the requirements of the IPA, these two groups were admitted as
study groups. The Sociedade Psicanalı́tica de Recife
and the Sociedade Psicanalı́tica de Pelotas became provisional study groups at the San Francisco congress in
1995. Three new study groups were recognized: the
Porto Alegre group in 1992, the Ribeirão Preto group
in 1993, and the Brası́lia group in 1994. During the
Barcelona congress in 1997, the first of these groups
was admitted as the Sociedade brasileira de Psicanálise
de Porto Alegre. In 2005 four other core groups,
located at Belo Horizonte, Campo Grande, Curitiba,
and Espı́rito Santo were working with a view to being
recognized as study groups.
Durval Marcondes, Mario Martins, and Danilo Perestrello were posthumously named honorary presidents of the ABP.
The military dictatorship (1964 to 1985) affected
not only political life but also, in a direct and particularly harsh manner, the cultural life of the country.
Ideas were suppressed and censorship was openly
practiced in university, literary, artistic, and scientific
circles, as witnessed by the events at the famous Instituto Oswaldo Cruz. The atrocities committed by
groups and individuals in the name of ‘‘Institutional
Acts’’ are known throughout the world. The psychoanalytic milieu also suffered an unhealthy influence.
Although some candidates and analysts took an active
part in the struggle for the redemocratization of the
country, others proved to be full of anti-communist
prejudice. However, some of these same colleagues,
while being politically to the right, maintained a psychoanalytic position in their consulting rooms without
blindly submitting to their political ideology.
In 1973 the clandestine newspaper Voz Operária
denounced Amilcar Lobo Moreira da Silva, a candidate for the SPRJ (Rio I), as a member of the military
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policeÕs torture squad. An analyst from the other Rio
society, SBPRJ (Rio II), Helena Besserman Vianna,
sent the press cutting to Argentina, where it was published in the review Questionamos, directed by Maria
Langer. The denouncement was communicated to the
IPA and other psychoanalytic societies, along with the
name of the candidate and his analyst, Leáo Cabernite.
This courageous denouncement was not taken
seriously by Serge Lebovici, president of the IPA, or by
David Zimmermann, president of the Coordinating
Committee for Psychoanalytic Organizations in
Latin America (COPAL), nor was it credited by the
managing council for Rio I, with Leáo Cabernite as
its president. It was considered to be a ‘‘rumor’’ and
‘‘calumny’’ against Amilcar Lobo. A persecution campaign was started against the person who made the
denunciation (who suffered the consequences in her
society) and not against its subject.
An IPA committee visiting Rio came to no firm
conclusion, but in October 1980 Amilcar Lobo was
definitively excluded from the SPRJ as a trainee candidate. In 1981 ex-prisoners identified Amilcar Lobo
before the Commission for the Rights of Man of the
Brazilian Bar Association. When questioned, the exprisoners provided the following statements: ‘‘Lobo
did not torture people directly but he supervised prisonersÕ health to determine whether they could continue to be tortured or not.’’ Sometimes ‘‘Lobo acted
in two stages: firstly he evaluated vital data and
checked their capacity to resist torture, then he administered medicines intravenously in order to make it
easier to acquire information.’’ In 1986 a group of prisoners appeared at an assembly of the SPRJ to confirm
these accusations. In 1988, when LoboÕs guilt had been
proven, the regional medical council struck him off
the register of physicians. The federal council later
amended the suspension to thirty days. Informed of
this situation, the IPA wrote to the SPRJ stating the
necessity of expelling Cabernite. Cabernite had
resigned not long before in ‘‘disgust’’ at the IPAÕs attitude and now asked to be reinstated. In the course of
an assembly in 1993 he was reinstated by vote. Disturbed by this resolution, which they considered to be
contrary to the statutes, the president of Rio I, Claudio
de Campos, and his colleagues in the managing council resigned from their positions. An ethics commission was formed to study the Cabernite case. After a
two-year study, a long report recommended expelling
Cabernite from the society and suspending another
21 6
incriminated member, La Porta, for one year. At the
end of 1995 an assembly of Rio I discussed the report
and refused to accept the recommendations of the
ethics commission. Six members resigned immediately. This was followed by a controversial debate,
many members of the SPRJ being unable to accept this
‘‘lack of respect’’ for the study and efforts of the ethics
commission. To highlight their difference from the leadership of Rio I without however resigning from it,
they founded the Groupo Pró-Etica and published a
small journal, Destacamento.
Other societies manifested their discontent when
Cabernite was granted an amnesty, speaking of a possible sanction for the SPRJ. For several years the executive
council of the IPA had not considered the BessermanLobo-Cabernite problem in an impartial fashion. In
1995, however, during the presidency of Horacio Etchegoyen, the executive committee rehabilitated Helena
Besserman Vianna and in 1997 appointed an ad hoc
investigating commission consisting of members from
Europe and North and South America to study all the
documents and present a report that would be available to all IPA members at Barcelona. Having heard all
parties in the dispute, the executive council was to elucidate the problem in an objective manner.
In March, 1997, Cabernite resigned definitively
from the SPRJ. The report considered him guilty of
unethical and morally reprehensible conduct and concluded that he could not be admitted under any circumstances into any IPA-affiliated psychoanalytic
society. During the Barcelona congress in July 1997,
the executive council unanimously accepted and ratified the ad hoc commissionÕs report.
Psychoanalytic ideas were first introduced at a university level by Marcondes, Bicudo, Danilo Perestrello,
and Oliveira, and later by Mendonça Uchôa, Renato
Mezzan, Portella Nunes, Prunes, P. Guedes, and Zimmermann. Medical (non-psychiatric) circles were pervaded with a dynamically charged atmosphere under
the influence of Danilo Perestrello, Gernandes Pontes,
Miller de Paiva, and Capizano, who inculcated psychosomatic concepts and accorded great importance to
the physician-patient relationship, with the help of
Mario and Cyro Martins, J. Mello Filho, A. Eksterman,
and others. With regard to the relationship between
psychoanalysis and the arts, literature, and mythology,
it is essential to mention the contributions of Bahia,
Cyro Martins, Meneghini, Hermann, Marialzira
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Perestrello, Nosek, Oliveira, Honigsztejn, David Azoubel, and many more. Nise da Silveira conducted
research into the artistic production of mental patients
and created the ‘‘Museu do Inconsciente.’’ Some articles by these authors have become known abroad.
In 1928 Marcondes published the first and only
issue of Revista brasileira de psicanálise, although the
review reappeared in 1967 with the BPA. The SBPSP
publishes the IDE review and its Institute publishes
the Jornal de psicanálise. For two years the two Rio
societies published the Revista de psicanálise do Rio de
Janeiro. The SBPSP publishes TRIEB and the SPPA
publishes the Revista de psicanálise de Porto Alegre.
It must be said that the country has other societies
in addition to those affiliated with the IPA. The shortlived Sociedade de psicologia individual (Adlerian)
was founded in the 1930s. In 1994, during the presidency of Horus Vital Brazil, the IMP took on the name
Sociedade psicanalı́tica Iracy Doyle and was affiliated
with the International Federation of Psychoanalytical
Societies (IFPS). It publishes Tempo psicanalı́tico and
Cadernos do Tempo psicanalı́tico. The Sociedade brasileira de psicoterapia de grupo was founded in December 1958 with twenty-six members and Walderedo de
Oliveira as president. Following the foundation of the
Associação brasileira de psicoterapia analı́tica de
grupo, the affiliated societies changed their name to
‘‘Analytic group psychotherapy.’’ The Rio de Janeiro
society is currently called GRADIVA. The Cı́rculo brasileiro de psicanálise, founded in 1956 in southern
Brazil, is affiliated to the IFPS and comprises about ten
sections scattered over several cities. The Recife society
publishes two reviews: Revista psicanalı́tica and Cadernos de psicanálise. In 1963, in Belo Horizonte, Father
Malomar Lund Edelweiss founded the Cı́rculo psicanalı́tico de psicologia profunda (Igor Caruso),
affiliated with the IFPS, which in turn led to the
founding of other societies.
Because the two Rio IPA-affiliated societies refused
to accept non-physicians, a group of nine psychologists founded the Sociedade de psicologia clı́nica in
Rio in 1971 with Maria Regina Domingues de Morais
as president. In 1989 it changed its name to Sociedade
de psicanálise da cidade and published Foco and
Cadernos de psicanálise. In 1967 Werner Kemper
returned to Germany leaving his wife Kattrin and two
sons in Brazil. In 1968 she left the SPRJ, followed by
several of her analysands. In 1969 four of them along
with four people linked to Father Malomar founded
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the Cı́rculo psicanalı́tico do Rio de Janeiro (affiliated
to the IFPS), which Kattrin Kemper joined in 1972.
In São Paulo the Sedes Sapientiae, founded in the
1970s, took an active interest in social problems, organized specialist courses, a psychoanalysis department
from 1985, and published Percurso. With a Jungian
orientation, the Sociedade brasiliera de psicologia analı́tica (founded in São Paulo in 1975) and the Associação jungiana brasileira operate in São Paulo and Rio.
They are both affiliated with the International Association for Analytic Psychology.
There are many Lacanian societies. The Campo
freudiano was dissolved after operating for fifteen
years and, spurred on by Jacques-Alain Miller, eleven
founders created the Escola Brasileira de Psicanálise do
campo freudiano (EBP) in Rio de Janeiro in June
1995. The EBP is a member of the World Association
of Psychoanalysis and numbers five sections and three
secretariats. It would be impossible to mention all the
societies and groups in the different schools: It is currently essential to maintain a certain pluralism in
terms of ideas.
Following the IFPS 1989 congress, a Forum brasileiro de psicanalı́se was opened up to all societies with
a view to reconciling different theories. Emilio Rodrigué, a former full member of the APA, has lived at Salvador (Bahia) for more than twenty years. Without
belonging to any society, he is respected for his profound humanistic culture and his independent spirit.
FreudÕs work has been and still continues to be the
basic subject of study in the majority of Brazilian
societies. As early as 1950, Kleinian ideas enjoyed
great popularity in Rio and São Paulo, thanks to
Decio de Souza, V. Bicudo, Philips, and Lyra, and
thanks to the couple Mario and Zaira Martins at
Porto Alegre. Some Rio and São Paulo analysts
underwent a second analysis and attended seminars
and supervisions at the British Society. Several Kleinians visited Brazil. For several years the founders
and members of societies not affiliated to the IPA
attended courses by Arminda Aberastury and Mauricio Knobel. Sándor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Wilhelm
Reich, and William Fairbairn were studied in turn.
Donald Winnicott has been taught since 1970. Bahia
and Philips, and then León Grinberg, introduced
Wilfred Bion in the 1970s, and his theories continue
to receive widespread dissemination. Heinz KohutÕs
self psychology has been taught since 1980. Many
societies not affiliated to the IPA conduct in-depth
217
BREAKDOWN
studies of Lacanian thought, which was not introduced in IPA societies until the end of the twentieth
century. The different schools are involved in disputing the right to dispense training in a more democratic manner than formerly.
MARIALZIRA PERESTRELLO
Bibliography
Besserman-Vianna, Helena. (1997). Politique de la psychanalyse face à la dictature et à la torture. NÕen parlez à personne.
Paris: LÕHarmattan.
Galvão, Luis Almeida Prado. (1967). ‘‘Notas para a história
de psicanálise em São Paulo.’’ In Revista brasileira psicanálı́tica, 1 (1), 46–68.
Perestrello, Marialzira. (1992). Histoire de la psychanalyse
au Brésil des origines à 1937. Frénésie, 2 (10), 283–304.
———. (1992). A Psicanálise no Brasil. Encontros: psicanálise. Rio de Janeiro: Imago.
Perestrello, Marialzira, et al. (1986). História da Sociedade
brasileira de psicanálise do Rio de Janeiro: suas origens e fundação. Rio de Janeiro: Imago.
Sagawa, Roberto Yutaka. (1980). Durval Marcondes e o inı́cio do movimento psicanalı́tico brasileiro. Cadernos
Freud-Lacan, 2.
BREAKDOWN
The term breakdown draws on Donald WinnicottÕs
posthumous article ‘‘The Fear of Breakdown,’’ published in 1974. Winnicott was referring to mental
breakdown associated with a serious failure of the
facilitating environment at such an early stage that the
self is not yet capable of dealing with it, experiencing
it, integrate it, giving it meaning, or retain a recognizable memory of it.
Winnicott describes the temporal paradox that
results when the disaster occurs too early in the childÕs
development to be properly experienced. The fear of
breakdown is the product of the persistence of this
unassimilated experience, which is perceived as a continuing permanent threat even though the disaster has
actually already happened.
The interpretation according to which the feared
cataclysm has already occurred gives meaning to its reactualization during the transference in response to
the minor failures of the holding environment. The
21 8
breakdown emphasizes the essential fact that the loss
of the object occurred before the object and self were
differentiated. Here Winnicott distinguishes his own
position from that of Melanie Klein: self and object
exist and function during infancy. Yet, for Winnicott,
the issue is not an object loss that can be metabolized
through introjection (mourning) or incorporation
(melancholy), but rather the subjectÕs experience of
annihilation, and mental agony.
In this way, at the end of his life, Winnicott completed his conceptualization of the pathogenic infantile deprivation in the environment before the self had
had a chance to organize itself: a massive deficiency
resulting in the organization of a psychosis and breaks
in continuity leading to ‘‘psychotic depression.’’ When
the self is sufficiently organized, this same situation
can lead to antisocial tendencies. WinnicottÕs ‘‘primitive agony’’ can be compared to the ‘‘black hole’’ of
autism described by Frances Tustin.
In these cases, therefore, the recollection of infantile
trauma is not to be found in memory traces of the
event but in the subjectÕs anguished sense of fragility.
DENYS RIBAS
See also: Autistic capsule/nucleus; Bulimia; Deprivation;
Primitive agony; Splitting.
Bibliography
Winnicott, Donald W. (1974). Fear of breakdown. International Review of Psychoanalysis, 1, 103–107.
BREAST, GOOD/BAD OBJECT
The primitive ego cannot perceive or conceive of the
objects in its external world as whole, multifaceted
persons. Instead it lives in a world of one-dimensional
objects that have either good or bad intentions
towards the infant (Klein, 1932).
AbrahamÕs concept of whole-object love was a way
of talking about the integration of various impulses
from all levels of development—the libidinal stages and
the phases of early aggression linked with them. All
these levels were, in FreudÕs view, linked and integrated
under the dominance of the genital libido. Working
with children, Melanie Klein found herself confronted
with partial impulses towards objects, toys, and the
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person they represented. She was impressed by how
pure these relations were, either wholly hating or wholly
loving.
She noticed, too, that the objects were related to as
if they had similar single-minded attitudes and
impulses towards the ego (Klein, 1929). Some objects
were feared and hated as terrifyingly violent and punitive, and some were loved for their equal benevolence.
The objects themselves had internal states and the ego
was greatly preoccupied by their good or bad relations
with itself. This sharply redirected her attention from
the satisfactions of libidinal impulses toward the relations to objects.
The predominance of the childÕs hatred and fears
led her at first to concentrate on the harshness of
objects, and she believed it represented in play a superego of great ferocity (Klein, 1932, 1933). The multiple
representations and nuances of these superego figures
led her to understand that the superego was not a unitary object but a composite of many figures inside the
child. Her attention, once drawn to these internal
objects, expanded to recognize an internal world of
good objects as well as bad ones.
With her more disturbed patients she noted the
concreteness of these internal objects, good or bad.
They were conceived by the child as actual physical
entities roaming around inside it. She believed that
this concreteness is not just explicit in children and
disturbed (schizophrenic) adults, but it is also the
character of a deep layer of the unconscious in all
people.
KleinÕs observations led her to the view that oedipal
configurations occurred in phantasies at a very early
age. It became clear to her that the father particularly
was regarded for some time as a very restricted function, called in short-hand ‘‘fatherÕs penis.’’ This occupied mother and took her mentally and physically
from the infant. It was thought that at the earliest
stages mother was little more than a breast. When she
fed, she was ‘‘good breast’’ and when she frustrated she
was an evilly intentioned ‘‘bad breast.’’ Likewise the
penis inside her was a ‘‘bad penis’’ if it was an obstruction in the infantÕs way to the breast. But it could be a
‘‘good penis’’ if it was felt to protect mother (or the
breast) for the infant. The parents as part-objectsbreast and penis were believed by the infant to be in
some form of intercourse defined by the infantÕs own
phantasies. The bad parents (breast and penis) were
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dangerous, threatening to destroy each other, and
known as the ‘‘combined parent figure.’’ In contrast,
the infant in loving mood, could then fantasize in an
intercourse of great, benign, and beautiful creativity.
KleinÕs point of view put great weight on the internalization of these part-objects that loved or hated the
infant. Ordinary steady development and sanity
depended on the internalization of the good object.
This gives rise to an internal good state of mind. The
ego develops a continuity in its feeling of being loved.
Conversely when introjection is mostly of bad objects
there ensues a state of internal turmoil, disorganization and ultimately fragmentation.
The early introjection of a good object/breast results
in a benign internal state, and a growth of the ego. The
object is drawn into the ego itself or assimilated to
become a benign core to the personality. The ego, and
the personality, tends therefore to build up from
objects that are internalized and assimilated. Bad, evil
objects may be internalized and remain unassimilated,
constituting a permanent internal threat, often
expressed in hypochondriacal complaints.
At a stage when the external objects can be perceived in a more realistic way, there is a tendency,
through internalizing them as a mixed object, for the
internal state to become populated by objects that are
a mixture of good and bad. This poses an alarming
change for the personality, known as the depressive
position. Its characteristic anxiety—guilt—derives
from the sense of the internal object now being a
spoiled good object, damaged and with the threat of
its death.
The classical Oedipus complex displays a restricted
version of the polarities; the one a good source of all
libidinal satisfactions, and the other hated parent,
thought to be dangerous, obstructing, and castrating.
KleinÕs early descriptions of an internalized punitive
object relate to the concept of the superego, notably a
harsh one. The variety of forms of this object, in play,
dreams and phantasy manifestations, led her to believe
that the superego is a large repertoire of objects, only
some of which had moral aspects.
The primitive experience of separating apart good
and bad features of the world, does occur in Freud,
notably in ‘‘Die Vereinigung’’ (‘‘Negation’’) (Freud,
1925) where he places the origins of judgment in the
narcissistic decision to take in good things and eject
bad things.
219
BREASTFEEDING
Fairbairn presented a schema in which the ego, itself
split, relates to three internal objects—the libidinal,
anti-libidinal and ideal objects—to form three paradigm endopsychic structures. Though there is leeway
for much variation in these structures, they are rather
different from the free world of internal play and
drama of KleinÕs internal objects.
FreudÕs descriptions of infancy are rooted in the
drive theory and are distinct from Melanie KleinÕs conception of the good and bad breast. Good and bad
objects are in themselves motivated with good or bad
intentions towards the ego. The latter downplays the
libido theory and promotes object-relations to the
center of metapsychology.
ROBERT D. HINSHELWOOD
See also: Object; Splitting; Splitting of the object.
Bibliography
Klein, Melanie. (1932). The psycho-analysis of children. London: Hogarth Press.
———. (1933). The early development of conscience in the
child. In Sándor Lorand, (Ed.), Psycho-analysis today (pp.
149–162). New York: Covici-Friede.
———. (1952). Developments in psycho-analysis (Joan Riviere, Ed.). London: Hogarth Press.
———. (1975). Infantile anxiety situations reflected in a
work of art and in the creative impulse. (Reprinted from
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 10 (1929), 436–
443.)
———. (1975). Personification in the play of children. In
The writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 1, pp. 199–209). London: Hogarth. (Reprinted from International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 10 (1929), 171–182.)
BREASTFEEDING
Suckling is the action whereby milk is fed to the infant
until it is weaned. By extension, the term refers to
breastfeeding as well as bottle-feeding. Before an
emphasis was placed on the importance of the object
and the infantÕs environment, psychoanalysts spoke
little of maternal suckling. However, Sigmund Freud,
in a text that needs to be viewed in historical context,
titled ‘‘A Case of Successful Treatment by Hypnotism,’’
evokes the case of a young woman, ‘‘occasionally hysterical . . . who is willing to feed her infant but behaves
22 0
as if she doesnÕt want to’’ (1892–93a). The dimension
of the unconscious conflict is not taken into account
here and Freud clings to the idea of will and counterwill. An outline of maternal psychopathology is given,
and here the difficulties of breastfeeding are treated by
hypnosis.
Suckling is not a psychoanalytic concept. In speaking of suckling we cannot forget the physical link associated with the reality of the nutritive relation. The
image of the infant at the motherÕs breast has considerable metaphoric and symbolic value; it is an image
that makes us nostalgic for a sense of original fulfillment and can be compared with that other, ‘‘final,’’
image of death, as characterized by the iconography of
the old man at the breast. The container, the breast,
and its content, milk, are both associated with projected fantasies. The milky substance, a liquid that
contrasts with the solidity of the breast, is a vehicle of
fantasies of fusion and vampirism. Once the infantÕs
teeth begin to grow, the fantasies are those of oral sadism and cannibalism. There is an analogy to be made
between the breast and the penis, between milk and
sperm, one of which nourishes and one of which
fecundates, and at the same time an incompatibility
because sperm is, in fantasy at least, supposed to spoil
milk; thus there is a separation between the sexual and
the nutritive.
A dichotomy has always existed between the breast
as a nourishing object and the breast as an erotic object,
a separation that helps avoid the confrontation between
an incestuous mother and the importance of maternal
libidinal and erotic investment. However, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), commenting on the
‘‘dream of the Fates (Knödel), Freud wrote that ‘‘at the
womanÕs breast love and hunger meet.’’ For the breast
satisfies both the alimentary and the sexual impulses:
‘‘To begin with, sexual activity attaches itself to functions serving the purpose of self-preservation and does
not become independent of them until later. No one
who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the
breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life’’ (1905d). The nipple is a sexual object
throughout Freudian metapsychology. The transition
from sucking the nipple to sucking is a key moment in
the organization of the earliest feelings of autoeroticism
and investment of the mouth as an erogenous zone.
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feeding. For the infant the breast assumes (secondarily)
its forbidden erotic value with the organization of the
oedipal conflict; initially the infant simply ‘‘is the
breast’’ (Freud, 1941f [1938]), during a period of primary identification with the breast and primal fusion.
It has become obvious that the object plays a key
role in enabling the polarization of the libido into certain zones. This follows their unification when the
infant is breastfeeding and the libido experiences a
sense of satisfaction, at a time when the mouth that
sucks and the nipple that nourishes are inseparable
and indistinguishable. The mother ‘‘(moreover) makes
a gift to the infant (while she is lavishing her attention
on him) of feelings arising from her own sexual life . . .
and clearly grasps these as a substitute for a separate
sexual object’’ (1905d). Freud returned to this position
and developed it in his Outline of Psychoanalysis: ‘‘She
is not content to nourish, she cares for the infant and
thus awakens in him many other physical sensations,
agreeable and disagreeable. Thanks to the care she
lavishes, she becomes his first seductress. Through
these two relations, the mother acquires unique
importance, incomparable, unalterable, and permanent, and becomes for both sexes the object of the first
and most powerful of his loves, the prototype of all
later amorous relations’’ (1940a [1938]).
The role of the object and precocious maternal
seduction as it occurs through breastfeeding are questioned by contemporary analysts. Jean Laplanche
(1987) has developed the idea that sexuality is
implanted in the infant through the initial seduction
of the adult, and emphasizes the unconscious sexuality
of the seducer. From this follows the possibility of a
significant reassessment of the role of the impulses, the
role of the object, and anaclisis; he also raises the question of the primal. For Paul Denis the question of mastery is present at the heart of the initial experiences of
feeding, but the encounter between the mouth and the
nipple, to the extent that it combines kinesthetic and
sensory feelings, instinctual excitation and pleasure/
unpleasure, is an essential period during which the
activity of the initial representation takes place (the
‘‘pictogram’’ of Piera Aulagnier, 1975). For authors
such as Esther Bick, the emphasis is on the presenceabsence of the breast during this primitive stage of
undifferentiated autosensuality characterized by the
encounter between mouth and nipple. The role of the
object remains essential for enabling the consensual
union and unification of the libido. The motherÕs
container function is experienced as a ‘‘skin’’: ‘‘The
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optimal object is the nipple in the mouth, together
with the motherÕs touch (holding), speech, and familiar odor’’(1968).
With respect to bottle or breastfeeding, Freud
responds only in terms of privation. In all cases there
remains a feeling of ‘‘having sucked too little and for
too short a time,’’ the nostalgia for the breast being
stronger for the child who has been bottle-fed (1940a
[1938]). Melanie Klein (1952), writing about breastand bottle-feeding, returns to the question of the primacy of the object and instinct, the importance of the
exterior object and the reality of the breast. For her the
breast is the object of intense fantasized projections
because it is a primordial object. The cannibalistic oral
impulses directed toward the motherÕs breast are especially intense. As for the mother, the fact of feeding her
baby has a restorative effect because it terminates the
sadistic fantasies with respect to her own mother:
‘‘The nourishing and beneficial milk she dispenses signifies for the unconscious that her sadistic fantasies
have not been realized and that their objects have
rediscovered their integrity’’(1932).
For Donald Winnicott breastfeeding is expanded to
the babyÕs environment in the broad sense and to the
richness of the experience the mother offers. The quality of maternal holding and handling is essential, for
these are both a function of the motherÕs internal conflicts and of her own infantile experiences. The foundations of psychic health depend on this ‘‘facilitating
environment.’’ The experience of the survival of the
object in the face of the babyÕs attacks seems to her
essential and in the end helps her advance the idea of
difference ‘‘between the survival of a part of the
motherÕs body and the survival of a bottle’’ (1987).
Although he is cautious when discussing mothers and
does not dismiss the unconscious maternal implications, he emphasizes the importance of the carnal reality of the experience of the breast; in this body-tobody relation, the exchange of glances and the sensual
experience are essential to communication.
Breastfeeding is a situation that so profoundly
involves the motherÕs body and psychic life that it is subjected to the unconscious conflicts that affect the mother
and to the fantasies awakened through the encounter
between a specific mother and a specific infant. Suckling
extends the period of pregnancy and birth and is inseparably a part of the womanÕs sexual life and her life history.
Primitive psychic activity is associated with these very
first contacts that are always difficult to conceptualize.
221
BRENTANO, FRANZ
VON
(1838 –1 917)
Psychoanalysts who care for infants are conscious of this
in their clinical activity and research.
Laplanche, Jean. (1987). Nouveaux Fondements pour la psychanalyse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
The invention of the bottle (1820), followed by the
introduction of sterilization (1892–1898), have profoundly altered breastfeeding. Artificial milk eliminates the need for direct recourse to another woman,
in the position of wet-nurse, and the babyÕs survival
(in reality) no longer depends on the product of the
motherÕs body. The transition from motherÕs milk to
artificial milk, while it abandons its natural origins,
cannot be assimilated to the transition from raw food
to cooked food discussed by Lévi-Strauss. But how can
social and cultural ideology be made to mesh with
unconscious maternal choices?
———. (1997). Le prégénital freudien à la trappe: après
l’analyse. Revue française de psychanalyse, 61, 4: 1357–
1369.
JOYCELINE SIKSOU
See also: Early interactions; Erotogenic zone; Holding;
Weaning.
Bibliography
Bick, Esther. (1968). The experience of the skin in early
object relations. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,
49, 558–566.
Castoriadis-Aulagnier, Piera. (1975). La Violence de l’interprétation. Du pictogramme à l’énoncé. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ‘‘Le Fil rouge.’’
Delegay-Siksou, Joyceline. (1986). Allaiter: au sein ou au
biberon? Nourrir un enfant. Lieux enfance, 6–7, 35–57.
Denis, Paul. (1997). Emprise et satisfaction, les deux formants
de la pulsion. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Freud, Sigmund. (1892–93a). A case of successful treatment
by hypnotism SE, 1: 115–128.
———. (1900a) The interpretation of dreams. Part I., SE, 4:
1–338; The interpretation of dreams. Part II., SE, 5: 339–
625.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
———. (1940a [1938]). An outline of psycho-analysis. SE,
23: 139–207.
———. (1941f [1938]). Findings, ideas, problems. SE, 23:
299–300.
Klein, Melanie. (1952). En observant le comportement des
nourrissons. In Joan Riviere (Ed.), Developments in psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press
———. (1952). Quelques conclusions théoriques concernant la vie émotionnelle des bébés. In Joan Riviere (Ed.),
Developments in psycho-analysis. London: Hogarth Press.
22 2
Winnicott, Donald W. (1987). Babies and their mothers.
(Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis,
Eds.). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Further Reading
Sarlin, Charles N. (1981). The role of breast feeding in psychosexual development and the achievement of the genital
phase. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association,
29, 631–642.
BRENTANO, FRANZ VON (1838–1917)
Franz von Brentano, a German Dominican philosopher and theologian, was born in Marienberg in 1838
and died in Zürich in 1917. His ideas influenced
Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. It was in
1874, the year Brentano published his Psychologie vom
empirischen Standpunkt (Psychology from an empirical standpoint), that the young Sigmund Freud, an
eighteen-year old student, wrote to his friend Eduard
Silberstein[RB1], ‘‘I, a doctor and atheist empiricist, I
have signed up for two courses in philosophy . . . One
of the courses—you will be amazed when you hear
this—concerns the existence of God; Prof. Brentano,
who is teaching the course, is a man, a thinker, and a
marvelous philosopher.’’ On March 7, 1875, he added,
‘‘Both of us (me and Paneth) have grown closer to
him, we sent him a letter with our objections and he
invited us to his home, refuted us, seemed to take an
interest in us. . . . Concerning this remarkable man (he
is a believer, a teleologist [!] and a Darwinist, and
damned intelligent, even brilliant), who in many ways
satisfies the requirements of the ideal, I will have much
to tell you in person. But I can give you this piece of
news now: under BrentanoÕs influence especially
(which has had a maturing effect), I have made a decision to sit for the doctorate in philosophy and will
study philosophy and zoology.’’
The most detailed report of the visit to Brentano
shows how he influenced Freud: ‘‘He totally condemns
[HerbartÕs] a priori constructions in psychology and
feels that itÕs unforgivable that he never thought of
considering spontaneous experience or provoked
experience to see if they confirmed his gratuitous
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hypotheses; he claims unhesitatingly to belong to
the empirical school, which applies the method of
natural science to philosophy and, in particular, to
psychology (this is, in fact, the principal advantage
of his philosophy, the only thing that makes it bearable for me), and he revealed to us several interesting psychological observations that show the inanity
of HerbartÕs speculations. According to him, it is
more necessary to submit certain specific problems
to more extensive research, in order to achieve definite partial results, than to claim to embrace philosophy as a whole, which is not possible, given that
philosophy and psychology are still young sciences,
which cannot expect any support, especially from
physiology.’’
Aside from the affirmation of empiricism and the
primacy of observation and experiment that Freud
would never forget, the meeting with the Catholic
theologian is the only time that Freud, ‘‘an atheistic
Jew,’’ had a momentary metaphysical hesitation. He
described the experience as follows: ‘‘Ever since Brentano imposed his God on me with ridiculous facility,
through his arguments, I fear being seduced one of
these days by proofs in favor of spiritualism, homeopathy, Louise Lateau, etc. . . . ItÕs a fact that his God is
nothing but a logical principle and that I have accepted
it as such. Yet, we proceed down a slippery slope
once we acknowledge the concept of God. It remains
to be seen at which point we stumble. Moreover, his
God is very strange. . . . It is impossible to refute
Brentano before hearing him out, studying him,
exploring his thought. Confronted with such a rigorous dialectician, we must strengthen our intellect by
addressing his arguments before confronting him
directly.’’
FreudÕs connection to philosophy lasted longer
than this first contact, and it was Franz von Brentano
who suggested to Theodor Gomperz, five years later,
that Freud translate the twelfth volume of the Complete
Works of John Stuart Mill (1880a), which contained
‘‘On the Emancipation of Women,’’ ‘‘Plato,’’ ‘‘The
Social Question,’’ and ‘‘Socialism.’’
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Breuer, Josef; Hard science and psychoanalysis;
Philosophy and psychoanalysis; Self-consciousness;
Vienna, University of.
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Bibliography
von Brentano, Franz. (1874) Psychology from an empirical
standpoint. Edited by Oskar Kraus, English edition edited
by Linda L. McAlister, translated by Antos C. Rancurello,
D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister, with a new introduction by Peter Simons. London, New York: Routledge, 1995.
Freud, Sigmund. (1989a) [1871–81, 1910]). The letters of
Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, 1871–1881 (Walter
Boehlich, Ed.; Arnold J. Pomerans, Trans.). Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
BRETON, ANDRÉ (1896–1966)
A French poet, the founder and theoretician of the
surrealist movement, André Breton was born February 19, 1896, in Tinchebray, France, and died in
Paris on September 28, 1966. Until he was four years
old, Breton was raised in Brittany by his maternal
grandfather. Nostalgia for those early years of astonishment, fear, and surprise never left Breton. In 1907
he entered the Lycée Chaptal in Paris. In 1913 he
began studying medicine, published his first verses,
and established literary friendships, first with Paul
Valéry, followed by Guillaume Apollinaire and Pierre
Reverdy.
Mobilized in 1915, in July 1916 he asked to be
assigned to the armyÕs neuropsychiatric center in
Saint-Dizier. This period had a ‘‘decisive influence’’
(Conversations, 1952) on Breton. As a student of medicine, he observed his patients with close attention. He
developed a strong interest in psychiatry and in Freud,
whose ideas he encountered for the first time in
Emmanuel RégisÕs Précis de psychiatrie. As a poet he
began to ask questions about literary creation. The discourse of madness contained striking images, how did
these come into being? How did madmen and poets
develop their language? What was the relationship
between subject and object embodied in language?
Freud provided a response to these fundamental
questions but Breton had access to them only in the
form of RégisÕs introduction. As a result his concept of
Freudian analysis was distorted. Although Breton
understood the role of the libido, the conflict between
desire and censure, and the dream work that provides
insight into the artistic process, he believed with Régis
that the analytic method was a mechanized collection
of the subjectÕs verbal outpourings, which he repeated
as they popped into his mind, like a ‘‘recording device’’
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B R E U E R , J O S E F (1842 –1 925)
(Régis). This was a formula Breton was to use in his
Surrealist Manifesto: ‘‘We . . . who have turned ourselves into . . . modest recording devices in our art . . .’’
(1924). Transference, the analystÕs suspended attention
in the face of the representations supplied by the subject or their interpretation, dream associations, all of
this disappeared. Although Breton continued his medical training until 1920, he was not interested in therapy. His meeting with Freud in 1921 had no affect on
him (1924). The problems he wanted to resolve were
different: ‘‘There is the entire question of language.’’
(1919)
With psychoanalysis, Freud provided Breton with a
theory of language. ‘‘Those verbal representations that
Freud claims are Ômemory traces arising principally from
acoustic perceptionsÕ are precisely what constitute the
raw material of poetry’’ (1935). The poet as dreamer is
the ‘‘receiver of Indirect Contributions’’ supplied by the
figurative activity of the preconscious mind, where representations of words and things make contact with one
another. He ‘‘yields to the collage’’ of associations (1919).
This leads to the creative experiments Breton conducted
from 1919 to 1924 (automatic writing, hallucinosis, halfsleep, automatic writing, and others), which found a
large number of applications in literature.
In the Surrealist Manifesto, Breton condensed the
theoretical conclusions he drew from his experiments.
This was the founding text of the surrealist movement
that did so much to introduce Freudian ideas to
France and elsewhere. Although Breton used Hegelian
dialectics to criticize Freud (Communicating Vessels,
1932; the republication of 1955 contains three letters
from Freud to Breton), he continued to study him
(Carnet, 1921, Cahier de la girafe sur la Science des
rêves, 1931, Position politique du surréalisme, 1935,
Anthology of Black Humor, 1940) and emphasize the
importance of his thought. ‘‘Surrealism . . . considers
the Freudian critique of ideas . . . to be the first and
only one with a basis in fact’’ (1930).
NICOLE GEBLESCO
See also: Claude, Henri Charles Jules; Literature and psychoanalysis; Surrealism and psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Alexandrian, Sarane. (1974). Le surréalisme et le rêve. Paris:
Gallimard.
22 4
Bonnet, Marguerite. (1975). La violence du voir. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Breton, Andre. (1988, 1992). Œuvres complètes (M. Bonnet,
Ed.). Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade.
Carrouges, Michel. (1950). André Breton et les données fondamentales du surréalisme. Paris: Gallimard.
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1978). Les vases non communicants. N.R.F, 302, 26–45.
BREUER, JOSEF (1842–1925)
Josef Breuer, an Austrian doctor, was born January 15,
1842, in Vienna, where he died on June 20, 1925.
Breuer, the son of a liberal Jewish professor of theology, studied medicine in Vienna and obtained his
degree in 1864. He served as an assistant in internal
medicine to Theodor Oppolzer, and worked on heat
regulation and the physiology of respiration (HeringBreuer reflex); upon becoming a practitioner in 1871,
he set up his practice in Vienna. He also conducted
research on the function of the inner ear (Mach-Breuer
theory of the flow of endolymphatic fluid) and,
although he became a specialist in internal medicine in
1874, he returned to his research in 1884.
He was the friend and family doctor of several
members of the Vienna Teachers College and of Viennese high society. He maintained a correspondence
with artists, writers, philosophers, psychologists, and
colleagues in his field, and in 1894 was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. Well
versed in philosophy, Breuer was interested in the
theory of knowledge and the theoretical foundations
of Darwinism (1902 conference, exchange of letters
with Franz von Brentano). He was an active participant in discussions on the foundations of politics and
ideology, and discussed issues of art, literature, and
music. As an assimilated and enlightened Jew, he
adopted a kind of pantheism that he derived from
Goethe and Gustav Theodor Fechner. His favorite
aphorism was SpinozaÕs suum esse conservare (preserve
oneÕs being). He was gripped by a form of skepticism
and spoke, following William Thackeray, of his ‘‘demon
ÔbutÕ,’’ which forced him to question any newly acquired
knowledge. Because of his detailed knowledge of the
history of ideas and social history, his appreciation of
the political conditions of his era, as well as for reasons
having to do with his own life, he believed it was nearly
impossible for him to undertake a questionable action.
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B R E U E R , J O S E F (1842 –1 925)
Underlying BreuerÕs research on physiology was the
quest for the relation between structure and function,
and thus for a form of teleological query. He was particularly interested in regulatory processes in the form
of self-control mechanisms. Unlike a number of physiologists in the so-called biophysicalist movement,
inspired by Ernst Brücke, Hermann von Helmholtz,
and Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Breuer believed in
neovitalism.
In 1880–1882 Breuer treated a young patient,
Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.), for a nervous cough
and a multitude of other hysterical symptoms (mood
swings, alterations in states of consciousness, visual
disturbances, paralysis and contractions, aphasia).
During the many long interviews, doctor and patient
saw that some symptoms disappeared when the memory of their first appearance returned and could be
reproduced, and the associated affects could be awakened and abreacted. This occurred at specific times of
day, during spontaneous auto-hypnotic states. Based
on these observations, initially accidental, patient and
doctor developed a systematic procedure whereby the
individual symptoms were gradually recalled during
their appearance in reverse chronological order, until
they disappeared for good following a reproduction of
the original scene. Sometimes artificial hypnosis was
used during therapy if the patient was not in a state of
auto-hypnosis. The patient, who at times ‘‘forgot’’ her
native language and understood only English, jokingly
referred to this therapy as the talking cure, or chimney
sweeping.
During the therapy, a stay at a clinic near Vienna
was required because of the patientÕs heightened risk
of suicide. In spite of the apparent and surprising success of the method, certain manifestations remained.
These included the temporary loss of her native language and violent neuralgia of the trigeminal nerve,
which required morphine treatment, leading to addiction. Because of her symptoms Breuer had his patient
admitted for further treatment to Dr. Ludwig
BinswangerÕs Bellevue sanatorium in Kreuzlingen in
July 1882. She left in October, improved but not fully
cured (Histoire de la maladie, in Hirschmüller, A.
1978). She lived until 1888 in Vienna, was treated on
several occasions, then moved to Frankfurt, where she
had an active life as a writer, social worker, defender of
womenÕs rights, and a leader of the movement of Jewish women in Germany (Jensen, E. 1984; Tisseron, Y.
1986; Heubach, H. 1992).
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In 1882 Breuer discussed the case with his colleague
Sigmund Freud, fourteen years his junior. Freud tested
BreuerÕs method on patients after he began working as
a neurologist. Starting from the theories of Jean Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, August Ferdinand Möbius,
Hippolyte Bernheim, and others, they jointly developed a theoretical framework for the operation of the
psychic apparatus and for their therapeutic procedure,
which they called the ‘‘cathartic method’’ in reference
to AristotleÕs ideas about the function of tragedy (catharsis as the purification of the spectatorsÕ emotions).
In 1893 they published a preliminary report entitled
‘‘On the Psychic Mechanisms of Hysterical Phenomena’’. This was followed two years later by the Studies
on Hysteria, the ‘‘cornerstone of psychoanalysis’’ (Ilse
Grubrich-Simitis), establishing the foundations of the
field. There was a chapter on theory (Breuer), a chapter on therapy (Freud), and five case histories
(Anna O., Emmy von N., Katharina, Lucy R., Elisabeth
von R.).
Freud continued to develop the theory and technique as they developed the work jointly (defense
neuroses, free association). Breuer was not convinced
by the exclusive emphasis on sexual factors and Freud
saw BreuerÕs caution as a sign of aloofness. In 1895
the distance between the two men increased, resulting
in the end of their collaboration. Breuer continued to
take an interest in the development of psychoanalytic
theory but abandoned cathartic therapy. Freud later
proposed the hypothesis that Anna O.Õs treatment
had been suddenly interrupted because of a violent
erotic transference, accompanied by hysterical pregnancy and childbirth. This version of events, constructed retroactively by Freud and spread by Ernest
Jones, among others, cannot withstand historical
scrutiny. More recent attempts to show that the
description of the case of Anna O. was a ‘‘fraud’’
(Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen) are a form of unsubstantiated polemic.
ALBRECHT HIRSCHMÜLLER
See also: Anna O., case of; ‘‘Autobiographical Study, An’’;
Autosuggestion; Cathartic method; Conversion; Free
energy/bound energy; Hypnoid states; Hypnosis; Hysteria; Memory; On the History of the Psychoanalytic
Movement; Pappenheim, Bertha; Psychic energy;
Remembering; Reminiscence.
225
B R I E R L E Y , M A R J O R I E F L O W E R S (189 3 –1984 )
Bibliography
Breuer, Josef. (1986). Die krisis des Darwinismus und die teleologie. Vortrag, gehalten am 2.5.1902. Tübingen: Diskord.
Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie von; Breuer, Josef. (1969). Ein
briefwechsel, 1889–1916. Vienna: Robert A. Kann.
Hirschmüller, Albrecht. (1978). Physiologie und psychoanalyse
in leben und werk Josef Breuers. Bern-Stuttgart: Hans Huber.
Jensen, Ellen M. (1970). ‘‘Anna O: A study of her later life.’’
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 39, 269–93.
———. (1984). Streifzüge durch das leben von Anna O.Bertha Pappenheim. Ein fall für die psychiatrie. Ein leben für
die philanthropie. Dreieich.
Pappenheim, Bertha. (1992). Sisyphus. Gegen den Mädchenhandel Galizien: Bertha Pappenheim, die Anna O. In Helga
Heubach (Ed.), Freiburg im Breisgau. Le Travail de Sisyphe.
(1986). Paris: Des femmes-Antoinette Fouque.
BRIERLEY, MARJORIE FLOWERS
(1893–1984)
Marjorie Flowers Brierley, British psychoanalyst, was
born on March 24, 1893, and died on April 21, 1984.
Entering University College, London, in 1916, she
gained her BSc Hons (first class in psychology) in 1921,
and her MB BS in 1928, registering as a medical practitioner in 1929. Concurrently, she trained with the British
Psycho-Analytical Society, having personal analysis with
John Carl Flugel (1922–1924), and Edward Glover
(1925–1927). She was ‘‘passed for practice’’ in October
1929, becoming a full member in 1930, and training analyst, control analyst and lecturer to students in 1933.
In 1922 she married William B. Brierley, botany
professor at Reading University, formerly husband to
Susan Isaacs.
Between qualification and the late 1940s she
served actively on many committees of the British
Society, including the Training Committee and
Board and Council, and helped organize the Controversial Discussions of 1943–1944 (King, Pearl, 1991).
She read thirteen papers to the Society and published
eleven papers, thirty-one book reviews and twentyfour abstracts in the International Journal, and one
book. In 1954 her husband retired and they moved
to the country, whence she published twenty-six
further book reviews and two articles, continuing as
assistant editor of the International Journal until
1978.
22 6
Her earliest psychoanalytic publications, two
papers on the then-topical subject of female development (1932, 1936), were notable for scholarship and
independence; Brierly was, though not aggressive
about it, one of those who differed from Freud. Her
book, Trends in Psycho-Analysis (1951), contained versions, sometimes revised or expanded, of all her other
papers of 1934–1947. These included ‘‘Affects in Theory and Practise,’’ a concise and original review, which
aimed to restore affects (which had never lost their
importance in psychoanalytic practice) to their consonant place in theory, which had lapsed into disuse
after Freud focused more on repressed unconscious
and instinct theory. The chapter ‘‘Problems Connected with the Work of Melanie Klein’’ derived from
her papers ‘‘A Preparatory Note on Internalised
Objects,’’ and ‘‘Internal Objects and Theory,’’ and on
contributions Brierley made to the Controversial
Discussions.
Valuing the great enrichment of KleinÕs new ideas
of infantile phantasy and object relationships, she
acutely explored problems concerning inter alia precocity, regression, and differences between stages, as well
as terminology confusing concept and phantasy conceptually. A later chapter extended this differentiation
to describe two independent aspects of psychoanalytic
theory, the abstract objective, ‘‘Metapsychology,’’ and
the subjective, which she named ‘‘Personology.’’ Later
sections explored metapsychology as ‘‘Process Theory,’’ and many other aspects and ramifications of psychoanalytic thinking.
John Bowlby described Brierly as ‘‘[p]robably having a better grasp of scientific principles than anyone
else’’ (King 1991), regarding her 1937 paper on affects.
This paper was considered ‘‘seminal’’ and as ‘‘opening
a new era in understanding,’’ when the 1977 International Congress took ‘‘Affect’’ as its main theme. Calm
and open-minded, she contributed significantly
towards the partial resolution of acrimonious disputes
within the British Society prior to and after the Controversial Discussions. During them, her clarifying
contributions were much valued by both sides. Her
writings are remarkable for concision, clarity, scholarship, intelligence and great intuitive sensitivity.
ANNE HAYMAN
See also: British Psycho-Analytical Society; Controversial
Discussions.
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B R I L L , A B R A H A M A R D E N (1874 –1 948)
Bibliography
Brierley, Marjorie. (1932). Some problems of integration
in women. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 13, 433–448.
———. (1936). Specific determinants in feminine development. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 17, 163–180.
———. (1951). Trends in psycho-analysis. London: Hogarth.
Hayman, Anne. (1986). What do we mean by phantasy?
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 70, 105–114.
King, Pearl H. M., and Steiner, Riccardo. (1991). The FreudKlein controversies 1941–1945. London, New York: Tavistock
Publications-Routledge, New Library of Psychoanalysis.
BRILL, ABRAHAM ARDEN (1874–1948)
The American psychiatrist Abraham Brill was born on
October 12, 1874, in Kanczugv, Austria (then Galicia)
and died on March 2, 1948, in New York City.
His father was a noncommissioned officer in the
Austrian Army who served with Maximilian in Mexico. After spending his childhood in Austria, Brill
emmigrated to the United States in 1889 at age fifteen,
without his family and with almost no money. He
worked to support himself through high school and
college, graduating from New York University in 1901.
He received an MD degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University in 1904.
Brill worked as a psychiatrist in the New York State
Mental Hospital System at the Central Islip State Hospital under the tutelage of Adolph Meyer and August
Hoch. From 1902 to 1907, he traveled in Europe, first to
Paris and then, at the suggestion of Frederick Peterson,
to Zürich; there he learned about FreudÕs new science,
psychoanalysis, from the staff of the Burgholzi Psychiatric Clinic (which included Eugen Bleuler and Carl
Jung). He returned to America a year later and accepted
a position as assistant physician of mental disease, Bellevue Hospital, which he held until 1911. In 1909 he
attended the Clark University Conference, traveling with
FreudÕs party from New York. He became the first practicing psychoanalyst in America and interested a small
group of New York psychiatrists in psychoanalytic ideas.
In 1911, Sigmund Freud urged Ernest Jones to
establish the American Psychoanalytic Association
(APA) with James Jackson Putnam as president, and
Brill as secretary. Brill refused to participate and
instead, on February 12, 1911, with fifteen other physicians, founded the New York Psychoanalytic Society,
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several months before the APA was established in May
of that year. From that time to the close of the First
World War the New York Psychoanalytic Society was
kept alive, practically single handedly, by Brill. He was
the expositor and public advocate of psychoanalysis
par excellence. He spoke at medical, neurological, and
psychiatric societies, and to lay groups as well. He lectured to social workers, the New York City Police College, the Education Department of NYU—many of
these lectures were reprinted in professional journals
and lay publications. During the 1930s he presented a
weekly radio broadcast lecture on mental health
themes.
Of greatest importance for the dissemination and promulgation of psychoanalytic ideas in America were BrillÕs
translations. Brill translated into English the major work
of Sigmund Freud, some of Carl Gustav JungÕs works,
and BleulerÕs Textbook of Psychiatry. His own publications included numerous journal articles and important
books, including Psychoanalysis (1921). His The Basic
Writings of Sigmund Freud was published in 1938.
Abraham Arden BrillÕs importance to psychoanalysis was also as a leader of both psychoanalytic and psychiatric institutions. Brill became a member of the
APA in 1914. He served as president of the APA in
1919 and 1920 and again from 1929 to 1935. He was
president of the New York Psychoanalytic Society from
1911 to 1913 and from 1925 to 1936. His influence on
psychoanalysts both in New York and the United States
was at its zenith between 1929 to 1936. During this
period he played a central role in restricting membership in the New York Society and in the APA to physicians. He defied Freud, who was supportive of lay analysis, because of his concern about ‘‘quackery,’’ medical
treatment by poorly trained or unauthorized practitioners. It was BrillÕs conviction that the survival of
psychoanalysis in the United States depended on
maintaining its medical identity.
Brill also played an important role in achieving
autonomy for the APA within the International
Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). These organizational and credential principles were maintained until
overturned by the settlement of a lawsuit brought
against the IPA, the New York and Columbia Psychoanalytic Institutes, and APA by a group of psychologists in the 1980s. From the years immediately preceding World War II and until his death in 1948, Brill was
displaced first by the Americans Bertram Lewin and
Lawrence Kubie, and then by the Viennese psychoana227
B R I T I S H P S Y C H O -A N A L Y T I C A L S O C I E T Y
lysts who emigrated to New York to escape Nazi persecution. However, he remained a proud and respected
figure who more than any other psychoanalyst was
responsible for the growth of psychoanalysis in the
United States.
ARNOLD D. RICHARDS
See also: Frink, Horace Westlake; International Psychoanalytic Association; Lay analysis; New York Psychoanalytic Institute; United States.
Bibliography
Hale, Nathan G., Jr. (1995). The rise and crisis of psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans 1917–
1985. New York: Oxford University Press.
BRITISH PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL SOCIETY
The London Psycho-Analytical Society, formed in
1913, was composed of thirteen members, only four of
whom worked as psychoanalysts, while others agreed
with Jung. On February 20, 1919, ten members interested in FreudÕs work agreed to disband that group
and to re-form it as the British Psycho-Analytical
Society. They decided only to accept as members,
those who were interested in and practiced psychoanalysis. The members elected Dr. Ernest Jones as
president and decided that members and associate
members should be elected. They drew up rules for the
Society, and in 1924 the Institute of Psycho-Analysis
(IPA) was set up to hold property, to deal with financial and other matters concerning publication. Later
the Institute became responsible for the administration of the Clinic and of training activities. The officers
of the Society were responsible for the scientific activities of members and were its link with the IPA.
In 1926, the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis was
established. Members gave one session a day freely to
the Clinic, for the next thirty years. It was disclaimed
from the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948–49
and it is still an independent clinic. As membership
increased, so the committee structure expanded, and
after 1946 committees were governed by the ‘‘GentlemanÕs Agreement.’’ In September 1972 the Society was
registered as a Charity: No. 264314.
By 1920 there were thirty members and associate
members of the British Society. During the 1920s several members of the British Society went to Europe for
22 8
analysis with Freud, Hans Sachs, Karl Abraham and
Sandor Ferenczi. The approach of these analysts influenced the British approach to psychoanalysis. By 1925
there were fifty-four members of the Society, who
came from a number of professional disciplines,
among them were psychiatrists, medical practitioners,
teachers, graduates and ‘‘gentlemen scholars.’’ In 1927
Melanie Klein became a member of the Society and
she brought with her various scientific differences with
the Viennese, and especially with Anna Freud.
After 1933 the growth of anti-Semitism under
Hitler put the lives of Jewish psychoanalysts in danger,
first in Germany, and then from 1938 in Austria. Many
became refugees, and some of them, including the
Freuds, accepted membership of the British Society, to
the great enrichment of psychoanalysis in London.
Originally, to become a member, associates read a clinical paper to the Society or to a Panel, but since 1975,
they have had the option of taking a two-year membership course.
In 1925 at the Bad Homburg Congress in Germany,
the first Conference of delegates from branch societies
took place and agreed that training should be the
responsibility of a training committee and not of an
individual. In 1926, the British elected their first training committee and formalized their training. The need
for medical qualifications was discussed but most
members of the Society supported FreudÕs point of
view against this requirement.
Disagreements in the British Society and criticisms
of Melanie KleinÕs theories led to the ‘‘controversial
discussions,’’ which were concerned with what kind of
psychoanalysis should be taught to students. Following these discussions, Glover resigned from the Society
and Anna Freud resigned from the training committee.
When Sylvia M. Payne was elected as President in
1944, she suggested a change in the training program
in order to include Anna FreudÕs approach to psychoanalysis. Training was divided into Course A, which
catered to the majority of the British Society (i.e. the
Middle Group and the Kleinians) and Course B, which
catered to Anna FreudÕs approach. In order that no
one group could dominate the others, it has been
agreed that all committees contain representatives of
each group. This was not written down in the Society
rules, so it was called the ‘‘gentlemenÕs agreement.’’
Groups are now designated as Kleinian, Independent
(Rayner, 1991), and Contemporary Freudian.
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These earlier training arrangements were revised in
the early 1960s when a separate curriculum committee
was set up alongside the training committee. Later in
1973, after much research, a new structure was agreed
upon, which allocated aspects of the training process
to separate sub-committees, whose chairmen were
members of the policy-making education committee.
Training takes place primarily in London, although
special arrangements have been made for selected students from Scotland and Northern Ireland to be
trained as psychoanalysts.
Since 1919 the scientific and clinical interests of
members have included the role of anxiety, hostility
and aggression, the theory of symbolism, character
problems, the origin and structure of the superego,
problems of psychoanalytic technique, a psychoanalytic theory of psychoses, and the psychoanalysis of children. They also applied psychoanalytic understanding
to the arts, educational, and social issues.
Interest in the early development of infants and the
possibility of analyzing them increased with the move of
Klein to London in 1927. Her ideas started to have implications for work with adult patients, which some members considered to be incompatible with FreudÕs
approach. KleinÕs critics objected to her use of fantasy,
her interpretation of FreudÕs concept of the death
instinct, and her concept of internal objects. When Anna
Freud and her colleagues arrived in 1938, they joined
KleinÕs critics. Between 1942 and 1944 Scientific Meetings were arranged to explore these differences, after
which members agreed to differ within the context of the
gentlemanÕs agreement (King and Steiner 1991).
After the Second World War the scientific life of the
Society continued to be characterized by interest in
child analysis, psychotic and borderline conditions and
the application of psychoanalysis to the arts and social
issues. The division into three groups created at times
serious disagreements, but properly contained they contributed to the creativity and liveliness on the scientific
life of the Society. In the early twenty-first century, the
scientific differences between members have decreased,
and interest now centers on technique and the ‘‘here
and now’’ of the analytic relationship rather than on the
elucidation of theoretical issues and concepts.
As papers on applied subjects were seldom read at
Scientific Meetings, in 1968 a special Section was set
up that became known as the ‘‘Applied Section.’’
Through this section and courses of public lectures,
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alongside the Annual Ernest Jones Lecture, links have
been made with colleagues from other professional
disciplines.
During the 1920s, Susan Isaacs did research on the
social and intellectual development of young children
in the Malting House School, Cambridge (Isaacs
1933). In 1932, Edward Glover carried out and later
published research on the way members of the Society
worked as psychoanalysts (Glover and Brierley 1940).
In 1957, the Research Committee was set up to facilitate applications for membersÕ research. Interest also
centers on the conceptualization in statistical terms of
the outcome and effectiveness of psychoanalysis. In
1981, the Erich Simenauer Foundation was set up,
through the generosity of the late Prof. Simenauer,
who was an Honorary Member of the Society, to support and encourage psychoanalytic research work.
After Ernest Jones died, his remaining papers were
given to the Archives of the Society. They cover his
work for the International, as well as for the Society.
When Pearl King became honorary archivist, she
began to index the Archives on a computer database.
This is an ongoing task. The Archives have become an
important center for research into the history of
psychoanalysis.
In 1920, the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis
started publication—the first psychoanalytic journal in
the English language. A Glossary Committee of Joan Riviere, James and Alix Strachey, and Ernest Jones, worked
in collaboration with the Freuds on the task of translating
FreudÕs work and concepts from German into English. In
1924, The International Psycho-Analytical Library was
started with the Hogarth Press. In 1986, the Institute
launched The New Library of Psychoanalysis in cooperation with Tavistock and then Routledge.
Following the Second World War, the Society
sponsored the translation of FreudÕs complete psychological works into English and their publication in
twenty-four volumes as the Standard Edition. James
Strachey carried the main responsibility for this great
achievement, with the help of Anna Freud (Steiner
1987). A revised Standard Edition is planned; it is to
include matter from previously unknown papers,
corrections, and a glossary of German words having
controversial translations.
Professional and public concern with the legitimacy
of psychoanalysis as a medical specialty led the British
Medical Association in 1927 to set up a committee to
investigate it. After meeting for two years, they agreed
229
B R Ü C K E , E R N S T W I L H E L M
VON
(18 19 –189 2)
not to oppose the use of psychoanalysis, by those
trained by the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, as a treatment for mental illness. Since then the Society has presented evidence to a number of Royal Commissions.
In 1956, on the centenary of FreudÕs birth, the
London County Council placed a commemorative
plaque on the house where he had lived in Maresfield
Gardens, Hampstead. In 1986, following the death of
Anna Freud, this house was opened by Princess Alexandra as the home of the Freud Museum. In 1975
David Astor donated the money for a Freud Professorship at University College, London. Initially, the professors were appointed annually, but in 1984 Dr. J. J.
Sandler was appointed as the first full-time Freud Professor. The Society built up close links with hospitals
in the NHS, especially with the Tavistock Clinic and
the Cassel Hospital, which resulted in their facilitating
the training of psychoanalysts who were on their staff.
The Society also supported the Anna Freud Center in
its training of child psychotherapists and child
psychoanalysts.
Several members of the British Psycho-Analytical
Society have held important professional roles in the
psychoanalytical world: Ernest Jones, William H.
Gillespie, Adam Limentani and Joseph Sandler were
presidents of the IPA. The Society has organized four
IPA. Congresses: in Oxford in 1929, in London in
1953, in Edinburgh in 1961 and in London in 1975.
The Society was responsible to the IPA for the Sponsoring Committees for Australia and Canada, and it
has trained candidates from many countries.
Isaacs, Susan. (1933). Social development in young children.
London: Routledge.
King, Pearl H. M., and Steiner, Riccardo. (1991). The FreudKlein controversies 1941–1945. London, New York: Tavistock
Publications-Routledge, New Library of Psychoanalysis.
Rayner, Eric. (1991). The independent mind in British psychoanalysis. London: Free Association Books.
Steiner, Riccardo. (1985). Some thoughts about tradition
and change arising from an examination of the British Psycho-Analytical Society’s ‘‘Controversial Discussions,’’
1943–1944. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 12,
27–71.
BRÜCKE, ERNST WILHELM VON
(1819–1892)
A German doctor and physiologist, Ernst Wilhelm von
Brücke was born June 6, 1819, and died January 7,
1892, in Vienna. The son of a portrait and historical
painter, following his motherÕs premature death he
was raised by his uncle, the superintendent C. Droysen, in Stralsund. He studied medicine in Berlin and
Heidelberg in 1838 and became a doctor of medicine
in Berlin in 1842. In 1843 he became an assistant to
Johannes Müller at the Museum of Comparative Anatomy and a prosector; in 1846 he also served as a teacher of anatomy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin.
Bibliography
Brücke completed his degree in physiology in 1844
and was appointed full professor of physiology and
general pathology in Königsberg, and professor of
physiology and (microscopic) anatomy in Vienna,
where he held the chair of physiology for forty years,
until his appointment as professor emeritus in 1890.
He was ennobled in 1873 and became rector of the
University of Vienna in 1879. He was a member of the
Academy of Sciences, the Prussian Order of Merit, and
the Upper House of Austria, and received numerous
decorations and honorary distinctions. As a cofounder of the Physics Society in 1845 (the Berlin and
later the German Physics Societies were offshoots of
this organization), he was, along with Emil Du
Bois-Reymond, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Karl
Ludwig, one of the defenders of organic physics,
which, in contrast to the then-dominant vitalist tradition, held that all vital manifestations were the result
of physico-chemical forces in the organism.
Glover, Edward, and Brierley, Marjorie. (1940). An investigation of the technique of psycho-analysis. London: Bailliere,
Tindall and Cox.
Brücke was the most learned physiologist of his time
and helped enrich several areas of natural science. He
was active in the physiology of optics, the physiology of
Joseph Sandler and Anne Marie Sandler were Presidents of the European Psychoanalytical Federation.
Since 1969, every two years the Society has organized
the English Speaking Conference for European
psychoanalysts.
PEARL KING AND RICCARDO STEINER
See also: Controversial Discussions; Jones, Ernest;
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, The; Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud.
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plants, the physiology of digestion, of the blood, the
nerves, and the muscles, cellular physiology, biochemistry (the purification of pepsins, which led to our
understanding of enzymes), the physiology of speech,
and even linguistics. His many publications included
the two-volume Vorlesungen über Physiologie (Lessons
on Physiology; 1873, 1874). BrückeÕs laboratory was a
place where fundamental research on the exact
sciences of nature was carried out and he introduced a
new methodology to the Vienna school of medicine,
which was strongly influenced by his work.
Sigmund Freud, who described Brücke as the
‘‘highest authority who has ever had an influence on
me,’’ worked in BrückeÕs laboratory between 1876
and 1882. His earliest writings on neurophysiology
are based on his work there and BrückeÕs influence is
clearly evident in FreudÕs earliest theoretical writings
on psychoanalysis. Brücke, who had sponsored Freud
for a professorship, referred, in his letter of recommendation, to FreudÕs work on neurology as being
‘‘very important.’’ He also helped Freud obtain the
travel stipend that allowed him to work with Charcot
in Paris.
HELMUT GRÖGER
See also: ‘‘Autobiographical Study, An’’; Freud, Ernst;
German romanticism and psychoanalysis; Interpretation
of Dreams, The; Reversal into the opposite; Science and
psychoanalysis; Vienna General Hospital.
Bibliography
Bernfeld, Siegfried. (1949). Freud’s scientific beginnings.
American Imago, 6, 163–196.
Brücke, Ernst Wilhelm von. (1873–1874). Vorlesungen über
Physiologie. Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller.
Jones, Ernest. (1953). Sigmund Freud: Life and work. London: Hogarth Press.
Lesky, Erna. (1965). Die Wiener medizinische schule. 19 Jahrhundert. Graz-Köln: Hermann Böhlaus.
BRUN, RUDOLF (1885–1969)
Rudolf Brun was a Swiss physician, a neurologist,
holder of the chair of neurology (1940), and member of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society. He was
born March 15, 1885, in Zurich, where he died on
January 14, 1969. Brun was born into a family of
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Huguenots. His father was a professor of art history in Zurich. As a young man Brun studied in
Zurich, completing his medical studies in Zurich,
Geneva, and Algiers. Upon leaving school in 1909,
he became an assistant to C. von Monakow (clinical work and brain anatomy) at the Zurich Neurological Institute. He completed his training as a
general practitioner at the regional hospital in
Glarus in 1911–1912 and studied neurology in
London and Paris from 1912 to 1913. Under the
influence of August Forel, while Brun was still a
student, he began studying the behavior of ants,
and his research soon attracted the attention of the
scientific community. Between 1918 and 1925 he
was head physician at the Zurich Neurological
Institute.
He was exposed to FreudÕs writings during his studies but it wasnÕt until 1916, during his psychological
experiments with animals and humans, that he was
willing to accept the theory of drives. After 1925 he
had his own practice as a neurologist and psychoanalyst. After the makeover of the Swiss Psychoanalytic
Society in 1919 he became an associate then a full
member, and shared administrative duties with Philipp Sarasin, with whom he completed a training analysis in 1925–1926. Together with Emil Oberholzer he
provoked a break between the Ärztgesellschaft für Psychoanalyse (Medical Society for Psychoanalysis) and
the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society, which he returned to
in 1947. He never met Freud in person.
Brun wrote more than 120 publications on entomology, anatomy and pathology, neurology, and psychoanalysis. In the Allgemeine Neurosenlehre (1942) he established the position of psychoanalysis in biology. For Brun
neuroses were the result of conflicts between the primary
(sexual and self-preservative) and secondary (social)
instincts. Anxiety is the result of libidinal stasis caused by
hormonal activity. Actual neuroses, in FreudÕs sense,
assumed considerable importance for Brun. Because of
his biological orientation, Brun reacted violently to
beliefs that were based, according to him, on ‘‘transcendental idealism,’’ such as Daseinanalyse (existential
analysis).
KASPAR WEBER
See also: Schweizerische Ärztegesellschaft für Psychoanalyse; Switzerland (German-speaking).
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B R U N S W I C K , R U T H M A C K (1897 –1 946)
Bibliography
Aeschlimann, Jürg. (1890). Rudolf Brun (1885–1969).
Leben und werk des zürcher neurologen, psychoanalytikers und entomologen. Zürcher medizingesch. Abhandlung,
144, 1980.
Brun, Rudolf. (1926). ‘‘Experimentelle beiträge zur dynamik
und ekonomie des triebkonflikts; biologische parallelen zu
Freuds trieblehre.’’ Imago, 12, 147–170.
———. (1951). General theory of neuroses; twenty-two lectures on the biology, psychoanalysis and psychohygiene of
psychosomatic disorders. (Bernard Miall, Trans.). New York:
International Universities Press.
———. (1956). Mein weg zu Freud. Schweizer Zeitschrift für
Psycholie, 15, 125–130.
Minkowski, Mieczyslaw. (1969). Louis Rodolphe Brun,
1885–1969. Schweizer Archiv. Neurol. Neurochir. Psychiatr.,
106, 330–334.
BRUNSWICK, RUTH MACK (1897–1946)
Ruth Mack Brunswick, a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, was born in 1897 in Chicago, died January 25,
1946 in New York City.
Ruth BrunswickÕs father, Judge Julian Mack,
became a famous jurist on the U.S. Circuit Court in
New York, and also he was known as a prominent
Jewish philanthropist. His only daughter Ruth
attended Radcliffe College during World War I, and
also graduated from Tufts Medical School.
In 1917 she married Dr. Herman Blumgart, who
later pursued a successful career as a heart specialist;
his brother Leonard had gone to Vienna for a short
analysis with Sigmund Freud at the end of World
War I. Ruth had completed her psychiatric residency
when, at the age of twenty-five, she also went to Freud.
Her marriage was already troubled; her husband saw
Freud in an unsuccessful effort to salvage the marriage,
but Freud evidently decided the relationships was
hopeless.
Ruth had fallen in love with a man five years
younger than herself, Mark Brunswick, at the time a
music student. Ruth was still in analysis with Freud in
1924 when Mark as well began to consult Freud.
According to Mark, Freud later admitted that it had
been a mistake for Freud and Ruth to have discussed
MarkÕs case in detail.
In the meantime Ruth was teaching at the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Training Institute; her specialty was the
23 2
psychoses, an area of study that Freud personally
avoided. Ruth and Mark were married at the town hall
in Vienna in 1928; it was one of the few weddings
Freud ever attended. RuthÕs access to Freud seemed
unique; she came to meals at his apartment, visited
him in summers, and was on excellent terms with his
children. Ruth was considered a member of FreudÕs
extended family.
Ruth played a special role in mediating between the
American analysts and FreudÕs circle in Vienna. She
became an important channel through which wealthy
American patients arranged to undergo analyses with
Freud. In recognition of her special standing, Ruth became
one of the few women who received a ring from Freud.
She also played a notable part in supervising FreudÕs precarious health. Her own patient in analysis, Dr. Max
Schur, became appointed FreudÕs personal physician.
Ruth had health problems, though, that her doctors
could not diagnose as unquestionably organic. By
1933 or 1934 at the latest she had developed a serious
drug problem, and by 1937 she had become an addict.
Her failure to overcome her difficulties was the main
reason for FreudÕs final disappointment in her.
The worst of RuthÕs drug addiction occurred in
America; her mother died in 1940, her father in 1943.
Ruth and Mark were divorced in 1937, and then—
against FreudÕs advice—they re-married in six months.
Mark finally divorced her in 1945. RuthÕs death in
1946 was the end-result of a pattern of self-destructive
behavior. She had been drinking paregoric the way an
alcoholic consumes whiskey. Her health was undermined, and the federal authorities had taken note of
her drug-taking. She caught pneumonia, recovered,
and then died from the combination of too many opiates and a fall in the bathroom; she had hit her head
and fractured her skull. The full tragedy was for many
years not publicly known. The cloudy circumstances
associated with RuthÕs medical troubles, and the misfortune of her early death, have obscured both her
scientific contributions and her immense personal
standing with Freud.
RuthÕs central contribution to psychoanalytic
thinking had to do with her special concern with the
childÕs earliest relationship to the mother. In 1929 she
was one of the first in print to use the term preoedipal, and Freud himself adopted it two years later.
Otto Rank probably deserves the credit for being the
earliest to invoke the concept, but Ruth was tactful
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enough to be able to emphasize the importance of the
mother in the development of the child, without any
revolt on her part against FreudÕs basic ideas.
She will also be remembered as the Wolf ManÕs second analyst. In 1926 Freud referred the Wolf Man to
Ruth for treatment, paying her a high compliment; he
knew that anything she published would become
famous in the clinical literature. She wrote an article
about the Wolf Man in close collaboration with Freud.
She also trained some famous future analysts; she analyzed Muriel Gardiner, Max and Helen Schur, and
Robert Fliess, the son of FreudÕs former friend Wilhelm. Her most famous student was Karl Menninger,
who saw her later in the United States.
Ruth had a special talent for manipulating FreudÕs
theoretical concepts, and using them to set forth new
ideas of her own. Freud admired her freedom, which
helps to account for his partiality toward her. RuthÕs
analysis with Freud stretched, with some interruptions,
from 1922 until 1939. Unwittingly Freud had helped
bring about the dependency that it ideally should have
been the task of analysis to dissipate. Mark claimed that
Freud had first treated Ruth in too close a way, and then
tried to be too distant. To insiders within the analytic
movement RuthÕs death was proof that analytic treatment could not be counted on to prevent human misery. It was left to others, such as Rank and Melanie
Klein, to go on to make ‘‘pre-oedipal’’ problems the
centers of their respective systems of thought.
Ruth Mack Brunswick was one of the most important women in FreudÕs immediate circle during the last
years of his career; but the tragedy of her life, and the
implications it made about her work, has meant that
her name is relatively unknown to the general public.
PAUL ROAZEN
See also: Addiction; ‘‘From the History of an Infantile
Neurosis’’ (Wolf Man); Schur, Max.
Bibliography
Brunswick, Ruth Mack. (1928). A supplement to FreudÕs
history of an infantile neurosis. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 9, 439–76.
———. (1929). The analysis of a case of paranoia (delusions
of jealously). Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 70, 1–
22; 155–178.
———. (1940). The preoedipal phase of the libido development. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 9, 293–319.
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BULIMIA
Bulimia (from the Greek boulima: hunger [limos] of
an ox [bous]), a medical term that has entered common usage, refers to an eating disorder characterized
by episodes.
A bulimic episode (a binge) is defined as a fit of
frenzied overeating in which an excessive amount of
food is consumed in a short time; this episode involves
a sense of loss of control. It can occur several times in
one day and can completely overwhelm the subject.
Bulimia always entails a major and overwhelming
event that is convulsive or ritualized, and violent.
There is usually an awareness of the pathological nature of this behavior, combined with fear of an inability
to avoid it, pleasure, shame, and self-denigration.
In addition to bulimia relating to food, there is a form
of bulimia that relates to various consumer items
(medicines, pathological buying) and to sex.
There are descriptions of bulimic episodes dating
from antiquity. Medical dictionaries, particularly in
the English language, refer to this disorder from the
beginning of the eighteenth century (Blankaart, 1708).
Historically, bulimia was predominantly a male disorder and was akin to hyperphagia and gluttony. It was
long considered a manifestation of the same order as
neurotic symptoms (Janet, 1903); Sigmund Freud
referred to it as one of the symptoms of anxiety neurosis and also recorded it as an eating compulsion motivated by a fear of starvation.
As a manifestation of orality in the broad sense,
bulimia is generally a form of pathological behavior, a
passage to the act that is often impulsive and bypasses
any mentalization or psychic material. It then has a
defensive function in warding off psychotic disorganization or depressive affects. Karl Abraham mentioned
it in his work on melancholia and, in Fear of Breakdown (1974), Donald Winnicott described it as a form
of defense against the frightening nature of the void.
Bulimia is also associated with the addictions
(Radó, 1926). In 1945, Otto Fenichel classified it as a
‘‘drugless addiction.’’ Marie-Claire Célérier regards it
as a symptom on the boundary between a psychosomatic loss of meaning and a hysterical signifier
(1977), while Joyce McDougall describes it in terms
of a symptomatic act that substitutes for the
undreamt dream.
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B U L L I T T , W I L L I A M C. (18 91 –196 7)
Bulimia is a widespread phenomenon in Western
societies that is both on the increase and more out
in the open. It has gradually become a syndrome in
its own right—bulimia nervosa—with a separate status from anorexia nervosa and obesity. Wermuth
and Russell first established the diagnostic criteria
for the bulimic syndrome. In addition to bulimic
episodes, these include various strategies for controlling weight and a psychiatric co-morbidity that can
be severe (thymic disorders and addictions). These
criteria reflect the notions of loss of control, chaotic
functioning, inadequate mentalization and relationships of dependency (Jeammet, 1991) that are
observed in these patients.
Contemporary discussions of bulimia refer to a
complex, multi-faceted disorder that combines eating
binges with a range of strategies for maintaining a normal weight, distortions in cognitive functioning and
body-image perception, and emotional disturbances
(Vindreau, 1991). In the majority of cases, the origins
of the disorder are traced back to adolescence and its
physiological and psychodynamic transformations. As
of 2004, ninety percent of bulimics are women but the
bulimia rate is rising among men. Whereas the incidence of the syndrome is three percent in the general
population, it rises to seven percent in some adolescent, student, and high-school groups.
The conception of bulimia has developed from a
simple compulsive substitution for a repressed sexual
drive, into the widely-recognized, contemporary bulimia nervosa. Throughout this development, its definition has closely reflected both sociological and cultural
changes and the psychopathological theories that prevailed over time. Above all, both the recourse of acting
out through eating behavior, and the perceived need
for particular bodily sensations in order to produce a
psychic effect (Brusset, 1991), pose questions relating
to self-esteem, difficulty in controlling behavior and
emotions, narcissistic difficulties, and the quest for
identity.
CHRISTINE VINDREAU
See also: Anorexia nervosa; Self representation.
Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1924). A short study of the development of
the libido, viewed in the light of mental disorders. Selected
papers on Psycho-Analysis (pp. 418–501). London: Hogarth
Press.
23 4
Brusset, Bernard. (1991). Psychopathologie de l Õanorexie
mentale. Paris: Dunod.
Célérier, Marie-Claire. (1977). La boulimie compulsionnelle.
Topique, 18, 95–116.
Fenichel, Otto. (1945). The psychoanalytic theory of neurosis.
New York: W. W. Norton.
Freud, Sigmund. (1926d). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. SE, 20: 75–172.
Igoin, Laurence. (1979). La boulimie et son infortune. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Janet, Pierre. (1903). Les Obsessions et la psychasthénie. Paris:
Alcan.
Jeammet, Phillipe. (1991). Dysrégulations narcissiques et
objectales dans la boulimie. In Bernard Brusset and Catherine Couvreur (Eds.), La boulimie (pp. 89–104). Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
McDougall, Joyce. (1974). The psyche-soma and the psychoanalytic process. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,
1, 437–460.
Radó, Sándor. (1926). The psychic effects of intoxicants: an
attempt to evolve a psycho-analytical theory of morbid
cravings. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 7, 396–
413.
Vindreau, Christine. (1991). La boulimie dans la clinique
psychiatrique. In Bernard Brusset and Catherine Couvreur
(Eds.), La boulimie (pp. 63–79). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1974). Fear of breakdown. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 1, 103–107.
BULLITT, WILLIAM C. (1891–1967)
William C. Bullitt, an American political leader, was
born on January 25, 1891, in Philadelphia and died on
February 15, 1967, in Paris. With Freud, he was coauthor
of ‘‘Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study’’
(1967), and he helped Freud to immigrate to London.
Bullitt was raised in Philadelphia and educated at
Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut. He became a
prominent figure in American foreign policy. He was a
U.S. advisor at the negotiations for the Treaty of
Versailles and went to see Lenin on behalf of the U.S.
and British delegations. When BullittÕs Russian mission was disavowed, he became bitter toward President
Wilson and testified before Senator Henry Cabot
LodgeÕs congressional committee; the secretary of state
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was then forced to resign, and BullittÕs evidence also
helped defeat the entry of the United States into the
League of Nations. In 1933 when President Roosevelt
extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union,
Bullitt became the first U.S. ambassador. Next Bullitt
was ambassador to France from 1936 until the German
invasion toppled the French Third Republic. Bullitt
performed the role of a roving ambassador all over
Europe and possessed a unique set of diplomatic contacts. As ambassador to Austria, Bullitt helped Freud
escape Vienna in June 1938 after the Nazis moved into
Austria, though what role Bullitt played is not entirely
clear.
The stories about Bullitt are colorful. His role in
destroying the political career of Undersecretary of
State Sumner Welles during the Second World War
ruined BullittÕs standing with Roosevelt. Bullitt then
attempted to become elected mayor of Philadelphia
but was badly beaten. His early disappointment with
the Soviets led him to become one of the first cold-war
warriors. Bullitt was impulsive and high-handed, mercurial and impressionable—altogether not easy to
work with. His brilliance did not prevent his becoming
known as intemperate and unstable, even if he could
be charming and debonair. In 1948 Bullitt became a
Republican and remained on personal terms with
some of the great and mighty. But he ended up as an
outsider, a political exile.
In 1926 Bullitt published a novel that sold some
150,000 copies. In the late 1920s Bullitt, who had been
a patient of FreudÕs, began a collaborative study with
Freud on Wilson, who both authors, for different reasons, hated. It has remained a curiosity how Freud and
Bullitt came to write such a polemical assault, using
psychoanalytic concepts, in their book on Wilson. It is
still unknown who wrote which sections. Part of the
scholarly problem has stemmed from BullittÕs fascination with intrigue; Freud privately complained about
BullittÕs secretiveness shortly after the manuscript was
completed. The book on Wilson may be one of the
first efforts at psychological history, but it was so partisan as to have damaged the case for using psychology
to understand political leaders.
PAUL ROAZEN
Work discussed: Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Twentyeighth President of the United States. A Psychological
Study.
See also: Politics and psychoanalysis.
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Bibliography
Bullitt, William C. (1919). The Bullitt mission to Russia. New
York: Huebsch.
———. (1926). It Õs not done. New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World.
———. (1946). The great globe itself. New York: ScribnerÕs.
Freud, Sigmund, and Bullitt, William C. (1967). Thomas
Woodrow Wilson: A psychological study. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
BURGHÖLZLI ASYLUM
The psychiatric asylum in Burghölzli entered the history of psychoanalysis as a result of the interest shown
by Eugen Bleuler and his students (including Carl Gustav Jung) in FreudÕs theories and their possible application to the mental patients at the asylum. By the
mid-nineteenth century there were a number of significant problems with this former clinic. Plans for its
reconstruction were made between 1860 and 1864
with the help of Wilhelm Griesinger, a professor of
internal medicine at the University of Zurich. The
actual work took place between 1864 and 1870. On
July 4, 1870, work on the Burghölzli was completed.
The various medical directors of the Burghölzli left
their mark on the institution. The first director, Bernhard von Gudden (1870–1872), Gustav Huguenin
(1873–1874), and Eduard Hitzig (1875–1879), had a
purely biological orientation. Brain pathology and
physiology were the focus of their research. It was
August Forel (1879–1898) who brought international
attention to the clinic. The Burghölzli then served as a
bridge between the dynamic approach taken by French
psychiatry and the biological orientation of German
psychiatry. ForelÕs celebrated book on hypnotism
reflects the importance of the asylum at the time.
Bleuler, the director from 1898 to 1927, who had
worked with Jung at the Burghölzli, opened the field
to psychoanalytic research and its application in an
institutional framework. In 1913 he distanced himself
from FreudÕs work because of personal conflicts and
scientific disagreements. The clinic lost its importance
as a center of psychoanalytic research and a vehicle for
its dissemination. The Burghölzli would never again
generate the level of interest in psychoanalysis shown
at that time.
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The clinic did play a central role in the diffusion of
psychoanalysis between 1904 and 1913. It was not only
the first clinic in the world where FreudÕs theories were
scientifically tested and his therapeutic methods
applied to patients, but also an internationally
renowned research center for analytical psychology
and therapy. For Freud the Burghölzli served to legitimize his work in the face of the often violent polemics
against him. Aside from Jung, Adolf Meyer, Abraham
Brill, and Emil Oberholzer, a number of FreudÕs students, including Karl Abraham, worked at the
Burghölzli.
The Burghölzli has become a modern psychiatric
clinic with 341 beds and more than 1600 new patients
annually (1996). In addition to treating a wide range
of conditions, there are ambulatory and semi-ambulatory services for all sectors of psychiatry. It administers its own school of nurses. As a university clinic the
Burghölzli has continued to pursue teaching and
research activities since its inception. Its research in
the field of psychopathology and in the treatment of
mental illness has attracted international attention.
BERNARD MINDER
See also: Bleuler, Paul Eugen; Switzerland (Germanspeaking).
Bibliography
Bleuler, M. (1951). Geschichte des Burghölzlis und der psychiatrischen universitätsklinik. Zürcher Spitalgeschrift, 2,
377–425.
Psychiatrische Universitätsklinik Burghölzli Zürich. (1970).
1870–1970: Hundert Jahre Festschrift (pp. 1–87).
BURLINGHAM-ROSENFELD SCHULE. See
Hietzing Schule/Burlingham-Rosenfeld School
BURLINGHAM-TIFFANY, DOROTHY
(1891–1979)
Psychoanalyst Dorothy Burlingham was born in New
York on October 11, 1891, and died in London on
November 19, 1979. She was closely associated with
Anna Freud and her personal history is intimately
linked to the psychoanalytic movement.
23 6
BurlinghamÕs grandfather, Charles Tiffany, was the
founder of the famous jewelry store, Tiffany & Co.,
and her father was Louis Comfort Tiffany, the celebrated painter and artisan. In 1914 Dorothy wed a surgeon, Robert Burlingham, but their marriage was soon
troubled, in great part due to his phobias and episodes
of manic-depressive illness. The couple separated in
1921.
After moving to Vienna with her four children in
1925, Dorothy began analysis with Theodore Reik.
Her life subsequently became entwined with that of
the Freuds, as Anna Freud took her children into
treatment. In spite of becoming AnnaÕs close friend,
Dorothy undertook a second analysis with Sigmund
Freud. The situation was loaded with a series of fantastically complex entanglements. Ernst, son of Sophie
Halberstadt (FreudÕs daughter, who died in 1920) was
best friends with Bob, Dorothy BurlinghamÕs son.
Both attended the Hietzing School, which had been
founded in 1927 by Anna and Dorothy, together with
Eva Rosenfeld, with a view to raising children from
their milieu in a ‘‘psychoanalytic’’ fashion.
Burlingham fled Vienna upon the Nazi invasion in
1938, and after a short stay in the United States, and
following FreudÕs death in London, settled close to
Anna Freud near Maresfield Gardens. During the war,
Anna and Dorothy founded and managed together the
Hampstead War Nurseries, where they undertook historic research which they reported on in Infants Without Families (1943). Their collaboration led them to a
groundbreaking description of infantile depression
and an important advance in psychoanalytic
psychopathology.
Their friendship was profound, and DorothyÕs
death powerfully affected Anna. She continued to care
for her friendÕs children with such emotional investment that it provides an interesting perspective on the
mechanism of ‘‘altruistic surrender’’ that she had once
described.
In addition to her work with Anna Freud, Burlingham wrote several studies of blind children and, in
addition, undertook early research on the psychology
of identical twins.
BERNARD GOLSE
See also: Abandonment; Bergasse 19, Wien IX; Freud,
Anna; Hampstead Clinic; Latent; Lehrinstitut der Wiener
psychoanalystischen Vereinigung.
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B U R R O W , T R I G A N T (1875 –1 950)
Bibliography
Burlingham, Dorothy. (1952). Twins: A study of three pairs of
identical twins. London: Imago Publishing.
Burlingham, Michael John. (1989). The last Tiffany: A biography of Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham. New York:
Atheneum.
Freud, Anna, and Burlingham, Dorothy. (1943). Infants
without families. London: G. Allen and Unwin.
BURROW, TRIGANT (1875–1950)
A forgotten American psychoanalyst and pioneer of
group analysis, Trigant Burrow was born in Norfolk,
Virginia, on September 17, 1875, and he died on May
25, 1950, in Westport, Connecticut.
Burrow was the fourth child of John and Anastasia
Burrow; his father was Protestant, his mother, a
Catholic. His father was a scientifically-minded wholesale pharmacist. At the beginning of his higher education, Burrow attended Fordham University, where the
dogmas of the Catholic church began to lose their significance for him. Following his graduation in 1895,
he entered the medical school at the University of Virginia, 1899. One year was spent in post-graduate study
of biology, one year touring Europe where he attended
the psychiatric clinic in Vienna of Professor WagnerJarureg. Returning to America he spent three years in
the study of experimental psychology, for which he
received a PhD in 1909 based on his study of the process of attention. This was a subject that he pursued
later in his psychoanalytic career when his interest
turned back to physiological processes.
Burrow began to work with the Swiss psychiatrist
Adolf Meyer at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and was introduced to Freud and Jung who were
in America for the Clark University Lectures. Burrow
was immediately determined to study psychoanalysis
and at the age of thirty-four moved with his family to
Zurich for a year’s analysis with Carl Gustav Jung. This
involved considerable financial hardship, but he
greatly valued his experience there. This was at the
time when Freud and Jung were still closely associated.
Burrow was proud of the fact that he was the first
American-born person to study psychoanalysis in Europe. In 1910, he returned to Baltimore to work with
Meyer at Johns Hopkins University. In 1911, he joined
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Ernest Jones and others to found the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA).
Between 1911 and 1918, Burrow published eighteen
papers on psychoanalysis. His originality is shown in
papers written from 1914 onwards. They anticipate
much later work in infant development: He writes of
the ‘‘preconscious’’ experience of the infant, which
remains part of the psyche throughout life. He does
not mean Freud’s preconscious, that which is accessible to consciousness, but that which is prior to consciousness, when the infant is at one with the mother.
For the infant the mother is the infant’s love subject,
not love object, and the preconscious mode is a feeling
that goes out of the infant’s primary identification
with the mother. In the womb there is a primary physiological unity between infant and mother and a psychological union, a pre-objectless state. These manifest
in later life as states of quietude and self-possession.
The break in physiological and psychological union
with the mother through birth is restored when the
infant nourishes at the breast, experiencing a semblance of organic unity, completion and satisfaction.
This anticipates much later work, of Margaret Mahler
on separate individuation, and Kohut and his selfobject theory. Burrow saw resemblances between his
ideas and those of Ferenczi.
Burrow’s move into group analysis was preceded by
his accepting the challenge of one of his analysands,
Clarence Shields, to change places with him. Accepting
the role of patient, Burrow was immediately impressed
with the nature of his own resistances and an
appreciation of the social forces at work in the analytic
situation. Soon he extended his study to the group
situation where he, his colleagues and pupils entered
into an intensive study of group processes. Burrow’s
emphasis was on the analysis of the ‘‘here and now’’:
‘‘Group analysis or social analysis is the analysis of the
immediate group in the immediate moment.’’ Every
member of the group, including the analyst, is both an
observer of his own processes and is observed by all
the other members of the group. The analyst does not
have a privileged position.
Throughout his life Burrow thought of himself as
being a psychoanalyst and a Freudian. He believed that
he was extending the relational aspects that were
already present in Freud and in correspondence tried
to persuade Freud of the validity of his work with
groups. He failed in this and in 1926 Freud wrote: ‘‘As
237
B U R R O W , T R I G A N T (1875 – 1950)
far as the group is concerned an analytic influence is
impossible.’’ Some of Burrow’s attempts to have his
papers published in the Internationale Zeitschrift were
blocked by Paul Federn and Sandor Rado.
Burrow saw the ‘‘I-persona’’ that is each individual’s
self-image as being derived from social influences.
From infancy onward, society imposes concepts of
what it is to be good and bad and each internalizes
these social images and adapts to the demands of
society. Thus individuals are divided from the primary
organismic unity with society, the world; in group
analysis individuals become aware of the strength of
the social self-image and can begin to overcome its
influence and to reunite with the group as a whole,
with the wider society.
Between 1925 and 1928, Burrow published a further
thirteen papers, nine of which were given to the APA.
He tried to persuade his fellow analysts that the neurotic structures of the individual are replicated in the
neurotic structures of society: society is hysterical too,
has its own elaborate system of defense mechanisms.
He was appointed president of the American Psychoanalytic Society in 1925, but continued his critique of
psychoanalysts. ‘‘We need to rid ourselves of the idea
that the neurotic individual is sick and that the psychopathologists are well. We need to accept a more liberal societal viewpoint that permits us to recognize
without protest that the individual neurotic is in many
respects not more sick than we ourselves.’’ Burrow
insisted that consensual observation is synonymous
with scientific method and therefore it is only in the
group ‘‘laboratory’’ situation that sexual fantasies,
family conflicts, and the social mask become observable. At the annual meeting of the APA in 1925, he said
that neurosis is social and that a social neurosis can be
met only through a social analysis.
In 1933, when the APA reorganized itself, Burrow
was asked to resign his membership. He accepted this
with dignity and tried to remain on friendly terms
with many of his former colleagues.
In the last phase of his work his interest turned back
to the process of attention. Through physiological
research and self-observation he described the process
23 8
by which each individual experiences the tensions of
being a member of society: that is, by muscular tension
in the ocular and forehead regions, which he called
‘‘ditention.’’ Through training it is possible to identify
and to give up this process and to experience ‘‘cotention,’’ an experience that restores the sense of unity
with the social.
Burrow and his followers formed the Lifwynn Institute (Foundation for laboratory research in analytic
and social psychiatry) in Westport, Connecticut,
which has carried on his work.
Burrow’s psychoanalytic and group analytic work
anticipated the findings of much later workers. Sigmund Henrich Foulkes, the founder of group analysis,
acknowledges his influence, having read his work in
1926. Many of the techniques of group therapy and of
the encounter group movement originate from Burrow and his group laboratory. He wrote seven books
and seventy articles, and had this comment: ‘‘Psychoanalysis is not the study of neurosis: it is a neurosis,’’
but for Freud he was a ‘‘muddled bubbler’’ (letter to
Sándor Rádo, September 30, 1925).
MALCOLM PINES
See also: Group analysis; Group psychotherapies.
Bibliography
Burrow, Trigant. (1927). The group method of analysis. Psychoanalytic Review, 14, 268–280.
———. (1949). The neurosis of man: An introduction to the
science of human behaviour. New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World.
———. (1958). A search for man’s sanity. The selected letters
of Trigant Burrow, with biographical notes. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Syz, Hans. (1963). Reflections on group or phylo-analysis.
Acta Psychotherapeutica et Psychosomatica, 2, 37–55.
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1
2
3
one: Karl Abraham (1877–1925), German
psychoanalyst and doctor. Abraham was a
close collaborator of Freud and founder of
the Berliner Psychoanalytische Vereinigung
(Berlin Psychoanalytic Society). Public
Domain. Courtesy of the New York
Psychoanalytic Institute and Society. two:
Alfred Adler (1870–1937), American psychiatrist and creator of Individual
Psychology, a form of psychotherapy . Getty
Images. Reproduced by permission. three:
Franz Alexander (1891–1964), Hungarian
doctor, psychoanalyst, and founder of the
Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute (shown
here with A. A. Brill, left). Courtesy of the
New York Psychoanalytic Institute and
Society. Reproduced by permission.
5
4
four: Didier Anzieu (1923–1999), French
psychoanalyst and professor of psychology.
Anzieu developed the notion of "skin-ego."
Courtesy of the International Association for
the History of Psychoanalysis. Reproduced
by permission.
five: Piera Aulagnier
(1923–1990), French physician, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst. Aulagnier was the
founder of the Quatrième groupe. Courtesy
of the International Association for the
History of Psychoanalysis. Reproduced by
permission. six: Robert Bak (1908–1974),
Hungarian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
Bak was president of the New York
Psychoanalytic Society from 1957 to 1959.
Photo by Ethel Pries. Courtesy of the New
York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society.
Reproduced by permission. seven: Edmund
Bergler (1899–1962), Austrian psychoanalyst. Bergler was director of Freud's clinic in
Vienna from 1933 to 1938, and the author
of The Basic Neurosis. Courtesy of the New
York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society.
Reproduced by permission.
6
7
8
9
eight: Siegfried Bernfeld (1892–1953),
Austrian philosopher and psychoanalyst.
Freud considered Bernfeld to be one of his
most gifted students. Public Domain.
Courtesy of the New York Psychoanalytic
Institute and Society. nine: Grete Lehner
Bibring (1899–1977), Austrian doctor and
psychoanalyst. Bibring made important contributions to the field of women's psychology, especially in her research on pregnancy
and mother-child relationships. Archives,
Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
(BPSI). Reproduced by permission. ten:
Peter Blos, Sr. (1904–1997), German child
psychoanalyst and founder of the
Association of Child Psychoanalysis.
Courtesy of the New York Psychoanalytic
Institute and Society. Reproduced by permission. eleven: Eugen Bleuler (1857–
1939), Swiss professor of medicine. Bleuler
was instrumental in opening the European
medical community to psychoanalysis,
despite his own tentative acceptance of
Freud's work. Courtesy of the New York
Psychoanalytic Institute and Society.
Reproduced by permission.
10
11
twelve: Berta Bornstein (1899–1971),
child psychoanalyst. Bornstein was an innovator in the field of child psychoanalysis.
Photo by Ina Furst. Courtesy of the New
York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society.
Reproduced by permission. thirteen: Josef
Breuer (1842–1925), Austrian physician.
Breuer developed the "cathartic method" in
collaboration with Freud as a result of
Freud’s treatment of "Anna O." © Corbis.
Reproduced by permission. fourteen: A. A.
(Abraham Arden) Brill (1874–1948),
American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst,
first practicing psychoanalyst in the United
States and one of the founders of the New
York Psychoanalytic Society. Courtesy of the
New York Psychoanalytic Institute and
Society. Reproduced by permission. fifteen: Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893),
French physician. Charcot was the first to
use hypnosis to treat hysteria. Public
Domain. Courtesy of the New York
Psychoanalytic Institute and Society.
14
12
13
15
sixteen:
Clark University: Group photograph taken during Freud's visit in 1909,
his only visit to the United States. Back row
from left: A. A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sandor
Ferenczi; Front row from left: Freud, G.
Stanley Hall, Carl G. Jung. © Corbis/
Bettmann. Reproduced by permission. seventeen: Clark University Psychological
Conference attendees, September 1909. ©
Corbis. Reproduced by permission.
16
17
18
19
eighteen: Helene Deutsch (1884–1982),
American psychoanalyst. Deutsch was the
first to write a book on the psychology of
women. Archives, Boston Psychoanalytic
Society and Institute (BPSI). Reproduced
by permission. nineteen: Max Eitingon
(1881– 1943), Russian physician, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst. Eitingon was the
founder of the Palestine Psychoanalytic
Association in 1934. Courtesy of the New
York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society.
Reproduced by permission. twenty: Erik
Erikson (1902–1994), German-born child
psychoanalyst famous for his theory of the
"Eight Stages of Psychosocial Development.”
©
Ted
Streshinsky/Corbis.
Reproduced by permission. twenty-one:
Jean Favreau (1919–1993), French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Favreau served as
head physician of the Centre de consultations et de traitements psychanalytiques
(Center for Psychoanalytic Consultations
and Treatment) from 1958 to 1989.
Courtesy of the International Association for
the History of Psychoanalysis. Reproduced
by permission.
20
21
22
23
24
25
twenty-two: Sándor Ferenczi (1873–
1933), Hungarian neurologist and psychoanalyst. Ferenczi developed the "active
technique" of analysis and pioneered work
on the concept of introjection. Public
Domain. Courtesy of the New York
Psychoanalytic Institute and Society. twenty-three: Anna Freud (1895–1982),
Freud's youngest child and a psychoanalyst.
She was a pioneer in child analysis.
Archives of the History of American
Psychology. Reproduced by permission.
twenty-four: Sigmund Freud (1856–
1939), Austrian physician, psychiatrist, and
founder of psychoanalysis. Freud was also a
prolific writer, whose work is appreciated for
its artistry as well as its content. The Library
of Congress. Reproduced by permission.
twenty-five: Freud with his father Jakob
(1815–1896), January 1865. Photo by
Hulton Archive/Getty Images. Reproduced
by permission.
26
27
28
twenty-six: Freud and sculptor O. Nemen
with bust of Freud, 1931. AP/Wide World
Photo. Reproduced by permission. twentyseven: Freud, his wife Martha and their
daughter Anna, 1899. The Library of
Congress. Reproduced by permission.
twenty-eight: Erich Fromm (1900–1980),
German psychoanalyst. Fromm, a Marxist,
was very interested in connecting Marxism
and psychoanalysis. He was also the
founder of the Mexican Psychoanalytic
Institute. Archive Photos, Inc. Reproduced
by permission.
C
CÄCILIE M., CASE OF
‘‘Frau Cäcilie M.’’ is the pseudonym given by Sigmund
Freud to Anna von Lieben (her identity was discovered
by Peter Swales [1986]), a patient Freud described only
briefly in the Studies on Hysteria (1895d). Born
Baronne von Todesco in 1847 into a rich Jewish family
living in Vienna, she was treated for several years by a
number of celebrated physicians, including Jean
Martin Charcot, before being sent to Freud, in 1887 or
early 1888, by either Josef Breuer or Rudolf Chrobak.
Freud treated Cäcilie M. until November 1893.
Although the case receives scant attention in the Studies
on Hysteria and in his correspondence with Wilhelm
Fliess, it was significant. ‘‘This was shown in the case of
another patient, Frau Cäcilie M., whom I got to know
far more thoroughly than any of the other patients
mentioned in these studies. I collected from her very
numerous and convincing proofs of the existence of a
psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomenon such
as I have put forward above. Personal considerations
unfortunately make it impossible for me to give a
detailed case history of this patient, though I shall have
occasion to refer to it from time to time’’ (1895d, p. 69)
Von Lieben had been suffering sporadically from a
facial neuralgia when she became FreudÕs patient. In
1925 Freud wrote that she had been sent to him
‘‘because no one knew what to do with her’’ (1925d,
p. 18) after thirty years of hysterical disturbances,
absences, and pain, which, against a background of
depression and feelings of low self-esteem, had led to a
serious morphine dependence.
She was nine years older than Freud and was fortyone when he met her. Through her mother, born
Gomperz, she found herself involved in a family that
played an important role in FreudÕs life. Apparently,
she met him prior to a trip to Paris, since a letter from
Charcot dated September 26, 1888, makes reference to
a consultation with the Parisian master, a consultation
that does not appear to have been the first:
‘‘I am very grateful to you for the details you have
provided concerning the state of Madame de L. Your
difficult and extensive analysis of the varied and complex physico-psychic phenomena she presents show
that you have grown attached to this interesting person just as we ourselves grew attached during her stay
in Paris. I am in complete agreement with you on the
method to be followed at this time. Moral treatment
must play the principal role and, from the point of
view of medication, there is absolutely nothing to say
in general. One must naturally act following the indications of the moment. With respect to the diarrhea of
which she complains and sometimes lasts two or three
weeks, wouldnÕt it be appropriate to see how she
responded to a few centigrams of silver nitrate taken
internally? . . . But, I repeat, it is on her psyche that we
must act, as you perfectly understood and it is in this
way that we can be useful in this case. Moreover, compared to what she was before, the Mademoiselle de L.
of today is much better in all respects. She is, as she
herself recognizes, up to a certain point prepared to
struggle for her life, something she was not willing to
do previously’’ (de Mijolla, 1988).
Because she was difficult to hypnotize, he accompanied her in July 1889 to Nancy to see Hippolyte
Bernheim, who failed to obtain the desired results.
This setback was part of what led Freud to abandon
hypnosis and suggestion, which nonetheless had
enabled his patient ‘‘to lead a tolerable existence’’
(1925d, p. 18).
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According to Freud, she presented a ‘‘hysterical psychosis of denial,’’ with broad periods of amnesia
regarding the traumatic moments she had lived
through. Toward the end of 1889 ‘‘an old memory suddenly broke in upon her clear and tangible and with all
the freshness of a new sensation’’ and a ‘‘cathartic
cure’’ could be undertaken, not however without
‘‘accompanied by the acutest suffering and the return
of all the symptoms she had ever had’’ (1895d, p. 70n).
It took three years of ‘‘chimney sweeping’’ to pay back
‘‘the old debts’’ (p. 70n), with alternating periods of
irritability, depression, and anxiety.
Cäcilie influenced Freud as well; she taught him the
mechanism of ‘‘hysterical conversion’’ associated with a
process of symbolization. Her trigeminal neuralgia, for
example, appeared to be determined by a ‘‘traumatic
scene’’ during which her husband had made a remark
to her that she re-experienced during treatment, saying
‘‘It was like a slap in the face’’ (1895d, p. 178).
She had an intuition of a future state that led her to
remark, ‘‘ItÕs a long time since IÕve been frightened of
witches at night,’’ the night before she experienced this
fear. For Freud, ‘‘On each occasion what was already
present as a finished product in the unconscious was
beginning to show through indistinctly. This idea,
which emerged as a sudden notion, was worked over
by the unsuspecting ÔofficialÕ consciousness (to use
CharcotÕs term) into a feeling of satisfaction, which
swiftly and invariably turned out to be unjustified.
Frau Cäcilie, who was a highly intelligent woman, to
whom I am indebted, for much help in gaining an
understanding of hysterical symptoms, herself pointed
out to me that events of this kind may have given rise
to superstitions about the danger of being boastful or
of anticipating evils’’ (1895d, p. 76n).
It is known that Freud saw her as often as twice a day
(like Emmy von N.), even during his vacations, which
earned her the name of Prima Donna in a letter to Fliess
dated July 12, 1892. These two wealthy patients provided the bulk of his income for several months during
1889, but it was for other reasons that he was disappointed when Anna terminated her cure in 1893. On
November 27, 1893 he complained in a letter to
Wilhelm Fliess ‘‘My head misses the usual overwork
since I lost [Cäcilie M.]’’ (letter to Wilhelm Fliess,
November 27, 1893, in 1985, p.61). On February 8,
1897, he returned to the subject, ‘‘If you knew . . . [Cäcilie M.], you would not doubt for a moment that only
this woman could have been my teacher’’ (1985, p. 229).
24 0
Peter Swales, after a long investigation, has written
a fairly complete biography of this patient, who was a
member of ViennaÕs aristocracy and an active participant in Jewish intellectual life. It is easy to understand
the extent to which she could have influenced Freud,
who also saw in her a refutation of the theories of
Pierre Janet on the congenital deficiencies of the mental state of hysterics. She died on October 31, 1900, of
a heart attack.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Studies on Hysteria.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies in hysteria, SE, 2: 48–106.
Freud, Sigmund. (1925d). An autobiographical study, SE,
20: 1–74.
Freud, Sigmund, and Fliess, Wilhelm. (1985). The complete
letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess: 1887-1904
(Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Ed. and Trans.). Cambridge,
MA and London: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press.
Mijolla, Alain de. (1988). Les lettres de Jean-Martin Charcot
à Sigmund Freud, 1886–1893. Le crépuscule d’un dieu.
Revue française de psychanalyse, LII, 3, p. 703–726.
Swales, Peter. (1986). Freud, his teacher, and the birth of
psychoanalysis. In Paul E. Stepansky (Ed.), Freud: Appraisals and reappraisals (pp. 3–82). New Jersey: The Analytic
Press, 1986.
CAHIERS CONFRONTATION, LES
Under the editorial direction of René Major, Les Cahiers Confrontation was the eponymous publication that
broadened the audience for the discussions and
debates that constituted the well-known series of seminars, Confrontation. In articles that asked probing and
provocative questions outside the usual bounds of various disciplines, each issue of the biannual publication
(1979-1989), which featured original cover art with
drawings by Valério Adami, helped to extend psychoanalytic investigation into the broader realms of
culture and contemporary thought.
Indeed, Les Cahiers played a precursor role in creating
what became known as the ‘‘Confrontation effect’’ that
impacted a number of associations and publications of
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analysts, who appealed to related disciplines in pursuing and developing psychoanalytic research.
Some themes addressed in Les Cahiers directly
related to issues in psychoanalytic practice, theory, or
institutions. Examples include LÕEtat cellulaire (The
cellular state), Les machines analytiques (Analytic
machines), La sexualité masculine (Male sexuality), Les
fantômes de la psychanalyse (The ghosts of psychoanalysis), Télépathie (Telepathy), LÕEtat freudien (The
Freudian state], LÕInterprétation (Interpretation), and
La logique freudienne (Freudian logic).
Les Cahiers also examined aspects of art and literature,
in articles such as Art et désordre (Art and disorder),
America Latina (Latin America), Correspondances
(Correspondences), Palimpsestes (Palimpsests), and
Déchiffrement (Deciphering). Philosophical issues
included Derrida and Aprés le sujet Qui vient (After the
subject, who?); religion was the focus of Conversion
(Conversion) and La religion en effet (The impact of
religion). Articles from these issues were frequently
cited in numerous works both in France and abroad,
by among others, Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Alan
Bass, Jean Baudrillard, Antoine Berman, Maurice
Blanchot, Michel de Certeau, Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-François Lyotard,
Charles Malamoud, Guy Rosolato, René Thom, Maria
Torok, Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Serge Viderman, Paul
Virilio, Samuel Weber, and influenced the texts of
famous writers Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, and Octavio Paz.
The publication of Les Cahiers Confrontation
marked a fruitful period, during which psychoanalysis
opened up to and participated in the important cultural debates of the times. Issues included feminism
and phallocentrism, the role of psychoanalytic institutions with their inherent contradictions and aporias,
and politics and the putative end of ideology. A variety
of issues anticipated questions that would subsequently gather currency, including the return of religion and the contribution of Lacanian thought to
rethinking Freudian orthopraxis.
Editions Confrontation represented a publishing
outcome of Les Cahiers that enabled major communications from the seminars to find their way rapidly
into print. Numerous works published under these
auspices are still in demand. LÕInanalysé (Un-analyzed)
discussed analytic theory in terms of a sort of coded
residue of what is unthought and unthought-out in
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established psychoanalysis; contributions to Le corps et
le politique (The body and politics) played a role in dissolution of the Ecole freudienne de Paris. Le lien social
(Social cohesion) raised issues as to the social nature
of analysis. Géopsychanalyse remains famous today for
questioning why analysts at an International Psychoanalytical Association congress in New York failed to
take a principled stand regarding the role of analysis in
human rights violations during the Argentinean military dictatorship (1976-1984).
Other publications included Affranchissement
(Franking/emancipation) in which, regarding the publication of La carte postale, the fundamental question
of the divisibility (or its opposite) of the letter is discussed, as well as Derridian reading of FreudÕs Beyond
the Pleasure Principle. The texts that comprise Psychanalyse et apocalypse (Psychoanalysis and apocalypse)
appeared in the context of the dissolution of the Ecole
Freudienne de Paris and the disintegration of the
Lacanian movement. In Les Années brunes (The
dark years), German analysts discussed the compromises made in the name of psychoanalysis under the
Third Reich.
CHANTAL TALAGRAND
Bibliography
Les Cahiers Confrontation 1-20 (1979–1989).
CANADA
Although Ernest Jones chose Toronto as the city from
which he would undertake his campaign to institutionalize psychoanalysis in North America, Montreal is
the city where it got its start in Canada. In 1957 the
International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) officially recognized the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society
(CPS). Although English and French were the societyÕs
two official languages, exchanges and teaching activities took place almost exclusively in English until
1969, when the Société Psychanalytique de Montréal
(Montreal Psychoanalytic Society) was established.
Only after the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society created a French section, along with other English sections, did it institute a training program in French.
Mirroring the relationship between Quebec and the
remainder of Canada, the Société Psychanalytique de
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CANADA
Montréal and the English-language sections were two
isolated entities that continued to question the reasons
for their cohabitation.
In 1908 Ernest Jones established himself in Canada
as a neuropathologist at the Toronto Lunatic Asylum.
He remained there until 1913, when he returned to
Europe, after having contributed to the foundation of
psychoanalysis in the United States. However, no permanent organization was established in Canada as a
result of his presence there, and it would take another
forty years before psychoanalysis gained a foothold in
the country.
After being established in Montreal, a large metropolis of psychoanalysis in Canada is the result of a
paradox that is as strange as it is revelatory of the
unique character of the country: an anti-Franco Spanish refugee, Miguel Prados, formed an alliance with a
French-Canadian priest, the Dominican Noël
Mailloux. Beginning in the spring of 1945, four interns
from the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University, founded by Dr. Ewen Cameron in 1944 and
affiliated with the Royal Victoria Hospital, began
meeting at the home of Dr. Prados, who had obtained
a position at the Neurological Institute in the early
1940s. There they discussed clinical cases and studied
what they referred to as ‘‘Freudian doctrine.’’
In early 1946 they decided to form a group known
as the Cercle Psychanalytique de Montréal (Montreal
Psychoanalytic Circle). At this time Prados had only
undertook a self-analysis and was not affiliated with
any psychoanalytic association. In 1948 Father
Mailloux, who had founded the Institute of Psychology at the University of Montreal at the same time as
Cameron was founding the Allan Memorial Institute,
joined the group, which grew considerably from this
time on. The number of members grew to forty, with
as many guests invited to meetings. From New York
they invited Sándor Lorand, Edith Jacobson, Bertrand
D. Lewin, Phyllis Greenacre, Rudolph Loewenstein,
Rene Spitz, George Gero, Charles Fisher, and
Kaufman; from Detroit, Leo Bartemeir and Richard
and Editha Sterbas; from Boston, Eduard Lindeman
and Edward and Grete Bibring.
Although the circle certainly helped to spread
psychoanalysis, it did not promote the training of
Canadian psychoanalysts. Forced to seek training at
institutions in the United States, these candidates had
little inclination to return to Canada. In 1948, with the
24 2
help of the Lady Davis Foundation and Father Mailloux, Professor Théo Chentrier, a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic
Society), became the first psychoanalyst to immigrate
to Canada. He was appointed professor at the University of Montreal and joined the Cercle Psychanalytique, of which he later became an enthusiastic and
loyal director. Between 1948 and 1950 the circle was
very active and held semimonthly meetings, along
with weekly seminars on clinical practice and theory.
In 1950 Dr. Eric Wittkower of the British Psychoanalytic Society came to the Allan Memorial Institute.
Then in 1951 Georges Zavitzianos, a member of the
Société Psychanalytique de Paris, immigrated to Montreal. In the autumn of that same year, Dr. Alastair
MacLeod, of the British Psychoanalytic Society, was
hired by the psychiatry department of McGill University. Finally, in September 1952 Dr. Bruce Ruddick,
who had just completed his training at the New York
Institute, returned to Montreal.
With the arrival of these four psychoanalysts, all
members of organizations recognized by the IPA,
members of the circle felt that it was time to seek official status. Since recognition could only be granted to
members who belonged to an affiliate group, Théo
Chentrier, Alastair MacLeod, Miguel Prados, Bruce
Ruddick, Eric Wittkower, and Georges Zavitzianos
formed a study group and applied to the IPA, hoping
to be recognized at the 1951 congress. As the bylaws
required a recommendation from an affiliate group,
they turned to the Detroit Psychoanalytic Society,
which was familiar with the circle, to obtain recognition as an independent organization and affiliate of
the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA). Since
the APA had recently discredited the Detroit training
program, it was suggested to the study group that they
contact the Boston Psychoanalytic Society, which they
never did. At the end of September 1951, the group
learned that during the congress in Amsterdam, its
request had been referred to the office of professional
standards of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Although the professional-standards committee may
have supported the request, the APAÕs official response
was that the time was not right: a member of the
group was an analyst but not a physician, and the
Canadians were planning to admit lay analysts.
Faced with this situation, the study group withdrew
its request to the American association and turned to
the British Psychoanalytic Society, which granted them
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membership after no more than a few weeks of deliberation. As a result, in March 1952 the Canadian
Society of Psychoanalysts became an affiliate of the
British Psychoanalytic Society. Chentrier was the president, and MacLeod the secretary. The response from
the APA was immediate. They let it be known that
the Marienbad Agreement of the 1936 IPA congress
gave them exclusive control over all of North America.
The British Psychoanalytic Society replied that since
Canada was part of the British empire, it was only fair
that it serve as sponsor in this case. The Americans
rejected out of hand a compromise that would have
involved joint sponsorship from both associations. In
July 1952, after lengthy negotiations, the British Psychoanalytic Society indicated that it would not oppose
an agreement with the APA if this solution would help
to establish in Canada a psychoanalytic society recognized by the IPA. To facilitate negotiations with the
Americans, Chentrier, who was not a physician, decided in August 1952 to give up the presidency of the
Canadian Society of Psychoanalysts. MacLeod became
president, and Ruddick secretary. After being dissolved
on October 17, 1953, the society was replaced by the
Canadian Society for Psychoanalysis. But more important, in October 1952 Prados proposed dissolving the
Montreal Psychoanalytic Circle because he was
convinced that the Americans confused it with the
Canadian Society of Psychoanalysts, which consisted
exclusively of member analysts. These concessions
turned out to be pointless because the Americans never
granted affiliate status to the Canadian group.
On October 17, 1953, the group was officially formed
as the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society. In December
1953 the group withdrew its request for membership in
the APA and reaffirmed its membership in the British
Psychoanalytic Society, which had never been abandoned. Because Canada is bicultural, with equal weight
given to French and English, it was decided that the
society would officially be bilingual. During the summer
of 1953, Dr. Jean-Baptiste Boulanger, his wife
Françoise, and Dr. J. P. Labrecque, all of whom were
trained by the Société Psychanalytique de Paris,
became members of the study group. The following
year, Dr. W. Clifford M. Scott, a Canadian psychoanalyst who had become president of the British Psychoanalytic Society; Drs. Hans and Friedl Aufreiter of the
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society; and André Lussier,
who was completing his training at the London Institute, joined the new organization. Initially incorporated in Quebec by the lieutenant-governor of the
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province in 1955, it became incorporated under
Canadian federal law on April 3, 1967. And with the
sponsorship of the British Psychoanalytic Society, it
became officially recognized as a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association on July 31, 1957,
during the twentieth IPA congress.
The British Psychoanalytic Society also sponsored
the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis. This professional organization made its initial foray into the
professional sphere in 1954 in a university setting, at
the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University
(directed by Dr. Ewen Cameron). With the help of
Doctor Clifford Scott, agreements were concluded in
mid-1954 to initiate a training program identical to
that of the British Institute, with three training analysts. After thriving in Britain for a quarter century,
Scott, at CameronÕs request, returned to Montreal to
run the program. The way was now open for training
future analysts.
The first students had already begun their training
in Montreal, London, Paris, or the United States. Scott
helped them complete their training. The other analysts supported this decision, with the exception of
Cameron, who had integrated psychoanalysis in his
program at the university so it would be under his
direct control. When Cameron refused to hire another
training analyst, Scott and the other colleagues realized
they could avoid his controlling efforts only by forming their own autonomous institute. The training
committee of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society
developed and introduced a teaching program in
1958. The first seminar was held on April 4, 1959. On
October 1, 1960, members of the society ratified a proposal recommending the creation and incorporation
of the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis, which was
done on March 17, 1961, in Quebec. Jean-Baptiste
Boulanger was the first director. The first training
program, in 1959, had twelve teachers for thirteen students. Of the thirty-seven candidates trained from
1959 to 1967, eleven were French speakers.
Around 1968 and 1969, for cultural as well as geographic reasons, a federal model was used to create different sections within the Canadian Psychoanalytic
Society. A French-speaking section was created in Montreal, the Société Psychanalytique de Montréal, and an
English-speaking section in Quebec, the CPS Quebec
English Branch. In Ontario the Toronto Psychoanalytic
Society was formed. Currently, at the start of the
twenty-first century, the Canadian Psychoanalytic
243
CANADA
Society has approximately four hundred members,
seven sections, and three institutes. In addition to
those already mentioned, which have had an associated institute since their formation, three sections—
the South Western Ontario Psychoanalytic Society
(located in London), the Société Psychanalytique de
Québec, and the CPS Western Canadian Branch—do
not yet have an institute, while the Ottawa Psychoanalytic Society is still in the process of formation, since it
does not have the requisite number of training analysts
(five). Service agreements have been concluded
with the CPS Quebec English Branch so that candidates
of the Ottawa Psychoanalytic Society can continue to be
trained locally. For the CPS Western Canadian Branch,
the national executive committee recently authorized
two training analysts from the Seattle Psychoanalytic
Society in the United States to work with the Toronto
Psychoanalytic Institute to train candidates in Western
Canada locally. Candidates of the Société de Québec
must complete their training in Montreal, since the
Quebec group has only a single training analyst. Candidates of the Western Canadian Branch in Ontario
undergo training at the Toronto Institute.
The CPS Quebec English Branch consists of analysts
from Montreal from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds who concentrated on English language and
culture when sections were created in 1969. As of
2002, it consisted of a hundred members. The training
program of its institute was, until the first few years of
the twenty-first century, much more academic than
that of the Société de Psychanalyse de Montréal
(SPM). Since 2000, the CPS Quebec English Branch
has added European authors such as Piera Aulagnier,
Wilfred Bion, and Jacques Lacan to the fourth-year
program.
Psychoanalysis has also made progress in Toronto.
In September 1954, Alan Parkin, who had just completed his training in London, England, arrived in the
city. In 1956 he created the Toronto Psychoanalytic
Study Circle with a core of eleven psychiatrists with an
interest in psychoanalysis. He attempted to establish a
psychoanalysis training program at the department of
psychiatry of the University of Toronto and obtain
recognition for his study group from the Ontario Psychiatric Institute. After two years of activity the circle
decided to transform itself into the psychotherapy section of the Ontario Psychiatric Society by opening its
doors to all members of that association. The request
was ratified on January 23, 1959, and two years later,
24 4
on January 20, 1961, the psychotherapy section held
its first scientific congress. In his History of Psychoanalysis in Canada, Parkin comments on the prodigious
growth of this section, which in January 1970 had no
fewer than ninety-three members. The establishment
of psychoanalysis within the context of psychiatry
helped determine the medical orientation psychoanalysis assumed in Ontario. This growth continued until
psychoanalytic psychologists of the Ontario Psychological Association, with the support of Division 39 of
the American Psychological Association, decided, at
the end of the 1980s, to found their own organization,
the Toronto Contemporary Society, and their own
institute, the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Initially, candidates training at the new
institute were not physicians; then psychiatrists began
to apply to the organization, although it was not a part
of the IPA. They were attracted by the diversity of
approaches used in its training program and wanted
to escape the incessant conflicts between Freudian and
Kohutian factions that divided the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society. The Toronto Psychoanalytic Society
would likely have split if there had not emerged a third
group, the post-Kleinians, whose members were partisans of object-relations theory and followers of Margaret Mahler and Otto Kernberg. Their emergence
prevented the complete polarization of the society.
Today the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society has approximately 130 members.
After the formation of the first three sections of the
society and the institute, other sections were created
when at least five analysts or training analysts belonging to the same geographic or cultural community
submitted a request. In 1972 the Ottawa Psychoanalytic Society was formed, followed by the Ottawa Institute in 1978. Then, also in 1978, the CPS Western
Canadian Branch was founded, consisting of members
scattered throughout the four western provinces.
Donald Watterson, in Vancouver, was the first psychoanalyst to settle in British Colombia, yet there was little
growth in psychoanalysis in the province until the end
of the twentieth century. Julius Guild settled in
Edmonton, Alberta, followed by Perry Segal in 1971
and Hassan Azim in 1973, but as of 1998 there was
only one analyst in Calgary and two in Edmonton.
Similar numbers were found in Winnipeg and Manitoba. Even though it covers an area that is roughly a
third of Canada, the CPS Western Canadian Branch
currently has only ten members: six in British Colombia, three in Alberta, and one in Manitoba.
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CANADA
The Southwestern Ontario Psychoanalytic Society
is the sixth section of the Canadian Psychoanalytic
Society. It was founded on June 5, 1982, and currently
has fourteen members. Formed in 1988, the Société
Psychanalytique de Québec (Quebec Psychoanalytic
Society), with ten members, is the most recent of the
seven sections of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society.
The senior member is Henri Richard, who began practicing after psychoanalytic training in Paris from 1952
to 1959. A few years later he was joined by Noël
Montgrain, who had also studied at the Institut de
Psychanalyse de Paris (Paris Institute for Psychoanalysis). There is currently no organization in the maritime
provinces of eastern Canada. Aside from the cultural
and economic centers of Montreal and Toronto, psychoanalysis throughout Canada has grown very slowly.
For years oral communication was the primary
mode of transmission within the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society. The first generations of analysts were
more absorbed with fundamental issues and transmission than in the preparation of written texts. Although
a number of practitioners—such as W. Clifford M.
Scott, Georges Zavitzianos, Jean-Baptiste Boulanger,
Jean-Louis Langlois, Paul Lefebvre, André Lussier, Jean
Bossé, Pierre Doucet, Guy Da Silva, and Roger
Dufresne—wrote important articles, they spent the
majority of their time training future generations of
analysts.
The ephemeral character of psychoanalytic reviews
bears witness to the phenomenon. The first issue of
the Revue canadienne de psychanalyse, published in
1954 and sponsored by the Canadian Psychoanalytic
Society, was the final one until the reappearance,
nearly forty years later in the spring of 1993, of the
semiannual bilingual Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis/Revue canadienne de psychanalyse, edited by Eva
Lester. Similarly, the Société Psychanalytique de
Montréal has, since 1988, published an internal periodical three times a year, the Bulletin de la Société Psychanalytique de Montréal. Julien Bigras, however, was
the first to promote written communication within
the psychoanalytic community with the review Interprétation, of which he was the founder and editor-inchief from 1967 to 1971. Josette Garon, Jacques
Mauger, Lise Monette, and François Peraldi continued
his efforts with the publication of Frayages. In the
autumn of 1992, Dominique Scarfone published the
first issue of Trans, a semiannual, semithematic, interdisciplinary journal. The journal played a key role in
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encouraging the exchange of psychoanalytic ideas and
also played an important role in the Montreal psychoanalytic community by organizing annual colloquia
open to the public. Despite this success, the editorial
committee decided to discontinue publication in the
spring of 1999 with the publication of issue ten of the
journal. The year 1992 also saw the introduction of
the semiannual Filigrane, financed by the publication
of Santé mentale au Québec and directed at psychotherapists and professional psychoanalysts whose
clinical methods were compatible with psychoanalysis.
Patrick J. Mahoney, Jean Imbeault, and Dominique
Scarfone are among the first analysts to make significant contributions on an international level to a critical analysis of the psychoanalytic corpus.
In Canada, as elsewhere, the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society and its various sections are not the only entities involved in psychoanalysis. Alongside them have
always existed unaffiliated psychoanalysts working
alone or in small groups. Among the first to practice
psychoanalysis outside an institutional context was
Michel Dansereau, a doctor who had trained with René
Laforgue in Casablanca, Morocco, and was active during the 1950s. Much later were François Peraldi, who
arrived in Montreal in 1974, and Mireille Lafortune,
who was active during the late 1960s.
There also exist many organizations devoted to
psychoanalysis. In 1986 François Peraldi established
the Réseau des Cartels (Network of Cartels), composed of analysts interested in the work of Jacques
Lacan. This network did not survive the loss of its
founder, and in 2004 only a single cartel is still
active. The Association des Psychanalystes du
Québec (Quebec Association of Psychoanalysts),
founded in 1967 and having only ten members in
2004, is Lacanian in focus. The Association des Psychothérapeutes Psychanalytique du Québec (Quebec
Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists),
founded in 1985 and consisting of some 150 members in different regions of Quebec, includes clinicians who make use of psychoanalytic methods. The
association organizes colloquia and conferences, to
which members of the Société Psychanalytique de
Montréal are invited. The Groupe dÕÉtudes Psychanalytiques Interdisciplinaires (Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Study Group) consists of some fifteen
professors from the Université de Québec at
Montreal who teach psychoanalysis while practicing.
The Institut Québécois de Psychothérapie (Quebec
245
CANNIBALISTIC
Psychotherapy Institute), which has existed since
1992, provides a two-year training program in analytic and systemic psychotherapy. Father Henri Samson, who trained in France and was a contemporary
of Father Mailloux, founded the Institut de Psychothérapie de Québec in the 1960s for those who
wanted training in analytic psychotherapy. The
Groupe Interdisciplinaire Freudien de Recherches et
dÕInterventions Cliniques et Culturelles (Interdisciplinary Group for Freudian Research and Clinical
and Cultural Interventions), founded by Willy Apollon and cooperating with psychiatrists from the
Robert-Giffard Center, has gained a considerable
reputation in analytic psychotherapy based on Lacanian principles, especially in its work with psychotic
patients. The Cercle Jung de Québec (Quebec Jung
Circle), founded in the 1970s by Marcel Gaumont, a
Jungian analyst trained at the Jung Institute in Zurich,
promotes Jungian psychoanalysis in Canada through
public conferences and discussions. André Renaud, a
psychoanalyst with the Société Psychanalytique de
Québec, established in 1984, and ran until 1996,
Étayage (Support), a training program for doctors,
psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers who
wanted to study analytic psychotherapy. Finally, a
group of analytic psychotherapists has also been at
work in British Columbia in Western Canada.
JACQUES VIGNEAULT
Bibliography
Cloutier, Yvan. (1988). La naissance de la psychanalyse à
Montréal. Philosophiques, 15(1), 221–225. (Reprinted from
Frayages, 3 (1987).)
Paradis, André. (1988). La naissance de la psychanalyse à
Montréal. Revue dÕhistoire de lÕAmérique française, 41(3),
443–446. (Reprinted from Frayages, numéro spécial
(1987).)
Parkin, Allan. (1987). History of psychoanalysis in Canada.
Toronto: Toronto Psychoanalytical Society.
Prados, Miguel. (1954). La psychanalyse au Canada. Revue
canadienne de psychanalyse, 1, 1–33.
Sourkes, Theodore L., and Pinard, Gilbert (Eds.). (1995).
Building on a proud past: 50 years of psychiatry at McGill.
Montreal: McGill University.
Vigneault, Jacques. (1993). Transferts et déplacements: fondements de la psychanalyse en Amérique du Nord. Trans,
3, 223–237.
24 6
CANNIBALISTIC. See Oral-sadistic stage
CAPACITY TO BE ALONE
This notion made its first appearance in the mid1950s in a paper less than ten pages long (Winnicott,
Donald, 1958/1965), yet it would be fair to say that
today it informs the thinking, and even more the
practice, of every psychoanalyst. To be alone in the
presence of someone else—what better way could
there be of describing the analytic situation and
relationship?
WinnicottÕs aim in his paper is stated without preamble. Rather than the fear of being alone or the wish
to be alone, both of which are so often described, what
interests him is something that makes it possible to for
us to love. He describes a solitude understood not as a
defensive withdrawal that cuts us off from a hostile
world, nor as neglect, abandonment, or even destruction of the self, but rather as a positive experience and,
even more than that, as ‘‘a most precious possession’’
(p. 30).
This is indeed the discovery here, for the capacity to
be alone—with the stress on the word ‘‘capacity,’’ for
Winnicott speaks elsewhere of a capacity to dream,
and there is surely a link between the two—is not a
resigned tolerance of the effective absence or disappearance of the other person. This capacity, paradoxically, is quite compatible with the otherÕs presence.
But what is meant by ‘‘presence’’ here? To transform
a loss or separation into a departure implying a
return—in other words, a ‘‘Fort! Da!’’ is itself no easy
thing, and to experience the otherÕs absence as their
continued presence within oneself amounts to a
further step still. To be able to tell oneself ‘‘I am alone’’
without feeling forsaken—such is the prerequisite for
what Winnicott considers an essential achievement: to
be assured of a sense of continuity as between oneself
and the other person, or, better still, to perceive discontinuity in a permanent bond, or even its rupture,
as the very precondition of thatÕs bondÕs survival.
As so often in Donald WinnicottÕs work, the seeming simplicity of his assertions conceals an analysis of
considerable complexity. This is confirmed if one
reads ‘‘The Capacity To Be Alone’’ in conjunction
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C Á R C A M O , C E L E S E R N E S T O (1903 –1 990)
with another, almost contemporary text, ‘‘Primary
Maternal Preoccupation’’ (1956/1958), for such a
reading makes it clear that the figure of the absent/
present ‘‘other’’ should not be too hastily identified—
as it frequently is—with the mother as object. Thus a
number of authors, among them François Gantheret,
prefer to speak of ‘‘the maternal’’ as an extension of
what Winnicott—nonetheless reproached by some for
idealizing the mother—meant when he wrote of
maternal ‘‘illness’’ or ‘‘madness.’’ In venturing to use
such terms, Winnicott is referring to an initial state in
which the mother experiences the needs of her infant
as her own and treats what is external as if it were
internal—a state, in short, that is not far removed
from psychosis. It is only a break in this continuum,
once it is mastered, that can make it possible for
‘‘bodily needs’’ to be transformed into ‘‘ego needs,’’
and using WinnicottÕs own words, for a psychology
to be born from the imaginary working out of
physical experience. This imaginary working out
Winnicott calls ‘‘ego-relatedness,’’ as opposed to ‘‘idrelationships.’’ First comes ‘‘I am,’’ which is then as it
were amplified by ‘‘I am alone’’ (1958/1965,
pp. 33–34).
I am alone and at the same time I am not alone: not
that I maintain the presence of the mother within
myself; rather, I have managed to disentangle myself
from her ‘‘madness,’’ and no longer feel annihilated if
she goes away and if I am no longer of concern to her.
It may be that each of us must stand in, to some
degree, for a maternal environment susceptible to
becoming a realm without borders: an ‘‘imaginary
working out,’’ a mental life with its own inflows and
outflows—truly, a ‘‘most precious possession.’’
JEAN-BERTRAND PONTALIS
See also: ChildrenÕs play; Fort-Da; Good-enough mother.
Bibliography
Gantheret, François. (1984). LÕimpensable maternel et les
fondements maternels du penser. In Incertitude dÕÉros,
Paris: Gallimard.
Klein, Melanie. (1975). On the sense of loneliness. In Envy
and gratitude and other works 1946–1963 (The writings of
Melanie Klein, vol. 3). London: Hogarth/Institute of
Psycho-Analysis. (Original work published 1963)
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1988). De la mère, le maternel. In
Perdre de vue, Paris: Gallimard.
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Winnicott, Donald W. (1965). The capacity to be alone. In
The maturational processes and the facilitating environment,
London: Hogarth/Institute of Psycho-Analysis. (Reprinted
from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39 (1958),
416–20.)
———. (1958). Primary maternal preoccupation. In Collected papers: Through paediatrics to psycho-analysis.
London: Tavistock. (Original work published 1956)
CÁRCAMO, CELES ERNESTO (1903–1990)
An Argentinean physician, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, Celes Ernesto Cárcamo was the founder and
an honorary member of the Asociación Psicoanalı́tica Argentina (APA) [Psychoanalytic Association of
Argentina]. Born August 11, 1903, in La Plata, he
died April 7, 1990, in Buenos Aires.
CárcamoÕs father, who was Spanish, with a PhD in
chemistry and pharmacy, came from a long line of
doctors. He was well versed in both science and the
humanities and devoted much of his time to literature
and journalism. His mother, an Argentinean, was the
daughter of large landholders originally from the Basque country of France. Cárcamo had a quiet childhood
and discovered FreudÕs Interpretation of Dreams at an
early age. He studied medicine as a young man but
took courses in philosophy at the state university. He
specialized in neuropsychiatry and joined Dr. Mariano
R. Castex at the Clı́nicas Hospital, where the latest
methods in medicine were practiced. Here, after studying with James Mapelli, a hypnotist and psychotherapist, he soon realized the limitations of hypnosis.
Moved by a profound desire to provide therapeutic
services, he studied everything available on psychopathology and psychoanalysis, with a focus on their
clinical application.
Since Argentina had few practicing clinicians at this
time—most psychoanalysts being self-taught or
theorists—he decided to leave for France. At the recommendation of Marie Bonaparte, he studied at the Institut Psychanalytique de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic
Institute). He completed his training analysis with Paul
Schiff and was supervised by Rudolph Loewenstein and
Charles Odier. In February 1939 he was appointed a
member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. He
associated with scientists and writers such as Ernesto
Sábato. In Paris his friend Juan Rof Carballo introduced
him to Angel Garma, who wanted to settle in Argentina,
and to whom he offered support and advice.
247
C A R U S O , I G O R A . (1914 –1 981)
Both men arrived in Buenos Aires in 1939 with the
intention of settling there. They began to provide training analyses to help establish an affiliate of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), a project that
came to fruition in December 1942. Upon his return to
Argentina, Cárcamo had assumed the direction of the
department of psychiatry and psychotherapy at the
Medical and Surgical Institute of the Durand Hospital
Medical School. Here he analyzed some of the pioneers
of Brazilian psychoanalysis: Danilo Perestrello and his
wife Marialzira, and Alcyon Baer Bahia of Rio de
Janeiro, Zaira Bittencourt de Martins from Porto
Alegre, and other Latin American analysts. During his
tenure as director, the review Revista de psicoanálisis
was inaugurated, its first issue appearing in 1943.
Cárcamo was the first to teach psychoanalytic technique at the Training Institute. In 1958 he taught the
first course in medical psychology at the School of
Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires. His writings were collected and published in 1992. Cárcamo
was interested in the plumed serpent of the Maya and
Aztec religions, the image of the world in aboriginal
America, male impotence, female sterility, and the psychoanalytic process. With his wife he translated Anna
FreudÕs The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense and
Eugene MinkowskiÕs Traité de psychopathologie.
His personal prestige was of considerable benefit to
the APA, especially during difficult moments in ArgentinaÕs political life. The impact of CárcamoÕs personality, his integrity and lack of prejudice, together with
his considerable erudition and wit, had a lasting
influence on several generations of clinicians whom he
analyzed or monitored.
ROBERTO DORIA-MEDINA JR.
See also: Argentina.
Bibliography
Cárcamo, Celes Ernesto. (1948). Quetzalcoatl: le dieu serpent à plumes de la religion maya-aztèque. Revue française
de psychanalyse. 12 (1), 101–124.
———. (1984). ‘‘Entrevista a los fundadores, III: Celes E.
Cárcamo,’’ Revista de psicoanálisis de la Asociacı́on psicoanalı́tica argentina, 41 (6), 987–1000.
———. (1992). Escritos. Buenos Aires: Kargieman.
Doria-Medina, Roberto. (1993). Letter from Buenos Aires:
Celes Cárcamo’s writings. Psychoanalytical Books, 4, 585–594.
24 8
Mom, Jorge M., et al. (1982). Asociación psicoanalı́tica
argentina 1942–1982. Buenos Aires: A.P.A.
CARUSO, IGOR A. (1914–1981)
An Austrian psychologist and psychoanalyst, Igor Caruso was born February 4, 1914, in Tiraspol and died
June 28, 1981, in Salzburg. Born into a family of Italian
aristocrats who had settled in Russia, the young Caruso left home to study psychology in Louvain. He
wrote his thesis on the development of ethics in children. The growing importance of Piaget and his
followers turned his attention to philosophy and
orthodox Russian philosophy, German philosophy,
and new French thought. In 1942 Caruso settled in
Austria and worked for a while as an assistant for children at the large Steinhof psychiatric hospital in
Vienna. Shocked by the NazisÕ experiments in euthanasia, he left the hospital and found work as a psychologist in a small neuropsychiatric clinic under the
direction of Alfred Auersberg. Although he was encouraged to join the ‘‘Viennese working group’’ of the
Deutsches Reichinstitut für Psychologische Forschung
und Psychotherapie (German State Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy), there is no
proof of his participation. Nor is it certain that he
underwent his first analysis with August Aichhorn.
However, it is likely that he did his training analysis
with Viktor Emil Freiherr von Gebsattel, a German
psychoanalyst whose philosophical-anthropologicalChristian ideology must have fascinated this Italian
nobleman more than AichhornÕs charisma, social commitment, or his work with abandoned adolescents.
After the fall of Nazism and the end of the Second
World War, Caruso distanced himself from the group
formed by the Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung
(WPV) [Vienna Psychoanalytic Association], which he
found to be too dogmatic. In 1947 he created the Wiener
Arbeitskreis für Tiefenpsychologie (Viennese Depth Psychology Study Circle) as a relatively open and autonomous scientific community that rejected any form of
strict orthodoxy, even though academic thought was
becoming more consistent with orthodox standards.
After spending time studying with Carl Gustav
Jung, in 1952 Igor Caruso defined his psychoanalytic
program in his Existential psychology: from Analysis to
Synthesis. Here the term ‘‘psychoanalysis’’ is primarily
considered in terms of technique, while Freudian
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CASE HISTORIES
theory is expanded in the direction of ‘‘personal psychoanalysis.’’ This fixation on the concept of the
‘‘totality of the person’’ led to a consideration of a dialectic relation between freedom and constraint, and
between psychophysical conditioning and the transcendent mind as an expression of a hierarchy of values
within which the formation of the highest and most
sublimated aspects of the mind could not be reduced
to primitive drives or understood from a naturalist
point of view. The translation of CarusoÕs book into
six languages not only gave Caruso and his followers
international recognition, especially in South America,
it also led to the formation of other study circles in the
largest cities in Austria. A symposium in Brussels in
1954 on personal psychology provided the opportunity for a meeting between Igor Caruso and Jacques
Lacan, which was the start of their intellectual friendship and mutual admiration.
While CarusoÕs early theoretical ideas were impregnated with Catholic theological concepts, these gradually disappeared from his writings, giving way to a
lively discussion of FreudÕs work. In 1957, in Bios, Psyche, Person, a book known to the Vienna study circle,
he introduced a theory of symbols within the framework of the Freudian theory of drives and in relation
to psychic acts and the interpretation of dreams.
During the early sixties, Caruso adopted a kind of
Marxist Freudianism, which is apparent in his Soziale
Aspekte der Psychoanalyse (Social Aspects of Psychoanalysis), 1962. The emphasis, here and in his
subsequent essays on the social dimensions of psychoanalysis, implies an analysis of concrete, material
structures of power in the analysis of the ego and
superego, and of the analyst as the bearer of ideologies
and rationalizations of which he needs to be made
aware. In 1962 Caruso also published a series of articles that he wrote in French between 1952 and 1961
with the title Psychanalyse pour la Personne. It contains
his program for the reform of psychoanalysis, which
must be, according to Caruso: realistic; in search of
truth; concrete; world-based; existential; historic; of its
time and therefore liberating; and personalistic, the
gradual growth of consciousness leading to gradual
personalization (‘‘Une analyse de lÕopacité,’’ 1960).
A confrontation with the phenomenon of separation and refusal of the death impulse led to his Die
Trennung der Liebenden [Love and Separation], published in 1967. Of his written work (approximately
two hundred publications excluding his books) this
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essay has become the most widespread and the most
popular.
In 1972, Caruso was appointed to the chair of psychology at the University of Salzburg, a remarkable
event that reflected the recognition of Caruso and of
psychoanalysis in Austria. Following the boom in psychology of the late seventies (the Psychoboom), which
affected members of the Salzburg study circle and
spurred an interest in Bioenergetik, transactional analysis, Gestalt therapy, and so on, Caruso felt obligated to
show his disapproval by leaving the association, which
was now psychoanalytical in name only.
‘‘I am an orthodox disciple neither of Freud nor
Jung nor Adler. I am not eclectic, or the head of a new
school of psychoanalysts,’’ wrote Caruso in Existential
Psychology: From Analysis to Synthesis. His existential
psychology was a critical attempt that, in spite of its
Freudian references, became increasingly less
Freudian.
After his retirement from the University of Salzburg
in 1979, Caruso spent the remainder of his life examining theoretical questions, primarily issues of epistemology and methodology characteristic of a psychoanalysis
that was closely related to other fields, especially the
social sciences.
AUGUST RUHS
See also: Austria; Frankl, Viktor Emil; International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies.
Bibliography
Caruso, Igor A. (1962). Psychanalyse pour la personne. Paris:
Le Seuil.
———. (1964). Existential psychology: from analysis to
synthesis (Eva Krapf, Trans.). New York: Herder and
Herder. (Original work published 1952).
Huber, Wolfgang (1977). Psychoanalyse in Österreich seit
1933. Vienna-Salzburg: Geyer.
Parth, Walter (1998). Vergangenheit, die fortwirkt. Texte.
Psychoanalyse. Ästhetik. Kulturkritik, II, pp. 61–75.
CASE HISTORIES
Case histories are a classic form of documentation in
psychopathology literature. They range from clinical
sketches to highly detailed and extended accounts, as
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CASE HISTORIES
in the Madeleine case, which occupies both volumes of
Pierre JanetÕs De lÕangoisse à lÕextase (1926–1928).
Psychoanalysis caused the form to drift toward
what might more properly be called a ‘‘report on analysis.’’ With a view to publication, analysts elaborate
written accounts based on everything they have heard
from a patient, in order to reconstitute the sense and
significance of the patientÕs psychic and symptomatic
functioning, as well as the progressive unfolding of the
cure itself in the transference/counter-transference
exchange.
Sigmund Freud evokes his patients in his early writings (Studies on Hysteria, 1895d), but it is in dealing
with the analysis of the Rat Man that he expresses the
difficulty of giving an account of an analysis, in a letter
to Jung dated June 30, 1909: ‘‘How bungled our reproductions are, how wretchedly we dissect the great art
works of psychic nature! Unfortunately this paper in
turn is becoming too bulky. It just pours out of me,
and even so itÕs inadequate, incomplete and therefore
untrue. A wretched business.’’ (1974, p. 238).
Reports are difficult to write because where previously the analyst disentangled the elements in the
flow of associations, in order to allow the interpretable
meaning to organize itself, in the report, the analyst
instead must dismantle and take apart in order to
reproduce. Between communication in the analysis
and the communication of the analysis, the transformation is as radical as that which exists between the
logic of primary and secondary processes.
The heuristic necessity of the report on the analysis
is nevertheless obvious because it is this reflective
phase that enables us to focus on any given point of
theory, thus breaking not with clinical practice but
with the rule of not initially selecting anything in order
to afford equally-distributed attention to the associational material. As a transmission of knowledge without a prescriptive target, and relating equally to theory
and to clinical practice, the analysis report belongs in
the theoretical domain (Laplanche, 1980).
The desire to give an account of the analysis derives
from the analystÕs counter-transference. The disturbance then becomes the object of thought and the
motive for communication and may even remobilize
the analystÕs questions about his own non-analyzed
past. But the report also has an institutional, more or
less codified role and forms a part of exchanges that
contribute to progress and recognition.
25 0
Freud stressed the ethical and moral problems
posed by the analysis report: ‘‘It is certain that the
patients would never have spoken if it had occurred to
them that their admissions might possibly be put to
scientific uses: and it is equally certain that to ask them
themselves for leave to publish their case would be
quite unavailing’’ (1905e [1901]). But he nevertheless
defends the necessity for it in a letter to Oskar Pfister
(June 5, 1910): ‘‘Thus discretion is incompatible with
a satisfactory description of an analysis; to describe the
latter one would have to be unscrupulous, give away,
betray, behave like an artist who buys paints with his
wifeÕs house-keeping money or uses the furniture as
firewood to warm the studio for his model. Without a
trace of that kind of unscrupulousness the job cannot
be done’’ (1963, p. 38).
The models for dreaming and jokes shed light on
the respective methodologies used for the situations of
dialogue and transcription (Mijolla-Mellor, 1985).
While commenting on the difficulties relative to
reports on analysis, Freud highlights the necessity for
them and also their power of seduction, commenting
that his case histories read ‘‘like novels’’ (as in the case
of Katharina, 1895), a fair turning of the tables on
someone who never hesitated to see novels as the
equivalent of case histories.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: ‘‘A. Z.’’; ‘‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’’ (Wolf Man); Aimée, case of; ‘‘Analysis of a Phobia in
a Five-year-old Boy’’ (Little Hans); Anna O., case of;
Cäcilie M., case of; Eckstein, Emma; Elisabeth von R.,
case of; Emmy von N., case of; ‘‘Fragment of an Analysis
of a Case of Hysteria’’ (Dora/Ida Bauer); Hirschfeld,
Elfriede; Katharina, case of; Little Arpåd, the boy pecked
by a cock; Lucy R., case of; Mathilde, case of; ‘‘Notes
upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’’ (Rat Man);
Richard, case of; Studies on Hysteria.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905e [1901). Fragment of an analysis of a
case of hysteria. SE, 7: 1–122.
———. (1955a [1907–08]). Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis (Rat Man). SE, 10: 151–318.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Joseph. (1895d). Studies on
hysteria. SE, 2.
Freud, Sigmund, and Pfister, Oskar. (1963a). In Heinrich
Meng and Ernst L. Freud, (Eds.), Psychoanalysis and
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faith: The letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister (Eric
Mosbacher, Trans.). New York: Basic Books.
Freud, Sigmund, and Jung, Carl Gustav. (1974a [1906–13]).
The Freud/Jung letters: The correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung (William McGuire, Ed.; Ralph
Manheim and R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
CASTRATION COMPLEX
In psychoanalysis, the word ‘‘castration’’ is associated
with several others that define it and that it in turn
defines. These include ‘‘anxiety,’’ ‘‘threat,’’ ‘‘symbolic,’’
‘‘fear,’’ ‘‘terror,’’ ‘‘disavowal,’’ and above all ‘‘complex.’’
Beyond the everyday connotations of the term, the
specifically psychoanalytic definition of castration is
rooted in the act feared by male children, namely the
removal of the penis. The essential connection
between ‘‘castration’’ and ‘‘complex’’ derives from the
fact that psychoanalysis views the castration complex,
in tandem with the Oedipus complex, as the organizing principle of psychosexuality and, more broadly
speaking, of mental life in general.
The metapsychological position of the castration
complex was described relatively late in FreudÕs work,
but the word ‘‘castration’’ appeared earlier, linked to
various psychoanalytical notions the consideration of
which makes it possible to trace his theoretical course
chronologically.
Castration fantasies, the symbolic aspects of castration, and mythological references to castration all figured in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) and in
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b). In the
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), where
Freud dealt with sexual aberrations, infantile sexuality,
and the metamorphoses of puberty, fear and anxiety
concerning castration were evoked several times, and
the subject became even more prominent in the later
revisions of the book. In 1915, and again in 1920, the
set of problems surrounding castration was clearly set
in its Oedipal context, and castration was treated as a
major theoretical and clinical notion.
In ‘‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’’ (1908c), in
connection with the evasive answers that parents give
to childrenÕs questions as to ‘‘where babies come
from’’ and about sexuality in general, Freud noted the
coexistence in children (bespeaking a first split in
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mental functioning) of an official version, that of the
parents, and a set of firmly believed ‘‘theories.’’ The
first such theory was the belief that every human being
had a penis. It was the collapse of this belief that would
give rise to the castration scenario. It is notable that
Freud from the outset took the psychosexual profile of
the boy as his model; as a result he was led later to
explain female psychosexuality by reference to that
model. Meanwhile, already in this paper of 1908, he
was pointing out how the clitoris was conceived of as
‘‘a small penis which does not grow any bigger’’ and
the female genitalia were viewed as ‘‘a mutilated
organ’’ (p. 217).
The case history of ‘‘Little Hans’’ (1909b) illustrated
and rounded out FreudÕs discussion of the ‘‘sexual theories of children.’’ In FreudÕs eyes, the castration complex was still a sort of psychopathological nucleus,
frequently encountered, which had also left ‘‘marked
traces behind in myths’’ (p. 8). This nucleus was
amplified with a second surge of the castration threat,
the moment of seeing, as when Little Hans (aged three
and a half) saw that his newborn baby sister had no
penis. This observation occasioned an act of disavowal:
Little Hans decided that as his sister grew up, her penis
would get bigger (p. 11).
Only later, however, in a deferred manner with
respect to the two phases of the threat of castration,
would castration anxiety make its appearance. Note
that Freud long used the words ‘‘anxiety’’ and ‘‘terror’’
almost interchangeably with reference to the fear of
castration; he eventually drew a clear distinction in
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d [1925]),
contrasting the ‘‘anxiety as signal’’ that triggered
repression with the various terrors characteristic of
psychosis. Although FreudÕs account of 1909 did not
yet use the term ‘‘phallic,’’ when he introduced the
concept of the infantile genital organization in 1923,
he claimed universality for it precisely under that
heading.
In Totem and Taboo (1912–13a), Freud presented
the myth that he believed was the basis of human
socialization. The threat of castration and the murder
of the father were themes present in FreudÕs writings
in this vein throughout his work, concluding with
Moses and Monotheism (1939a). ‘‘The Taboo of Virginity’’ (1918a) had a similar perspective, though it was
concerned with more properly psychological issues.
This paper was one of a trio of short works called
‘‘Contributions to the Psychology of Love.’’ In the first,
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‘‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men,’’
the theme of castration was latent throughout, the
object-choice under consideration being made from
the ‘‘constellation connected with the mother’’ (the
mother and the whore ‘‘basically . . . do the same
thing’’) (1910h, pp. 169, 171). In the second paper,
‘‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the
Sphere of Love’’ (1912d), Freud described incestuous
wishes as giving rise to an equivalent of castration,
either in the direct form of male impotence or, indirectly, by means of projection, in the form of the
debasement of the love-object. The third text, ‘‘The
Taboo of Virginity,’’ dealt explicitly with the castration
anxiety precipitated in men by contact with women,
universally recognized as a danger to male sexuality,
that is to say, as always potentially castrating.
In the delusions of Dr. Schreber, castration was an
obligatory emasculation, but an acceptable one in that
it would afford him access to female ‘‘states of bliss,’’ so
much more voluptuous than male ones (1911c, p. 29).
With ‘‘On Narcissism’’ (1914c), Freud appeared to
reject the castration complex; in point of fact, however,
his allusion to castration was part of a refutation of
AdlerÕs conception of ‘‘masculine protest’’ (pp. 92–93),
while his clear account of the narcissistic hypercathexis
of the penis tended on the contrary to reinforce the
notions of the castration complex in boys and of penis
envy in girls.
The metapsychological papers of 1915 contain no
reference to the theme of castration. At the same period, however, Freud was at work on his case history of
the ‘‘Wolf Man’’ (1918b [1914]), where castration
played a prominent role in the ‘‘reconstruction’’ of his
patientÕs infantile neurosis. The Wolf Man sought
through identification to assume the passive position
of his mother during sexual intercourse; he chose the
fantasy of anal penetration by his father, implicit in
which was a castration fantasy. In this case history
Freud opted for several theoretical hypotheses related
to castration. These included the definition of femininity; castration as at once feared as a narcissistic
injury and desired as a precondition to penetration by
the father; repression; erogenous displacement onto
the bowel; splitting of processes of thought and ideation; and radical disavowal (Verwerfung, translated by
Jacques Lacan as forclusion (‘‘foreclosure’’). All the
same, castration as a complex was still not regarded by
Freud at this time as an organizing principle of the
psyche; he felt simply that as threat, anxiety, or fantasy
25 2
it was sufficiently freighted with meaning to bring
about reorganizations of the psyche.
In his paper ‘‘On Transformations of Instinct as
Exemplified in Anal Erotism’’ (1916–17e), Freud
returned to his earlier theoretical options and brought
them together, notably with respect to female sexuality
and anality. He presented female sexuality as centered
on penis envy and on the wish for a child, the two
being equivalent. A like set of equivalences obtained in
the psyche, ‘‘as an unconscious identity,’’ between
feces, penis, gift, and baby—all of them part-objects,
all of them small, ‘‘detachable’’ parts of the body (p.
133). In this way Freud came back to the idea of a
‘‘pregenital’’ phase (already mentioned in 1905) predicated on genital castration conceived as anal castration, just as an oral castration could be said to describe
separation from the breast. The word ‘‘castration’’ thus
came in all cases to indicate the sexual implications—
even if they were deferred—of such separations.
‘‘The Infantile Genital Organization’’ (1923e) was
presented as an addition to, and a development of the
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The paper
stressed the fundamental difference between the pregenital organizations of the libido on the one hand and,
on the other, the part played by the infantile genital
organization in the two-phase institution of sexuality.
The infantile genital phase was characterized by the
primacy, in both sexes, of the cathexis of the male genital organ. The evolution of FreudÕs thinking here thus
concerned not only the discovery of the anatomical
difference between the sexes but also the fact that it
was the presence or absence of a penis that gave full
meaning to that difference. ‘‘What is present, therefore, is not a primacy of the genitals, but a primacy of
the phallus’’ (p.142). The replacement of ‘‘penis’’ by
‘‘phallus’’ here clearly indicated FreudÕs new perspective. Further, and quite logically, he added that ‘‘the
castration complex can only be rightly appreciated if
its origin in the phase of phallic primacy is also taken
into account’’ (p. 144). The sadistic-anal pregenital
antithesis between active and passive gave way to the
antithesis between phallic and castrated. The sexual
polarity between male and female would not coincide
with masculine and feminine until puberty.
‘‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’’ (1924d)
rehearsed some now familiar arguments, but it did so
from the phallic perspective proposed in ‘‘The Infantile
Genital Organization.’’ The phallic genital organization
of the child succumbed to the threat of castration. This
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threat was conveyed first through what was understood
and then through what was seen; when its full effect was
felt, the child ‘‘turns away from the Oedipus complex’’
(p. 176). But the object-cathexes thus abandoned were
replaced by identifications. The period of latency followed: libidinal tendencies were desexualized and sublimated, and the introjection of paternal authority
formed the nucleus of the superego.
An important issue nevertheless remained unresolved,
that of female sexuality, including its relationships with
the Oedipus complex, with the superego, and with
latency. Was it also characterized by a phallic organization and a castration complex? Freud maintained that
the girl, realizing that a clitoris was not on a par with a
penis, accepted castration as an established fact. For her
the threat of castration and the superego were thus of lesser significance. A more general threat was that of the
loss of love. Penis envy tended to be replaced by the
wish to obtain an oedipal child from the father.
According to ‘‘Some Psychical Consequences of the
Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’’ (1925j),
whereas castration was experienced by boys essentially
as a threat, girls looked upon it as a reality to which
they were already subject. Either alternative derived
directly from the ‘‘primacy of the phallus’’ in both sexes.
When the girl observed a boy and his penis, she recognized that she did not have a penis, and wanted to have
one. Worse, she might develop a masculinity complex
(the wish to be like a man) or, as a further step, disavow
reality by ‘‘refusing to accept the fact of being castrated’’
(p. 253). Naturally, the consequences could sometimes
be serious, ranging from feelings of unfair treatment to
narcissistic injury, from jealousy to the sort of onanistic
fantasy described in ‘‘ÔA Child Is Being BeatenÕ’’ (1919e).
The mother, in such cases, though the original love
object, was blamed for this effective castration.
With puberty, however, a powerful wave of repression would bear down upon all sexual activity in girls
that was of a ‘‘masculine’’ stamp (clitoridal masturbation), clearing the way for the development of a passive and receptive femininity. Likewise, and at the
same time, she would take her father as an object of
Oedipal love and transform her penis envy into the
wish for a child from him. In short, ‘‘In girls the Oedipus complex is a secondary formation. The operations
of the castration complex precede it and prepare for
it’’ (1925j, p. 256).
For Freud, therefore, the anatomical difference
between the sexes was interpreted in the same way by
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both girls and boys. It is this Freudian account of
female sexuality that has been most widely criticized.
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d [1925])
introduced FreudÕs second theory of anxiety: the earlier
notion that the affect associated with a repressed idea
was converted into anxiety was replaced with a conception of anxiety as an alarm signal that itself triggered
repression. Anxiety and the castration complex were
both central to this new conceptualization. Revisiting
the cases of ‘‘Little Hans’’ and the ‘‘Wolf Man,’’ Freud
clearly expressed the view that ‘‘the motive force of
repression’’ was anxiety in face of the threat of castration (pp. 107–8). He added that the fear of being
devoured, bitten, and so on, as well as animal phobias,
and phobias and imaginary fears in general, should also
be attributed to castration anxiety, which for its part
was the fear of a danger felt to be thoroughly real (Realangst). This theoretical picture explained what the
three types of neurosis, hysterical, phobic, and obsessional, had in common: ‘‘in all three the motive force of
the egoÕs opposition is, we believe, the fear of castration’’ (p. 122). Furthermore, whether with respect to
pregenital forms (experiences of separation from breast
or feces) or with respect to more developed forms
(social or moral anxiety stoked by the superego), it was
invariably the danger of castration that was feared, and
distinctly not the danger of death, no representation of
which existed in the unconscious. Nor was the ‘‘birth
trauma’’ evoked by Otto Rank involved here.
The prototype of anxiety was the sucklingÕs state of
distress in the absence of its mother; from the economic standpoint, this biological situation implied an
increase in the tension created by need. The pivot of
anxiety—deferred, relative to that initial distress—was
the castration complex. The heir of the castration
complex was anxiety vis-à-vis the superego. In women,
fear of losing the objectÕs love played the same role as
castration anxiety in men (p. 143).
FreudÕs paper on ‘‘Fetishism’’ (1927e) broached the
issue of the disavowal of female castration. ‘‘Probably
no male human being is spared the fright of castration
at the sight of a female genital’’ (p. 154). For the fetishist, at the place where the penis ought to be, there was
indeed a penis, in the variable (and often vivid) form
of a personal fetish whose presence and employment
implied a splitting of the ego: one part acknowledged
the castration of women while the other disavowed it,
in a single, perpetual process that protected the fetishist from the terror of castration.
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In ‘‘Female Sexuality’’ (1931b) and throughout the
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933a),
especially in the lectures entitled ‘‘Femininity’’ and
‘‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life,’’ Freud reasserted the
importance of the structuring role of the castration
complex. He reiterated his general position as follows:
‘‘The danger of psychical helplessness fits the stage of
the egoÕs early immaturity; the danger of loss of an
object (or loss of love) fits the lack of self-sufficiency in
the first years of childhood; the danger of being
castrated fits the phallic stage; and finally fear of the
super-ego, which assumes a special position, fits the
period of latency’’ (p. 88).
The closing pages of ‘‘Analysis Terminable and
Interminable’’ (1937c) addressed what Freud continued to look upon as an anti-analytical enigma, even, in
a sense, a scandal: men would not understand that passive submission to a master does not amount to castration, while women could not admit that they have no
penis and that this is their nature. In short, menÕs fear
of castration and womenÕs penis envy corresponded to
a refusal of femininity (i.e., of castration) by both
sexes—a refusal graven in the ‘‘bedrock’’ of the biological (pp. 250–53).
In the myriad forms in which it manifested itself in
mental life, as interpreted theoretically by Freud, castration was omnipresent, and closely bound up with
the Oedipus complex; if female sexuality was something of a stumbling-block for it, the concept was
firmly anchored to the difference between the sexes
and the difference between the generations. Starting
out from empirical observations, such as those in the
case history of ‘‘Little Hans,’’ FreudÕs theoretical path
led him beyond clinical experience into fundamental
questions of epistemology. Castration turned out to be
more than the fantasy of a child under threat;
embedded in the Oedipus complex and theoedipal
situation, this fantasy emerged not only as an organizing principle in the psychic life of the individual but
also as prototypical of the ‘‘split’’ which, as distinct
from fusion, made possible individuation and the secondary processes (temporality, succession, language,
psychical working-out, thought, and so on). In this
perspective, Jacques Lacan laid much stress on symbolic castration, making the phallus responsible for
the organization of difference, hence for splitting, and
hence for the symbolic order, though at the same time
he continued to endow this order with the sexual aura
specific to the human condition.
25 4
It was precisely this anthropological dimension that
would seem to have been misapprehended by most
English-language authors. For Melanie Klein, admittedly, the castration fantasy continued to play a
predominant role in the development of childhood
psychosexuality, but it intervened at a late stage, even
though she spoke of an early Oedipus complex. As
early as the nineteen-twenties, Sándor Ferenczi and
Otto Rank had been critical of the castration complex,
while, later on, FreudÕs account of the link between
castration and femininity had, not unjustifiably, been
questioned. Castration had barely any place in the theoretical and clinical contributions of D. W. Winnicott,
whose definition of femininity was highly original; nor
did it have much significance for Wilfred Bion, and it
had even less for Heinz Kohut, for whom the Oedipus
and castration complexes refer merely to late, relative,
and contingent events in mental life.
Another conceptual difficulty that should not be
overlooked is that attending the relations between the
castration complex and the death instinct. It is notable
that Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g) pays scant
attention to the castration complex, whereas Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d [1925]), largely
focused on the castration complex, makes no mention
of the death instinct.
In its role as organizer of mental life, the castration
complex sometimes fails, either because it has not
been sufficiently developed to be effective, or because
it is apparently overwhelmed. In such cases the subject
finds himself grappling directly with instinctual disintegration and exposed to the ravages of the destructive
instincts. In psychotic functioning, castration anxiety,
so far from playing a structuring role, itself constitutes
a terror operating in the same mode as archaic fears of
dismemberment.
The fact is that two different perspectives are present
here. While Freud undoubtedly considered that the
castration complex played a basic organizing role in
mental life as a stage in which the anxieties and distress
of an earlier time—even the earliest time—were
revived in a deferred manner, he simultaneously looked
upon it a stage in the formation of the superego. And it
was thanks to the part played by the superego that
instinctual renunciations would eventually be effected
under the pressure of unconscious feelings of guilt and
the need for punishment.
Although such instinctual sacrifices were injurious to
the individual, they were essential to the ‘‘process of
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civilization,’’ that is, to the development of conscience
and thought. This process was subject, like the individual, to that instinctual duality which, we must not forget, was based at once upon an antagonism and an inextricable connection between the life and the death
instincts. The great lesson of Civilization and Its
Discontents was that ‘‘This conflict is set going as soon as
men are faced with the task of living together’’ (1930a, p.
132). Living together indeed requires at the very least the
symbolic marks of sacrifice (circumcision, for instance),
and such marks are planted on the sexual body, thus
clearly demonstrating the power of the notion of castration in the various registers of human reality.
———. (1911c [1910]). Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (Dementia
paranoides). SE, 12: 1–82.
JEAN COURNUT
———. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile
neurosis. SE, 17: 1–122.
See also: ‘‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’’
(Little Hans); Anxiety; Aphanisis; Biological bedrock;
Disavowal; Exhibitionism; Fascination; Father complex;
Fetishism; Fright; ‘‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (Wolf Man)’’; Identificatory project; Masculine protest (individual psychology); Oedipus complex; Penis
envy; Perversion; Phallic mother; Phallic stage; Phobias
in children; Phobic neurosis; Primal fantasies; Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie (Psychoanalysis and pediatrics); Psychosexual development; Self-mutilation in children; Sex
differentiation; ‘‘Some Psychical Consequences of the
Anatomical Difference between the Sexes’’; ‘‘Splitting of
the Ego in the Process of Defence’’; ‘‘Taboo of Virginity,
The’’; Unconscious fantasy.
———. (1912d). On the universal tendency to debasement
in the sphere of love. (Contributions to the psychology of
love II). SE, 11: 177–190.
———. (1912–13a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: an introduction. SE, 14:
81–105.
———. (1916–17e). On transformations of instinct as
exemplified in anal erotism. SE, 17: 125–133.
———. (1918a). The taboo of virginity (Contributions to
the psychology of love III). SE, 11: 191–208.
———. (1919e). A child is being beaten. SE, 17: 175–204.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18.
———. (1923e). The infantile genital organization (an interpolation into the theory of sexuality). SE, 19: 141–145.
———. (1924d). The dissolution of the oedipus complex.
SE, 19: 171–179.
———. (1925j). Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes. SE, 19: 241–258.
———. (1926d [1925]). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety.
SE, 20: 75–172.
———. (1927e). Fetishism. SE, 21: 147–157.
———. (1930a). Civilization and its discontents. SE21: 57–145.
Bibliography
Angoisse et complexe de castration (1991). Monographs of
the Revue française de psychanalyse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
———. (1931b). Female sexuality. SE, 21: 221–243.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on
psycho–analysis. SE, 22: 83–268.
Cournut, Jean. (1997). Épı̂tre aux oedipiens. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 209–253.
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4
and 5.
———. (1939a). Moses and monotheism. SE, 23: 1–137.
———. (1901b). The psychopathology of everyday life. SE, 6.
Green, André. (1990). Le complexe de castration. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
Lacan, Jacques. (1991). Le Séminaire VIII. Le transfert
(1960–61). Paris: Seuil.
———. (1908c). On the sexual theories of children. SE, 9:
205–226.
Laplanche, Jean (1980). Problématiques II, Castration, symbolisations. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
———. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy.
SE, 10: 1–149.
———. (1910h). A special type of choice of object made by
men (Contributions to the psychology of love I). SE, 11:
163–175.
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Further Reading
Jacobson, Edith. (1976). Female superego formation and female
castration conflict. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 45, 525–538.
255
CATASTROPHE THEORY
AND
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Horney, Karen. (1924). On the genesis of the castration
complex in women. International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
5, 50–65.
Mayer, Elizabeth Lloyd. (1995). The phallic castration complex and primary femininity: Paired developmental lines
toward female gender identity. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 43, 17–38.
Rangell, Leo. (1991). Castration. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 39, 3–24.
CATASTROPHE THEORY
AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
The mathematical concept of catastrophe theory was
proposed by René Thom in 1968 and was presented in
his Structural Stability and Morphogenesis (1972/1989).
ThomÕs ‘‘Elementary catastrophes’’ refer to the seven
dynamic configurations that a form, being sufficiently
stable to be recognized in ordinary space-time, adopts
in order to appear, subsist, and change.
René Thom introduced his work as follows:
This work aims to provide a formal structure that
can be used to attack any morphogenetic problem in
general. Based on a consideration of the mechanisms
at work in embryological development, this formal
structure leads to a universal method that can be used
to associate any morphological appearance with a
local dynamic situation that engenders it, in a way that
is independent of the substrate—material or immaterial, living or non-living—that supports it. In this way
we introduce the notion of Ôcatastrophe,Õ whose applications range from physics . . . to linguistics . . . and
biology. This book provides the first systematic
attempt to consider problems of biological control in
geometric and topological terms as well as those associated with the structural stability of shapes (1989).
The research on which catastrophe theory depends,
as undertaken by Alexandre Liapounov (1857–1918),
in Russia, on structural stability, and by Henri
Poincaré (1854–1912), in France, on qualitative
dynamics, has continued (differential topology,
dynamic systems, and so on). Structural stability treats
shapes and phenomena according to an intrinsic variability that their persistence in time imposes on them,
and not as if they remained strictly identical to themselves—‘‘the simple stability’’ that classical science
requires. In this way the energy a being expends to persist can be taken into account, and consideration given
25 6
to the stylization of structurally stable shapes, according to a dynamic that is qualitative because it indicates
‘‘state trajectories,’’ possible histories and events, without measuring quantities. Catastrophe theory resolves
the following problems: Given a structurally stable
dynamic situation dependent on an unknown (or even
infinite) number of parameters, it describes all the
possible variations and changes in the situation with
the help of a finite and minimal number of parameters. If the situation can be represented in conventional space-time, the theory provides for seven kinds
of change, the seven elementary catastrophes, depending on at most four parameters.
Determining psychic forms, constructing a
dynamic that creates them, then making the problems
associated with the stability and regulation of these
forms intelligible—their possible histories—was the
work of Freud. Psychoanalysis is psychic morphodynamics. That a theory addressing conditions of possibility and constraints can serve to make FreudÕs work
more intelligible goes without saying. A standard case
involves the coexistence of primary narcissism and a
primary object relation that one of the catastrophes,
the ‘‘cusp,’’ can be used to model. Similarly, one of the
aspects of the duality of the life and death drives can
be described as the necessary co-presence of structural
and simple stabilities.
The application of the ‘‘exact sciences,’’ even the geometrization of a part of thermodynamics, to any nonmathematico-physical domain is complex. But René
Thom began to work out the epistemological implications of catastrophe theory. In his Semiophysics: a sketch
(1988/1990), he developed a phusis of meaning. He
shows how these mathematics subvert the Galilean subdivision of the world and respond to AristotleÕs—and
FreudÕs—questions by treating form and dynamic
together in their subjection to time. He then restores
the emergence and instrumental value of these mathematics within the framework of natural philosophy,
where, by means of ‘‘pregnance’’—drives according to
Freud—signification becomes a process immanent in a
vital dynamic. These analyses, which overturn epistemologies in force since the Galilean revolution, provide access to ‘‘laws of nature that are vaster and of
greater scope’’ (1914d) than Freud had hoped.
MICHÈLE PORTE
See also: Dualism; Strata/stratification.
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CATHARTIC METHOD
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1914d). On the history of the psychoanalytic movement. SE, 14: 1–66.
Porte, Michéle. (1994). La dynamique qualitative en psychanalyse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Porte, Michéle. (Ed.). (1994). Passion des formes. Dynamique
qualitative, sémiophysique et intelligibilité. Á René Thom.
Paris: E.N.S. Fontenay-Saint Cloud.
Thom, René. (1989). Structural stability and morphogenesis:
an outline of a general theory of models. (D. H. Fowler,
Trans.). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Pub. (Original
work published 1972)
———. (1990). Semiophysics: a sketch. (Vendla Meyer,
Trans.). Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.,
Advanced Book Program. (Original work published
1988)
CATASTROPHIC CHANGE
The concept of catastrophic change emerged from
BionÕs mathematical period in which he expressed
interested in physical transformations. When an analysand undergoes a violent psychotic change, for
instance, what aspects of him remain invariant through
that change, from the pre-catastrophic through the
actual catastrophic to the post-catastrophic stage.
Invariance in change is a concept Bion borrowed from
mathematical set theory. He also relates the invariance
in change to differing modes of representing an image,
such as in art, where the artist has to represent a threedimensional world on a two-dimensional surface. Bion
asserts, ‘‘It should . . . be possible to detect a pattern
that remains unaltered in apparently widely differing
contexts. It would be useful to isolate and formulate
the invariants of that pattern so that it could be communicated’’ (Bion 1970).
His basic thesis in this regard is that ‘‘the psychoanalyst should be regarded as transformation of realization (the actual psycho-analytic experience) into an
interpretation or series of interpretations’’ (Bion
1965). He invokes the term ‘‘catastrophic’’ to designate
a psychic event in an analysand that subverts the order
or system of things in the environment and/or in the
analysand himself, and this catastrophic change represents either a controlled or uncontrolled regression on
the part of the analysand where the emergence of
violence is pivotal.
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Analysis in the pre-catastrophic stage differs from
the post-catastrophic stage insofar as the former is characterized by the analysandÕs being unemotional, theoretical, and not manifesting any evidence of change. In
addition, hypochondriacal symptoms are manifested.
In the post-catastrophic stage the presence of violation
is obvious, it lacks an ideational template, in contrast to
the pre-catastrophic stage where ‘‘ideational violence’’
without affect is more in evidence. The analyst must
then look, according to Bion, for the invariants in the
post-catastrophic stage that correspond as invariants
from the pre-catastrophic stage, e.g., hypochondria in
the latter may be invariant with paranoid relations with
external objects in the former. Returning to the middle
stage, catastrophic change, that stage is characterized by
the emergence of violence.
Bion encloses the phenomenon of pre-, post-, and
catastrophic changes as transformation as follows:
In terms of the analysand, the transformation is, when
a realization takes place, from T (patient) a to T
(patient) b. In the analyst, if there is no observed
change, the event is inscribes as T (analyst) a and T
(analyst) b. In the event of a change, the inscription is:
T (pre-catastrophic change) to T (post-catastrophic
change).
JAMES S. GROTSTEIN
See also: Hallucinosis.
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred R. (1965). Transformations: Change from
Learning to Growth, London, Heinemann.
———. (1970). Attention and interpretation, London, Tavistock Publications.
CATHARTIC METHOD
The so-called ‘‘cathartic method’’ was a treatment for
psychiatric disorders developed during 1881–1882 by
Joseph Breuer with his patient ‘‘Anna O.’’ The aim was
to enable the hypnotized patient to recollect the traumatic event at the root of a particular symptom and
thereby eliminate the associated pathogenic memory
through ‘‘catharsis.’’ The term was derived from AristotleÕs use of it to describe the emotionally purgative
effect of Greek tragedies.
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CATHARTIC METHOD
Reading the case history of Anna O., one sees that
the method developed gradually. At first, Breuer limited himself to making use of the patientÕs self-induced
hypnotic states in which she would strive to express
what she preferred to avoid talking about when normally conscious. Later on, Anna O. began inventing
stories around a word or words she heard, at the conclusion of which she awakened serene and improved.
After the death of her father, such stories evoked diurnal fears and hallucinations. The cathartic effect,
linked to the emotional state that accompanied these
fears, required the doctor to listen without actively
seeking etiological clues. Anna O. aptly described this
procedure, speaking seriously, as a ‘‘talking cure’’,
while she referred to it jokingly as ‘‘chimney-sweeping’’ (1895d, p. 30). At this juncture Breuer began to
more systematically employ a technique by which,
while Anna O. was in a trance, he repeated to her a few
words that she herself had muttered while in a selfinduced ‘‘absence.’’
It was probably in August 1881 that the method
acquired its definitive form. This was when Anna O.,
after refusing to drink water and suffering nearhydrophobia during hot weather, remembered the disgust she felt when she happened upon her English
lady-companionÕs dog while it was drinking from a
water glass. As soon as she described the event, she
asked for water and ‘‘thereupon the disturbance vanished, never to return’’ (p. 35) Other examples provided Breuer with evidence that ‘‘in the case of this
patient the hysterical phenomena disappeared as soon
as the event which had give rise to them was reproduced in her hypnosis’’ (p. 35), and that systematic
application of what she called ‘‘chimney sweeping’’
would put an end to one after another of such morbid
phenomena. To move the treatment along faster,
Breuer began use hypnosis, which he had not regularly
employed previously.
Freud and Breuer filled out the notion of catharsis
with the concept of ‘‘abreaction’’—a quantity of affect
that was linked to memory of a traumatic and pathogenic event that could not be evacuated through normal physical and organic processes as required by the
‘‘principle of constancy’’ and so, thus blocked (eingeklemmt), was redirected through somatic channels to
become the process at the origin of the pathological
symptoms (1893a).
decided, in treating Emmy von N., to employ ‘‘the
cathartic method of J. Breuer.’’ But failure to regularly
induce hypnotic states inclined him by 1892 to give up
hypnosis, which his patient Elisabeth von R. disliked.
He asked her to lay down and close her eyes but
allowed her to move about or open her eyes as she
wished, and he experimented with a ‘‘pressure technique’’: ‘‘I placed my hand on the patientÕs forehead or
took her head between my hands and said: ÔYou will
think of it [a symptom or its origin] under the pressure of my hand. At the moment at which I relax my
pressure you will see something in front of you or
something will come into your head. Catch hold of it.
It will be what we are looking for.—Well, what have
you seen or what has occurred to you?’’ (Freud 1895d,
p. 110). This procedure ‘‘has scarcely ever left me in
the lurch since then,’’ (p. 111) Freud added, claiming
that this was the case to such an extent that he told
patients that it could not possibly fail but invariably
enabled him to ‘‘at last [extract] the information’’
(p. 111).
BreuerÕs method little by little thus became an ‘‘analysis of the psyche’’ which prefigured ‘‘psychoanalysis,’’
a term that first appeared in print in 1896. The technique would be developed progressively over the course
of a dozen years.By 1907, when Freud undertook analysis of the ‘‘Rat Man,’’ he no longer actively demanded
that patients produce material, but asked only that
they verbalize what spontaneously came to mind.
FreudÕs thesis, according to which trauma at the
root of displaced energy towards the soma is invariably
sexual in nature, led to a rupture in his relationship
with Breuer, but it also determined the future course
of psychoanalysis. His explanation of the difficulties
that patients experienced during treatment to defend
themselves against pathogenic memories would come
to be known as ‘‘resistance,’’ while the concept of
‘‘transference’’ would emerge from his understanding
of BreuerÕs sudden termination of Anna O., or the
time that a patient, upon waking from hypnosis, threw
her arms around his neck.
Catharsis and abreaction, even while still observed
during psychoanalytic treatment, no longer constitute
therapeutic aims as in 1895. However, they remain
prominent in several psychotherapeutic techniques,
such as in ‘‘Primal Scream’’ therapy and certain types
of psychodrama.
Tired of poor results and of the monotony of hypnotic suggestion, by 1889 Freud appears to have
25 8
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
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CATHEXIS
See also: Dynamic point of view; Economic point of view;
First World War: The effect on the development of psychoanalysis; ‘‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’’; ‘‘Repression’’; Topographical point of view ; ‘‘Unconscious, The’’;
Witch of Metapsychology, the.
Bibliography
Anderson, Ola. (1962). Studies in the prehistory of psychoanalysis. Stockholm: Svenska Bokförlaget.
energy, which, neutral in itself, can be added to a qualitatively differentiated erotic or destructive impulse,
and augment its total cathexis. . . . It seems a plausible
view that this displaceable and neutral energy . . . proceeds from the narcissistic store of libido—that it is
desexualized Eros’’ (p. 44). The adherents of ego
psychology have made this supposed neutral energy
into the energy powering their ‘‘conflict-free ego.’’
PAUL DENIS
Chertok Léon; and Saussure, Raymond de. (1973). Naissance du psychanalyste. Paris: Payot.
See also: Psychic energy.
Freud, Sigmund. (1893a). On the psychical mechanism of
hysterical phenomena: Preliminary communication. SE, 2.
Bibliography
———. (1895d). Studies on Hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4–5.
Mijolla Alain de. (1982). Aux origines de la pratique psychanalytique. In R. Jaccart (Ed.), Histoire de la psychanalyse.
Paris: Hachette.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
CATHEXIS
CATHECTIC ENERGY
In the most general terms, cathectic energy is the
energy attached to various psychic formations. Freud
used this expression in two different contexts: one
where it clearly designates a libidinal cathexis, and
another where by implication the energy in question is
of a different nature—neutral or desexualized.
In this last, narrower sense, cathectic energy appears
in the letter to Wilhelm Fliess of January 1, 1896, as
‘‘free psychic energy,’’ small quantities of energy bound
to the phenomena of attention and consciousness. In
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), cathectic energy
is the energy invested in thoughts by the preconscious
as opposed to the countervailing ‘‘energy of the
unconscious’’: ‘‘[the primary processes] appear whenever ideas are abandoned by the preconscious cathexis,
are left to themselves and can become charged with
the uninhibited energy from the unconscious which is
striving to find an outlet’’ (p. 605). Freud would continue throughout his career to maintain this distinction between the energy whose displacements regulate
the processes of thought and fuel cathexis, on the
one hand, and the countercathexes of the instinct on
the other.
As for the origin of this energy, Freud wrote in The
Ego and the Id (1923b), for example, that he ‘‘reckoned
as though there existed in the mind . . . a displaceable
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A key concept from the economic point of view,
‘‘cathexis’’ refers to the process that attaches psychic
energy, essentially libido, to an object, whether this is
the representation of a person, body part, or psychic
element. Implicit in FreudÕs early works, the idea of
cathexis stems directly from the hypothesis of psychic
energy. The term first appeared in 1895 in Studies
on Hysteria, as well as in ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’’ (1950c [1895]). It then recurs throughout
FreudÕs works.
The term is used to designate various psychic
impulses in energic terms. As a result, ‘‘cathexis’’ is
also used to refer to organizational psychic impulses,
the interplay of symptoms and regressions, and the
workings of attention and pain. Freud used it to
describe major and modulated quantitative phenomena in symptoms and psychic processes. The term also
denotes the binding of psychic energy to interconnected representations in the progressive organization
of the psyche. Cathexis relates to the affects, where the
issue of the quantum of affect becomes paramount
(Freud, 1933a [1932]). A feeling not cathected with
energy, or loaded with a certain quantity of affect,
does not become fixed in memory. Psychic objects
and representations are the result of cathexis. Most psychic mechanisms have to be considered from the economic point of view, that is, in terms of cathexis, decathexis, anticathexis, and hypercathexis. The concept
259
CATHEXIS
of cathexis thus underpins FreudÕs entire theory of the
constitution of the psyche.
Everything that takes place in the body or the psyche can be an object of cathexis. Real persons are
cathected only through the intermediary of the psychic
representations constructed of them. Cathexes are
objective when they are directed at individuals with a
corresponding existence in the external world and are
narcissistic when they have meaning only for the subject. Any stable psychic formation, essentially any psychic formation constituted from a stable cathexis, can
in turn become the support for a cathexis added to its
constituent cathexis.
Every cathexis has an impact on psychic equilibrium because it reduces the quantity of free energy,
but the cathexes most constitutive of the psyche are
the drive cathexes. Libidinal cathexis of the object of
the drive and of the experience of satisfaction obtained
in the subjectÕs interaction with that object constitute
the most vital internal objects that can support
pleasurable ego functioning.
The concept of fixation has to be understood in
terms of libidinal cathexes that have remained organized around historically determined objects (in the
widest sense). Freud used many different metaphors to
describe this process. He used military metaphors to
describe how troops (psychic energy) occupy
(cathect—the literal meaning of ‘‘Besetzung’’) a particular piece of the psychic territory and how some of these
troops remain behind to establish a base for a return
of forces that have completed the advance. Freud also
used metaphors from banking, deploying an analogy
between libidinal cathexes and financial investments.
With the metaphor of an amoeba, Freud illustrated how
narcissistic and objective cathexes are related: the pseudopodia that the amoeba extends toward objects are
currents of object cathexis that can be withdrawn back
into the subject and turned into narcissistic cathexes.
The stronger the narcissistic fixation, the greater the
potential for narcissistic regression.
the id is the source of libido and thus the origin of libidinal cathexes. Freud also posited a form of free energy
that can emanate from the ego and hypercathect a particular psychic element. Via this process, the ego essentially comes to direct cathexes. Such free energy is
neutral and displaceable energy belonging to hypercathexis, which plays a part in the economy of attention, perception, and the egoÕs preparation for possible
traumas (1940a [1938]). It is Freudian formulations of
this kind that formed the basis for ego psychology,
which postulates a conflict-free sphere of the ego. The
term ‘‘hypercathexis’’ is also used more generally to
refer to libidinal intensification of an existing cathexis.
In Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926d [1925]),
Freud addressed the issue of psychic pain caused by substantial cathexis directed at a lost object. Freud outlined
how a painful bodily lesion imposes a substantial narcissistic cathexis that tends to ‘‘empty the ego’’ (p. 171). He
then identified cathexis as the common element in physical and psychic pain: ‘‘The intense cathexis of longing
which is concentrated on the missed or lost object (a
cathexis which steadily mounts up because it cannot be
appeased) creates the same economic conditions as are
created by the cathexis of pain which is concentrated
on the injured part of the body’’ (p. 171).
PAUL DENIS
See also: Anticathexis; Cathectic energy; Decathexis;
Defense mechanisms; Economic point of view; Ego
boundaries; Free energy/bound energy; Hypercathexis;
Libido; Object; Primal repression; Psychic energy; Transference relationship.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4: 1–338; 5: 339–625.
———. (1910i). The psycho-analytic view of psychogenic
disturbance of vision. SE, 11: 209–218.
———. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159–204.
———. (1916–1917a [1915–1917]). Introductory lectures
on psycho-analysis. SE, 15–16.
The concept of displacement too is related to that
of cathexis. Quantities of cathected libido, or psychic
energy, can be displaced onto other supports. These
displacements result from the greater or lesser capacity
of cathected libido to detach from its early objects and
from its ‘‘viscosity’’ (1916–1917a [1915–1917]).
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
Cathected psychic energy is essentially libido. In the
context of his structural theory, Freud theorized that
———. (1940a [1938]). An outline of psycho-analysis. SE,
23: 139–207.
26 0
———. (1926d [1925]). Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety. SE, 20: 75–172.
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C É N A C , M I C H E L (1891 –1 965)
———. (1950c [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology.
SE, 1: 281–387.
Should Know about Psychoanalysis). In 1936 he
opened a clinic for psychoanalysis with John Leuba.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
In 1943, when the French police arrested Françoise
and Eugène Minkowski, their daughter Jeanine took
refuge with Michel Cénac. He intervened with the Prefecture of Police and was able to obtain their freedom.
During the Occupation, the term ‘‘psychoanalysis’’
appeared only once in the title of a review, ‘‘Psychiatrie
et psychanalyse: LÕapport de la psychanalyse à la
psychiatre,’’ which he signed and published in March
1943 in Annales médico-psychologiques, even though
the content of the article reflected the reticence typical
of the French (Mijolla, 1982). In a letter to Ernest
Jones written on December 31, 1944, John Leuba
writes, ‘‘Borel and Cénac are working as best they
can . . . the second with complete probity but a technique that leaves much to be desired.’’ He was the first
treasurer, [RB1]after the Liberation, in 1946 and vice
president of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris
between 1949 and 1951.
Rouart, Julien. (1967). Les notions dÕinvestissement et de
contre-investissement à travers lÕévolution des idées freudiennes. Revue française de psychanalyse, 31 (2), 193–213.
Further Reading
Holt, Robert R. (1962). Critical examination: Freud’s concept of bound vs. free cathexis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 10, 475–525.
Ornston, Darius. (1985). The invention of ’cathexis’ and
Strachey’s strategy. International Review of Psychoanalysis,
12, 391–400.
CAUSALITY. See Need for causality
CÉNAC, MICHEL (1891–1965)
Michel Cénac, a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and member of the Société Psychanalytique de
Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society), was born June
28, 1891, in Argelès-Gazost (Hautes-Pyrénées), and
died in Paris in 1965. He was awarded the Croix de
Guerre and the Legion of Honor during the First
World War and later studied medicine and psychiatry. An intern at the Asiles de la Seine in 1921, he was
a student of Professor Trénel and Henri Claude and
later became the head of his clinic. His dissertation,
‘‘Langages crées par les aliénés’’ (The Languages of
the Mentally Ill), which he defended in 1928, was primarily devoted to the meaningless jargon often
spoken by mentally ill patients. He soon became
interested in psychoanalysis and began a training analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein. He was elected a
member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris on
November 26, 1929. With Adrien Borel, in 1933 he
presented a report on obsession at the VII Conférence
des Psychanalystes de Langue Française (Seventh
Conference of French-Speaking Psychoanalysts). Preoccupied by the links between medicine and psychoanalysis, in 1934 he published ‘‘Ce que tout médecin
doit savoir de la psychanalyse’’ (What Every Doctor
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Together with Jacques Lacan, at the XII Conférence
in 1950, he presented a paper entitled ‘‘Introduction
théorique aux fonctions de la psychanalyse en criminologie’’ (Theoretical introduction to the use of psychoanalysis in criminology), in which both authors
expressed their disagreement with theories that stipulated the existence of a criminal instinct. Very much
involved with Sacha Nacht in the origins of the 1953
split, on January 20 he announced his candidacy for
president of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris
against Jacques Lacan. He lost during the third round
of voting. Cénac became the first senior physician of
the Centre de Diagnostic et de Traitement Psychanalytique, which was created at the same time as the Institut de Psychanalyse de Paris (Paris Institute for
Psychoanalysis) in 1954, and was elected president of
the Société Psychanalytique de Paris in 1955.
As part of his work at the psychiatric infirmary of
the Paris Prefecture of Police, where he became honorary senior physician, Cénac conducted several studies
on the value of witnesses (1951), recidivism and antisocial activities (1956), juvenile delinquency (1961),
and subjective post-concussional syndromes.
JEAN-PIERRE BOURGERON
See also: France; Société psychanalytique de Paris et Institut psychanalytique de Paris.
261
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LOVER
IN
HER
Bibliography
Borel, Adrien, and Cénac, Michel. (1932). LÕobsession.
Revue français de psychanalyse, V (4), 586–648.
Cénac, Michel. (Jan.–Feb.–March 1943). Psychiatrie et psychanalyse. LÕapport de la psychanalyse à la psychiatrie,’’
Annales médico-psychologiques, 101 (1), 278–288.
Lacan, Jacques, and Cénac, Michel. (1997). A theoretical
introduction to the function of psychoanalysis in criminology, May 29, 1950 (Mark Bracher, Russell Grigg, and
Robert Samuels, Trans.). Journal for the Psychoanalysis of
Culture and Society, 1 (2). (Original work published 1951)
Mijolla, Alain de. (1982). France, 1893–1965. in Peter Kutter
(Ed.), Psychoanalysis international. A guide to psychoanalysis throughout the world (Vol. I, Europe, 66–113). StuttgartBad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1992.
CENSORING THE LOVER IN HER
The notion of ‘‘censoring the lover in her’’ was first
introduced by Michel Fain, then reworked by Fain and
Denise Braunschweig in order to highlight the way in
which the mother may modulate her presence for the
infant while looking after their bodily needs.
When, in the course of caring for the baby, the
mother daydreams about her love life with the father
of the child, this other experienced as independent of
the child induces a relative distance in the relation
with the child. This leads the child to create an early
(primary) state of triangulation which will be the basis
for the future oedipal organization.
Censoring the lover in her is therefore the effect of
the internal events in the mother, leading the developing child to make room for a third party within the
framework of their ‘‘real’’ two-person relationship. For
the mother it is also this that enables her to countercathect the erotic feelings caused by the contact with
the infant’s body. Her life as a lover thus takes on the
value of a protective shield for the psyche of the child,
but also for her own psyche because it ‘‘censors’’ a part
of the erotic feelings aroused by maternal care.
MICHEL ODY AND LAURENT DANON-BOILEAU
See also: Fatherhood; Maternal object; Object, change of/
choice of; Parenthood; Protective shield.
Bibliography
Braunschweig, Denise, and Fain, Michel. (1975). La nuit, le
jour. Essai psychanalytique sur le fonctionnement mental.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
26 2
Fain, Michel. (1971). Prélude à la vie fantasmatique. Revue
française de psychanalyse, 35 (2–3), 291-364.
CENSORSHIP
The term censorship in everyday language connotes
ideas of blame and repression of faults. This is how it
appears in Freud in Studies on Hysteria: ‘‘we are very
often astonished,’’ he writes, ‘‘to realize in what a mutilated state all the ideas and scenes emerged which we
extracted from the patient by procedure of pressing.
Precisely the essential elements of the picture were
missing [ . . . ] I will give one or two examples of the
way in which a censoring of this kind operates . . .’’
(1895b, p. 281–282). He then shows that what is censored is what appears to the patient to be blameworthy, shameful, and inadmissible. In a letter to Wilhelm Fleiss (December 22, 1897, in 1950a) he
compares this psychic work to the censorship that the
czarist regime imposed on Russian newspapers at
the time: ‘‘Words, sentences and whole paragraphs are
blacked out, with the result that the remainder is unintelligible’’ (1950a, p. 240).
Although the term appears quite frequently in writings from this first period, its status remains uncertain.
Freud seems to be describing the deliberate suppression by patients, in their communication with the doctor, of what they do not wish to reveal to him, as well
as the mechanism and effects of unconscious repression (1896b). A second meaning appears when he
evokes the censorship which, in dream-work, results in
a manifest text being presented as a riddle (Interpretation of Dreams, 1900a).
The metapsychological texts of 1915 elaborate on the
distinctions outlined in chapter seven of the Interpretation of Dreams. Censorship is in fact defined as that
which opposes the return of that which is repressed, at
the two successive levels in the passage from the unconscious to the preconscious (the ‘‘antechamber’’) and
on to the conscious (the ‘‘drawing-room’’) (1915e).
Censorship is thus clearly distinguished from
repression: whereas repression rejects a representation
and/or an affect into the unconscious, censorship is
what prevents it from re-emerging. Freud nevertheless
confuses this distinction later when he writes, for
example: ‘‘We know the self-observing agency as the
ego-censor, the conscience; it is this that exercises
the dream-censorship during the night, from which
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the repressions of inadmissible wishful impulses proceed’’ (1916–17a, p. 429). With the introduction of the
structural theory Freud made a new distinction, with
the ego becoming the agent of the censorship under
the superego—the merciless supervisor (1923b).
Although the notion of censorship continues to be
fairly widely used in psychoanalysis to describe resistance to the treatment, it has scarcely received any
further elaboration and its global nature may cause it
to appear to be somewhat outmoded.
ROGER PERRON
See also: Censoring the lover in her; Dream; Dream interpretation; Ego; Fantasy; Fantasy (reverie); Fundamental
rule; Hysteria; Jokes; Latent; Nightmare; Preconscious,
the; Repression; Reverie; Secondary revision; Superego;
Wish/yearning.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1895b). On the grounds for detaching a
particular syndrome from neurasthenia under the description ‘‘anxiety neurosis.’’ SE, 3: 85–115.
———. (1896b). Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses
of defence. SE, 3: 157–185.
———. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4–5.
———. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159–204.
———. (1916–1917a). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. Parts I & II. SE, 15–16.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
———. (1950a). Extracts from the Fliess papers. SE, 1:
173–280.
CENTRE ALFRED-BINET
The Centre Alfred-Binet (Alfred Binet Center), the
department for child and adolescent psychiatry of the
Association for Mental Health in Paris, annually
receives about two thousand children for consultations and treatment. It is at the center of a group of
institutions (Training Club, Foster Home Placement,
Adolescent Day Hospital) and operates in coordination with an evening unit (Fondation Lyon) and a
specialized homecare unit (Fondation de Rothschild).
The system is sector-based, but the center receives 20
percent of its patients from outside of the sector it
serves.
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Created in 1956 by Serge Lebovici, who was soon
joined by René Diatkine, it was the first sector-based
center in France for children and adolescents. Breaking
with standard practice at the time, the center sought to
create essentially outpatient treatment in collaboration
with the different institutions in which the children
participated. The center was run by psychoanalysts
and psychiatrists who were co-opted into the system
and who devoted a large part of their time to analysis
in an environment of reliable multidisciplinary teams.
This fact clearly distinguished this system both
from university institutions focused on hospitalization
and from a large number of sector services later organized throughout France.
In its development, the center came to rely essentially on psychoanalytic experience and use the
mediation of other disciplines. Its practice was progressively elaborated under the influence of its creators, Serge Lebovici until 1978 and René Diatkine
until 1994. It continues to have considerable influence on the work of the many public and private
practitioners of child psychotherapy and psychiatry
who trained in its seminars. The training, while
deriving some of its ideas from trends in British psychoanalysis, attempts to define the limits and principles of the analystÕs work with children by constantly
sorting out what comes from the child and what
comes from the environment.
The necessity of working with families in a climate
of trust without inappropriate therapeutic or educational aims and generally for long periods of time led
the psychoanalysts to adopt extensive therapeutic consultation and a broad range of treatments that allow
children to remain in their usual surroundings. Practitioners take into account the varied conflicts in the
psychic lives of the children and the pressure of their
unconscious transfer/counter-transfer fantasies without any special fascination for the origin of these fantasies. This has led to a concept of child development
as being dominated by successive and barely foreseeable deferred actions on the part of children in which
games occupy a special place with regard to the appearance of new functions.
In 2004 nearly five hundred people trained at the
Centre Alfred-Binet. In spite of its budgetary
restrictions, its evolving practice has enabled it to
bring together a group of consultants that benefit
parents and children and to organize brief therapy
sessions aimed at enlarging the range of activities
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where analysts interact with young children and
their families.
way to develop the ability to conduct psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy.
GÉRARD LUCAS
The other analytic treatments practiced at the center
were developed there in order to adapt, up to a certain
point, to the range of the demand; among these are various forms of psychotherapy, individual and group
psychodrama, and group psychoanalysis. But these other
forms of treatment derive from the model of psychoanalytic treatment, of which they are thoughtful modifications taking into consideration the method, the
frame, and the processes of change, and wherein clarification of the transference remains of central importance.
See also: Diatkine, René; Lebovici, Serge Sindel Charles.
CENTRE DE CONSULTATIONS ET DE
TRAITEMENTS PSYCHANALYTIQUES
JEAN-FAVREAU
The Centre Jean-Favreau (CCTP) grew out of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) and its training
institute. The agreement linking it to the Paris Social
Services Department (DASS) recognizes its purely psychoanalytic vocation.
At the instigation of Sacha Nacht and René Diatkine, the Institut de Psychanalyse created the center in
1954. It was originally a clinic based on a model that
the burgeoning psychoanalytic movement created
around the time of World War I (it was similar to the
Berlin Institute, for example). It provided free treatment to patients who lacked the resources necessary to
pay for treatment. Unpaid analysts conducted these
treatments, under the supervision of experienced analysts. This system also made it possible to explore the
effects of free treatment on the analytic process and to
facilitate access for non-physicians.
In 1958 an agreement was signed with the Seine
prefecture borough authorities. It guaranteed an operating budget for the center, thus testifying to the public
authority’s interest in the renewal and use of psychotherapeutic modalities in the field of psychiatry.
The center also was to contribute indirectly to training
psychiatrists, who, within the framework of the policy
of the sector, would then run extra-hospital clinics
with a largely psychotherapeutic orientation.
The center’s specific role and aims must be seen
within this historical context. During a period of great
innovation when many institutions were created, integrating psychoanalytic ideas into their treatment perspectives in various ways, the center based its activity
around the classic analytic treatment conducted in the
course of three or four weekly sessions of forty-five
minutes each. This approach derived from the conviction held to this day that psychoanalytic treatment, if
implemented correctly, is the most effective treatment,
and the belief that psychoanalytic training is the best
26 4
The physicians who—delegated by the president of
the PPS—have successively directed the center (Jeanne
M. Favreau, Jean Favreau, Jean-Luc Donnet) and their
assistants (Robert Barande, Monique Cournut) have
thus been able to ensure compatibility between the
socio-therapeutic obligations required by the agreement and the ethics of psychoanalytic practice. Some
fifty analysts—including some candidates—work in
the center in a very part-time fashion. The type of
patient and the way the center is run make it particularly interesting from a psychoanalytic and psychiatric
point of view, for several reasons.
It is a privileged situation wherein to make evaluations and assessments within the consultative framework and to evaluate the types and predictive values
of the initial interviews, as well as determining the
indications for the various psychoanalytically derived
treatments. Its legal status makes it necessary to critically and carefully evaluate the influence of the institutional factors, particularly free sessions, on the
therapeutic processes. Of course the optimal analytic
situation is one in which the patient pays for the
treatment. But it would be inappropriate to establish
this principle as a dogma. The availability of free psychoanalytic treatment is not of interest only to
patients who lack the necessary resources but,
because of the infinite variety of cases seen, it contributes to an ongoing reassessment of the theory of the
analytic framework and the constant difficulties surrounding it. Without this in any way taking from its
essentially therapeutic aim, the center provides training through its use of consultations for teaching purposes, as well as through participation in the psychodrama sessions.
JEAN-LUC DONNET
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CERTAINTY
See also: Favreau, Jean Alphonse; Société psychanalytique
de Paris et Institut de psychanalyse de Paris.
child and parent group psychodrama. Innovations
were also constantly introduced in other domains,
educational psychology, psychomotricity, and orthophonics for example.
CENTRE PSYCHOPÉDAGOGIQUE
CLAUDE-BERNARD
The question has been raised whether the multiplicity of approaches would not dilute the psychoanalytic
idea at the base. On the contrary, it would seem that
the conjunction of ‘‘impossible tasks’’ is what makes
such an institution rich and dynamic.
Named after the Parisian lycée where it was first installed, the Centre psychopédagogique Claude-Bernard
was founded in 1946 on the initiative of Juliette FavezBoutonier (quickly succeeded by André Berge) and
Georges Mauco.
The project came into being during the German
Occupation, when these three analysts held informal
meetings with Françoise Dolto and Marc Schlumberger. The idea was to create an institution that would
enable children, adolescents, and their families to benefit from the discoveries of psychoanalysis in a framework other than hospital consultation. They envisaged
a different approach to character disorders, language
problems, and intellectual inhibitions. The revolutionary aspects of this project made it quite compatible
with the vast plan of social and educational reforms
that came into being at the end of the war.
Like other centers later created in other cities, this
structure had a dual vocation: medical on the one
hand, educational and administrative on the other, the
managers of both sections being analysts. This dual
vocation symbolized the ‘‘crucible’’ in which actors
from all sorts of different disciplines worked for the
benefit of the children and their families, but
this diversity shared a common horizon: analytic
comprehension. In 1972 the center became ‘‘medicopsycho-educational’’ (CMPP).
The social backdrop has changed completely over
the last fifty years. Child psychology and psychoanalysis have seen their domains extended and, most of
all, considerably deepened. The CMPP model has
been contested, although November 1996 saw ClaudeBernard celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in good
health!
The Centre had an unquestionable role in the psychoanalytic movement in France. It played a considerable part in spreading psychoanalytic concepts in the
domain of education and teaching. In addition, it promoted innovative practices in the psychoanalytic
domain: From the very beginning, individual psychotherapy was complemented with the addition of
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CLAIRE DOZ-SCHIFF
See also: Berge, André; Clark-Williams, Margaret; FavezBoutonier, Juliette; France; Mauco, Georges.
CERTAINTY
An internal moral conviction resulting from reflection,
or subjectively imposed in the form of an intuition or
illumination, certainty is an intellectual sentiment that
transposes sensory evidence into the realm of thought.
Sigmund Freud gave little thought to the concept
except when considering its opposite, doubt, or as
related to the idea of conviction, which connotes an
illusory or mistaken content (delusional conviction).
However, dreams are an example of a mental product
accompanied by certainty since images, rather than
judgments, are involved. Conversely, whenever there is
doubt, it is the misrepresentation that underscores the
ability of the element in question to convey meaning.
It is especially in the area of superstition and knowledge of the paranormal that Freud investigated the
notion of certainty. As with paranoid delirium, he sees
its origin in a projection of the contents of the unconscious onto the outside world (1901b). This idea was
developed in connection with animist thought and
later with the category of experience, which included
feelings of seeing or experiencing something one has
seen or experienced before (déjà-vu and déjà-vécu)
(1914a), and feelings of alienation (Entfremdung), or
the uncanny (Unheimlichkeit). What is in question in
all of these are ‘‘obsolete primal convictions’’ associated with a primal inability to differentiate between
the ego and the outside world.
FreudÕs analysis of religious feelings—what Romain
Rolland refers to as oceanic feelings (1930a [1929])—
provided him with an opportunity to question whether
certainty is equivalent to an objective perception. These
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DE
(1925 –1986)
feelings, he wrote, are ‘‘described as feelings but are
apparently complicated processes associated with
determinate contents and decisions concerning those
contents.’’ The only things that are certain are death
and the relation between the mother (certissima [absolutely certain]) and the child, while the father is semper
incertus (always uncertain). The fantasy of certainty,
which the most skeptical researcher is never without,
can thus be associated with this experience of primary
and irreplaceable assurance: that of being the motherÕs
child. What is certain is irreplaceable. For Freud, the
psychoanalyst is prepared ‘‘for the sake of attaining
some fragment of objective certainty, to sacrifice
everything—the dazzling brilliance of a flawless theory, the exalted consciousness of having achieved a
comprehensive view of the universe, the mental calm
brought about by the possession of extensive grounds
for expedient and ethical action’’ (1941d [1921], pp.
179). This spiritual abstinence is not based on an
obsessive predilection for uncertainty but, on the contrary, a desire of anticipated certainty, of possessing
fragmentary crumbs of knowledge once and for all
(Mijolla-Mellor, S., 1992).
The concept of certainty in psychoanalysis appears
to be related both to the analysis of illusion associated
with desire (Freud); or, more radically, with the destruction of critical thought, the seductive appeal of deviation, where the only possibility is one of repetition
(Aulagnier,1984), and to the always partial and painfully won acquisition of partial certainties incorporated
in a renewed hypothetical-deductive approach.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Construction-reconstruction; Death and psychoanalysis; Déja-vu; Doubt; Foreclosure; Ideology; Illusion; Paranoia; Pleasure in thinking; Sudden involuntary
idea.
Bibliography
Aulagnier, Piera. (1984). LÕapprenti-historien et le maı̂tre-sorcier. Du discours identifiant au discours délirant. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Freud, Sigmund. (1901b). The psychopathology of everyday
life. SE, 6.
———. (1912–13a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
———. (1914a). Fausse reconnaissance (déjà raconté) in
psycho-analytic treatment. SE, 13: 201–207.
26 6
———. (1914d). On the history of the psycho-analytic
movement. SE, 14: 1–66.
———. (1930a [1929]). Civilization and its discontents. SE,
21: 59–145.
———. (1941d [1921]). Psycho-analysis and telepathy. SE,
18: 177–193.
Lacan, Jacques. (1945). Le temps logique et lÕassertion de
certitude anticipée. Un nouveau sophisme. In Écrits (pp.
197–213).
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1992). Le plaisir de pensée. Paris,
Presses Universitaires de France.
CERTEAU, MICHEL DE (1925–1986)
Michel de Certeau, Jesuit historian—he was a specialist on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and
religion—was born in Chambéry in Savoy on May 17,
1925, and died at the age of sixty on January 13, 1986.
He was introduced to psychoanalysis by Louis
Beirnaert. He was one of the first members of the
École Freudienne de Paris in 1964 and remained a
member until it was dissolved by Jacques Lacan in
1980. Between 1963 and 1967 he directed the review
Christus, together with François Roustang, introducing psychoanalysis to the magazine.
His interest in alterity and the Other led him to
study the work of Jean-Joseph Surin, a Jesuit mystic of
the seventeenth century who was brought in to exorcize the possessed at Loudun. To understand the mystic priest, Certeau made use of psychoanalysis together
with semiotics and ethnology. A historian, like Surin,
of impossible speech and the broken subject, Michel
de Certeau gave exceptional pertinence to Lacanian
concepts. In search of the traces of the absent, attentive
to the sites of a Real that was impossible to restore, he
anchored historical writing in the relation between the
body and language and in the constituent division of
the subject between ‘‘outside’’ and ‘‘inside.’’
After 1968 he taught in the Department of Psychoanalysis at the Université de Paris in Vincennes. He
later divided his time between the University of California at San Diego and Paris, and was appointed head
of research at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Sociales in 1984.
A tireless investigator of ideas and places, Certeau,
in his historical work, demonstrated the fecundity of
what Freud referred to as the work of mourning. For
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him historical writing is the equivalent of the ‘‘tombeau,’’ a literary and musical genre practiced in the
seventeenth century, which gave voice to the past in
order to bury it, that is, to honor and eliminate it.
At a time when the social sciences were deeply influenced by scientism, Michel de Certeau felt that history,
like psychoanalysis, was dependent primarily on a hermeneutics of loss. He defined an epistemology of the
‘‘in-between,’’ which hovered between science and fiction, and which studied the memory traces inscribed
in a present subject to the ‘‘uncanny familiarity’’ of a
past that was always ready to rise up to haunt our
actions.
FRANÇOIS DOSSE
See also: History and psychoanalysis; Religion and
psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Certeau, Michel de (1970). The Possession at Loudun
(Michael B. Smith, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000.
———. (1973). LÕabsent de lÕhistoire. Repères, Paris: Mame.
———. (1975). The writing of history (Tom Conley, Trans.).
New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
———. (1982). The mystic fable (Michael B. Smith, Trans.).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
———. (1987). Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction. Paris: Gallimard, Folio.
CHANGE
The psychic changes observable during psychoanalytic
treatment involve two distinct processes. First, the
therapeutic process applies to symptoms, personality
traits, and behaviors amenable to transformation. Second, the psychoanalytic process applies to how the
experience created by the analytic setting and the rules
of technique is lived out. The articulation of these
two processes defines the question of change in
psychoanalysis.
Without ever acquiring a specific conceptual status,
the idea of change has been the focus of continual
questioning since the beginning of psychoanalysis. As
pointed out by Daniel Widlöcher (1970), it is easily
traced in Sigmund FreudÕs work. As early as their
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preliminary communication of 1893, which served to
introduce their Studies on Hysteria (1895d), Freud and
Breuer established both the modus operandi of the
cathartic treatment of hysteria and the idea that the
mechanism of treating the symptom is the reverse of
the mechanism of its formation. The recollection of an
event and its affective charge spark a process that
reverses the pathogenic process brought about by
repression. From that point on and indeed throughout
the rest of his work, Freud drew on his observation of
resistances to change to modify, deepen, and refine his
model of change. Three moments mark the beginnings
of psychoanalysis: the development of the rules of
technique, the shift in focus from trauma theory to the
role of fantasy, and the introduction of the concept of
change in the form of libidinal development. Here we
have an indication of the importance of a model of
change to psychoanalysis.
FreudÕs discovery of the extent and importance of
the transference between 1904 and 1910 introduced a
new model of change, which is particularly well
explained in his Introductory Lectures on PsychoAnalysis (1916–1917a [1915–1917]). Transference
affects the processes of change in several ways. It is an
obstacle used by resistance, and it hinders the processes of association and remembering by encouraging
repetition through acting out. But it is also a lever for
therapeutic transformation, because the patient
cathects with the therapist and this reveals features of
past attachments and conflicts. Above all, repetition in
the transference leads the patient to externalize a conflicted intrapsychic structure and displace it onto the
relationship with the analyst. This is the origin of the
tripartite therapeutic model of clinical neurosis, transference neurosis, and infantile neurosis.
Beginning in the 1920s, growing doubts about the
therapeutic effectiveness of psychoanalysis led Freud
to make two basic theoretical revisions. First, he introduced the dualism of the life and death instincts to
account for the force of the compulsion for repetition
as compared with the inertia of libidinal-object choice.
The second revision was based on a more diversified
analysis of the processes of resistance to change, which
allowed Freud, in ‘‘Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety’’ (1926d [1925]), to differentiate the resistances of
the id, the ego, and the superego—a distinction made
possible by the new structural model but also strengthened the clinical effectiveness of treatment. On this
basis Freud constructed a third model, which he
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CHANGE
formulated in a binary manner: ‘‘Where id was, there
ego shall be,’’ he wrote in ‘‘New Introductory Lectures
on Psycho-Analysis’’ (1933a [1932], p. 80). In ‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’ (1937c), Freud
offered a more modest version of this formulation,
evoking a kind of to-and-fro between ego analysis and
id analysis. He was also careful to recall the bases of
resistance to change (libidinal viscosity, the repetition
compulsion, and also penis envy in women and masculine protest in men).
developed around the concepts of interaction, empathy (Ralph Greenson, Heinz Kohut), and ‘‘co-thinking’’ (Widlöcher).
Throughout his work, in fact, Freud emphasized
the study of resistances. In ‘‘Analysis Terminable and
Interminable’’ (1937c), he emphasized, ‘‘Instead of an
enquiry into how a cure by analysis comes about (a
matter which I think has been sufficiently elucidated)
the question should be asked of what are the obstacles
that stand in the way of such a cure’’ (p. 221).
Another theme is the mechanisms of externalization and internalization. Authors here have returned
to the model of transference neurosis to show how
pathological structures are displaced in the therapeutic
relationship. Often abandoning the classical model of
neurosis, these authors (including Melanie Klein and
her students, as well as object-relations theorists)
describe more archaic processes that become amenable
to analysis once they are externalized in the
transference.
Have developments in psychoanalytic thinking since
Freud followed through on this recommendation?
Probably in part, even though the various theories have
focused chiefly on their respective models of change.
The development of many different schools of thought
after Freud owes a great deal to modifications of technique (though only in close association with the work of
interpretation) and, in the final analysis, to theoretical
approaches that seek to specify the articulations
between a pathological model, a developmental model,
and a model of change through treatment. Yet all
schools of psychoanalysis have based themselves on theoretical and clinical elements already present in FreudÕs
work. Rather than an expression of allegiance, this is a
consequence of the fact that FreudÕs theory of change
(and the different models successively added to it) covers a very complex reality, of which the various schools
have tried to specify a particular portion.
It is worth drawing out a few main themes of these
schools, though without reviewing the technical and
theoretical frameworks of each (which are rarely presented in connection with the processes of change and
resistance to change). The first theme concerns the
psychoanalystÕs involvement in the process of change.
The idea of a neutral therapist, whose ‘‘noninvolvement’’ ensures the necessary capacity for listening and
interpretation, has given way to an ever narrower
focus on the analystÕs mental efforts and role in
change. This trend, already well underway in Sándor
FerencziÕs innovations in technique, is evident in studies of the role of counter-transference by Paula
Meimann and Heinrich Racker, and is currently being
26 8
Rather different from the foregoing is the narrative
or constructivist tendency. This trend includes the
otherwise varied approaches of Jacques Lacan, Roy
Schafer, and Serge Viderman, all of whom in their
respective ways emphasized how the work of interpretation is constructive.
A third approach stresses the reparative function of
the process of change. Change is expected to affect
choices of libidinal objects. This trend develops the
Freudian idea of the ‘‘revision of the process’’ by placing
considerable emphasis on the emotions and the psychoanalystÕs containing function. Such authors as Michael
Balint, Donald Winnicott, and Wilfred R. Bion, very
different in other respects, belong to this trend.
Other dimensions of change could, of course, be
taken into consideration. The most important thing,
perhaps, is to identify the reasons for the various divergences on the nature of psychic change and their impact
on the activity and future development of the institutions of psychoanalysis. The problem is less one of justifying the existence of several models (which, as noted
earlier, has to do with the complexity of the processes
involved) than of explaining the reasons for theoretical
choices. Clearly, the extension of psychoanalytic treatment to a broader range of cases and the application of
psychoanalysis to serious pathologies have had a decisive impact on evolving ideas about change. Will this
trend toward disparate models of psychic change continue? If not, what other trend will supplant it? What
role will planned research studies, which tend to objectify certain data, play at a time when psychoanalysts are
increasingly being held accountable for treatment
choices, their effectiveness, and their cost?
DANIEL WIDLÖCHER
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CHARACTER
See also: Adolescent crisis; Autoplastic; Catastrophic
change; Cure; Depersonalization; Ego autonomy; Female
sexuality; Mutative interpretation; Narcissistic withdrawal; Object, change of/choice of.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1916–1917a [1915–1917]). Introductory
lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 15–16.
———. (1926d [1925]). Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety. SE, 20: 75–172.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 209–253.
———, & Breuer, Josef. (1893a). On the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomina: Preliminary communication.
SE, 2: 1–17.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
Widlöcher, Daniel. (1970). Freud et le problème du changement. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
CHANGE PROCESS. See Processes of development
CHARACTER
Character is a psychological, philosophical, and a literary concept. A distinction needs to be drawn
between this concept and the metapsychological
aspects of character and its relation to symptoms and
neurosis.
There are two main ways of defining it, which are
interconnected. Concepts of character are designated
on the one hand by the metapsychological aspects that
are intrinsically connected with developments in theory and, on the other hand, by the distinction between
normality and pathology and, specifically, the convergence between character and the major concepts of
neurosis, psychosis, and borderline conditions.
The concept of character appeared as early as 1900
in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), in connection
with the importance of mnemic traces. The role of
fixations emerged more clearly in 1905 in Three Essays
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on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), emphasizing the
role of sublimation in character formation; Freud
wrote: ‘‘A sub-species of sublimation is to be found in
suppression bb reaction-formation’’ (p. 238). He then
described various character types associated with the
partial drives in ‘‘Character and Anal Erotism’’
(1908b) and ‘‘Some Character-types Met with in
Psycho-Analytic Work’’ (1916d). It was in 1913, in
‘‘The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis: A Contribution to the Problem of Choice of Neurosis’’ that he
most sharply differentiated symptom and character:
‘‘the failure of repression and the return of the
repressed—which are peculiar to the mechanism of
neurosis—are absent in the formation of character. In
the latter, repression either does not come into action
or smoothly achieves its aim of replacing the repressed
by reaction-formations and sublimations’’ (1913i,
p. 323).
In 1923, with the introduction of the structural theory, character is located in the ego and the importance
of identifications is emphasized: ‘‘an object which was
lost has been set up again inside the ego—that is, an
object-cathexis has been replaced by an identification. . . . We have come to understand that this kind of
substitution has a great share in determining the form
taken by the ego and that it makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its ÔcharacterÕ’’ (1923b, p. 28). Character thus comprises the
history of object-choices that have since been abandoned. However, the earliness of these identifications
should not allow us to forget that the earliest identifications with the parents are those that influence the
constitution of the superego rather than the ego
(Lecture 32, New Introductory Lectures on PsychoAnalysis, 1933a). Here the function of character traits
as resistance is frequently emphasized: ‘‘we may now
add as contributions to the construction of character
which are never absent the reaction-formations which
the ego acquires—to begin with in making its repressions and later, by a more normal method, when it
rejects unwished-for instinctual impulses’’ (p. 91).
Freud saw a degree of overlap between character
and symptom in spite of their differences and maintained that it was the failure of the defensive function
of character that led to repression and neurosis; in
‘‘Analysis terminable and interminable,’’ he demonstrated that: ‘‘the defensive mechanisms, by bringing
about an ever more extensive alienation from the
external world and a permanent weakening of the ego,
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CHARACTER
pave the way for, and encourage, the outbreak of neurosis’’ (1937c, p. 238).
The ‘‘libidinal types’’ (1931a) have been considered
a development of character theory. However, these are
in fact an attempt by Freud to attribute a key role to
the agencies of the structural theory (id, ego, and
superego) in a psychoanalytic nosography.
The study of character has been continued by various authors but it has been overtaken by the subject
of character resistance and the associated problems of
technique. Karl Abraham emphasized the importance
of fixations, although he cautioned against the notion
of a fixed nature as something that is disproved by
modifications in character (‘‘A Short Study of the
Development of the Libido,’’ 1924/1927). He set out to
establish a semiology of psychic material and emphasized the earliness of object relations involved in symptom-formations and character-formation. Wilhelm
Reich is known mainly for the modifications in technique that he advocated with patients who presented
him with ‘‘character armor.’’ This means avoiding
interpreting drive impulses before having interpreted
and overcome this resistance, layer by layer. In their
demonstration that a large number of muscular reactions are designed to prevent the breakthrough of
emotions, excitations, or anxiety, these descriptions
are reminiscent of Pierre MartyÕs discussions of
rachialgia (1963).
In The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1945),
Otto Fenichel also demonstrated the need to resolve
the conflicts between the drives and defenses.
Raymond de Saussure considered character as a developmental stage in which the subject has become stuck
and not as a type that is established for a lifetime.
Jean Bergeret (1976) described character and structure by distinguishing three levels of character:
Character, as an emanation from the deep structure in
relational life, traces the progress or failure of the
structural development; character traits, elements of
the fundamental character, are often associated with
elements of other forms of character, compensating
for deficiencies in fundamental character through
adaptive requirements, and can thus appear in a different structure from the one from which they derive.
Character pathology, on the other hand, corresponds
to the ‘‘borderline’’ economy and its decompensation
leads to a deformation of the ego, with the onset of
more or less severe forms of splitting.
27 0
Otto KernbergÕs work on character forms part of
his studies of borderline functioning. In ‘‘A psychoanalytic classification of character pathology’’ (1970), he
proposed a classification of character pathologies with
three levels of severity, corresponding to the level of
development of the drives, the superego or the ego, or
the more or less pathological nature of the character
traits. The three levels of severity that he distinguishes
are reminiscent of the levels of mentalization in Pierre
MartyÕs theory of character neurosis.
The issues raised by character traits continue to be
of interest to the French psychosomaticians among
others. In ‘‘Névrose de caractère et mentalisation’’
(Character neurosis and mentalization) for example,
Michel Fain (1997) argued that the disappearance of a
character trait indicates a dementalization occurring
in an essential depression rather than the resolution of
a neurotic process.
ROBERT ASSÉO
See also: Anal-sadistic stage; Character Analysis; Character formation; Character neurosis; ‘‘Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child’’; Countercathexis;
Dependence; Ego; Eroticism, anal; Eroticism, urethral;
Failure neurosis; Fate neurosis; I; Identification; Indications and contraindications for psychoanalysis for an
adult; Orality; Paranoia; Psychic structure; Psychological
types (analytical psychology); Reaction-formation; Sex
and Character; Sublimation; Transference neurosis;
Transgression.
Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1927). A short study of the development of
the libido. Selected papers of Karl Abraham. London:
Hogarth. (Original work published 1924)
Bergeret, Jean. (1976). Personnalités normales et pathologiques: Les structures mentales, le caractère, les symptômes.
Revue française de psychanalyse, 40 (2), 351–370.
Fain, Michel. (1997). Névrose de caractère et mentalisation.
Rev. française de psychosomatique, 11, 7–17.
Fenichel, Otto. (1945). The psychoanalytic theory of neurosis.
New York: W. W. Norton.
———. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4–5.
———. (1905d).Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
———. (1908b). Character and anal erotism. SE, 9: 167–
175.
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CHARACTER ANALYSIS
———. (1913i). The disposition to obsessional neurosis: A
contribution to the problem of choice of neurosis. SE, 12:
311–326.
———. (1916d). Some character-types met with in psychoanalytic work, SE, 14: 309-333.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
———. (1931a). Libidinal types. SE, 21: 215–220.
———. (1933a). New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 209–253.
Kernberg, Otto. (1970). A psychoanalytic classification of
character pathology. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 18, 800–822.
Marty, Pierre. (1963). La psychosomatique de lÕadulte. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Reich, Wilhelm. (1945). Character analysis: Principles and
technique for psychoanalysts in practice and in training
(Theodore P. Wolfe, Trans.). New York: Orgone Institute
Press. (Original work published 1933)
CHARACTER ANALYSIS
In the course of his clinical work in Vienna (1924–
1930) and then in Berlin (1930–1933), Wilhelm Reich
worked out his own techniques of psychoanalytic
practice that emphasized the analysis of resistances
and the structure of the character. He made his techniques public in his book, Character Analysis (1933/
1945), his richest contribution to psychoanalysis.
Character represents a stable, more or less rigid, organization of the libidinal economy of the person; it is at
the same time submitted to the pressures of the drives
and to social constraints, to gratifying or traumatic
experiences, and to the repetitions or defenses that
they give rise to: ‘‘Character is in the first place a
mechanism of narcissistic protection.’’
The ‘‘character traits’’ that it brings together under
the name of ‘‘character armor ’’ correspond to the
mechanisms used by the person to deal with the
repressed. Reich described two great poles of character,
defined by their degree of ‘‘orgasmic potency’’ and the
prevalence of various states of the libido: The genital
character, the Reichian ideal, is distinguished by an
orgasmic potency that reaches a true plenitude, a flexible and free circulation of libidinal energy, and also by
modes of relation to the self, to others, and to the
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world, founded on a rational approach that respects the
reality principle. The neurotic character, conversely, suffers from a libidinal imbalance that gives primacy to
repression and negation or, in other cases, to impulsivity and an inability to master the pressure of unconscious impulses. In addition to these fundamental
character types, Reich described ‘‘some well defined
forms of character,’’ such as the hysteric character, dominated by ostentation and sexual mobility; the compulsive character, where rigidity, retention, and obsession
for order dominate; and the phallic-narcissistic character, structured so as to resist the ‘‘anal and passivehomosexual impulses.’’ For the masochistic character,
Reich refers, through several individual examples, to a
cultural form marked by guilt and the desire for punishment—in short, the death drive, as the source of the tendency towards such deadly political practices as fascism.
ReichÕs broadening of character analysis included a
third part called ‘‘On the Psychoanalysis of the Biophysics of Orgone,’’ in which Reich, linking ‘‘physical contact’’ and ‘‘vegetative current,’’ emphasized the role of
violent, elementary sensations such as the feeling of
‘‘breakdown’’ and the ‘‘representation of death.’’ He
proposed, on this basis, an original interpretation of the
‘‘schizoid disintegration,’’ by which certain symptoms
typical of schizophrenia—the ‘‘faraway stare,’’ dissociation of the personality, and catatonia—are presented in
a clarifying and suggestive light. By inscribing his
researches within a ‘‘language expressive of life,’’ Wilhelm Reich committed himself to a vitalist vision that
shall see subsequent and more ample developments.
ROGER DADOUN
See also: Character; Character formation; Character neurosis; Reich, Wilhelm.
Source Citation
Reich, Wilhelm. (1945). Character analysis: Principles and
technique for psychoanalysts in practice and in training
(Theodore P. Wolfe, Trans.). New York: Orgone Institute
Press. (Original work published 1933)
Bibliography
Boadella, David. (1973). Wilhelm Reich, The evolution of his
work. Chicago: Henry Regnery.
Dadoun, Roger. (1975) Cent fleurs pour Wilhelm Reich.
Paris: Payot.
271
CHARACTER FORMATION
CHARACTER FORMATION
Character is a psychological notion that refers to all
the habitual ways of feeling and reacting that distinguish one individual from another. Sigmund Freud
had a sustained interest in the question of character
formation, since it touches on the major themes that
interested him: ‘‘anatomo-physiological destiny,’’
memory traces, and, more generally, the role of
acquired traits, as well as the function of sublimation
with regard to the ‘‘remains’’ of the pregenital libido.
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), Freud
defined character in relationship to the unconscious:
‘‘What we describe as our ÔcharacterÕ is based on the
memory-traces of our impressions; and, moreover,
the impressions which have had the greatest effect on
us—those of our earliest youth—are precisely the
ones which scarcely ever become conscious’’ (pp.
539–540). This definition posits character as a sort of
memory, a collection of traces. Five years later, in
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), Freud
emphasized individual psychic activity: ‘‘What we
describe as a personÕs ÔcharacterÕ is built up to a considerable extent from the material of sexual excitations and is composed of instincts that have been
fixed since childhood, or constructions achieved by
means of sublimation, and of other constructions,
employed for effectively holding in check perverse
impulses which have been recognized as being unutilizable’’ (pp. 238–239).
In 1920, in an addendum to the Three Essays that
reiterates material presented in the article ‘‘Character
and Anal Erotism’’ (1908b), Freud summarized,
‘‘Obstinacy, thrift and orderliness arise from an exploitation of anal erotism, while ambition is determined
by a strong urethral-erotic component’’ (p. 239, n. 1).
Character derives from instincts, but not directly, since
reaction formations and sublimations intervene. Thus,
as Freud noted in ‘‘Thoughts for the Times on War
and Death’’ (1915b), ‘‘The pre-existence of strong
ÔbadÕ impulses in infancy is often the actual condition
for an unmistakable inclination towards ÔgoodÕ in the
adult’’ (p. 282).
With the development of the notion of identification, that of character took on additional dimensions.
Character formation was understood to be based on
the mechanism of identification, that is, unconsciously
identifying with character traits derived from objects.
According to Freud in The Ego and the Id (1923b),
27 2
when a lost object is reestablished in the ego, thus
allowing an identification to replace object cathexis,
this ‘‘makes an essential contribution towards building
up what is called its ÔcharacterÕ ’’ (p. 28).
The notion of character thus evolved in FreudÕs
work. The importance Freud attributed to it can be
seen in his remarks in ‘‘FreudÕs Psycho-Analytic Procedure’’ (1904a), where he wrote, ‘‘Deep-rooted malformations of character, traits of an actually degenerate
constitution, show themselves during treatment as
sources of a resistance that can scarcely be overcome’’
(p. 254). However, determining character traits is not
easy. In ‘‘Some Character-types Met with in PsychoAnalytic Work’’ (1916d), Freud noted that it is not
the character traits that patients see in themselves,
nor those attributed to patients by persons close to
them, that pose the greatest problem for analysts;
rather it is the previously unknown and surprising
peculiarities often revealed in the course of analysis.
Freud analyzed some of the character types revealed
through analysis, including those of subjects who
claim for themselves the right to perpetrate injustice
because they believe they have been subjected to it
themselves, subjects ‘‘wrecked by success’’ (pp. 316 ff),
and finally, taking a perspective that changed criminology, ‘‘criminals from a sense of guilt’’ (pp. 332 ff).
Karl Abraham (1925/1953–1955) returned to the
specific issue of the anal character. A broader, more central notion of character can be found in the work of
Wilhelm Reich (1933/1945). The idea of character analysis, and especially that of ‘‘character armor,’’ are linked
to his theories of a biological energy that he later named
‘‘orgone energy.’’ Subsequently, these theories became a
separate discipline from psychoanalysis, ‘‘bioenergy.’’
Citing the work of Edward Glover and Franz Alexander
(who contrasted character neurosis and symptomatic
neurosis), Reich reconsidered the known character
types (hysterical, obsessional, masochistic, etc.) under
the presupposition that the primordial function of any
character type is to defend against stimulations from
the external world and against repressed internal
instincts. The character analysis he developed consists
in isolating in the patient the character trait that is the
source of greatest resistance and thus rendering it analyzable. His general idea is that the ego forms a character trait by taking over a repressed instinct to use as a
defense against another instinct. Thus, character is
essentially a mechanism of narcissistic protection—
hence the term ‘‘character armor.’’
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CHARACTER NEUROSIS
After Reich, character became far more important
among psychoanalysts whose work focuses on the ego.
In the United States many studies have been published
on this topic, notably Heinz HartmannÕs Ego psychology and the problem of adaptation (1939/1958).
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Character.
Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1953–1955). Contribution of the theory of
the anal character. In Selected papers of Karl Abraham,
M.D. (Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey, Trans.). New
York: Basic Books. (Original work published 1925)
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4: 1–338; 5: 339–625.
———. (1904a). FreudÕs psycho-analytic procedure. SE, 7:
249.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
———. (1908b). Character and anal erotism. SE, 9:
167–175.
———. (1915d). Thoughts for the times on war and death.
SE, 14: 273–300.
———. (1916d). Some character-types met with in psychoanalytic work. SE, 14: 309–333.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
Hartmann, Heinz. (1958). Ego psychology and the problem of
adaptation. New York: International Universities Press.
(Original work published 1939)
Reich, Wilhelm. (1945). Character-analysis: principles and
technique for psychoanalysts in practice and in training
(Theodore P. Wolfe, Trans.). New York: Orgone Institute
Press. (Original work published 1933)
Further Reading
Lewin, Betram. (ed.) (1966). On Character and Libido Development. Six Essays by Karl Abraham, New York: W. W.
Norton & Co.Arlow. Jacob A. (1990). Psychoanalysis and
character development. Psychoanalytic Review, 77, 1–10
CHARACTER NEUROSIS
The term ‘‘character neurosis’’ did not originate with
Freud. It grew out of difficulties in treating character
pathologies, distinguished by the great resistance that
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character opposes to analysis. And its use spread in the
wake of Wilhelm ReichÕs work on character analysis
beginning in 1928. Sigmund Freud, in lecture 34 of his
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933a
[1932]), underscored the often extremely long duration required by character analysis, but, he assured
readers, ‘‘it is often successful’’ (p. 156).
It was undoubtedly a lack of success with such cases
that led Reich to his conception of ‘‘character armor.’’
At the time he was working at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Clinic with impulsive psychopaths. The problems
raised by their treatment, he said, required a sharp
focus on the structure of the impulsive ego.
The difficulties of regression in the transference, the
inaccessibility of character fixations to analysis, and
the difficulty of investing the analyst except in an idealizing mode (a defense against any erotic or aggressive
investment) form the basis for the analysis of character
pathologies. In his Vienna seminars between 1922 and
1926, Reich noted that the obstacle to a cure is found
in the patientÕs whole character. He advocated a rigorous analysis of the character defenses, layer by layer,
before any deep interpretation.
Hermann Nunberg (1956), denouncing what he
saw as the artificial separation of the analysis of resistance and the analysis of deep contents, had serious
disagreements with Reich with regard to the techniques to be implemented. In ‘‘Le traitement psychanalytique du caractère’’ (1928/1982), Sándor Ferenczi
argued that the analyst has to reveal how character
traits are unconsciously used to resist analysis and has
to link them to the corresponding forgotten childhood
experiences, in particular, experiences of seduction by
an adult, for analysis to progress. This is in keeping
with what he called analytic pedagogy, which makes
use of his active technique. Following Ferenczi,
Michael Balint (1932/1952) emphasized the effects of
the fear of excitation, and indeed of pleasure itself,
often the result of hyperstimulation of the child by an
adult.
Later Otto Kernberg, in ‘‘A psychoanalytic classification of character pathology’’ (1970), sought to establish a form of classification based on the increasing
severity of pathological manifestations by integrating
the various nosographic and metapsychological data
(agencies, part instincts). This terminology is reminiscent of Pierre MartyÕs 1980 classification of neuroses
as well, poorly, or irregularly mentalized, or even as
273
C H A R C O T , J E A N M A R T I N (1825 –1 893)
behavioral neuroses. According to Marty, the same
metapsychological elements are paramount: deficiencies in mentalization correspond to deficiencies in
object internalization and to acting out, which give
rise to behavior disorders. René Diatkine (1966)
emphasized the suffering of persons close to the
patient; in his view, the ego-syntony of character protects the subject from anxiety. Henri Sauguet (1966)
established a gradation between neurotic character
(close to the symptomatic neuroses) and character
neurosis (close to borderline states or even psychosis).
Despite the importance of, and the number of
authors who have taken an interest in, character neurosis, in France this notion is obsolescent because the
general focus has shifted toward problems of symbol
formation and identity construction. The term nevertheless retains some currency among psychosomatically
oriented analysts, particularly in France. One area being
researched concerns the connections among the structure of the superego, the presence of the ideal ego (in
MartyÕs sense), and the quality of mentalization. In
‘‘Névrose de caractère et mentalisation’’ (Character neurosis and mentalization; 1997) Michael Fain emphasized how character defenses play a protective role:
‘‘The disappearance of character traits more often
attests to a dementalization taking place in an essential
depression than to the resolution of a neurotic process.’’
ROBERT ASSÉO
See also: Character.
Bibliography
Balint, Michael. (1952). Character analysis and new Beginning. In his Primary love and psychoanalytic technique.
London: Hogarth. (Original work published 1932)
Diatkine, René, (1966). Intervention au 7e séminaire de perfectionnement. Revue française de psychanalyse, 30 (3), pp.
324–344.
Fain, Michel. (1997). Névrose de caractère et mentalisation.
Revue française de psychosomatique, 11, 7–17.
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1982). Le traitement psychanalytique du
caractère. In his Œuvres complètes. Vol. 4: Psychanalyse,
1927–1932. Paris: Payot. (Originally published 1928.)
Freud, Sigmund. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures
on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
Kernberg, Otto F. (1970). A psychoanalytic classification of
character pathology. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 18 (4), 800–822.
27 4
Marty, Pierre. (1980). Les mouvements individuels de vie et
de mort (Vol. 2: LÕordre psychosomatique). Paris: Payot.
Nunberg, Hermann. (1956). Character and neurosis. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 37 (1), 36–45.
Reich, Wilhelm. (1945). Character-analysis: principles and
technique for psychoanalysts in practice and in training
(Theodore P. Wolfe, Trans.). New York: Orgone Institute
Press. (Original work published 1933.)
Sauguet, Henri. (1966). Caractère et nevrose. Revue française
de psychanalyse, 30 (3), 298–307.
Further Reading
Kernberg, Otto F. (1970). A psychoanalytic classification of
character pathology. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 18, 800–822.
Nunberg, Henry. (1956). Character and neurosis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 37, 36–45.
CHARCOT, JEAN MARTIN (1825–1893)
Jean Martin Charcot was born in Paris in 1825, the son
of a coach builder, and died of a heart attack near Lake
Settons (Nièvre) on August 16, 1893. He was a physician with the Hôpitaux de Paris, a professor of clinical
medicine for nervous disorders, and a member of the
Académie de Médicine.
He was appointed a physician with the Hôpitaux de
Paris in 1856, associate professor of medicine in 1860,
senior physician at the Salpêtrière in 1862, professor of
pathological anatomy in the School of Medicine at the
University of Paris in 1872 (succeeding Alfred Vulpian), and in 1882 was appointed to the first chair of
neurology, a position created for him at the request of
Léon Gambetta, as professor of diseases of the nervous
system. He was made a member of the Académie de
Médicine in 1873 and the Académie des Sciences in
1883,
Charcot had an impressive career and received
numerous academic honors, but the accuracy of his
theories on hysteria, which he began working on in
1865 after the ‘‘department of epilepsy’’ was placed
under his supervision, had begun to be seriously questioned at the time of his death. The work of his student, the neurologist Joseph Babinski; the rise of Pierre
JanetÕs dynamic psychology; and especially the success
of psychoanalysis all contributed to bringing down a
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theoretical structure that had nurtured these developments at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Charcot was an attentive observer, which helped
establish methods of neurological description and
classification still in use (CharcotÕs disease, CharcotBouchard aneurysm, and so on), and possessed an
almost magical talent as a speaker. He attracted a
diverse group of personalities to his presentations: his
public ‘‘Leçons Cliniques,’’ held on Wednesdays, and
his ‘‘Grandes Leçons,’’ held on Fridays. His patients, it
was learned after his death, had to some extent been
prompted to exhibit to the audience the typical ‘‘hysterical crises’’ that the Master expected of them. He
was particularly interested in paralysis, anesthesia, and
other symptoms considered to be ‘‘hysterical,’’ and
attempted to demonstrate their ‘‘functional’’—rather
than anatomical—origin, a belief that contradicted a
number of other practitioners, who were proponents
of the surgical removal of their patientsÕ ovaries.
He succeeded in isolating a clinical entity he
referred to as the ‘‘grande hystérie’’ or ‘‘hysteroepilepsy.’’ He described a crisis, or ‘‘attack,’’ as occurring in four successive phases: the epileptiform phase,
clonic spasms, emotional ‘‘acting out,’’ and terminal
delirium. In addition to these attacks patients exhibited
‘‘stigmata’’ (narrowing of the visual field, anesthesia)—
conditions that could only exist if there were some form
of ‘‘diathesis,’’ that is, a predisposition to hereditary
degeneration.
To demonstrate his ideas, Charcot publicly performed hypnosis to provoke or eliminate such symptoms, which proved they were not connected to
organic lesions, unlike true neurological disorders.
This was a step toward a ‘‘psychological’’ conception
of the origin of hysterical symptoms, but Charcot
wrote in 1887, ‘‘What I call psychology is the rational
physiology of the cerebral cortex.’’ He gave encouragement to the new field with the creation, in 1890, of the
Laboratory of Psychology at the hospital, with Pierre
Janet as its head. He supported Janet in his work on
his dissertation, ‘‘L’État mental des hystériques’’ (The
Mental State of Hysterics; 1893), and ensured publication of the work of Sigmund Freud in French medical
reviews.
FreudÕs work with Charcot at the Salpêtrière contributed greatly to FreudÕs later work and the birth of
psychoanalysis. Arriving in Paris on October 13, 1885,
with the help of a grant from the School of Medicine
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of the University of Vienna to study anatomic pathology, he was introduced to hysteria and its ‘‘psychological’’ etiology, which had a decisive influence on his
decision to treat patients privately, which he did when
he returned to Vienna in the spring of 1886.
A month after his arrival in Paris, on November 24,
1885, he wrote to his fiancée, ‘‘Charcot, who is one of
the greatest of physicians and a man whose common
sense borders on genius, is simply wrecking all my
aims and opinions. I sometimes come out of his lectures as from out of Nôtre Dame, with an entirely new
idea about perfection. . . . Whether the seed will ever
bear fruit, I donÕt know; but what I do know is that no
other human being has ever affected me in the same
way.’’ Before he left Paris at the end of February 1886,
Freud obtained CharcotÕs approval to translate his
Leçons cliniques into German. He took with him a
number of expressions that proved useful to him later
on: ‘‘theory is good, but that doesnÕt prevent its
existence,’’ ‘‘in those cases, itÕs always genital,’’ ‘‘the
wonderful indifference of hysterics,’’ ‘‘the refusal of the
sexual is enormous, like a house.’’
Freud and Charcot maintained their relationship
through correspondence, even though the personal
comments Freud added to the Poliklinische Vorträge
(1892–1894a), his translations of the Leçons du mardi,
left a somewhat bittersweet residue (Mijolla).
Although Charcot was not interested in the cathartic
method Freud had spoken to him about, Freud left the
hospital with a draft for an article on hysterical paralysis that took him seven years to complete, but when
published in French in the Archives de neurologie
(1893c), represented the first ‘‘psychoanalytic’’
approach to the phenomenon. Freud named his first
son Jean Martin, and throughout his life kept a reproduction of André BrouilletÕs painting Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière.
In his homage to Charcot at the time of his death,
Freud confirmed his rejection of CharcotÕs theories
but at the same time expressed his gratitude: ‘‘He was
not a reflective man, not a thinker: he had the nature
of an artist—he was, as he himself said, a Ôvisuel,Õ—a
man who sees’’ (1893e). In February 1924, at the
request of the review Le Disque vert, he wrote, ‘‘Of the
many lessons lavished upon me in the past (1885–6)
by the great Charcot at the Salpêtrière, two left me
with a deep impression: that one should never tire of
considering the same phenomena again and again (or
of submitting to their effects), and that one should not
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mind meeting with contradiction on every side provided one has worked sincerely’’ (1924a).
(The Psychology of Everyday Life), an extension of his
conversations with Paul Jury. The series lasted for nine
years.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
ANDRÉ MICHEL
See also: Bernheim, Hippolyte; Cäcilie M., case of;
See also: Canada.
Bibliography
Didi-Huberman, Georges. (2003). The invention of hysteria:
Charcot and the photographic iconography of the Salpêtrière
(Alisa Hartz, Trans.). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bibliography
Chentrier, Théodore (1981). Vivre avec soi-même et avec les
autres (M. Hoffman, Ed.). Montreal: La Mortagne.
Ellenberger, Henri F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious. The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry.
New York: Basic Books.
———. (1984). Un art de vivre (M. Hoffman Ed.). Montreal: La Mortagne.
Freud, Sigmund. (1893e). Charcot. SE, 3: 7–23.
Chentrier, Théodore and Jury, Paul (1948, April–May). La
culpabilité: quelques précisions et quelques questions. Psyché, 18–19.
———. (1924a). Letter to ‘‘Le Disque Vert,’’ SE, 19: 290–
290.
Gauchet, Marcel, and Swain, Gladys. (1997). Le Vrai Charcot. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.
Mijolla, Alain de. (1988). Les lettres de Jean-Martin Charcot
à Sigmund Freud, 1886–1893. Le crépuscule d’un dieu.
Revue française de psychanalyse, 52 (3), 703–726.
CHENTRIER, THÉODORE (1887–1965)
Théodore Chentrier, a French psychoanalyst, was born
in Marseille on November 18, 1887, and died in Montreal on July 3, 1965. A fellow student with Charles de
Gaulle and Georges Bernanos at the Jesuit school of
the Immaculate Conception in Paris, he began his
career teaching French and Latin. A man with an
inquisitive mind, Chentrier took an interest in
homeopathy, morphology, graphology, and psychopedagogy, which he practiced starting in 1927 while
working for Professor Laignel-Lavastine and Doctor
Vinchon at the Hôpital de la Pitié in Paris. He began
his analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein on July 3, 1931,
and became a member of the Société Psychanalytique
de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society) in 1933. A
friend of Paul Jury, he practiced with him in Paris
from 1944 to 1948, the year he left for Quebec.
Appointed professor of psychology at the University
of Montreal in October 1948, for three years he was
president of the Société de Psychanalyse de Montréal
(Montreal Society for Psychoanalysis). He developed a
widespread reputation from his broadcasts on Radio
Canada known as ‘‘Psychologie de la Vie Quotidienne’’
27 6
CHERTOK, LÉON (TCHERTOK, LEJB)
(1911–1991)
A French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst of Russian
origin, Léon Chertok (Lejb Tchertok) was born October 31, 1911, in Lida (a Byelorussian city near Vilnius,
Lithuania) and died July 6, 1991, in Deauville, France.
Because of the educational quotas for Jews in Poland,
Chertok studied medicine in Prague, where he
defended his dissertation in 1938. On his way to America to escape the Nazi invasion, he stopped in France,
where war broke out in 1939. He volunteered for the
army, was demobilized in 1940, and entered the Resistance, where he worked mostly with the Jewish MOI
section (‘‘Main-dÕoeuvre immigrée,’’ which brought
together communist and foreign militants). Appointed
to head the Mouvement National contre le Racisme
(MNCR) [National Movement Against Racism], he
founded the clandestine newspaper Combat médical
and played an active role in saving Jewish children
threatened with deportation. He was awarded the
Croix de Guerre.
After the war his interest turned to psychiatry and
he spent several months at Mount Sinai Hospital in
New York City before being made a doctor of medicine
in 1948 by the School of Medicine of the University of
Paris. Between 1949 and 1963 he served as a resident
and then an assistant at the Hospital of Villejuif,
where, with Victor Gachkel, he became co-director of
the Center of Psychosomatic Medicine, which they
had recently created. From 1963 to 1972 he was head
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of the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine at the
La Rochefoucauld Psychiatry Institute in Paris, then,
from 1972 to 1981, the director of the Déjerine Center
for Psychosomatic Medicine, in Paris, where, with
Didier Michaux, he started a hypnosis laboratory. The
founder and executive secretary of the Société Française de Médicine Psychosomatique, he was also editor-in-chief of the Revue de médecine psychosomatique.
In 1948 he began a training analysis with Jacques
Lacan, which was concluded in 1953, during the first
split in the French psychoanalytic movement. In spite
of supervised analyses with both Marc Schlumberger
and Maurice Bouvet, Chertok the nonconformist was
not admitted to the Société Psychanalytique de Paris;
the fact that he made extensive use of hypnosis in his
practice, becoming one of the leading specialists in
France, certainly did not improve his chances of
admission. His practice, and the many articles he
wrote about his work, ultimately pushed him further
and further from traditional psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, in 1973 he co-authored, with Raymond de Saussure, La Naissance du psychanalyse, de Mesmer à Freud,
a historical work on the origins of Freudian psychoanalysis that has become a classic.
At the request of Philippe Bassine and A. E. Sherozia, he also organized a symposium on the unconscious held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in October 1979, which
was attended by a number of psychoanalysts, including
several from France. This was the first official event
where psychoanalysis was openly discussed in Soviet
Russia.
However, hypnosis was ChertokÕs true field of
research and the subject of considerable thought. In
1987, toward the end of his life, his work took a new
turn when he and Isabelle Stengers began a seminar
entitled ‘‘LÕhypnose, problème interdisciplinaire.’’
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Hypnosis; Suggestion.
Bibliography
Chertok, Léon. (1966). Hypnosis (D. Graham, Trans.).
Oxford, New York: Pergamon Press. (Original work published 1963)
———. (1981). Sense and nonsense in psychotherapy: The
challenge of hypnosis (R.H. Ahrenfeldt, Trans.). Oxford,
New York: Pergamon Press. (Original work published
1979)
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Chertok, Léon, and Stengers, Isabelle. (1992). A critique of
psychoanalytic reason: Hypnosis as a scientific problem from
Lavoisier to Lacan (Martha Noel Evans, Trans.). Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Chertok, Léon, and de Saussure, Raymond. (1979). The
therapeutic revolution, from Mesmer to Freud. (R. H.
Ahrenfeldt, Trans.). New York: Brunner/Mazel.
CHICAGO INSTITUTE FOR
PSYCHOANALYSIS
The Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, one of the
oldest in the United States, has been both a key institution in its own right and a hub for westward expansion
of the profession. Founded during the Great Depression, in the 1940s the Institute served as a training and
credentialing institute for analysts who then created
organizations in other cities, including Topeka, Los
Angeles, and Detroit. Although ultimately most closely
associated with the classical ego psychology that dominated analysis at mid-century, the Chicago Institute
was distinctive for a certain tolerance of divergent
points of view. Its founder, Franz Alexander, promoted
several unconventional ideas and techniques; Heinz
Kohut, after a long career as a purely orthodox analyst,
developed his influential self psychology at the institute during the 1970s. Thomas Szasz, who became a
iconoclastic critic of psychiatry, originally trained at
the Chicago Institute.
Organized psychoanalysis in the city dates to establishment of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society in
1931. N. Lionel Blitzsten, the societyÕs first president,
was considered the first trained analyst in Chicago and
a charming teacher who lacked administrative interests or skills. Establishment of the Chicago Institute
fell to the Hungarian analyst Franz Alexander.
Alexander, who lectured at the University of
Chicago in 1930 but did not receive a warm welcome
among psychiatrists there, returned to the city two
years later to found and become first director of the
Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. His objective was
to create a training center outside a university setting
that could also support research and clinical activities.
A charismatic figure originally attached to the Berlin
Psychoanalytic Institute, Alexander became a magnet
for other European analysts, especially with the rise of
German fascism. Alexander modeled the center on the
Berlin Institute, which itself had been founded along
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the lines of the great nineteenth-century research institutes designed to encourage intellectual exchange,
debate, and collaboration. The Chicago Institute had a
brick-and-mortar presence from the beginning and
boasted classrooms, a library, and a dining room
where staff lunches became an enduring feature, as
they had in Berlin.
The organizational structure that Alexander established at Chicago was in certain respects unique. He
proved able to attract wealthy donors, some among his
analysands, and early funding was provided by Alfred
K. Stern, an executive with the Julius Rosenwald Fund,
a Chicago-based philanthropy, and by the Rockefeller
and Macy Foundations. Alexander created a lay board
of trustees with fiscal responsibility for the institute,
which became a powerful source of funding, especially
during the heyday of psychoanalysis. In addition, the
institute was staffed by a small group of analysts with
lifetime appointments and, in organizational terms,
was entirely separate from the Chicago Psychoanalytic
Society. This arrangement is thought to have promoted the tolerance for divergent points of view that
helped Chicago avoid the splits so common in psychoanalytic institutes in other cities.
Alexander directed the Chicago Institute for the
best part of a quarter century. As an administrator he
was regarded as authoritarian, albeit a benign despot,
while he and the analytic staff functioned as an oligarchy. AlexanderÕs research, for which he secured large
grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, was a considerable stimulus to psychosomatic medicine, which,
although later engulfed by molecular psychiatry and
other developments, came to enjoy a high profile by
the 1950s. Also involved in research were Thomas M.
French, until 1961 the instituteÕs director of research,
and the German analyst Therese Benedek, the author
of a major text on psychoanalytic supervision and one
of a number of prominent female analysts at Chicago.
In 1953, Alexander decided to leave the institute
and he spent the last phase of his career in Los Angeles,
until his death in 1964. To some extent his departure
was a consequence of the advancing orthodoxy at Chicago that viewed AlexanderÕs innovative treatment
options, such as analysis only three times per week and
the concept of a ‘‘corrective emotional experience,’’ as
out-of-step with techniques then in vogue.
Gerhart Piers effectively succeeded Alexander in
1956, for what became a fifteen-year administration.
27 8
He exercised power much as Alexander had done and
used his influence to reengineer the training institute
and introduce several other innovations, including a
low-fee graduate clinic. He also paid greater attention
to therapy for children and adolescents, an area that
Alexander had neglected. Piers organized the Child
Therapy Training Program for pediatricians, nurses,
and social workers and, in 1965, developed a Teacher
Education Program.
To Heinz Kohut, a recent graduate of the institute,
Piers entrusted the task of reorganizing and revamping
the curriculum. Kohut, who then worked closely with
the forces shaping ego psychology, created a core set of
classes with a historical perspective, and went on to
teach the two-year theory course himself for many
years. As was the case at other institutes, the new curriculum at Chicago paid little attention to the work of
Melanie Klein or the British analysts who were then
developing object relations theory.
Although George Pollock, who succeeded Piers in
1971, became a controversial figure late in his tenure,
he was an energetic director who moved the Chicago
Institute with a multi-pronged agenda. As a major
administrative figure in both the American Psychoanalytic Association and the American Psychiatric
Association, he raised the profile of the Chicago Institute through the effective exercise of power, though
some thought his actions were based too much on a
patronage-like system. In 1973, he engineered authorization from the State of Illinois for the institute to
offer a doctoral program in psychoanalysis. The same
year, the Annual of Psychoanalysis began publication
and became an influential yearly review. Pollock also
established the Barr-Harris ChildrenÕs Grief Center,
which remains in operation today, to help children
cope with the loss of a parent or sibling. Research
meetings at the Institute regularly drew renowned analysts as speakers, and although analysis would soon to
lose much of its privileged cache to biological psychiatry, Charles B. Strozier wrote (2001), ‘‘I doubt there
has been a more lively intellectual atmosphere in the
history of psychoanalysis than at the Chicago Institute
in the 1970s.’’
While Chicago remained Heinz KohutÕs base
throughout his career, his innovative brand of psychoanalysis was not warmly received by either Pollock or
many of his colleagues at the institute. However,
KohutÕs deemphasis on drive theory and his view that
narcissism was a separate developmental path did win
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adherents—Arnold Goldberg, Charles B. Strozier, and
Ernest Wolf at Chicago—and self psychology eventually established itself as a branch movement within
psychoanalysis. Kohut died relatively young, at age
sixty-seven in 1981, just ten years after publication of
his The Analysis of the Self.
Although Pollock liberalized the oligarchic character of the instituteÕs staff and was a successful fundraiser through the lay board of directors, he could not
stem the effects of a nationwide decline in the popularity of analysis as it ceased to attract large numbers of
psychiatrists and patients. In 1988, after Pollock was
sued by the son of a patient who claimed that his
mother, a wealthy donor to the institute, had been
financially exploited, he resigned. Subsequent reorganization in the wake of his acrimonious departure
favored greater pluralism and more power extended to
the faculty. Both Arnold Goldberg, who became next
director in 1989, and Thomas Pappadis, who succeeded him in 1992, brokered policies that further
democratized the institute. Jerome Winer, named
director in 1998, continued to broaden the focus of the
institute while attempting to enhance funding and to
further cooperative ventures with universities.
As was the case in other cities, the Chicago Institute
for Psychoanalysis survived the recalibration of analysis as a therapy and profession by creating for itself a
place within the larger context of mental health practice. While the Chicago Society for Psychoanalysis, still
a separate body, is comprised primarily of medically
trained analysts, the Chicago Institute serves a broader
community with a more inclusive mandate. In the
early 2000s, the institute provides training programs
for physicians, psychoanalysts, social workers, and
other professionals, and offers clinical and community
services in a variety of venues for children, adolescents,
and adults.
JOHN GALBRAITH SIMMONS
Bibliography
Kavka, J. (1984). Fifty years of psychoanalysis in Chicago:
A historical perspective. In G. Pollock and J. Gedo (Eds.),
Psychoanalysis: The vital issues (Vol. II, pp. 465–93). New
York: International Universities Press.
Pollock, George H. (1978). The Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis from 1932 to the present. In J. Quen and E.
Carlson (Eds.). American psychoanalysis: Origins and development (pp. 109–26). New York: Brunner/Mazel.
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Strozier, Charles B. (2001). Heinz Kohut: The making of a
psychoanalyst. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
CHILD ANALYSIS
The term child analysis refers to the application of psychoanalytic treatment and concepts to a child with a
view to understanding the psychic life and mental
development of children.
The notion of child analysis first appeared in the
work of Melanie Klein, in the sense that she first provided an extensive definition that is both theoretical
and practical. The pioneers in the field include Sándor
Ferenczi, who contributed still-original ideas on the
confusion of tongues between adult and child, as well
as his account of the treatment of Little Arpad, and
Alfred Adler, one of the first practitioners of child analysis in Vienna.
Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth was one of the first
child psychoanalysts to use play techniques, but it was
only with Klein that the notion of transference and the
idea of psychoanalytic treatment for children
appeared. This perspective placed her in sharp opposition to Anna Freud, who believed that transference did
not really exist for children owing to the parentsÕ place
in the childÕs life. In contrast, Klein used the transference for the ‘‘deep’’ interpretation of hate and envy.
This controversy left its imprint on the evolution of
psychoanalysis in Great Britain and led to the creation
of the Independent group, which consistently upheld
the importance of childhood development.
In relation to adult psychoanalysis, child psychoanalysis occupies an indeterminate position that is
both peripheral and central, and that is reflected in
debates about the various modes of psychoanalytic
training throughout the world. It is peripheral in that
not all adult analysts have the inclination or training
to work with children, and not all psychoanalytic
societies require that their candidates have specific
training or even knowledge of the elements of mental
development. It is central in that the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis are summed up in the child:
infantile sexuality, transference, the unconscious, resistance, repetition, the drives, and interpretation. The
case of Little Hans, described by Sigmund Freud in
‘‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’’ (1909b)
is a good example of this, even though the treatment
was essentially based on observations and exchanges
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CHILDHOOD
between Hans and his parents, in a sort of precursor to
treatment proper.
Freud, Sigmund. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a fiveyear-old boy. SE, 10: 1–149.
In this sense, child analysis can be seen as the application of psychoanalysis in all its facets. In fact, it has
not been limited to the treatment of neuroses, but has
rapidly been extended to various forms of psychosis,
autism, mental retardation, childhood psychosomatic
disorders, the psychoanalytic observation of infants,
and ethnopsychoanalysis. Donald W. Winnicott applied KleinÕs thinking and his own pediatric experience
to a psychoanalytic approach to infants and their relational and developmental difficulties, in particular the
encroachment of maternal depression on the infantÕs
self. From this he derived a model for treating borderline states in adults.
Klein, Melanie. (1975). The psycho-analysis of children. In
The Writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 2). London: Hogarth.
(Original work published 1932)
In France, Sophie Morgenstern is credited with the
first psychoanalytic use of a childÕs drawing. In 1958
Jacques Lacan gave an original description of the
development of subjectivity in the infant, based on the
notion of the mirror stage and using the concepts of
privation, frustration, and castration, along with the
concepts of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary.
Françoise Dolto contributed a great deal to the popularization of child analysis through her analytic and
pedagogical talents, and proposed the notion of the
unconscious body image. Serge Lebovici, René
Diatkine, Michel Soulé, Roger Misès, and Janine
Simon were among the analysts most actively involved
with children, through institutions that they created,
such as the CMPP. (Consultations médico-psychopédagogiques [Medical and psycho-pedagogical consultations]), as well as through studies on the specific
requirements of child analysis, its technique and training. Together with Michel Fain and Léon Kreisler, and
working within a perspective close to that of René
Spitz, Michel Soulé helped define the field of psychosomatic psychoanalytic work with infants, children,
and adolescents.
Kreisler, Léon; Fain, Michel; and Soulé, Michel. (1974). LÕenfant et son Corps. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
CHILDHOOD
Childhood is not a Freudian concept. A large part of
psychoanalytic theory concerns the early years of life
and childhood but, in a certain sense, we can say along
with Donald Winnicott that ‘‘Freud neglected childhood as a state in itself ’’ (1961).
Only after a wrenching period of revision (1895–
1901) could Sigmund Freud come to acknowledge the
active role of the child in sexual seduction and to
abandon his earlier view of children as innocent victims of the incestuous desires of adults; this reversal,
moreover, led him to theorize childhood sexuality for
the first time. ‘‘In the beginning,’’ he would later write,
‘‘my statements about infantile sexuality were founded
almost exclusively on the findings of analysis in adults
which led back into the past. I had no opportunity of
direct observations on children. It was therefore a very
great triumph when it became possible years later to
confirm almost all my inferences by direct observations and the analysis of very young children’’ (1914d).
Diatkine, René, and Simon, Janine. (1972). La psychanalyse
précoce. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
It was in connection with the treatment of adults
that Freud became interested in observing small children. As he wrote apropos of the case of ‘‘Little Hans,’’
‘‘I have for years encouraged my pupils and friends to
collect observations on the sexual life of children,
which is normally either skillfully overlooked or deliberately denied’’ (1909b). Freud indeed never abandoned this line of enquiry, as witness his celebrated
account of the ‘‘Fort/Da’’ game played with a cotton
reel by one of his grandsons, the personal observation
of which he used to support his theoretical conclusions. As related in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920g), the fact that an act provoking unpleasure
would be repeated, coupled with clinical findings from
his treatment of traumatic neuroses, was what led
Freud to formulate the concept of the death instinct.
Dolto, Françoise. (1984). LÕimage inconsciente du corps.
Paris: Le Seuil.
After the publication of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), the first generation of analysts
ANTOINE GUEDENEY
See also: Infantile neurosis.
Bibliography
28 0
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began observing and reporting on the behavior of
their own children in reference to infantile sexuality,
the Oedipus complex, and castration anxiety. Anna
Freud shared in this activity (Geissmann and Geissmann, 1992). Soon these analysts were joined by specialists on child behavior who had themselves been
analyzed. They began to observe specific populations
of disturbed children, such as delinquents, then certain
periods of childhood, notably that of the earliest
mother-child relations, and finally certain types of
problems encountered (feeding, thumb-sucking,
attempts at separation, etc.). In so doing they were
‘‘systematically constructing a psychoanalytic psychology of the child, integrating two kinds of data: data
based on direct observation and data based on reconstructions with adults’’ (Freud, 1968).
It is important to note, along with Anna Freud, that
psychoanalysts at first showed considerable reluctance
to undertake such direct observation of children. The
pioneers were more concerned to underscore the differences between observable behavior and hidden
drives than they were to point up the similarities.
Their chief aim was still to show that manifest behavior concealed unconscious processes. Anna Freud was
initially interested in the defense mechanisms, which
became accessible to an observational approach; she
then turned her attention to childrenÕs behavior, to
what they produced, and, lastly to the childÕs ego. She
sought to include a psychology of the ego within the
analytic framework, an effort further developed later
by her friend Heinz Hartmann, whom she never completely disavowed.
On a practical level she created institutions for
young children, the first in Vienna in 1924–1925, the
last and most complex, which was established after the
war in London, being the Hampstead Clinic, an extension of Hampstead Nurseries. At the end of her life she
trained child specialists at Hampstead Clinic who
worked within the framework of a psychoanalytic psychology of childhood. This work involved treating the
child—not only with analysis—to prevent further disturbances, conducting research, and training future
specialists in childrenÕs education and pedagogy by
applying previously acquired knowledge.
During this same period, Melanie Klein also became
interested in childhood. She did not base her theories
on direct observation, however. Starting from the psychoanalysis of young children, she constructed a
detailed picture of the internal world of the young
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child. She pioneered the use of play in analysis. Like
dream interpretation for Freud, the free play of the
child was for Klein the royal road to the unconscious
and to the fantasy life. In The Psychoanalysis of Children (1932), she argued forcefully that play translated
the childÕs fantasies, desires, and lived experience into
a symbolic mode. Her technique consisted in analyzing play just as one would analyze dreams and free
association in adults, that is, by interpreting fantasies,
conflicts, and defenses. The inner world of the young
child as she describes it is filled with monsters and
demons, and the picture of infantile sexuality she presents is strongly tinged with sadism. In discussing the
death drive, she describes an infant whose first act is
not simply a gesture of pure love toward the object
(breast) but also a sadistic act associated with the
action of the drive. Here, as Freud had earlier, Klein
challenged a universal human shibboleth: the innocent
soul of the child. This was one of the reasons why her
work was often poorly received.
The direct observation of young children has
expanded considerably in recent years, helped in part
advances in technology: it is now possible to study
newborns and even fetuses. It is interesting to note
that, in this way, the significance and the complexity of
the mental life of the very young child have been confirmed, along therefore with the intuitions and efforts
of psychoanalysts working during the early twentieth
century.
It is clear that psychoanalysis has renewed our
vision and understanding of the world of childhood.
However, that world remains highly complex, especially its pathology, and it is important to avoid seeing
it in terms of adult behavior. Also, while psychoanalysis has enabled us to better understand that world, we
must remember, as Anna Freud remarked at the end of
her life, that it does not have the power to eliminate
childhood neuroses and turn the child and childhood
into that place where we would so much love to find
innocence, the mythical innocence of a paradise lost.
CLAUDINE GEISSMAN
See also: Childhood and Society; ChildrenÕs play; Fort-Da;
Klein-Reizes, Melanie; Winnicott, Donald Woods.
Bibliography
Freud, Anna. (1966). Collected writings. New York: International Universities Press.
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AND
SOCIETY
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
youth, to complement his description with materials
taken from Russian history.
———. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy.
SE, 10: 1–149.
Revised and expanded in 1963, Childhood and
Society is the work of a pioneer who sought to raise
psychoanalytic thought to the level of the modern
social sciences. Although he did not renounce his early
Freudianism, Erikson endeavored to provide a new
way of looking at things. When asked what the aims of
a normal individual should be, Freud customarily
replied with two words that Erikson liked to recall:
‘‘Love and work.’’ Erikson wanted such a maxim to
become a psychoanalytic norm.
———. (1914d). On the history of the psycho-analytic
movement. SE, 14: 1–66.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1–64.
Geissmann, Claudine and Geissmann, Pierre. (1992). A history of child psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.
Klein, Melanie. (1975). The psycho-analysis of children. In
The Writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. II). London, Hogarth.
(Original work published 1932)
Winnicott, Donald. (1965). The theory of infant-parent relationship. In The maturational processes and the facilitating
environment. (pp. 17–55). London: Hogarth. (Original
work published 1962)
PAUL ROAZEN
See also: Anthropology and psychoanalysis; Erikson, Erik
(Homburger); Ego (ego psychology).
Source Citation
CHILDHOOD AND SOCIETY
This book by Erik Erikson, published in 1950, is a classic because it was one of the first to show how Sigmund FreudÕs theory of infantile sexuality could be
broadened in the light of fieldwork in cultural anthropology and sociological studies.
Erikson studied two American Indian tribes and
compared their different ways of socializing children.
Based on this work he elaborated his conception of the
development of the ego, in which he discerned eight
distinct phases that he believed were an aspect of psychology at least as important as the libidinal stages
outlined by Freud. Attempting to identify positive,
organizing aspects of the psyche, Erikson sought to
show how these achievements of the ego continue to
change and exert an influence long after the conflicts
of early childhood that had so interested Freud.
Erikson was particularly interested in problems
relating to youth, above all the ways in which psychosocial identity could be a key organizing concept for
understanding adolescence. He approached this issue
from a cultural-comparatist perspective, with a special
focus on the characteristic polarities of American
society. He then studied the legendary characteristics
of Adolf HitlerÕs childhood to see how the rise of
Nazism could be interpreted within the framework of
typically German social structures. Lastly, Erikson
interpreted what is known about Maxim GorkyÕs
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Erikson, Erik H. (1950). Childhood and society. New York:
Norton.
Bibliography
Friedman, Lawrence J. (1999). Identity’s Architect: A biography of Erik H. Erikson. New York: ScribnerÕs.
Paul Roazen. (1976). Erik H. Erikson: The power and limits of
a vision. New York: The Free Press.
CHILDREN’S PLAY
In psychoanalysis, ‘‘childrenÕs play’’ is mental and physical activity which gradually becomes more structured
in the course of a childÕs development. This activity
bears witness to a psychic capacity for ‘‘concentration’’
within a personal mental sphere of illusion where
objects and phenomena in the external world are
transformed in accordance with the subjectÕs wishes,
so serving the internal world and augmenting
pleasure.
For Freud (1905d, 1905c, 1908e, 1911b), childrenÕs
play, being subject to the pleasure principle, stood
opposed to the constraints of critical thought and reality. The opposite of play is not seriousness but reality,
even if children like to prop their imaginary objects on
visible, tangible ones. Such propping is precisely what
distinguishes playing from fantasizing; as the child
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grows up, it is left behind. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), Freud told how he observed his oneand-a-half-year-old grandson repeating in an active
way—by making a wooden reel attached to a string
alternately disappear and reappear—what he had had
to experience passively, namely the departure of his
mother; the pleasure derived from this game allowed
the child to work over the unpleasurable experience of
his motherÕs absence. In FreudÕs view, the compulsion
to repeat that operated ‘‘beyond the pleasure principle’’ and the childÕs tendency to seek immediate pleasure through play were intimately linked. Today it is
felt that play indeed helps the child tolerate the
absence of an object, that it implies the cathexis of a
representation: the boy with his reel successfully converts absence into nostalgia.
Melanie Klein was a closer student of the use of play
in child psychoanalysis than of the phenomenon of
play per se. Following Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, she
devised a technique of play interpretation that treated
the ordering of childrenÕs play as equivalent to the
adultÕs production of associative material in analysis.
She was thus able to apply the Freudian method to
very young children, opening the way to child psychoanalysis (Klein, 1955).
Donald Woods Winnicott offered an original
account of the notion of ‘‘play’’ and incorporated it into
psychoanalytic theory. Since play was not subsumed
under the sublimation of instincts, Winnicott speculated that a space existed between the mother and her
baby: since the mother (or her substitute), motivated by
love (or hate) and not by reaction-formations, needed
to be able to adapt actively to her babyÕs needs, to be
what the baby was capable of finding while also leaving
the baby the time to find her, a realm of illusion
emerged in which the infant felt omnipotent (the breast
being under its magical control); such feelings of omnipotence were necessary if the infant was going gradually
to accept the disillusion to come. According to Winnicott, the intermediate area between mother and infant
was occupied by ‘‘transitional phenomena’’—groups of
functional experiences, as for example thumb-sucking,
the holding and sucking of the edge of a blanket, a
repeated gesture, or the production of musical sounds
(Winnicott, 1974, p. 4)—and it arose between the period of primary creativity and that of objective perception founded on reality-testing. The ‘‘transitional
object,’’ created internally though found in the outside
world, would be the first tangible sign of the existence
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of this intermediate zone where the question whether
experience was of external or of internal origin simply
did not arise. Transitional objects lay ‘‘between me and
not-me.’’
There is a direct progression, in the Winnicottian
perspective, from transitional phenomena to play,
from the childÕs ability to play alone in the presence of
another person to the ability to play a game with
others—at first with the mother and only later with
peers. Until the age of five or six, children play alongside one another rather than with one another, as
Anna Freud showed in her discussion of lines of development. Play involves the body, and the pleasure
derived from the functioning of the ego in play activity
requires that neither excitement nor anxiety be too
intense; childrenÕs play is a precarious achievement
within the area between subjectivity (not to say hallucination) and objective perception. The capacity for
play, once successfully acquired, will endure in every
kind of inner experimentation, in the life of the imagination and in adult creativity, although, beginning at
the latency period, the individual must become capable of suspending play activity.
NORA KURTS
See also: Active imagination (analytical psychology); Activity/passivity; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Breast, good/
bad object; Child analysis; Childhood; ‘‘Creative Writers
and Day-Dreaming’’; Creativity; Fantasy (reverie); FortDa; Humor; Illusion; Infant observation (therapeutic);
Jokes; Magical thinking; Metaphor; Object a; Visual arts
and psychoanalysis; Pleasure/unpleasure principle; PsychoAnalysis of Children, The; Rambert, Madeleine; Richard,
case of; Squiggle; Technique with children, psychoanalytic;
Transitional object, space; Transitional object; Transitional
phenomena; Unconscious fantasy.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905c). Jokes and their relation to the
unconscious. SE, 8: 1–236.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
———. (1908e). Creative writers and day-dreaming. SE, 9:
141–153.
———. (1911b). Formulations on the two principles of
mental functioning. SE, 12: 213–226.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18:
1–64.
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CHILE
Klein, Melanie. (1955). The psycho-analytic play technique:
Its history and significance. In Envy and gratitude and
other writings, 1946–1963 (The Writings of Melanie Klein,
vol. 3), London: Hogarth/Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Kurts, Nora. (1993). LÕEnfant qui ne savait pas jouer. Psychiatrie de lÕEnfant 36, no. 2, pp. 537–554.
Lebovici, Serge, and Diatkine, René. (1962). Fonction et signification du jeu chez lÕenfant. Psychiatrie de lÕEnfant 4,
207–253.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1974). Playing and reality. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin.
Further Reading
Furman, Erna. (1990). Play and work in early childhood.
Child Analysis, 1, 60–76.
Klein, Melanie. (1929). Personification in the play of children. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 10, 193–204.
CHILE
The Chilean doctor Germán Greve Schlegel (1869–
1954) was the first to publish on the subject of psychoanalysis in Chile and, in general, in Latin America. His
study, Sobre psicologı́a y psicoterapia de ciertos estados
angustiosos was presented in Buenos Aires in 1910. Sigmund Freud (1911g, 1914) wrote about the event in
the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse and in his On the
History of the Psychoanalytic Movement.
The true pioneer, however, was Fernando Allende
Navarro (1890–1981), the first Chilean psychoanalyst.
Born in Concepción, Allende Navarro studied medicine in Belgium and completed his doctorate in
Switzerland in 1919. He specialized in neurology and
psychiatry, studying with von Monakow, Rorschach,
and Veragout. He began his psychoanalytic training in
Switzerland and became a member of the Société
Suisse de Psychanalyse [Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis] and the Société Psychanalytique de Paris [Paris
Psychoanalytic Society]. Upon his return to Chile in
1925, he presented his dissertation—‘‘El Valor de la
psicoanálisis en la policlinica: Contribución a la psicologı́a clı́nica’’—at the University of Chile.
The consolidation of the psychoanalytic movement
began in 1943 with the return of Ignacio Matte-Blanco
(1908–1994) and culminated in 1949 during the international congress in Zurich, with the recognition of
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the Asociación Psicoanalı́tica du Chili [Psychoanalytic
Association of Chile] by the International Psychoanalytic Association. Matte-Blanco was born in Santiago
and studied medicine at the University of Chile. In
1933 he left for London, where he trained in neuropsychiatry at Northumberland House and at Maudsley
Hospital. He received his psychoanalytic training at
the British Institute. He did his training analysis with
Walter Schmideberg and his control analysis with
Anna Freud, Melitta Schmideberg, Helen SheehanDare, and James Strachey. In 1940 he went to the United States to work at Johns Hopkins Hospital and,
between 1941 and 1943, was assistant professor of psychiatry at Duke University. Upon his return to Chile
he trained and analyzed a group of individuals interested in psychiatry and psychoanalysis; these men and
women worked under the auspices of the Psychiatric
Clinic of the University of Chile. In 1949 he was
appointed professor and chair of psychiatry, which
gave considerable impetus to the group but was not
without complications because of the overlapping
roles and responsibilities entailed.
The period was characterized by numerous activities and publications and an overall modernization of
the field of psychiatry in Chile. It reached its apogee in
1960, during the third Latin American Congress of
Psychoanalysis held in Santiago. The groupÕs orientation was toward classical psychoanalysis, but it was
open to new developments, many of which were
inspired by work in anthropology and philosophy.
Matte-Blanco published Lo Psı́quicio y la Naturaleza
humana in 1954 and Estudios de psicologı́a dinámica in
1955, books that contained the core ideas he would
later develop in Rome and which were published in
1975 in The Unconscious as Infinite Sets: An Essay in
Bi-logic and in 1989 in Thinking, Feeling and Being:
Clinical Reflections on the Fundamental Antinomy of
Human Beings in the World.
There was also interest in clinical research, which
was reflected in a precocious psychoanalytic investigation of the field of psychosis and perversion, primarily
in the work of de Ganzaraı́n and Whiting.
This first generation of psychoanalysts included
Arturo Prat (1910–1989), Carlos Whiting (1918–
1982), Erika Bondiek, Carlos Nuñez (1918–1983),
Ramón Ganzaraı́n, and Hernán Davanzo; they were
followed by José Antonio Infante, Otto Kernberg,
Ximena Artaza, and Ruth Riesenberg.
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Important changes occurred after 1961. Because of
operational difficulties and outside influences, the
majority of analysts abandoned work in clinical settings
and rejected the leadership of Matte-Blanco, focusing
instead on the association as an independent institution. Between 1962 and 1971 several well-known members emigrated to Europe or the United States, including Matte-Blanco himself, who settled in Rome in 1966.
There followed a general weakening of the movement,
although training continued at more or less the same
rate. There were exchanges within Latin America, and
David Liebermann was called to Buenos Aires on several occasions. The connection to the universities was
maintained by Professors Hernán Davanzo, Mario
Gomberoff, Omar Arrué, and their staffs. The association itself became increasingly Kleinian.
In the eighties there was a sustained development in
the psychoanalytic movement in Chile. Several generations of analysts were trained by Artaza, Bondiek,
Davanzo, Eva Reichenstein, and Infante, who had
returned from Topeka in 1978. Frequent visits by those
who had emigrated, including Otto and Paulina
Kernberg, Ramón Ganzaraı́n, and Ruth Riesenberg,
had an invigorating effect on the profession. Access of
this third generation of analysts to training and guidance within the association, together with the associationÕs work with scientific and cultural organizations,
led to the growth of a renewed psychoanalytic movement, one that was more pluralist and open to change.
A number of psychoanalysts from this period stand
out: Mario Gomberoff, Liliana Pauluan, Elena Castro,
Omar Arrué, Ramón Florenzano, Jaime Coloma,
Eleonora Casaula, Juan Francisco Jordán, and Juan
Pablo Jiménez. The Argentinians Horacio Etchegoyen,
Jorge Olagaray, and Guillermo Brudny provided significant contributions to the movement. The associationÕs
official publication is the Revista chilena de psiconálisis.
OMAR ARRUÉ
Bibliography
Arrué, Omar. (1988). Cuarenta años de psicoanálisis en
Chile. Revista chilena de psicoanálisis, 7 (1), 3–5.
———. (1991). Origenes e identidad del movimiento psicoanalı́tico chileno. In E. Casaula, J. Coloma, and J.-F.
Jordán (Eds.), Cuarenta años de psicoanálisis en Chile.
Santiago: Ananké.
Casaula Eleonora, Coloma Jaime, and Jordán, Juan Francisco (Eds.). (1991). Cuarenta años de psicoanálisis en
Chile, Santiago: Ananké.
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Davanzo, Hernán. (1993). Origenes del psicoanálisis en
Chile. Revista chilena de psicoanálisis, 10, 58–65.
Whiting, Carlos. (1980). Notas para la historia del psicoanálisis en Chile. Revista chilena de psicoanálisis, 2 (1), 19–26.
CHINA
Unlike in Japan and Korea, psychoanalysis in China
has had a relatively checkered history. FreudÕs ideas
achieved some notoriety in the 1920s during a period
of significant social and political reform but were
otherwise not taken seriously until the 1930s when the
first translations began to appear. To this day, only a
handful of FreudÕs works have been translated into
Chinese.
Early translations resulted in some distortions of
the original ideas for several reasons. There has been a
tendency for translators to directly borrow the
Japanese terminology as the two languages share a
common writing system in kanji—characters, even
though the same characters may mean different things
in the two languages. This has produced occasional
errors, as, for example, with ChinaÕs initial use of the
Japanese term muisiki for ‘‘Unconscious’’, which literally means, in Chinese, ‘‘without consciousness.’’
More systematic distortions were also evident.
There was concern in some quarters that FreudÕs theory, which appeared to grant primacy to a freereigning sexuality, could be construed as a threat to the
stability of family relations. Some interpretations of the
Oedipus complex were desexualised, emphasizing a
social component. The female author Yonqin, writing in
1930 about FreudÕs theory of hysteria (and omitting all
references to infantile sexuality), stated that the condition arises out of conflict between social pressure and
the ‘‘biological instinct for satisfaction and fulfilment.’’
A motive for translating Freud, in one translatorÕs eyes,
was to forewarn a general public of the dangers of taking
Freud too seriously (Zhang, 1989).
By contrast, very serious attempts have been made
to rethink the oedipal myth in terms of culturally prevalent myths. In China the myth of Hsueh Jen Keui
tells of a soldier of the Tang dynasty who kills his own
son in ignorance of the kinship tie, preserving the
authority of the father; some commentators have held
that this becomes an exemplar of the Confucian ethic
of filial piety (Zhang, 1989).
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Sometimes translations of psychoanalytic and
scientific articles based upon primary sources were
written with a clear political purpose. The May Fourth
movement of 1919 had heralded a brief renaissance in
which there had been increasing call from intellectuals
to modernize China and shake off certain feudalistic
practices and ‘‘superstitions.’’ Freudian notions of sexual tension in families proved compelling to those calling for social reform. Freudian ideas could be claimed
to be useful because of their allegiance to biology,
medicine and education.
As several commentators have amply documented,
psychiatry, as a separate discipline, was in its infancy
in China before 1949. There was a home for the mentally ill in Canton which opened in 1898 run by an
American missionary doctor. Before that there appears
to have been little in the way of psychiatric services.
By the time the Communist Party came to power a
small number of psychiatric hospitals appeared in the
major cities where foreign influence was quite high.
The most significant was the Peking Union Medical
College which launched the first full-scale academic
program in 1932 with new initiatives in teaching and
practice involving the disciplines of sociology and
social work.
However, psychoanalysis as therapy has not easily
taken root in China. This is because, it has been
argued, there has been no tradition of expressiveness
in the doctor-patient relationship and the doctor in a
traditional Chinese setting adopts an authoritarian
attitude towards patients. Before WWII there had been
only one Chinese psychoanalyst, Bingham Dai, who
trained under Harry Stack Sullivan and taught psychotherapy at Peking Municipal Psychopathic Hospital (allied to the Peking Union Medical College) from
1935–39. While he was of the view that, but for the
Japanese invasion, psychoanalysis might have taken
root in China, he downplayed the theoretical importance Freud attached to the instinctual impulses,
claiming that Chinese clinicians emphasised interpersonal relations, and gave more attention to helping
their patients tackle the problems of being human
(Blowers, 2004).
One should also note that Chinese typically present
psychological problems as somatic complaints and
have deeply ingrained philosophical systems of
thought for which traditional practices such as worshipping of ancestors and visits to the temple to seek
oneÕs fortune serve in times of distress.
28 6
These practices have been understood by Unschuld
(1980, cited in Gerlach, 1995) as embodying a ‘‘Medicine of parallels,’’ evolving out of Confucianism, Taoism
and Buddhism in which ‘‘visible and invisible occurrences in the internal and external worlds of the human
being (e.g. emotions, internal organs, climatic conditions, elements) are allocated to particular series of parallels and are mutually dependent on each other. Thus
the dividing lines between internal and external, mind
and body, are removed and a change in one link in the
series of parallels will directly affect the others’’ (Gerlach, p. 94). These systems of thought have also been
influenced by turbulent political events. After the
founding of the PeopleÕs Republic of China (PRC) in
1949, the Communist government severed all ties with
non-Communist countries. Attention became focused
on Russia. In the early part of its first decade, all psychological work in the PRC was based upon Russian psychology and followed PavlovÕs work very closely. When
this model proved less than satisfactory for explaining
all psychological phenomena, there then followed two
very difficult periods in which psychology was criticised
and eventually shut down along with many other disciplines in the second of these periods that became
known as the ‘‘Proletariat or Cultural Revolution’’. Only
since 1978 has psychology emerged with a new agenda,
largely free of previous political constraints.
During the 1980s visiting psychoanalysts to China
(Joseph, 1987) formed the impression that, insofar as
psychotherapeutic methods are applied, they are
oriented to behavioral therapy or use supportive techniques. They argued, however, that this circumstance
maybe connected with traditional Chinese cultural
patterns, which discourage both disclosure and communication about oneÕs own feelings and thoughts to
strangers and openness to sexual desires. Insightoriented psychotherapies face obstacles both in the traditional pattern of Chinese thought and in conflicts
leading to feelings of shame more than guilt. However,
there have been substantive changes since the 1980s,
both in the doctor-patient relationship and in the status of psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, in
several of ChinaÕs key cities.
In spite of there being no analysts in the early years
of the PRC, by the 1990s things began to change. The
German-Chinese Academy for Psychotherapy (GCAP),
comprising German family therapists, behavioral therapists, and psychoanalysts under its president, Margarethe Haass-Wiesegart, initiated a range of training
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programs covering behavioural, systemic and psychoanalytic trends. From 1997–1999 they began a continuous training program of six-week courses in Kunming,
Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, and Chengdu; the curriculum consisted of psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy. The analysts involved in this training were
Antje Haag, Margarethe Berger and Alf Gerlach, the latter having first lectured in China in the 1980s. A second
program was initiated in 2000 in Shanghai and Hefei.
Since 1995 the IPA has also begun reaching out to
China, organising a committee for Asia, with China
represented by Argentinean-trained Teresa Yuan, of
Chinese descent. She began training programs at Beijing
Anding Psychiatric Hospital, attended by professionals
from universities in Beijing and other Chinese cities.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy has been taught in a variety of psychiatric settings in the above mentioned cities,
as well as in Xian, Guangzhou, Nanjing and Hong
Kong. Huo Datong, a Chinese analyst trained with a
Lacanian orientation in France, recently founded a psychoanalytic center in Chengdu (Yuan, 2000).
Although these developments signal a promising
outlook for psychoanalytic methods and their application in China, the range and complexity of FreudÕs
ideas may not be fully appreciated unless and until
translation revisions and translation of more of his
works are undertaken, clinical psychology gets more
firmly established, and the therapeutic context is
expanded to encompass thorough education on a
range of treatments and the possibilities of the individual psychotherapeutic scheme.
GEOFFREY H. BLOWERS AND TERESA YUAN
Bibliography
Blowers, G.H. (2004). Bingham Dai, Adolf Storfer, and the
tentative beginnings of psychoanalytic culture in China:
1935–1941. Psychoanalysis and History, 6 (1), 93–105.
Gerlach, A. (1995) China. In P. Kutter (Ed.) Psychoanalysis
International: A guide to Psychoanalysis throughout the
world (Vol. 2, pp. 94–102). Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Fromman-Holzboog.
Joseph, E.D. (1987). Psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the
PeopleÕs Republic of China: a transcultural view. In R. Fine
(Ed.), Psychoanalysis around the world. New York: Howarth
Press.
Yuan, T. A. (2000). China in the history of psychoanalysis:
a possible fate for psychoanalysis at the dawn of the
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millennium. 8th International Meeting of the International
Association for the History of Psychoanalysis.
Zhang, Jingyuan. (1989). Sigmund Freud and Modern Chinese Literature. Ph.D. dissertation. Cornell University.
CHOICE OF NEUROSIS
As soon as a unified theory of neurosis had been formulated, the factors that determined the clinical form
the neurosis assumed in particular cases had to be specified. The study of the choice of neurosis was concomitant, for Freud, with the development of the general
theory of psychoneuroses.
The term neurosis, coined in the eighteenth century
by Cullen, first referred to a heterogeneous set of illnesses attributed to a crisis of nerves. During the nineteenth century, the classificatory system was revised
based on individualization of illnesses as different as
exophthalmic goiter (GravesÕ disease) and ParkinsonÕs
disease. The idea of consolidating characteristic mental
disturbances (the madness of doubt and phobias) and
a neurosis (hysteria) within a single framework
occurred after the psychological nature of hysteria
(‘‘the great neurosis’’) was established at the end of the
nineteenth century, by Charcot in Paris and Breuer in
Vienna. Freud (CharcotÕs student and BreuerÕs collaborator) and Janet (CharcotÕs student) were responsible for the two principal theoretical constructions that
established the unified theory of neurosis. These two
constructions differed in their conceptualization of the
mechanisms and causes of neurosis, and the two theories also approached the choice of neurosis very
differently.
For Freud, the explanation of the choice of neurosis
evolved directly from the theory of neurosis, initially
described in 1896. This is expressed clearly in FreudÕs
correspondence with Fliess (especially the letters dated
January 1, May 30, and December 6, 1896) and in two
articles, ‘‘Heredity and the Etiology of the Neuroses’’
(1896a) and ‘‘Further Remarks on the NeuroPsychoses of Defence’’ (1896b), situated within the framework of the traumatic theory of neuroses: Nothing
in the nature of the trauma itself enables us to differentiate the choice of neurosis; the cause must be sought
for elsewhere. Initially, Freud referred to a disposition
of attitude at the time of the trauma. Sexual incidents
passively experienced during childhood predisposed the
subject to hysteria, while those in which the child played
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NEUROSIS
an active role predisposed the subject to obsessive neurosis. This theory was soon abandoned in favor of a
chronological approach, and a decade later, Freud repudiated it explicitly.
Its replacement, the chronological theory, was
based on the principle that the dates of childhood
events play a decisive role. Initially, the date of the
trauma was considered crucial. But, in a January 1897
letter to Fliess, Freud modified his position and
claimed the key moment took place at the time of
repression. In a letter of November of that same year,
he concluded, ‘‘It is probable, then, that the choice of
neurosis (the decision whether hysteria or obsessional
neurosis or paranoia emerges) depends on the nature
of the wave of development (that is to say, its chronological placing) which enables repression to occur—
i.e. which transforms a source of internal pleasure into
one of internal disgust’’ (1950a, p. 271).
The question was still not fully resolved, however,
as Freud noted two years later in his December 9,
1899, letter to Fliess. Meanwhile, the theory of trauma
had given way to the theory of libidinal development
and intrapsychic conflict. Freud retained the chronological point of view, but what was important to him
now was the type of relationship the relevant stage of
development allowed one to establish with others: one
of autoeroticism or alloeroticism (homo- or heteroeroticism). Curiously, hysteria and obsessional neurosis
are lumped together, the second considered a variant
of the first. What was important to him at this point
was the distinction between them and paranoia,
which, unlike hysteria and obsessional neurosis, originates in autoeroticism.
The approach that remained the basis for the theory
of psychoanalysis and makes use of the concept of
point of fixation can be dated to Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality (1905d). In the last pages of the
work, Freud discusses the role of regression, which, at
the time of the conflict, leads the libido to return to an
earlier stage, the choice of stage depending on an
attraction factor, the tendency to fixation that characterized the earlier development of the libido. The
chronological significance was no longer considered
proactively (the age of the past event) but retroactively
(the return to a particular position).
It is within this new conceptual framework that
Freud developed the perspectives in ‘‘Formulations on
the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’’ (1911b)
28 8
and the psychopathological study that concludes the
Schreber case (1911c). Moreover, this ‘‘canonical’’ version was used didactically in the twenty-second chapter of the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
(1916–1917a). On the basis of a metaphor (the migration of a people, elements of which are established at
different intermediate stages) and a biological model
(his own histological work on the embryology of eel
gonads), he introduces the concepts of fixation and
regression before emphasizing the multiple factors
that go into determining a neurosis and the role of
‘‘complemental series.’’ By insisting on the role
of intrapsychic conflict, he is led to consider the role of
the ego and the defense mechanisms, a consideration
he had already developed in ‘‘The Disposition to
Obsessional Neurosis: A Contribution to the Problem
of Choice of Neurosis’’ (1913i).
In this last text, Freud describes the chronological
factor as dependent on the development of infantile
sexuality. But, while providing a now-classic description of the stages of this development, he suggests that
the predisposition to the choice of neurosis has as
much to do with the libidinal relationship to the object
as it does to the ego defense mechanisms associated
with each of the steps. He firmly maintains the chronological reference, as long as the development of
the ego as well as that of the libido is taken into
consideration.
This change in the Freudian outlook cannot be
understood without reference to the early work of Karl
Abraham. In a series of articles published between
1921 and 1925, Abraham made significant contributions to the establishment and refinement of the relation between libidinal development and nosological
categories. In 1924 he published ‘‘A Short Study of the
Development of the Libido, Viewed in the Light of
Mental Disorders,’’ an essay that falls well within the
bounds of the Freudian perspective but goes beyond it
in its description of the neuroses, proposing a chronological model that explains all aspects of mental
pathology.
A few years before this, in ‘‘Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality’’ (Ferenczi, 1913/1980),
Ferenczi had expanded the hypothesis advanced by
Freud according to which the choice of neurosis is
determined by the development of the ego and the
libido, specifying that development of the ego could be
understood with reference to the sense of reality.
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C H O I S Y , M A R Y S E (1 903–1 979)
Subsequently, the term ‘‘choice of neurosis’’ disappeared from the vocabulary of Freud and his successors.
The term itself had not been very well chosen in the
sense that it was not describing choice actively made by
the subject but a complex process resulting from a set of
determinants. Subsequent interest turned to the comparative determination of neuroses and psychoses.
In the field of neuroses the issue then shifted from the
causes determining the ‘‘choice’’ of neurosis (or the factors predisposing to it) to the study of structural traits
that could be used to distinguish obsession from hysteria.
There was less interest in symptoms than in the underlying structure. The distinction was based on a theory of
the ego and libido, in keeping with the thinking that
inspired it. An especially illustrative example of this type
of approach is the work of Jacques Lacan and a number
of his students. But these structural models tend to
describe the process more than its genesis.
At the end of the twentieth century and beginning of
the twenty-first, the psychoanalytic theory of neurosis
and choice of neurosis were been approached from two
different perspectives. The first, inspired by behaviorism,
questions the principle of a neurotic structure and
focuses instead on the mechanisms of conditioning that
explain the production of the symptom. The second
questions the unitary concept of neurosis and, within the
framework of recent American nosological classifications, many clinical neuroses have lost their labels and
are found scattered among heterogeneous nosological
categories, implying the existence of a number of pathogenic explanations. In both cases the question of choice
of neurosis never appears, at least not in the terms in
which psychoanalysis has traditionally presented it. Thus
the concept that had so strongly aroused FreudÕs interest
at the beginning of psychoanalysis seems to attract less
attention from psychoanalysts a century later. The question may again become relevant if the unified concept of
neurosis returns to a prominent place in nosography.
DANIEL WIDLÖCHER
See also: Constitution; Conversion; Doubt; Libidinal
stage; Organic repression; Somatic compliance.
Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1949). A short study of the development of
the libido, viewed in the light of mental disorders. In
Selected papers of Karl Abraham, M.D. (D. Bryan and A.
Strachey, Trans.). London: Hogarth. (Original work published 1924)
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Ferenczi, Sándor. (1980). Stages in the development of the
sense of reality. In First contributions to psychoanalysis. New
York: Brunner/Mazel. (Original work published 1913)
Freud, Sigmund. (1896a). Heredity and the etiology of the
neuroses. SE, 3: 141–156.
———. (1896b). Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses
of defence. SE, 3: 157–185.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
———. (1911b). Formulations on the two principles of
mental functioning. SE, 12: 213–226.
———. (1911c). Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides). SE, 12: 1–82.
———. (1913i). The disposition to obsessional neurosis: a
contribution to the problem of choice of neurosis. SE, 12:
311–326.
———. (1916–17a [1915–17]). Introductory lectures on
psycho-analysis. Parts I & II, SE, 15–16.
Freud, Sigmund, and Fliess, Wilhelm. (1985c [1887–1904]).
The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess
1887–1904 (Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Trans.). London:
Belknap/Harvard University Press.
CHOISY, MARYSE (1903–1979)
Journalist, writer, and founder of the review Psyché,
Maryse Choisy was born in Saint-Jean-de-Luz on February 1, 1903, and died in Paris on March 21, 1979.
She was an officer of the National Order of Merit, and
was awarded a silver medal of Arts, Lettres, et Sciences,
and the Lamennais Prize (1967).
She was raised in an old château in the Basque
country by wealthy aunts. At the end of the First
World War, she continued her studies in Cambridge,
then entered Girton College and prepared her dissertation on Samkhya philosophy; she also studied yoga.
When she was twenty-four—the year was 1927—
she had her first contact with psychoanalysis when she
sought treatment with Sigmund Freud. At their third
meeting she related an anxiety dream that Freud
responded to by stating, ‘‘You are an illegitimate
child.’’ Incredulous, she nevertheless followed his
advice by asking her aunt about her birth. Her illegitimacy was confirmed. That was all she learned of her
birth, but she never returned to Berggasse Street. It
was another twenty years before she again had any
involvement with psychoanalysis.
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C H O I S Y , M A R Y S E (190 3–197 9)
Through her career as a journalist and writer, she
became an active participant in the intellectual life of
the 1930s. She wrote some thirty books: novels,
poems, essays, and personal journalism (she became a
journalist with LÕIntransigent in 1925), which brought
her fame. Between 1927 and 1931 there appeared Un
mois chez les hommes (A month among men; on the
monks of Mount Athos), Un mois chez les filles (A
month among girls; on prostitution), which caused a
scandal upon its publication, LÕAmour dans les prisons
(Love in the Prisons), and Un mois chez les députés (A
month among parliamentarians).
She criticized the Surrealist Manifesto, which she
felt was based on a false understanding of FreudÕs concept of the unconscious, and, in Nouvelles littéraires,
published her ‘‘Manifeste surridéaliste,’’ in 1927. She
married the journalist Maxime Clouzet. In 1932 their
daughter Colette was born. There followed Neuf mois,
(Nine months), Savoir être maman (How to be a
mama), and two books of childrenÕs stories.
In 1927 her first novel appeared, entitled C6 H8
(Az03)6 Mon coeur dans une formule (My heart in a
formula). She felt she was expressing the aspirations of
the younger generation of the time, breaking the habits
of a ‘‘generation of pen pushers,’’ ‘‘a generation that
was horizontal from five to seven,’’ she described, ‘‘in
the twenties, we are a vertical brood.’’ In 1929, following a mystical crisis, she dabbled in various forms of
spiritualism until her meeting with Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin in 1938, a turning point in her spiritual quest.
She converted and, after the Liberation, devoted her
efforts to bringing together science, religion, and
psychoanalysis. She used psychoanalysis to satisfy her
religious ideals, both those of Catholicism and those
of a ‘‘meditative’’ and ‘‘orientalist’’ ecumenicalism,
through which she affirmed her ‘‘adherence to the
ideals of the Roman Catholic church.’’
The review Psyché, founded in 1946, reflects these
concerns. Together with Father Leycester King of
Oxford, she founded the Association Internationale de
Psychothérapie et de Psychologie Catholique (International association of Catholic psychotherapy and
psychology).
She resumed her analysis, this time with René
Laforgue. She felt she was a victim of FreudÕs ‘‘savage’’
analysis, comparing herself to Dora, but she did not
question his genius, which reminded her of Einstein.
The fact that Laforgue was a dissident and had
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dropped out of the International Psychoanalytic Association encouraged Choisy to begin a second, training
analysis with Maurice Bouvet. She considered this an
obligation but acknowledged she had made a ‘‘solid
negative transference.’’
Un mois chez les filles was about prostitution but
Choisy intended to approach it the same way Freud
approached neurotics, restoring to them their humanity and avoiding TolstoyÕs moralizing or the aestheticism of Pierre Louÿs and Francis Carco. (The book
was rediscovered and published in 1961 in the United
States as Psychoanalysis of the Prostitute.) In 1949
Choisy published a study on the ‘‘Métapsychologie du
scandale’’ in Psyché, reprinted in her book Le Scandale
de lÕamour (The scandal of love). She published four
other works popularizing psychoanalysis. Her last
book, published in 1978, is volume two of her memoirs, significantly subtitled: Sur le chemin de Dieu on
rencontre dÕabord le diable (On the path to God we first
meet the devil).
Choisy had an adventurous and provocative intellect that she developed through her many publications, and she occupied an important position in the
intellectual world of pre-War Paris. But it was only
after the Liberation that she became part of the history
of psychoanalysis for two complementary reasons:
First, her efforts to obtain official recognition of psychoanalysis by the Catholic church and encourage
practitioners and researchers to consider positions
that were different and sometimes radically distinct,
and second, the creation of the review Psyché, which,
more than all her other writing, constitutes her
‘‘psychoanalytic oeuvre’’ and explains her renown in
the field.
JACQUELINE COSNIER
See also: France; Psyché. Revue internationale de psychanalyse et des sciences de l’homme (Psyche, an international
review of psychoanalysis and human sciences).
Bibliography
Choisy, Maryse. (1961). Psychoanalysis of the prostitute. New
York: Philosophical Library. (Original work published
1928)
———. (1977). Mémoires : sur le chemin de Dieu on rencontre d’abord le Diable. Paris: Émile Paul.
Guillemain, Bernard. (1959). Maryse Choisy ou l’Amoureuse
Sagesse. Paris: C.A.M.C. Hachette.
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CHRISTIANS
CHRISTIANS AND JEWS: A
PSYCHOANALYTICAL STUDY
Rudolf M. Loewenstein began this work in France during ‘‘the wretched year of 1941’’; he finished it ten
years later in the United States and dedicated it to ‘‘the
Christians who sacrificed themselves to defend the
persecuted Jews’’ (1952). Loewenstein, who would
become one of the founders of ego psychology in the
United States, was then director of a psychoanalytic
journal financed by Marie Bonaparte, with whom he
began to discuss aspects of the anti-Semitic environment in France. ‘‘We are in a revolutionary period . . . ,’’
he wrote. ‘‘Blood has not yet been spilled. . . . But the
people need to grapple with someone, they need victims. . . . Hence, the Jews.’’
More personal motives also compelled Loewenstein
to write Christians and Jews. Born in Russia, he was a
citizen of several nations before, having settled in
France and identified himself entirely with the French,
he suddenly found himself scorned and rejected by his
adopted country because he was Jewish. He believed
that psychoanalysis could contribute to some better
understanding of anti-Semitic attitudes and might
even offer a solution.
Loewenstein began by reviewing the known causes of
anti-Semitism, citing various works and historical documentation. He then offered examples from his experience
as an analyst; he believed that therapy represented ‘‘a
good opportunity for a kind of experimental study in the
incipient and developmental stages of anti-Semitism’’ (p.
30). Citing Leon Pinsker, the Russian physician and
author of Auto-Emancipation (1882 [1916]), Loewenstein discussed ‘‘judeophobia’’ as a type of demonophobia, a near-psychosis that incorporates feelings of fear,
hatred, and disgust. Certain forms of anti-Semitism
represent aspects of paranoia, such as xenophobia, revulsion over circumcision, and projection of self-hatred,
while other characteristics, such as religious intolerance
and economic rivalry, have an opportunistic appeal.
LoewensteinÕs hypothesis, based on Gustave Le
BonÕs theory of collective psychology, is that antiSemitic tendencies, latent in individuals, suddenly
metamorphose in groups into violent attitudes that
spread like an epidemic. HitlerÕs anti-Semitic laws and
his persecution of Jews, for example, enabled latent
anti-Semitism in individual Germans to manifest
itself. The underlying mechanisms rely on irrational
and absurd medieval beliefs, such as the putatively
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peculiar anatomy of the Jew (a hidden tail, menstrual
periods in males) and his supposedly demonic character (engagement in ritual murder, sexual perversions),
as well as modern beliefs (Jewish culpability in starting
wars, international financial cabals, Jewish-Masonic
conspiracies). Loewenstein also suggested another,
more oedipal level to anti-Semitism, as reflected in
FreudÕs Moses and Monotheism, viewing the struggle of
the early Christians, with their hatred of the old
religion, as a means of avoiding the ‘‘return of
the repressed’’—the recollection of their own revolt
against imposed religion. Finally, Loewenstein questions whether the Jews do not themselves aid in perpetuating anti-Semitic reactions, in a chapter titled ‘‘On
ÔJewishÕ Character Traits and Social Structure.’’
Skeptical of Zionism as a political solution because it
might provoke anti-Semitism, Loewenstein called for a
pedagogical solution. He proposed teaching sacred history in a less anti-Semitic spirit and, always philosophical, he suggested a mutual search for understanding
between Christians and Jews for the good of mankind.
A courageous book, Christians and Jews, together
with works by Imre Hermann (1945) and Ernst
Simmel (1946), was among the earliest psychoanalytically-informed works on the subject. It is not a landmark work, however. LoewensteinÕs use of a medical
model, with its description of symptoms, etiology, and
finally treatment, is inadequate to understand the
modern antipathy and negative attitudes toward Jews
known as anti-Semitism.
MICHELLE MOREAU RICAUD
See also: Loewenstein, Rudolf M.; Racism, anti-Semitism
and psychoanalysis.
Source Citation
Loewenstein, Rudolf M. (1952). Christians and Jews; A psychoanalytical study. New York: International Universities
Press.
Bibliography
Hermann, Imre. (1945). Az antiszemitizmus lélektana. (The
psychosis of anti-Semitism), Budapest: Bibliotheca.
Pinsker, Leon. (1916). Auto-emancipation. New York, Federation of American Zionists. (Original work published 1882)
Simmel, Ernst. (1946). Anti-Semitism. A social disease. New
York: International Universities Press.
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CINEMA AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
As contemporaries, cinema and psychoanalysis
both reveal, in their own way, mankindÕs complex personality. The interior dramas that psychoanalysis brings
to light can be experienced within the ‘‘other scene’’ of
cinematic fiction. The similarity of certain terms and the
occasional apparent resemblances between the two techniques encourage spontaneous comparisons: During
psychoanalysis the subject is confronted with fantasized
‘‘representations’’ and can identity with ‘‘projected’’
characters. And we often speak of ‘‘dream screens.’’
Psychoanalysis as perceived by the cinema, especially by Hollywood, has not escaped a degree of confusion. For, while engaging in one sense with the
‘‘question of lay analysis,’’ American psychoanalytic
practice is related to psychiatry. Therefore, in American film productions as well as in critical analyses of
those films, there has not always been a clear distinction between psychiatry and psychoanalytic practice.
To bring the relation into sharper focus, I will not consider films that depict the world of psychiatry, such as
Shock Corridor (Sam Fuller, 1963), Lilith (R. Rossen,
1964), or One Flew Over the CuckooÕs Nest (Milos Forman, 1975). This article will avoid discussion of the
serial killer films of the nineteen eighties (Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer by J. McNaughton, 1985, released
in 1990, The Silence of the Lambs by Jonathan Demme,
1991, Seven by D. Fincher, 1995, and others).
The term ‘‘psychoanalysis’’ appeared for the first
time in Sigmund FreudÕs Heredity and the Aetiology of
the Neuroses (1896). Almost simultaneously, on
December 28, 1895, the Lumière brothers, inventors of
the cinematograph, organized the first paid movie in
Paris. The show, twenty minutes long, contained the
famous Arrivée du train en gare de La Ciotat and La
Sortie de lÕusine Lumière à Lyon.
It took the cinema more than twenty years to present
psychoanalytic imagery, even in a rudimentary form. In
1919, R. Wiene filmed The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in
which a mad doctor—at least thatÕs what he claims to
be—uses hypnosis for evil purposes, just as the diabolical Dr. Mabuse in the film of the same name (Fritz
Lang, 1922), released three years later, made use of his
hypnotic powers for criminal purposes.
On the other hand it took psychoanalysis a number
of years before it approached cinema. Münsterberg did
write a 1916 essay, Le Cinéma: étude psychologique, but
it was only in 1970 that, for the first time, film analysis
29 2
made use of the tools of psychoanalysis (Les Cahiers du
cinéma, no. 223). The authors dissected Young Abe Lincoln (John Ford, 1939) and analyzed the importance of
the Law (personified by Henry Fonda as Lincoln) and
the Oedipus complex it implied.
The history of the relation between psychoanalysis
and cinema can be subdivided into three major periods.
In its earliest manifestations (Caligari and Mabuse),
psychoanalysis became, during the thirties, a familiar
figure to cinema, although it often assumed the form of
caricatured archetypes, which revealed a complete misunderstanding of psychoanalytic reality. It was superficial and incompetent (Carefree, M. Sandrich, 1938,
Bringing up Baby, Howard Hawks, 1938), disturbing
and ambitious (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Frank Capra,
1936), or provided effective, although simpleminded,
advice (Blind Alley, King Vidor, 1939). It still had little
to do with the behavior of ordinary people.
After the Second World War, the references to psychoanalysis (psychiatrists treating shell-shocked soldiers, for example)—at least in terms of explanatory
material—made psychoanalysis seem more serious
and sympathetic. Its cinematic representation followed
this positive evolution. It was the seductive Peterson
(Ingrid Bergman) who enabled Ballantyne (Gregory
Peck) to remember the traumatic childhood scene
that, having been repressed, had led him to believe he
was guilty of murder (Spellbound, Alfred Hitchcock,
1945). It is Moss, the G.I. in Home of the Brave (S.
Kramer, 1949), who, returning home after the war, is
healed of the paralysis that resulted from his inferiority
complex. Psychoanalysis, although not yet fully understood, is here better integrated in social life and
becomes a ‘‘serious’’ reference.
More recently we have seen a return to a more critical position. Dressed to Kill (Brian de Palma, 1980)
involves an analyst who is a serial killer of women. The
grasping psychoanalyst in Passage à lÕacte (F. Girod,
1997), manipulated by his patient, becomes his assassin with few second thoughts. The psychoanalysts portrayed by Woody Allen are frequently among the funniest characters in his films. Psychoanalysis, neither
caricature nor definitive ‘‘knowledge,’’ becomes a subject for the cinema that can be treated objectively and
even ridiculed.
Even though he allowed himself to be filmed by his
close friends (Marie Bonaparte, Mark Brunswick,
René Laforgue, Philip Lehrman, see Mijolla, A. de,
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1994), Freud was never very interested in the cinema.
Arguing that ‘‘he didnÕt feel that a plastic representation of our abstractions worthy of the name could be
made,’’ he disavowed his disciples, Karl Abraham and
Hanns Sachs, for their collaboration on the script of
The Mysteries of a Soul (G. W. Pabst, 1925). He also
refused a considerable sum of money offered by
Samuel Goldwyn to develop a script on ‘‘famous love
affairs.’’ This suspicion of the filmic representation of
psychoanalysis continued after the death of its founder. It was primarily FreudÕs daughter who opposed
any attempt to make a film about Freud. Fearing Anna
FreudÕs hostility, John Huston abandoned the idea of
using Marilyn Monroe to play the part of Cecily in
Freud, the Secret Passion (1962).
Should we attribute to this suspicion the paucity of
films about Freud? The few films that do represent
Freud show him during the early years of psychoanalysis. The Seven-Percent Solution (H. Ross, 1976) is a
comedy in which the founder of psychoanalysis attempts
to cure Sherlock Holmes of his cocaine addiction, a
wink at FreudÕs own experience. Sogni d Õoro (Nino Moretti, 1981) involves the making of a film entitled
‘‘FreudÕs Mother,’’ in which the fictional relations of Sigmund and Amalia are treated comically. In a more serious vein, Nineteen-Nineteen (H. Brody, 1984) evokes
Freud in flashback psychoanalyzing two celebrated
patients, the Wolfman and the young woman described
in ‘‘a case of female homosexuality’’ (1920a). John HustonÕs Freud (1962) is the only film that seriously and
directly confronts the theoretical and practical questions
of psychoanalysis through a ‘‘biographical’’ fiction.
Like Freud leaving the famous 1921 photograph—
cigar in hand, without his glasses—to come to life in
Lovesick (M. Brickman, 1983), the image of the fictional
psychoanalyst is often a stereotype or caricature: white
beard, tiny pince-nez glasses, maybe a strong foreign
accent. He becomes the old doctor Brulov in Spellbound
(1945) or the disturbing Caligari (1919) or Mabuse
(1922), who make use of their knowledge of hypnosis
for evil purposes. Nor are they the only ones. The analyst in Nightmare Alley (E. Goulding, 1947) makes use
of his patientsÕ confidence to blackmail them.
Even though the psychoanalystÕs image in cinema
evolves after the Second World War, becoming more
reassuring, it still retains an aura of strangeness. The
two doctors—even if they are not, strictly speaking,
psychoanalysts—who appear in Seventh Heaven
(B. Jacquot, 1997), are oddly different from the other
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characters in the film. The first, and most important,
disappears as mysteriously as he appears.
In Hollywood films classical Freudian concepts are
used: the neurosis of anxiety, the Oedipus complex,
the repression of an infantile trauma. In most cases,
the model used, at least implicitly, is based on the Studies on Hysteria; the spectacular effects of the catharsis
can be used for the purposes of dramatization. Bringing back a repressed memory is sufficient for healing.
This occurs in Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang,
1948), in Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959), The Snake Pit (Anatol Litvak, 1949),
and even, although it is caricatured, in Marnie (Alfred
Hitchcock, 1964). Dreams have obviously assumed
their place as one of the deus ex machina of cinema,
beginning with the dream sequence in Spellbound,
designed by Salvador Dali. The analysis of a recurrent
dream experienced by one of the characters is used to
solve the ‘‘enigma’’ at the heart of the script. Nightmares occur in Pursued (Raoul Walsh, 1949), Lady in
the Dark (M. Leisen, 1944), Secret Beyond the Door
(1948), and The Three Faces of Eve (N. Johnson, 1957).
Then there are the dreams of Freud himself, taken
from the Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), which are
used in Freud: The Secret Passion (1962). Unraveling
these oneiric obsessions resolves the characterÕs neurosis and the story (the film) comes to an end.
For the purposes of dramaturgy, psychoanalysis is
used by cinema to cure patients and especially to reveal
the neuroses of psychoanalysts, their entourage, and
society. The Cobweb (Vincente Minelli, 1955) is the
model for this type of exposition. In the film Richard
Widmark, a psychoanalyst working in an institution,
is impotent with his wife, with whom he disagrees.
Should we be surprised then that HollywoodÕs celluloid psychoanalysts, psychiatrists especially, rarely
engage in any real psychoanalysis—often confused
with hypnosis—and that the framework of the psychoanalytic cure is rarely respected? In Spellbound,
Dr. Petersen (Ingmar Bergman) is seated next to her
patient, the so-called Dr. Edwards (Gregory Peck); the
psychoanalyst in Sex and the Single Girl (R. Quine,
1964), played by Natalie Wood, does the same and, as
in so many representations, writes down his remarks.
In Lady in the Dark (1944), the analystÕs seat is placed
behind the couch but the patient is seated. This difficulty in displaying the psychoanalytic frame—the analysand lying on a couch and the psychoanalyst seated
behind him in another plane—has been neatly
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resolved by H. Brody in Nineteen-Nineteen (1984).
Here, two of FreudÕs former patients recall their
respective psychoanalysis. When the therapy is shown
on screen, the psychoanalyst (Freud), is not in the picture, only his voice is present (Mijolla, A. de, 1994).
in the study of the imaginary signifier.’’ Other authors
also became interested in the analogy between psychoanalysis and cinema: the importance of sight (Jean-Louis
Baudry), the different meanings of the word ‘‘screen’’ (G.
Rosolata), the place of the spectator in Persona (N.
Brown), fetishism and film noir (M. Ernet).
Even today it seems that cinema continues to insist
that psychoanalysis is hypnosis (the dramatic effects of
which are evident on screen) or catharsis (which facilitates explanatory shortcuts). Nonetheless, its representation has become more subtle and it is now fully
integrated in the film. In Seventh Heaven, psychoanalysis is not only part of the script but present on screen
as well. White surfaces are used by the heroine to project her traumatic memories. Similarly, F. Girod makes
psychoanalysis the background for Passage à l Õacte
(1997). Psychoanalysis is given the comic treatment in
nearly all of Woody AllenÕs films as well as a few others
(A Couch in New York by Chantal Ackerman, 1997).
Sometimes the approach is tragicomic, as in Another
Woman (Allen, 1988), where a woman begins to question her entire life after eavesdropping on a psychoanalyst at work through a vent in her apartment.
However, theory shouldnÕt cause us to overlook the
many studies of individual films and directors.
Raymond Bellour (1975) provided a psychoanalytic
analysis (the murder of the father, the castrating
mother) of HitchcockÕs North by Northwest (1959), a
film said to be frivolous and entertaining. Minutely
dissecting the sequence of the airplane attack, he
reveals the importance of sight and its role in the film.
Similarly, T. Kuntzel (1975) made use of the Freudian
discovery of the presence of the unconscious in dreams
to analyze The Most Dangerous Game (E. B. Shoedsack
and I. Pichel, 1932). Patrick Lacoste (1990) examines
The Mysteries of a Soul (1925) from a strictly psychoanalytical point of view and Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor
(1994) analyzes the way the ‘‘anxiety of fiction’’ operates on the spectator of HitchcockÕs films.
However, there is no need to see an analyst at work or
present a formal psychoanalytic situation for psychoanalysis to be presented on screen. A number of films promote a latent psychoanalytic statement without being
explicit. This is the case, for example, with the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, who presents neurotic characters
(Written on the Wind, 1956), with many of Ingmar BergmanÕs films (The Silence, 1963, Persona, 1966, Cries and
Whispers, 1973, Autumn Sonata, 1978), with Michael
PowellÕs Peeping Tom (1960), and any of Tex AveryÕs productions, which use comedy to present neurosis.
Throughout the nineteen-eighties American film
theory looked at a number of films made between
1945 and 1960 from the point of view of psychoanalysis and feminism. In several analyses that could be
described as ‘‘feminist psychoanalysis,’’ Laura Mulvey,
Janet Walker, and M. A. Doane attempted to show
how the role of women in cinema reflected their role
in society. The approach taken by E. Ann Kaplan,
which was part of this movement—one that was more
sociological than psychoanalytical—emphasized issues
of race in society, which the cinema reflected.
It is often in films where the elements of psychoanalysis are presented but not spelled out that psychoanalytic concepts appear with the greatest subtlety and
relevance. What would Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel,
1928), that sprawling ninety-minute dream, have been
like if the script had provided a psychoanalytic explanation? Probably a poor film, slow and overbearing.
But making use of psychoanalytic concepts to
examine films from a sociological perspective (feminist or antiracist) was bound to be unsatisfactory as
long as these readings involved distortion and reduction; the film and its analysis became a pretext to
defend, and in a way that was not always rigorous,
questionable intellectual ideas. Psychoanalysis is often
a pretext in the service of a discourse; once abandoned,
it is seen to be an element inessential to the logical
structure of the argument. IsnÕt this the reproach
made to cinema whenever it represents psychoanalysis,
a filmic representation that is generally incomplete
and often a form of caricature?
It was only natural that psychoanalysis should take an
interest in film, one of many cultural constructs, as Freud
did, for example, with drama, beginning with Hamlet.
Nonetheless, the theory of cinema did not make use of
the tools of psychoanalysis until the early seventies. With
reference to the work of Lacan, Christian Metz provided
a careful spectatorial analysis, trying to determine ‘‘what
contribution Freudian psychoanalysis could . . . provide
29 4
If film often ‘‘fails at’’ representation of the psychoanalytic situation, it is no doubt because ‘‘the unconINTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
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scious, like the being of philosophers, rarely makes
itself visible’’ (J.-B. Pontalis). Moreover, ‘‘the rhythm
of analysis is very different from that of film, and it is
quite difficult to provide an accurate representation of
the sensation’’ (Mijolla, 1994).
A film cannot be judged on the accuracy of its portrayal of psychoanalytic notions—within certain limits, of course—but on the relevance of the use of those
notions for the dramatic presentation of its themes.
‘‘From this point of view—[the use of language and
the language of images as fundamental Freudian reference points] between psychoanalysis and cinema—is
formed a variant of the situation of the analyst as
always being between two languages’’ (Lacoste, 1990).
More work needs to be done on the complex relationships that are created between psychoanalysis and
cinema, beyond the application of psychoanalytic concepts to the art of film.
PIERRE-JEAN BOUYER AND SYLVAIN BOUYER
See also: American Imago; Cinema (criticism); France;
Freud, the Secret Passion; Secrets of a Soul; Psyche, revue
internationale de psychanalyse et des sciences de l Õhomme
(Psyche, an international review of psychoanalysis and
human sciences); Robertson, James; Surrealism and
psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Bellour, Raymond. (1979). The analysis of film (Constance
Penley, Ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
Communications. (1975). ‘‘Psychanalyse et cinéma.’’ 23.
Lacoste, Patrick. (1990). LÕetrange cas du Pr. M. Psychanalyse
à lÕécran. Paris: Gallimard.
Metz, Christian. (1979). The imaginary signifier: Psychoanalysis and the cinema (C. Britton et al., Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mijolla, Alain de. (1999). Freud and the psychoanalytic
situation on the screen. In J. Bergstrom (Ed.), Endless
night. Cinema and psychoanalysis: Parallel histories (p. 188–
199). Los Angeles and London: University of California
Press. (Original work published 1994)
Further Reading
Gabbard, Glen. (2001). The impact of psychoanalysis on the
American cinema. Annual of Psychoanalysis, 29, 237–246.
Gabbard, Erin and Gabbard, Glen. (1989). Psychiatry and
the cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Greenberg, Harvey R. (1993). Screen memories: Hollywood
cinema on the psychoanalytic couch. New York: Columbia
University Press.
CINEMA CRITICISM
The discipline of psychoanalysis and the art of the
cinema evolved in parallel at the beginning of the twentieth century. Psychoanalysts soon began interpreting the
appeal and meaning of movies. As early as 1916 Hugo
Münsterberg wrote The Film: A Psychological Study, in
which he suggested that film transforms the external
world into the mechanisms of the mind, including
memory, imagination, attention, and emotion.
Although Freud himself had little interest in the
cinema, one of his disciples, Hanns Sachs, served as a
consultant to George Wilhelm PabstÕs 1926 classic,
Secrets of a Soul. This German expressionist film was
the first serious treatment of psychoanalysis in film
history, complete with rather sophisticated use of
dream symbolism.
Since these early interdisciplinary efforts, a whole
field of psychoanalytic film criticism has evolved. Systematic studies of movies first appeared in the 1950s in
the French periodical, Cahiers du Cinèma. The Cahiers
theorists subsequently appropriated Italian semiotics
as well as the ideas of the deconstructionist Jacques
Derrida and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
Film scholars influenced by Lacan and Derrida focus
on the ‘‘deep structures’’ at work in movies and how
meaning is generated in film. LacanÕs most important
student in the field of film theory has been Christian
Metz, whose work has become standard reading in
academic cinema studies programs.
The Lacanian approach to film criticism centers on
how audiences experience movies. The camera creates
a ‘‘gaze’’ or perspective on the events of the filmÕs narrative. A key aspect of the Lacanian discourse is the
concept of ‘‘lack,’’ both as the phallocentric key to sexual difference and in the symbolic sense of viewing
external reality in terms of absence and presence.
These ideas have been appropriated by feminist semioticians like Laura Mulvey, who suggested that the
womanÕs body is fetishized because it creates anixiety
in men, to whom it represents ‘‘lack,’’ i.e., castration.
Moreover, the cinema is viewed as historically serving
the interests of patriarchy, privileging the gaze of the
male hero, while subordinating the female characters
as the object of the gaze.
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DISCONTENTS
Interpretations of film based on Lacanian ideas
have generated a good deal of criticism. Many have
objected to the semioticiansÕ methodology as topheavy with theoretical formulations and too dismissive
of the actual content of a film. In addition, a number
of critics have pointed out that masculinity is regularly
undermined in films and that male viewers often will
identify with a female character. Moreover, male
bodies are often fetishized in the cinema to the same
extent as the female body.
Psychoanalytic film scholars have taken a number of
different approaches that part ways with the Lacanian
perspective. Bruce Kawin, Marsha Kinder, and Robert
Eberwein, for example, have examined films from the
perspective of Freudian dreamwork. Robert B. Ray and
Krin and Glen Gabbard have taken a pluralistic
approach to psychoanalytic film criticism, suggesting
that Lacanian interpretations are reductionist and limiting, and that broadening oneÕs theoretical perspective
may be more useful when studying film.
GLEN O. GABBARD
See also: Cinema and psychoanalysis; Mannoni, DominiqueOctave; Psyché, revue internationale de psychanalyse et des
sciences de l’homme (Psyche, an international review of psychoanalysis and human sciences).
Bibliography
Gabbard, Krin, and Gabbard, Glen O. (1987), Psychiatry and
the cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Metz, Christian. (1982). The imaginary signifier. Psychoanalysis and the cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Mulvey, Laura. (1977). Visual pleasure and narrative
cinema. In K. Kay, G. Peary (Eds.), Women and the cinema
(pp. 412–428). New York: Dutton,.
Ray, Robert B. (1985). A certain tendency of the hollywood
cinema, 1930–1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Between 1928 and 1930, Freud devoted himself exclusively to Civilization and its Discontents—apart from a
handful of prefaces and his acceptance speech for the
Goethe prize. Dated 1930, the book appeared in
December 1929. It was an immediate success, selling
twelve thousand copies the first year, with the first
German reprint in 1931. The book has remained
29 6
successful over the years, generating a vast amount of
commentary. There were translations into English
(1930), Spanish (1936), French (1943), Italian (1971),
and Portuguese (1974). Freud himself was less expansive about it: during the composition of the text,
FreudÕs cancer was painful and required care, and Max
Schur became his personal physician in the spring of
1929. The first version of Civilization and its Discontents was written quickly, in July 1929. Freud wrote to
Lou Andreas-Salomé on July 28, 1929 : ‘‘Today I wrote
the final sentence, the one that concludes the
book. . . . ItÕs about culture, feelings of guilt, happiness
and other elevated subjects and, it rightly seems to me,
quite superfluous, unlike the earlier work, behind
which there was always some internal drive. But what
is there to do? One canÕt smoke and play cards all day
long. . . . During the writing, I rediscovered the most
banal truths’’ (1966a [1912–1936]).
Freud began with Romain RollandÕs criticisms of
The Future of an Illusion (1927c) concerning the ‘‘religious sensation’’ and the ‘‘simple and direct fact of the
ÔeternalÕ sensation (which may indeed not be eternal,
but simply without any perceptible limits, and oceanic)’’ (letter to Freud, December 27, 1927). He replied
to Rolland on July 14, 1929, indicating that his
remarks left him little rest.
Chapter one opens with a mention of the great man
(Rolland) and explains the ‘‘oceanic’’ feeling through
the concept of narcissism. Freud then develops the
extensive metaphor comparing the unconscious to the
archaeologistÕs Rome, which, like the initial ego, supposedly contains everything. It makes evident the preservation of memory traces, as if the various stages of
the city since its foundation could exist simultaneously
(as in the stratified spaces and multidimensional time
of mathematics). Freud concluded that the oceanic
feeling may exist as a memory trace, but stated that he
would not pursue the investigation of the Mothers,
which he mentions without elaborating. Instead, he
maintains the supremacy of the religion of the Father.
Like Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
(1921c), Civilization and its Discontents begins by circling around psychical questions, and claiming that
culture is born from the religion of the Father, characteristic of European monotheistic religions.
For several chapters Freud provides a fairly commonplace description of our relation to culture. Citing
a number of European writers, Freud describes the
impossibility of achieving happiness, the ‘‘essence of
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culture,’’ the ambivalent relationships we entertain
with it, and the opposition between culture and sexuality. For someone familiar with FreudÕs work, there is
little to learn. But, using a frequent tactic, he outlines a
broader scope of understanding before advancing his
more incisive hypotheses, which are sketched in terms
of the economic, dynamic, and topographical points
of view.
It is as if Freud were asking why the forms and
dynamics of groups that he constructed in Group Psychology were necessary, considering the inhibitions of
sexual drives, the alienation that accompanies identification with large groups and the submission it entails.
The response was economic: mankindÕs aggressive
drives endanger culture. Freud then inserts the economic hypothesis into mental dynamics. Recalling the
theory of drives, he suggests that the development of
culture illustrates the struggle between Eros and death,
the life instinct against the destructive instinct, as it
unfolds within the human species. Once the dynamic
relation has been established, there remains the problem of identifying mental formations, the correlative
topography. The end of the book is devoted to a subtle
study of the superego, the moral conscience, remorse,
guilt, and the need for punishment. ‘‘I suspect that the
reader has the impression that our discussions on
the sense of guilt disrupt the framework of this
essay . . . This may have spoilt the structure of my
paper; but it corresponds faithfully to my intention to
represent the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilization and to show
that the price we pay for our advance in civilization is
a loss of happiness through the heightening of the
sense of guilt’’ (p. 134).
FreudÕs principal thesis is that the culture of patriarchal religion creates a particular way of working for
the superego, which turns its aggression against the
ego and expresses itself in the feeling of guilt. This process is unregulated. Once it is triggered, it worsens and
becomes aggravated, exhausting not only the aggressive drives but the sexual drives as well. Moreover,
‘‘since civilization obeys an internal erotic impulsion
which causes human beings to unite in a closely-knit
group, it can only achieve this aim through an everincreasing reinforcement of the sense of guilt’’
(p. 133). Eros itself serves the death drives or aggressive instincts, which culture serves as well. This results
in the death-driven and unregulated dynamic of the
cultural process.
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Freud details the ontogenesis of the moral conscience and superego from the primitive social anxiety
of the child—loss of the parentsÕ love—to the erection
of an internal authority, which does not distinguish
between acts and intentions and whose power is reinforced with every rejection of a drive and every real
misfortune. He then claims that the origin of the feeling of guilt is the murder of the primal father, who
alone is capable of provoking the conflict of ambivalence and generating the superego.
In the last chapter Freud returns to the relations
between the various terms discussed, while expanding
the analogy between the origin of culture and individual development. He returns to the notion of the
great man, who is likely to contribute to the development of the superego in a given cultural moment.
Noting that psychic processes are sometimes more
accessible in the group than the individual, Freud
introduces the idea of analyzing the pathology in specific of cultural communities.
Just as Group Psychology analyzed the ego, Civilization
and its Discontents examines the superego, as distinct
from the ego ideal. In both texts, aggression and reality
are integrated in a dynamic which links individual and
collective psychology. To do this Freud simplified, identifying the death drive with the urge to destruction, and
culture with Eros (‘‘civilization is a process in the service
of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human
individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples
and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind’’
(p. 122). This is the text in which Freud best defends and
illustrates the analogy, even the identity, between individual and cultural development—the family always serving as the medium of change.
MICHÈLE PORTE
Source Citation
Freud, Sigmund. (1930a [1929]). Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. Leipzig-Vienna-Zurich, Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag; GW, XIV, p. 419–506; Civilization and its
discontents. SE, 21: 57–145.
Bibliography
(1998). Autour du ‘‘Malaise dans la culture’’ de Freud. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Enriquez, Eugéne. (1983). De la horde à lÕetat. Paris:
Gallimard.
Freud, Sigmund, and Andreas-Salomé, Lou. (1966a [1912–
1936]). Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters.
297
CIVILIZATION (KULTUR)
(William and Elaine Robson-Scott, Trans.). London:
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Marcuse, Herbert. (1955). Eros and civilization. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Vermorel, Henri, and Vermorel, Madeleine. (1993). Sigmund
Freud et Romain Rolland : correspondance 1923–1936.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
CIVILIZATION (KULTUR)
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud
defines civilization as follows: ‘‘The word ÔcivilizationÕ
[Kultur] describes the whole sum of the achievements
and regulations which distinguish our lives from those
of our animal ancestors and which serve two
purposes—namely to protect men against nature and
to adjust their mutual relations’’ (1930a, p. 89). In The
Future of an Illusion Freud provided a more extended
definition of civilization: ‘‘Human civilization, by
which I mean all those respects in which human life
has raised itself above its animal status and differs
from the life of the beasts—and I scorn to distinguish
between culture and civilization—presents, as we
know, two aspects to the observer. It includes, on the
one hand, all the knowledge and capacity that men
have acquired in order to control the forces of nature
and extract its wealth for the satisfaction of human
needs and, on the other hand, all the regulations necessary in order to adjust the relations of men to one
another and especially the distribution of the available
wealth’’ (1927c, p. 5–6).
These definitions, however, leave out many aspects
of the concept of civilization that Freud had mentioned in other works, including ‘‘Civilized Sexual
Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’’ (1908d). These
themes include the relationship of civilization to the
superego and to sublimation, its consequences for
neurosis, the origin of civilization, and the different
attitudes of individuals toward civilization, especially
as a function of their sex.
FreudÕs conflation of civilization and culture here is
surprising, especially when we consider that the distinction is clearly present when he discusses the force
deployed by civilization (Kultur), on the one hand,
and the ‘‘spiritual heritage of culture’’ used to ‘‘reconcile mankind’’ with that civilization, on the other,
namely, the ‘‘spiritual heritage of culture’’ (1927c). Le
Rider (1993) has pointed out that this opposition
between culture and civilization had behind it a
29 8
philosophical tradition of which Freud was a part.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) saw civilization as a ceremonial aspect of culture, and saw culture as achieved
by means of a sustained effort (Bildung) and as culminating in the great achievements of art and thought. In
a more radical perspective, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–
1900) saw civilization as subjugation and saw culture,
in contrast, as the artistic and intellectual flowering of
intact natures. The period between 1920 and 1939 saw
the rise and spread of the idea of popular culture and
the notion that culture is a means of fulfilling human
life (Le Rider, 1993).
It is also arguable that Freud rejected this tradition
and deliberately ignored the distinction between culture and civilization because of his theory of the birth
of civilization and its link with sexuality. His theory
might be considered an example of the cunning of
civilization, in the dialectical sense in which G. W. F.
Hegel (1770–1831) speaks of the ‘‘cunning of Reason’’
(Mijolla-Mellor, 1992). The cunning lies in the fact
that humanity creates civilization by transforming and
sublimating individualsÕ instinctual aims and objects
and sublimation simultaneously enables individuals to
realize those aims and attain those objects in another
form. Yet in doing this, humanity consolidates a cultural edifice that weighs upon individuals and imposes
restrictions on them by dint of suppression. ‘‘There
will be brought home to you with irresistible forces the
many developments, repressions, sublimations, and
reaction-formations by means of which a child with a
quite other innate endowment grows into what we call
a normal man, the bearer, and in part the victim, of
the civilization that has been so painfully acquired’’
(Freud, 1910a, p. 36). Freud thus found himself once
more in thrall to his concept of sublimation, whose
shortcomings led him to confuse the coercion of institutionalized education with the process of individual
learning (Bildung), a creative force and source of pleasure (intellectual pleasure) for the subject. The dialectic in which the sublimation of one group can become
the source of suppression for another group that does
not participate in the process of self-education without
doubt constitutes a cunning of civilization, whereby a
devitalized culture dons the mantle of civilizing
norms.
Civilization appears as an entity in and of itself, a
given for the subject on whom it is imposed: ‘‘The
development of civilization appears to us as a peculiar
process which mankind undergoes, and in which
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several things strike us as familiar. We may characterize
this process with reference to the changes which it
brings about in the familiar instinctual dispositions of
human beings, to satisfy which is, after all, the economic task of our lives’’ (Freud, 1930a, p. 96).
As Freud pointed out in ‘‘Civilized Sexual Morality
and Modern Nervous Illness’’ (1908d), civilization,
by imposing sexual frustration, has a direct effect on
the genesis of neuroses. Freud repeatedly claimed that
sublimation should not be a norm, since it is possible
only for some people: ‘‘Mastering it by sublimation,
by deflecting the sexual instinctual forces away from
their sexual aim to higher cultural aims, can be
achieved by a minority and then only intermittently,
and least easily during the period of ardent and vigorous youth’’ (1908d, p. 192). For the others, submission, especially to sexual morality, has negative
consequences ranging from neurosis to a degradation
of sexual objects (1908d). Of those who sublimate,
some are heroes, like Prometheus, whom Freud analyzes in ‘‘The Acquisition and Control of Fire’’
(1932a), or Hercules, about whom he writes, ‘‘The
prevention of erotic satisfaction calls up a piece of
aggressiveness against the person who has interfered
with the satisfaction, and that this aggressiveness has
itself to be suppressed in turn. But if this is so, it is
after all only the aggressiveness which is transformed
into a sense of guilt, by being suppressed and made
over to the superego’’ (1930a, p. 138).
The process of civilizing is divided among ideals:
coercion from the superego, cultural creation, and the
resulting admiration from the ego ideal. ‘‘The satisfaction which the ideal offers to the participants in the
culture is thus of a narcissistic nature; it rests on their
pride in what has already been successfully achieved’’
(Freud, 1927c, p. 13). Here too the civilizing process
reveals its unstable nature, for by reinforcing nationalism, the ‘‘narcissism of minor differences,’’ and the cultural ideals of a people, it can become a pretext for a
return to the most savage form of struggle: war.
Civilization appears as a separate entity, albeit one
produced by humankind. It is necessary, though it is
always excessive in its demands and premature in its
anticipation: ‘‘It is an ineradicable and innate defect of
our and every other civilization, that it imposes on
children, who are driven by instinct and weak in intellect, decisions which only the mature intelligence of
adults can vindicate’’ (Freud, 1927c, p. 51–52).
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Alongside the writings in which Freud directly
addresses the question of civilization, there are a number of anthropological texts in which, starting from
the primitive horde and the murder of the father, he
retraces the genesis of the matriarchy, the band of
brothers, and the return to patriarchy. Yet these two
perspectives are relatively dissociated in FreudÕs work
to the extent that his ideas on civilization, with a few
digressions to discuss ancient Rome or Louis XIV, the
Sun King, in France, are for the most part related to
the twentieth century. Abram Kardiner (1977) and
Ruth Benedict (1935), writers on culture and psychoanalysis, would later make use of FreudÕs interest in
anthropology.
FreudÕs views on the genesis of matriarchy, however,
are totally dissociated from his writings about women.
Women, Freud wrote, ‘‘come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining
influence’’ (1930a, p. 103). Here too the cunning of
civilization is on display: Women form the basis of
civilization, ‘‘represent[ing] the interests of the family
and sexual life.’’ They are betrayed, however, by the
fact that men sublimate to their detriment. ‘‘The
woman,’’ Freud concludes, ‘‘finds herself forced into
the background by the claims of civilization, and she
adopts a hostile attitude toward it’’ (1930a, p. 104).
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia;
Applied psychoanalysis and the interactions of psychoanalysis; Civilization and its Discontents; ‘‘Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest’’; Cultural transmission;
Darwin, Darwinism, and psychoanalysis; Future of an Illusion, The; Incest; Law and psychoanalysis; Marxism and
psychoanalysis; Moses and Monotheism; Organic repression; Phylogenetic Fantasy, A: Overview of the Transference
Neuroses; Politics and psychoanalysis; Primitive horde;
Religion and psychoanalysis; Rolland, Romain Edme PaulEmile; Smell, sense of; Sociology and psychoanalysis,
sociopsychoanalysis; Sublimation; Superego; Transgression; ‘‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.’’
Bibliography
Benedict, Ruth. (1935). Patterns of culture. London:
Routledge.
Freud, Sigmund. (1908d). Civilized sexual morality and
modern nervous illness. SE, 9: 181–204.
———. (1910a). Five lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 11: 7–55.
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PSYCHOANALYSIS
TO
SCIENTIFIC INTEREST’’
———. (1927c). The future of an illusion. SE, 21: 5–56.
———. (1930a). Civilization and its discontents. SE, 21:
64–145.
———. (1932a). The acquisition and control of fire. SE, 22:
183–193.
Kardiner, Abram. (1977). My analysis with Freud. Reminiscences. New York: W. W. Norton.
Le Rider, Jacques. (1993). Kultur contre civilisation. Topique,
52, 273–287.
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1992). Le plaisir de pensée. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
‘‘CLAIMS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
TO SCIENTIFIC INTEREST’’
The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest was
first published in the Italian review Scientia. It was the
first of FreudÕs texts to be translated into French, and
this translation was by M.W. Horn. ScientiaÕs title page
contained some information concerning the publication: it was a bimonthly based in Milan, its subtitle
being International Review of Scientific Synthesis. It was
co-edited in London and Leipzig, and in Paris by Félix
Alcan. Among its contributors between 1912 and 1914
were Alfred Adler, Émile Durckheim, Albert Einstein,
Henri Piéron, Henri Poincaré, and Bertrand Russell.
‘‘I have just had to do an unwanted job, a kind of
introduction to psycho-analysis for Scientia; I did it, not
wishing to refuse in view of the admirable character of
that international journal,’’ Freud wrote to Oskar Pfister
on March 11, 1913. It was in fact a ‘‘propaganda article,’’
in FreudÕs words to Karl Abraham on September 21,
aimed at making a large public more familiar with the
advantages and possibilities that psychoanalysis offered
to contemporary culture. Presented in German in the
review and simultaneously in French in an attached fascicule containing other translations from this resolutely
eclectic collection, the first part, Its Interest for Psychology, was thus published in the supplement to volume
XIV dated September 1, 1913. The second, Its Interest for
the Non-Psychological Sciences, was published in the supplement to the next issue, dated November 1, 1913. For
unknown reasons, although World War I no doubt had
a large role to play, it remained totally unknown to
French psychoanalysts until 1976.
The first part is a summary, such as Freud was
good at producing, of the psychoanalytic theory of
30 0
parapraxes, dreams and their interpretation, and of
the hopes of curing psychopathological affections. But
the second part is perhaps the most original because in
it Freud develops the spirit of ‘‘conquest’’ (he used the
expression in a letter to Jung in 1909) with regard to
‘‘other domains of knowledge,’’ a spirit that motivated
him ever since the afflux of students put an end to his
splendid isolation. The break with the Jungians further
reinforced the necessity of familiarizing researchers
with the ‘‘reveals unexpected relations’’ (p. 165)
between their subjects and the pathology of mental
life" (p. 165).
First mentioned were the ‘‘language sciences,’’ a
pre-eminence that may easily seem prophetic. Interpretation is the ‘‘translations from an alien method of
expression into the one which is familiar to us’’
(p. 176) and the study of dream symbols evokes ‘‘the
earliest phases of linguistic development and conceptual construction’’ (p. 176). ‘‘The language of dreams
may be looked upon as the method by which unconscious mental activity expresses itself. But the unconscious speaks more than one dialect’’ (p. 177).
‘‘The philosophical interest of psycho-analysis’’
(p. 178) comes next, specifically asserting the existence
of an Unconscious that is no longer a mystical hypothesis, and the new implications of this for ‘‘the relation
of mind to body’’ (p. 178). But FreudÕs distrust of philosophers found expression in the paragraph where he
extols the merits of a psychoanalytic pathography that
‘‘psychography’’ (p. 179) that ‘‘can indicate the subjective and individual motives behind philosophical theories which have ostensibly sprung from impartial
logical work’’ (p. 179).
It was in terms of its ‘‘biological’’ (p. 179) interest
that psychoanalysis attracted the most criticism: the
revelation of the importance of the sexual function
shocked, mainly because of the light it shed on the forbidden territory of infantile sexuality. It was, however,
desirable to establish a junction between the two
sciences in order to have a better understanding of the
instincts, a point of contact with biology’’ (p. 182) and
to shed light on their ‘‘active’’ and ‘‘passive’’ properties
in their relations with masculinity and femininity.
‘‘The interest of psycho-analysis from a developmental point of view’’ followed next, organized
around the evolution from the psychic life of the child
to that of the adult and the discovery that ‘‘in spite of
all the later development that occurs in the adult, none
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of the infantile formations perish. All the wishes,
instinctual impulses, modes of reaction and attitudes
of childhood are still demonstrably present in maturity
and in appropriate circumstances emerge once more’’
(p. 184). Moreover, psychoanalysis confirmed the idea
that ‘‘Ôontogeny is a repetition of phylogeny’’ (p. 184),
which demonstrated its ‘‘interest . . . from the point of
view of the history of civilization’’ (p. 184) in relation
to deciphering myths, understanding primitive peoples, ancient civilizations and religions. The new
hypothesis was that ‘‘the principle function of the
mental mechanism is to relieve the individual from the
tensions created in him by his needs. One part of this
task can be achieved by extracting satisfaction from
the external world; and for this purpose it is essential
to have control over the real world’’ (p. 186). The
study of the neuroses demonstrated the same dynamism and thus enriched anthropological research with
its discoveries.
‘‘The interest of psycho-analysis from the point of
view of the science of aesthetics’’ (p. 187) is next
stressed, opening the door to this form of ‘‘applied psychoanalysis’’ that has been of such importance in the
history of psychoanalysis. But Freud cautiously states
that ‘‘the motive forces of artists are the same conflicts
which drive other people into neurosis and have encouraged society to construct its institutions. Whence it is
that the artist derives his creative capacity is not a question for psychology’’ (p. 187). Art ‘‘constitutes a region
half-way between a reality which frustrates wishes and
the wish-fulfilling world of the imagination—a region
in which, as it were, primitive manÕs strivings for omnipotence are still in full force’’ (p. 188).
The erotism underlying social relations and the
repression required by the cohabitation of human
beings are essential psychoanalytic contributions to
‘‘sociology.’’ Hence, also, ‘‘the educational interest’’
(p. 189) of a science that becomes more familiar with
the real psychic life of the child and its evolution. ‘‘We
grown-up people cannot understand children because
we no longer understand our own childhood’’
(p. 189). Teachers learned from the discoveries concerning the ‘‘Oedipus complex, self-love (or ÔnarcissismÕ), the disposition to perversions, anal erotism,
[and] sexual curiosity’’ (p. 189). Psychoanalysis ‘‘can
also show what precious contributions to the
formation of character are made by these asocial and
perverse instincts in the child, if they are not subjected
to repression but are diverted from their original aims
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to more valuable ones by the process known as Ôsublimation.Õ Our highest virtues have grown up, as reaction formations and sublimations, out of our worst
dispositions’’ (p. 190).
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Anthropology and psychoanalysis; Applied psychoanalysis and the interactions of psychoanalysis; Ego;
France; Imago. Zeitschrift für die Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften. ‘‘On the History of
the Psychoanalytic Movement’’; Psychoanalytic epistemology; Sociology and psychoanalysis, sociology.
Source Citation
Freud, Sigmund. (1913j). Das Interesse an der Psychoanalyse. Scientia, XIV, p. 240–250, 369–384; GW, VIII: 389–
420; The claims of psycho-analysis to scientific interest. SE,
13: 163–190.
CLAPARÈDE, ÉDOUARD (1873–1940)
Édouard Claparède, a Swiss physician and psychologist, was born March 24, 1873, in Geneva, where he
died September 30, 1940. He was born into a Protestant family that left Languedoc after the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes; his father was a pastor. His precocious interest in natural science, the legacy of his childhood admiration for the paternal uncle whose name
he bore, would have repercussions on his future career.
Claparède did not feel any religious calling and envisaged a future in the sciences. The individual who had
the greatest influence on him was his uncle Théodore
Flournoy, nineteen years his senior. It was because of
him that Claparède developed an interest in psychology. This interest led him to study medicine, which
seemed to him ‘‘the best introduction to the study of
mankind.’’ He completed his medical studies in
Geneva in 1897 after a brief period of study in Leipzig.
In 1899 he became a collaborator with Flournoy, who
turned over to him the job of running the psychology
laboratory in 1904.
Together with his uncle, Claparède founded the
Archives de psychologie in 1901, where the first French
reviews of FreudÕs work appeared, together with that
of other psychoanalysts. In 1903 they published
Théodore FlournoyÕs review of The Interpretation of
Dreams. There were several articles on FreudÕs work,
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CLARK UNIVERSITY
including Über Psychotherpie (‘‘On Psychotherapy’’;
1905) and another on Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; 1905). It
was not long before discussions were underway to
make the Archives de psychologie a French-language
‘‘psychoanalytic journal.’’ This effort, undertaken by
Carl Gustav Jung, was unsuccessful. But the review did
publish work by Jung, Alphons Maeder, Charles
Baudouin, Charles Odier, Henri Flournoy, and Raymond de Saussure. Every year critical essays on psychoanalytic works appeared, but the psychoanalysis
section disappeared from the review in 1930.
In 1912 Claparède founded the Institut JeanJacques Rousseau, where the psychoanalysts Ernst
Schneider (1916–1919) and Charles Baudouin began
teaching in 1915. When Sabina Spielrein came to Geneva in 1920, she became his assistant. Oskar Pfister
dreamed that the institute would become a place
where ‘‘teaching psychoanalysts’’ would be trained.
But his project never materialized.
Aside from his essays in Archives de psychologie, Claparède published ‘‘Quelques mots sur la définition de
lÕhystérie’’ (1907), ‘‘De la représentation des personnes
inconnues et des lapsus linguae’’ (1914), ‘‘Freud et la psychanalyse’’ (1920), ‘‘Quelques remarques sur le subconscient’’ (1923), ‘‘Freud va avoir quatre-vingt ans’’ (1936).
Claparède was not, strictly speaking, a psychoanalyst but he favored the diffusion of psychoanalysis in
French-speaking Switzerland and, therefore, in France,
and he defended psychoanalysis against its detractors.
As Freud wrote to him on May 24, 1908, concerning
psychoanalysis: Claparède is ‘‘in some sense a measure
of the international growth to which we aspire.’’
MIREILLE CIFALI
See also: Archives de psychologie, Les; Institut Claparède;
Société psychanalytique de Genève; Subconscious; Switzerland (French-speaking).
Bibliography
Claparède was responsible for the first French translation of FreudÕs Über Psychoanalyse, Fünf Vorlesungen
gehalten zur 20 jährigen Gründungsfeier der Clark University (Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis). The translation was published in the December 1920 and January
and February 1921 issues of the Revue de Genève, with
the title ‘‘Origine et développement de la psychanalyse.’’ The translator was Yves Le Lay. Claparède added
an introduction entitled ‘‘Freud et la psychanalyse.’’
Claparède took part in the Salzburg (1908) and
Nuremberg (1910) Congresses. He founded the Cercle
Psychanalytique de Genève (Geneva Psychoanalytic
Circle) in 1919, of which he became president, but he
did not belong to the Société Suisse de Psychanalyse
(Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis), created on February 10, 1919. On September 19, 1919, he was invited to
join. His correspondence with Freud was published by
Carlo Trombetta (1970). He also corresponded with
Oskar Pfister.
It can be assumed that Claparède underwent a certain amount of psychoanalysis with Pfister between
1915 and 1918. Was he analyzed by Sabina Spielrein
during the twenties? We have no confirmation of this
and if he did undergo analysis, it would only have been
for a short period of time. Freud spoke of him as a
dilettante. An eclectic individual, Claparède never
wanted to become too deeply involved in
psychoanalysis.
30 2
Cifali, Mireille. (1982). ‘‘Entre Genève et Paris: Vienne,’’
Bloc-notes de la psychanalyse, 2, 91–127.
———. (1991). Notes autour de la première traduction
française dÕune œuvre de Sigmund Freud. Revue internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse, 4, 291–305.
Claparède, Edouard. (1920). Freud et la psychanalyse. Revue
de Genève, 6, 850–851.
Trombetta, Carlo. (1970). ‘‘Claparède e Freud. Con publicazione di inediti,’’ Orientamenti pedagogici, 17, 6.
———. (1989). Édouard Claparède psicologo. Rome:
Armando. Clark University
CLARK UNIVERSITY
Sigmund Freud’s only visit to the United States was in
1909, when he was invited by G. Stanley Hall, first president of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts,
to deliver a series of lectures to celebrate the twentieth
anniversary of the university.
Hall invited twenty-seven other distinguished participants, all of whom received honorary degrees,
including the Nobel Laureates in physics Albert
Michelson and Ernest Rutherford. But clearly Freud
was the most important participant, in HallÕs view;
part of the celebration was delayed from July to September, the date Freud requested, so as not to interfere
with his private practice. Hall also invited Carl Gustav
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C L A R K - W I L L I A M S , M A R G A R E T (1910 –1 975)
Jung to participate, and Freud asked Sándor Ferenczi
to accompany him. The three psychoanalysts thus
sojourned from Bremen to New York on the George
Washington. They spent a week in New York, welcomed by Abraham Brill, seeing their first movie, visiting Central Park, Chinatown, the Lower East Side,
Coney Island, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Freud
especially enjoyed the antiquities). At the Psychiatric
Clinic at Columbia University, near Riverside Drive
overlooking the Hudson River, Freud experienced an
embarrassing incident of urinary incontinence. Worried that he might experience another while on stage
at Clark, Jung offered to help by analyzing the incident. Freud produced a dream, but the associations to
it apparently became too intimate; when Jung pressed,
Freud demurred, saying he could not risk his authority
by such disclosures. According to JungÕs account, this
began the break between the two of them.
See also: Brill, Abraham Arden; Five Lectures on PsychoAnalysis; Jones, Ernest; Putnam, James Jackson; United
States.
Freud was ecstatic by the invitation and by the prospect of lecturing to a distinguished American audience.
After years of working in ‘‘splendid isolation’’ he found
himself ‘‘received by the foremost men as an equal. As I
stepped on to the platform at Worcester to deliver my
Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis it seemed like the realization of some incredible day-dream: psycho-analysis
was no longer a product of a delusion, it had become a
valuable part of reality. It has not lost ground in America since our visit . . .’’ (Freud, 1925d, p.52). In the audience were William James (he and Freud walked together
and James suffered what was probably an angina attack
from the heart disease that was to kill him shortly thereafter), Emma Goldman, and many other notables.
CLARK-WILLIAMS, MARGARET
(1910–1975)
To be spontaneous, Freud delivered the five lectures
without notes or extensive preparation; he simply
talked with Ferenczi shortly before each lecture about
the dayÕs topic. Later, Freud changed the text somewhat before publication by ClarkÕs house organ.
Intending a general introduction, Freud discussed hysteria, repression and the talking cure, functions and
interpretation of dreams, childhood sexuality, and
symptoms. One of the great intellectual events of the
century, the trip greatly stimulated the growth of psychoanalysis in the United States: the American Psychoanalytic Association was founded in Baltimore just
two years later, years earlier than may have been the
case otherwise.
ROBERT SHILKRET
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Bibliography
Cooper, Martha, & Makay, John J. (1988). Knowledge,
power, and FreudÕs Clark Conference lectures. Quarterly
Journal of Speech, 74, 416–433.
Freud, Sigmund. (1910 [1909]). Five lectures on psychoanalysis. SE, 11: 1–56.
———. (1925). An autobiographical study. SE, 20: 1–74.
Hale, Nathan G., Jr. (1971). Freud and the Americans: The
beginnings of psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–
1917. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rosenzweig, Saul. (1992). Freud, Jung, and Hall the KingMaker: The historic expedition to America (1909). Seattle,
WA: Hogrefe & Huber.
A psychologist and psychoanalyst who practiced in
France, Margaret Clark-Williams was born in the United States in 1910 to a family of prominent academics;
she died in 1975.
At 21 she went first to France, then to Vienna,
where she made her initial contacts in psychoanalytic
circles. After a period in the United States with her two
children, she returned to France in 1945 and began
psychoanalysis with Raymond de Saussure, clinical
training with Georges Heuyer, and university studies
with Daniel Lagache; she also practiced analysis under
the supervision of John Leuba. She subsequently
worked as a psychotherapist at the recently opened
Centre Claude Bernard. Nothing had prepared ClarkWilliams, a reserved woman of charm and humor, to
become the center of a sensational media affair widely
reported in the French press. Major articles on the
Clark-Williams Trial, as it became known, appeared in
Le Figaro, Paris Presse, Combat, Le Monde, and
Libération.
In March 1950 the official Order of Physicians
brought legal action against Clark-Williams for illicit
practice of medicine ‘‘due to the fact that she practices
psychoanalysis and, therefore, medicine.’’ By French
law (lÕOrdonnance du 24 septembre 1945), physicians
alone had the right to diagnose and treat illness. However, at the Sorbonne in 1947 Daniel Lagache had
303
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created a licence (i.e., masterÕs degree) in psychology,
and in 1950 the first graduates sought to put their education to practical use in a therapeutic context.
Meanwhile, a Gaullist cabinet member and nonmedical psychoanalyst, Georges Mauco, through the
intermediary of the Committees of Population and
the Family, had created the Centre Claude Bernard,
the first psychopedagogical institution in France, in
1945. The Center boasted two distinctive features. It
took account of the fact that the role of emotions had
theretofore been neglected in favor of cognitive issues,
and it brought the psychoanalyst into the consulting
room for the initial interviews. In France this represented the first extension of psychoanalysis into social
institutions.
Clark-WilliamsÕs trial, which began on December 4,
1951, turned quickly to her advantage. Medically
trained analysts attested to her competence and,
although she was not a physician, they described her
as perfectly qualified to practice psychoanalysis.
Dr. Leuba went so far as to request that he sit with the
defendant since the accused was one of his former students. Arguments quickly centered on the relationship
of medicine and psychoanalysis. Clark-WilliamsÕs supporters had no difficulty explaining that, inasmuch as
medicine did not officially recognize psychoanalysis, it
was in no position to accuse psychoanalysts of practicing medicine illegally.
Analysts Georges Parcheminey and André Berge
testified that psychoanalysis did not involve treating
an illness but resembled an effort to help a person with
‘‘abnormal behavior’’ to adjust. Daniel Lagache and
Juliette Favez-Boutonier suggested that ‘‘psychoanalysis is not a medicine but a psychological technique.’’
Jacques Lacan, who did not take part in the trial but
became involved at meetings where the issue was
debated, offered his view that ‘‘it is difficult for doctors
to do without the best psychologists.’’
When the court rendered judgment on March 31,
1952, it ruled to dismiss charges against the defendant.
The Order of Physicians appealed and on July 15,
1953, a second verdict found Clark-Williams guilty
and imposed the purely symbolic fine of one franc.
Contrary to the plaintiffsÕ intentions, the trial served
to advance the cause of psychologists and lay psychoanalysis in France.
GEORGES SCHOPP
30 4
See also: Berge, André; Bonaparte, Marie Léon; FavezBoutonier, Juliette; France; Lay analysis; Mauco, Georges;
Société psychanalytique de Paris et Institut de psychanalyse de Paris.
Bibliography
Berge, André. (1975). Nécrologie de Margaret Clark
Williams. Revue française de psychanalyse, 39 (4), 669–670.
Freud, Sigmund. (1926). The question of lay analysis. SE, 20:
183–250.
Schopp, Georges. (1990). ‘‘LÕaffaire Clark-Williams ou la
question de lÕanalyse laı̈que en France.’’ Revue internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse, 3, 199–239.
CLAUDE, HENRI CHARLES JULES
(1869–1946)
Henri Claude was born in Paris in 1869, where he died
in 1946. He was a French physician, psychiatrist, and
professor of the chair of mental illness and brain disease at Saint-AnneÕs Hospital. He played a leading role
in introducing psychoanalysis in France.
An assistant to Professor Fulgence Raymond at the
Salpêtrière Hospital, he developed an interest in neuropsychiatry. Although committed to the physiological
origin of mental disease, he developed an early interest
in psychoanalysis. Although we may laugh, like Sigmund Freud, at his ambivalence, nonetheless he was
one of the first to accept Freudian theories and to
encourage the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the hospitals where he worked. He was, for
example, receptive to the work of Adolf Schmiergeld
and was present at the session of the Société de Neurologie on July 4, 1907, when Schmiergeld, together with
P. Provotelle, presented ‘‘La méthode psychoanalytique
et les ÔAbwehr-NeuropsychosenÕ de Freud,’’ one of the
first serious studies on psychoanalysis in France.
In February 1913 he authored a report on the fourth
edition of Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (The
psychopathology of everyday life), which concludes: ‘‘In
short, this book, whose conception is so uncommon in
the French literature (however, in this context, the work
of Maeder, 1906, should be mentioned) and which is
written in an accessible language, should be better
known to psychologists and physicians.’’
When he was appointed the chair at Sainte-Anne in
1922, he apparently removed from his department
Eugénie Sokolnicka, the woman Georges Heuyer had
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put in charge of psychoanalysis during his tenure, to
replace her with René Laforgue. Claude commented, ‘‘I
ask that this psychoanalytic practice, which is so shocking
in some respects, remain strictly within the scope of
medicine, and I exclude from these investigations anyone
who is not impregnated with the notion of responsibility
felt by any physician worthy of the name. . . . The danger
is carrying out the risky Freudian transference’’ (1924).
From August 2 to 7, 1926, Claude attended the
Congrès des Médecins Aliénistes et Neurologistes de
France et des Pays de Langue Française, which was
held in Geneva. During the congress, at which he presented a report on what was then the focus of his psychiatric work, ‘‘Démence précoce et schizophrénie,’’
his young students René Laforgue, Gilbert Robin, and
Adrien Borel, accompanied by Mrs. Laforgue, Raymond and Ariane de Saussure, Angélo Hesnard, and
Édouard Pichon created the first Conférence des Psychanalystes de Langue Française (Conference of
French-speaking psychoanalysts) on August 1, 1926.
After 1931 it was in the lecture hall of the Clinique des
Maladies Mentales that these conferences took place.
The department of which he was in charge welcomed psychoanalysis, whose therapeutic merits he
extolled by publishing, with Laforgue, highly optimistic statistics on rates of recovery. Pierre Mâle became
his medical extern in 1920. In 1927 Michel Cénac, one
of the doctors who ran the clinic, along with Paul
Schiff, Charles-Henri Nodet, Adrien Borel, and many
others sought training with Claude. Later, Jean Delay,
who was his student in 1939, continued to use psychoanalysis in his own department beginning in 1942. It
was Claude who created the first laboratory of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis at the school of medicine at the University of Paris. In December 1931 he
appointed Sacha Nacht to be head of the lab.
In 1926 Laforgue wrote to Freud, ‘‘I have enclosed
the schedule of courses at ClaudeÕs clinic. This will
give you an idea of the importance of psychoanalysis
in these courses. Starting next year the courses will be
given in the main building of the school of medicine.’’
This was the only source of psychoanalytic training in
France prior to the creation of the Institut de Psychanalyse in 1934. Departments of psychology offered no
training in psychoanalysis since Georges Dumas, who
had worked with Claude, was violently opposed to it.
As director of the review LÕEncéphale, Claude was a
busy editor, publishing a number of articles and
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prefaces, including the preface to Roland DalbiezÕs
dissertation ‘‘La Méthode psychanalytique et la Doctrine de Freud,’’ in 1936. But it was a preface he
wrote in 1924 that later cast an unfavorable light on
his character. Here he wrote ‘‘By agreeing to present
to the medical public the book by Messrs. Laforgue
and Allendy on Psychanalyses et les névroses, I have
not hidden from the authors that it was not my
intent to support their opinions . . . Certain investigative procedures which shock the delicacy of intimate
sentiments and of certain habitual ways of looking at
things, by means of an extremist symbolism, applicable perhaps with subjects of another race, do not
strike me as appropriate in a Ôclinique latine.Õ’’ Freud
responded to the authors, on June 29, 1924: ‘‘I have
received your book. Naturally, I havenÕt yet read it
but after ClaudeÕs preface I see that it must be good,
for his reservations prove to me that you have not
compromised in any way and were not afraid of
being contradicted.’’
More serious than these reservations, the presumed
eviction of Eugénie Sokolnicka, the threat of his
‘‘patronage’’ to the detriment of FreudÕs during the
creation of the Revue française de psychanalyse in 1927,
and his attitude throughout the Occupation, when in
1941 he participated in René LaforgueÕs aborted project to create a French section of the Société de Psychothérapie Nazie (Nazi society for psychotherapy),
directed by Professor Matthias Göring, diminished
any positive elements of his support at a time when
just about all French physicians were opposed to
psychoanalysis.
Yet, André Breton may have said it best when he
wrote: ‘‘The essential thing is that I do not suppose
there can be much difference for Nadja between the
inside of a sanitarium and the outside. There must,
unfortunately, be a difference all the same, on account
of the grating sound of a key turning in a lock, or the
wretched view of the garden, the cheek of the people
who question you when you want to be left alone, like
Professor Claude at Sainte-Anne, with his dunceÕs
forehead and that stubborn expression on his face
(ÔYouÕre being persecuted, arenÕt you?Õ No, monsieur.
ÔHeÕs lying, last week he told me he was being persecuted.Õ Or ÔYou hear voices, do you? Well, are they
voices like mine?Õ No, Monsieur. ÔYou see, he has
auditory hallucinations.Õ).’’
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
305
CLAUSTROPHOBIA
See also: Congrès des psychanalystes de langue française
des pays romans; Delay, Jean; Disque vert, Le; Ey, Henri;
Psychanalyse et les nevroses, La; Revue française de psychanalyse; Sainte-Anne Hospital.
Bibliography
Claude, Henri. (1913). Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, par Sigm. Freud, de Vienne (De la psychopathologie
de la vie de tous les jours). (4th ed.). Berlin: Lib. S. Karger.
———. (1924, May). Freud et la méthode psychanalytique.
Les nouvelles littéraires.
Freud, Sigmund. (1977h). Correspondance Freud-Laforgue,
préface d’André Bourguignon. Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse, 15, p. 235–314.
Laforgue, René; and Allendy, René. (1924). La psychanalyse
et les névroses. Paris: Payot.
CLAUSTROPHOBIA
Benjamin Ball introduced the term ‘‘claustrophobia’’
into the field of psychiatric semiology in 1879. It is
derived from the Latin claustrum (enclosed place) and
the Greek phobos (fear). Claustrophobia is defined as
the fear of enclosed spaces. Faced with the impossibility of escape, the person suffering from claustrophobia
fears being suffocated, being crushed, losing consciousness, or losing control of his actions or sphincter
muscles. Avoidance techniques are then developed
together with counterphobic behavior (being accompanied by another person, carrying a key) or behavioral modifications (opening doors and windows,
positioning oneself near an exit).
The word is part of psychiatric semiology. Albert
Pitres and Emmanuel Régis (1902) classify claustrophobia as a phobia of place, and Pierre Janet as one of
the systematic anxieties constituting psychasthenia.
Recent British and American clinical practice includes
claustrophobia among the simple phobias, often associated with agoraphobia, which predominantly affect
women and are rare in children (Freud, A., 1977).
For Sigmund Freud claustrophobia is one of the
phobias of locomotion, similar to agoraphobia. Its
metapsychological status evolved along with the development of his theories of anxiety and the construction
of phobias. Freud first considered it as one of the
chronic symptoms of neurasthenia (Manuscript B,
1893, in 1950a). Later he distinguished it, along with
the other phobias, from the obsessions (‘‘Obsessions
30 6
and Phobias,’’ 1895c), ultimately associating it with
anxiety hysteria (1905d). In his early writings, he interpreted claustrophobia as the result of an excess of
unused libido. He related it to castration anxiety, produced by the repression of oedipal desire. Here, the
emergence of free anxiety was displaced and projected
onto the phobic object, in this case an enclosed space.
Melanie Klein (1932/1975) believed it involved a
projective identification with the dangerous body of
the mother, with the anxiety of being enclosed there
and castrated by the fatherÕs penis. Bertram D. Lewin
(1935) proposed a similar definition of claustrophobia, in which he refers to an unconscious fantasy of
return to the maternal breast, accompanied by oral
fantasies of being devoured. For Otto Fenichel (1953)
the enclosed space that is feared represents the
patientÕs body and the sensations the patient is trying
to get rid of through projection of excess excitation
onto the claustrum. The phobogenic situation mobilizes infantile anxieties, the fear of solitude, and the
temptation to masturbate. François Perrier (1956/
1994) saw claustrophobia as being organized like
speech, where, symbolically, a key held in the hand
enables one to avoid the anxiety, thus escaping the
enclosed world of the mother and making access to the
father possible. Some authors explored other aspects
of claustrophobia, analyzing its associations with
depression (Gehl, R. H., 1965) or agoraphobia (Weiss,
E. 1964).
LAURENT MULDWORF
See also: Phobic neurosis; Phobias in children.
Bibliography
Birraux, Annie. (1994). Éloge de la phobie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Compton, Allan. (1997). La théorie psychanalytique des
phobies. In Peurs et Phobies (p. 33–65). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Gehl, Raymond H. (1965). Dépression et claustrophobie.
Revue française de psychanalyse, 29 (2–3), 233–255.
Fenichel, Otto. (1953). Respiratory introjection. In The collected papers, first series. New York: W.W. Norton.
Freud, Anna. (1977). Fears, anxieties, and phobic phenomena. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 32, 85–90.
Freud, Sigmund. (1895c [1894]). Obsessions and phobias:
their psychical mechanism and their aetiology. SE, 3:
69–82.
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COCAINE
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
———. (1950a [1887-1902]). Extracts from the Fliess
papers. SE, 1: 173–280.
Klein, Melanie. (1975). The psycho-analysis of children. In
The Writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 2). London: Hogarth.
(Original work published 1932)
Lewin, Bertrand D. (1935). Claustrophobia. Psychoanalytic
Quarterly 4, 227–233.
Perrier François. (1994). Phobies et hystérie d’angoisse. In
Jacques Sédat (Ed.), La Chaussée d’Antin (New rev. ed.,
p. 300–325). Paris, Albin Michel. (Original work
published 1956)
Pitres Albert, and Régis, Emmanuel. (1902). Les obsessions et
les impulsions. Paris: O. Doin.
Weiss, Edoardo. (1964). Agoraphobia in the light of ego psychology. New York, Grune & Stratton.
AND
PSYCHOANALYSIS
opment to form the clinging theory. He conducted
wide-ranging investigations, starting with primate biology, through clinical facts supported by neurological
data, and through developmental psychological data he
examined the relationship of the phenomenology of the
clinging syndrome to love, anxiety, shame, and, through
ego development, to thinking. He also studied ethnology, culture history, and social psychology.
Later ethological researchers (e.g., Harlow and
Lawick-Goodall) demonstrated the verisimilitude of
HermannÕs theories, while John BowlbyÕs and René
SpitzÕs concepts demonstrated them biosocially.
Michel Balint integrated the theory into his concept of
primary love.
HUNGARIAN GROUP
See also: Hermann, Imre; Hungary; Hungarian School;
Ethology and psychoanalysis.
Further Reading
Bibliography
Asch, Stuart S. (1966). Claustrophobia and depression. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 14, 711–729.
Binet, Agnes. (1977). Comportement dÕattachement ou
instinct de cramponnement? Psychiatrie de l’enfant, 20,
533–564.
Willoughby, Roger. (2001). ’The dungeon of thyself ’: the
claustrum as pathological container. International Journal
of Psychoanalysis, 82, 917–932.
———. (1976). Clinging-searching:contrasting instincts, rel.
sadism, masochism,’’ Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 45:5–36.
CLINGING INSTINCT
———. (1978). Psychanalyse et logique. Paris: Denoël.
Imre Hermann presupposes an instinct manifest in primates and latent in human babies, namely, the drive to
cling to the mother, which is frustrated from the outset
by the absence of biological endowments, but is present
in the form of reflexes (grasping, Moro, heat-orientation)
in the early stages of development and in later pathological symptoms (e.g., hair-pulling, nail-biting).
Based on the psychoanalytical examination of comparative psychology, Hermann first expounded the theory of the clinging instinct in the study, ‘‘Sich Anklammern und Auf-SucheGehen,’’ in 1936. He described the
operation of phylogenic heritage in the mother-child
dual union, its integration into the libidinal organization, the relationship of frustrated instinct drives to castration complex, to passively endured separational
trauma and active separational drive, to sadism and
masochism, to destruction instinct and narcissism. In
his book, The Primeval Instincts of Man (1943), he
expanded the biosocial model theory of human develINTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
Hermann, Imre . (1943). Az ember ösi össztönei. Budapest:
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Nemes, L. (1980). Biographical notes of Professor Imre Hermann, International Review of Psychoanalysis, 7, 1–2.
COCAINE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Cocaine is an alkaloid extracted from coca leaves,
which has been used in medicine for its analgesic and
anesthetic properties. Cocaine dependency is an addiction to this narcotic. The relation between cocaine and
psychoanalysis goes back to Freud’s research in which
he used the substance as an ophthalmic anesthetic.
Cocaine was first used as an anesthetic agent in
Vienna in 1884. Freud conducted research into the
physiological action of the drug with a view to using it
for therapeutic purposes. It was nevertheless his colleague, Carl Köller, who continued this work and to
whom we attribute the discovery of the anesthetic
properties of cocaine, based on its use in eye surgery.
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Years later Freud described the situation in these terms:
‘‘A side interest, though it was a deep one, had led me in
1884 to obtain from Merck some of what was then the
little-known alkaloid cocaine and to study its physiological action. . . . I suggested, however, to my friend
Köningstein, the ophthalmologist, that he should investigate the question of how far the anaesthetizing properties of cocaine were applicable in diseases of the eye’’
(1925d, pp. 14–15). Ernest Jones (1953) reports that in
1884 Freud administered injections of cocaine to his
friend Ernst von Fleischl in order to wean him off his
morphine addiction and to ease his terrible trigeminal
neuralgia. One year later he observed that the massive
doses of cocaine required by Fleischl had led to chronic
intoxication. He thus discovered the toxicity of cocaine,
which stood in the way of its being used medically.
Coca leaves and cocaine had been used in the Americas
as stimulants to fight fatigue and hunger, but their use
led to neurochemical and physiological effects as well as
severe addiction problems.
Psychoanalysis has studied the underlying dynamics
and the unconscious fantasies that drive patients to seek
out the chemical and physiological effects of cocaine in
a compulsive manner. Cocaine addiction is normally
difficult to cure. Classification of the pathological structures underlying cocaine addiction seems to suggest
that a process of pathological mourning or manicdepressive behavior can be found in many patients.
Patients sometimes seek out this toxic substance as a stimulant or an anti-depressant in order to conceal states
of depression. Some drug addicts unable to work
through their grief develop pathological mourning
wherein they identify with the lost dead object(s), thus
unconsciously putting their lives in grave danger. Their
repeated risk taking allows them to feel as if they are
conquering death and are being resuscitated. This fantasied resurrection represents success to these addicts, in
whose mental state the psychological notions of danger,
death, and suicide do not exist. The psychoanalytic
interpretation therefore must direct itself to the uncovering and interpreting of their resurrection fantasies
and thus lead them to give up living within a dead
object or give up identifying with a dead person.
DAVID ROSENFELD
See also: Addiction; Alienation; Anorexia nervosa;
Borderline conditions; Dependence; Fantasy (reverie);
Indications and counterindications for psychoanalysis;
Transitional object.
30 8
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1925d). An autobiographical study. SE,
20: 1–74.
Jones, Ernest. (1953). Sigmund Freud. Life and work. London: Hogarth.
Rosenfeld, David. (1992). The psychotic aspects of the personality. London-New York: Karnac Books.
COGNITIVISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Ever since the 1960s, an important body of thought
has developed in reaction to the presumed behaviorism according to which intellectual activity is beyond
the grasp of any form of scientific investigation. Cognitivism has marked a return to a scientific approach
to mental activity that has materialized in the development of the cognitive sciences.
The term refers to those sciences that study systems
for representing understanding and the processing of
information. Included in the term are certain areas of
speculative research (philosophy of mind), artificial
intelligence, semantic, syntactic, and lexical models
(linguistics), the study of human activities (psychology), and the neuronal basis of those activities (neuroscience). These disciplines do not fall entirely within
the field of cognitive science (social psychology or the
neurobiology of development, for example).
Cognitivism originally developed as an interdisciplinary activity. The work of Jean Piaget on genetic
epistemology and the work of Edward Toman on cognitive mapping opened the way in psychology long
before Miller, Galanter, and PribramÕs seminal work,
Plans and the Structure of Behavior (1960). The term
‘‘artificial intelligence’’ was coined during a seminar by
Herbert Simon.
The application of the methods of cognitive science
to the field of psychopathology is more recent (M. C.
Hardy-Baylé, 1996) and is based on work in the
philosophy of mind and a renewed interest in phenomenology as well as on expert systems in artificial
intelligence (models of paranoid thought, Parry), and
especially experimental research (anomalies in the
processing of information during schizophrenic states
or a slowing down of the decision-making process
during depressive states).
The development of cognitivism did not fail to
arouse suspicion and opposition on the part of
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psychoanalysts. Some of their reservations were based
on a confusion with so-called cognitive therapies,
which in reality have to do with the content of representations (judgment errors) and not the underlying
mechanisms. They are based on the use of suggestion,
which falls within the domain of behavioral therapy,
which in turn draws on behaviorism. More serious
reservations involve the fact that cognitivism, which is
primarily concerned with understanding, has often
neglected the role of affects and has not sufficiently
taken into consideration the question of motivation or
the role of the body.
For their part cognitive science specialists have contested the scientific value of psychoanalytic theories
and, until recently, have had little interest in the area
of pathology.
In fact it is easy to show that Sigmund FreudÕs early
work clearly makes use of a cognitive approach (H. K.
Pribram, M. Gill, 1968 ), as does chapter seven of the
Interpretation of Dreams and a number of later texts.
Gradually the emphasis on a dynamic and economic
approach shifted the investigation to why rather than
how. David Rapaport and, later, Georges Klein
resumed the study of thought mechanisms to compare
them with experimental results. Their premature
deaths and the still strong influence of behaviorism on
the psychology of the time explain the delay before
psychoanalysts actually got around to confronting
these issues directly (P. Holzman, G. Aronson, 1992,
D. Widlöcher, 1993).
This confrontation appears to have shocked psychoanalysts, to the extent that they were accustomed
to question these disciplines in isolation (psychology,
linguistics, logic modeling) and not within an interdisciplinary framework. If psychoanalysis is to assume its
place within this framework, the terms of its inclusion
must be specified. It would be necessary to acknowledge that psychoanalysis is a unique form of communication and not a science. The knowledge gained
from it concerns complex objects that other
approaches must first break down into more simple
objects.
Such an exchange can benefit the cognitive sciences
by exposing them to an area of mental life that has not
been explored by them. Psychoanalysis can benefit by
escaping the intellectual isolation of their field. It is
less obvious how psychoanalytic treatment, as the
investigation of the unconscious, can benefit from a
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more analytic knowledge of the complex objects it
engages.
DANIEL WIDLÖCHER
See also: Amnesia; Archetype (analytical psychology);
Body; Non-verbal communication; Psychic causality;
Psychogenesis/organogenesis.
Bibliography
Hardy-Baylé, Marie-Christine. (1996). Troubles de l’information et troubles mentaux. In Daniel Widlöcher (Ed.).
Traité de psychopathologie (pp. 463–496). Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
Holzman, Philip, and Aronson, Gerald, (1992). Psychoanalysis and its neighboring sciences: Paradigms and opportunities, Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association,
40 (1), 63–88.
Miller, George A., Galanter, E., and Karl H. Pribram. (1960).
Plans and the structure of behavior, New York: Holt,
Rinehart & Winston.
Pribram, Karl H., Gill, Merton M. (1976). Freud’s ‘‘Project’’
reassessed. London: Hutchinson.
Widlöcher, Daniel. (1993a). Intentionnalité et psychopathologie, Revue internationale de psychopathologie, 10, 193–224.
———. (1993b). LÕanalyse cognitive du silence en psychanalyse. Quand les mots viennent à manquer, Revue internationale de psychopathologie, 12, 509–528.
COLLECTED PAPERS ON SCHIZOPHRENIA
AND RELATED SUBJECTS
By the time this book was published, Harold F. Searles,
M.D., was 47 years old and was already widely
regarded as the worldÕs leading authority on the
intensive psychotherapy of patients with chronic
schizophrenia.
His writings on schizophrenia reveal his unparalleled skill in making contact with severely ill patients,
and learning from them not only about schizophrenia,
but about the human condition in general. (‘‘Research
in schizophrenia has its greatest potential value in the
fact that the schizophrenic shows us in a sharply
etched form that which is so obscured, by years of progressive adaptation to adult interpersonal living, in
human beings in general.’’) He consistently avoids the
temptation to view the patient as the sole repository of
psychopathology within the patient-analyst dyad.
Thus, he continually focuses not only on the patientÕs
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transference to the analyst, but equally on the analystÕs
countertransference to the patient.
His many original contributions to the topic of
countertransference are among his most significant
and widely recognized accomplishments—for example, in discussing dependency conflicts over his regressive dependency needs and omnipotent fantasies, and
the role of these countertransference feelings in both
motivating the analyst to treat schizophrenic patients,
and also in interfering in the psychotherapeutic work.
SearlesÕs papers are unusual for the candor with
which he presents his own thoughts and feelings to the
reader. For example, in exploring the role of defenses
against grief and separation anxiety in the patientÕs
manifest vindictiveness, he writes of a woman who
fled her therapy with him to avoid facing her grief over
an early loss. Searles adds, ‘‘My belief now is that I,
too, contributed to the dissolution of the therapy, on
the basis of my own anxiety about grief from my early
life—an area which, at the time, I had not yet explored
at all thoroughly in my analysis.’’
Another quality which pervades SearlesÕs contributions is his deep and abiding interest in unconscious
processes, including those in patient and analyst. He
thus remains more faithful to FreudÕs work than many
analysts in the United States.
Searles believes that conflicts over love rather than
conflicts over hatred and rejection are more basic in the
development of schizophrenia. He contends that the
schizophrenic illness represents the patientÕs ‘‘loving
sacrifice of his very individuality for the welfare of a
mother who is loved genuinely, altruistically, and
with . . . wholehearted adoration.’’ He further maintains
that this genuine love, which is mutual, can be difficult
to recognize because the patient and mother are unconsciously afraid of their love for each other. He traces this
conflict back to the motherÕs own childhood experiences,
which have led her to believe that her love is destructive.
Searles emphasizes the role of symbiotic relatedness
between analyst and schizophrenic patient. He believes
the treatment of these patients is so prolonged partly
because both patient and analyst fear and resist this
symbiotic stage of the transference and countertransference. Because of the fluctuating role reversals in this
phase of treatment, the analyst must be relatively
accepting not only of omnipotent feelings that accompany being in the role of an infantÕs mother, but also
accepting of the infantile dependency feelings that result
31 0
from being in the converse role of the infant. Anticipating Kohut, Searles wrote as early as 1958 of the analystÕs
difficulty in tolerating the patientÕs adoration: ‘‘It
requires a sounder sense of self-esteem to be exposed to
the patientÕs genuine admiration, of this degree of
intensity, than to face his contempt towards oneself.
‘‘Driving the other person crazy’’ includes reciprocal
efforts to do so between parent and child, as well as
between analyst and patient. Lack of integration in one
person tends to have an emotionally disintegrating
impact on the other person. Motives for driving another
person crazy, which are largely unconscious, can include
a wish to destroy that person psychologically; a wish to
externalize oneÕs own craziness in the other person; a
childÕs wish that the parentÕs covert craziness would
become obvious enough that others would validate the
childÕs perceptions and share the burden of caring for
this parent; a wish to individuate or help the other person individuate, which may be experienced by both parent and child as a wish to drive the other person crazy;
and finally, Searles especially emphasizes the wish to
attain a deeply gratifying symbiotic mode of relatedness
with the other person. He notes that an important
unconscious motive in the analystÕs choice of profession
may be the presence of reaction formations to unconscious wishes to drive other people crazy. He speculates
that the irrational ‘‘schizophrenogenic mother’’ concept
appeals to analysts who are striving to deny their own
regressive urges toward symbiotic relatedness.
SearlesÕs influence on psychoanalysis and psychotherapy
worldwide has been immense. His genius at discerning and
describing unconscious processes in patient and analyst has
profoundly enriched our understanding of a wide range of
psychopathology, and has made invaluable contributions to
the understanding and use of countertransference.
RICHARD M. WAUGAMAN
See also: Counter-transference; Mutual analysis; Negative
therapeutic reaction; Schizophrenia.
Source Citation
Searles, Harold F. (1965). Collected papers on schizophrenia and
related subjects. New York: International University Press.
Bibliography
Langs, Robert, and Searles, Harold F. (1980). Intrapsychic
and interpersonal dimensions of treatment. New York: Jason
Aronson.
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Searles, Harold F. (1960). The nonhuman environment in
normal development and schizophrenia. New York: International Universities Press.
———. (1979). Countertransference and related subjects,
New York: International University Press.
———. (1986). My work with borderline patients, Northvale,
NJ: Aronson.
COLLECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Collective psychology, or human psychological behavior within communities, has been a subject of study
in the Bible and among the ancient Greeks, hence
since the origins of Western culture. In the nineteenth
century, new fields of investigation opened up: schools
of anthropology in Great Britain, folk psychology in
Germany, and sociology in France. Sigmund FreudÕs
predecessors and contemporaries within these schools
of thought were his favorite interlocutors. From the
outset, Freud collaborated in his works on individual
and collective psychology (see his letters to Wilhelm
Fliess dated December 6, 1896; January 24, 1897; and
May 31, 1897 [1950a]).
This form of debate, if not actual borrowing,
between psychoanalysis and collective psychology continued throughout FreudÕs work. A vivid and systematic picture thus emerges in which Totem and Taboo
(1912–1913a) formed the basis for the Schreber case
(1911c) and anticipated ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’ (1914c); in which Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego (1921c) is a response to Beyond
the Pleasure Principle (1920g) and paves the way for
The Ego and the Id (1923b); and in which The Future of
an Illusion (1927c) and Civilization and Its Discontents
(1930a [1929]) led Freud to develop and elaborate,
between 1923 and 1927, his structural theory (the castration complex, the superego, and the theory of anxiety) in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926d
[1925]).
Some other works also relate to FreudÕs first topography: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
(1905c), a contribution to the study of central European Jewish culture; ‘‘Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices’’ (1907b), the first major analogy
between individual and collective psychology; and
‘‘ÔCivilizedÕ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’’ (1908d), in which Freud proposes that society
reduce cultural sexual repression as a collective
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prophylaxis for neurosis. Moses and Monotheism:
Three Essays (1939a [1937–1939], one of FreudÕs last
works, brought together and explained the themes
developed on collective psychology and went on to
analyze Jewish and Christian monotheistic cultures.
Finally, there is FreudÕs work between 1930 and 1932
on U.S. President Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1966).
The nexus between individual and collective psychology is the family, as the origin of the Oedipus
complex and of totemism, which connects the transference neuroses with collective manifestations.
Previously Freud had investigated more localized analogies of the connection between individual and
group, such as analogies between the observances and
rituals of obsessive neurotics and those of religion.
From Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
(1921c) on, he proclaimed collective psychology to be
part of psychoanalysis and established his metapsychology on this basis. He discussed the libidinal
dynamics of the formation and stabilization of groups
in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c)
and explained the economic point of view in The
Future of an Illusion (1927c) and Civilization and Its
Discontents (1930a [1929]), where he related the economic point of view to hatred and fear. The topography characteristic of groups consists of reduced and
simplified forms of the individual psychic agencies of
the ego, ego ideal, and superego, as a result of the identifying ties that groups impose: ‘‘A primary group of
this kind is a number of individuals who have put one
and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and
have consequently identified themselves with one
another in their ego’’ (1921c, p. 116). Depending on
the form of authority and its degree of symbolic elaboration, these reductions are more or less extreme—
hence the importance of the great man, capable of
representing the ideal at the highest level of elaboration. There are three paradigmatic groups: the horde,
the matriarchy, and the totemic clan (in political
science, they correspond to rule by one person, by a
few, and by all). They differ according to type of representative of the ideal, which ranges from the flesh-andblood leader to such symbolic forms as the totem and
the stated ideal, which substitute for the leader after
the greater or lesser elaboration of his murder.
Freud created or developed some core concepts in
the course of this research: primal ambivalence, narcissism, the Oedipus complex (1912–1913a); identifications, the ego ideal, aim-inhibited drives, sublimation
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(1921c); the superego and guilt feelings, dereliction
and its consequences, the conflict between Eros and
Thanatos (1927c, 1930a); and splitting of the ego, constructions in analysis (1939a).
Criticisms have abounded, impeding work on
almost half of the body of FreudÕs work. FreudÕs
method of analogy (between individual and collective
psychic processes) has not been accepted, nor has his
dynamic method. FreudÕs explicit Lamarckism concerning the transmission of mnemic traces in groups
has been rejected. Freud has been criticized for a narrow view of religion that ignores its cultural contributions by considering it as a collective neurosis or
delusion. Finally, although Freud considered matriarchy at an early stage (1911f), he neglected other similar
figures of identification.
———. (1911c [1910]). Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides). SE, 12: 1–82.
———. (1911f). ‘‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’’ SE, 12:
342–344.
———. (1912–1913a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1–64.
———. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
———. (1926d [1925]). Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety. SE, 20: 75–172.
———. (1927c). The future of an illusion. SE, 21: 1–56.
Two further qualifications were formulated by Freud
himself: collective psychic processes have to be understood in isolation from any form of therapeutic activity;
the analysis of these processes requires the analyst to be
separated from groups, especially groups to which the
subject belongs, which is difficult to achieve.
Psychoanalysis has made a clear contribution to
anthropology, yet collective psychology has mainly
been used with small groups in clinical practice. The
metapsychological, sociological, and political dimensions of FreudÕs work have yet to be turned to account.
MICHÈLE PORTE
See also: Alienation; Anthropology and psychoanalysis;
Christians and Jews: A Psychoanalytical Study; Civilization
and Its Discontents; ‘‘Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest’’; ‘‘Dreams and myths’’; Ego ideal; Fascination; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; Identification; Le Bon, Gustave; Narcissism of minor
differences; Otherness; Racism, anti-Semitism, and psychoanalysis; Schiff, Paul; Totem and Taboo.
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred R. (1961). Experiences in groups. London:
Tavistock Publications.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905c). Jokes and their relation to the
unconscious. SE, 8: 1–236.
———. (1907b). Obsessive actions and religious practices.
SE, 9: 115–127.
———. (1908d). ‘‘Civilized’’ sexual morality and modern
nervous illness. SE, 9: 177–204.
31 2
———. (1930a [1929]). Civilization and its discontents. SE,
21: 57–145.
———. (1939a [1934–1938]). Moses and monotheism:
Three essays. SE, 23: 1–137.
———. (1950a). Extracts from the Fliess papers. SE, 1: 173–280.
Freud, Sigmund, Bullitt, William C. (1966b [1930–1932]).
Thomas Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eighth president of the United States: A psychological study. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Gillibert, Jean. (1985). Le psychodrame de la psychanalyse.
Paris: Champ Vallon.
Kaës, René, & Anzieu, Didier. (1976). Chronique d Õun
groupe, le groupe du ‘‘Paradis perdu’’: Observation et commentaires. Paris: Dunod.
Porte, Michèle. (1998). Pulsions et politique: Une relecture de
l Õévénement psychique collectif à partir de lÕœuvre de Freud.
Paris: Harmattan.
Further Reading
Scheidlinger, Stuart. (1990). Internalization of group psychology: the group within. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 18, 494–504.
Tuttman, Saul. (1991). Psychoanalytic group theory and therapy: essays in honor of Saul Scheidlinger. Madison, CT:
International Universities Press.
COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS (ANALYTICAL
PSYCHOLOGY)
The ‘‘collective unconscious’’ is the part of the collective psyche that is unconscious, the other parts being
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consciousness of the perceptible world and consciousness itself. The collective unconscious is different from
and in addition to the personal unconscious in that it is
a stratum of reality that ‘‘does not derive from personal
experience and is not a personal acquisition but is
inborn . . . universal . . . [and] more or less the same
everywhere and in all individuals.’’ (Jung, 1934 [1948]).
The term collective unconscious was first introduced
by Carl Gustav Jung in 1916 in a talk to the Zurich
School for Analytical Psychology entitled ‘‘Uber das
Unbewesste und seine Inhalte.’’ The German manuscript
for this talk was not found until 1961, after JungÕs death.
The earliest written appearance of the term was found in
the French translation of the Zurich talk published in
1916 in the Archives de Psychologies (Jung, 1916).
JungÕs notion of the collective unconscious ranges
from a passive repository that records the history of all
human reactions to the world to an active substratum
that is the ground out of which all reality emerges. The
components of the collective unconscious were first
said by Jung to be primordial or ancestral images and
later archetypes that manifest in consciousness
through images, strong affects, and behavioral patterns. When the energies of the collective unconscious
break through into consciousness, consciousness itself
is altered, and reactions vary from insanity to a significant reordering of major attitudes.
The notion of the collective unconscious first came
to Jung from a dream he had in 1909 on board a ship
returning from the United States with Freud. The
dream depicted a house that had a cellar below the normal cellar and below that a repository of prehistoric
pottery, bones, and skulls. ‘‘I thought, of course, that he
[Freud] would accept the cellars below this cellar [i.e.,
the personal unconscious], but the dreams [during the
writing of his first book, from 1910 to 1912] were preparing me for the contrary’’ (McGuire, 1989). In fact,
Freud acknowledged primordial ancestral patterns but
regarded them as simply inheritable traits (Lamarckianism) posited in each individual (the biogenetic law).
For Freud such experiences were phylogenetic recapitulations unrelated to a transcendent structure such as the
collective unconscious, but for Jung they arise anew
from the collective unconscious in each person in each
instance just as they did in oneÕs ancestors.
By 1925 Jung had theorized that the collective
unconscious and the external world are opposites
between which lies the observing ego which accesses
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the collective unconscious through the anima or animus and the world through the persona. The personal
unconscious of Freud is regarded as the shadow of the
ego. This schema remained unchanged for Jung.
JungÕs collective unconscious can be seen as a variation within the tradition of philosophical idealism. It
shares characteristics with the Apeiron of Anaximander, the One of Parmenides, and the Forms of Plato. It
also calls to mind the Pleroma of the Gnostics, the
Categories of Emmanuel Kant, and the Will of Arthur
Schopenhauer. What justifies JungÕs notion as psychology and not philosophy is his insistence that the collective unconscious is an empirical fact attested to by
the common experiences of humankind over many
ages and cultures. JungÕs proof is phenomenological,
and he avoids claiming a priori truths whether or not
he believes they exist.
In spite of his avoidance of ontological affirmations,
Jung often appears to suggest that the collective
unconscious is a metaphysical reality, which invites
less sophisticated analysts to engage in ideological
thinking and inflated claims to transcendent knowledge. In his review of JungÕs autobiography, Winnicott
says that the positing of a collective unconscious
results from JungÕs split psyche and ‘‘was part of his
attempt to deal with his lack of contact with what
could now be called the unconscious-accordingto-Freud.’’ (Winnicott, 1964) With this criticism,
Winnicott dismissed JungÕs and perhaps all efforts to
speculate about and derive heuristic guidelines consonant with an ultimate ground against which lie subjectivity, consciousness, and the very mystery of life. As
Jung points out, the alternative is a void (Jung, 1948).
DAVID I. TRÉSAN
See also: Amplification; (analytical psychology); Animaanimus (analytical psychology); Archetype (analytical
psychology); Desoille, Robert; Event; Midlife crisis; psychology of the unconscious; Numinous (analytical psychology); Shadow (analytical psychology); Transference
(analytical psychology).
Bibliography
Jung, Carl Gustav. (1916). The structure of the unconscious,
Coll. works, vol. VII, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
———. (1931–34). The practical use of dream analysis.
Coll. Works, vol. VIII, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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PSYCHANALYSTES
———. (1934 [1948]). A review of the complex theory.
Coll. works, vol. VIII, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
———. (1947 [1954]). On the nature of the psyche, Coll.
works, vol. VIII, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
——— (1948). On the conception of psychic energy and the
nature of dreams. Zurich: Rascher Verlag.
McGuire, William. (1989). C.G. Jung, Analytical psychology,
Notes of the seminar given in 1925. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1963). Memories, dreams, reflections.
By C.G. Jung. London, Collins & Routledge, 1963. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 45, 450–455.
licensing, and finally the question of social issues and
anti-Semitism, the offshoot of a conference devoted to
Rudolf BinionÕs psychohistorical work on Hitler held
on June 18, 1992, caused further friction within the
organization. This led to a series of group and individual resignations from the Collège and engendered a
climate of crisis, culminating in the dissolution of the
organization in June 1994.
JACQUES SEDAT
See also: France.
Bibliography
Geahchan, Dominique. (1986). Temps et Désir du psychanalyste. Paris: InterÉditions.
COLLÈGE DE PSYCHANALYSTES
The Collège de Psychanalystes was founded on November 3, 1980, by a group of psychoanalysts (roughly
thirty) from different backgrounds upon the initiative
of Dominique Geahchan (1925–1983), François Roustang, Jacques Sédat, Conrad Stein, and Serge Viderman,
who drafted the by-laws. There were no founding members. The organizationÕs goal, beyond that of existing
analytic institutions, was to consider the role of psychoanalysis in society and defend the analytic approach
against the risks of governmental regulation or the shifts
in practice arising from mental health coverage. Membership was simple, and involved only approval by a
majority of the members. This removed any problems
associated with qualifications, which, along with training, were relegated to the various psychoanalytic organizations. Its originality lies in the way it enabled analysts from different organizations and with different
backgrounds (members of the International Psychoanalytic Association, its critics, Lacanians) to work together
on issues of psychoanalysis and society.
The Collège at times had more than a hundred
members, including both French and a handful of
Canadian members. Beginning in November 1981 it
began publishing a review, Psychanalystes, at the
request of its first president, Dominique Geahchan,
who was also cofounder of Confrontation with René
Major in 1974, and a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. The review remained in print until
March 1994; a total of forty-eight issues on the role of
psychoanalysis in society were published.
Problems arose, however, over the question of
membership, which gradually evolved into a form of
31 4
COLLOQUE SUR L’INCONSCIENT
The Colloque sur lÕinconscient, organized by Henri Ey
and devoted to the problems associated with the
concept of the unconscious, took place at the end of
October 1960, at the Bonneval Psychiatric Hospital,
Bonneval, France. The proceedings, published in an
octavo volume of more than four hundred pages in
1966, remains one of the most important works on psychopathology of the second half of the twentieth century.
Previous colloquia at Bonneval include ‘‘Neurologie et
Psychiatrie’’ in 1943, organized by Julian de Ajuriaguerra
and Henri Hécaen, and ‘‘La Psychogenèse des Névroses
et des Psychoses’’ in 1946, organized by Lucien Bonnafé,
Sven Follin, Jacques Lacan, and Julien Rouart.
The first part of the book discusses the associations
between the unconscious and the drives, and includes
papers by Serge Lebovici and René Diatkine and by
François Perrier. Part 2 covers the unconscious and language, and contains papers by Jean Laplanche and Serge
Leclaire and by Conrad Stein. In the discussion Maurice
Merleau-Ponty introduced his books The Visible and
the Invisible and The Prose of the World, and Jacques
Lacan, who has an article in the book. Just seven years
after the Rome Congress (1953), he positively and
polemically laid out his ideas on the central role of language in the formation of the subject (self) and the
structuring of the unconscious. Part 3 includes articles
on interrelations between our understanding of neurobiology and the question of the unconscious, with a
paper by Claude Blanc and another by Catherine G.
Lairy. There follows discussion by Paul Guiraud, René
Angelergues, Maurice Dongier, Eugène Minkowski,
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Jean Hyppolite, and André Green. Part 4 covers the role
of the unconscious in psychiatric problems and includes
articles by Henri Ey, S. Follin, and André Green, followed by discussion by Jean Hyppolite, Eugène Minkowski, and Jean Laplanche. Part 5, on the unconscious
and sociology, contains papers by Henri Lefèbvre and
by Conrad Stein. The last part of the book concerns the
relations between the unconscious and philosophical
thought, and includes articles by Alphonse dÕWaelhens,
Georges Lantéri-Laura, and Paul Ricoeur.
According to the participants, the published texts
accurately reflect the content of the actual proceedings.
The event provided an opportunity to compare two different concepts of psychoanalysis and to discuss connections among mental pathology, the unconscious, the
role of society, brain activity, and some epistemological
issues. Although dated, none of the articles in the
collection have lost any of their relevance.
GEORGES LANTÉRI-LAURA
See also: Ey, Henri; France; Lacan, Jacques-Marie Émile.
Bibliography
Ey, Henri (Ed.). (1966). LÕInconscient, 6e Colloque de Bonneval, 1960. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.
COLOMBIA
The history of the Colombian Psychoanalytic Society
and Institute has been influenced by the scientific cultural currents of the rest of the world, especially France,
England, the United States, Argentina, and Chile.
Between 1922 and 1940, some physicians and other
non-physicians traveled to Europe and around Latin
America, getting direct contact with Freud or being
psychoanalyzed. After the Second World War, three
physicians arrived from France and Chile: Drs. José
Francisco Socarras (1906–1995), Arturo Lizarazo
(1915–1992), and (from Venezuela) Herman Quijada,
born in 1915.
By that time eight more physicians had gone to
Argentina to be trained in psychoanalysis, while others
went to the United States and France. The three immigrants begun to conduct studies of Freud, Numberg,
and Klein, beginning analytical supervisions that differed from personal analysis.
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Between 1948 and 1950, a prestigious Argentine
analyst, Dr. Arnaldo Rascovsky, visited Bogotá and
edited the bylaws to be followed for the formation of a
Study Group recognized by the IPA. On May 6, 1956,
the Study Group was officially founded and was recognized by the IPA a year later, being sponsored by
France and Chile.
In 1959, an Associate Member of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, Dr. Carlos Plata, arrived to
Bogotá who elaborated the Group bylaws. In 1960, Angel
and Betty Garma visited Colombia and held a series of
seminars as well as individual and collective supervisions,
and later in 1961 the Society was recognized by the IPA.
In 1962 a conflict arose between the two pioneers of
psychoanalysis in Colombia, which appeared to be
political-ideological and ended with the resignation of
Arturo Lizarazo, but he left the Colombian Psychoanalytic Association to found his own Study Group, now
recognized by by the IPA, which is led by M. Gonzalez,
J.A. Marquez and R. De Zubirı́a. Also the ‘‘Sigmund
Freud Psychoanalytic Group I.P.A.’’ is led by G. Arcila
and B. Alvarez.
In Colombia there are other psychoanalytic Groups in
Cali, Medellin, and Bogotá, with some leaders (O. Espinosa, A. Villar) trained at the Colombian Psychoanalytic
Society, but the groups are not recognized by the IPA.
Since 1976, the Review of the Colombian Psychoanalytic Society (Revista de la Sociedad Colombiana de
Psicoanálisis) has appeared, with 21 volumes, four
numbers each year, and there is also a ‘‘Boletin’’ published monthly. As of 2002, the Society had four
honorary members, 33 full members, 57 associate
members. The Institute has 15 training analysts, 10
professors, 14 candidates; there have been 19 graduating classes from 1959–1996. The Institute requires
eight semesters (four years training) with two hours
daily and two individual supervisions weekly. Freud is
the main author studied, but others are reviewed,
especially from France, England, the United States,
and Argentina, with a multi-theoretical frame of reference. There are members of the Society working in the
cities of Cali and Buoaramanga.
Various members of the Colombian Psychoanalytic
Society have participated in the COPAL, FEPAL, and
IPA boards.
Several theoretical and technical contributions have
been published, mainly in the Journal and in books. The
315
COMBINED PARENT FIGURE
practice has increased daily, and some analysts are professors at different universities. Psychoanalysis has been
admitted at the National Academy of Medicine and is generally well accepted by Colombian society, as well as in
scientific reviews and daily journals. Among other wellknown contemporary analysts are G. Ballesteros, E.
Gómez, E. Laverde, A. Sánchez, I. Villarreal, and L. Yamı́n.
GUILLERMO SÁNCHEZ MEDINA
Bibliography
Brainsky, Simon. (1984). Manual de psicologia y psicopatologia
dinámica fundamentos de psicoanálisis. Bogotá: Ed. Pluma.
Carvajal, Guillermo. (1993). Adolecer: La aventura de una
metamorfosis. Una visión psicoanalitica de la adolescencia
Bogotá: Printing Service Network.
González Velásquez, Mario. (1993). La cohesión del self.
Bogotá: Ed. Guadalupe Ltda.
Plata Mújica, Carlos. (1989), Metapsicologia y Técnica Psicoanalitica. Bogotá: Ed. Tercer Mundo Editores.
Sánchez Medina, Guillermo. (1994). Técnica y clinica psicoanalitica. Bogotá: Ed. Centro Profesional Gráico Ltda.
Later in development the infant experiences the parents in more realistic ways, and gains reassurance from
the evidence of their survival. At the same time the
infant may internalize one or other parent (or perhaps
both) to keep them safe. Another primitive response is
to mobilize genital feelings of a loving kind, in order to
mitigate the violence in himself and perceived in the
parental figure. The latter, eroticizing defense may result
later in precocious and perverse sexuality.
With the onset of the depressive position, the parents are more realistically appreciated and their relationship can slowly be tolerated as a creative one in its
own right. Internalization of a creative parental couple
is an important basis of new developments. Tolerating
the parents internally in intercourse is an achievement
that allows creativity and intellectual curiosity to
develop freely.
In KleinÕs view those later phantasies and investigations which Freud described are emotionally colored
by the preceding phantasies of the combined parent
figure.
COMBINED PARENT FIGURE
Doubt has been shed on the capacity for infants to
have such detailed phantasies and, it is argued, they
are to be regarded as subsequent elaborations at a later
stage of development when three-person situations
can be conceived.
ROBERT D. HINSHELWOOD
The combined parent figure is an early and primitive
version of Freud’s concept of the primal scene. Those
phantasies however were believed to supervene at a
later stage of development.
See also: Breast, good/bad object; Imago; Object, change
of/choice of; Oedipus complex, early; Phallic mother;
Primal scene.
———. (1991). Psicoanálisis, ayer, hoy y mariana. Bogotá:
Ed. Gaviota.
In the powerful phantasies of the early Oedipus
complex the infant has terrifying experiences of the
parents engaged in a particularly violent and dangerous kind of intercourse (Klein, 1928/1975).
Melanie Klein discovered in the panics and night
terrors of childhood the persisting of the infant’s
phantasies of the parents in intercourse. These have a
violent tone that matches the violence the infant feels
towards the parents at the sense of exclusion.
These phantasies are of pre-genital kinds. For
instance the parents may be experienced as mutually
feeding each other, which then, in response to the child’s
hatred, come to be phantasies of the parents devouring
each other (Klein, 1929). The imagined mutual destruction is usually extremely worrying for the child, and
exclusion may be replaced by a helplessness.
31 6
Bibliography
Britton, Ron, Feldman, Michael, and OÕShaughnessy, Edna.
(1989). The Oedipus complex today. London: Karnac
Books.
Klein, Melanie. (1975). Early stages of the Oedipus conflict.
In The writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 1, 186–198). (Reprinted from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 9
(1928), 167–180.)
———. (1929). Infantile anxiety situations reflected in a
work of art and in the creative impulse. In The writings of
Melanie Klein (Vol.1, p. 210–218). London: Hogarth.
(Reprinted from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,10 (1929), 436–443.)
———. (1975). The psycho-analysis of children. In The writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 2). London: Hogarth. (Original
work published 1932)
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COMPENSATORY STRUCTURES
COMPENSATION (ANALYTICAL
PSYCHOLOGY)
See also: Animus-Anima (analytical psychology); Interpretation of dreams (analytical psychology); Projection
and ‘‘participation mystique’’ (analytical psychology).
Compensation (transcendent function) finds its origins in the delineation of dynamics of the complex.
Bibliography
In 1907 Carl Gustav Jung notes the pathogenic complex posses a quantum of libido which grants it a degree
of autonomy that is opposed to conscious will. Though
this dynamic has a pathological cast, it conveys the
essence of what Jung termed compensation; namely, the
capacity of the unconscious to influence consciousness.
Jung noted the ego identifies with a preferred set of
adaptive strategies, and thus tends to restrict the range
of adaptive response and hamper individuation. In
‘‘The Importance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology’’ (1914), he introduced the idea, saying, ‘‘the
principal function of the unconscious is to effect a
compensation and to produce a balance. All extreme
conscious tendencies are softened and toned down
through a counter-impulse in the unconscious.’’
(1914a). This assertion ascribes a different role to
unconscious dynamics, i.e. one that is purposive and
intelligent, and not restricted solely to wishing.
In 1917, Jung expanded his notion of an intelligent
unconscious further when he asserted the existence of a
‘‘supraordinate unconscious’’ as a common human inheritance, viewed as the source of compensatory activity.
Later, Jung referred to compensation as ‘‘an inherent self regulation in the psychic apparatus.’’ JungÕs
assertion of an intelligent unconscious culminated in
his concept of the self (1928a), understood as the personalityÕs central organizing agency that instigated and
guided individuation. Paired with the concept of the
self, compensation was seen as the core process in realizing selfhood.
Given this core value, Jung sought a means to maximize its efficiency and benefits. He termed this means
the ‘‘transcendent function,’’ described as a joining of
the opposing tendencies of conscious and unconscious
that would produce a synthesis in the form of a ‘‘uniting symbol’’ in order to release compensatory contents
of the unconscious. Jung, noted the transcendent function facilitated a transition from one attitude to
another and held the person skilled with understanding of conscious and unconscious interaction and its
symbolic products could accelerate individuation.
PETER MUDD
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Jung, Carl Gustav. (1907). The psychology of Dementia præcox. Coll. works, vol. III, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
———. (1914a). On the importance of the unconscious in
psychopathology. Coll. works, vol. III, London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.
———. (1917–18–26–43). The psychology of the unconscious processes. Coll. works, vol. VII: London, Routledge
& Kegan Paul.
———. (1928a [1935]). The relations between the ego and
the unconscious. Coll. works, vol. VII, London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.
———. (1928b [1948]). On psychic energy. Coll. works, vol.
VIII, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
———. (1928c [1948]). General aspects of dream psychology. Coll. works, vol. VIII, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
———. (1928d [1948]). Instinct and the inconscious. Coll.
works, vol. VIII, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
COMPENSATORY STRUCTURES
Compensatory structures are complex psychological
configurations that are an integral part of the overall
self or the personality of an individual. As their name
indicates, they compensate for certain primary structural deficits in the self, and they do this by activating
another structure. Thus, when the mirroring pole, the
idealizing pole, or the pole of twinship/alter ego of the
self are deficient or underdeveloped, one of the other
three becomes the dominant force in the functioning
of the self of the person in question.
The deficiencies come from the developmental failures of early childhood concerning self-object experiences, and thus the selfÕs development. Compensatory
structures derive from more optimal self-object relations. They are different from defensive structures,
which serve merely to protect the self from any further
wound. Compensatory structures go beyond this to
become more or less independent of any protective
purpose and thus intervene in a gratifying, vitalizing
way: they become the selfÕs main way of orientating
itself. Thus, they transcend the fragility of the original
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COMPLEMENTAL SERIES
structural deficiency, which then becomes resistant to
any analytical intervention. Compensatory structures
make up for the deficit, whereas defensive structures
cover it over.
Though defensive structures can and must be analyzed to reach into and make up for the structural deficit that they protects, compensatory structures cannot
and must not be analyzed in an attempt to bring to
light the underlying deficiency. In The Restoration of
the Self, Kohut says that a successful analysis is one
that enables a compensatory structure to be fully
developed and consolidated. One neither can nor
should try to determine or direct the course of such an
analysis, insofar as the development of the self remains
a multi-potential process that draws on and chooses
from the stock of available self-objects. Instead of
deciding that all defenses should be analyzed, it might
well be that analytical activity is not indicated for the
compensatory structure.
ARNOLD GOLDBERG
See also: Self; Self-object.
returned to this question, apropos of trauma, in the
last part of Moses and Monotheism (1939a [1934–38]):
‘‘In this way we reach the concept of a sliding Ôcomplemental seriesÕ as it is called, in which two factors converge in fulfilling an aetiological requirement. A less of
one factor is balanced by a more of the other’’ (p. 73).
The concept of ‘‘complemental series’’ thus appears
in FreudÕs work in relation to two key themes, neuroses and traumas, a fact that underscores its importance. It would be interesting to look at this concept
from the standpoint of FreudÕs renunciation of his
neurotica in 1896, that is to say, the change he introduced in the etiology of the neuroses from the theory
of a real trauma to that of an imagined trauma.
As we know, Sigmund Freud may never have abandoned the theory of the real trauma, and there is a sense
in which the concept of ‘‘complemental series’’ testifies to
the very real effort he made to reconcile internal and
external factors and thus transcend the opposition
between external reality and psychic reality. In a way the
complemental series foreshadows our more modern and
still debated polyfactorial model of pathological etiology.
BERNARD GOLSE
Bibliography
Kohut, Heinz. (1977). The restoration of the self. New York:
International Universities Press.
COMPLEMENTAL SERIES
In The Language of Psychoanalysis, Jean Laplanche and
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis give the following definition of
complemental series: ‘‘Term used by Freud in order to
account for the aetiology of neurosis without making a
hard-and-fast choice between exogenous and endogenous
factors. For Freud these two kinds of factors are actually
complementary—the weaker the one, the stronger the
other—so that any group of cases can in theory be distributed along a scale with the two types of factors varying
in inverse ratio. Only at the two extremities of such a
serial arrangement would it be possible to find instances
where only one kind of factor is present’’ (1967).
The concept is most clearly explained by Freud in
the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916–17a
[1915–17], p. 347 and note). The endogenous factor
corresponds to the fixation points specific to each
person (and determined by that personÕs hereditary
constitution and childhood experience), while the exogenous factor corresponds to frustration. Freud
31 8
See also: Constitution; Internal/external reality; Psychic
causality; Psychogenesis/organogenesis.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1916–17a [1915–17]). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 15–16.
———. (1939a [1934–38]). Moses and monotheism: three
essays. SE, 23: 1–137.
COMPLEX
A complex is a group of partially or totally unconscious psychic content (representations, memories,
fantasies, affects, and so on), which constitutes a more
or less organized whole, such that the activation of one
of its components leads to the activation of others.
Freud did not coin the term ‘‘complex.’’ At the end
of the nineteenth century, it was occasionally used in
psychiatry to designate a collection of ideas belonging
to a subject. Freud used it in this sense in 1892 in a
sketch written in preparation for his ‘‘Preliminary
Communication.’’ He wrote that in hysteria, ‘‘the content of consciousness easily becomes temporarily dissociated and certain complexes of ideas which are not
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COMPLEX
associatively connected easily fly apart’’ (1940–41
[1892], p. 149). Shortly after, he used the term again in
Studies on Hysteria (1895d), specifically in the case of
Emmy von N. Josef Breuer, coauthor of the Studies,
wrote, ‘‘It is almost always a question of complexes of
ideas, of recollections of external events and trains of
thought of the subjectÕs own. It may sometimes happen that every one of the individual ideas comprised
in such a complex of ideas is thought of consciously,
and that what is exiled from consciousness is only the
particular combination of them’’ (1895d, p. 215n).
In the ensuing years, the idea that at the heart of a
neurosis there was a collection of ideas and affects specific to the subject and organized around a traumatic
sexual experience became central to the development
of psychoanalysis—even though subsequently Freud
rarely used the term ‘‘complex’’ to designate such a set
of ideas. He did add an essential modification to the
previous psychiatric conception in positing that, for
the most part, such a collection is made up of unconscious processes and remains unconscious itself.
In 1906 he explicitly discussed the term ‘‘complex’’
for the first time in an article on ‘‘Psycho-Analysis and
the Establishment of Facts in Legal Proceedings’’
(1906c). He paid homage to Eugen Bleuler, and more
particularly to Carl Gustav Jung, whom he had just
met, and praised the method of ‘‘word association,’’
which was developed by Wilhelm M. Wundt and practiced by Jung. This experimental method consisted of
giving a subject a series of ‘‘stimulus words’’ and asking the subject to react as quickly as possible. The time
that it takes the person to respond and the nature of
their response are assumed to indicate a ‘‘complex.’’
Freud, in this work, defined a complex as ‘‘ideational
content’’ charged with affect (p. 104).
From then on, he used the term frequently to designate the ‘‘nuclear complex of neurosis,’’ that is, ‘‘the
father complex’’ (1909d, p. 208n; p. 200ff.), which he
designated as the ‘‘Oedipus complex’’ starting in 1910
(1910h, p. 171). Similarly, he began to speak of the
‘‘castration complex’’ (1909b, p. 8).
After he split with Jung, Freud withdrew the praise
that that he previously bestowed upon him. Thus he
wrote, in his History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement
(1914d), that the ‘‘theory of complexes’’ proposed by
Jung did not actually attain the status of a theory and
had not ‘‘proved capable of easy incorporation into
the context of psycho-analytic theory’’ (p. 29), even
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though the term itself had become common in psychoanalytic usage. In other words, Freud adopted the
term to give meaning to his own metapsychological
constructions, but rejected the theory of Jung himself.
The following points should be emphasized:
1. There is an obvious difference between the popular
use of the term ‘‘complex’’ in contemporary culture
and its more specific usage in the psychoanalytic
literature. In this regard, what Freud described in
1914 remains the same today: ‘‘None of the other
terms coined by psycho-analysis for its own needs
has achieved such widespread popularity or been
so misapplied to the detriment of the construction
of clearer concepts’’ (1914d, pp. 29–30). In contemporary psychoanalytic writings, the term is
hardly ever encountered anymore except in two
closely connected situations: references to the
Oedipus complex and the castration complex.
2. As surprising as it may seem, there has been scarcely any coherent theoretical reflection on the
notion of the ‘‘complex’’ as such, except insofar
as it is related to other terms used to designate
an organized set of mental processes and activities (‘‘structure’’ and ‘‘system,’’ for example).
The difficulty arises from the need to distinguish
and yet coordinate two different levels. The first
describes the structure of the psyche as being the
same, at least in its broad outlines, in every
human being; such features would be, at least in
theory, constitutive of the psyche itself (this is
the case with the Oedipus complex and its corollary, the castration complex). The other level is
that of individual variations, that is, the particularities of such a fundamental structure taken as
a function of personal history, of imagos, of the
play of identification, etc. The study of such particularities is the very object of psychoanalytic
treatment. But the temptation to group complexes into ‘‘families’’ led over time to the proliferation of ‘‘new complexes,’’ generally named
after mythological figures. There was the ‘‘Electra
complex,’’ the supposed feminine version of the
Oedipus complex; the ‘‘Jocasta complex,’’ which
designated the maternal counter-Oedipus; and
even the ‘‘Ajase complex,’’ which referred to the
guilt that is linked in Japanese culture to the
desire to kill the mother (Kosawa, 1931/1954).
Thus there is a danger of falling into a purely
descriptive typology in which the coherence of
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the Freudian metapsychology disappears and its
explanatory power is lost. But in fact, not one of
these proposed complexes has survived.
3. Insofar as it relates to a fundamental structure, a
complex is in itself not characteristic of this or that
neurosis. Only its functionally disruptive manifestations and fixations can rise to the level of pathology.
In the definitions given above, a complex is ‘‘a group of
ideas.’’ Josef Breuer correctly noted that these ideas could
be or could become conscious, but that what is ‘‘exiled
from consciousness’’ is their ‘‘particular combination.’’
However, we cannot remain at the level of ideas in the
strict sense: memory traces, fantasies (at every level, from
conscious to unconscious), and imagos, for example, all
enter into this ‘‘combination.’’ Moreover, what accounts
for the effect of the complex is its quota of affect, and also
its drive force. Thus, the study of an individual complex in
the treatment leads to a topological consideration of all
the related defenses and the retroactive reworkings that
combined to set up a functional structure of this kind.
ROGER PERRON
See also: Compensation (analytical psychology); Complex (analytical psychology); Ego (analytical psychology);
Femininity; Nuclear complex; Oedipus complex; Oedipus complex, early; Projection and ‘‘participation mystique’’ (analytical psychology); Psychology of Dementia
praecox; Word association.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1906c). Psycho-analysis and the establishment of facts in legal proceedings. SE, 9: 97–114.
———. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy.
SE, 10: 1–149.
———. (1909d). Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis.
SE, 10: 151–318.
———. (1910h). A special type of choice of object made by
men. SE, 11: 163–175.
———. (1914d). On the history of the psycho-analytic
movement. SE, 14: 1–66.
———. (1940–41 [1892]). Sketches for the ‘‘Preliminary
Communication’’ of 1893. SE, 1: 147–154.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies on Hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
Kosawa, Heisaku. (1954). Two kinds of guilt feelings: the
Ajase complex. Japanese Journal of Psychoanalysis, 11.
(Original work published 1931)
32 0
COMPLEX (ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY)
A complex is the more- or less-repressed standardization of emotionally strong conflictual experiences.
When these experiences are triggered, either by certain
themes (such as new pieces of information), or emotions (in which case they are called ‘‘constellations’’),
the complex produces a reaction, such that the individual perceives the situation in terms of the complex
(with a distortion of perception), and responds with
an emotional overreaction, which mobilizes the processes of stereotyped defense.
Carl Gustav Jung developed his concept of the complex at the same time as he was engaged in his experiments with association. It is within this context that the
concept appeared for the first time, in 1904, in an essay
called ‘‘Experimentelle Untersuchungen über Assoziationen Gesunder’’ (‘‘The associations of normal subjects,’’
with Franz Riklin). But he had already used the term,
without any particular specificity, in his thesis of 1902.
When, at the turn of the century, Jung and Riklin
eagerly turned to research on association in order to
construct typologies, they studied what they considered normal disturbances of experience. They showed
that a test subject could not uniformly form associations with ideas that were attached to highly emotionally-charged experiences and personal difficulties.
They went on to hypothesize that such complexes
might constitute the background of consciousness,
and that in any neurosis of psychical origin, there
would be a complex characterized by a particularly
strong emotional charge.
Later, in 1907, Jung established that any event
charged with affect gives rise to a complex and reinforces those that are already in place. Complexes act
from the unconscious and can at any moment either
inhibit, or on the contrary, activate conscious behavior. They reveal conflicts, but are also defined by Jung
as crucial hot points of psychic life.
In 1934, Jung summarized his theory of complexes
and emphasized that, even outside of the effects of any
individual constellation, complexes involve the active
forces that determine the interests of everyone and thus
serve as the basis for the symbol formation. This conception of complexes, which he continued to develop
afterwards, led him to emphasize their creative effects.
From a therapeutic perspective, this is an important
aspect of his psychology and his clinical work. From it
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COMPROMISE FORMATION
he developed the idea of promoting creative development through the integration of complexes. This idea
plays a large role in many of the techniques developed
by the Jungian school. Finally, it is from this insight that
Jung came to see archetypes at the heart of complexes.
The experiments in association, as well as the concepts of the complex-ego, of the symbol and the archetype, imagination and emotion, and transference and
counter-transference, all refer to JungÕs idea that the
complex is caused by the painful confrontation of the
individual with the ‘‘necessity to adapt.’’ Thus the very
concept of complexes takes on an even more dynamic
dimension: each one appears as an effect of the condensation and generalization of experiences that might, at
any moment, be associated by analogy with a new piece
of information or emotion. This is why the concept
takes on decisive importance for understanding what is
at play in the transference and the counter-transference.
VERENA KAST
See also: Castration complex; Dead mother complex; ‘‘On
the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement’’; Libidinal
development; Ethnopsychoanalysis; Identification; Imago;
Masculine protest (analytical psychology); Penis envy;
Phallus; Primal fantasies; Primitive horde; Psychanalyse et
Pédiatrie (psychoanalysis and pediatrics); Psychoanalysis of
Fire, The; Repression; Sexual differences;Structural theories; Word association; Word-Presentation.
Bibliography
Jung, Carl Gustav. (1902). On the psychology and the
pathology of the so-called occult phenomena. In Coll.
works, vol. I. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957.
———. (1904). The associations of normal subjects. In Coll.
works, vol. II. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.
———. (1907). The psychology of dementia præcox. In Coll.
works, vol. III. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
———. (1934 [1948]). A review of the complex theory. In
Coll. works, vol. VIII. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Kast, Verena. (1992). The Dynamics of Symbols: Fundamentals of Jungian Psychotherapy. (Susan A. Schwarz, Trans.).
New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation.
unconscious and ordinarily repressed and strives
towards satisfaction—that is, wish-fulfillment—while
the other, belonging probably to the conscious ego, is
disapproving and repressive. The outcome of this conflict is a compromise-formation (the dream or the
symptom) in which both trends have found an incomplete expression’’ (Freud, 1923a, p. 242).
This definition was given by Freud in an encyclopedia article called ‘‘Psycho-Analysis.’’ In it he refers to
both a dynamic process (the drive/defense conflict) and
to its result. The term ‘‘compromise’’ emphasizes that it
is a partial satisfaction that is achieved (as the mechanism of the daydream illustrates), which, within the general framework of the theory of symptom formation
differentiates this concept from similar notions such as
substitutive formations and reaction formations.
The term first appeared in 1896 in ‘‘Further
Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defense’’ in relation to the mechanisms of obsessional neurosis: obsessive representations and compulsive acts are ‘‘what
become conscious as obsessional ideas and affects, and
take the place of the pathogenic memories as far as the
conscious life is concerned. . . . [They] are structures in
the nature of a compromise between the repressed idea
and the repressing ones’’ (p. 170). It was later extended
by Freud beyond obsessional neurosis to the entire
dynamics of the psyche as a major component of the
process of symptom formation (1916–17a, Lecture
23), and then reconceived within the structural theory.
It was this new formulation that was taken up again in
Moses and Monotheism (1939a).
Is every compromise formation a return of the
repressed? Or could we say that compromise formation could result from other defensive mechanisms,
such as negation and even disavowal? This question
wasnÕt explicitly raised by Freud, but it could be posed
in light of modern work.
See also: Contradiction; Fantasy, formula of; Flight into
illness; Parapraxis; Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The;
Reaction-formation; Substitutive-formation; Symbolism;
Symptom-formation.
Bibliography
COMPROMISE FORMATION
Freud, Sigmund. (1896b). Further remarks on the neuropsychoses of defence. SE, 3: 157–185.
In dreams, just as in symptoms formation, ‘‘we find
a struggle between two trends, of which one is
———. (1916–17a). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis, parts I and II. SE, 15–16.
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———. (1939a). Moses and monotheism: Three essays. SE,
23: 1–137.
———. (1923a). Two encyclopaedia articles: psycho-analysis and the libido theory. SE, 18: 233–259.
COMPULSION
Compulsion is a mental pressure of internal origin
compelling the subject to think, act, or react in accordance with specific modalities that do not coincide
with his habitual patterns of thought. Freud used the
German term Zwang to describe this concept. In an
article written in French in 1894 (‘‘Obsessions et phobies’’), Freud used an equivalent term, obsession. The
word ‘‘compulsion,’’ attested in French as early as
1298, is derived from the Latin compulsio and originally signified a ‘‘constraint, a legal summons, or formal
notice to pay.’’ ‘‘Constraint’’ is somewhat older
(twelfth century) and has the same legal connotation
found in the expression ‘‘physical constraint.’’ As for
the term ‘‘obsession,’’ which appeared later, its origin
is both religious (possession) and military (siege). All
three terms were used in the early literature on psychoanalysis to take into account the corresponding
complex phenomenon: compulsion emphasized the
internal origins of the phenomenon, constraint its
immediate effect, and obsession described one of the
most symptomatic consequences in the subjectÕs life.
For Freud the German term Zwang is one of a series
of analogous terms like drive, urge, or thrust, used to signify that the mental forces governing the human mind
must be treated in the same way as other natural forces,
even though their origin and meaning are radically different. The word was used in medical research in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, and was first
defined by Karl Friedrich Westphal in 1877. At the time
the term corresponded to the way in which members of
the Berlin Group (1840–1846), represented by Hermann
von Helmholtz, approached the investigation of mental
phenomena, first subjecting them to rigorous scientific
observation, as they would any other phenomenon.
The term appeared in 1894 when Freud addressed
what he referred to as the ‘‘psychoneuroses of defense’’
in a discussion of obsessional representations, to differentiate them from hysterical or phobic manifestations.
Freud explains that the compulsive representation
results from a ‘‘poor connection,’’ whereby an affect
arising from a repressed representation attaches itself to
32 2
another representation (1894a). As in hysteria the
repressed representation is of a sexual origin, but the
compulsive representation is completely dissociated
from it. In the Studies on Hysteria (1895d), Freud speaks
of a ‘‘compulsion to associate.’’ And on September 25,
1895, in his ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’’ (1950a
[1895]), he uses the term ‘‘compulsion’’ to refer to the
impression produced by ‘‘hyperinvested representations’’ such as those that occur during hysteria, even
referring to ‘‘hysterical obsession.’’ The occurrence of
these representations produces effects ‘‘that it is impossible to suppress or understand,’’ the subject being completely aware of the strangeness of the situation. During
this same period, he refers to compulsive affects
(Zwangsaffekte). In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess dated
December 6, 1896, the term ‘‘compulsion’’ characterizes
the return of the memory of a satisfying sexual experience, regardless of the clinical presentation in question.
Finally, it is compulsion that pushes all human beings
toward incest (letter to Fliess dated October 15, 1897,
and An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 1940a [1938]).
The concept followed two separate paths in its evolution. Faithful to his initial intentions, Freud pursued
his investigation of compulsion in obsessional neurosis, especially in his analysis of the ‘‘Rat Man’’ (1909d).
The most symptomatic compulsion of this patient was
the ‘‘rat torture,’’ together with its obvious connotation of anal sadism. But the analysis revealed many
others, such as the compulsion to protect his lady
friend, ‘‘which can signify nothing other than a reaction to the contrary, and therefore hostile, tendency.’’
He also refers to ‘‘two-stage compulsive acts,’’ where
the first is cancelled by the second, and points out the
ambivalence. This simultaneity of internal compulsion
and the struggle against what it entails is characteristic
of compulsive neurosis and is what causes the unrelenting and exhausting struggle; it is this that led Pierre
Janet to speak of ‘‘psychasthenia.’’
Subsequently, Freud made compulsion a key element of his metapsychology. It refers to what is ineradicable and insurmountable in the drive, the thing
that must always be confronted. If it werenÕt for the
possibility of change, this would not be unlike the idea
of some inevitable destiny or hopeless determinism.
For Freud, compulsion has the following characteristics: its dystonic quality with respect to the behavior or
customary activities of the subject, the conviction of a
disastrous outcome if it is not obeyed, and the promise
of actual relief if it is allowed to proceed unrestricted.
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CONCEPT
The notion of compulsion was adopted by FreudÕs
early disciples, especially Alfred Adler, who saw in it a
reaction to a feeling of inferiority (1907). Melanie Klein
attributes it to the activity of partial primary objects, as
do Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion. Jacques Lacan
considered compulsion an ‘‘object-cause of desire,’’
which he formulated in terms of an ‘‘object a.’’ For Jean
Laplanche compulsion is the effect of ‘‘messages of enigmatic origin.’’ These are accompanied by the progressive
objectification of the foundations of the compulsion,
and an increasingly greater effort at translating them
into objects or representations.
Concepts that are similar to compulsion in the
Freudian lexicon include pressure (Drang), introduced
by Freud in 1915 in the Metapsychology (1915c), which
is the equivalent for each drive of what compulsion is
in the totality of mental life. Similarly, an urge is the
irrepressible fulfillment of an act during a moment of
paroxysm, whereas the compulsion implies an internal
obstacle to its fulfillment.
The Freudian idea of a constant and insistent force
associated with certain thoughts is not without its
drawbacks. It does reflect the speech of certain
patients, especially during obsessional neurosis or
cases of mental automatism (Gaëtan de Clérambault).
But by emphasizing the element shared by all forms of
internal compulsion, as Freud does in the Outline, the
concept is sometimes used to justify exclusively medicinal or behaviorist approaches to treatment. The initial
Freudian idea is, however, quite different. It attempts
to reestablish the relational conditions that give rise to
compulsion, to restore it to the internal setting in
which it first took shape.
GÉRARD BONNET
See also: Bulimia; Change; Development of Psycho-Analysis;
Dipsomania; Excitation; Negative transference; Negative,
work of the; ‘‘Notes Upon a Case of Obsessinal Neurosis
(Rat Man); Obsessional neurosis; Obsession; Pleasure/
unpleasure principle; ‘‘Remembering Repeating and Working-Through’’; Repetition compulsion; Resistance.
Bibliography
Adler, Alfred. (1974). La pulsion dÕagression dans la vie et
dans la névrose. Revue française de psychanalyse, 38 (2–3),
417–426. (Original work published 1908)
Freud, Sigmund. (1894a). The neuro-psychoses of defence,
SE, 3: 45–61.
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Further Reading
Busch, Fred. (1989). The compulsion to repeat in action: a
developmental perspective. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 70, 535–544.
Kubie, Lawrence S. (1939). A critical analysis of the concept
of a repetition compulsion. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 20, 390–402.
Loewald, Hans W. (1971). Some considerations on repetition and repetition compulsion. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 52, 59–66.
COMPULSIVE NEUROSIS. See Obsessional
neurosis
CONCEPT
For Wilfred Bion, conception is the result of coupling
a pre-conception, an innate a priori idea, and a realization, elements of the real that are provided by external-sensory or internal-emotional experience. The
concept is derived from conception through abstraction and generalization. Language and the attribution
of a name to a concept unite preconception and realization, preventing any loss of experience in the process. In BionÕs grid conception appears in row E, below
the pre-conceptions (row D). The transition from D to
E occurs when a pre-conception (for example, the
infantÕs innate expectation of the breast) encounters a
negative realization (absence of the real breast).
In a key article on the theory of thought, presented
during the International Congress of Psychoanalysis
held in Edinburgh in 1961, Bion appears to contradict
himself when discussing his theory of conceptions. In
one paragraph he says that the union of the preconception (innate expectation of the breast) with the
realization (‘‘the breast itself ’’) gives rise to a conception, associated with an experience of satisfaction. In
the following paragraph he writes that it is only when
the pre-conception is joined with frustration that a
conception (thought) is produced.
There is a problem with BionÕs first statement. For if
there is no internal object because that object has not
been thought, it is difficult to justify how the ‘‘breast
itself’’ could make contact with the pre-conception.
BionÕs second statement leads us to believe that the sensation of hunger (emotion), combined with the frustration (absence of the breast), will create the conception
of ‘‘no breast,’’ a ‘‘non-object,’’ which then, through
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CONDEMNING JUDGMENT
contact with the mother and the intervention of the
container-contained mechanism, #$, will be able to
become a ‘‘good breast.’’ The presence of two innate
pre-conceptions, present at the start of life: ‘‘bad’’ and
‘‘good’’ breasts, which are coupled with the realizations
concerning the ‘‘absent breast’’ and the nourishing
breast also need to be recognized. This will be the basis
of the first internal object. Additionally, it is the infantÕs
constitution, which enables him or her to tolerate the
frustration of hunger, of the ‘‘absent breast,’’ while preventing it from becoming prematurely the ‘‘bad breast’’
whose fate is then to be evacuated in the same way as
feces, tears, et cetera (beta-elements).
Bion considers the concept a conception that has
been assigned a name. The concept signifies a growth
of the abstraction that enables us to expand the generalization of psychoanalytic theories, which, as a whole
are judged to be too descriptive, too concrete. Concepts can be articulated in a deductive scientific system
that functions like an Ars combinatoria .
PEDRO LUZES
See also: Grid; Breast, good/bad object; Preconception;
Realization; Thought.
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred. (1962a). Learning from experience. London:
Heinemann; New York: Basic Books.
———. (1967). A theory of thinking. In Second thoughts.
London: Heinemann. (Reprinted from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 43, 4–5.)
———. (1963). Elements of psycho-analysis. London:
Heinemann.
CONDEMNING JUDGMENT. See Judgment of
condemnation
CONDENSATION
Condensation, along with displacement, is an essential
process in dream work and more generally in primaryprocess thinking. We tend to view it as a way of
attributing, to a person or representative object, characteristics and properties that, from the point of view of
latent thoughts, belong to other persons or objects. In
reality, if we go by FreudÕs text in The Interpretation of
32 4
Dreams (1900a), condensation, like displacement, does
not proceed directly by modifying the content of a
representation. All dreams are made up of latent dream
thoughts, each of which corresponds to one or several
chains of associations, with each link being initially
charged with a psychic intensity. Dream work consists
in changing the location of these fragmentary intensities
without either increasing or reducing their global value.
In displacement, one assigns to link A in a chain of
associations the intensity initially associated with link B.
Condensation, in contrast, operates by bringing intensities together. When two chains of association intersect,
it assigns to the common link the sum of the intensities
of the two intersecting chains. This nevertheless indirectly alters the representation because, in the manifest
content of the dream, a link will not figure if it does not
retain an intensity. By displacing the intensities of several chains to their common link, condensation makes
it possible to represent all of the chains by a single link.
Hence, there is an economy of means that contributes
to censorship. As a result, when one link takes the place
of several chains, this makes it more difficult to read
through to the wish corresponding to those chains.
Condensation thus has an indirect effect on the figural content of representations. It does not create chimeras that bring together in one element the attributes
of others. Nor does it engage in metonymy, in which
one of the links represents one or several chains of
association. It is a process that operates by displacing
intensity, but when the intensity of several chains is
brought to bear on their common link, condensation
seeks to represent them all.
When explaining the effect of condensation, Freud
used the metaphor of italics. A representative link
whose intensity has been reinforced by condensation
has a status comparable to that of a word in italics in
a text. This metaphor calls for two remarks. First, the
intensity added to a fragment of a representation
through condensation makes it possible, like italics,
to stress the importance of the representation. This
added intensity indicates at the manifest level that the
representation stands for the different latent chains
intersecting at the link. Second, typographical
emphasis warps the texture of a text and invites us to
look for links other than those offered by successive
statements. Typographical emphasis is an invitation
to abandon linearity and search for the dreamerÕs
associations.
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CONFLICT
The notion of intensity is complex. The term indicates
the psychic interest of a particular idea. But we may well
ask whether this interest should not be extended to the
affect associated with each chain of associations or the
instinct that determines each association.
Although Freud studied condensation particularly in
relation to dreams, especially in The Interpretation of
Dreams, he also describes the effect of this process in
other manifestations of primary-process thinking, such
as jokes, forgetting names, slips of the tongue, and symptoms. In these latter domains, however, it is sometimes
quite difficult to distinguish between condensation and
overdetermination. In both cases, as the result of a transformation, a representation substitutes for more elaborate thought content. Both processes seem to proceed by
increasing intensity, that is, by economic modification,
and this results in the reorganization of the thought content. But whereas condensation can be viewed as a sum
of intensities relative to forces acting in the same direction, overdetermination appears more as an appropriation of content by heterogeneous if not antagonistic
forces. In fact, the content of an overdetermined representation acts as a fulcrum for opposing logics and conflicting systems (such as the preconscious and the unconscious). A thought content (or representation) resulting
from the interaction of forces pushing for the fulfillment
of an unconscious wish and forces opposing it (the censor) is a good example of overdetermination but not of
condensation, since the censor is not part of the latent
dream thoughts. However, as soon as the signifying element begins to represent conflict (as in the case of a
symptom), the difference between condensation and
overdetermination is more difficult to establish.
CONFLICT
In psychoanalysis, the notion of conflict generally
refers to intrapsychic conflict in which antagonistic
forces are pitted against each other. The idea is central
to psychoanalytic doctrine: It is no exaggeration to say
that in light of the importance given to infantile sexuality and the unconscious, conflict is basic to the structuring of the psychic armature; further, it can be said
that Sigmund Freud devoted his entire life to elaborating a theory of conflict.
Freud takes a cautious approach in his early work.
He remains close to a psychology of consciousness at
the beginning of his theory of repression, when he
evokes, in the patient under the influence of a wish, the
surging forth of ‘‘contrasting representations’’ and ‘‘irreconcilable ideas’’ that are so painful that, by an effort of
‘‘counter-will’’ the patient decides ‘‘to forget the thing’’
(1941b [1892], Notice III). From the outset, then, he
posits the idea of a fundamental conflict between wishes
and what opposes them. When Freud later unreservedly
states that this process—repression—is essentially
unconscious, that perspective, as much as the role of
sexuality in wishes, becomes the basis for his parting of
ways with Josef Breuer and for his ongoing opposition
to such thinkers as Pierre Janet.
From that point on, it is possible to follow the
stages in his elaboration of a general theory of conflict:
as their name indicates, the neuropsychoses of
defense (hysteria, obsessional neurosis, phobia)
can be attributed to the conflict between wishes
and obstacles to their fulfillment;
this struggle is expressed in compromise formations in which the wish is blocked and, at the
same time, finds fulfillment in disguised forms:
This is the return of the repressed, in the form of
symptoms, dreams, slips of the tongue, parapraxes, and so forth, and all these socially and
morally acceptable substitutive formations nevertheless produce an occult satisfaction of desire,
thus providing and outlet for accumulated psychic energy;
it is thus important to distinguish manifest conflict, as it appears in the complaints of the patient
and those around him or her, in symptomatology, and so on, from latent conflict, which only
the work of psychoanalysis can bring to light;
LAURENT DANON-BOILEAU
See also: Dream; Dream work; Identification; Jokes;
Metaphor; Primary process/secondary process; Representability; Slips of the tongue; Unconscious formations;
Unconscious, the; Work (as a psychoanalytical notion).
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4: 1–338; 5: 339–625.
———. (1905c). Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. SE, 8: 1–236.
———. (1916–1917a [1915-17]). Introductory lectures on
psycho-analysis. SE, 15: 9–239; 16: 243–463.
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CONFLICT
the source of conflict is always to be sought in psychosexuality. Such, at least, is the position that
Freud vigorously affirms in the first part of his
work. However, the status of aggression posed a
problem and would remain a troublesome point‘‘’’
in his theory. He returned to the issue, without
finding a satisfactory solution, with his second
theory of the instincts and the introduction of the
‘‘death instinct,’’ in his attempt to find what might
lie ‘‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’’ (1920g) and by
reframing questions related to sadism and masochism (for example, in ‘‘The Economic Problem
of Masochism’’ [1924c]) and the like;
the theorization of the neuropsychoses of defense
explicitly posits the existence of psychopathological states that do not follow this schema in that
they are not produced by a conflict between the
instincts and the defenses: perversions (‘‘the neuroses are the negative form of perversion,’’ Freud
writes in ‘‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’’ [1905d, p. 238]) and actual neuroses, in
which the symptom is produced by a direct flow
of libidinal energy into the somatic functions,
without passing through psychical working over
(this latter category was taken up and extensively
developed in modern studies of psychosomatic
disorders). However, these distinctions, which
seem to originate in a somewhat overly rigorous
psychoanalytic nosography, were challenged by
FreudÕs successors;
an important watershed occurred around 1910
with regard to two connected areas, when Freud
began to envisage conflicts between the ‘‘two
principles of mental functioning,’’ the pleasure
principle and the reality principle (‘‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’’ [1911b]), and the opposition between
narcissistic cathexes and object cathexes (‘‘On
Narcissism: An Introduction’’ [1914c]);
at the same time, FreudÕs theorization of the
Oedipus complex (explicitly designated by that
name for the first time in 1910, although the idea
is present much earlier) brought to light the idea
of conflicting identifications (first and foremost,
between paternal and maternal identifications);
from this point on, the stages in libidinal development having been established, different developmental and structural levels of psychic conflict
can be distinguished. In the case of orality,
32 6
biting/not biting the breast; according to Karl
Abraham, this ambivalent phase is preceded by
a preambivalent phase. In the anal phase,
expulsion/retention; this is where the sadistic/
masochistic and active/passive oppositions are
imbricated. The phallic phase is characterized by
the oppositions between phallic/castrated and
masculine/feminine as well as by the principal
form of conflict that places desire in opposition
to prohibition. As is clear from this brief summary, conflict in Freudian thought often takes
the form of pairs of opposites.
There is more at issue here than merely situating
conflicts in the activation of the erogenous zones. When
there is conflict, it involves the putting into play of
object relations (for example, in the case of anality, in
the oppositions between satisfying/disappointing or
giving/refusing). The love/hate opposition, which Melanie Klein posits as fundamental (working within the
perspective inaugurated in FreudÕs second theory of the
instincts) has since undergone extensive elaboration.
Finally, at the most basic level of all, the opposition
between being/nonbeing should no doubt be added; its
importance is apparent in the study of psychoses.
Conflict can pit the instincts themselves against one
another. In his early work Freud places the sexual
instinct in opposition to the instinct for self-preservation; in his second theory, he opposes the life instinct
to the death instinct. Moreover, clinical practice suggests that instincts may be conflictual in themselves: It
has been observed that in certain anxiety states instinctual satisfaction is fantasized as a cataclysmic explosion that would annihilate all the subjectÕs vital energy
in a single instant and cause death. We should also
recall the forms of conflict in which different agencies
within the psychic apparatus are in opposition: the
conscious and the unconscious in FreudÕs early theory,
or the Id, the Ego, and the Superego in his later work.
In all the above forms, conflict is considered in
terms of its intrapsychic workings. However, it is clear
we should also consider its articulation with interpersonal conflicts and, beyond that, the problem of conflicts between the individual and society, which Freud
himself addressed several times, notably in Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego (1921c) and Civilization
and Its Discontents (1930a).
ROGER PERRON
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CONFRONTATION
See also: Allergy; Ambivalence; ‘‘Analysis Terminable and
Interminable’’; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Compromise formation; Defense; Defense mechanisms; Doubt;
Drive/instinct; Dualism; Dynamic point of view, the;
Ego autonomy; Hysteria; Oedipus complex; Neutrality/
Benevolent neutrality; Nuclear complex; Prohibition;
Psychotic potential; Reaction-formation; Splitting;
Symptom-formation; Transference hatred.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1894a). The neuro-psychoses of defence.
SE, 3: 45–61.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 130–243.
———. (1911b). Formulations on the two principles of
mental functioning. SE, 12: 218–226.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: an introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1–64.
———. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
———. (1924c). The economic problem of masochism. SE,
19: 155–170.
———. (1930a). Civilization and its discontents, SE, 21:
57–145.
———. (1941b [1892]). Sketches for the ÔPreliminary
commmunicationÕ of 1893, (B) ÔIII.Õ SE, 1: 149–150.
Further Reading
Brenner, Charles. (1982). The mind in conflict. New York:
International Universities Press.
Frank, George. (1996). Conflict and deficit: two theories or
one? Psychoanalytical Psychology, 13, 567–570.
Smith, Henry. (2003). Conceptions of conflict in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 72, 49–96.
CONFRONTATION
The seminar known as Confrontation, designed to foster discussion and overcome intellectual isolation
engendered by institutional divisions in French
psychoanalysis, was created by René Major and
Dominique Geahchan in 1973. It represented an effort
to develop a non-sectarian forum for discussion and
debate among analysts and to bring psychoanalysis
into contact with related disciplines.
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At the time, four psychoanalytic institutions were
operating in France. The Société Psychanalytique de
Paris (SPP) and training institute was the first to be
founded and the progenitor of the others; there was
also the Association Psychanalytique de France (APF).
Members of that organization helped Jacques Lacan to
establish the École Freudienne de Paris in 1964 while a
schism in that group had led five years later to the
founding of what was known as the Quatrième
Groupe. The various splits had precipitated considerable resentment amongst French analysts, especially
after the International Psychoanalytic Association
(IPA) pointedly refused to recognize Lacan or Françoise Dolto as training analysts. The resulting climate
of divisiveness favored dogmatism.
Major and Geahchan belonged to the Paris society;
the former was director of the training institute. Attendees at the first seminar brought Wladimir Granoff,
Serge Leclaire, and François Perrier before institute
members, including Nicolas Abraham, Denise Braunschweig, Alain de Mijolla, Jacques Mynard, Michel Neyraut,
Catherine Parat, Maria Torok, Serge Viderman; analysts
from the three other groups also attended. Subsequent
meetings took place at the Maison de la Chimie and at
the Maison des Polytechniciens.
Thus there developed an extensive exchange of ideas,
after years of relative isolation, among analysts such as
Piera Aulagnier, Jean Clavreul, Jean Laplanche, Maud
and Octave Mannoni, Michèle Montrelay, JeanBertrand Pontalis, Elisabeth Roudinesco, François
Roustang, Moustapha Safouan, Conrad Stein, and
Nathalie Zaltzman. Dialogue also took the form of
meetings with philosophers, mathematicians, historians, and linguists—among them Jean Baudrillard,
Catherine Clément, Jacques Derrida, Serge Doubrovsky,
Luce Irigaray, Sarah Kofman, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,
Jean Claude Milner, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jean Petitot.
By 1975 these seminars became a site of intellectual
exchange that considered psychoanalysis in relation to
literature, politics, law, and religions through investigations of little-studied themes. Well-known analysts
attended these meetings, regardless of their institutional affiliation, in an atmosphere of openness that
encouraged debate on the merits of the various idioms
that were then developing what might be more broadly
construed as the language of psychoanalysis. The seminars also led to various publications under the
imprints of Éditions Confrontation and Éditions Aubier Montaigne.
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Memorable seminars included one that, for the first
time in France, brought to light the situation of psychoanalysis in Argentina and Brazil during a period of
dictatorship and human rights abuse. Another concerned The Post Card, re-igniting the dispute initiated
by LacanÕs ‘‘Seminar on ÔThe Purloined LetterÕ’’ and
DerridaÕs interpretation of it. An Anglo-French meeting debated the relationship of psychoanalysis and
deconstructionism, analytic philosophy, and feminism; it brought together Hélène Cixous, Jacques
Derrida, Antoinette Fouque, Serge Leclaire, and Juliet
Mitchell. Another seminar, in Italy with Armando
Bauleo, concerned politics and society.
Neither an institute nor training program vis-à-vis
clinical practice, the Confrontation seminars realized
in embryonic form FreudÕs hope, expressed in The
Question of Lay Analysis, for new post-graduate institutions that would enable analysts to acquire a broader
base of knowledge for understanding science and culture. The seminars ended in May 1983, with the death
of Dominique Geahchan.
In a larger context, Confrontation was a first step
toward a broader forum for analytic thought outside
of conventional institutes. At the Collège International de Philosophie, René Major directed a colloquium on ‘‘Lacan and the Philosophers’’ in 1990. In
1997, after a similar meeting held upon publication
of Helena Besserman ViannaÕs book on Brazil, Major
called for an international conference. This became
the first Estates General of Psychoanalysis, held at the
Sorbonne in the year 2000, with representative from
thirty-three countries and the ultimate aim of creating a European-based institute of advanced studies in
psychoanalysis.
CHANTAL TALAGRAND
See also: Cahiers Confrontation, Les.
Bibliography
Major, René. (1991). Lacan avec Derrida. Paris: Éditions
Mentha.
Besserman Vianna, Helena. (1995). NÕen parlez à personne.
La psychanalyse face à la dictature et à la torture. Paris: Éditions lÕHarmattan.
Collège International de Philosophie. (1991). Lacan avec les
philosophes. Paris: Editions Albin Michel.
32 8
‘‘CONFUSION OF TONGUES BETWEEN
ADULTS AND THE CHILD’’
Sándor FerencziÕs original title for this article, prepared for the Wiesbaden Congress (September, 1932)
was ‘‘The Passions of Adults and their Influence on the
Development of the Character and the Sexuality of the
Child.’’
The change in the name of the article is indicative
of FerencziÕs new perception of the problem of traumatism; for the first time he established a clear distinction between the language and motivation (desire for
tenderness, security, basic love, ‘‘passive object-love’’)
of childhood and the reasons for passionate language
in some adults, when they are seducers, desirous of
genital excitation and a domination through violence.
Recalling the central Freudian thesis of the Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), Ferenczi
expounded most eloquently in this text the notion of
the hypnotizing and the terrorizing effects of suffering,
which, because they are passionate punishments coming from the adult, allow the child to feel even more
attached to that person: ‘‘The same anxiety, however, if
it reaches a certain maximum, compels them to subordinate themselves like automata to the will of the
aggressor, to divine each one of his desires and to gratify these; completely oblivious of themselves they
identify themselves with the aggressor. Through the
identification, or let us say, introjection of the aggressor,
he disappears as part of the external reality, and becomes
intra- instead of extra-psychic’’ (1932/1955, p. 162).
This is how Ferenczi describes the introjection of
the adultÕs guilt by children, followed by confusion,
loss of confidence in their own perceptions, and fragmentation of the personality, particularly devastating
when the traumatic shock has been incestuous. In
this text he created his daunting metaphor for posttraumatic precocious maturity: ‘‘The precocious
maturity of the fruit that was injured by a bird or
insect’’ (p. 165).
The conclusions he came to on the basis of this
pathological model had a bearing also on the practice
of analysis; while they were not very well received at
the time, some have turned out to be quite pertinent.
A good number of these notions, articulated in his
Clinical Journal, have influenced other prominent psychoanalysts, including Sacha Nacht in France; Michael
Balint, his student and friend, in Great Britain; and
Harold Searles and his students, Elizabeth Severn,
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Clara Thompson, Sándor Lorand, and Sándor Radó,
in the United States.
PIERRE SABOURIN
See also: Childhood; Ferenczi, Sándor; General theory of
seduction; Neurotica; Passion; Primal fantasies; Psychic
casuality; Real trauma; Relaxation principle and neocatharsis; Seduction scenes; Seduction; Sexual trauma;
Tenderness; Trauma.
Source Citation
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1955). Confusion of tongues between adults
and the child. In Final contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis (, p. 156–67). London, Hogarth Press.
(Original work published 1932).
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
Sabourin, Pierre. (1982). Préface. In Sándor Ferenczi,
Oeuvres completes (Vol. 4). Paris: Payot.
CONGRÈS DES PSYCHANALYSTES DE
LANGUE FRANÇAISE DES PAYS ROMANS
On July 19, 1926, Freud mailed René Laforgue a little
card announcing the first in a series of meetings. It read,
‘‘Dear Master, Gathered together on the occasion of the
Geneva psychiatric congress, the members of our little
Paris group and our Swiss friends send you our best
wishes. The beautiful countryside allows us to rest from
complicated discussions concerning schizophrenia, the
superego, and the id.’’ Signatures: René Laforgue, Dr
Robin, Mme Laforgue, Raymond de Saussure, Angélo
Hesnard, Ariane de Saussure, Édouard Pichon, Adrien
Borel.These meetings are still held regularly today; only
their name has changed over the years.
The Congrès des psychanalystes de langue française
des pays romans (Congress of Psychiatrists and Neurologists of France and French-Speaking Countries [also
called ‘‘Congress of Alienists and Neurologists of France
and French-Speaking Countries’’]) was held in Geneva
from August 2 to 7, 1926. The congress was organized
around a paper by Henri Claude, ‘‘Dementia praecox
and Schizophrenia.’’ ClaudeÕs students came to listen to
their ‘‘leader.’’ In this very psychiatric atmosphere, without anyone being aware of the preparations for the
innovation, ClaudeÕs followers, by associating with their
Swiss colleagues—then more enthusiastic than the
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French about psychoanalysis—held the first Conference
of French-Speaking Psychoanalysts on Sunday, August
1, 1926. They also founded the Linguistic Commission
for the Unification of French Psychoanalytic Vocabulary. In the morning session, presided over by Raymond
de Saussure (of Geneva), René Laforgue (of Paris) presented a paper titled ‘‘Schizophrénie et schizonoı̈a’’
(Schizophrenia and schizonoia; 1926). The afternoon
session, presided over by A. Hesnard, was devoted to a
paper by Charles Odier (of Geneva) titled ‘‘Contribution à lÕétude du surmoi et du phénomène moral’’ (A
contribution to the study of the superego and the phenomenon of morality; 1927).
Édouard Pichon, the new secretary, stated, ‘‘It has
been decided to hold the conference every year in the
same city as the Congress of Psychiatrists and on the
eve of the opening of that congress.’’ This plan was followed for the second conference, held in Blois, France,
on July 27, 1927. The conference focused on Charles
OdierÕs paper ‘‘La névrose obsessionnelle’’ (Obsessional neurosis; 1927). And it opened up to physicians
other than psychiatrists. The third meeting, now separate from the Congress of Psychiatrists, was held in
Paris in July 1928 on the subject of ‘‘psychoanalytic
technique.’’ Thereafter, conferences were held in the
amphitheater of the mental health clinic of SaintAnneÕs Hospital, thus facilitating a mandatory show of
reverence for the resident master Henri Claude.
In the conference two cliques formed. On one side
were the ‘‘orthodox’’ Freudians, grouped around Marie
Bonaparte and including Eugénie Sokolnicka, Rudolph
Loewenstein, and two Swiss members, Raymond de
Saussure and Charles Odier. On the other side were the
partisans of a ‘‘French psychoanalysis,’’ associated with
the medical and institutional hierarchy. They had
Édouard Pichon as their bellicose herald, along with
Angélo Hesnard, René Allendy, Georges Parcheminey,
Henri Codet, and later René Laforgue.
One of the themes of the latter group was a distinction between a suspect psychoanalytic doctrine and a
method whose success was undeniable but whose
mode of application needed to be adapted to French
sensitivities. An example of this distinction is President René AllendyÕs address on the occasion of the
sixth Conference of French-Speaking Psychoanalysts
on October 30, 1931: ‘‘Psychoanalysis is not just some
kind of a theory. It has a more precious and less debatable claim to fame: it has cured morbid states that
hitherto resisted all therapeutic treatments.’’ As a result
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of the distinction, later meetings saw the presentation
of two distinct papers, one theoretical and one clinical.
This dichotomy was maintained until 1960, when,
on the occasion of the twenty-first Congress of
Romance-Language Psychoanalysts in Rome, the congress bureau, encouraged by a suggestion from Nicola
Perotti, decided to abolish the distinction.
The success of the conference and an abundance of
contributions on the subject of ‘‘conversion hysteria’’
(including those by Georges Parcheminey and Blanche
Jouve-Reverchon) led in 1931 to the sixth conference
being held, for the first time, over a two-day period. It
was also the first conference to receive a good-will telegram from Max Eitingon, president of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). This custom
was regularly maintained by Ernest Jones and continued after the war until it was replaced in 1974, during
the presidency of Serge Lebovici, by a representative of
the IPA attending the conferences.
The eighth conference, on ‘‘genetic psychology and
psychoanalysis,’’ brought Jean Piaget and Raymond de
Saussure face to face in December 1933. Among the
speakers we find, for the first time, the name of then
thirty-two-year-old Jacques Lacan. There were no conferences in 1932 and 1934, but two were held in 1933.
There followed the mystery of two ‘‘ninth’’ conferences, this figure being applied both to the conference
held in Paris on February 2, 1935, on Paul SchiffÕs
paper ‘‘Les paranoı̈as et la psychanalyse’’ (Paranoia
and psychoanalysis; 1935), and to the conference held
in Nyons on April 10 and 11, 1936.
The tenth conference, in reality the eleventh, was
held in Paris on February 21 and 22, 1938. Sacha
Nacht delivered a paper titled ‘‘Le masochisme: étude
historique, clinique, psychogénique et thérapeutique’’
(Masochism: an historical, clinical, psychogenetic,
prophylactic, and therapeutic study; 1938). Rudolph
Loewenstein, speaking on ‘‘LÕorigine du masochisme
et la théorie des pulsions’’ (The origin of masochism
and the theory of the instincts; 1938), opposed his former analyst on the notion of a death instinct, which
Nacht rejected. This was the last conference of Frenchspeaking psychoanalysts before the Second World War.
The conferences, which were just as political as they
were theoretical or clinical, were not held for the duration of the war. Their resumption after ten years marked
the renewal of psychoanalysis in both France and Europe. This eleventh conference, held in Brussels between
33 0
May 14 and 17, 1948, was organized around Sacha
NachtÕs paper ‘‘Les manifestations cliniques de lÕagressivité et leur rôle dans le traitement psychanalytique’’
(Clinical manifestations of aggression and their role in
psycho-analytic treatment; 1948) and Jacques LacanÕs
paper ‘‘LÕagressivité en psychanalyse’’ (Aggression in
psychoanalysis; 1948). The following year, at the twelfth
conference held in Paris, John Leuba and H. G. Van des
Walls dealt with narcissism. This conference was distinguished most of all by the presence of Melanie Klein,
who, however, failed to make converts among French
psychoanalysts. Relations with neighboring countries
improved, and on October 16, 1951, the conference
changed its name to the Conference of Romance-Language Psychoanalysts, an extension attributed to Jacques Lacan. The conference thus made official its
increasingly close collaboration with Belgian, Spanish,
Italian, and Swiss societies of psychoanalysis.
In 1953 a sixteenth special conference was held in
Rome. The division of the Société psychanalytique de
Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society) (SPP) in June
divided the conference into two parts. In one, the
members of the society listened to Emilio Servadio,
Francis Pasche, René Spitz (who came from New
York), Serge Lebovici, and René Diatkine. They then
departed, and members of the new Société française de
psychanalyse (French Society of Psychoanalysis)
entered to listen to Jacques LacanÕs paper ‘‘Fonction et
champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse’’
(The function and field of language in psychoanalysis).
Jealously simmering in the Paris Psychoanalytic
Society tore the two rival societies apart for more than
a decade, and the following conferences of Frenchspeaking psychoanalysts fit into the general strategy of
the two societiesÕ struggle for influence.
Yet the conferences were also the scene of original
theoretical elaborations marking the evolution and deepening of the psychoanalytic thinking of members of the
Paris Psychoanalytic Society. This can be seen from a
sample of papers presented at the conferences: Sacha
Nacht and Serge Lebovici, ‘‘Indications et contre-indications de la psychanalyse chez lÕadulte’’ (Indications and
contraindications for psychoanalysis for adults; 1954);
René Diatkine and Jean Favreau, ‘‘Le caractère névrotique’’ (The neurotic character; 1956); Francis Pasche,
‘‘Le génie de Freud’’ (The genius of Freud; 1957); Béla
Grunberger, ‘‘Essai sur la situation analytique et le processus de guérison’’ (The analytic situation and the process of healing; 1956); Sacha Nacht and Paul-Claude
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Racamier, ‘‘La théorie psychanalytique du délire’’ (The
psychoanalytic theory of delusions; 1958); Maurice Bouvet, ‘‘Dépersonnalisation et relations dÕobjet’’ (Depersonalization and object relations; 1960); P. Bofill and P.
Folch-Mateu, ‘‘Problèmes cliniques et techniques du
contre-transfert’’ (Clinical and technical problems with
counter-transference; 1963); Michel Fain and Christian
David, ‘‘Aspects fonctionnels de la vie onirique’’ (Functional aspects of dream life; 1962); Angel Garma, ‘‘LÕintégration psychosomatique dans le traitement psychanalytique des maladies organiques’’ (Psychosomatic
integration in the psychoanalytic treatment of organic
illnesses); Michel Gressot, ‘‘Psychanalyse et psychothérapie: leur commensalisme’’ (Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy: their compatibility; 1963); René Held,
‘‘Rapport clinique sur les psychothérapies dÕinspiration
psychanalytique freudienne’’ (Clinical report on psychotherapies inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis;
1963); Franco Fornari, ‘‘La psychanalyse de la guerre’’
(The psychoanalysis of war; 1964); Evelyne Kestemberg
and Jean Kestemberg, ‘‘Contribution à la perspective
génétique en psychanalyse’’ (Contribution to the genetic
perspective in psychoanalysis; 1965); Rudolph Loewenstein, ‘‘Rapports sur la psychologie psychanalytique de
H. Hartman, E. Kris, et Rudolf Loewenstein’’ (Report on
the psychoanalytic psychology of H. Hartmann, E. Kris
and Rudolf Loewenstein; 1965); Olivier Flournoy, ‘‘Du
symptôme au discours’’ (From symptom to discourse;
1967); André Green, ‘‘LÕaffect’’ (The affects; 1970); and
to end this list, Didier Anzieu (of the Association psychanalytique de France [French Psychoanalytic Association]), the first such contributor since the split in 1953),
‘‘Eléments dÕune théorie de lÕinterprétation’’ (Elements
of a theory of interpretation; 1970).
In 1955 the conferences became known as
congresses. In 1956 Pierre Luquet was appointed
permanent secretary for the congresses, a position he
occupied for thirty-three years until 1989, when he
was replaced by Augustin Jeanneau, assisted by Pearl
Lombard. He handled the arrival and departure of
societies from neighboring countries, administrative
matters concerning their participation, relations with
the French Psychoanalytic Association, and relations
with the European Federation for Psychoanalysis, created in 1966. In addition, he negotiated publication of
the first large annual volumes of congress proceedings.
The locale of the congresses alternated between Paris
and a neighboring country. This international character
is reflected in its changes of name to Congress of
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French-Speaking psychoanalysts from Romance-language countries and then to French-speaking psychoanalysts. The days of didactic reports gave way to much
more audacious presentations of clinical and theoretical
research, as shown by the few examples mentioned.
Moreover, the choice of subjects and contributors traces
the history of psychoanalysis in France, including the
tensions and alliances that characterized the division of
the French psychoanalytic movement in relation to the
International Psychoanalytical Association.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Belgium; France; Revue française de psychanalyse;
Société psychanalytique de Paris and Institut de psychanalyse de Paris.
Bibliography
Mijolla, Alain de. (1991). Le congrès des psychanalystes de
langue française des pays romans: quelques éléments dÕhistoire. Revue française de psychanalyse, 55 (1), 7–36.
CONGRÈS INTERNATIONAL DE L’HYPNOTISME EXPÉRIMENTAL ET SCIENTIFIQUE,
PREMIER
Organized by Doctor Edgar Bérillon, founder and
director of the Revue de lÕhypnotisme, the Premier congrès international de lÕhypnotisme expérimental et
scientifique (First international congress on scientific
and experimental hypnotism) was held at the city
hospital in Paris on August 12, 1889, and chaired by
Doctor Victor Dumontpallier. The discussions were
heated, especially between those who maintained the
existence of a link between hypnosis and hysteria
(École de la Salpêtrière) and those who saw it as a
form of suggestion that could be therapeutically useful
(École de Nancy). There were further disagreements
between Gilles de la Tourette (École de la Salpêtrière),
who felt the power of suggestion of the hypnotist presented no danger to society, since the patient would
resist any orders that challenged his morality, and the
lawyer Jules Liégois, who feared the consequences of
such behavior. Additionally, some participants felt that
hypnosis in public should be banned and hypnosis
placed under medical supervision (Ladame, de
Genève), and those who held a more liberal position
(Joseph Delboeuf, de Liège), who believed that hypnosis should be practiced freely, although responsibly,
331
CONSCIOUS PROCESSES
further claiming that a medical degree was not alone
sufficient (given the level of medical education at the
time) to ensure competence in the area of hypnosis.
The proceedings of the congress were sent to all
active members. These included ‘‘Dr. Sigmund Freud,
doctor, Vienna.’’ Early in his career Freud made use of
hypnotic suggestion. He spent several weeks in Nancy
to perfect his technique with Ambroise Auguste Liebeault and Hippolyte Bernheim. Freud left directly
from Nancy to attend two congresses in Paris—the
first on physiological psychology (August 5–10), the
second on hypnotism (August 8–12). If it is true, as
Ernest Jones noted, that Freud left Paris the evening of
August 9, he could not have been present for the controversy between Ladame and Delboeuf during the
second congress. Although he may have not been present for the discussions, he would have been able to
read the various presentations in the published
proceedings.
FRANÇOIS DUYCKAERTS
See also: Bernheim, Hippolyte; Delboeuf, Joseph Rémi
Léopold; Hypnosis.
Bibliography
Bérillon, Edgar. (1889). Premier Congrès international de
l’hypnotisme expérimental et thérapeutique. Paris: Doin.
Duyckaerts, François. (1990). Delbœuf-Ladame: un conflit
paradigmatique. Revue internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse, 3, 25–37.
Freud, Sigmund. (1925d [1924]). An autobiographical
study. SE, 20: 3–70.
Jones, Ernest. (1953). Sigmund Freud: Life and work. London: Hogarth Press.
CONSCIOUS PROCESSES
Conscious processes comprise all phenomena, organized in time, linked to the individualÕs intuitive and
immediate knowledge of his own mental life.
If, as Freud stressed, ‘‘in the Y-systems memory
and the quality that characterizes consciousness are
mutually exclusive’’ (1900a, p. 540), consciousness is
thus indissolubly linked to perception and to the qualitative changes brought about by the Pcs.-Cs. system,
on the one hand with respect to the outside world, by
means of the sense organs, and on the other with
33 2
respect to the most superficial as to the deepest layers
of the psyche. This system responds to the perception
of pleasure and unpleasure, releases of which thus
‘‘automatically regulate’’—at all levels, including the
conscious one—‘‘the course of cathectic processes’’ (p.
574). ‘‘But it is quite possible that consciousness of
these [perceived] qualities may introduce in addition a
second and more discriminating regulation, which is
even able to oppose the former one, and which perfects
the efficiency of the apparatus by enabling it, in contradiction to its original plan, to cathect and work over
even what is associated with the release of unpleasure’’
(p. 616). ‘‘Thought-processes are in themselves without quality, except for the pleasurable and unpleasurable excitations which accompany them, and which, in
view of their possible disturbing effect upon thinking,
must be kept within bounds. In order that thoughtprocesses may acquire quality, they are associated in
human beings with verbal memories, whose residues
of quality are sufficient to draw the attention of consciousness to them and to endow the process of thinking with a new cathexis from consciousness’’ (p. 617).
By virtue of the qualities thus acquired by the Pcs.
system, now governed by secondary processes, ‘‘consciousness, which had hitherto been a sense organ for
perceptions alone, also became a sense organ for a portion of our thought-processes’’ (p. 574), whereas feelings for their part pass directly from the unconscious
into consciousness. Hence it is thanks to the mediation
of word-presentations that ‘‘internal thoughtprocesses are made into perceptions,’’ which is to say
that they ‘‘are actually perceived—as if they came from
without—and are consequently held to be true’’
(1923b, p. 23).
Such a hypercathexis of thought, which enables it to
pass into consciousness, should be seen as analogous
to what occurs at the level of the perception of the outside world thanks to the part played by attention,
which Freud is just as insistent upon, and which is
reinforced by the function of the Cs. systemÕs protective shield against stimuli (1920g, p. 28). Whereas the
sense organs process only a minimal proportion of
external stimuli, ‘‘cathectic innervations are sent out
and withdrawn in rapid periodic impulses from within
into the completely pervious system Pcpt.-Cs. . . . It is
as though the unconscious stretches out feelers,
through the medium of the system Pcpt.-Cs., towards
the external world and hastily withdraws them as soon
as they have sampled the excitations coming from
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it’’—a process that in FreudÕs view ‘‘lies at the bottom
of the origin of the concept of time’’ (1925a, p. 231).
A subtle dialectic may be observed here between the
pleasure principle and the reality principle, a dialectic
that facilitates the gradual institution and development of the functions of consciousness—attention,
judgment, memory, and thought—in parallel with the
shift from free energy to bound energy.
Over and above spontaneous conscious processes, it
behooves psychoanalysis to offer an account of the
processes involved in the passage into the conscious
that occurs during treatment, among them displacement; the mastery of excitation; the transference of the
analysandÕs internal objects onto the analyst (for later
return to the former); the transformation of unconscious traces into ideational representations; and
working-through, meaning the transition from the
spontaneous work of the psyche to an uninterrupted
working-out activity, during the treatment, within and
by means of the Pcpt.-Cs. system. Upon all of this is
predicated the possibility of the past being effectively
transformed into memory, and repetition into meaning; it is worth noting, however, that today the main
concern would seem to be less the acknowledgment of
transferred content than the work of transformation
itself.
‘‘essence’’ of mental life. Rather, consciousness has a
fugitive quality and does not ‘‘form unbroken
sequences which are complete in themselves’’ (p. 157).
‘‘The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is in itself
unconscious and probably similar in kind to all the
other natural processes of which we have obtained
knowledge’’ (1940b [1938], p. 283). Freud stressed,
however, that consciousness still plays an importance
role; indeed, it is ‘‘the one light which illuminates our
path and leads us through the darkness of mental life’’
(p. 286).
The work of psychoanalysis, as Freud saw it, is
‘‘translating unconscious processes into conscious
ones, and thus filling in the gaps in conscious perception’’ (p. 286). Consciousness is the qualitative perception of information arising both from the external
world and from the internal world: an external world
that is unknowable in itself and to which we have
access only via subjective elements collected by our
sense organs and an internal world that consists of
unconscious mental processes and that we are aware of
solely through sensations of pleasure/unpleasure and
revived memories. According to Freud, ‘‘A personÕs
own body, and above all its surface, is a place from
which both external and internal perceptions may
spring’’ (1923b, p. 25).
RAYMOND CAHN
See also: Consciousness; Introspection; Preconscious, the;
Process; Signifier/signified.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1–64.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
———. (1925a [1924]). A note upon the ‘‘Mystic WritingPad.’’ SE, 19: 225–232.
CONSCIOUSNESS
In psychology, consciousness is the subjectÕs immediate apprehension of mental activity. Although Freud
thought that conscious processes are ‘‘the same as the
consciousness of the philosophers and of everyday opinion’’ and ‘‘a fact without parallel, which defies all
explanation or description’’ (1940a [1938], pp. 159,
157), he argued that they could not be considered the
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From the beginning Freud treated consciousness
and perception as indissolubly linked, indeed, so
much so that throughout his work he deemed them to
constitute a single structure, the perceptionconsciousness system. Freud also drew a distinction,
within nonconscious phenomena, between latent
states susceptible of becoming conscious at any
moment and repressed psychic processes inaccessible
to consciousness. This led him to differentiate the
unconscious system proper from a preconscious system, cut off from consciousness by censorship but also
controlling access to consciousness. In this sense, the
preconscious and the conscious are very close: both
are governed by secondary processes and both draw on
a bound form of psychic energy. In The Interpretation
of Dreams (1900a), Freud spoke of the preconsciousconscious system, and in ‘‘The Unconscious’’ (1915e),
he described the preconscious as ‘‘conscious knowledge’’ (p. 167), even though it provides access to
unconscious contents and processes, provided that
they have been transformed.
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CONSTANCY
From his earliest writings on, Freud saw the
link between consciousness and the ego as very close.
And although by 1920 Freud viewed the ego as in large
part unconscious in its defensive activities, he continued to attach consciousness to it as both the ‘‘nucleus’’
and the ‘‘surface of the mental apparatus’’ (1923b,
p. 19).
CONSTANCY. See Principle of constancy
By the early twenty-first century, the problem of
perception had become increasingly complex. FreudÕs
near conflation of perception and consciousness,
which required him to postulate that perceptual phenomena and the laying down of memory traces are
incompatible, has come in for serious reconsideration. It is worth noting, though, that Freud himself,
in his last years, was given pause on this issue by the
problem of fetishism, apropos of which it was apparent that perceptions and mnemic traces could be
caught up in one and the same conflict. This line of
thinking has led to a reevaluation of all psychopathologies where disavowal and splitting predominate,
such as borderline conditions, and more generally, to a
review of all states involving the relationship between
perception and hallucination (see Donald W.
WinnicottÕs notions of the subjective object and of
transitionality [1953]).
Constitution is all the characteristics and tendencies, both somatic and psychic, that an individual
brings into life at the time of birth. It is those parts of
the individual that are innate, inherited, or genetically
determined. Classically, it stands in opposition to all
that is accidental, things acquired in the course of
life. Certain doctrinal trends in the field of psychopathology rely on the notion of constitution in
order to define personality types that are predisposed
to specific psychiatric affections, particularly
psychosis.
RAYMOND CAHN
See also: Agency; Censorship; Conscious processes; Ego;
Metapsychology; Mnemic trace/memory trace; ‘‘Note
upon the ÔMystic Writing Pad,Õ A’’; Perception-consciousness (Pcpt.-Cs.); Preconscious, the; Psychic apparatus; Psychoanalytic treatment; Topographical point of view;
‘‘Unconscious, The.’’
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4–5.
———. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 166–204.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 12–59.
———. (1940a [1938]). An outline of psychoanalysis. SE,
23: 139–207.
———. (1940b [1938]). Some elementary lessons in psycho-analysis. SE, 23: 279–286.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1953). Transitional objects and
transitional phenomena: A study of the first not-me
possession. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34,
89–97.
33 4
CONSTITUTION
The notion of a constitutional factor is FreudÕs, and
he elaborated the theory in two distinct periods.
Before 1905, he conflated it with hereditary disposition, referring to a general and universal condition in
the pathogenic determinism of all affections, particularly neurotic affections. In the etiology of these affections, the hereditary disposition is associated with
specific causes of a sexual nature in accordance with
the rules of a complemental series. Thus, ‘‘the same
specific causes acting on a healthy individual produce
no manifest pathological effect, whereas in a predisposed person their action causes the neurosis to come
to light, whose development will be proportionate in
intensity and extent to the degree of the hereditary
precondition’’ (1896a, p. 147).
After 1905, the Freudian conception of constitution
became inseparable from the sexual doctrine resulting
from his identification of infantile sexuality in all
human beings. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), Freud traces the origin of infantile sexuality to component instincts that are perverse because
they seek satisfaction independently of each other and
thus define, for all individuals, a ‘‘polymorphously
perverse disposition’’ (1905d, p. 191). ‘‘The conclusion
now presents itself to us that there is indeed something
innate lying behind the perversions but that it is something innate in everyone, though as a disposition it
may vary in its intensity and may be increased by the
influences of actual life’’ (1905d, p. 171). Sexual constitution thus came to replace general hereditary
disposition.
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DE
In lecture twenty-three of Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis (1916–17a), entitled ‘‘The Paths to the
Formation of Symptoms,’’ Freud enriched the notion
of sexual constitution with that of fixation of the
libido. These fixations represent the individualÕs constitutional past toward which the libido regresses as a
result of the repression imposed on it by the neurosis.
According to Freud, these fixations are partly the
traces of the phylogenetic heritage.
CLAUDE SMADJA
See also: Bisexuality; Character; Heredity of acquired
characters; ‘‘Heredity and the Etiology of the Neuroses’’;
Instinct; Intergenerational; Phylogenesis; Prehistory; Primal fantasies; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1896a). Heredity and the aetiology of the
neuroses. SE, 3: 141–156.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
———. (1906a). My views on the part played by sexuality
in the aetiology of the neuroses. SE, 7: 269–279.
———. (1916–17a). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. Parts I & II. SE, 15–16.
CONSTRAINT. See Obsessional neurosis
CONSTRUCTION DE L’ESPACE ANALYTIQUE
(LA-) [CONSTRUCTING THE ANALYTICAL
SPACE]
This work has had and continues to have great importance for French psychoanalysis. It sheds an original
light on a central question in FreudÕs work, that of
constructions in analysis.
Serge Viderman proposes to extend this notion very
broadly and make it the basis of a metapsychological
line of thought. He draws a distinction between the
certainties we may derive from reconstructing a past
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lost to repression and the uncertainty that must always
attend constructions of the original nucleus. But he
adds that ‘‘any thoroughgoing interpretation does not
reconstruct the subject’s history, rather, it invents a
story’’ (p. 27).
Much more than a discovery or a recovery, what is
involved here is conjecture: to reconstruct a history is
in fact to construct it. A metaphor nevertheless illustrates moments of certainty that occur in analysis:
‘‘Imagine two lighthouses turning in opposite directions with their beams crossing periodically. It is when
transference and counter-transference intersect that
the moments of greatest brilliance occur. Privileged
moments when the truth of interpretation shines
through’’ (p. 52).
Viderman keeps his distance from his contemporary Jacques Lacan, specifically writing: ‘‘The unconscious is structured as a language only because
language structures it,’’ as well as from certain psychoanalytical clichés, especially ‘‘listening with the third
ear.’’ In a sense, Viderman’s theory is built on the
whole question of historical reality in analysis, a debate
that began in 1897 when Freud declared that he no
longer believed in his neurotica. For Viderman, ‘‘the
historic illusion of psychoanalysis is still the trauma
theory—fons and origo of pathogenesis—an infantile
disorder of psychoanalysis that we may never have
recovered from’’ (1970). Starting from the analysis of
the counter-transference, he centers his theoretical
approach to the analytic treatment on the analyst’s
ability to construct—or rather to invent, based on
what he hears, and on what he knows about analysis
from his own analytic experience and theoretical
knowledge.
The work of analysis, as he presents it, consists in
trying to link the unknowable aspect of the instinct
with the idea that denotes the instinct, an idea that, in
turn, suffers the effect of interpretation, of what the
analyst says about it. VidermanÕs book closes with this
thought: ‘‘Hegel had a presentiment that we would
have to fabricate truth’’ (p. 344).
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Construction-reconstruction; ‘‘Constructions
in Analysis’’ ‘‘From the History of an Infantile
Neurosis (Wolf Man)’’; Historical truth; History and
psychoanalysis; Memories; Memory; Primal scene;
Viderman, Serge.
335
CONSTRUCTION/RECONSTRUCTION
Source Citation
Viderman, Serge. (1970). La construction de lÕespace analytique. Paris: Denoël.
Bibliography
Revue française de psychanalyse. (March–June 1974). Constructions et reconstructions. Á propos de La construction
de l’espace analytique. 38, (2–3).
Further Reading
Casement, Patrick. (1990). Further learning from the patient.
The analytic space and process. London/New York:
Tavistock/Routledge.
Poland, Warren S. (1992). From analytic surface to analytic
space. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association,
40, 381–404.
CONSTRUCTION/RECONSTRUCTION
Constructions are conjectures that the analyst couches
in the form of stories concerning a part of the analysandÕs childhood history and bases on previous partial
interpretations. A construction is meant to compensate for absent or insufficient memory, but it may itself
stimulate recollection.
Freud spoke of construction in connection with the
‘‘Rat Man’’ (1909d) and, more specifically, in connection with the Rat ManÕs wish for his fatherÕs death,
with the circumstances, and approximate date of its
emergence. He also spoke of it in relation to the punishment the patient’s father apparently inflicted on
him for a reason connected with masturbation. This
childhood scene, or rather the motherÕs account of it,
was recalled as a result of a construction.
But it was in the case of the ‘‘Wolf Man,’’ apropos of
the authenticity of the primal scene, that the notion of
construction really came to the fore. Freud emphasized
in this connection that if primal scenes were simply
fantasies, they would never become the basis for recovered memories. But since these dreams that frequently
confirmed the self-same content were in his view
‘‘absolutely equivalent to a recollection,’’ a patient’s
conviction of a scene’s reality was ‘‘in no respect inferior to one based on recollection.’’ Indeed, scenes
‘‘which date from such an early period and exhibit a
similar content, and which further lay claim to such an
extraordinary significance for the history of the case,
33 6
are as a rule not reproduced as recollections, but
have to be divined—constructed—gradually and
laboriously from an aggregate of indications’’ (1918b
[1914], p. 51).
The issue came up once more in Freud’s discussion
of a young homosexual woman, where he expressed
the view that the analyst’s reconstruction of the origins
of a patient’s disorder belongs to the beginning of an
analysis, before the analysand takes charge him or herself (1920a, p. 152).
Only in FreudÕs late paper on ‘‘constructions in analysis’’ (1937d) does he deal with the matter fully. Here
again he stressed the preliminary nature of the analystÕs work of construction in the two-step process of
analysis, arguing that ‘‘the work of analysis consists of
two different portions, that it is carried out in two
separate localities, that it involves two people, to each
of whom a distinct task is assigned’’ (1937d, p. 258).
The analystÕs job is to divine or rather to reconstruct
what has been forgotten, based on clues that have
escaped from oblivion. This work precedes that of the
analysand, but this does not mean that ‘‘the whole of it
must be completed before the next piece of work can
be begun’’ (1937d, p. 260). In fact, "both kinds of work
are carried on side by side, the one kind being always a
little ahead and the other following upon it’’ (p. 260).
The patientÕs work thus consists in accepting or refusing to accept the analyst’s constructions, confirming
them or failing to confirm them by means of recollections.
This is far removed from certain later deviations in
analytic practice that promote the idea that the analyst
be silent. Here we see a kind of practice that takes
risks. Freud distinguishes the different meanings of the
analysandÕs ‘‘Yes’’ and ‘‘No’’ and notes that although
the ‘‘Yes’’ has no value unless it is followed by indirect
confirmations, reciprocally the ‘‘No’’ can mean the
incompleteness but not necessarily the inaccuracy of
the construction. He goes even further, noting that
‘‘the false construction drops out, as if it had never
been made; and, indeed, we often get an impression as
though, to borrow the words of Polonius, our bait of
falsehood had taken a carp of truth’’ (1937d, p. 262).
The epistemological status of constructions is illuminated by means of two analogies. The first is a comparison to the archeologistÕs ‘‘work of construction, or,
if it is preferred, of reconstruction.’’ The analyst and
the archaeologist, Freud writes, ‘‘have an indisputed
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right to reconstruct by means of supplementing and
combining the surviving remains’’ (1937d, p. 259).
The first, however, ‘‘works under better conditions
and has more material at his command to assist him
since what he is dealing with is not something
destroyed but something that is still alive’’ (p. 259).
The second analogy is more unexpected and in Freud’s
discussion it follows an image of destruction, that of
psychotic anxiety bound to an inaccessible memory of
a terrifying event that actually happened. Freud suggests a parallel between constructions in analysis and
delusions: ‘‘The delusions of patients appear to me to
be the equivalents of the constructions which we build
up in the course of an analytic treatment—attempts at
explanations and cure, though it is true that these,
under the conditions of the psychosis, can do no more
than replace the fragment of reality that is being disavowed in the present by another fragment that had
already been disavowed in the remote past’’ (1937d, p.
268). The distinct nature of truth in psychoanalysis is
thus suggested by the notion of construction/
reconstruction.
In 1937 Freud regretted that construction had not
been the subject of as much later work as interpretation. It has been explored since, however, particularly
in the work of Serge Viderman (1970), who developed
the question of levels of certitude in relation to the
deformations caused by repression, and adopted the
notion from Hegel and Freud of a truth that must be
constructed and not merely found.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Amnesia; Anticipatory ideas; Archeology (metaphor); Autohistorization; Bernfeld, Siegfried; Construction de lÕespace analytique (La-) [Constructing the
analytic space]; Family romance; ‘‘From the History of
an Infantile Neurosis’’ (Wolf Man); Historical truth; Historical reality; Intergenerational; Interpretation; Lifting
of amnesia; Memories; Memory.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1909d). Notes upon a case of obsessional
neurosis. SE, 10: 151–318.
———. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile
neurosis. SE, 17: 1–122.
———. (1920a). The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman. SE, 18: 145–172.
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IN
ANALYSIS’’
———. (1937d). Constructions in analysis. SE, 23: 255–
269.
Viderman, Serge. (1970). La Construction de l’espace analytique. Paris: Denoël.
‘‘CONSTRUCTIONS IN ANALYSIS’’
FreudÕs ‘‘Constructions in Analysis’’ was written in
1937 and appeared in print at the end of the year. It
appears that Freud wrote this technical article in
response to criticisms of the interpretations offered by
analysts to their patients. The article begins with the
question of evaluating the ‘‘yes’’ and ‘‘no’’ of the
patient in response to an interpretation and with a justification of a technique intended to take into account
the defensive value of negation. The goal of analysis is
to expose repressed elements and enable the person to
experience reactions that are commensurate with their
level of maturity and to restore a more accurate image
of a forgotten past. To achieve this the analyst has
recourse to various signs and indicators: fragmentary
and distorted memories that arise in dreams, ideas
alluding to repressed elements, and the repetition in
transference of repressed affects. Analysis proceeds on
two levels—manifest and latent.
The analystÕs job is to use the indications provided
by the patient to construct what has been forgotten
and communicate it at an opportune moment. Unlike
the work of the archeologist, psychoanalysis benefits
from the fact that mental formations are not completely destroyed; however, the work of interpretation is
more complex and preliminary since it also relies on
the motivations of the analyst.
Construction covers an entire period of the analysandÕs forgotten prehistory, while interpretation
involves only a particular aspect of the analytic material. But how can its validity be evaluated? An incorrect construction, if it is isolated, does not cause any
damage or provoke a reaction from the patient. The
risk of suggestion is negligible however. The patientÕs
reactions to a construction are important indicators.
The ‘‘yes’’ is equivocal and only has value when additional confirmation becomes available. The ‘‘no’’ only
informs us about the incomplete nature of the construction. Indirect modes of response such as ‘‘I
never thought of that’’ indicate that the analyst has
touched an unconscious idea and are more reliable,
but these are more a question of interpretation than
construction. Equally valuable are the associations
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CONSULTATION
and parapraxes that corroborate the construction; as
is the case with a negative therapeutic reaction, a correct construction results in an aggravation of the clinical state.
However, constructions are only suppositions that
await confirmation. When the construction is correct
the patient will have a sense of conviction; even though
the memory may not have been recalled, the construction will have the same therapeutic effect. Occasionally, a construction leads to very clear memories in the
vicinity of what was constructed. Defensive displacement contributes to the quasi-hallucinatory quality of
such recollections.
Based on the foregoing, it is possible that even in
psychosis hallucinations are a return of forgotten
events (seen or heard) from the first years of life,
which have been distorted or subjected to other forms
of defensive activity such as displacement. Thus, the
upward pressure during psychosis would involve both
desire and the repressed, distorted as in dreams. Delusions would also be constructions containing ‘‘a kernel
of historical truth,’’ denied originally and drawing
their strength of conviction from their infantile source.
The analysand, like the hysterical patient, suffers from
reminiscences. Basically, the compelling force of the
analystÕs construction is similar to the delusion: the
restoration of a piece of lived history. More generally,
humanityÕs beliefs are inaccessible to criticism since
they contain an element of historical truth concerning
a forgotten primitive past.
Although considered a technical article, FreudÕs
essay later helped elevate the term ‘‘construction’’ to
the rank of a psychoanalytic concept. The emphasis is
on repetition and the relationship between conviction
and historical truth. Memory traces become more
important than desire or fantasy, which leads to rich
possibilities for the treatment of psychotic delirium. A
dialectic process can be identified between the rediscovered past and the construction as a creation associated with the treatment.
Source Citation
Freud, Sigmund. (1937d). Konstruktionen in der Analyse.
Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 23: 459–469;
G.W., 16: 43–56; Constructions in analysis. SE, 23: 257–269.
Bibliography
Fédida, Pierre. (1978). LÕidentité. LÕéconomie du théorique.
Autour du texte sur ‘‘les constructions dans lÕanalyse.’’ Psychanalyse à l’Université, 3 (11), 437–444.
Katan, Maurits. (1969). The link between FreudÕs work on
aphasia, fetishism and constructions in analysis. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 50 (4), 547–553.
Kofman, Sarah. (1983). Un métier impossible. Lecture de
construction en analyse. Paris: Galilée.
Pasche, Francis. (1988). Travail de construction ou, si lÕon
préfère, de reconstruction, S. Freud, in Third Symposium
of the European Federation of Psychoanalysis, Stockholm,
1988, on ‘‘Construction and Reconstruction.’’Bulletin de la
Fédération européenne de psychanalyse, 31, 19–31.
Viderman, Serge. (1970). La construction de lÕespace analytique. Paris: Denoël.
CONSULTATION. See Initial interview(s)
CONTACT AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
CHRISTIAN SEULIN
Josef Breuer was known in Vienna as the ‘‘man with
hands of gold’’ because he ‘‘made contact’’ in a
friendly, non-objectifying way with his patients. It was
with him that Bertha Pappenheim invented the psychoanalytic method. Sigmund Freud began as BreuerÕs
student and Breuer sent him patients and ‘‘monitored’’
the evolution of their treatment. When Freud began to
distance himself, the shift from chair to couch was gradually promoted: ‘‘DonÕt touch me! Keep quiet!’’ as
Emmy von N. said.
See also: Construction de l’espace analytique, La (Constructing the analytical space); Construction/reconstruction; ‘‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’’ (Wolf
Man); Historical reality; Interpretation.
In Totem and Taboo (1912–13a), a festival of
‘‘touching,’’ die Berührung, appears more than seventy
times in sixty pages in Part II, entitled ‘‘Taboo and
Emotional Ambivalence.’’ In Laplanche and PontalisÕs
The Language of Psycho-Analysis, however, the word
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does not appear. In chapter 3 of Totem and Taboo,
‘‘Animism, Magic, and the Omnipotence of
Thoughts,’’ Freud refers to FrazerÕs distinction between
magic based on similarity—we destroy a statue representing the being whose death we desire—and magic
based on contiguity—we spread grease on the weapon
that produced the wound (1912–13a, pp. 81–83).
Roman Jakobson (1963) pointed out that the very
essence of speech, the Freudian holy of holies, is
directly bound up with Totem and Taboo: metaphor
and metonymy are at work in FreudÕs dream analysis
as they are in FrazerÕs magic.
‘‘The two principles of association—similarity
[Ähnlichkeit] and contiguity [Kontiguität]—are both
included in the more comprehensive concept of ÔcontactÕ,’’ Freud writes. ‘‘Association by contiguity is contact in the literal sense, association by similarity is
contact in the metaphorical sense [im übertragenen
Sinne]. The use of the same word for the two kinds of
relation is no doubt accounted for by some identity in
the psychical processes concerned which we have not
yet grasped’’ (1912–13a, p. 85).
The realm of touching permeates these writings of
FreudÕs. It takes in touching that is prescribed, essential from the very beginning of life, beneficial, soothing, healing. And it also includes proscribed touching,
the touch of evil, the touch that kills. The realm of
touch is par excellence a social realm.
But how does contact differ from touch? Touch is
objectifying, it manipulates the body or objects. Contact is emotional; it establishes a relationship with a
living being. By promoting ‘‘benevolent neutrality’’ in
place of freundlich and Wohlwollen (to amicably
desire what is Good and Gratifying for the other),
analysts have distorted the Freudian message in a
very particular way. To say ‘‘IÕm listening’’ is to
acknowledge the existence of the patient; to say ‘‘I
understand’’ is to emphasize the reality of his or her
thoughts, which the ‘‘haptonomy’’ of Franz Veldman
(1998) describes as ‘‘existential affirmation’’ and
‘‘rational confirmation’’ of existence. But without real
emotional contact, it is impossible to help a human
being develop his or her sense of ‘‘basic security,’’
affective confirmation being essential to the growth
of every individual. In VelmanÕs terms, it is the mobilization of ‘‘philia’’ that ‘‘unveils the Good of the
other, recognizes him in the Good he can be.’’ Some
have said that recognizing the other is the Supreme
Good, ‘‘because where love awakens, the self, that
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somber despot, dies’’ (Giordano Bruno, cited in
1911c [1910]).
BERNARD THIS
See also: Anna O., case of; Emmy von N., case of; Neutrality/benevolent neutrality; Taboo; Tenderness; Totem and
Taboo.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1911c [1910]). Notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia. SE, 12: 9–79.
———. (1912–1913a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
Jakobson, Roman. (1963). Essais de linguistique générale.
Paris: Minuit.
Veldman, Franz. (1998).Haptonomie, science de lÕaffectivité
(7th ed.). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
CONTACT-BARRIER
Bion first used the term ‘‘contact-barrier,’’ which he
borrows from Freud, in Learning from Experience
(1962, p.17):
I shall now transfer all that I have said about the
establishment of conscious and unconscious and a
barrier between them to a supposed entity, that I designate a Ôcontact-barrierÕ; Freud used this term to
describe the neurophysiological entity subsequently
known as a synapse. In conformity with this my statement that the man has to ÔdreamÕ a current emotional
experience whether it occurs in sleep or in walking life
is reformulated thus: The manÕs alpha-function
whether in sleeping or waking transforms the senseimpressions related to an emotional experience, into
alpha-elements, which cohere as they proliferate to
form the contact-barrier. This contact-barrier, thus
continuously in process of formation, marks the point
of contact and separation between conscious and
unconscious elements and originates the distinction
between them. The nature of the contact barrier will
depend on the nature of the supply of alpha-elements
and on the manner of their relationship to each other.
This contact-barrier, like a number of other concepts in psychoanalysis, can be seen as a structural
concept, an area between conscious and unconscious,
or as a function, a constant transformation of betainto alpha-elements. It would result in what Freud saw
as a permeable repressive barrier, in which the
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CONTAINER-CONTAINED
conscious and unconscious are in constant symbolic
communication. Bion also compares it to a continuous dream in interaction with conscious rational
experience. An alpha-element contact-barrier gives
emotional meaning, and resonance in communication
with an external object, where the contact-barrier may
be transformed into an impermeable beta-screen, and
the internal communication between the conscious
and unconscious is blocked.
HANNA SEGAL
See also: Alpha-elements; Beta-elements; Beta-screen; LoveHate-Knowledge (L/H/K links); Physical pain/psychic
pain; Psychosomatic limit/boundary; ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology, A’’.
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred R. (1962). Learning from experience. London:
Heinemann; New York: Basic Books.
———. (1963). Elements of psycho-analysis. London:
Heinemann.
CONTAINER-CONTAINED
In Elements of Psycho-Analysis (1963), W. R. Bion writes
that psychoanalytic theories contain a twofold defect:
‘‘on the one hand, description of empirical data is unsatisfactory as it is manifestly what is described in conversational English as a ÔtheoryÕ about what took place rather
than a factual account of it and, on the other, the theory
of what took place cannot satisfy the criteria applied to a
theory as that term is employed to describe the systems
used in rigorous scientific investigation’’ (p. 1).
elements of psychoanalysis need to be capable of representing the realization that they were originally used to
describe and of being articulated like letters with other
similar elements and, having been articulated, to be
capable of forming a scientific deductive system.
BionÕs first element, represented as $#, can be
defined as a dynamic relationship between the container and the contained, deriving from KleinÕs concept of projective identification. To become a psychic
object, the projected element has to encounter a container, or a thinking function. The intrusive projected
element is thereby associated with a masculine symbolism, and the containing receptive element with a feminine symbolism. This therefore establishes a model
that represents the transference-countertransference
dynamics between patient and analyst, without any
starting assumptions as to the qualities that may
emerge there.
Wilfred Bion thus returns to his original hypothesis,
which relates to finding an element that can simultaneously define a realization in the treatment and the
original realization relating to the patientÕs psychic
life, past memories and the intense, even pathological,
mechanisms of projective identification that can be
associated with these. For him, the $# element also
represents the apparatus of thought in which certain
aspects can carry out an $ (or #) function for other #
(or $) aspects. Psychic growth therefore results from
the integration of this mechanism when projective
identification is operating normally. In the treatment
of psychotic patients, the violence of the projective
mechanisms hinders the $# ‘‘interlocking,’’ which
then creates a sense of dislocation.
It is therefore necessary to ‘‘formulate an abstraction, to represent the realization that existing theories
purport to describe’’ (pp. 1–2). As elements in psychoanalysis, these abstractions operate like alphabetical
letters in the formation of words: through many different combinations, they offer the analyst an infinite
number of possible adaptations and interpretations
for understanding the vicissitudes of the transference
through thought and, of course, through words.
W. R. Bion locates the container/contained dimension in the vertical axis of his grid. It represents the
positive growth of thought; this element operates
through its F part that is equivalent to the preconception, which is immersed in the M part that corresponds to realization and gives access to meaning. It
only finally becomes operative if, through the integration of the container-contained element, the subject
tolerates a primary bisexuality, with the beginnings of
triangulation that accompany it.
By contrast, the classical model of psychoanalytic
theory, like the ideogram in relation to the word, ultimately allows of only one possible form of thought.
JEAN-CLAUDE GUILLAUME
Insofar as the analytic situation establishes the conditions for a new realization in the transference, the
34 0
See also: Alpha function; Arrogance; Concept; Hallucinosis; Internal object; Psychic envelope; Psychotic panic; Realization; Relations (commensalism, symbiosis, parasitism);
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Psychoanalytic setting; Selected fact; Skin; Thoughtthinking apparatus.
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred R. (1963). Elements of psycho-analysis. London: Heinemann.
CONTRADICTION
In its primary meaning, contradiction is the act of
contradicting, of opposing oneself to someone by saying the opposite of whatever he or she says. The term
is used in mathematics and philosophy. In mathematical logic, a contradiction is a statement whose truth
function has only one value: false. In philosophy it is
the relation that exists between the affirmation and the
negation of a proposition. A term that embodies
incompatible (contrary or contradictory) elements is
also called a contradiction.
Contradicting the fears and feelings of a patient
under hypnosis was the first therapeutic intervention
that Freud described in his early article on ‘‘A Case of
Successful Treatment by Hypnotism’’ (1892–93a). He
showed that the etiology of the symptom depended on
‘‘antithetic ideas’’ (p. 121) opposed to the individualÕs
intentions. The formal element in the etiology was
thus contradiction, which also applied to repression:
‘‘For these patients whom I analysed had enjoyed good
mental health up to the moment at which an occurrence of incompatibility took place in their ideational
life—that is to say, until their ego was faced with an
experience, an idea or a feeling which aroused such a
distressing affect that the subject decided to forget
about it because he had no confidence in his power to
resolve the contradiction between that incompatible
idea and his ego by means of thought-activity’’ (Freud
1894a, p. 47).
The Interpretation of Dreams and the ‘‘first topography’’ increased the places in FreudÕs theory where contradictory oppositions could be found within a single
agency, between agencies, or between psychical reality
and external reality. As early as 1900, Freud noted that
‘‘Thoughts which are mutually contradictory make no
attempt to do away with each other, but persist side by
side. They often combine to form condensations, just
as though there were no contradiction between them,
or arrive at compromises such as our conscious
thoughts would never tolerate, but such as are often
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admitted in our actions’’ (1900a, p. 596). The absence
of contradiction, Widerspruchslosigkeit, at first an attribute of the primary process, later became a feature of
the unconscious:
The nucleus of the Ucs. consists . . . of wishful
impulses. These instinctual impulses are co-ordinate
with one another, exist side by side without being
influenced by one another, and are exempt from
mutual contradiction. When two wishful impulses
whose aims must appear to us incompatible become
simultaneously active, the two impulses do not diminish each other or cancel each other out, but combine
to form an intermediate aim, a compromise. There are
in this system no negation, no doubt, no degrees of
certainty: all this is only introduced by the work of the
censorship between the Ucs. and the Pcs. Negation is a
substitute, at a higher level, for repression’’ (Freud,
1915e, pp.186–187).
Freud used similar language apropos of the id, adding that ‘‘The logical laws of thought do not apply to
the id, and this is true above all of the law of contradiction’’ (1933a [1932], p. 73). Ambivalence is the final
dynamic factor necessary for understanding the ubiquity of contradiction in the expression of psychic
processes.
Thus, all products of the unconscious—dreams,
slips, jokes, symptoms—simply disregard ‘‘the category of contraries and contradictories. . . . Dreams feel
themselves at liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so that there is no way of
deciding, at first glance, whether any element that
admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts
as a positive or as a negative’’ (Freud, 1900a, p. 318).
Freud compared these psychic creations to the antithetical meanings of primal words (1910e), which he
again analyzed in his study of taboos (1912–1913),
and then in his essay on ‘‘The Uncanny’’ (1919h). The
term ‘‘compromise formation,’’ a feature of all
defenses, demonstrates the extension of contradiction
across the whole of mental life.
Contradiction intersects with negation and with the
formal referential binary true/false. But Freud was especially interested in dynamic processes that allow contradictory mental positions to be maintained simultaneously. In addition to those already mentioned, he also
referred to negation linked to repression, disavowal,
splitting, and repudiation (or foreclosure, in Lacanian
terms). Thus the contradiction between wish and reality
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L O V E ’’
is systematic in relation to the difference between
the sexes.
The notion of contradiction implies the formal
expression of an opposition and its relation to truth.
Mathematicians such as Kurt Gödel have shown that
its domain of relevance is restricted. Structuralist linguists have distinguished oppositions based on contraries from those based on exclusion. Contradiction
would appear to be a very rudimentary formal instrument for investigating psychic conflicts. Freud did not
rely much on it, preferring the more dynamic terms
‘‘opposite’’ and ‘‘contrary.’’
MICHÈLE PORTE
See also: Dream; Dream work; Illusion; Interpretation of
Dreams, The; ‘‘Negation’’; Primary process/secondary process; Reversal into the opposite; Sense/nonsense; Unconscious, the; ‘‘Unconscious, The’’.
and for that reason are more exciting. The lover of
this type proposes to save the woman he desires,
though he readily accepts the presence of his rival.
Freud explains this behavior by reference to the Oedipus complex (a term he used for the first time in the
same year, 1910, that this article was published).
What is involved here is a desire to steal the mother
from the father, or at least share her with him. The
mother has first been compared to a prostitute when,
at puberty, the boy was obliged to acknowledge, after
the idealization of childhood, that she too has
had sexual relations. Thenceforward he feels he must
save her from degradation. This pattern, Freud
adds, is repetitive, because it can only result in
disappointment.
‘‘Contributions to the Psychology of Love’’ is the title
given collectively to three articles by Sigmund Freud:
‘‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men,’’
published in 1910; ‘‘On the Universal Tendency to
Debasement in the Sphere of Love,’’ published in 1912;
and ‘‘The Taboo of Virginity,’’ published in 1918. It
was Freud himself who, believing they formed a whole,
decided to publish them under a single title.
In ‘‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in
the Sphere of Love,’’ Freud discusses male impotence.
This problem arises for the most part from an
‘‘incestuous fixation on mother or sister’’ (p. 180).
Freud distinguishes two ‘‘currents’’ in erotic life: the
‘‘affectionate’’ and the ‘‘sensual.’’ The affectionate
current is the older, as it was directed towards the
infantÕs earliest caretakers, that is, towards the primary object-choice, typically the mother. The sensual
current reaches its acme during puberty but, coming
into conflict with the oedipal prohibition, turns to
other objects, while often remaining fixated to the
first. It ‘‘can happen that the whole of a young manÕs
sensuality becomes tied to incestuous objects in the
unconscious, or to put it another way, becomes
fixated to unconscious incestuous phantasies. The
result is then total impotence’’ (p. 182). But, Freud
wonders, why is this relatively uncommon? His
answer is that in many cases where the same factors
are at work the upshot is sexual relations unaccompanied by pleasure. For the two currents to combine
and produce complete satisfaction is unusual, and
the solution that consists in directing each current to
a different woman is very frequent. But, Freud adds,
it is no doubt in the very nature of the instinct to
remain ever unsatisfied in the choice of object. The
gain, perhaps, is to be found in the processes of sublimation, the motor of the development of
civilization.
In ‘‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by
Men,’’ Freud considers men who are interested only
in women over whose affections they must compete
with another man; women who by virtue of their sexual life have something of the prostitute about them
In ‘‘The Taboo of Virginity,’’ the last of this set of
three papers, Freud returns to some of the ideas
concerning women briefly referred to in the previous
article. He cites ethnologists according to whom, in
certain so-called primitive peoples, a person other
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1892–93a). A case of successful treatment
by hypnotism. SE, 1: 115–128.
———. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams; Part I. SE, 4:
1–338; Part II. SE, 5: 339–625.
———. (1894a). The neuro-psychoses of defence. SE, 3: 41–61.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
———. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159–204.
‘‘CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PSYCHOLOGY
OF LOVE’’
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C O N T R O V E R S I A L D I S C U S S I O N S ( A N N A F R E U D -M E L A N I E K L E I N )
than the husband deflowers the fiancée. This practice,
according to Freud, is followed in order to protect
the husband from danger. He then examines a number of causes for fear in this connection. The bleeding that results from the loss of virginity is associated
with physical wounds and death. In a number of socalled primitives, all of sexual life is wrapped in
taboos. The woman is feared because of the assumed
loss of virility that occurs through physical contact
with her and this activates the fear of castration,
especially as a result of her first sexual intercourse.
But these general considerations are inadequate in
FreudÕs view. The analysis of female frigidity, he
argues, leads us to consider such other factors as the
Oedipus complex, penis envy, the desire to obtain a
child from the father as reparation, and hostility
towards any man who appears as a poor substitute
for the true object of this ancient desire. Thus the
husband who avoids deflowering his wife acts thus
because he fears losing his penis and, like Holofernes,
his life.
ROGER PERRON
See also: Castration complex; Love; Oedipus complex;
Sexuality; Taboo of virginity; Tenderness.
Source Citation
Freud, Sigmund. (1910h). Über einen besonderen Typus der
Objektwahl beim Manne (Beiträge zur Psychologie des
Liebeslebens I). Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, 2: 389–97; GW, VIII: 66–77; A
special type of choice of object made by men. SE, 11:
165–175.
———. (1912d). Über die allgemeinste Erniedrigung des
Liebeslebens (Beiträge zur Psychologie des Liebeslebens
II). Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische
Forschungen, 4: 40–50; GW, VIII: 78–91; On the universal
tendency to debasement in the sphere of love. SE, 11:
179–190.
———. (1918a [1917]). Das Tabu der Virginität (Beiträge
zur Psychologie des Liebeslebens III). Sammlung kleiner
Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, Leipzig-Vienna: Vierte Folge,
p. 229–251; GW, XII: 159–180; The taboo of virginity. SE,
11: 193–208.
CONTROL CASE. See Supervised analysis
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CONTROVERSIAL DISCUSSIONS
(ANNA FREUD-MELANIE KLEIN)
The title, Controversial Discussions, refers to the protracted discussions between Anna Freud, Melanie Klein,
their followers and members of the indigenous group of
British analysts which took place in the British PsychoAnalytical Society between 1941 and 1946.
The Discussions involved scientific, educational,
and administrative problems and had the aim of
deciding whether the new views concerning child
development and psychoanalytic technique to treat
both children and adults proposed by Klein and her
followers: Susan Isaacs, Paula Heimann, Joan Riviere,
and others, were compatible with the classical view of
psychoanalysis as understood by Anna Freud and her
Viennese and Berliner colleagues: Willie Hoffer, Kate
Friedlander, Barbara Lantos, Dorothy Burlingham,
and others, or whether Klein should be expelled from
the psychoanalytical community. The indigenous
group of British psychoanalysts, composed of Ernest
Jones, Sylvia Payne, James Strachey, Ella Sharpe,
Marjorie Brierley, and others, tried to mediate between
the two contenders and to reach a compromise which
in the end managed to hold the British PsychoAnalytical Society together and led to the formation of
three groups: the so called Freudians, the so-called
Kleinians and the so-called Independents.
The Controversial Discussions were at the same time
the peak and the symptom of longstanding tensions and
disagreements between the British way of looking at psychoanalysis, mainly but not exclusively influenced by
Klein, and that represented by the Continental analysts,
gathered mainly around Freud and his daughter Anna.
Those disagreements had already expressed themselves
in the late twenties and the late thirties.
The tensions and divergences exploded when Freud
and his family had to emigrate to London as a result of
the Nazi persecutions and, after FreudÕs death in London, Anna and many Continental analysts decided to
stay in England.
One should consider the various factors which contributed to the Controversial Discussions: longstanding personal rivalries, the difficult situation of Klein,
whose daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, was in analysis
with Edward Glover. Schmideberg became, together
with Glover, one of KleinÕs fiercest critics, joining the
group of Anna Freud. Also significant were the ‘‘prima
343
CONVENIENCE, DREAM
OF
donna’’ types of personalities of both Anna Freud and
Melanie Klein, the objective tensions created by the
war, the difficulties of mourning FreudÕs death for
Anna and her group in those circumstances, but
also the cultural background of the indigenous members of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, which
allowed the debate to take place without it degenerating into a catastrophic ending.
In order to defend their views, the Kleinians were
required to present four papers to an ad hoc committee of the British Psycho-Analytical Society made up
of Edward Glover, Marjorie Brierley, and James Strachey, and chaired by Ernest Jones. The first paper was
that of Susan Isaacs, ‘‘On the Nature and Function of
Unconscious Phantasy’’ on January 27, 1943. Paula
Heimann then read her paper on June 23, ‘‘Some
Aspects of the Role of Introjection and Projection in
Early Development.’’ A third paper was given on
December 17, 1943, by Isaacs and Heimann, called
‘‘On Regression.’’ Finally, on March 1, 1944, Klein read
her paper ‘‘The Emotional Life and the Ego Development of the Infant with Special Reference to the
Depressive Position.’’
Also very important were the papers on technique
which were written by Anna Freud, Klein, Sylvia Payne,
Ella Sharpe, and Marjorie Brierley, to illustrate different
approaches to the handling of the transference and the
way to interpret the defenses of the patients.
The Controversial Discussions are now considered
one of the most important documents of the history of
psychoanalysis (King and Steiner, 1992). Indeed, they
allow the study in vivo of the conscious and unconscious complexities of the emotional, personal, cultural, institutional, and political tensions of what on
the surface appeared to be only a scientific disagreement between different ways of approaching the study
of psychic development.
Hayman, Anne. (1989). What do we mean by phantasy?
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 70, 105–114.
King, Pearl H.M., and Steiner, Riccardo. (1991). The FreudKlein controversies 1941–1945. London and New York:
Tavistock Publications-Routledge, New Library of
Psychoanalysis.
Steiner, Riccardo. (1985). Some thoughts about tradition
and change arising from an examination of the British Psycho-Analytical SocietyÕs ‘‘Controversial Discussions’’,
1943–1944, International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 12,
27–71.
CONVENIENCE, DREAM OF
The ‘‘dream of convenience’’ is a dream described by
Freud as fulfilling two of a dreamÕs essential functions:
satisfying a wish and safeguarding sleep.
He first mentioned this type of dream in a letter to
Wilhelm Fliess dated March 4, 1894 (letter 22): A young
doctor (Josef BreuerÕs nephew) is awakened early one
morning so that he can go to work at his hospital ward.
However, he immediately falls back to sleep and, in his
dream, has ‘‘a hallucination of a notice-board over a
hospital bed with [his] name on it’’ (p. 213); in the
dream the thought comes to him that he does not need
to wake up, since he is already in the hospital.
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), Freud
twice referred to ‘‘Herr PepiÕs dream’’: in chapter 3,
where he discussed the fulfillment of wishes in dreams,
and in chapter 5, where he mentioned the dreamÕs role
as ‘‘guardian of sleep’’ (p. 233). In chapter 3 he gave
other examples of what he explicitly called ‘‘dreams of
convenience’’: for example, dreaming that he is drinking saves the dreamer the trouble of having to wake up
to quench his thirst.
Bibliography
Freud did not especially develop a theory of this
type of dream, which only represents a specific type of
wish-fulfillment in dreams. In his last mention of this
topic in ‘‘An Outline of Psycho-Analysis’’ (1940a), he
illustrated this theme by again citing the case of
the doctor who can continue to sleep by dreaming that
he is already at the hospital, and two other dreams that
fulfill wishes, one involving hunger and the other sexual desire. He reminded readers that dreams are in fact
compromise formations (between renunciation and
satisfaction).
Grosskurth, Phyllis. (1986). Melanie Klein. Her world and
work. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Clinical practice often provides examples of dreams
of convenience. Their interpretation cannot be limited
RICCARDO STEINER
See also: British Psycho-Analytical Society; Freud, Anna;
Glover, Edward; Isaacs-Sutherland, Susan; Jones, Ernest;
Klein-Reizes, Melanie; Psychoanalytical Treatment of
Children; Transference in children.
34 4
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CONVERSION
to ‘‘decoding’’ the meaning only within a particular
category of dreams, because the dream involves the
entire dynamic theory (conflicts between the instincts
and the defenses).
ROGER PERRON
See also: Dream.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4–5.
———. (1940a [1938]). An outline of psycho-analysis. SE
23: 139–207.
———. (1950c [1887–1902]). Extracts from the Fliess
papers. SE, 1: 173–280.
CONVERSION
The term ‘‘conversion’’ and its definition appear for
the first time in an 1894 article by Freud titled ‘‘The
Neuro-Psychoses of Defense.’’ ‘‘In hysteria the incompatible idea rendered innocuous by its sum of excitation being transformed into something somatic, for this
I should like to propose the name of conversion . . . . By
this means the ego succeeds in freeing itself from the
contradiction [with which it is confronted]; but
instead, it has burdened itself with a mnemic symbol
which finds a lodgement in consciousness, like a sort
of parasite, either in the form of an unresolvable
motor innervation or as a constantly recurring hallucinatory sensation’’ (1894a, p. 49). In the Freudian terminology of the time, an ‘‘irreconcilable’’ idea is a
desire that is incompatible with the subjectÕs moral
ideals and consequently condemned and most often
rendered unconscious.
Consequently, the concept is, from the beginning,
located along the three axes that will structure all Freudian metapsychology: dynamic through the reference
to ‘‘contradiction,’’ which will later be theorized as
‘‘conflict’’; topographical through the reference to the
unconscious, which is still only allusive but will
quickly assume major importance; and economic
through the idea of a displacement of the energy (this
will later become the libido) of the mind to the body.
From this Freud draws a therapeutic conclusion:
‘‘BreuerÕs cathartic method lies in leading back the
excitation in this way from the somatic to the psychical
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sphere deliberately, and in then forcibly bringing
about a settlement of the contradiction by means of
thought-activity and a discharge of the excitation by
talking’’ (1894a, p. 50).
Freud initially considered the mechanisms of conversion to be specific to hysteria, unlike the other
defensive psychoneuroses (obsessions and phobias).
There would be a predisposition to hysteria for reasons
he believes are probably constitutional, through what
he refers to as ‘‘somatic compliance’’ in the Dora case
(1905e). However, the ‘‘choice of neurosis,’’ a problem
to which he often returned, here finds only its modalities of realization; to these fundamental conditions
must be added ‘‘trigger factors’’ rooted in personal history (childhood traumas such as early ‘‘seduction’’
experiences, that is, sexual assaults initiated by adults).
This is FreudÕs position during the first period of his
career. Later, in 1915, he distinguished ‘‘conversion
hysteria,’’ which used this mechanism to produce
symptoms, from ‘‘anxiety hysteria,’’ dominated by
phobic mechanisms but without being accompanied
by any conversion phenomena (1915d). He also
acknowledged that minor conversion phenomena can
be found in situations other than so-called conversion
hysteria (1916–17a).
It is important to remember that Freud
quickly established the necessity of distinguishing psychoneuroses—to which hysteria belongs—from actual
neuroses (neurasthenia, anxiety neurosis, hypochondria), whose source is not found in infantile conflicts
but in current disturbances of the sexual function
(1898a). In such cases the accumulation of sexual excitation that has not been released or has been released
by unsatisfactory means (coitus interruptus, masturbation, and so on) is reflected in anxiety and somatic
symptoms (these views were modified in Inhibitions,
Symptoms, and Anxiety, 1926d), but without the symbolic dimension inherent in conversion phenomena.
While the notion ‘‘actual neurosis’’ went into a long
decline, modern work in psychosomatic medicine has
given it new currency. It is used to describe somatic
disturbances, often serious, that appear to arise from a
form of interaction between mind and body where
energy ‘‘passes directly’’ from the mind to somatic
functions without symbolic mediation, that is, without ‘‘mentalization’’ of the psychoneuroses (Marty,
1980).
ROGER PERRON
345
COPROPHILIA
See also: Cäcilie M., case of; Elisabeth von R., case of;
‘‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’’ (Dora/
Ida Bauer); Hysteria; Hysterical paralysis; Innervation;
Katharina, case of; Neurosis; Psychosomatic; Psychosomatic limit/boundary; Psychogenic blindness; Repression; Somatic compliance; Stammering; Studies on
Hysteria; Sum of excitation; Symptom; Tics.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1894a). The neuro-psychoses of defence.
SE, 3: 45–61.
———. (1905e). Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria (Dora/Ida Bauer). SE, 7: 7–122.
———. (1915d). Repression. SE, 14: 146–158.
———. (1916–17a). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. SE, 15–16.
Marty, Pierre. (1980). Les mouvements individuels de vie et
de mort (Vol. II, LÕOrdre psychosomatique). Paris: Payot.
COPROPHILIA
The term ‘‘coprophilia’’ is used to describe a predilection for fecal and related matters. On January 4, 1898,
Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess: ‘‘Today I am sending
you No. 2 of the ‘‘dreckological’’ reports . . .’’ (1985, p.
291). In creating this neologism from the German
word Drek, meaning mud, filth, excrement, he was,
according to Max Schur (1975), testifying to the abundant amount of anal material in his self-analysis at the
time.
Food can remind children of excrement: ‘‘He protests loudly—in the form of overcompensation—the
successful overcoming of his coprophiliac inclinations,’’ Freud explained to his pupils (Wiener Psychoanalystiche Verinigung,1962–1975, p. 177). Repression
of an olfactive coprophilic pleasure can determine the
choice of a fetish (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905d). In the same vein, on February, 24, 1910, he
wrote to Karl Abraham: ‘‘I regard coprophilic olfactory
pleasure as being the chief factor in most cases of foot
and shoe fetishism’’ (1965a, p. 87).
He later indicated, in his article On the Universal
Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love (1912d),
that when man changed to the erect position he raised
his smelling organ above ground level. It was then that
‘‘the coprophilic instinctual components [ . . . ] proved
incompatible with our aesthetic standards of culture’’
(p. 189). Reflecting in the same article on sexual
34 6
impotence of a psychic origin, he stated: ‘‘The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up
with the sexual; the position of the genitals—inter urinas et faeces—remains the decisive and unchangeable
factor’’ (p. 189).
Coprophilia takes on an entirely different meaning
in the light of work on mourning and the notion of
loss. Reflecting on the subject of mourning, Karl
Abraham (1924) detected in certain rites the link
between loss and attachment to the content of the
intestines. Given the specific features of the two opposite pleasures of anal eroticism, retention and expulsion, he distinguished the same opposition in the
sadistic instincts. There would then be a link between
the expulsion of the anal object and the melancholy
that results from the expulsion of a person. Psychoanalysis thus facilitated the establishment of a link between
melancholy, obsessional neuroses, and coprophilia.
Abraham went on to write: ‘‘The coprophagic instinct
seems to me to conceal a symbolism that is typical of
melancholy’’ (1924, p. 444). The motion of introjection
can then be considered as a psychic mechanism that is
of central importance for melancholics.
DOMINIQUE J. ARNOUX
See also: Anality; Eroticism, anal; Feces; Melancholia;
Anal-sadistic stage.
Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1924). Melancholia and obsessional neurosis. In Selected papers of Karl Abraham (pp. 422–432).
London: Hogarth.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1912d). On the universal tendency to debasement
in the sphere of love. SE, 11: 177–190.
Freud, Sigmund, and Abraham, Karl. (1965a). A psychoanalytic dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham: 1907–1926. (Hilda C. Abraham and Ernst L. Freud,
Eds.; Bernard Marsh and Hilda C. Abraham, Trans.). New
York: Basic Books.
Freud, Sigmund, and Fliess, Wilhelm. (1985c). The complete
letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess: 1887–1904. (Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Ed. and Trans.). Cambridge, MA
and London: Belknap/Harvard University Press.
Schur, Max. (1972). Freud: Living and dying. New York:
International Universities Press.
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C O R R A O , F R A N C E S C O (1922 –1 994)
Wiener Psychoanalystiche Verinigung. (1962–1975). Minutes 72, Scientific Meeting on March 10, 1909. In Herman
Nunberg and Ernst Federn (Eds.), Minutes of the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society (Volume II: 1908–1910) (M. Nunberg,
Trans.). New York: International Universities Press.
Further Reading
Hollós and Les trois cases blanches, a drama by Alain
Didier-Weill.
Le Coq-HéronÕs editorial committee has also formed
a translation group. To date it has translated volume
four of the Oeuvres complètes of Sándor Ferenczi and
his Journal clinique, the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence, and Carl SpittelerÕs Imago.
Karpman, B. (1948). Coprophilia: a collective review. Psychoanalytic Review, 35, 253–272.
Tarachow, Stanley. (1966). Coprophagia and allied phenomena. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 14,
685–699.
See also: Ferenczi, Sándor.
CORRAO, FRANCESCO (1922–1994)
COQ-HÉRON, LE
The review Le Coq-Héron includes essays on psychoanalysis, education, and the social sciences in general.
It is published four to six times a year and there are
several special issues for the presentation of ‘‘working
documents.’’ The print run is between eight hundred
and two thousand. The review was founded in 1969 by
a group from the Centre Étienne-Marcel to make
available to researchers at the center texts that were
inaccessible (original articles or translations from English, German, Spanish, or Hungarian) and thereby
promote dialogue among scholars.
After three private issues were distributed within
the center, the review went public. Supported by the
Centre National des Lettres, it maintained its special
relationship with the Centre Étienne-Marcel. By June
2001, 165 issues had been published. The review is
characterized by the fact that its editorial committee
includes analysts from various schools who work
together in a collegial environment. Participating in
the review does not require that they abandon their
differences or convictions, and the editorial committee tries to ensure that all psychoanalytic orientations
are represented. To this end the reviewÕs bylaws stipulate that if even one of the editors wants an article
published, it must be published, the other editors
having the right to include their comments and
criticisms.
The review has published articles by well-known
authors (Freud, Ferenczi, Dolto, Balint, Lacan, Mannoni, Mahler, Hermann) as well as lesser known or
even unknown authors in psychoanalysis and related
fields. It has also published several full-length books
including Mes adieux à la maison jaune by István
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Francesco Corrao was an Italian physician, psychoanalyst, president of the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana
(SPI) [Italian Psychoanalytic Society] from 1969 to
1974, and founder of psychoanalytic centers in Rome
and Palermo. He was born in Palermo on December
14, 1922, and died in Rome on April 23, 1994.
Corrao studied medicine but was also interested in
philosophy, especially epistemology and Greek
thought. He studied psychoanalysis with Alessandra
Wolf Stomersee, Princess of Lampedusa, who, after her
marriage, moved to Palermo during the late thirties. It
was Corrao, a member of the SPI from 1952 and a
training analyst at the institute founded by Nicola
Perrotti, who was entrusted with the task of bringing
psychoanalysis to Sicily when Lampedusa settled in
Rome.
Introduced by Lampedusa to the work of Melanie
Klein, Corrao became interested in her ideas as
expressed in the work of Wilfred Bion, especially their
application to the psychoanalysis of group activities.
Convinced of BionÕs importance, he had him translated into Italian and worked to introduce his ideas in
Italy, organizing seminars in Rome during the seventies. In 1969, colleagues and students met with Corrao
in Rome, forming the ‘‘Pollaiolo’’ circle to train members in analysis. The Pollaiolo circle published a review
entitled Gruppo e Funzione Analitica, which has
recently been replaced by Koinos.
CorraoÕs writings have been collected into a volume
entitled Modelli psicoanalitici: Mito, Passione, Memoria. He devoted much time to the institutional
renewal of the SPI, introducing new bylaws (1974)
while he was president and creating regional centers
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COUNTER-IDENTIFICATION
for psychoanalysis, including one in Palermo (1976),
where he organized the annual scientific seminars,
Colloquia of Palermo.
of such an identification remains one of the fruitful
moments of the treatment.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
ANNA MARIA ACCERBONI
See also: Italy.
Bibliography
Corrao, F. (1992). Modelli psicoanalitici. Mito passione
memoria. Laterza: Roma-Bari.
COUNTER-IDENTIFICATION
The term ‘‘counter-identification’’ has two different uses.
For English-speaking authors, it refers to an analystÕs
unconscious identification with his or her patient and
thus designates a counter-transferential attitude. For certain French authors, it designates the subjectÕs adoption
of character traits, drive tendencies, or of defensive
modes that are opposite to those of an object that the
subject fears or with which he refuses to identify.
The first meaning is generally recognized by Anglophone authors. Robert Fliess defined it specifically as an
irregularity in the counter-transference that must
become a topic of the analystÕs self-analysis if it is to be
overcome. Such a distortion of empathy results in a part
of the analystÕs ego identifying with a part of the
patientÕs ego, causing the analyst to no longer observe
the patient with the necessary analytic attitude. In consequence, the analyst might fail to recognize psychotic factors in the patient (Fliess, 1953). León Grinberg similarly
described a ‘‘projective counter-identification’’ as ‘‘the
result of an excessive projective identification that is not
consciously perceived by the analyst, who consequently
is ÔledÕ by it. Thus the analyst conducts himself as if he
had actually and concretely acquired, by assimilation,
the features that were projected onto him’’ (Grinberg,
1962).
The other, less common meaning of the term characterizes the claims of certain patients who try to organize their lives opposite to those of their parents or
intensely invested objects from their early childhood.
A statement such as ‘‘I just donÕt want to be like them’’
indicates a tactic that belongs to the domain of consciousness. This tactic is most often an attempt at
negating an unconscious identification. The analysis
34 8
See also: Counter-transference; Identification; Transference in children.
Bibliography
Fliess, Robert. (1953). Countertransference and counteridentification. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 1, 268–284.
Grinberg, León. (1962). On a specific aspect of countertransference due to the patientÕs projective identification.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. 43, 436–440.
Mijolla, Alain de. (1987). Unconscious identification fantasies and family prehistory. International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 1, 397–403.
COUNTER-INVESTMENT.
See Anticathexis
COUNTER-OEDIPUS
The term ‘‘counter-Oedipus’’ generally designates the
complete set of parental displays of the fatherÕs or
motherÕs own oedipal conflict. Thus in these displays
we can expect to find themes of incest and murder.
In numerous passages Freud discussed how parents
replay their infantile Oedipus complex in the present,
yet he never used the term ‘‘counter-Oedipus’’ to refer
to these displays.
In 1979 Francis Pasche, returning to themes in
FreudÕs article ‘‘The Acquisition and Control of Fire’’
(1932a), analyzed the relationship of Zeus, Prometheus,
and humankind in terms of a positive counter-Oedipus
and a negative counter-Oedipus: Zeus, the ‘‘father of the
gods,’’ subdued and mistreated Prometheus even though
he belonged to a later generation. Prometheus, who
revolted against Zeus, played a paternal role in relation
to humankind.
In this perspective, the father is ambivalent toward
the son when he is confronted with homosexual
desires (as illustrated by Alain FineÕs myth of Laius the
pedophile [1993]) and the desire to murder (Laius
tried to kill Oedipus twice, once by exposure on
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Cithaeron and then again later when he met him at the
crossroads). Jacques Bril (1989) revealed the theme of
murder of the son in ChristÕs passion. In fathersÕ relationships with daughters, we frequently encounter
actual incest and tyrannical jealousy, as when fathers
prohibit their daughters from having any sexual life.
Although we find the same fundamental themes of
incest and murder in the counter-Oedipus of the
mother, they are envisioned differently. In the
motherÕs relationship with a daughter, primary homosexuality, long-term alienating bonds, and motherdaughter rivalry become important. In the motherÕs
relationship with a son, the incestuous dimension of
the childÕs penis comes to the fore. Additionally,
whether the child be a boy or a girl, murder fantasies
cause the mother to be anxious during pregnancy.
The notion of the counter-Oedipus thus brings
together an extremely varied set of clinical facts and
theoretical elements. Though it is a convenient term
current in France, it still awaits full theoretical development. A task for the future is to relate the counterOedipus to transgenerational phenomena.
ROGER PERRON
See also: Adoption; Complex; Devereux, Georges (born
György Dobo); Relaxation principle and neo-catharsis.
Bibliography
Bril, Jacques. (1989). LÕaffaire Hildebrand, ou le meurtre du
fils. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Fine, Alain. (1993). Laios pédophile et infanticide. Revue
française de psychanalyse, 57 (2), 515–524.
Freud, Sigmund. (1932a). The acquisition and control of
fire. SE, 22: 183–193.
Pasche, François. (1979). Le ‘‘Prométhée’’ dÕEschyle, ou les
Avatars du contre-œdipe paternal. Revue française de psychanalyse, 43 (3), 401–407.2
COUNTERPHOBIC
We speak of counterphobic objects or phenomena
when the person seeks out one or more external
objects or phenomena, whether consciously or unconsciously, to escape from the manifestations of anxiety
linked to his or her phobias.
The specificity of the counterphobic phenomenon
appears to be linked not to the nature of the object
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used, but rather to the function that object assumes
within the personÕs psychic economy. In the phobic
situation, anxiety is focused on an ‘‘external object’’
(which may be an object, a person, or a situation). In
these conditions, the counterphobic object is that
object whose link or relationship to the phobic object
is sufficiently well established within the personÕs psychic economy that its presence can neutralize the anxiety associated with the phobic object.
Given the extreme heterogeneity of phobic phenomena, this perspective means that we need not
attempt to make a clear distinction between the counterphobic object and the various types of objects
described in other contexts that enable the person to
escape from manifestations of anxiety (psychotic
object, transitional object, fetish object, etc.).
FRANCIS DROSSART
See also: Claustrophobia; ‘‘Lines of Advance in PsychoAnalytic Therapy’’; Neurotic defenses; Object; Phobia of
commiting impulsive acts; Phobias in children; Phobic
neurosis; Prepsychosis; Symptom-formation.
Bibliography
Diatkine, René, and Éric Valentin. Les phobies de lÕenfant et
quelques autres formes dÕanxiété infantile. In Nouveau
Traité de psychiatrie de lÕenfant et de lÕadolescent. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1985.
Freud, Sigmund (1909). Some general remarks on hysterical
attacks. SE, 9: 229–234.
Freud, Sigmund (1928). Fetishism. SE 21: 147–157.
Geissmann, Claudine and Pierre. LÕEnfant et sa Psychose.
Paris: Dunod, 1984.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena, a study of the first not-me possession.
Coll. papers, through paediatrics to psycho-analysis
(pp. 229–242). (Reprinted from International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 34 (1951), 89–97.)
COUNTER-TRANSFERENCE
Counter-transference refers to the analystÕs unconscious reactions to the transference of the patient,
including the feelings projected onto the analyst by the
patient.
Sigmund Freud introduced the concept at the Nuremberg congress of the International Association of
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Psychoanalysis in 1910: ‘‘We have become aware of the
Ôcounter-transferenceÕ, which arises in [the analyst] as
a result of the patientÕs influence on his unconscious
feelings, and we are almost inclined to insist that he
shall recognize this counter-transference in himself
and overcome it’’ (Freud, 1910d, p. 144–145).
He spoke of it again in a letter to Ludwig Binswanger dated February 20, 1913: ‘‘The problem of
counter-transference . . . is—technically—among the
most intricate in psychoanalysis. Theoretically I
believe it is much easier to solve. What we give to the
patient should, however, be a spontaneous affect, but
measured out consciously at all times, to a greater or
lesser extent according to need. In certain circumstances a great deal, but never oneÕs own unconscious.
I would look upon that as the formula. One must,
therefore, always recognise oneÕs counter-transference
and overcome it, for not till then is one free oneself ’’
(letter 86f, p.112). He made reference to it again in
‘‘Observations on Transference-Love’’ (1915a [1914]):
‘‘For the doctor the phenomenon [the patientÕs falling
in love with successive analysts] signifies a valuable
piece of enlightenment and a useful warning against
any tendency to a counter-transference which may be
present in his own mind’’ (p. 160).
In spite of these references, the notion of countertransference remains ambiguous in FreudÕs work. What
are the analystÕs unconscious feelings? Can the analyst
merely master the counter-transference or must he or
she overcome it, which would imply a working-through?
These three texts sowed the seeds of a theoretical and
technical debate that developed after FreudÕs death.
The conceptual tools needed for a theorization and
explication of the counter-transference were introduced by Melanie Klein (1946) with her discovery of
projective identification. This made it possible to
understand how the patient could act upon the analystÕs psyche by projecting a part of his or her own psyche onto the analyst. Thus the counter-transference no
longer appeared to be just the sum of the analystÕs
blind spots, but instead became a way of perceiving
certain aspects of the patientÕs communication—
primitive communication in particular. Melanie Klein
did not use the term counter-transference very often,
thought it could be said that her entire technique is
founded on the concept.
It was her student Paula Heimann who, at the 1949
International Psychoanalytical Association conference
35 0
in Zurich, first made counter-transference a genuine
tool for perceiving certain aspects of the patientÕs communication: ‘‘My thesis is that the analyst’s emotional
response to his patient within the analytic situation
represents one of the most important tools for his
work. The analyst’s counter-transference is an instrument of research into the patient’s unconscious’’
(1950, p. 81). From this point on, the concept became
an object of increasing interest, most notably in relation to developing research in the fields of child analysis and the psychoses.
The definition of counter-transference remains
controversial insofar as it is understood either strictly
as a response to the unconscious processes that the
patientÕs transference produces in the analyst or more
globally as the part played within the framework of the
treatment by the analystÕs personality. In analytic
work, this concept is used in two different ways: on the
one hand, as a defensive position on the part of the
analyst, who must take care to remain as much as possible a projective surface, a mirror, for the patientÕs
transference, and on the other, as a position in which
the personality of the analyst, most notably his or her
emotions, is engaged in the transferential/countertransferential dynamic on the basis of a more threedimensional conception of the transference. For the
analyst, then, it is a matter of working through the
counter-transferential experience in order to distinguish between the patientÕs projections and his or her
own internal objects and see the common elements
that might serve to guide the interpretation.
This concept carries two potential pitfalls. On the
one hand there is a possibility of psychologizing the
analytic relation to the extent that it could be considered more in terms of personal interaction than in
terms of a transferential repetition of unconscious scenarios (Fédida, 1986). On the other is the possibility of
forgetting that while counter-transference can be a
guide for understanding and the most faithful of servants, it can also be the harshest of masters (Segal,
1981).
CLAUDINE GEISSMANN
See also: Abstinence/rule of abstinence; Balint group;
Boundary violations; Case histories/description; Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects;
Complex (analytical psychology); Development of Psycho-Analysis; Elasticity; Empathy; Ethnopsychoanalysis;
Fourth analysis; Heimann, Paula; Initial interview(s);
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‘ ‘C R E A T I V E W R I T E R S
Interpretation; Listening; Mutual analysis; Neutrality/
benevolent neutrality; Nonverbal communication;
Object relations theory; Projective identification; Psychoanalyst; Psychoanalytic treatment; Racker, Heinrich;
Self-analysis; Silence; Supervised analysis (control case);
Therapeutic alliance; Training analysis; Training of the
psychoanalyst; Transference; Transference and Countertransference.
Bibliography
Fédida, Pierre. (1986Le contre-transfert en question. Psychanalyse à lÕUniversité, XI (41), 19–21.
Freud, Sigmund. (1910d). The future prospects of psychoanalytic therapy. SE, 11: 139–151.
———. (1915a [1914]). Observations on transference-love
(Further recommendations on the technique of psychoanalysis III). SE, 12: 157–171.
Freud, Sigmund, and Binswanger, Ludwig. (2003). The Sigmund Freud-Ludwig Binswanger correspondence: 1908–
1938 (Arnold J. Pomerans, Trans.; Gerhard Fichtner, Ed.).
New York: Other Press.
Heimann, Paula. (1950). On countertransference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 31, 81–84.
Klein, Melanie. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
Segal, Hanna. (1981). Countertransference. In The work of
Hanna Segal. New York: Jason Aronson.
Further Reading
Gabbard, Glen O. (1995). Countertransference: the emerging common ground. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 76, 475–486.
Greenberg, Jay R. (1991). Countertransference and reality.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1, 52–73.
Jacobs, Theodore. (1999). Countertransference past and
present:a review of the concept. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 80, 575–594.
Levine, Howard. (1997). The capacity for countertransference. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 17, 44–68.
Ogden, Thomas H. (1995). Aliveness and deadness of the
transference and countertransference. International Journal
of Psychoanalysis, 76, 695–710.Smith, Henry. (2000).
Countertransference, conflictual listening and the analytic
object. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association,
48, 95–128.
Steiner, John. (1994). Patient–centered and analyst–centered
interpretations: Some implications of containment and
countertransference. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 14, 406–422.4
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AND
DAY-DREAMING’’
‘‘CREATIVE WRITERS AND DAY-DREAMING’’
In 1908 Sigmund Freud presented a talk entitled
‘‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’’ at the publisher
Hugo HellerÕs offices. This was an important article in
which Freud responded to the questions introduced in
‘‘Psychopathic Characters on the Stage’’ (1942a
[1905]). It is contemporary with the ‘‘Gradiva’’ essay
(1907) and was to be continued in numerous texts
that discussed artistic creation, such as ‘‘The Uncanny’’
(1919h) and ‘‘Dostoyevsky and Parricide (1928b
[1927]). The condensed and theoretical nature of
FreudÕs statements here summarize ideas he was to
present elsewhere in his work.
He begins with an idea that Donald Winnicott
would later take up concerning the link between childhood games and creation—in this case, literary creation. The game is defined as a ‘‘daydream’’ and extends
into adolescence in ‘‘fantasies.’’ Both belong to the
more general category of fantasy activity, which is itself
the result of unsatisfied desires. The link with literary
creation takes place through popular literature, whose
heroes are always victorious after they have undergone
various trials. The pleasure of reading is defined as
essentially narcissistic. The hero is always His Majesty
the Ego and the ‘‘psychological’’ novel differs from the
adventure novel only in that the ego is split into ‘‘partial egos’’ that are represented by the various heroes in
conflict. The social novel, however, makes the ego an
outside observer.
The novelistÕs literary capacity is supported through
the echoes that real events or folkloric sources awaken
in his or her childhood memory. The creator allows
the reader to participate in his fantasy world through
the formal techniques he exercises, which provide a
source of pleasure. This frees a deeper source, enabling
the reader to ‘‘enjoy his fantasies without scruple and
without shame.’’ Even though, as Freud himself
acknowledges, the origin of this creative ability
remains mysterious, this dense text introduces several
new paths for discovery and reminds us of popular literatureÕs importance in understanding the pleasure of
reading.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Applied psychoanalysis and the interaction of
psychoanalysis; Creativity; Literary and artistic creation;
Fantasy (reverie); Reverie; Sublimation.
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Source Citation
Freud, Sigmund. (1908e [1907]). Der Dichter und das Phantasieren. Neue Revue, 1, 716–724; Creative writers and daydreaming. SE, 9: 143–153.
CREATIVITY
The term ‘‘creativity’’ is not used by Sigmund Freud
but the concept is Freudian if we understand it to
mean the creative imagination embodied in fantasies
or daydreams. These may or may not receive further
elaboration and be transformed into a work of art,
regardless of its specific nature. However, it is primarily Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott who are
responsible for establishing the concept as an active
attitude of the ego with respect to its objects.
As early as the Studies on Hysteria (1895d), Freud
realized that the world of fantasy (Anna OÕs private
theater) can take the place of the real world, and this
includes the researcher captivated by his subject. In discussing humor (1905c), Freud also emphasized the freedom of the intellect in the face of highly constrained
situations. Literary creation (1908e [1907]) appeared to
Freud as an extension of childrenÕs daydreams, situations in which the fantasy is affirmed in the face of the
empire of reality, without, however, leading the subject
to misinterpret it as happens in delusional states. It is
precisely this ability, whose origin remains mysterious,
to turn fantasies into a reality inscribed in a work of art
and therefore something that can be shared with others,
that constitutes creativity, regardless of the field of
endeavor. Freud was especially interested in literary
(Dostoyevsky, Hoffmann, Jensen) and artistic creation
(Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo).
Melanie Klein (1929) had a very different outlook
on creativity, which she saw as an impulse experienced
by the infant to repair the object that had been initially
split into good and bad and attacked during the paranoid phase. The creative function is therefore initially
curative but goes hand in hand with the representation
of a unified object. In this sense the creative function
constitutes a reconstitution of the ego and the object,
which having been simultaneously destroyed, subsist
in an empty or mutilated state.
Donald Winnicott (1971) gave the fullest extension
to the concept of creativity by emphasizing its function
as an attitude in the face of outside reality and not
necessarily successful or recognized creative work. He
35 2
contrasted creativity and submission to the outside
world but, unlike Freud, emphasized the fact that fantasy life could diverge from the creative attitude.
Fantasizing is not living but can, on the contrary, as
Freud noted with respect to hysterics, isolate the individual from life; it will never serve as an object of
communication.
For Winnicott, while creativity is related to dreaming and living, it is not really a part of our fantasy life.
The experience of self can only be achieved through
that physical and mental creative activity whose model
is game playing. Creativity is not the creative capacity
but something universal, inherent in the very fact of
living. In the case where the individual submits to outside reality to the point of losing himself in it (false
self), his creativity disappears and remains hidden
without however being destroyed. It is in this way
deprived of contact with the experience of life. ‘‘The
creative impulse,’’ Winnicott writes, ‘‘is present as
much in the moment-by-moment living of a backward
child who is enjoying breathing as it is in the inspiration of an architect who suddenly knows what it is that
he wishes to construct’’ (1982, p. 69).
The concept of creativity is much closer to the question of activity than to the production of a work of art.
This aspect is only sketched out by Freud but was theorized by Winnicott for whom the concept is associated
with considerations of the ego and non-ego and the
transitional space that serves as an ‘‘outlet’’ for primary narcissism.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Literary and artistic creation; ‘‘Creative Writers
and Day-dreaming’’; Fantasy; Heroic Identification;
Repetition; Reverie; Sachs, Hanns; Sublimation.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905c). Jokes and their relation to the
unconscious. SE, 8: 1–236.
———. (1908e [1907]). Creative writers and day-dreaming.
SE, 9: 143–153.
Klein, Melanie. (1975). Infantile anxiety situations reflected
in a work of art and in the creative impulse. In The Writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 1). London: Hogarth. (Reprinted from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 10,
(1929) 436–443.)
Winnicott, Donald. (1982). Playing and reality. London:
Routledge.
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CRIMINOLOGY
Further Reading
Nagera, Humberto. (1967). The concepts of structure and
structuralization: psychoanalytic usage and implications
for a theory of learning and creativity. Psychoanalytic Study
of the Child, 22, 77–102.
Niederland, William. G. (1976). Psychoanalytic approaches
to artistic creativity. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 45, 185–212.
CRIMINOLOGY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Criminology is the ‘‘scientific’’ study of criminal behavior. Part of its mandate is to look for the causes of
criminality. A distinction is made between general
criminology, which coordinates and compares results
from different criminological ‘‘sciences,’’ and clinical
criminology, which is an interdisciplinary approach to
the individual criminal (Pinatel, 1975). Criminalistics
is the set of methods and scientific means used by law
enforcement to search for criminals and establish their
guilt.
It is customary to trace the origins of criminology
to Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909), trained in medicine
at Pavia and Padua, a volunteer in the Piedmontese
army for seven years. A physician of Jewish origin,
Lombroso became famous with the publication of
LÕUomo Delinquente (Criminal man) in 1876. His
countryman Enrico Ferri, a professor of law and
sociology, was the author of Criminal Sociology (1917)
and Raffaele Garofalo wrote Criminologia (1881),
from which the term derives. Lombroso is notorious
for his theory of ‘‘the born criminal,’’ based on the
search for an ‘‘atavistic’’ factor in criminality (in fact
part of a larger naturalistic quest for the origins of
crime that ranged from the occipital lobe to a supposed ‘‘criminal chromosome’’). It is too often forgotten, however, that he founded the comparative
approach to large numbers and introduced the study
of criminalsÕ writings. Historians of criminology put
the true beginnings of the discipline almost a century
before Lombroso. His genius lay in his ability to combine phrenology, anthropology, legal medicine and
proto-psychiatry under the aegis of Darwinism
(Mucchielli and Lantéri-Laura, 1994).
Sigmund Freud, who made no secret of his aversion
to criminals, was silent about the work of his contemporaries in that area and singularly cautious when it
came to applying psychoanalysis to criminology. In
June 1906 he was invited to give a talk to Professor
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LöfflerÕs students on the possible application of psychoanalysis to the ‘‘establishment of facts in legal proceedings’’ (1906c, p. 103). He directed his comments
to future judges and lawyers, providing advice about
the ‘‘interest in a new method of investigation, the aim
of which is to compel the accused person himself to
establish his own guilt or innocence by objective signs’’
(1906c, p. 103). This text has given rise to considerable
misunderstandings, which have been discussed by
François Sauvagnat (1992). Freud cautioned his audience about a considerable obstacle: the judge was likely
to be misled by neurotics, who were liable to behave as
if they were guilty. He gave free rein to his skepticism,
taking but a few sentences to discuss the psychoanalytic method as having no practical application in legal
matters given the risk of error entailed.
In ‘‘Criminals from a Sense of Guilt’’ (in 1916d,
pp. 332–33), Freud goes a step further, based on his
experience in treating subjects who had committed
some minor offense during therapy: ‘‘He was suffering
from an oppressive feeling of guilt, of which he did not
know the origin, and after he had committed a misdeed this oppression was mitigated. His sense of guilt
was at least attached to something’’ (p. 332). The origin of this obscure feeling of guilt was the Oedipus
complex, with its implications of criminal intent: ‘‘killing the father and having sexual relations with the
mother’’ (p. 333). Freud hypothesized that this could
clarify our understanding of some criminals but he
was careful to exclude those who did not have such
feelings, those who were without moral inhibitions,
and those who rationalized their struggle against
society.
It would have been easy to make use of the Oedipus
complex to account for criminal acts, especially partricide. In 1931, Freud was asked by Joseph Hupka, a
professor of law at the University of Vienna, to provide
testimony during a review of the trial of Philipp Halsmann, accused of having killed his father. In examining both possibilities, guilt or innocence, Freud steered
a careful course between a defense of psychoanalysis
and his ethical reservations concerning its use; he
again exercised considerable caution, writing, ‘‘because
it is always present, the Oedipus complex is not suited
to provide a decision on the question of guilt’’ (1931d,
p. 252).
Apropos of his rare allusions to the relationship
between psychoanalysis and criminology, it must be
said that FreudÕs prudence has proved salutary. It was
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CRUELTY
subsequently evident that an overly hasty application
of psychoanalysis can mechanically alter the role of
fantasy, or generalize unconscious feelings of guilt, or
even sustain the illusion that psychoanalysis might one
day conquer the world of law.
Sándor Ferenczi must be mentioned here, not only
for his hope of contributing to the development of a
psychoanalysis of crime, but also for the richness of his
theoretical and clinical ideas, which served as the foundations of a psychoanalytic understanding of victimhood, especially in his accounts of identification with
the aggressor and introjection of the aggressor, who
‘‘disappears as external reality and becomes
intrapsychic.’’
DANIEL ZAGURY
See also: Act, passage to the; Acting out/acting in; Aimée,
case of; Alexander, Franz Gabriel; Cénac, Michel;
Ellenberger, Henri Frédéric; Guilt, unconscious sense of;
Lacan, Jacques-Marie Émile; Lagache, Daniel; Law and
psychoanalysis; Parricide/murder of the father; Schiff,
Paul.
Bibliography
Balier, Claude. (1988). Psychanalyse des comportements violents. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Ferri, Enrico. (1967). Criminal sociology (Joseph I. Kelly and
John Lisle, Trans.). New York: Agathon. (Original work
published 1917)
Freud, Sigmund. (1906c). Psycho-analysis and the establishment of facts in legal proceedings. SE, 9: 97–114.
———. (1916d). Some character-types met with in psychoanalytic work. SE, 14: 309–333.
———. (1931d). The expert opinion in the Halsmann case.
SE, 21: 251–253.
Garofalo, Raffaele. (1891). Criminologia. Turin: Fratelli
Bocca.
Lacan, Jacques. (1975). Motifs du crime paranoı̈aque: le
crime des sœurs Papin. In De la psychose paranoı̈aque dans
ses rapports avec la personnalité. Paris: Le Seuil. (Original
work published 1933)
Lantéri-Laura, Georges. (1994). Recherches psychiatriques:
Vol. 1. Sur le langage. Paris: Sciences en situation.
Legendre, Pierre. (1989). Le crime du caporal Lortie, traité
sur le père. Paris: Fayard.
Mucchieli, Laurent. (1994). Histoire de la criminologie française. Paris: LÕHarmattan.
35 4
Pinatel, J. (1975). Traité de droit pénal et de criminologie (Vol
3: Criminologie, 3rd ed). Paris: Dalloz.
Reik, Theodor. (1973). Le besoin d’avouer: psychanalyse du
crime et du châtiment. Paris: Payot.
Sauvagnat, François (Ed.). (1992). Les coordonnées historiques de la distinction acting-out / passage à l’acte. In Le
souci de l’être : Le soin en psychiatrie. Paris: GRAPP-Le Seuil.
Zagury, Daniel. (1996). Entre psychose et perversion narcissique, une clinique de l’horreur: les tueurs en série. LÕÉvolution psychiatrique, 59 (1).
Further Reading
Goldberg, Arnold. (2003). Addendum to Freud’s ‘‘Criminals
from a sense of guilt.’’ Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 72,
465–468.
CRUELTY
Cruelty is a multi-faceted concept in FreudÕs work. It
can relate to actions and motivations but also to agencies, events, or destiny. When Dora (1905e [1901])
abruptly terminated her analysis, Freud mentioned the
young girlÕs ‘‘cruel impulses and revengeful motives’’
(p. 120), which, through Freud in the transference,
were directed at Herr K. and through him at her father.
This text, written in 1901, contains an implicit question as to whether these impulses originate from the
drives or the ego, but also as to the type of person associated with these impulses: in fleeing the transference,
did Dora intend to be cruel towards Freud?
An ‘‘instinct of cruelty’’ appears in the Three Essays
on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d). In this work, Freud
relates it to male sexuality: the man has a tendency to
subjugate in order to overcome ‘‘the resistance of the
sexual object’’ (p. 158) and satisfy his sexual urges.
Freud states: ‘‘There is an intimate connection between
cruelty and the sexual instinct’’ (p. 159). Along with
scopophilia and exhibitionism, cruelty is classified as a
partial or component drive. Whether active or passive,
it also stems from the drive for mastery. Whereas this
drive is exerted through the ‘‘apparatus for obtaining
mastery’’ (p. 159), connected with the musculature, it
is the skin, as the ‘‘erotogenic zone par excellence’’ (p.
169) that constitutes ‘‘one of the erotogenic roots of
the passive instinct of cruelty’’ (p. 193). Freud also
refers to Jean-Jacques RousseauÕs memories of being
beaten, which he goes on to discuss further in ‘‘A Child
is Being Beaten’’ (1919e).
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CRUELTY
Like mastery, cruelty involves the use of the object
simply as a means of satisfaction. In this sense, it differs from the ‘‘sadism proper’’ (1924c, p. 163) that
results from the binding of the drive for cruelty with
the sexual drive towards the object. Whereas the drive
for cruelty, like the drive for mastery, is characterized
by indifference on the part of the subject to the feelings
experienced by the object of satisfaction, considered as
a part-object, sadism involves a pleasure derived from
the objectÕs suffering.
Describing sadism in Instincts and their Vicissitudes
(1915c) as ‘‘the exercise of violence or power upon
some other person as object’’ (p. 127), having also
described the drive for cruelty in this way ten years earlier, Freud added: ‘‘the sadistic child takes no notice of
whether or not it inflicts pain, nor is it part of its purpose to do so’’ (1915c, p. 128). Thus, strictly speaking,
the small child is cruel but not sadistic. This becomes
possible only after he has discovered the total object
and his ambivalence towards it.
In the same year (1915b), Freud specifically related
cruelty to egotism. Intrinsically neither good nor bad,
the drives acquire these qualities with regard to the necessary process of civilization. But the child is able to
renounce drive gratification because of his need to be
loved by his libidinal object. However, the object still
remains an unloved and sometimes hated stranger as a
direct result of its otherness. Egoistic and cruel impulses
resurface and are directed at the object, particularly if the
object is generally designated as an enemy. Wounded by
these attacks, the object becomes even more frightening.
After the introduction of the death drive in 1920,
the drive for cruelty gave way to the ‘‘destructive
drive,’’ understood as an external deflection of the
death drive (1923b) and described as aggressive when
directed at objects. If it is taken up by the ego, the ego
itself becomes cruel or sadistic. The ego then risks not
only losing the objectÕs love but also being subjected to
the reprimands of the superego. This agency, which
equates with moral conscience, can demonstrate an
extreme cruelty, according to the need for aggression
aroused by present and past frustrations. Rebellious by
nature towards what is nevertheless the necessary process of civilization, the human being is always able to
display a ‘‘cruel aggressiveness’’ (1930a, p. 111) if circumstances lend themselves to this.
Melanie Klein substantially developed this concept
of cruelty on the part of the superego. In the context of
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the controversy that pitted her against Anna Freud, she
drew attention to the extreme severity of the infantile
(or early) superego, even where the parents are conciliatory (1927). The harshness of the agency is proportional
to the aggression felt by the child as a result of the frustrations experienced during weaning and toilet training.
Thus a cruel superego, ‘‘something which bites, devours
and cuts’’ (1928, p. 187) is the outcome of the oralsadistic and anal-sadistic drives. Taking up FreudÕs
hypothesis concerning the necessary external projection
of the death drive, to which the effects of pre-oedipal
frustrations are added, Melanie Klein described an
extremely cruel child who ‘‘attacks its motherÕs breast’’
(1933, p. 253), ‘‘thinks of sucking out and eating up the
inside of its motherÕs body’’ (p. 254) and attacks its
object with excrements that are ‘‘regarded as burning
and corroding substances’’ (p. 253). This intense hostility both from the object and toward it is the product of
the deflection of the death drive and past frustrations
but also of fears of reprisal for the hostility towards the
hated object, ultimately of the influence of the early
superego. Thus, ‘‘the small child becomes dominated by
the fear of suffering unimaginable cruel attacks, both
from its real objects and from its super-ego’’ (p. 251).
Although the oedipal phase is influenced by the earlier
stages, these destructive rages are tempered with pity
and some reparative impulses emerge.
Donald Winnicott (1955/1975) has clearly demonstrated the process of transition from a ‘‘pre-ruth era’’
in which the little child can inadvertently or unintentionally display aggression, since ‘‘if destruction be part
of the aim in the id impulse, then destruction is only
incidental to id satisfaction’’ (p. 210), to a subsequent
stage when the child is concerned about his object. He
then has worries about it and is able to feel compassion
or potentially creative reparative wishes, which prevents
him from remaining cruel toward his object.
Of course, these drives are primitive and potentially
cruel toward the object. Throughout his life, the subject will have to find compromises between the claims
of the narcissistic pole of his drives and the intensity of
his love for the object. However, the objectÕs tolerance
of the subjectÕs drive-based egoism varies. In fact,
some parents and spouses are better able than others
to tolerate narcissistic egocentrism in their child or
partner and are accordingly less vulnerable to their
‘‘cruelty’’.
ANNETTE FRÉJAVILLE
355
CRYPTOMNESIA
See also: Mastery, instinct for; Object; Pair of opposites;
Reaction-formation; Sadism; Sadomasochism; Superego;
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; Violence, instinct
of.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1905e). Fragment of an analysis of a case of Hysteria. SE, 7: 1–122.
———. (1915b). Thoughts for the times on war and death.
SE, 14: 273–300.
———. (1915c). Instincts and their vicissitudes. SE, 14:
109–140.
———. (1919e). ‘‘A child is being beaten’’: a contribution to
the study of the origin of sexual perversions. SE, 17: 175–
204.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
———. (1924c). The economic problem of masochism. SE,
19: 155–170.
———. (1930a). Civilization and its discontents. SE, 21:
57–145.
Klein, Melanie. (1927). Criminal tendencies in normal children. In Love, guilt and reparation and other works 1921–
1945. The writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 1, pp. 170–185).
London: Hogarth,.
———. (1928). Early stages of the Oedipus conflict. Love,
guilt and reparation and other works 1921–1945. The writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 1, pp. 186–198). London:
Hogarth.
———. (1933). The early development of conscience in the
child. In Love, guilt and reparation and other works 1921–
1945. The writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 1, pp. 248–267).
London: Hogarth,.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1975). Aggression in relation to
emotional development. In through paediatrics to psychoanalysis (pp. 204–218). London: Hogarth. (Original work
published 1955)
CRYPTOMNESIA
Cryptomnesia is a memory that has been forgotten
and then returns without being recognized as such by
the subject, who believes it is something new and original. In general, the memory returns in the form of
an idea or intuition, but reappearances in the form of
actions have also been included.
35 6
The word was first used by the Geneva-based psychiatrist Théodore Flournoy in From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary
Languages (1901/1994), his book about the case of the
spiritualist medium Catherine-Élise Müller, who used
the name Hélène Smith. It thus comes out of an
attempt at a rational approach to spiritualist phenomena that showed a delusional character: ‘‘In the communications or messages provided by mediums, the
first (but not the only) question that arises is always
whether, where spiritualists see the influence of disembodied spirits or some other supranormal cause, one is
not simply dealing with cryptomnesia, with latent
memories on the part of the medium that come out,
sometimes greatly disfigured by a subliminal work of
imagination or reasoning, as so often happens in our
ordinary dreams.’’
In his thesis, ‘‘On the Psychology and Pathology of
So-Called Occult Phenomena’’ (1902), and an article,
‘‘Cryptomnesia’’ (1905), Carl Gustav Jung expressed
his belief that he had isolated this phenomenon in
NietzscheÕs Zarathustra. Cryptomnesia was the object
of a few studies or mentions until around 1920 (Géza
Dukes, Sándor Ferenczi, Wilhelm Stekel). Thereafter,
it was seldom mentioned in the psychoanalytic literature and was even rarer in the psychological and psychiatric literature.
The notionÕs interest remains marked by the particular use Sigmund Freud made of it, from 1919, by
linking it to the issue of the originality of his inventions. Entering into the category of forgetting, cryptomnesia indexes it with a univocal meaning, that of
tempering a claim to the originality of an idea. In an
article signed ‘‘F.’’ and titled ‘‘Note on the Prehistory of
the Technique of Analysis’’ (1920), Freud acknowledged that a text by Ludwig Börne, ’Die Kunst in drei
Tagen ein Original-Schriftsteller zu werden (How to
become an original writer in three days; 1823), had
served as a precursor to the technique of free association. Freud also mentioned his cryptomnesia with
regard to Josef Popper-Lynkeus, Empedocles, and
Wilhelm Fliess, and interpreted Georg GroddeckÕs
statements along these lines. It is known that he was
sometimes reluctant to refer to himself as the inventor
of psychoanalysis, invoking the contributions of Josef
Breuer, and that in addition, in The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life (1901), he made himself vulnerable to a
claim of priority on the part of his friend Fliess by
accusing himself of harboring the unconscious wish to
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steal the idea of bisexuality from him. No doubt we
should see in this problematic, to which Freud linked
the meaning of cryptomnesia, the characteristic difficulty the man of science has in taking personal responsibility for a discovery that shakes the foundations of
the very rationality he identifies himself with. Invoking
cryptomnesia in this context arguably means maintaining the fiction of a subject-supposed-to-know guaranteeing that the knowledge was already there before the
creator invented it.
ERIK PORGE
See also: Amnesia; ‘‘Autobiographical Study, An’’; Flournoy, Théodore; Forgetting; Free association; Memories;
Memory; Mnemic trace/memory trace; Repression.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1920). A note on the prehistory of the
technique of analysis. SE 18: 263–265.
———. (1923). Josef Popper-Lynkeus and the theory of
dreams. SE 19: 259–263.
Flournoy, Theodore. (1994). From India to the planet Mars:
A case of multiple personality with imaginary languages.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work
published 1901)
Jung, Carl Gustav. (1902). On the psychology and pathology
of so-called occult phenomena. Coll. works, Vol. 1,
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
———. (1905). Cryptomnesia. Coll. works, Vol. 1, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul; United States Bollingen
Foundation.
Trosman, Harry. (1969). The cryptomnesic fragment in the
discovery of free association. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 17 (2), 489–510.
CULTURAL HEREDITY. See Cultural transmission
CULTURAL TRANSMISSION
The term ‘‘cultural transmission’’ does not appear in
Sigmund FreudÕs work, but the idea is implicit in
such notions as cultural heritage and phylogenetic
inheritance. Freud believed that the (since abandoned)
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biological precept, according to which ‘‘ontogenesis
recapitulates phylogenesis,’’ could be applied to
human psychic development. The notion of cultural
transmission refers to the possibility that the acquisitions of an individual or of a culture can be transmitted to descendents and form the basis of cultural
development.
Freud addressed the topic for the first time in Totem
and Taboo (1912–13a), where he advanced the hypothesis that the feeling of guilt over the murder of the primal father had persisted over the centuries and still
affected generations that could know nothing directly
about it.
In FreudÕs later works, the main mechanism of
transmission was said to be identification, which
ensconced the lost object in the ego, as described in
‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’ (1916–17g [1915]), and
finally produced an alteration in the ego that gave rise
to the superego, as described in The Ego and the Id
(1923b). In the New Introductory Lectures (1933
[1932]) Freud observed that the superego could be
viewed as the outcome of successful identification
with the parental agency, and as the natural and legitimate heir to the Oedipus complex. As the bearer of
tradition, the superego was a true agent of cultural
transmission from one generation to the next. In
Moses and Monotheism (1939a [1934–38]) Freud
returned to the idea of an archaic heritage and compared such inherited acquired characteristics to
instincts in animals—an inheritance on par with
symbolism.
After Freud, the idea of phylogenetic transmission
was seemingly relegated to the background, as an
explanation of last resort, and the emphasis shifted
toward a detailed and expanded study of identifications. The point of departure for this was FreudÕs
remark in the New Introductory Lectures, in which he
observed that the childÕs superego was not formed in
the image of the real or imaginary parents, but instead
modeled on the parentsÕ superego. The main focus
soon moved beyond direct parental and intergenerational identifications to more distant identifications,
such as those with grandparents, ancestors, or mythical characters in family history, who re-emerge amid
the descendents as a kind of actualization of family
prehistory. The theme of the intergenerational (or
transgenerational) appears in psychotherapeutic work
with families, children, and adolescents, and
sometimes gives the impression that this sphere of
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CULTURE
observation is being invaded by the study of archaic
identifications. The other area where this theme comes
to the fore is work with survivors or descendents of
survivors of the Holocaust or other genocides, such as
those committed by Latin American dictatorships. In
these two areas, the importance of secrets, the unspoken, or ancestral crimes that the family has decided to
bury, is much in evidence. In the case of the survivors
of genocide, there is an attempt to make the traumatic
situation disappear by denying it representation. But
the buried material reappears two or three generations
later, as a ghost that occupies the place where the concealment of important aspects of the ancestorÕs life has
produced a ‘‘blank’’ in the descendantÕs psyche. In
such cases, we speak of ‘‘alienating identifications.’’ A
particular aspect of this type of intergenerational
transmission was studied by Nicolas Abraham and
Maria Torok (1972/1978), in relation to the problem
of grief.
We thus see that a number of ideas are related: in
FreudÕs work we encountered identification, phylogenetic heritage, and intergenerational process; in other
authors, the notions of transgenerational transmission, ‘‘fantasies of identification’’ (de Mijolla, 1986),
and ‘‘alienating identifications.’’
In summary, we may say that the concept of phylogenetic heritage has gradually been reconsidered, to
the benefit of more detailed study of the mechanisms
of possible transmission, notably identification, the
core of the issue. The uncovering of alienating factors
in the subjectÕs prehistory, factors that can go back several generations, has come to the fore, replacing the
ideas of ‘‘family romance’’ and ‘‘mythical descent,’’ so
well known to us since Freud. But emphasis on the
intergenerational may push analytic work in the direction of applied psychoanalysis, so distancing it from a
deeper understanding of the configurations and processes of the analytic situation, which is the prime
locus of psychoanalytic discovery. This danger may
even be exploited by the ever-renewed faces of resistance to psychoanalysis.
MADELEINE BARANGER
See also: Intergenerational; Ontogenesis.
Bibliography
Abraham, Nicolas, and Torok, Maria. (1968). The shell and
the kernel: Renewals of psychoanalysis. Ed. and trans.
35 8
Nicholas Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994.
Freud, Sigmund. (1912–13a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13:
1–161.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
———. (1916–17g [1915]). Mourning and melancholia. SE,
14: 237–258.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
———. (1939a [1934–38]). Moses and monotheism: Three
essays. SE, 23: 139–207.
Kaës, René; Faimberg, Haydée; Enriquez, Micheline, et al.
(1993). Transmission de la vie psychique entre générations.
Paris: Dunod.
Mijolla, Alain de. (1986). Les Visiteurs du Moi, fantasmes
dÕidentification (2nd ed.). Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
CULTURE. See Civilization (Kultur)
CURE
Freud clearly stated that ‘‘the aim of the treatment will
never be anything else but the practical recovery of the
patient’’ (1904a, p. 253). He also declared that
‘‘Psycho-analysis was born out of medical necessity. It
sprang from the need for bringing help to neurotic
patients, who had found no relief through rest-cures,
through the arts of hydropathy or through electricity’’
(1919g, p. 259).
Many of the arguments that divide psychoanalysts
on the problem of the ‘‘cure’’ arise from their different
conceptions they have of the termÕs meaning. The
medical model leads to the idea that the cure is a matter of the disappearance of symptoms or lesions, or
even of a restitutio ad integrum (restoration of health)
that would actually be impossible in the mental field.
Hypnosis and suggestion made disorders disappear as
if by magic, but only temporarily, which is why Freud
abandoned these techniques. He was more concerned
with deeper causes and, from the time of Studies on
Hysteria, he limited his own influence: ‘‘[Y]ou will be
able too convince yourself that much will be gained if
we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into
common unhappiness. With a mental life that has
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been restored to health, you will be better armed
against that unhappiness’’ (1895d, p. 305).
In the analysis of ‘‘Little Hans,’’ he insisted that ‘‘a
psychoanalysis is not an impartial scientific investigation, but a therapeutic measure. Its essence is not to
prove anything, but merely to alter something’’ (1909b,
p. 104). Thus the objective is ‘‘change,’’ giving the
patient a capacity to mobilize his defenses differently
and more effectively to manage both the external and
internal conflicts that the cure cannot prevent from
returning. In a note to The Ego and the Id, Freud wrote
that ‘‘analysis does not set out to make pathological
reactions impossible, but to give the patientÕs ego freedom to decide one way or the other’’ (1923b, p. 50n).
It is necessary to remove all obstacles to the attainment of this goal, and that is the work of the treatment:
the unconscious must ‘‘convey itself into the preconscious’’ (1900a, p. 610); treatment involves ‘‘overcoming
the internal resistances’’ (1905a, p. 267); analysis
‘‘replaces repression by condemnation’’ (1909b, p. 145);
the patient must ‘‘make the advance from the pleasure
principle to the reality principle’’ (1919b, p. 312); and
‘‘the aim of the treatment is to remove the patientÕs
resistances and to pass his repressions in review and
thus to bring about the most far reaching unification
and strengthening of his ego, to enable him to save the
mental energy which he is expending upon internal
conflicts, to make the best of him that his inherited
capacities will allow and so to make him as efficient and
as capable of enjoyment as possible’’ (1923a, p. 251).
From this perspective, ‘‘partial or complete sublimation’’ represents, as Freud wrote to James Jackson
Putnam in a letter of May 14, 1911, ‘‘the goal of
[psychoanalytic] therapy and the way in which it serves
every form of higher development’’ (1971a, p. 121).
Freud never concealed the pedagogic aspect of such a
program. He insisted on several occasions that psychoanalysis was a kind of ‘‘after-education’’ (1916–17a,
p. 451; 1940a, p. 175), even though he also maintained
that the psychoanalyst must not fall into the role of an
educator. Similarly, he often spoke out, right up to the
end of his life, against the idea that a ‘‘schematic normality’’ could define the end of the treatment, adding
that ‘‘The business of analysis is to secure the best possible psychological conditions for the functions of the
ego; with that it has discharged its task’’ (1937a, p. 250).
A growing awareness of the death drive and the
repetition compulsion led Freud to reconsider the
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secondary gain from illness as an obstacle to the cure
and to reexamine the role of the ‘‘negative therapeutic
reaction.’’ The latter, which satisfies unconscious guilt
feelings and the need for punishment in the neurotic
(through masochism), represents one of the most
important obstacles to the satisfactory progress of a
psychoanalytic treatment.
FreudÕs continuing efforts to describe and analyze
the negative therapeutic reaction shows that he persisted in looking for this, in the sense of ‘‘change,’’
despite his later pessimistic remarks. Other analysts
broadened the concept of cure, even if certain remarks
by Jacques Lacan seemed to devalue it. On February 5,
1957, after a lecture by Georges Favez on ‘‘The
Encounter with the Analyst,’’ Lacan expressed with the
utmost clarity an idea that has since been greatly distorted by both his adversaries and partisans. He began
by arguing against the idea that ‘‘if the measure of a
therapeutic analysis is defined by its achieving the aim
of producing a cure, that would mean that a therapeutic analysis is always something rather limited. All the
same,’’ he went on, ‘‘cure always seems to be a happy
side effect—as I have said, to the scandal of certain
ears—but the aim of analysis is not cure. Freud said
the same thing himself, namely, that making cure the
aim of analysis—making it nothing more than a
means towards a specific end—leads to something like
a short circuit that could only falsify the analysis. Thus
analysis has another aim’’ (1958, p. 309).
Lacan made these remarks were within the context
of an argument that pitted him against the idea of
‘‘therapeutic analysis’’ and against the aim of ‘‘cure’’—
defined by Sacha Nacht as the ‘‘disappearance of fear
and the possibility of loving and being loved’’
(1960)—as extolled by the Psychoanalytic Institute of
Paris. His remarks aimed at a ‘‘pure psychoanalysis’’
that Lacan associated with training analysis.
In any case, LacanÕs remarks can be compared to a
formulation of FreudÕs that is similar only if we neglect
the fact that it involves the question of symptomatic
suffering and not ‘‘cure.’’ However, as stated at the outset, everything depends on how one understands the
term: ‘‘The removal of the symptoms of the illness is
not specifically aimed at, but is achieved, as it were, as
a by-product if the analysis is properly carried
through’’ (1923a, p. 251).
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
359
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See also: ‘‘Analysis Terminable and InterminableÕÕ; Analyzability; Archetype (analytical psychology); Change;
Ego; Memory; Negative therapeutic reaction; Transference neurosis; Psychoanalytic treatment; Resolution of
the transference; Termination of treatment; Therapeutic
alliance.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4 & 5: 1–751.
———. (1904a). FreudÕs psycho-analytic procedure. SE, 7:
247–254.
———. (1905a). On psychotherapy. SE, 7: 255–268.
———. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy.
SE, 10: 1–149.
———. (1916–17a). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. SE, 15 & 16: 1–496.
———. (1919b). Some character-types met with in psychoanalytic work. SE, 14: 309–333.
———. (1919g). Preface to ReikÕs ritual: psycho-analytic
studies. SE, 17: 257–263.
———. (1923a). Two encyclopaedia articles. SE, 18: 235–
259.
———. (1923d). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 209–253.
———. (1940a). An outline of psycho-analysis. SE, 23:
139–207.
Freud, Sigmund, et al. (1971a), James Jackson Putnam and
psychoanalysis. Letters between Putnam and Sigmund
Freud, Ernest Jones, William James, Sándor Ferenczi, and
Morton Prince, 1877–1917 (NathanG. Hale, Ed.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. (1895d). Studies in hysteria. SE, 2.
Lacan, Jacques. (1958). Intervention, in G. Favez: ÔLe
rendez-vous avec le psychanalyste.Õ La Psychanalyse, 4,
305–314.
Further Reading
Abend, Sander. (1979). Unconscious fantasy and theories of
cure. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association,
27, 579–596.
Eagle, Morris. (1993). Enactments, transference, and symptomatic cure: a case history. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 3,
93–110.
36 0
Eissler, Kurt R. (1963). Notes on the psychoanalytic concept
of cure. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 18, 424–463.
Kohut, Heinz. (Arnold.Goldberg, ed.) (1984). How does
analysis cure? Chicago & London: University of Chicago
Press.
CZECH REPUBLIC
The first pioneer of psychoanalysis in the Czech lands
was Jaroslav Stuchlik (1890–1967), the Czech psychiatrist. He studied medicine in Switzerland, where he
met with Eugen Bleuler and Carl Gustav Jung. At the
end of the First World War, he was the first Czech to
visit FreudÕs seminars in Vienna. He surrounded himself with a group of young physicians in Slovakia
(Kaschau) in the 1920s.
Another group, consisting of Russian physicians,
originated in Prague around the Russian emigré
Nikolaj I. Osipov (1877–1934, who lived in Prague
from 1921 until his death and founded the Russian
Psychoanalytical Association with Drosnez, Tryto, and
Viroubov. Osipov lectured in psychoanalytic psychiatry at Charles University in Prague.
Nicolaj Osipov and Jaroslav Stuchlik, along with
Eugen Windholz, formerly of the group in Kaschau,
initiated the idea of the commemorative plaque that was
installed on FreudÕs home in Freiberg on October 25,
1931. Anna Freud took part in the celebration and Sigmund Freud, at that time 75 years old, sent a letter of
greeting to participants. In connection with this event
the first Czech Yearbook of Psychoanalysis (1932)
appeared, edited by Windholz. Windholz (1903–1986),
a Slovak Jew, was the first in the Czechoslovakian history
to receive a proper psychoanalytical training. He started
his analysis with Dr. Wolfe in the Berlin Psychoanalytical
Institute where he spent few weeks in 1930. Then he
continued his training in Prague with Frances Deri, a
German analyst, who was the first émigré from Germany, followed by Heinrich and Yela Loewenfeld, Steff
Bornstein. Hanna Heilborn, Annie Reich, and Elisabeth
Gero-Heymann.
The Prague Psychoanalytical Study Group was
established in 1933, led by Frances Deri until 1935,
when she moved to Los Angeles and, after that, by
Otto Fenichel, who trained and taught in Prague until
1938 as an emissary of the Viennese Psychoanalytical
Society which was affiliated with the Prague Group
officially at the Lucerne Congress in 1934. Among the
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analysts from Vienna who traveled to Prague on weekends to present lectures were E. Bibring, R. Waelder, R.
Spitz, P. Federn, E. Kris, and A. Aichhorn. Among the
pupils were Emmanuel Windholz, Jan Frank, a Slovak
psychiatrist and neurologist, Richard Karpe, a Czech
pediatrician, Theodor N. Dosuzkov, a Russian émigré,
neurologist and psychiatrist, and Otta Brief and
Theresa Bondy. The Czech Study Group was officially
recognized by the 14th IPA Congress in Marienbad in
1936. The Munich treaty in 1938 had disastrous consequences for the psychoanalytic movement: Czechoslovakia was occupied by Hitler in March 1939.
During the years 1938–1939, a majority of the
Czech Study Group emigrated to the United States
(Windholz to San Francisco, Frank to New York,
Karpe to Hartford, Connecticut), some died in concentration camps, and the only member to survive the
German occupation was Theodor Dosuzkov (1899–
1982). He had been trained by Annie Reich and Fenichel supervised him. During the war he went on with
his psychoanalytic work illegally, surrounding himself with a small group that played a significant role in
the postwar development of psychoanalysis in
Czechoslovakia.
The Society for the Study of Psychoanalysis was
reestabilished in Prague in 1946. It had to be dissolved
officially at the beginning of the 1950s, after the Communist putsch, but it continued illegally a further 40
years (1950–1989). The training in psychoanalysis
went on secretly. Theodor Dosuzkov and his pupils
Otakar Kuera, Ladislas Haas (emigrated in 1965 to
London), and M. Benová were direct members of the
IPA, and had some private contacts with analysts
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abroad. In the 1960s the younger generation of analysts started to train candidates: P. Tautermann, A.
Sizková.
In the early 1980s, descendants of Dosuzkov and
others established the new group and the Psychoanalytic Institute. Since 1987, the Czech Group has been
visited by several important European and American
psychoanalysts. An important step was made at the
26th IPA Congress in Rome in 1969: V. Fischelová, Jiri
Kocourek, Vaclav Mikota, M. Šebek, and B. Vacková
were recognized as the direct and associate members
of the IPA. The Czech Group became a Study Group of
the IPA at the 38th Congress in Amsterdam in 1983.
The official journal of the Czech Study Group, Psychoanalyticky sbornik, has been published since 1989.
MICHAEL ŠEBEK
Bibliography
Fischer, Eugenia. (1992). Czechoslovakia. In P. Kutter (Ed.),
Psychoanalysis international, a guide to psychoanalysis
throughout the world, vol. 1, Europe (pp. 34–49). StuttgartBad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 34–49.
Fischer, René. (1975). Zur Geschichte der psychoanalytischen Bewegung in der Tschechoslowakei. Psyche, 29, 12.
Šebek, Michael. (1992). La psychanalyse, les psychanalystes
et la période stalinienne de lÕaprès-guerre. La situation
tchécoslovaque. Revue internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse, 5, 553–568.
Šebek, Michael. (1993). Psychoanalysis in Czechoslovakia.
Psychoanalytic Review, 80 (3), 433–439.
361
D
DALBIEZ, ROLAND (1893–1976)
Roland Dalbiez, a French philosopher, was born in
Paris on June 23, 1893, and died in Rennes on March
14, 1976. He is best known for his Psychoanalytic
Method and the Doctrine of Freud, a philosophical critique of psychoanalysis published in 1936. Dalbiez was
born into an aristocratic Christian family (his father
was a general in the army and his mother a Churchill)
and entered the French naval academy in 1911. He was
a naval officer during the First World War. After contracting pleurisy he was forced to abandon the military
and turned to philosophy, graduating in 1921 and
receiving his doctorate in 1936. He spent his entire
career as a professor in the literature department of
the University of Rennes.
His research involved the boundaries between biology
and metaphysics. Together with Professor Rémy Collin
of the University of Nancy, he founded Cahiers de philosophie de la nature (The philosophy of nature), and
published several studies on the theory of evolution.
In the early 1930s he was part of the circle of people
around Jacques Maritain, the neo-Thomist philosopher, where he met Emmanuel Mounier and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty. It was Maritain who encouraged
Dalbiez to write about Freud. His research was so
extensive that it turned into a dissertation. He
defended his dissertation at the Sorbonne and it was
published the same year by Desclée de Brouwer, as La
Méthode Psychanalytique et la Doctrine Freudienne
(Psychoanalytic method and freudian theory). There
were two volumes: The first included an account of
Freud’s ideas and the second a discussion. There was a
preface by Henri Claude. Claude introduced Dalbiez
as a student who had become personally acquainted
with the psychoanalytic method through his study,
together with several psychiatrists, of various cases
over a period of years.
Dalbiez insists on the fact that his judgment is not
only based on what he has read but also on what he
has seen. ‘‘On a number of points, books leave us with
a feeling of uncertainty, but the facts are convincing.’’
(p. 8) The main thrust of his dissertation is that while
Freudianism is wrong for many reasons—exaggeration, eccentricity, dogmatism—the method is excellent
and fruitful. Dalbiez essentially reproaches Freud for
lacking philosophic rigor and behaving ‘‘as if he were
unaware of the idea of proof.’’ His principal merit is to
have emphasized the primacy of the unconscious in
mental life.
Dalbiez’s friend Édouard Pichon provided a
detailed review of the book in the Revue Française de
Psychanalyse in 1936. He presents the work as ‘‘a milestone in psychoanalysis in France’’ and feels that the
philosopher from Rennes will ‘‘convince even the most
reluctant of philosophers that the psychoanalytic
method represents a definite advance, something real
and durable in the field of psychology.’’ He fully
accepted the distinction made by Dalbiez between
Freudian doctrine, ‘‘about which we are free to accept
what we wish,’’ and method. Moreover, he claims to be
the origin of this idea. At the beginning of the Second
World War, Henri Ey also published an article entitled
‘‘Réflexions sur la Valeur Scientifique et Morale de la
Psychanalyse (à propos de la Thèse de Roland
Dalbiez),’’ which represented his first important statement about psychoanalysis.
The impact of Dalbiez’s work on philosophy was
less significant than it was in the analytic community.
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DANGER
There was no mention of the book in philosophical
reviews of the time and, as Dalbiez himself notes, the
book aroused considerable hostility at the Sorbonne.
It was only gradually that it became an important
work on the application of philosophy to psychoanalysis, primarily through the efforts of Paul Ricoeur, who
was a student of Dalbiez. His book, especially the distinction he made between theory and method, was the
source of considerable misunderstanding.
See also: Philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Codet, Henri. (1936). La méthode psychanalytique et la doctrine freudienne, compte rendu. L’Évolution psychiatrique,
3, 92–96.
Dalbiez, Roland. (1972). Psychoanalytical method and the
doctrine of Freud. (T. F. Lindsay, Trans.) Freeport, N.Y.:
Books for Libraries Press. (Original work published 1936)
Ey, Henri. (1939). Réflexions sur la valeur scientifique et
morale de la psychanalyse: à propos de la thèse de Roland
Dalbiez. Encéphale, 34, 189–220.
Pichon, Édouard. (1936). De Freud à Dalbiez. Revue Française de Psychanalyse, 9, 4, 559–588.
DANGER
As with many concepts a tentative definition of danger
is based on its use in ordinary language: it signifies
either a situation or set of circumstances that compromise the security or existence of a person or thing.
Aside from the past or present, it can include future
situations, that is, threats or risks having a high probability of realization. This definition likewise concerns
threats to the operation of the mind.
The term ‘‘danger’’ appeared for the first time in
Freud’s writings in an article entitled ‘‘On the Grounds
for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description ÔAnxiety Neurosis’’’ (1895b
[1894]). Freud used it to define an external situation
likely to provoke emotional and structural reactions.
The danger forces the psychic apparatus to ensure the
stability of its organization by implementing defensive
measures intended to avoid a catastrophic disturbance
(psychic trauma).
There are two dimensions to the concept: (1) In
terms of clinical treatment and theory, it implies the
36 4
existence of two spaces, an external space with its own
reality and an internal space that is part of what Freud
named psychic reality (related to the later concept of
reality-testing). (2) It entails the need to consider temporal differences, quantitative aspects, and specific
effects. ‘‘Danger’’ refers to a situation that may have
been accidental or contingent, consciously experienced, or unconscious.
This picture was later refined in Freud’s work, but
it retained its initial features. Situations involving
danger came to be viewed as more internalized and
more specific: the dangers of separation and objectloss, of castration, of uncontrollable drives, of threats
from an internal object. With the development of the
second theory of anxiety, the concept of danger
became more ambiguous, almost completely identified with the anxiety that signaled its presence. However, it is essential to distinguish clearly between the
affects of anxiety (Angst), fright (Schreck), and fear
(Furcht), each of which reflects a specific relationship
to danger.
The notion of danger still has to be used with caution,
especially in view of the inevitable and necessary evolution
of psychoanalytic language, which now emphasizes psychic envelopes, the therapeutic setting, or a topography of
‘‘interfaces’’ rather than the older metapsychological models. There is also a risk of confusion with concepts from
cognitive psychology and neurobiology (such as the concept of ‘‘stress,’’ for example).
CLAUDE BARROIS
See also: Animistic thought; Annihilation anxiety; Anxiety; Castration complex; Darwin, Darwinism, and
Psychoanalysis; Ego; Ego function; Envy; Fright; Id; Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety; Negative transference
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis; Fear;
Projection; Suicidal behavior; Symptom-formation;
‘‘Uncanny, The’’.
Bibliography
Dayan, Maurice. (1985). Inconscient et réalité. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
Freud, Sigmund. (1895b [1894]). On the grounds for
detaching a particular syndrome from neurasthenia under
the description ‘‘Anxiety Neurosis.’’ SE, 3: 85–115.
Laplanche, Jean. (1980–87). Problématiques. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
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DARK CONTINENT
DARK CONTINENT
In The Question of Lay Analysis (1926e), Freud wrote,
‘‘We know less about the sexual life of little girls than
of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark
continent’ for psychology’’ (p. 212). The evocative
phrase dark continent connotes a geographic space that
is murky and deep, one that defies understanding.
Freud borrowed the expression from the African
explorer John Rowlands Stanley’s description of the
exploration of a dark forest—virgin, hostile, impenetrable. By using this phrase and comparing the adult
woman’s sexual life to an unknown continent, Freud
indicates both his embarrassment as well as his
explorer’s curiosity. He also emphasizes the obscure
and incomplete nature of the clinical material on the
sexual life of girls and women for the psychoanalyst.
His metaphor for the female sex turns it into an unrepresentable enigma, expressing the castration anxiety
of the man who approaches it. For although he insists
on the central idea constituting his theory of female
sexuality—namely, the primitive masculinity of the little girl, who is a little man before she changes objects
and wishes to acquire a child from her father—Freud
does have doubts about his theory.
If we consider his statements about female sexuality, a theory that was never really explained in a comprehensive manner, we see that Freud is close to being
his most severe critic. In 1923, the year his most specific statements about female sexuality appeared, he presented, in ‘‘Infantile Genital Organization,’’ his thesis
of the primacy of the phallus: ‘‘For both sexes, only
one genital, namely the male one comes into account.
What is present, therefore, is not a primacy of the genitals, but a primacy of the phallus.’’ He immediately
adds, ‘‘Unfortunately we can describe this state of
things only as it affects the male child; the corresponding processes in the little girl are not known to us’’
(1923e, p. 142).
However, Freud himself attempts to illuminate the
darkness of the continent. For he discovers that for
the little girl, the mother, who first provides care for
the child, is the object of an especially intense and
long-lasting cathexis. This archaic bond between
mother and daughter, which psychoanalytic theory
would later describe as one of primary homosexuality,
is compared by Freud to Minoan-Mycenaean civilization, which had been hidden for so long by Athenian
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civilization. Freud also insists on the function of the
phallus for the woman. The phallus—not to be confused with the penis—is understood to represent the
paternal function and the capacity for symbolization
in all human beings. These ideas were further developed by Jacques Lacan and his school.
In Freud’s writing on femininity, a rigorous, sometimes even dogmatic, conceptualization always shares
space with a sense of perplexity. But the invisibility of
the female sex, its internal nature, a multiplicity of theories have been offered. Research by Freud’s disciples,
such as Ernest Jones and Karen Horney, exposed new
fields of exploration that are rich and heteroclite.
Female psychoanalysts deepened the investigation of
the female Oedipus and the young girl’s relationship to
the phallic phase (Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel). Following Lacan, important work was done (Michèle Montrelay) on the ‘‘other’’ jouissance, which functions
centrifugally in women, unlike the centripetal jouissance found in men. Influenced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, there has also been important work on
the feminine and the unrepresentable (Luce Irigaray).
Finally, analysis of the female Oedipus resumed and
was seen to consist of two phases (maternal object and
paternal object, sensoriality and language) that constitute the basis of female bisexuality (Julia Kristeva).
JULIA KRISTEVA
See also: Activity/passivity; Aphanisis; Bisexuality;
Castration complex; Feminine masochism; Feminine
sexuality; Femininity; Feminism and psychoanalysis;
Homosexuality; Masculinity/femininity; Object, change
of/choice of; Oedipal complex; Phallic mother; Phallic
stage; Psychology of Women The. A Psychoanalytic Interpretation; Sexual identity; Sexuation, formulas of; ‘‘Some
Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction
between the Sexes’’; Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality.
Bibliography
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine; Luquet-Parat, Catherine J.;
Grunberger, Béla; et al. (1970). Female sexuality: new psychoanalytic views. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press. (Original work published 1964)
Freud, Sigmund. (1923e). The infantile genital organization
(an interpolation into the theory of sexuality). SE, 19:
141–145.
———. (1926e). The question of lay analysis. SE, 20:
183–250.
365
DARWIN, DARWINISM,
AND
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Irigaray, Luce. (1985). Speculum of the other woman (G. C.
Gill, Trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Original work published 1974)
Kristeva, Julia. (2000). The sense and non-sense of revolt
(J. Herman, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
(Original work published 1996)
Montrelay, Michèle. (1977). L’ombre et le nom. Sur la féminité. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
DARWIN, DARWINISM, AND
PSYCHOANALYSIS
In 1859, when Charles Darwin published The Origin of
Species, Sigmund Freud was three years old. As a
young student and later, during his early years as a
dedicated scientific researcher, Freud greatly admired
Darwin, who had gained considerable popularity
throughout Europe. In his Autobiographical Study,
Freud would recall that ‘‘Darwin’s doctrine, then in
vogue, was a powerful attraction, since it promised to
provide an extraordinary thrust to understanding the
universe’’ (1925d). From then on Darwin joined Hannibal in Freud’s personal pantheon and he dreamed of
becoming his equal. In ‘‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis,’’ he described the three wounds inflicted
on humanity’s pride: when Copernicus established
that the earth was not the center of the universe, when
Darwin proved that mankind developed in an unbroken line from other animal species, and when he,
Freud, showed that man did not have control over the
most important aspects of his own mental processes
(1917a).
Freud cites Darwin at least twenty times in his published writings. It is possible, however, to identify
three ‘‘Darwins’’ in Freud’s work:
The first Darwin is the Darwin of The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), referred to
by Freud in the Studies on Hysteria (1895d), where
Darwin is cited in connection with Emmy von N. and
Elisabeth von R. Freud writes that Emmy von N.’s
symptoms remind him ‘‘of one of the principles laid
claim to by Darwin to explain the expression of the
emotions—the principle of the overflow of excitation.’’
In describing Elisabeth von R., Freud emphasizes the
symbolic meaning of her symptoms, which, he writes,
‘‘are part of the Ôexpression of the emotional movements,’ as Darwin has taught.’’ Consisting ‘‘originally
of acts that are well-motivated and appropriate,’’
36 6
civilization has reduced and symbolically transposed
the expressions into language.
This sort of reference occurs several times, especially in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926d),
where the affects are ‘‘reproductions of earlier events
of vital importance, possibly preindividual.’’ Adaptation is involved since ‘‘anxiety must fulfill the biologically essential function of reacting to a state of danger.’’
We can, therefore, consider the theory of anxiety presented in this work to be of Darwinian origin. Emotion (anxiety) is adaptive in two ways, for it prepares
the animal for danger not just by mobilizing energy
but also by aiding adjustment based on the nature of
the threat (signal anxiety). However—and this too is
taken from Darwin—under certain conditions the
excess excitation can become disorganizing and nonadaptive.
The second Darwin is the Darwin of The Origin of
Species (1859). This is the influence that is most often
noted. It is used to support Freud’s views when he postulates a correspondence between phylogenesis
(humanity’s evolution since its origins) and ontogenesis (the individual development of the child of
today). Freud refers to Ernest Haeckel’s hypothesis
according to which ontogenesis repeats phylogenesis.
Freud writes, ‘‘Important biological analogies have
enabled us to acknowledge that individual psychic
evolution repeats, in abbreviated form, the evolution
of humanity’’ (1910c). In ‘‘From the History of an
Infantile Neurosis’’ (1918b), he writes, ‘‘The phylogenetic schemas that the child possesses at birth . . . are
the precipitates of the history of human civilization . . .
this instinctive heritage would constitute the core of
the unconscious.’’
This idea is central to Totem and Taboo (1912–13a),
where it is used to establish the universality of primal
fantasies, the Oedipus complex, and more generally
the processes of development and human mentation.
It occurs again in ‘‘A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview
of the Transference Neuroses’’ (1985 [1915]), where
the ‘‘prehistoric fantasy’’ (the expression is Freud’s) is
used to establish a correspondence between three
kinds of time: the time of the assumed succession of
psychopathologies, that of phylogenesis, and that of
ontogenesis.
Freud’s views were sharply criticized, even within
psychoanalysis, for a variety of reasons, among them
the questionable nature of the anthropological data on
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DAY’S RESIDUES
which they were based and the impossibility of accepting Haeckel’s hypothesis.
———. (1926d). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. SE,
20: 75–172.
It is worth noting that in these texts (especially in
the ‘‘Overview’’) Freud is more Lamarckian than
Darwinian: it is essential to his theory that individual
traits be transmissible by incorporation into the
genetic heritage. Freud never abandoned this postulate
in spite of the discredit that befell Lamarck’s ideas.
———. (1987 [1915]). A phylogenetic fantasy: Overview of
the transference neuroses. (Axel Hoffer and Peter T. Hoffer,
Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
The third and final Darwin is the Darwin of The
Descent of Man (1871), a work that postulated a process of continuous evolution from animal to man and
distinguished stages within human evolution, that is, a
temporal sequence that was also a form of progress, a
hierarchy ranging from the most primitive forms to
the most noble: lower animals, higher animals, the
‘‘savage,’’ civilized man. Darwin distinguished between
‘‘inferior’’ human races and ‘‘superior’’ races, even
superior nations (such as Great Britain). Like many
others at the time, Freud accepted these ideas and used
them to support his views on the progress of civilization through the difficult, but necessary, repression of
instinctual drives, a repression that made necessary the
phenomenon of sublimation, which directed these
energies to more ‘‘noble’’ ends.
This notion of the evolution of civilizations remains
a source of continued interest. However, we can
obviously no longer adhere to the idea of a hierarchy
of values among human ‘‘races’’ that would ‘‘naturally’’ follow from the process of evolution as described
by Darwin. And we know only too well what excesses
and crimes ‘‘social Darwinism’’ can lead to. Nor is it
any longer possible to postulate, as Freud once did, an
equivalence between prehistoric humanity, or ‘‘primitive peoples’’ of today, and the child.
ROGER PERRON
See also: Brentano, Franz von; Heredity of acquired characters; Primitive horde; Phylogenesis; Totem, totemism;
Totem and Taboo; Vienna, University of.
Bibliography
Buican, Denis. (1987). Darwin et le darwinisme. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Freud, Sigmund. (1910c). Leonardo da Vinci and a memory
of his childhood. SE, 11: 57–137.
———. (1918b). From the history of an infantile neurosis.
SE, 17: 7–122.
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Ritvo, Lucile B. (1990). Darwin’s influence on Freud: a tale of
two sciences. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Thuillier, Pierre. (1981). Darwin and co. Brussels: Complexe.
DAY’S RESIDUES
According to Freud’s theory of dreams, day’s residues
are memory traces left by the events and psychic processes of the waking state; they are used as raw material
by the dream-work that serves the wishes of the
dreamer.
This idea is much in evidence in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), and is consonant with his
basic thesis that all dreams are wish-fulfillments.
With the help of the relaxation of the defenses that
sleep allows, unsatisfied wishes of waking life work
their way to a fulfillment that is described as ‘‘hallucinatory,’’ because though invested with an illusory
reality, it is cut off from both perception and
motricity.
This permeability of the censorship permits explicit
daytime wishes to be represented in dreams. It may
still oppose their expression in an overly crude form.
However, the distorting mechanisms characteristic of
the primary processes then come into play: condensation, displacement, and putting into images, or ‘‘representability.’’ The mechanism of displacement lets the
dream-work use the day’s residues for the purpose of
wish-fulfillment by producing innocent-seeming
representations: whence the dreamer’s impression,
upon awakening, of details that are trivial, if not
meaningless. An acceptable meaning may emerge,
however, when secondary revision comes into play,
giving the dream an intelligible ‘‘facade’’ and thus in
fact perfecting the distortion.
The day’s residues, perhaps in combination with
sensory impressions occurring during sleep, constitute
the ‘‘raw material’’ that will be reworked by the dream.
Here Freud used the metaphor of work performed in
the construction industry: daytime thoughts and the
work to which they were subjected played the role of
the contractor, while the unconscious wish was
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DEAD MOTHER COMPLEX
comparable to the capitalist who finances the operation (furnishing its plan and the power for it).
Freud extended and rounded out this account in ‘‘A
Metaphysical Supplement to the Theory of Dreams’’
(1916–1917f [1915]), notably from a topographical
angle. He argued that the day’s residues are part of the
preconscious, but receive the full cathexis necessary
for the dream-work from the unconscious. He
returned to this group of hypotheses in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916–1917 [1915–
1917]).
Thereafter, the question of day’s residues was paid
scant attention by Freud, but inasmuch as the notion
has a bearing on perception, memory, reality testing,
hallucination, and other issues, it remains central.
Meanwhile, psychoanalytic technique and practice
continue to make use of it on a daily basis.
ROGER PERRON
See also: Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘‘Gradiva’’;
Dream; Irma’s injection, dream of; Latent; Manifest; Secondary revision.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4–5: 1–625.
———. (1916–1917f [1915]). A metaphysical supplement
to the theory of dreams. SE, 14: 217–235.
———. (1916–1917a [1915–1917]). Introductory lectures
on psychoanalysis. SE: 15–16.
Further Reading
Langs, Robert J. (1971). Day residues, recall residues,
dreams: reality and the psyche. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 19, 499–523.
Luborsky, Lester, and Shevrin, Howard. (1956). Dreams and
day–residues: a study of the Poetzl observation. Bulletin of
the Menninger Clinic, 20, 135–148.
DEAD MOTHER COMPLEX
The complex of the dead mother was described by
André Green in 1980. Evidence of it emerges during
the transference, so it is often not identifiable when
analysis is first requested. It is manifested especially by
a ‘‘transference depression,’’ a repetition of an infantile
36 8
depression that is often not capable of being recalled.
The essential characteristic of this depression is that it
occurs in the presence of an object that itself is
absorbed in mourning. The causes of this mourning
can be many, and are not admitted by the maternal
object. They are therefore, for the most part, hypothetically deduced through the analysis, with more or less
certainty.
The main observable consequence on the level of
the counter-transference is insight into a cold, hard,
unfeeling kernel at the heart of the transference. This is
the result of a brutal maternal decathexis that the child
is unable to understand and that turns his psychic
world upside down. After vain attempts at reparation,
feelings of impotence became dominant. Complex
defenses are then set up which associate a mirrorrepresentation of the disinvestment in the maternal
object with an unconscious identification with the
dead mother. The result of this is the psychic murder
of the object, which takes place without any hatred.
The maternal affliction prohibits any aggressive
expression, which would risk augmenting the maternal
detachment. On the one hand, the pattern of object
relations is punctured, while on the other, peripheral
cathexes are clung to at the edge of this hole. Silent
destructiveness does not allow the subject to reestablish an object relation capable of overcoming the conflict and opening the way to connections that would
strengthen it, or else definitive adjustments serve only
as a shield that prevents access to the kernel of the conflict. The only thing that endures is a dull psychic pain,
characterized especially by an incapacity to cathect
closely with any object having anything to do with
affects. Hatred is as impossible as love, and it is impossible to receive without feeling obliged to give back, so
as not to owe anything, even masochistic pleasure. The
dead mother is omnipresent, but without being represented, and seems to have seized the subject, making
him captive of his mourning for her.
This clinical picture develops against the background of the child’s inability to grasp the reasons for
it. Important measures of infantile depression are the
loss of meaning, and the feeling of inability to repair
the mourned object, to awaken the lost desire. Sometimes significant rationalizations displace the source of
the conflict onto the external world, the mother’s
desire becoming inaccessible compared to what the
child believes he has observed. The child then blames a
failure of subjective omnipotence in relationships,
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leading, by compensation, to a reinforcement of omnipotence in areas less directly connected with the primary object.
An oedipal analysis of pregenital fixations and
unconscious guilt is of no use in finding a way to move
past this situation, insofar as analysis is not centered
on the configuration of the complex of the dead
mother. For the mother is not directly identifiable in
the discourse of the patient. She only appears to the
extent that the analytic situation succeeds in drawing
out evidence of her silent presence without being able
to find her in this absence where even indirect signs of
her existence are missing.
Repression has erased the memory trace of her
touch, of contact with her, and of the child’s cathexis
with her before the occurrence of his mourning for
her, which put a sudden end to this forgotten relation.
This is a repression that returns to bury her alive, even
demolishing everything, including a tomb, that would
mark her past existence. Winnicottian holding has collapsed in this situation, because the object has been
encysted, with no trace of it left. The identification has
been with the vacuum left behind by the disinvestment. The absence of all meaningful reference points
cannot be too strongly emphasized. Since the modification of the maternal attitude seemed to be inexplicable, it led in turn to all sorts of questions which
arouse a feeling of guilt, and these in turn are aggravated by secondary defenses and displaced onto elements that have been annexed for that purpose.
In effect, attempts to block problems not governed
by repression of this untenable situation prompt some
significant reactions. Their purposes are: (1) To keep
the ego alive through secondary hatred of the object,
by the frenetic, but unquenchable, search for pleasures,
or through the headlong search for a possible meaning
to the displacements that have been made; (2) To reanimate the dead mother, interest her, distract her,
seduce her, give her back the taste for life, breathing
into her by any means possible, including the most
artificial, a joy of being alive; and (3) To compete with
the object of mourning in a precocious triangulation.
The dead mother complex, as a powerful and
intense element, naturally draws to it other components of psychic life, and is closely tied to its most
important systems. Consequently the fantasy of the
primal scene attempts to make intelligible the competitive relations with the hypothetical object of sudden
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cathected, by highlighting whatever recalls the primal
scene, and often in an apocalyptic way, through projective identification. The catastrophe thus envelops and
retaliates against the maternal object, which shifts
between indifference and terror. It is frequently the case
that the father is the object of a precocious investment
in an Oedipus complex that is rushed into for this very
occasion, but lacking in its normal attributes. This variant complex brings with it not so much castration
anxiety, but a feeling of impotent rage and paralysis,
helpless against the violence that follows action against
a supposed rival. The result is often an intensified feeling of emptiness, repeating and amplifying the most
deleterious effects at the heart of the conflict.
On the bases of these clinical observations, André
Green hypothesized a destiny of the primary object as
a framing structure for the ego, hiding the negative
hallucination of the mother. The dead mother complex demonstrates the failure of this process, forcing
its representations into a painful vacuity, and obstructing their capacity to bind together in any preconscious
thought pattern. The dead mother complex opposes a
‘‘hot’’ castration anxiety, linked to the vicissitudes of
object relations, which can be threatened with corporal
mutilation, to a ‘‘cold’’ anxiety, which is linked with
losses suffered on the narcissistic level (negative hallucination, flat psychosis, dull mourning), resulting in
the clinical treatment of negativity.
ANDRÉ GREEN
See also: France; Intergenerational; Oedipus complex,
early; Transference depression; Work (as a psychoanalytic
notion).
Bibliography
Green, André. (2001). The dead mother. In his Life narcissism/death narcissism (Andrew Weller, Trans.). London,
New York: Free Associations Books.
Kohon, Gregorio. (Ed.). (1999). The dead mother. The work
of André Green. London, New York: Routledge.
DEATH AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Our own death cannot be represented, which is
obvious since it would require a self-observing consciousness that disappears with death and therefore
cannot perceive the death. Any anticipation of our
own death as nothingness is therefore impossible. For
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PSYCHOANALYSIS
Freud, this philosophical evidence was reflected in his
remarks that ‘‘our unconscious . . . does not believe in
its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal’’
(1915b, p. 296) and ‘‘it is indeed impossible to imagine
our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we
can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators’’ (1915b, p. 289). These two propositions should
not be confused. The second is a logical statement,
since in the absence of existence there is no consciousness, while the first refers to the make-up of the
unconscious system and especially the fact that it
ignores time and its passage, and more radically,
negation.
The inability to represent one’s own death does not
imply that we fail to suffer about the certainty of
death. Anxiety about death occupies a central place in
our lives, and ultimately it is this that superego anxiety
and castration anxiety refer to. Moreover, death is
represented in dreams and symbols. Departures and
muteness, or the ability to hide from others are oneiric
representations of death. Among the typical dream
types Freud mentions in The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900a) is the dream of the death of loved ones.
Perception about the death of the other is a central
element in obsessive neurotics. Freud wrote, ‘‘these
neurotics need the help of the possibility of death
chiefly in order that it may act as a solution of conflicts
they have left unsolved’’ (1909d, p. 236). By suppressing an element of indecision, death would allow resolution, but death, and the possibility of escaping it
through superstitious magical activities, is associated
with their unconscious hatred in the conflict of
ambivalence. The idea of death offers a solution in
obsessive neurosis, but it is also, for everyone, a value
that, by establishing a contrast, exalts the value of life.
Freud demonstrates this in relation to transience
(1916a [1915]), but he also emphasizes it in relation to
the risk of death: ‘‘Life is impoverished, it loses in
interest, when the highest stake in the game of living,
life itself, may not be risked’’ (1915b, p. 290).
Beyond the impossible representation of one’s own
demise, there is the question of death as enigma, similar to birth, as the end mirrors the beginning. Freud
questions primitive man’s attitude to death (1912–
1913a) by distinguishing between the triumph before
the corpse of the enemy and the pain experienced in
the loss of a loved one. Certainly, in these cases identification could lead primitive man to also consider his
own death. But Freud introduced an additional idea,
37 0
that of the ambivalence that would lead to suffering
and relief, and considered it to be the root not of the
representation of death but of the fact that the disturbance caused by it might have led men to think:
‘‘What released the spirit of enquiry in man was not
the intellectual enigma, and not every death, but the
conflict of feeling at the death of loved yet alien and
hated persons’’ (1915b, 293).
As for children, Freud also felt that the origin of the
activity, if not of thought, at least of research, was
found in the desire for affection (preserving the love of
one’s parents without sharing it with younger siblings). In contrast he does not appear to have considered that for children the representation of death and,
in particular, their own death, might have constituted
an enigma and encouragement for reflection. ‘‘Children’’, he wrote, ‘‘know nothing of the horrors of corruption, of freezing in the ice-cold grave, of the terrors
of eternal nothingness—ideas which grown-up people
find it so hard to tolerate, as is proved by all the myths
of a future life’’ (1900a, p. 254). On the contrary, we
can consider that the theories, or myths, that the child
creates to explain the origin of life also treat its end,
and that both preoccupations are inseparable.
These theories raise the question of the causality of
death. We know that the adult, rather than seeing
death as an inevitable destiny, will consider the
immediate causes, or even look for those responsible
(1915b). The child, in a similar position, does not hesitate to make death the result of murder. For here the
relationship to death retains its original form, that is,
the impulse to kill repressed by an important moral
injunction, ‘‘Thou shalt not kill.’’ However, there is one
area where this impulse can be given free rein: literary
fiction, which provides the pleasure of remaining alive
and the certainty that we have not killed anyone. ‘‘In
the realm of fiction we find the plurality of lives which
we need’’ (1915b, p. 291). The fact that so-called
‘‘crime’’ writing has always enjoyed such success attests,
as surely as the existence of a moral imperative, to the
existence and persistence of this impulse to murder
and the enigma contained in this return to death, here
couched in playful terms (Mijolla-Mellor, 1995).
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Castration complex; Certainty; Death instinct (Thanatos); Estrangement; ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’; ‘‘On Transience’’;
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Phantom; Suicidal behavior; Suicide; ‘‘Thoughts for the
Times on War and Death’’; ‘‘Uncanny, The’’.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams,
part I. SE, 4–5.
———. (1912–1913a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
———. (1915b). Thoughts for the times on war and death.
SE, 14: 273–300.
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1995). Meurtre familier.
Approche psychanalytique d’Agatha Christie. Paris:
Dunod.
M’Uzan, Michel de. (1977). De l’art à la mort. Paris:
Gallimard.
Further Reading
Laplanche, Jean. (1976). Life and death in psychoanalysis
(Jeffrey Mehlman, Trans.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
DEATH DRIVE. See Death instinct (Thanatos)
DEATH INSTINCT (THANATOS)
to the life drive: ‘‘The opposition between the ego or
death instincts and the sexual or life instincts would
then cease to hold and the compulsion to repeat would
no longer possess the importance we have ascribed to
it’’ (p. 44).
The death instinct was Freud’s attempt to explain
this repetition compulsion that overrides the pleasure
principle, whether in post-traumatic dreams, certain
compulsive children’s games (such as the ‘‘fort-da’’
game), or indeed in analysands’ resistances to the
treatment (the transference). He observed that ‘‘the
aim of all life is death,’’ ‘‘inanimate things existed before
living ones’’ and that ‘‘everything living dies for internal reasons’’ (p. 38). Drawing on August Weismann’s
differentiation of soma from germ-plasma, Freud
went on to draw ‘‘a sharp distinction between egoinstincts, which we equated with death instincts, and
sexual instincts, which we equated with life instincts’’
(pp. 52–53). He thus continued to adhere to the dualistic concept of the drives: ‘‘even more definitely dualistic than before—now that we describe the opposition as being not between ego instincts and sexual
instincts but between life instincts and death
instincts’’ (p. 53).
Freud found support for his arguments in Fechner’s
stability principle: ‘‘The dominating tendency of mental life . . . is the effort the reduce, to keep constant or
to remove internal tension due to stimuli . . . a tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principle;
and our recognition of this fact is one of our strongest
reasons for believing in the existence of death
instincts’’ (p. 55–56).
The death instinct or death drive is the force that
makes living creatures strive for an inorganic state. It
does not appear in isolation; its effect becomes apparent, in particular through the repetition compulsions,
when a part of it is connected with Eros. Its tendency
to return living creatures to the earlier inorganic state
is a component of all the drives. In this combined
form, its main impetus is toward dissolution, unbinding, and dissociation. In its pure form, silent within
the psychic apparatus, it is subjugated by the libido to
some extent and thus deflected to the outside world
through the musculature in the drive for destruction
and mastery or the will to power: this is sadism proper;
the part that remains ‘‘inside’’ is primary erogenous
masochism.
In 1924, Freud drew a clear distinction between
three principles: ‘‘The Nirvana principle [Barbara
Low’s term], belonging as it does to the death instinct,
has undergone a modification in living organisms
through which it has become the pleasure principle
. . . the pleasure principle represents the demands of
the libido; and the modification of the latter principle,
the reality principle, represents the influence of the
external world’’ (1924c, p. 160). Although Freud
recognized the speculative nature of his final drive
theory, he continued to adhere to it throughout the
rest of his work.
Having put forward, particularly in ‘‘Instincts and
Their Vicissitudes’’ (1915c), a dualism in which the
sexual drives conflict with the ego drives, in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920g), Freud introduced the concept of the death drive as a negative term in opposition
The source of the death drive lies in the cathexis
of bodily zones that can generate afferent excitations
for the psyche then; this certainly involves tension in
the musculature determined by a biological urge. Its
locus is in the id, then later under the influence of
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D E A T H I N S T I N C T (T H A N A T O S )
the ego, as well as in the superego, where it functions
to restrict libidinization. In melancholia, ‘‘a pure culture of the death instinct’’ (1923b, p. 53) governs the
superego, such that the ego can impel the subject
towards death.
The energy of this urge is fairly resistant to shaping, diversion, or displacement and it manifests in
subtle but powerful ways. The operation of this
almost invisible energy has been described as a ‘‘work
of the negative’’ (André Green). Its object is the
implementing organ—the musculature—that enables
the aim to be fulfilled. Paradoxically, the libido, subject to restraint by the destrudo (Edoardo Weiss’s
term), and leading to primary masochism and sadism, is the object of the death drive here. According
to Freud’s descriptions, its goal is dissociation, regression, or even dissolution. While leading organic life
back to an inorganic state is the final stage, ‘‘the purpose of the death drive is to fulfil as far as is possible
a disobjectalising function by means of unbinding’’
(Green, p. 85). It is therefore an entropic process in
the strict sense.
After explaining the notion of the death instinct in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud returned to it a
number of times in his later works. He mentioned it
in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
(1921c) as the source of aggression and hostility
between people and in ‘‘The Libido Theory’’ (1923a),
and then developed the theory in The Ego and the Id
(1923b), especially in the chapters on ‘‘the two classes
of instincts’’ and ‘‘the dependent relationships of
the ego.’’ In this work, he connected his new drive
theory with the structural theory that he had just
expounded.
Then, following a dispute with Fritz Wittels, who
jumped to a hasty conclusion concerning a connection
between the death of Freud’s daughter Sophie (January 1920) and the emergence of the concept of the
death drive (a claim that is still being debated today—
cf. Grubrich-Simitis), Freud returned to this concept
in ‘‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’’ (1924c), in
which he posited primary masochism both as evidence
and as a vestige of the conjunction between the death
drive and Eros. He thus elucidated the negative therapeutic reaction and the concept of unconscious guilt
and indicated that ‘‘moral masochism becomes a classical piece of evidence for the existence of fusion of
instinct. Its danger lies in the fact that it originates
from the death instinct and corresponds to the part of
37 2
that instinct which has escaped being turned outwards
as an instinct of destruction’’ (p. 170).
In his short article on ‘‘Negation’’ (1925h), Freud
explained: ‘‘Affirmation—as a substitute for uniting—
belongs to Eros; negation—the successor to expulsion—belongs to the instinct of destruction’’ (p. 239).
He returned to this subject in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a [1929]), in his letter to Albert Einstein
(1933b [1932]) and finally in the thirty-second of the
New Introductory Lectures (1933a [1932]), in which he
discussed anxiety in connection with the life of the
drives.
For Melanie Klein, a firm advocate of the existence
of the death drive, psychic conflict is never a conflict
between the ego and the drives but always between the
life drive and the death drive. Anxiety is the immediate
response to the endopsychic perception of the death
drive. For Jacques Lacan, the death drive as something
beyond the pleasure principle forms the best startingpoint for introducing his concept of the ‘‘Real,’’ in connection with the Imaginary and the Symbolic. He links
to this the lethal dimension inherent in desire and
jouissance and makes the death drive ‘‘the necessary
condition for the natural phenomenon of the instinct
in entropy to be taken up at the level of the person, so
that it may take on the value of an oriented instinct
and is significant for the system insofar as the latter as
a whole is situated in an ethical dimension’’ (1959–
1960/1992, p. 204).
Toward the end of his life, Freud recognized that
‘‘the dualistic theory according to which an instinct of
death or of destruction or aggression claims equal
rights as a partner with Eros as manifested in the
libido, has found little sympathy and has not really
been accepted even among psychoanalysts’’ (1937, p.
244). Its detractors include authors such as Michel
Fain (1971), who regard the concept of the death drive
as the result of Freud’s speculations on matters that
could for the most part be explained without it—for
example by the mechanism of ‘‘reversal into its opposite’’ (1915c, p. 126). Others have objected to the theory of the death drive either because this would mean
that psychic conflict, the cornerstone of psychoanalysis, could no longer be the expression of lived experience alone, since the death drive is ‘‘evidently innate,
intrapsychic from the outset, and not secondarily
internalized’’ (Nacht), or because ‘‘this drive restricts
the field in which conflicts can be elaborated both
internally and externally; it introduces a fatalism into
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the gradual progression of the treatment and brings
out the negative therapeutic reaction instead of a relational problem between analyst and analysand’’ (Nicolaidis). Yet others have taken more interest in Freud’s
methodology and are surprised at the ‘‘quality of a foreign body—within psychoanalytic theory—that characterizes the conflict between Eros and the death drive
[which] emerges here from the use of dialectical procedures in which Freud is not well versed’’ (Denis).
By contrast, other authors, such as Melanie Klein,
Jacques Lacan, and André Green, consider this concept
of the death drive as further evidence of Freud’s scientific rigor, as he demonstrates his willingness to rework
his previous drive theory to take account of clinical
facts and hypotheses that do not accord with it.
Furthermore, studies based on the treatment of psychotic subjects, particularly by post-Kleinians, seem to
have reinforced the theory of the prevalence of the
death drive in the psychic apparatus of these patients,
as something that constantly tears at the fabric of their
representations and undermines their attempts to
establish an apparatus for thinking thoughts (Wilfred
Bion).
———. (1924c). The economic problem of masochism. SE,
19, 155–170.
———. (1925h). Negation. SE, 19, 233–239.
———. (1930a [1929]). Civilization and its discontents. SE,
21, 57–145.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22, 1–182.
———. (1933b [1932]). Why war? (Einstein and Freud).
SE, 22, 195–215.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23, 209–253.
Green, André. (1999). The death drive, negative narcissism
and the disobjectalising function. In The work of the negative (pp. 81–88) (A. Weller, Trans.). London: Free Association Books.
Grubrich-Simitis, Ilse. (1996). Back to Freud’s texts. Making
silent documents speak (Philip Slotkin, Trans.). New Haven:
Yale University Press. (Original work published 1993)
Lacan, Jacques. (1992). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book
VII. The ethics of psychoanalysis (J.-A. Miller, Ed., and D.
Porter, Trans.). London: Routledge. (Original work published 1959–1960)
PIERRE DELION
Nacht, Sacha. (1938). Le Masochisme, Étude historique,
clinique, psychogénique et thérapeutique. Paris: Denoël.
See also: Alienation; Anxiety; Drive/instinct; Ego and the
Id, The; Envy; Envy and Gratitude; Eros; Freud: Living
and Dying; Life instinct (Eros); Masochism; Narcissistic
neurosis; Negative, work of the; Negative therapeutic
reaction; Negative transference; Nirvana; Orgasm; Phobic neurosis; Pictogram; Projective identification;
Racism, antisemitism, and psychoanalysis; Repetition
compulsion; Sadism; Self-hatred; Trauma; ‘‘Why War?’’
Nicolaı̈dis, Nicos. (1993). La Force perceptive de la représentation de la pulsion. Paris: Presses universitaires de
France.
Bibliography
Feldman, Michael. (2000). Some views on the manifestation
of death instinct in clinical. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 81, 53–66.
Denis, Paul. (1997). Emprise et satisfaction, les deux formants
de la pulsion. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
Fain, Michel. (1971). Prélude à la vie fantasmatique. Revue
Française de Psychanalyse, 35, 2–3, 291–364.
Freud, Sigmund. (1915c). Instincts and their vicissitudes.
SE, 14, 109–140.
Further Reading
Eissler, Kurt R. (1971) Death drive, ambivalence, and narcissism. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 26, 25–78.
Grotstein, James. (2000). Some considerations of hate &
reconsideration of death instinct. Psychoanalytic Inquiry,
20, 462–480.
Segal, Hanna. (1993). On the clinical usefulness of the concept of death instinct. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 74, 55–62.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18, 1–64.
———. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18, 65–143.
———. (1923a). The libido theory. SE, 18, 255–259.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19, 1–66.
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Decathexis describes both the action and the result of
withdrawing psychic energy—usually libido—away
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DEFENSE
from where it had been attached to a psychic formation, a bodily phenomenon, or an object.
The idea of decathexis, or withdrawal of cathexis, is
linked to the notion of psychic energy and occurs very
early on in Freud’s work, although the term itself or its
equivalents are not explicitly used. As early as ‘‘The
Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’’ (1894a), Freud outlines
certain mechanisms for repressing representations
when he writes that we have ‘‘an approximate fulfilment of the task if the ego succeeds in turning this
powerful idea into a weak one, in robbing it of the
affect—the sum of excitation—with which it is
loaded’’ (1894a, p. 48). In fact the notion of decathexis
first appears as a means of repression in his work on
the paranoia of Justice Schreber: ‘‘It is quite possible
that a detachment of the libido is the essential and regular mechanism of every repression’’ (1911c [1910],
p. 71). But the important role eventually attributed to
energy in the very constitution of the psyche would
make decathexis a central notion, independent of the
mechanism of repression. The nature of decathected
mental structures or objects, the more or less massive
modalities of the decathexis, and the fate of the withdrawn energy, all would have serious consequences. As
Freud writes: ‘‘the liberated libido will be kept in suspension within his mind, and will there give rise to
tensions and color his mood’’ (1911c [1910], p. 72),
until it finds another attachment. In the case of paranoia it will hypercathect the ego. In ‘‘Mourning and
Melancholia’’ (1916–17f [1915]), Freud studied the
progressive withdrawal of cathexis from the lost object,
this being necessary for the reality of loss to be finally
acceptable.
PAUL DENIS
See also: Boredom; Cathexis; Counter-investment; Dead
mother complex; Dismantling; Fusion/defusion of the
instincts. Repression; Sleep/wakefulness; Transference
depression.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1894a). The neuro-psychoses of defence.
SE, 3 : 41–61.
———. (1911c [1910]). Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides). SE, 12: 1–82.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: an introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
37 4
———. (1915e). Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides). SE, 12: 1–82.
———. (1916–17f [1915]). A metapsychological supplement to the theory of dreams. SE, 14: 217–235.
Rouart, Julien. (1967). Les notions d’investissement et de
contre-investissement à travers l’évolution des idées freudiennes. Colloque de la Société psychanalytique de Paris,
Paris, 1965. Revue Française de Psychanalyse, 31, (2),
193–213.
DEFENSE
The term ‘‘defense’’ refers to all the techniques
deployed by the ego in conflicts that have the potential
to lead to neurosis. In the sense in which Freud first
used the term, defenses are unconscious because they
stem from a conflict between the drive and the ego or
between a perception or representation (memory, fantasy, etc.) and moral imperatives. The function of the
defenses is thus to support and maintain a state of psychic stability by avoiding anxiety and unpleasure. The
concept of defense was broadened somewhat when
Freud attributed an important role to the reality principle and to the superego. Melanie Klein then formed
the more radical view that the defenses exist within an
archaic ego.
In his letter to Wilhelm Fliess dated May 21, 1894,
and concerning his interpretation of the neuroses,
Freud introduced the concept of defense in connection
with the notion of psychic conflict: ‘‘What is warded
off is always sexuality’’ (1985c [1887–1904], p. 75). In
reference to the emergence of anxiety, he argued that
sexual tension turned into anxiety when it was not
psychically elaborated and thereby transformed into
affect. Freud attributed this phenomenon to, among
other things, a repression of psychic sexuality, that is,
to a defense. In his letter to Fliess dated May 30, 1896,
he linked repression with defense by emphasizing,
‘‘Surplus of sexuality alone is not enough to cause
repression; the cooperation of defense is necessary’’
(p. 188).
In ‘‘Further Remarks on the Neuro-psychoses of
Defence’’ (1896b), Freud deepened his analysis of
defense as arising from the conflict between the drive
and the ego, the conscious agent of repression. Freud
considered the defense as the ‘‘nuclear point’’ (p. 162)
in the psychic mechanism of the neuroses. With regard
to how symptoms arise, he detailed more clearly how
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the unconscious psychic mechanism of defense
resulted from the conflict of a representation with
moral imperatives.
In ‘‘Repression’’ (1915d), Freud emphasized that
the mechanism of defense ‘‘cannot arise until a sharp
cleavage has occurred between conscious and unconscious mental activity—that the essence of repression
lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at
a distance, from the conscious’’ (p. 147).
Much later (1926d), Freud observed that after he
had abandoned the term ‘‘defensive process’’ for thirty
years and replaced it with the term ‘‘repression’’ (without clearly explaining the possible connection between
these two concepts) (p. 163), there were ‘‘good enough
grounds for re-introducing the old concept of defence’’
(p. 164). In fact, Freud had never entirely abandoned
the term, since he discussed the denial of castration
(albeit initially without using the term ‘‘denial’’ [Verleugnung]) in relation to children’s theories of sexuality (1908c) and little Hans (1909b). Freud discussed
denial more explicitly with regard to fetishism
(1927e), a concept that plays a pivotal role in his work,
and in his paper on negation (1925h), which he
defined as representing ‘‘a kind of intellectual acceptance of the repressed, while at the same time what is
essential to the repression persists’’ (p. 236). Thus,
‘‘the content of a repressed image or idea can make its
way into consciousness, on condition that it is
negated’’ (p. 235). Freud also discussed sublimation, a
concept that was already present in ‘‘Leonardo da
Vinci and a memory of his childhood’’ (1910c) and
that reappeared in The Ego and the Id (1923b) in connection with the ego energy, which Freud stipulated as
involving ‘‘a desexualisation—a kind of sublimation’’
(p. 30).
These distinctions, which predate Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926d), were later probably instrumental in Freud’s ascribing a more important function
to this ‘‘old concept of defence’’ and restricting the role
of repression, to the extent that he suggested making
defense ‘‘a general designation for all the techniques
which the ego makes use of in conflicts which may lead
to a neurosis, while we retain the word Ôrepression’ for
the special method of defence which the line of
approach taken by our investigations made us better
acquainted with in the first instance’’ (p. 163).
In furthering her father’s work, Anna Freud sought
to develop a theory that would demonstrate how the
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three agencies of the structural theory functioned. In
particular, she described how the ego becomes ‘‘suspicious’’ in the face of the onslaught of the drives and
‘‘proceeds to counter-attack and to invade the territory
of the id. Its purpose is to put the instincts permanently out of action by means of appropriate defensive
measures, designed to secure its own boundaries’’
(1936, p. 8). Thus, Anna Freud’s account of psychic
functioning attributes some force to the adaptive functions of the ego.
Her works were often quoted by the ego-psychology
movement that formed in the 1950s in the United
States. Within the ego-psychology movement, Heinz
Hartmann developed his theory of the ego in connection with the problem of adaptation, which he
described in terms of the development of a ‘‘conflictfree ego sphere’’ (1958, p. 3 ) or autonomous ego. In
this movement, psychic functioning in general is considered in terms of defense and its quest for
equilibrium.
Along similar lines, René Spitz, who located the
first defense in the emergence of the second organizer
(the so-called eight-month or stranger anxiety),
explained that these defenses initially ‘‘serve primarily
adaptation rather than defense in the strict sense of the
term’’ (p. 164). It is when the object is established and
ideation starts that their function changes. With the
fusion of the aggressive and libidinal drives, some
defense mechanisms, in particular identification,
‘‘acquire the function that they will serve in the adult’’
(p. 164).
When Anna Freud was publishing her first psychoanalytic works, Melanie Klein, while breaking with
Freudian orthodoxy by asserting that the agencies of
the psyche begin functioning much earlier, introduced
a perspective that restored to anxiety and psychic
conflict a fundamental role in psychic functioning.
Drawing on Freud’s second theory of the drives, she
attributed a central role to the death drive and the conflicts between love and hatred. She thus developed her
ideas on early defense mechanisms that were already
present, in her view, in the earliest months of life during the paranoid-schizoid position.
The concept of defense, as it has developed and
been used since Freud, has become somewhat common in both clinical psychology and psychoanalysis.
There it refers either to a relatively conscious behavior
that rejects psychic reality (a definition that makes the
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DEFENSE MECHANISMS
concept more akin to the concept of resistance) or to a
psychic impulse that seeks to avoid anxiety and
unpleasure in the quest to adapt and achieve a state of
equilibrium. As a result, the function of defense as a
mechanism necessary for psychic growth is often
overlooked.
Spitz, René A., in collaboration with W. Godfrey Cobliner.
(1965). The first year of life: A psychoanalytic study of normal and deviant development of object relations. New York:
International Universities Press.
ELSA SCHMID-KITSIKIS
Blum, Harold, (Ed.). (1987). Defense and Resistance: Historical Perspectives and Current Concepts, New York:
International Universities Press.
See also: Actual neurosis/defense neurosis; Autistic
defenses; Conflict; Defense mechanisms; Ego; Ego and the
Mechanisms of Defense, The; Manic defenses; Narcissistic
defenses; Negation; Neurotic defenses; Paranoid-schizoid
position; Psychoneurosis (or neuro-psychosis) of
defense; Psychotic defenses; Repression; ‘‘Splitting of the
Ego in the Process of Defence, The.’’
Bibliography
Freud, Anna. (1936). The ego and the mechanisms of defense.
New York: International Universities Press.
Freud, Sigmund. (1896b). Further remarks on the neuropsychoses of defence. SE, 3, 157–185.
———. (1908c). On the sexual theories of children. SE, 9,
205–226.
———. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy.
SE, 10, 1–149.
———. (1910c). Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his
childhood. SE, 11, 57–137.
———. (1915d). Repression. SE, 14, 141–158.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19, 1–66.
———. (1925h). Negation. SE, 19, 233–239.
———. (1926d). Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety. SE,
20, 75–172.
———. (1927e). Fetishism. SE, 21, 147–157.
———. (1985c [1887–1904]). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (Jeffrey M. Masson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1985.
Hartmann, Heinz. (1958). Ego psychology and the problem of
adaptation. New York: International Universities Press.
(Original work published 1939)
Klein, Melanie. (1975). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. (pp. 1–24) In The writings of Melanie Klein. London:
Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1946)
Le Guen, Claude; Anargyros-Klinger, Annie; Bauduin,
Andrée; et al. (1986). Le refoulement (les défenses). Revue
Française de Psychanalyse, 50, 1, 23–370.
37 6
Further Reading
Brenner, Charles. (1981). Defense and defense mechanisms.
Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 50, 557–569.
Gray, Paul. (1994). The ego and the analysis of defense.
Northvale, NJ: Aronson Inc.
Loewald, Hans. (1952). The problem of defense; the neurotic interpretation of reality. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 33, 444–449.
DEFENSE MECHANISMS
Defense mechanisms are psychic processes that are
generally attributed to the organized ego. They organize and maintain optimal psychic conditions in a way
that helps the subject’s ego both to confront and avoid
anxiety and psychic disturbance. They are therefore
among the attempts to work through psychic conflict
but if they are deployed in an excessive or inappropriate way they can compromise psychic growth.
There is no clear distinction in Sigmund Freud’s
work between a defense and a defense mechanism,
(the latter referring to the unconscious processes by
which the defense operates). The concept of defense
first appeared in his article ‘‘The Neuro-Psychoses of
Defence’’ (1894a) and was next discussed in ‘‘Further
Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’’ (1896b)
and ‘‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’’ (1896c). Finally, in
the text entitled ‘‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’’
(1915c), turning against the self and reversal into the
opposite were identified as defense mechanisms, in
addition to repression and sublimation.
For Freud, the concept of defense refers to the ego’s
attempts at psychic transformation in response to
representations and affects that are painful, intolerable, or unacceptable.
He abandoned the concept of defense for a period
in favor of the concept of repression. He then reintroduced it in ‘‘Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy,
Paranoia and Homosexuality’’ (1922b [1921]). Freud
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ascribed a defensive significance to introjection (or
identification) and projection by terming them all
‘‘neurotic mechanisms.’’ Then in an addendum to
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d [1925]), he
reconsidered this concept in relation to that of repression, suggesting that: ‘‘It will be an undoubted advantage, I think, to revert to the old concept of Ôdefence,’
provided we employ it explicitly as a general designation for all the techniques which the ego makes use of
in conflicts which may lead to a neurosis, while we
retain the word Ôrepression’ for the special method of
defense which the line of approach taken by our investigations made us better acquainted with in the first
instance’’ (p. 163). Freud added that: ‘‘further investigations may show that there is an intimate connection
between special forms of defense and particular illnesses, as, for instance, between repression and hysteria’’ (p. 164). By this he meant, more specifically,
that the ego protects itself against the tendency
towards conflict by means of a counter-cathexis. It was
this counter-cathexis that came to represent the
supreme essence of the defense mechanisms.
This idea was taken up by Heinz Hartmann (1950)
in the context of his theory of the autonomous functions of the ego. He argued that once the energy of the
counter-cathexis had been withdrawn from the tendency that caused the conflict, it was neutralized. For
him, the autonomous processes (organization,
cathexis, delay) can be the precursors of defense
mechanisms. In general, neurotic defense mechanisms
constitute an exaggeration or a distortion of regulating
and adaptive mechanisms.
With strong support from the ego-psychology
movement in her studies on ego functions, Anna
Freud listed and described the ego’s defense mechanisms. For her, ‘‘every vicissitude to which the instincts
are liable has its origin in some ego-activity. Were it
not for the intervention of the ego or of those external
forces which the ego represents, every instinct would
know only one fate—that of gratification’’ (1937, p.
47). To the nine defense mechanisms that she identified: ‘‘regression, repression, reaction-formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against
the self and reversal,’’ she suggested that, ‘‘we must add
a tenth, which pertains rather to the study of the normal than to that of neurosis: sublimation, or displacement of instinctual aims’’ (p. 47).
Finally, for adherents of the Kleinian school, the
defense mechanisms take a different form in a strucINTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
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tured ego from the one they assume in a primitive,
unstructured ego (or an undifferentiated id-ego). The
defenses become modes of mental functioning. For
Susan Isaacs (1948), all mental mechanisms are linked
to fantasies, such as devouring, absorbing, or rejecting.
Melanie Klein herself (1952, 1958) principally identified the following primitive defenses: splitting, idealization, projective identification and manic defenses.
The terms ‘‘defense’’ and ‘‘defense mechanism’’ are
still used interchangeably today, which suggests a
degree of confusion between a descriptive approach to
the concept of defense and an approach based on the
analysis of psychic adaptations from an economic
viewpoint.
ELSA SCHMID-KITSIKIS
See also: Defense.
Bibliography
Benassy, Maurice. (1969). Le moi et ses mécanismes de
défense: Étude théorique. In La théorie psychanalytique.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Freud, Anna. (1936). The ego and the mechanisms of defence.
New York: International Universities Press.
Freud, Sigmund. (1926d [1925]). Inhibitions, symptoms
and anxiety. SE, 20: 75–172.
Hartmann, Heinz. (1950). Comments on the psychoanalytic
theory of the ego. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 5,
74–96.
Isaacs, Susan. (1952). On the nature and function of phantasy. In M. Klein, P. Heimann, S. Isaacs and J. Riviere
(Eds.), Developments in psycho-analysis (p. 67–121). (Reprinted from International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 29
(1948), 73–97.)
Klein, Melanie. (1952). Some theoretical conclusions regarding the emotional life of the infant. In Envy and gratitude
and other works, 1946–1963 (pp. 61–93). London:
Hogarth, 1975.
———. (1958). On the development of mental functioning.
In Envy and gratitude and other works, 1946–1963. (pp.
236–246). London: Hogarth, 1975.
DEFERRED ACTION
This notion is important to any understanding of the
psychoanalytic conception of time. It implies a complex and reciprocal relationship between a significant
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DEFERRED ACTION
event and its later reinvestment with meaning, a reinvestment that lends it a new psychic efficacy.
It was the French reading and translation of Freud
that brought out the import of ‘‘nachträglich’’ and
‘‘Nachträglichkeit,’’ terms which had not hitherto been
consistently translated into either French or English.
The index of Freud’s Gesammelte Werke has no
entry for either nachträglich or Nachträglichkeit, and
perusal of the indexes of the works of Freud’s chief successors garners similarly negative results. It was
Jacques Lacan who first drew attention to this notion,
defining it in a precise if narrow way (1953, p. 48).
Lacan did not consider the broader implications of the
concept of Nachträglichkeit in Freud’s work, concerning himself solely with its occurrence in connection
with the ‘‘Wolf Man’’ case (1918b [1914]) and ignoring
its use in the 1895–1900 period. It fell to Jean-Bertrand
Pontalis and Jean Laplanche to point up the overall
importance of the concept, first in ‘‘Fantasy and the
Origins of Sexuality’’ (1964) and then in The Language
of Psycho-Analysis (1967).
First let us consider Freud’s view. He used the terms
‘‘nachträglich’’ and ‘‘Nachträglichkeit’’ over a good part
of his working life—from the period, in fact, of his
correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, through The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), ‘‘Little Hans’’
(1909b), the ‘‘Wolf Man’’ case, and even well beyond.
It is thus possible to trace the development of this idea
in the general context of his work. It never achieved
sufficient conceptual substance, however, for Freud to
dedicate an entire paper to it.
The earliest development of the notion may be seen
in Freud’s letters to Fliess. The adjective ‘‘nachträglich,’’
part of German common usage, is employed by Freud
in several ways. In the first place, it has the simple
meaning of ‘‘additional’’ or ‘‘secondary’’; and hence, in
a temporal sense, of ‘‘later.’’ A second use implies
movement from past time in the direction of the
future, while a third implies the opposite, a movement
from the future towards the past. The second use,
meaning movement from past to future, is very much
bound up with the seduction theory: it implies that
something is deposited in the individual that will be
reactivated later, thus becoming active only at a ‘‘second moment.’’ It is in this regard that the notion of
Nachträglichkeit is closely correlated with another constant of Freudian thought, the idea that there are
always two moments in the constitution of a psychic
37 8
trauma: that of the event which leaves its trace and
that of the event’s later revival by an internal factor. It
is thus easy to understand how the idea of afterwardsness emerged in parallel with the seduction theory,
even if it survived the abandonment of that theory. It
should be pointed out that for Freud the seduction
theory did not contradict a determinism according to
which the past governs the present.
Freud never thought that the temporal direction
could be reversed. The analogy of a time-bomb serves
well here: the initial memory is like a time-bomb set
off by a delayed-action mechanism; there is no suggestion of retroactivity. On the other hand, there are a
number of passages in Freud where the inverse process
occurs, where things are perceived on the first occasion, then understood retroactively. Such passages are
relatively few, however.
The fact is that whenever Freud had a choice
between a deterministic account proceeding from the
past towards the future and a retrospective or hermeneutic conception proceeding from the present in the
direction of the past, he almost invariably opted for the
former. Thus in his letter to Fliess of October 3, 1897,
after recounting an episode in his self-analysis, he
makes the following comment: ‘‘A severe critic might
say of all this that it was retrogressively phantasied and
not progressively determined. Experimenta cruces
would have to decide against him’’ (SE 3, p. 263).
So things are not simple. As much as we might wish
to find in Freud a dual—perhaps even a contradictory—application of the concept of Nachträglichkeit,
what we actually find is a highly deterministic one.
Much the same goes for Freud’s theoretical confrontation with Carl Jung: in defending his view of the
reality of the ‘‘real’’ primal scene, Freud made a number of concessions but never wavered in his conviction
that what comes before determines what comes after.
The Freudian idea of Nachträglichkeit may by no
means be conflated with the Jungian notion of Zurückphantasieren (retrospective fantasizing).
To what extent can the concept of afterwardsness
enable us to transcend the alternative between, on the
one hand, a determinist view that places the entire
burden of psychic causality on events of the remotest
past, and, on the other hand, a so-called hermeneutic,
or even narrativist, approach that reverses the arrow of
time, so to speak, and focuses on ‘‘resignifications,’’ or
reinvestments with meaning, effected afterwards,
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whether in life or during psychoanalytic treatment?
When things are framed in this way, it seems impossible to resolve the polarity between childhood events,
events pure and simple, and the moment when they
are retrieved as meaning, within a history. Yet a way
out of this cul-de-sac presents itself if we consider that
the childhood event is itself pregnant with meaning—
not on the psychophysiological level, but on the level
of the interhuman relationship. Even if all our attention is focused on the retroactive temporal direction, it
cannot be overlooked that when someone reinterprets
their past, that past can never be strictly factual, cannot be a concrete, untransformed ‘‘given.’’ On the contrary, it must contain in immanent fashion something
earlier still: a message from the other. A purely hermeneutic approach, meaning that each person interprets
their past on the basis of their present, is therefore
untenable, for, already deposited in the past, is something that cries out to be deciphered, namely a message
from the other person.
Instead of considering only the bipolar temporal
vector connecting the child with the adult that the
child has become, we need to add a third term, external to the subject, which is the message emanating
from the other adult, a message which is imposed on
the child and which the child must translate. Indeed it
is the idea of ‘‘translation’’ so understood that may be
expected to cast a new light on the Freudian concept
of Nachträglichkeit.
JEAN LAPLANCHE
See also: Adolescence; Deferred action and trauma; General theory of seduction; Incompleteness; Infantile, the;
Latency period; ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology, A’’;
Proton-Pseudos; Puberty; Repression; Seduction scenes;
Trauma.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4–5.
———. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy.
SE, 10.
———. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile
neurosis. SE, 17.
———. (1950a [1887–1902]). The origins of psycho-analysis:
Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, drafts and notes. (Marie Bonaparte
et al., Ed., Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey, Trans.)
London: Imago, 1954; partial revised tr. in SE, 3.
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AND
TRAUMA
Lacan, Jacques. (2004). The function and field of speech and
language in psychoanalysis. In Écrits: A selection. (Bruce
Fink, Héloı̈se Fink, and Russell Grigg, Trans.) New York:
Norton. (Original work published 1953)
Laplanche, Jean. (1976). Life and death in psychoanalysis.
(Jeffrey Mehlman, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1970)
———. (1998). Temporalité et traduction. In Le Primat de
l’autre. Paris: Flammarion.
Laplanche, Jean. (1999). Notes on afterwardsness. In Essays
on otherness. (John Fletcher, Ed., and Luke Thurston, Philip Slotkin, and Leslie Hill, Trans.) London, New York:
Routledge. (Original work published 1998)
Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1968 [1964]).
Fantasy and the origins of sexuality. International Journal
of Psychoanalysis, 49, 1–18.
Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1974 [1967]).
The language of psycho-analysis. (Donald NicholsonSmith, Trans.) London: Hogarth/Institute of Psycho-Analysis; New York: Norton.
DEFERRED ACTION AND TRAUMA
Freud called upon the notions of deferred action and
of trauma to account for how time and causality are
organized in a mental life that he conceived of as permeated by sexuality. He argued that an impression
inconsequential on its face but unintegrated into the
flow of life by reason of its sexual character left mnemic traces that could be reactivated by later events in
the history of the individual. Only then, retroactively,
would it acquire a meaning capable of affecting psychic organization.
In his earliest thinking, Freud observed that certain childhood experiences left mnemic traces of an
active albeit unconscious nature. These operated like
internal ‘‘foreign bodies,’’ and getting rid of them
required that they be made conscious and ‘‘abreacted’’ (discharged by being revealed to the analyst).
Such traces were always related to a seduction in
early childhood that had not been fully comprehended at the time.
Freud quickly abandoned this theory and replaced
it with that of ‘‘deferred action’’ (Nachträglichkeit),
according to which the child first receives impressions
that have an exciting effect, but not a traumatic one,
for the child is still sexually undeveloped. When a particular experience occurring after puberty recalls
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TRAUMA
the earlier one by virtue of some resemblance, the
individual reinterprets the early event, which thus
acquires a force that it never had initially.
Before long, however, Freud discovered infantile
sexuality and could then no longer ground deferred
action in a sexual life that developed in two phases. He
therefore stipulated that all childhood experiences left
a residue, a mnemic trace, which cried out to be reinterpreted and would be reinterpreted at a later time.
This residue or trace always had a sexual character.
Freud developed this theory in his account of the
‘‘wolf man’’ case (1918b [1914]). As a two-year-old
child, the patient had witnessed his parents engaged in
sex without experiencing anything more than an
impression of strangeness; only at the age of four did
he construct his primal-scene fantasy as a way of
accounting for the original perception.
The theory of deferred action is one of the keys to
Freud’s metapsychological system. It effectively
addresses both the sexual nature of repressed memories and the manner in which time and memory work
within the psyche. In Freud’s view, our past—our
whole past from birth on—is responsible for what we
later become, but there is a sense, too, in which what
we become alters what we once were: the present transforms, translates, remolds a past that is still present in
us. The individual has contact with the past at every
instant of life, but is unable to apprehend that past,
which is forever emerging only to be retranslated
instantly into other terms.
The notion of deferred action must not, however,
be confused with a cognitivist view of how memories are transformed. The cognitivist view sees
memories as being reorganized and simplified in
natural ways, like material objects moving away
from an observer, for example. For psychoanalysis,
each moment lived by an individual, if it has a sexual aspect, is experienced as enigmatic, as bearing a
residue that poses a question. Such a moment may
resonate with a past event with nothing special
about it, save for an ever so slightly unsatisfactory
and unexplained dimension, which the psyche now
remobilizes as desire.
Like the unconscious, and like desire, deferred
action is capable of utterly disrupting an individual’s
spontaneously created idea of himself in relation to
the outside world and to other people. For one, it
explodes the notion of causality: not only is the indi38 0
vidual unable to relate his actions in life to his conscious will, not only is he always disappointed when
he obtains what he thought he wanted, because his
desire is never satisfied thereby, but also he can never
succeed in explaining the present in terms of the
past. What went before is never past: it is always present, always ungraspable, always needing to be
worked through.
Deferred action is usually associated with trauma.
The sight of cruelty can thus be traumatic if it reactivates an infantile sadistic occurrence dating from an
early time when cruelty was not disturbing. Likewise, a
rape may be traumatic if it revives an infantile sexual
wish that was left pending and never erased. Deferred
action is also closely tied to repression. If certain later
experiences and wishes need to be repressed, it is
because at the moment of their occurrence they
acquire a strength out of proportion to the circumstances, for they are reinforced by the power of
hitherto unassimilated past experiences. The representation of the object of desire then has to be repressed,
because, between the first and the second experience,
regulatory and prohibitory superstructures have been
set up.
Psychoanalysts are divided on how much importance to give to the idea of deferred action. For some,
this mechanism comes into play only during a second
phase. They believe that some early infantile experiences are traumatizing in themselves and require the
deployment of mechanisms more radical than repression, such as splitting or foreclosure. Analysts with
this view strive to elicit the memory of such experiences by means of the regression that the analytic
situation allows. Pioneers of this approach include
Sándor Ferenczi, Wilfred R. Bion, and Donald W.
Winnicott.
In contrast, some consider this orientation a simplification of psychoanalysis. In this school of thought,
psychical trauma of any kind should not be treated as
a quasi-physical event of external origin, imposed by
reality. In their eyes, such a trauma is inseparable from
deferred action, which they place at the center of a
mental life shot through with and determined by sexuality. What the young child seeks, but cannot obtain, is
the mother, and later the father—not in respect of
what they give, but in respect of what they withhold,
what they hide, namely their unconscious wishes. The
disparity in sexual maturity between the child and the
adult means that whatever the child receives (nourishINTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
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D É J À V U
ment, caresses, rebukes) is received in a way that is
enigmatic, and hence disturbing, to some degree. The
fact is that for the adult, the child is not just a child but
also the object whereby the adult gratifies his or her
desire. Hence the enigmatic quality to what is given to
the child.
It was Jacques Lacan who first reasserted the importance of Freud’s concept of deferred action, and
Jean Laplanche made it a key concept in his theoretical
work.
ODILE LESOURNE
See also: Deferred action/afterwardness; Sexual trauma;
Trauma
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an
infantile neurosis. SE, 17, 1–122.
———. (1950c [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology.
SE, 1, 281–387.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1893a). On the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena: Preliminary communication. SE, 2, 1–17.
Lacan, Jacques. (2002). The function and field of speech and
language in psychoanalysis. In his Écrits: A selection (Bruce
Fink, Héloı̈se Fink, and Russell Grigg, Trans.). New York:
Norton. (Original work published 1956)
Laplanche, Jean (1989). New foundations for psychoanalysis
(David Macey, Trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (Original
work published 1987)
DEFUSION. See Fusion/defusion
DEFUSION OF INSTINCT. See Fusion/defusion of
Instinct
DÉJÀ VU
Déjà vu refers to a state wherein a person feels certain
(cognitive judgment) that he or she has previously
seen or experienced something that is actually being
encountered for the first time. Sigmund Freud believed
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the feeling corresponded to the memory of an unconscious daydream.
The term first appeared in a French translation of
the Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b) as part of
the discussion of the superstition that can be associated with this mysterious feeling. Freud quotes certain ‘‘psychologists,’’ without specifying who they are.
The concept falls squarely within the framework of the
paramnesia extensively described by psychiatrists in
France, primarily Wigan (1844) and Valentin Magnan
(1893), who described systematic delirium accompanied by the illusion of doppelgängers, J. Capgras
(1923), who described the illusion of doppelgangers,
and Pierre Janet (1905), who described cases of false
recognition.
Freud discusses the concept in terms of the psychopathology of everyday life (errors, slips) by removing
it from the context of psychosis and by supporting it
with his own self-analysis (‘‘rapid sensations of déjà vu
that I myself experienced’’). He returned to it again,
but within the context of therapy, in his ‘‘Fausse reconnaissance (déjà raconté) in Psycho-Analytic Treatment’’ (1914a), referring to a central example of the
analysis of the Wolf Man. He then provided a partial
summary of authors who had discussed the issue,
separating them into ‘‘believers’’ (who thought that
déjà vu was proof of a previous existence), among
whom he includes Pythagoras, and ‘‘nonbelievers,’’
who regard such events as false memories (Wigan,
1860). Freud himself assumes a different position
(which he acknowledges sharing with Joseph Grasset,
1904) by believing in the reality of the representative
content, but associating this with the reactivation of
an older unconscious impression. He returned to the
question again in terms of self-analysis at the end of
his life in ‘‘A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis’’ (1936a).
Déjà vu is one of the ‘‘uncanny feelings’’ that, for
Freud, play the role of hallucinations, which become
more frequent and systematic during certain mental
disturbances. This is the most convincing example of
breaching the boundary between the normal and the
pathological addressed by Freud. It involves a dissociative type of change experienced by the subject in his or
her perception of things or himself. Reality appears
distant, like a dream or a shadow, and it is at this
point that false recognition occurs. Along with this
displacement of the perceived object from the present
into the past, there is a confused feeling of expectation
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D E L A Y , J E A N (190 7 –1987 )
or foreknowledge, whereby the subject is simultaneously projected into the future. For Freud this
involves the replacement of some part of reality by a
repressed desire (1901b). In the example cited here, a
young girl replaces the perception of her wish to have
seen her brother die with the sensation of having
already experienced the situation (a trip to the countryside to visit some young girls whose brother is seriously ill). The topographic displacement (unconscious/conscious) is also spatio-temporal, for the
memory involves the house and the girls’ dresses but
not the brother’s illness. In ‘‘A Disturbance of Memory
on the Acropolis,’’ the same phenomenon is reversed
since the reality of the Acropolis dissolves within the
feeling of disbelief Freud experiences. Here, doubt
replaces certainty; doubt is awakened by the reality of
the perception but contaminates perception at the
same time.
The concept of déjà vu must be compared with
other analogous terms in analysis, such as déjà vécu
(already experienced) and déjà raconté (already communicated). According to Freud, this paramnesia
can be explained as a confusion between the intention to communicate and its realization. As with the
doubt in his dream, these forms of paramnesia refer
to specifically significant facts, such as the hallucination of the severed finger that the Wolf Man is convinced he has already told Freud about, when, in
fact, he had only mentioned the existence of the
small knife carried by his uncle. Generally speaking,
paramnesia leads to a reflection on the process of
remembering during therapy and on the patient’s
illusion of having ‘‘always known’’ the repressed content revealed by interpretation (‘‘Remembering,
Repeating, Working-through’’). ‘‘It is by this means,’’
Freud writes, ‘‘that the problem of analysis is
resolved’’ (1914g).
Déjà vu touches on the whole question of forgetting
as a dissociation of memory, as well as on the question
of true and false from the psychoanalytic point of
view. The false recognition of Norbert Harnold (‘‘Is it
a Ôreal’ ghost?’’) is the true recognition of the originally
invested object displaced within the context of archeology in Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘‘Gradiva’’
(1907a [1906j]).
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Certainty; Estrangement; Illusion.
38 2
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1901b). The psychopathology of everyday
life. SE, 6.
———. (1907a [1906j]). Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s
‘‘Gradiva.’’ SE, 9: 1–95.
———. (1914a). Fausse reconnaissance (‘‘déjà raconté’’) in
psycho-analytic treatment. SE, 13: 199–207.
———. (1914g). Remembering, repeating, workingthrough (Further recommendations on the technique of
psycho-analysis II). SE, 12: 147–156.
———. (1936a). A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis
(an open letter to Romain Rolland on the occasion of his
seventieth birthday). SE, 22, 239–248.
DELAY, JEAN (1907–1987)
Jean Delay was a psychiatrist and writer, a professor
of medicine in Paris, and a member of the Académie
française and the Académie de médecine. He was
born on November 14, 1907, in Bayonne and died
on May 29, 1987, in Paris. He was the only son of
Maurice Delay, a surgeon who went to Bayonne to
practice and ultimately became mayor, and Berthe
Mihura, a musician, mystic, and cultured woman
from an old Basque family. Delay obtained his baccalaureate degree when he was only fourteen and a
half, and had to obtain permission from Léon
Bérard, minister of education, to attend medical
school. He was less than sixteen when he left for
Paris to study medicine, and he remained a precocious student throughout his life. He excelled as an
extern at the hospital but soon discovered that he
had little interest in surgery and enrolled in the university’s literature department. Georges Dumas, who
held the chair of psychopathology at the Sorbonne,
introduced Delay to psychiatry.
In 1928 Delay was an intern, the youngest doctor in
the Paris hospital system, and in 1939 he joined the
staff of the Sainte-Anne Hospital, where he worked
with Henri Claude and Maxime Laignel-Lavastine.
After the Germans deported Joseph Lévy-Valensi,
Delay became head of the psychiatry department. He
served as an expert adviser at the Nuremberg trials,
where he examined Rudolf Hess and Julius Streicher.
In 1946, when he was only 38 years old, Delay was
appointed to the chair of mental illness and brain diseases and later held the Charcot chair until 1970, when
he retired.
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D E L B O E U F , J O S E P H R É M I L É O P O L D (1831 –1 896)
After defending his doctoral dissertation in literature, entitled ‘‘Dissolutions de la mémoire’’ (1942),
which was influenced by the work of Pierre Janet, he
became part of the great tradition of French psychopathology through such publications as Les dérèglements de l’humeur (1946) and Études de psychologie
médicale (1953). Upon the departure of Henri Piéron,
he became director of the Institut de Psychololgie at
the University of Paris.
Delay was chair of the first International Congress
in Psychiatry held in Paris in 1950 and was elected
member of the Académie de médicine in 1955. His
neurological training is reflected in his dissertation on
tactile agnosia and other work published in this area.
He coined the term ‘‘neuroleptic’’ and introduced the
use of reserpine into psychiatry. His interests extended
to the use of antidepressants, and he completed his
research on mescaline by studying LSD and psilocybin,
which he referred to as ‘‘oneirogenics.’’ He was also
involved in the discovery of Largactil, used in psychopharmacology. In 1960 he chaired the first Congrès de
médicine psychosomatique (Congress of Psychosomatic Medicine).
Édouard Pichon introduced him to psychoanalysis
before the Second World War during a brief training
analysis. Delay retained a nuanced, nondoctrinaire
attitude toward Sigmund Freud’s work. During the
Occupation, the psychoanalysts John Leuba, Georges
Parcheminey, Jacques Lacan, and Marc Schlumberger
worked in his department; after the war Jacques Lacan
and André Green had a psychoanalytic practice there.
His department also hosted Jacques Lacan’s Wednesday seminars (from November 18, 1953, to November
20, 1963) and Friday seminars, until it was decided
that they were no longer appropriate. He remained
suspicious of the ‘‘quacks of the unconscious’’ and
what he considered poorly managed psychoanalysis.
Delay was elected to the Académie française in 1959.
Throughout his life Delay maintained a literary
career, his work initially being published under the
pseudonym Jean Faurel (La cité grise [1946], Les reposantes [1947], Les Hommes sans nom [1948]). His twovolume work on André Gide, The Youth of André Gide
(originally published in 1956–1957), soon became
famous. Jacques Lacan, in ‘‘Jeunesse de Gide, ou la lettre et le désir’’ (1966), wrote, ‘‘Jean Delay extends this
ambiguity by locating the effect within the soul, at the
very place where the message is formed.’’ He also
worked on a historical reconstruction of his mother’s
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family in the four volumes of Avant-mémoire (1979–
1986).
In a final homage to Delay at the Académie française, Jean Dutourd wrote, ‘‘In the case of Jean Delay,
who knew everything, who had explored medicine’s
most hidden pathways, the philosophy of the past, and
even madness, we do not have the feeling we are talking with a contemporary but with one of those
immense gluttons for knowledge who made the Quattrocento and the sixteenth century so amazing. Nor
was he contemporary in his behavior. In his courtesy,
his refinement, and his kindness, he was the kind of
gentleman one might have found in Balthazar Castiglione, and an Ôhonest man’ as well.’’
CLAUDE DELAY
See also: France; Narco-analysis; Sainte-Anne Hospital.
Bibliography
Delay, Jean. (1946). Les dérèglements de l’humeur. Paris:
Presses universitaires de France.
Delay, Jean. (1947). Les reposantes. Paris: Gallimard.
Delay, Jean. (1953). Études de psychologie médicale. Paris:
Presses universitaires de France.
Delay, Jean. (1956). Aspects de la psychiatrie moderne. Paris:
Presses universitaires de France.
Delay, Jean. (1960). Discours de réception à l’Académie française. Paris: Gallimard.
Delay, Jean. (1963). The youth of André Gide (June Guicharnaud, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(Abridged.)
Delay, Jean. (1971–1986). Avant-mémoire. Paris: Gallimard.
Lacan, Jacques. (1966). Jeunesse de Gide, ou la lettre et le
désir. In his Écrits. Paris: Seuil.
DELBOEUF, JOSEPH RÉMI LÉOPOLD
(1831–1896)
Joseph Delboeuf was a Belgian psychologist and hypnotherapist. He was born in Liège on September 30,
1831, and died in Bonn on August 13, 1896. He was a
professor at the University of Ghent from 1863 to 1866
(philosophy), and after 1866 taught at the University
of Liège (Latin, Greek, and psychology). Signs of Delboeuf ’s influence can be found in many places in
Sigmund Freud’s work, at least until 1900. The most
significant include:
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D E L G A D O , H O N O R I O (18 92 –196 9)
1. Delboeuf treated a woman traumatized by the
death of her son. He eliminated her symptoms,
which resembled the terrible conditions of his
death, by having her relive those experiences several times. Delboeuf explained ‘‘how the magnetizer assists in the healing process. He places the
subject in a state where the evil has manifested
itself and through speech combats that same,
recurring evil.’’ Freud discussed this hypothesis
extensively in ‘‘On the Psychical Mechanism of
Hysterical Phenomena’’ (1893a) and in the Studies on Hysteria (1895d).
2. Looking back on his therapy with Emmy von N.,
Freud doubted for the first time the value of
claims by Bernheim and the ‘‘perspicacious’’
Delboeuf. He questioned whether Bernheim was
correct in continuing to claim that ‘‘suggestion is
everything,’’ and Delboeuf for having claimed
that ‘‘that being so, there is no such thing as hypnotism.’’ Unable to resolve these issues, he abandoned theory and turned to practice, finally
showing preference for the analytic and genetic
method, which was in fact that of Delboeuf.
3. Delboeuf ’s Le Sommeil et les Rêves [Sleep and
Dreams] (1885) and Freud’s Interpretation of
Dreams (1900a) have several traits in common.
Delboeuf ’s work opens with the famous dream
of the lizards and the Asplenium, an intriguing
dream from several points of view and one that
led the psychologist to articulate his conception
of memory and remembrance, whose meaning
he attempted to grasp through the randomness
of free association. In the Interpretation of
Dreams two of Delboeuf ’s concepts are treated
favorably: ‘‘forced rapprochement’’ (to account
for the tendency of dreams to merge) and
‘‘cliché’’ to explain the presence of verbal expressions in certain dreams. Having decided to use
his own dreams for hermeneutic purposes,
Freud acknowledges that he had to overcome
[conquer] his initial reticence. He remarks that
he overcame his resistance by subjecting it to a
process expressed by Delboeuf, whom he quotes:
‘‘every psychologist must acknowledge even his
weaknesses if he feels he can shed light on a problem by doing so’’ (Freud, 1900a; Delboeuf,
1885, p. 30).
FRANÇOIS DUYCKAERTS
38 4
See also: Congrès international de l’hypnotisme expérimental et scientifique, First; Disque vert, Le; Hypnosis;
Suggestion.
Bibliography
Delboeuf, Joseph. (1885). Le Sommeil et les rêves. Paris: Félix
Alcan; Le Sommeil et les rêves et autres textes. Paris: Fayard,
1993.
———. (1889). Le Magnétisme animal. Á propos d’une visite
à l’École de Nancy. Paris: Félix Alcan.
Duyckaerts, François. (1993). ‘‘Les références de Freud à
Delbœuf.’’
Revue Internationale de Psychanalyse, 6,
231–250.
Freud, Sigmund. (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2.
———. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4–5.
DELGADO, HONORIO (1892–1969)
A Peruvian psychiatrist and philosopher, Honorio
Delgado was born in Arequipa on September 26, 1892,
and died in Lima on November 20, 1969. Delgado studied natural science at the University of San Agustı́n in
Arequipa before becoming a surgeon (1918) and a
doctor of medicine (1920) at the University of San
Marcos in Lima. A self-taught psychiatrist (formal
training then being unavailable), Delgado was a precocious and enthusiastic proselytizer for psychoanalysis
in Peru and Latin America between 1915 and 1927.
His first publication on psychoanalysis appeared in
1915 when he was only twenty-three years old. Published in El Commercio, it was a commentary on Sigmund Freud’s ‘‘The Claims of Psycho-analysis to
Scientific Interest,’’ which appeared in 1913 in Scientia,
which Delgado read on a regular basis.
In 1922 he traveled to Europe to attend the Berlin
congress but his ship was delayed and he missed the
presentations. In 1927 he traveled to Innsbruck for
the annual congress. He published the first work in
Spanish on psychoanalysis, entitled La Psychanalyse
(1919). Between 1919 and 1934 he corresponded
with Freud, whom he met in Weimar in 1922 and
visited in Semmering in 1927. In 1918, together
with Hermilio Valdizán, he founded Revista de psiquiatrı́a y disciplinas conexas (Review of Psychiatry
and Related Disciplines), which adopted a favorable
position regarding psychoanalysis. In 1921 he
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published ‘‘Der Liebesreiz der Augen’’ (The Amorous Attraction of the Eyes) in Imago. In 1926, with
the collaboration of several eminent Peruvian intellectuals, he edited a special issue of Mercurio Peruano devoted to Freud. That same year he also published a biography of Freud, which Freud annotated
extensively throughout their correspondence. Freud
took an active interest in Delgado’s publications,
and the way he responded to his eclectic approach
to psychoanalysis, which was in several respects
related to the ideas of Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav
Jung, should not come as a surprise.
After 1930 Delgado held the country’s only chair
in psychiatry and became a fierce adversary of psychoanalysis, paradoxically citing in his support the
references to him made by Freud in a 1923 note
added to ‘‘On the History of the Psychoanalytic
Movement’’ (1914d) and in an article written in English in 1924, ‘‘A Short Account of Psycho-analysis’’
(1924f [1923]).
While still a young man Delgado had identified
with Freud’s initial period of isolation. There exists a
letter, collectively written by Ernest Jones, Hanns
Sachs, and Oskar Pfister, congratulating Delgado for
his Pionierarbeit. His later rejection of psychoanalysis
appears to have arisen from his growing popularity
and a refusal—which he never concealed—to accept
some of the fundamental premises of psychoanalysis,
coupled with his increasingly strong attachment to
Catholicism. In spite of his productivity as a writer, his
lack of clinical experience is obvious (he had no personal experience of psychoanalysis aside from his own
self-analysis). His early work contains little of lasting
value and there is an obvious difference in quality with
his later work in psychiatry, influenced by the phenomenology of Karl Jaspers.
His correspondence, however, contains numerous
insights into Freud’s ideas about creating an institutional structure as well as Freud’s tendency to pardon
some of Delgado’s theoretical errors, for which he
would certainly have been less indulgent in other circumstances. His letters contain no more than mild
rebukes to Delgado for his sympathy toward Adler
(with whom he corresponded) and Jung.
ÁLVARO REY DE CASTRO
See also: Revista de psiquiatrı́a y disciplinas conexas; Peru.
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Bibliography
Ellenberger, H. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious: The
history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. New York:
Basic Books.
Mariátegui, Javier. (1989). Freud y el psicoanálisis. Lima:
University Cayetano Heredia.
Rey de Castro, Álvaro. (1983). Correspondance Sigmund
Freud–Honorio Delgado. Revue Internationale d’Histoire
de la Psychanalyse, 6, 1993.
———. (1991). Freud y Honorio Delgado: una aproximación psicoanalı́tica a la prehistoria del psicoanálisis peruano y sus escuelas. El múltiple interés del psicoanálisis–77
años después, Talleres de artes gráficas espino, 203–237.
———. (1993). Lettres de Sigmund Freud à Honorio Delgado, 1919–1934. Revue Internationale d’Histoire de la
Psychanalyse, 6, 401–428.
DELUSION
The first essential feature that defines a delusion is that
it concerns something that appears to be external to
the subject. It is thereby distinguished from obsessive
ideas and idées fixes. More precisely, wecan say that in
a delusion, an internal experience appears in theperceptual field. Delusion therefore concerns reality as a
whole, which distinguishes it from phobia, where the
distortion of reality is more circumscribed, because
projection manages to localize conflict, and keep
the rest of the subject’s mental life intact. In delusion,
conversely,the whole of reality is affected, and indeed
the delusion, for the subject, is the whole of reality.
In this sense, delusion represents a critical risk. Sigmund Freud speaks accordingly of a necessary restoration of the object (1924e), whether it is a matter of the
high level of libidinal or narcissistic tension evidentin
extreme cases, or a fundamental questioning of identity and relationswith others that is at stake.
Delusion is therefore something other than error.
Being delusional remains compatible with an accurate
apprehension of reality. We can even consider the
delusional individual as deprived of the freedom to
establisha flexible relationship between reality and
truth, as Paul-Claude Racamierhas said.
From this general perspective, we can differentiate
the two main modalities for the expression of delusions. In one, this involves a disturbance of consciousness, whose heightened character can have different
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IN
J E N S E N ’ S ‘ ‘G R A D I V A ’’
causes: a consciousness that is captive and agonized; or
a delirium tremens, which externalizes metabolic disturbances in the form of images; or the dream-like
upheaval of acute psychotic delusions; or the psychedelic intoxication of hallucinogens. In the other mode,
the same reversal of reality can express the refusal that
occurs during hallucinatory confusions that seek to
isolate a repressed complex, and keep it in a shadowy,
hysterical state.
There are occasions, however, when acute delirious
moments are experienced in isolation, as in the ‘‘primordial delusional fact’’ described by Jacques Moreau
de Tours, or the ‘‘primary delusional experience’’
described by Karl Jaspers, where the strange and
uncanny appears, sometimes in the form of illuminating moments in which a perception takes on a revelatory quality,or a moment of questioning emerges
without yielding any sense. These seem to be direct
confrontations between unconscious fantasy and reality, like a topographical short-circuit that requires a
return of the preconscious from the exterior world,
within the delusion of interpretation.
In yet another dynamic of delusion, less sharp in its
temporal unfolding,the dominant issue concerns the
limit between inside and outside. During moments of
mental automatism, thought grows heavy with the
weight of words that have lost their meaning. The schizophrenic seeks in hallucination to exteriorize an internal life that is invasive and does not seem to belong to
him. Chronic delusions, in the French systems of classification, or in Kraepelin’s paraphrenias, are more likely
to create delusions that are simultaneously persecutory
and protective, sometimes to the point of allowing a
reconstruction of the entire world (Schreber, 1903).
Passion also, with its affective power to dominate,
can provide material for delusions, along other lines.
The paranoiac projection of homosexual impulses can
turn into delusions of persecution, jealousy, or erotomania, depending on whether it is the subject or the
object of the fantasized investment that is affected by
the delusional force. However, emphasis should be
placed on the narcissistic demand, the lack of an
object, and the shortcoming, within the primary
homosexual relation, that eroticization compromises
and which the delusion of persecution maintains as
both present and distant (Jenneau, 1990). In other
cases it is the superego that returns in the ‘‘delusion of
reference,’’ where the shame and guilt of voyeurism
blend together in projection (Kretschmer, 1927).
38 6
One sees in this brief description that delusion cannot be explained simply in terms of a certain way of
treating instinctual life at the expense of reality. One
also has to take into account the patient’s need to
express conflict, in a single-minded way, within this
reality. It is the causality of delusion that remains the
foremost question, even within radically different
accounts.
See also: Aimée, case of; Amentia; Certainty; ‘‘Claims of
Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest’’; Constructionreconstruction; ‘‘Constructions in Analysis’’; Erotomania; Hypochondria; Illusion; Infantile omnipotence;
‘‘Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of
Dreams’’; Need for causality; Negative hallucination;
‘‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (Dementia
paranoides)’’; ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’; Paranoia; Paranoid psychosis; Persecution; Projection; Psychoanalytical nosography; Psychoses, chronic and delusional; Psychotic defenses; Psychotic potential;
Superego.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1924e). The loss of reality in neurosis and
psychosis. SE, 19, 180–187.
Jaspers, Karl. (1913). Allgemeine psychopathologie. Berlin:
Springer.
Jenneau, Augustin. (1990). Les délires non psychotiques.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Kretschmer, Ernst. (1963). Paranoı̈a et sensibilité. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France. (Original work published
1927)
Schreber, Daniel Paul. (1988). Memoirs of my nervous illness.
(I. Macalpine, R. Hunter, Trans.) Cambridge: Harvard
University Press. (Original work published 1903)
Further Reading
Robbins, Michael. (2002). The language of schizophrenia
and the world of delusion. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83, 383–406.
Shengold, Leonard. (1995). Delusions of everyday life. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
DELUSIONS AND DREAMS IN JENSEN’S
‘‘GRADIVA’’
Freud wrote this essay in the summer of 1906, seemingly to please Carl Gustav Jung, who had called to
his attention a short story by the German writer
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Wilhelm Jensen that was of interest because a dream
served as its point of departure.
good psychoanalyst, cautiously bringing to consciousness what Norbert forgot through repression.
In his essay Freud first minimally summarized and
commented on the story. It is the story of Norbert
Hanold, a young archeologist obsessed with his work
for whom women do not exist. Visiting a museum, he
is struck by the beauty of a bas-relief of young Roman
woman, very light on her feet, whom he baptized
‘‘Gradiva’’ (she who walks). He purchases a reproduction, which he hangs on the wall of his workroom.
Gradually his mind is invaded by the enigma of this
young woman. One night he dreams that he is in Pompeii in August 79 c.e., just before the eruption of Mt.
Vesuvius. There he meets Gradiva and wants to warn
her of the terrible danger that is about to occur, but he
is powerless to rescue her. After waking, he is overcome by the desire to meet Gradiva. He leaves for
Pompeii, where he meets a young woman, very much
alive, whom he takes for Gradiva. In the course of the
meetings that follow, he organizes his mania, stalking
and interpreting signs (Gradiva appears at noon, the
ghost hour, and the like). ‘‘Gradiva’’ seeks to cure him
by gradually revealing her identity to him. Through
this adventure, Norbert finally sees ‘‘Gradiva’’ for who
she really is: his neighbor and childhood friend Zoe
Bertgang (‘‘Bertgang’’ is the German equivalent of
‘‘Gradiva’’), who also traveled to Pompeii. For years he
had not seen her and had no desire to see her, but, in
love without knowing it, he had displaced his love on
the young woman of the bas-relief, Gradiva. Happily,
the mania yields to reality, and Norbert is cured.
Freud’s essay was published in May 1907. Four
months later, in September, in the course of a trip to
Rome, he went to see the bas-relief representing ‘‘Gradiva’’ at the museum of the Vatican, the same bas-relief
that had inspired Jensen’s tale. Just like Norbert, Freud
bought a copy of it and hung it in his office, at the foot
of the divan. He left it there until he left Vienna, and
took it with him to London in 1938.
Frequently citing his Interpretation of Dreams
(1900), Freud suggested in his comments that dreams
‘‘invented’’ by a writer can be analyzed by the same
method as real ones. He meticulously analyzed the two
dreams figuring in Jensen’s story, linking them to residues of daytime occurrences. He thus demonstrated
that dreams were substitute wish fulfillments and
established that they constitute a return of the
repressed. The source of Norbert Hanold’s mania is his
repression of his sexuality, which caused him to forget
Zoe Bertgang, so as to keep him from recognizing her
(anticipating his later views, Freud called such phenomena ‘‘negative hallucinations’’).
Freud, Sigmund. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4, 1–338; 5, 339–625.
The dream and the mania that makes the dream real
function by condensation and displacement, by way of
images. The correct proposition—I, Norbert, am living
in the same time and place as Zoe—is removed to Pompeii in the year 79. Zoe treats Norbert in the manner of a
Regarding demand, we can say that 1) it arises only
from speech; 2) it is addressed to someone; 3) it is
nevertheless only implicit; 4) it is related to a need for
love, but also to desire; 5) it does not need to be sustained by any real object.
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ROGER PERRON
See also: Anxiety dream; Applied psychoanalysis and the
interaction of psychoanalysis; Archeology, the metaphor
of; Fantasy; Literary and artistic creation; Negative hallucination; Passion.
Source Citation
Freud, Sigmund. (1907a [1906]). Der Wahn und die Träume
in W. Jensens Gradiva, Leipzig-Wien, Hugo Heller; G.W., 7,
29–122; Le Délire et les Rêves dans la ‘‘Gradiva’’ de W. Jensen, trad. J. Bellemin-Noël, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ‘‘Connaissance de l’inconscient,’’ dir. J.-B. Pontalis, 1986; Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s ‘‘Gradiva.’’ SE, 9, 1–95.
Bibliography
Engelman, Edmund. (1976), Bergasse 19, Sigmund Freud’s
home and offices, Vienna, 1938: The photographs of Edmund
Engelman. New York: Basic Books.
DEMAND
The concept of demand is not Freudian. It was developed by Jacques Lacan, who linked it with need and
desire (Lacan, 1966, 1991). Demand is identifiable by
the five clinical traits that constitute it, by the status
that it gives the object, by its function in relation to the
Other, and finally by its topological register.
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DEMAND
The object of demand is what is lacking in the
unconscious Other, and thus it is only a fantasmic
object. Its function is to satisfy the drive and to make
the demand of the subject and the demand of the
Other coincide. Although it is tied to both the symbolic and the real, the register of demand is primarily
imaginary, and thus most closely related to the body.
Before outlining more recent perspectives on
demand, we must return to what Lacan said about it
in relation to oral, anal, and genital regions of the
body that serve as the sources of demand.
The oral demand calls for an inverse response, such
that the other’s answer to the imperative ‘‘feed me’’ is
‘‘let yourself be fed.’’ This inversion becomes a source
of discord or even of destructive urges. To whom is the
demand addressed? To the Other, and not the mother.
It is addressed to the Other that separates the demand
from a desire. And that desire, in turn, deprives the
demand of its satisfaction. Thus the demand becomes
a non-demand. The dream of the ‘‘beautiful butcher’s
wife,’’ as reported by Freud, is a perfect example of
this. What is the object of her desire to define? It is a
cannibalistic object. This desire is directed towards the
nourishing body, an organic unconscious object
through which the demand’s relation to the Other can
be sexualized. This libidinization, ‘‘which is nothing
but surplus,’’ deprives the need of its gratification. The
function of desire, which sustains all demand, is in
turn maintained in it and thus preserved. Desire can
be recognized in the field of speech by the negation
with which it originates: this, and not that!
The original oral relation between the mother and
her child is constantly fed by a kind of hostility in
which each one is convinced, at the imaginary level, of
being ‘‘bawled out’’ by the other. Donald Winnicott
(1974) emphasizes moreover that the object is so
good, so exciting—that it bites. Consultations with
mothers and children always show this.
At the anal stage, need reigns supreme; but while
demand sets out to restrain need, desire wants to expel
it. The one is entrusted with satisfying it, while the
other is determined to control it. In the end, this control is legitimated only by turning need into a gift
expected by an other, who is always primordially the
mother. The oblation of this exonerating gift is metonymic. In order to evacuate the gift of symbolic desire,
the one who gives it (child, student, or citizen, for
example) could well adopt the slogan ‘‘everything for
38 8
the other’’ in reference to the one who expects it (the
mother, the teacher, or an authority figure)—this is
true enough in the voting booth, at any rate. Such a gift
is not produced by the one who gives it: someone else
is the producer, someone who is able to wait for it only
as long as the giver is suffering. It is not that the gift is
necessarily painful in itself; the reaction of the one who
receives it is the determining factor in that respect. So
that her expectations will not be in vain, the mother
eroticizes her relation with the child. She makes the
child a sexual partner, involved in a fantasy in which he
becomes the imaginary phallic object. In the end, the
child will have been forced to do the only thing it was
able to do. This was how the sadomasochistic economy
was described by Freud, who took the symbolic equivalence of penis, feces, and child as his starting point.
How do we recognize an obsessional neurosis? By
a declared conflict between demand and desire, satisfaction and discipline, need and legitimacy, gift and
exoneration. The outcome of this conflict can only be
a resignation to suffering. The characteristic ‘‘it could
have been worse’’ attitude alludes to the masochistic
jouissance that the obsessional derives from it, while
‘‘You had that coming’’ sums up the sadistic expectation of the other, who is without doubt the father—
when it comes to need, he’s always too much.
At the genital stage, demand seeks out a real partner.
A repressed demand returns in the field of sexuality, and
it will be satisfied only by a real engagement—one the
subject wants to wait for, since he or she intends to
bring it about. Thus the demand is based on the primacy
of a sexual desire that is certainly sustained by a need,
but that emphasizes a real lack in the other. Far from
realizing desire, this lack constantly renews it. ‘‘The subject does not know what he desires most,’’ either from
the other or in terms of his own lack. From then on, the
‘‘something else’’ that originates from this lack of knowledge is related to a desire that is deceived. It is deceived
if it believes itself to be lacking only the other, the missing half that is but a shadow from the past.
Taking the concept of transitivism as their point of
departure, Gabriel Balbo and Jean Bergès (1996) have
reconceptualized the analysis of demand. For them,
demand cannot be conceived independently of the
infant’s identification with the discourse that the
mother expresses in response the baby’s cries, smiles,
gurgling, and gestures. There is a double division at
work here. The mother’s own discourse, which she
puts in the mouth of her child, divides the mother into
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a bodily, experienced real demand in contrast to what
she expresses. The child is also divided from its own
real demand by identifying with whatever part of that
demand the mother expresses. This double division,
with its consequent double repression, has an organizing influence on the ego, the status of the object, body
image, the infant’s jubilation at its own specular
image, and the I. All processes of identification must
be rethought in these terms, while at the same time
demand and identification are also the origin of no
less a dualism than that of life and death.
Such an analysis allows one to rethink the demand
for an analysis, the preliminary interviews, the analytic
contract, the direction and conduct of the treatment,
and ultimately the transference. This reconceptualization reaches the very core of the discursive framework,
and the analysis of dreams as well as the patient’s
speech is determined by it.
GABRIEL BALBO
See also: Graph of Desire; Metonymy; Neurosis; Object a;
Other, the; Subject of the unconscious; Symbolic, the
(Lacan); Topology; Unary trait; Wish/yearning.
Bibliography
Balbo, Gabriel and Bergès, Jean. (1996). L’Enfant et la psychanalyse. Paris: Masson.
Lacan, Jacques. (1966 [2002]). Écrits. Paris: Seuil. Écrits: A
selection. (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.
———.(1991). Le Séminaire-livre VIII, le transfert (1960–
61). Paris: Seuil.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1974). The fear of breakdown. International Review of Psychoanalysis, 1. Reprinted in Psychoanalytic explorations. (1989). Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
DEMENTIA
Dementia has been defined in two very different ways.
The first definition, which came into use in the nineteenth century with the establishment of a nosographic
framework for the psychoses, culminated in the concept
of dementia praecox in the work of Emil Kraepelin. The
second definition concerns altered states in memory
and ideation following injury to the brain.
The word dementia, which first appeared in a psychiatric sense in Philippe Pinel’s work contrasting
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mania and dementia, underwent changes in meaning
during the nineteenth century. In 1911 Eugen Bleuler,
in his discussion of the concept of schizophrenia, centered around dissociation or splitting (Spaltung), proposed bringing together the old notion of ‘‘vesanic
dementia’’ (the culmination of psychotic development) and Kraepelin’s three forms of dementia praecox: hebephrenic, catatonic, and paranoid.
Sigmund Freud approved of Kraepelin’s approach
but he criticized the term dementia praecox, as well as
the term schizophrenia. This despite the fact that he felt
it important to distinguish between the two, writing,
in ‘‘Psycho-Analytical Notes on an Autobiographical
Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’’ (1911 c[1910]): ‘‘. . . we shall hope later on to
find clues which will enable us to trace back the differences between the two disorders (as regards both the
form they take and the course they run) to corresponding differences in the patients’ dispositional fixations’’ (p. 62). In reality, he continued to use both
terms indiscriminately. He focused his study of the
psychoses on paranoia in the essay cited above. After
‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction,’’ (1914) he proposed to distinguish among the neuroses, the psychoses, and the perversions. In Freudian theory,
dementia praecox consists of a withdrawal of object
libido onto the ego through regression and fixation.
Freud later went on to specify its linguistic characteristics (words are subjected to the primary process) and
its functioning (reality testing is no longer operant;
verbal delusions are an attempt at healing), but essentially it was Freud’s successors who developed a psychoanalytic theory of the psychoses.
In current usage, the term dementia refers to erosion of the intelligence caused by many different kinds
of damage to the brain: degenerative dementias
(dominated by Alzheimer’s disease), vascular diseases,
infectious diseases, toxic conditions, or metabolic
disorders. Clinical treatment of dementia from a psychoanalytic perspective runs up against problems of
theoretical elaboration. Psychoanalysis has limited
applications for these conditions and is used mainly in
the early stages of illness. The goal is to limit the breakdown of identity for a certain time. The gradual erosion of the capacity for symbolization and the work of
representation owing to memory loss, the weakening
of repression and the breaking through of the protective shield, and the instinctual flooding that ensues,
has led to reliance on a therapeutic approach focusing
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DENIAL
on the reconstitutive function of the affects as the basis
for mental activity, since, as Michèle Grosclaude suggested in Le Statut de l’affect dans la psychothérapie des
démences (The status of the affects in the psychotherapy of dementia; 1997), verbal therapies are among the
first to be affected by the degenerative process. Denial,
projective delusions, and heightened anxiety are all
typical of these conditions.
Berlin. Unfortunately he turned out to be psychically
ill, and all that survives of his brief stay in Denmark
are the reports of the scandal caused by his behavior.
Reich was to come to Denmark anyway in May 1933,
but as a political refugee. He was only granted six
months’ asylum, which was not extended, as he was
suspected of practicing psychoanalysis without the
requisite work permit.
RICHARD UHL
Reich nonetheless remained in touch with a circle
of disciples in Denmark during his ensuing stays in
Sweden and Norway. Another influence came from
Oskar Pfister, who enjoyed a certain popularity among
prominent theologians and teachers. He gave a series
of much-attended talks in Copenhagen in 1936.
See also: Ego; Infantile psychosis; Infantile schizophrenia;
Narcissism, secondary; Organic psychoses; Paranoid psychosis; Paraphrenia; ‘‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’’; Schizophrenia; ‘‘Unconscious, The’’
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1911c [1910]). Psycho-analytical notes on
autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia
paranoides). SE, 12, 9–82.
———. (1914). On narcissism: an introduction. SE, 14, 73–
102.
———. (1915). The unconscious. SE, 14, 166–204.
Grosclaude, Michèle. (1997). Le Statut de l’affect dans la psychothérapie des démences. Psychothérapie des démences.
Montrouge, France: John Libbey Eurotext.
DENIAL. See Disavowal
DENMARK
After World War I, psychoanalysis was diffused
among artists and pedagogues, but the discipline
was condescendingly dismissed by the leading university professors in philosophy, psychology, and
psychiatry.
After hearing a speech by Ernest Jones in 1926,
though, the psychologist Sigurd Næsgaard became the
first Dane to undertake a serious study of Freud. In
February 1933, Wilhelm Reich gave a speech in
Copenhagen and the IPA was requested to allow him
to come to Denmark as a training analyst; the answer,
however, was negative. Instead the Danes were offered
Jenö Hárnik from the Institute of Psychoanalysis in
39 0
From 1930 on, a series of more or less short-lived
psychoanalytic societies were founded in Denmark,
all marked by their respective founders and leaders.
The most important was the group that surrounded
Sigurd Næsgaard, who in the public eye was largely
identified with Danish psychoanalysis. Another
group was led by P. C. Petersen, who had a background in dairy production, and it represented especially the inspiration of Pfister. A third group arose
around Reich’s Danish pupils, led by the physicians J.
H. Leunbach and T. Philipson; these were known in
particular for their work in the movement for sexual
reform.
The person with the greatest influence on the
establishment of psychoanalysis in Denmark was
Sigurd Næsgaard (1883–1956). He started as a teacher and then completed a university degree in philosophy and psychology. He had strong roots in the
Danish high school movement, and considered general education, education reform, and sexual freedom
his most important goals. As a psychoanalyst he was
self-taught. His large authorship is characterized by a
popularizing tendency and a predilection for pat and
quick-witted interpretations. He is known for his
analyses of a number of the important cultural figures of his time, among others the painter Asger
Jorn. Some of the leading Danish IPA analysts after
World War II also started their analytic careers on his
couch.
The Danish-Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society that
was founded at the IPA congress in 1934 had only one
member with a Danish address, the Hungarian Georg
Gerö, a pupil of Reich who had been educated at the
Institute of Psychoanalysis in Berlin. Under pressure
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from the IPA, Gerö broke with Reich around 1937.
The only known work of his in Denmark today is his
training analysis of the psychiatrist Poul Færgeman.
Gerö emigrated to the United States at the beginning
of World War II.
Færgeman (1912–67) left for the United States in
1946 to terminate the training analysis he had started
with Gerö in Denmark. He later became a member of
the New York Psychoanalytic Society, but returned to
Denmark in 1960 and joined the Danish society. He is
best known for his work with psychogenic psychoses
(Færgeman, 1963). Because of his premature death he
was not to have the influence on Danish psychoanalysis to which he seemed entitled.
After the war, Næsgaard and Petersen each established new societies. Both sought admission to the
IPA, but since neither had had IPA-accredited training,
they were unsuccessful. Instead, the initiative slid to
another group. The Swedish analyst Nils Nielsen,
member of the IPA, came to Denmark in 1949 with a
view towards starting a number of training analyses
and founding a psychoanalytic society. The Danish
psychiatrists Thorkil Vanggaard and Erik Bjerg Hansen, who had received accredited psychoanalytic training in New York and Vienna, respectively, later joined
Nielsen. Their Danish Psychoanalytic Society attained
status as a study group under the IPA in 1953 and
obtained full IPA membership in 1957. The society
hosted the international IPA congresses in 1959 and
1967. The accession of members was low, as was the
level of activity throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Thorkil Vanggaard (1910–1998)) was the strong
leader of the Danish Psychoanalytic Society in the
years following World War II. He received his psychoanalytic training in New York with Robert Bak as his
training analyst. His psychoanalytic authorship is not
prolific, but a fairly original theory of the phallus as a
meditating symbol in connection with the transfer of
authority from master to pupil merits mention
(Vanggaard, 1972). He was vice president of the IPA
from 1967 to 1969, but then began to move away from
psychoanalysis and left the psychoanalytic society in
1984. He is known to the Danish public rather for his
highly controversial position on gender roles and
incest than as a psychoanalyst.
Not till 1980 was the increasing general interest in
psychoanalysis reflected in the number of members.
Among the Danish public, psychoanalysis has mainly
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been represented by psychologists, researchers and
writers with no analytical training (e.g., Andkjær
Olsen and Køppe, 1988).
In the 1990s the Danish Psychoanalytic Society had
around 30 full members, of whom more than one
third are from the southern part of Sweden, having
chosen to belong to the Danish society due to the fact
that Copenhagen is closer than Stockholm. There is no
institute, and the society depends greatly on its collaboration with the other Scandinavian societies, who
among other things have cooperated since 1978 on the
publication of the Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review
(in English).
Among the societies that do not belong to the IPA
are the Group Analytic Institute (established with the
support of the British group analysts Colin James and
Malcolm Pines) and the Psychoanalytic Circle
(Lacanian).
OLE ANDKJÆR OLSEN
Bibliography
Andkjær Olsen, Ole, and Køppe, Simo. (1988). Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. New York: New York University
Press.
Færgeman, Poul. (1963). Psychogenic psychoses. London:
Butterworths.
Reimer, Jensen, and Paikin, Henning. (1980). On psychoanalysis in Denmark. Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review,
3, 103–16.
Paikin, Henning. (1992). Denmark. In P. Kutter (Ed.), Psychoanalysis international. A guide to psychoanalysis
throughout the world (Vol. 1, Europe). Cannstatt: Frommannn-Holzboog.
Vanggaard, Thorkil. (1972). Phallos. New York: International Universities Press.
DEPENDENCE
The term ‘‘dependence’’ is part of contemporary language; it is frequently used in the field of psychopathology but more for descriptive convenience than
to specify a precise relational modality concerning the
subjection of a subject to an object. Sigmund Freud
used the term infrequently but made reference to it in
his discussion of the pleasure principle: ‘‘It will be
rightly objected that an organization which was a slave
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DEPENDENCE
to the pleasure principle and neglected the reality of
the external world could not maintain itself alive for
the shortest time, so that it could not have come into
existence at all. The employment of a fiction like this
is, however, justified when one considers that the
infant—provided one includes with it the care it
receives from its mother—does almost realize a psychical system of this kind’’ (1911b). Serge Lebovici
(1991) remarked that the human being’s original state
of dependence is a fundamental postulate of Freudian
theory; it is the baby’s Hilflosigkeit, or helplessness
(détresse or désaide in French).
As Michael Balint (1968) remarked, the notion of
‘‘oral dependence’’ appeared in the work of Otto Fenichel in 1945. Fenichel describes oral character traits,
especially a disguised dependent need, created by reaction-formation, manifest in attitudes and behaviors of
independence and rebellion. Franz Alexander used this
idea to describe ulcerous subjects who indicate their
condition by the conflict between the desire to maintain a state of infantile dependence and the affirmation
of independence of the adult ego.
Melanie Klein showed no interest in the concept,
but her students Paula Heimann and Joan Riviere, in
Developments in Psychoanalysis, refer to the infant’s
total dependence on the mother at the beginning of
life. The concept becomes central in the thought of
Donald Winnicott (1963), who emphasizes that the
baby, who is dependent on the care of those around
him, is subject to a ‘‘dual dependency,’’ which will
become simple dependency as soon as he or she
becomes aware of it.
This is part of a normal process for every human
being, so that not every state of dependence later
found to exist can be reduced to it. Yet this inaugural
kernel, which is characterized by a sense of powerlessness (as well as the narcissistic omnipotence associated
with it), is the basis of subsequently-observed states of
mental dependence and defects in the separationindividuation process. Adolescence especially is a period of reactualization and the heightened revival of
feelings of dependence and infantile helplessness. Philippe Jeammet (1989), who considers dependence to
be characteristic of this period, has developed the concept within a metapsychological perspective that
cannot be easily summarized. According to this conception, the adolescent shows himself to be clinically
dependent whenever he feels that his object needs
threaten his autonomy and narcissistic equilibrium.
39 2
Some authors have examined dependence in the
treatment of borderline states, following Winnicott,
who emphasized the danger of underestimating the
transference dependence in this type of case as part of
the counter-transference risks of his interpretation.
He, like Balint, cautions against an overly systematic
interpretation of transference dependence, introducing the risk of reinforcing the dependence—especially
oral dependence—of the patient on the analyst, and
the latter’s omnipotence. Otto Kernberg, working with
narcissistic patients, describes their inability to depend
on the analyst from the beginning of therapy, which
can be compared to the fear of ‘‘giving in to dependence’’ described by Masud Khan.
In contemporary psychiatric clinics there has been a
recategorization and clinical reassessment of dependence. The term is no longer only applied to drug
addiction, alcohol or tobacco dependence, and so on,
but tends to define a biological-psychologicalbehavioral syndrome that is very broad and includes
those states as well as pharmacodependence. The concept of ‘‘addiction,’’ which is very similar to that of
dependence, is an indication of this broadening. Thus
the pathological behaviors in which an act of incorporation (often but not exclusively through use of a toxic
object) allows the subject to relieve the internal tension
by short-circuiting a threatening mental condition are
grouped under the term ‘‘addiction.’’ These include
alcoholic and drug-related behavior, bulimia (and anorexia), as well as addictions that do not involve the ingestion of a product (games of chance, shopping sprees,
sexual addiction), and even relational dependence.
BÉNÉDICTE BONNET-VIDON
See also: Addiction; Helplessness.
Bibliography
Balint, Michael. (1968). The basic fault. Therapeutic aspects
of regression. London: Tavistock Publications.
Freud, Sigmund. (1911b). Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning. SE, 12, 218–226.
Jeammet, Phillippe. (1989). Psychopathologie des troubles
des conduites alimentaires à l’adolescence. Confrontations
psychiatriques, 31, 177–202.
Lebovici, Serge. (1991). La dépendance du nouveau-né. (pp.
29–39). In C. Dechamp-Le Roux (Ed.), Figures de la
dépendance, autour d’Albert Memmi, colloque de Cerisy-laSalle. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.
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DEPERSONALIZATION
Winnicott, Donald W. (1965). The maturational processes
and the facilitating environment; studies in the theory of
emotional development. New York: International Universities Press.
Further Reading
Coen, Stanley. (1992). The misuse of persons: analyzing
pathological dependency. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Searles, Harold. (1955). Dependency processes in the psychotherapy of schizophrenia. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 3, 19–66.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1963). Dependence in infant care,
child care, and the psychoanalytic setting. International
Journal of Psychoanalysis, 44, 339–344.
DEPERSONALIZATION
The term ‘‘depersonalization’’ refers to the appearance
of subjective impressions of change affecting the person or the surrounding world. Their intensity varies,
ranging from a simple feeling of dizziness to painful
feelings of physical transformation, from the fleeting
feeling of estrangement to the impression that the
world has become unrecognizable, dead, or uninhabited. Moments of depersonalization can occur during
the customary development of any individual or
within overtly pathological clinical settings.
The concept of depersonalization is not directly
present in the work of Sigmund Freud. In ‘‘Psychoanalytic notes on an autobiographical account of a
case of paranoia (dementia paranoides)’’ (1911c
[1910]), the elements of depersonalization perceptible
in the subject’s memory—themes of physical transformation, nerves of voluptuousness, the ‘‘hastily improvised men’’—are not treated as such by Freud.
Similarly the themes of depersonalization found in the
Wolf Man—the ‘‘veil’’ that is torn during successive
washings—are not referred to as such even though
they are analyzed in depth (1918b [1914]). It is possible that it was only after the development of his concept of narcissism and the reorganization of the
concept of the ego it contained that Freud became
aware of depersonalization, in ‘‘The Uncanny’’
(1919h) and later in ‘‘A Disturbance of Memory on the
Acropolis’’ (1936a). In both cases it is through feelings
affecting the perception of the outside world that the
topic is addressed, that is through the question of
‘‘derealization,’’ which can be considered the result of a
type of depersonalization.
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Paul Schilder was one of the first authors to take
an interest in depersonalization. He saw it as a function of the libido’s withdrawal of cathexis from the
image of the body. Paul Federn believed it corresponded to an alteration of the distribution of narcissistic libido throughout the body and its boundaries.
Hermann Nunberg associated it with the loss of a significant object. Clarence Oberdorf emphasized the
polymorphism of the clinical situations in which it
could be observed and Andrew Peto investigated the
role of the precocious loss of introjection. Maurice
Bouvet, in an important study entitled ‘‘Dépersonalisation et relation d’objet,’’ demonstrated the similarity of structure between states of depersonalization in
their various clinical forms and treated ‘‘depersonalization as a state of weakened ego structure.’’ He
insisted on the importance of a ‘‘rapprochement’’
with the object, that is a decrease in the creation of
psychic distance to the object, whereby the object
returns to the position it held in the subject’s unconscious fantasies. He also pointed out the character of
the object relation that made it a narcissistic object
since ‘‘the maintenance of the ego structure . . .
depends on its unconditional and absolute possession.’’ Bouvet also noted the importance of the conflict between the need to introject the object and the
fear of this introjection.
PAUL DENIS
See also: Boredom; Bouvet, Maurice Charles Marie
Germain; Ego boundaries; Ego feeling; Estrangement;
Face-to-face situation; Disintegration, feelings of, (anxieties); Rosenfeld, Herbert Alexander; Self-consciousness;
Tomasi di Palma Lampedusa-Wolff Stomersee, Alexandra.
Bibliography
Bouvet, Maurice. (1967). Œuvres psychanalytiques. I: La
Relation d’objet: névrose obsessionnelle, dépersonnalisation.
Paris: Payot.
Denis, Paul. (1981). J’aime pas être un autre. L’inquiétante
étrangeté chez l’enfant. Revue française de psychanalyse,
65, 3.
Freud, Sigmund. (1919h). The uncanny. SE, 17: 217 –256.
———. (1936a). A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis. SE, 22: 239–248.
Stewart, Walter A. (1964). Depersonalization. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, 12, 171–186.
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DEPRESSION
Further Reading
Jacobson, Edith. (1959). Depersonalization. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, 7, 581–610.
Renik, Owen. (1978). The role of attention in depersonalization. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 47, 588–605.
Rosenfeld, Herbert. (1947). Analysis of a schizophrenic state
with depersonalization. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 28, 130–139.
DEPRESSION
Depression is a mood disorder, understood from the
psychoanalytical viewpoint as resulting from an intrapsychic conflict that stems from the ego’s difficulties in
integrating aggressive drives that are experienced as too
dangerous for the preservation of libidinally cathected
objects. These aggressive drives turn against the subject
via the superego, which becomes too strict and
demanding. Depressive manifestations are frequent in
other clinical entities where the conflicts are essentially
intrapsychic, such as the psychoneuroses.
Karl Abraham (1912/1989) was one of the first psychoanalytical authors to concern himself with
depressed patients and to describe the extent of the
ambivalence of their drives. Narcissism is another
characteristic of the depressive personality, which that
Freud emphasized in ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’
(1916–17g [1915]). Subsequently, Abraham (1924/
1927) described the pregenital underpinning of this
ambivalence, given the importance of oral fixations in
these patients.
Freud compared the psychological mechanisms of
melancholia with those of mourning, which constitutes a depressive state in the normal person. The essential difference is the narcissism of the melancholic,
whose intolerance of experiences of loss lead him to
the oral incorporation of the lost object into the ego,
where it is attacked by the superego. Conversely, the
person in mourning finds himself faced with the painful difficulty of detaching the libido cathected onto the
lost object so as to recathect it onto objects in the
external world. However, the major problem raised by
Freud’s descriptions of the dynamics of melancholia is
that he does not specify the variations in the psychological mechanisms corresponding to the different
degrees of depressive states.
Melanie Klein (1940) developed the comparison
with mourning in her description of the depressive
39 4
position. For her, the capacity to work through one’s
mourning will depend on the possibility of resolving
the reactivation of the conflict proper to the depressive
position that the conflict causes, i.e., the feeling of losing good internal objects. Klein, like Freud, is imprecise when it comes to the different problematics of
depression. However, clinical analysis shows a whole
series of levels of severity in this problematic between
the working through of the mourning process (or during the integration of the depressive position) and the
peak of this process, which Klein described as ‘‘a melancholia in statu nascendi’’ (Palacio Espasa). These
depressive forms of conflict can be defined by reference to the predominant form of the fantasies expressing the experiences of the loss of the object of libidinal
cathexis, and by the quality of the types of anxiety
experienced by the ego.
When fantasies of the catastrophic and irreparable
destruction of the object predominate, given that the
subject has very little confidence in his libidinal capacities, feelings of guilt become intolerable and feelings
of sadness are massively denied. The ego can only
resort to archaic mechanisms of defense: splitting,
denial, projective identification, idealization, etc.—the
mechanisms proper to schizo-paranoid functioning or
to the dynamics of extreme melancholia, with confusion between the ego and the object attacked (the
‘‘parapsychotic’’ depressive conflict proper to borderline or psychotic structures).
When fantasies of severe and barely reparable
damage or death of the objects take the upper hand,
the ego will be confronted with intense feelings of guilt
and sadness. The significant repression of the aggressive drives towards the object (an aggressiveness that
reinforces the severity of the superego) will make it
possible for the negative affects to be partially denied.
The ego will succeed in keeping the conflict interiorized but at the cost of diverse inhibitions in the functions of the ego. Thus, the symbolic possibilities of the
individual are limited, but are not qualitatively
affected. This very narrow form of repression is often
insufficient, and the ego also has to resort to maniacal
defenses or to defenses of a melancholic type, which
then determine the clinical manifestations of mood
disturbances.
When feelings of abandonment and rejection prevail—i.e., when the experiences of loss are above
all fantasies such as the loss of the object’s love—
depressive conflict will take a ‘‘paraneurotic form.’’
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DEPRESSIVE POSITION
The feelings of sadness are often conscious, for guilt is
less intense and can equally easily become conscious.
The ego’s greater confidence in its libidinal capacities
gives these subjects a profusion of fantasies of reparation that will counteract the damage done to the
object, damage that is fantasized as resulting from
their own aggressiveness. These fantasies underlie
many of the neurotic mechanisms of defense, especially those of an obsessional kind, for example retroactive cancelling, reaction formation, etc. Under their
influence, repression authorizes a greater possibility of
symbolic expression, which distinguishes neurotic
repression from the massive repression of the depressive type. Such a libidinal predominance changes the
nature of what is repressed, for the counter-cathexis
does not operate on aggressiveness alone, but also on
the libidinal fantasies of an incestuous nature. This
contributes to the sexual differentiation of parental
objects, bringing into operation the conflict occasioned by triangulation and the Oedipus complex.
FRANCISCO PALACIO ESPASA
See also: Abandonment; Acute psychoses; Adolescent crisis; Anaclisis/anaclitic; Anxiety; Dead mother complex;
Depressive position; Essential depression; Guilt, unconscious sense of; Identification; Internal object; Lost
object; Manic defenses; Mania; Melancholia; Mourning;
‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’; Psychoanalytical nosography; Self-punishment; Suicide; Superego; Transference
depression.
Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1927). The process of introjection in melancholia: two stages of the oral phase of the libido. In Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (Trans.). Selected papers of
Karl Abraham, M.D. (pp. 442–452). London: Hogarth.
(Original work published 1924)
———. (1927). Notes on the psycho-analytical investigation and treatment of manic-depressive insanity and allied
conditions. In Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (Trans.),
Selected papers of Karl Abraham, M.D. (pp. 137–156). London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-analysis. (Original work published 1911)
Freud, Sigmund. (1916–17g [1915]). Mourning and melancholia. SE, 14: 237–258.
Klein, Melanie. (1940). Mourning and its relation to manicdepressive states. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,
21, 125–153.
Palacio Espasa, Francisco. (1993). La Pratique psychothérapique avec l’enfant. Paris: Bayard.
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DEPRESSIVE POSITION
A developmental stage in the first year allows the
infant to begin to integrate his objects, which become
mixed and take on both good and bad aspects. Particularly when the objects that attract ambivalent emotions are internalized, it creates a deeply troubling
internal world, dominated by various forms of guilt
feelings, sadness and reparative attempts to deal with
them. (Melanie Klein, 1935).
Melanie Klein derived her notion of internal objects
from the work that Abraham and Freud had done on
the internalization of objects through oral incorporation in melancholia (Freud, 1917 [1915], Abraham,
1924). Abraham described symptoms which vividly
expressed the movement of ‘‘loved objects’’ into and
out of the body.
Klein (1935, 1940) viewed aggression from the earliest stages as producing a particularly problematic
internal object. Freud described the internalization of
the loved one as a response to its loss, when there was
a particular heightened degree of ambivalence towards
that person. In other words when a loved object,
towards whom a lot of aggression is felt, is then lost, a
persisting depression rather than normal mourning
occurs. Klein discovered that this process also
occurred with an internal object that was damaged
(by the aggression) or, indeed, a dead internal object.
It is this internal sense of damage and death which is
the core experience of clinical depression, and was
Klein’s addition to Freud and Abraham’s work on
depression.
However, the depressive position (in contrast to
depression) is a normal enough process. In this case,
aggression, while internalizing loved objects, leads to
restorative efforts towards the object internally, or in a
symbolized and sublimated (and externalized) form.
In turn, fears about the state of the internal object are
always aroused by the loss of, or harm to, loved external objects.
Because of the love for a damaged or dead internal
object the experience is extremely painful, and this
anxiety of the depressive position has an internal reference point, known as guilt. During development the
harshness of guilt is at first very severe, and is felt to be
the retaliation of the damaged object inside—a phantasy that is in line with Freud’s description of guilt
arising from the superego. As a result the developing
infant may have great difficulty in accepting these
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DEPRESSIVE POSITION
feelings, and therefore hesitates to enter the depressive
position. Crucially, the infant is anxious that its own
badness and aggression will overwhelm its capacity for
love. In this sense it is an intensely ‘‘moral’’ position,
and indeed presupposes the struggle between love and
hate as an inherent morality.
Klein and her followers found themselves in possession of the difficult notion of ‘‘internal objects.’’
This term refers to phantasies about the contents of
the self, and especially the concrete contents of the
body. This idea developed Abraham’s work on introjection and projection of objects which he found
were phantasies of incorporation or expulsion of
physical objects from the body (food and excreta).
In Klein’s theory these objects are animate, and are
motivated with good or bad intentions towards the
ego, as if quite real homunculi were resident inside
the person.
The developmental step—crucially the recognition
that the loved person is also hated and attacked (at
least in phantasy)—may be avoided for the time being
by various specific defenses. Firstly, the infant may
revert to more paranoid-schizoid states—the paranoid
defense. Then the confluence of love and hate are prevented by continued splitting of good from bad
objects.
Manic defenses are characteristic in the depressive
position. Then, the importance of the loved object
(and therefore its condition) is denied. As a result no
serious guilt or dependence on the object is felt if it has
been rendered so unimportant.
Alternatively if, and when, the guilt can be tolerated
the ego is driven to seek methods of reparation for the
damage done in phantasy or reality. In this case the
harshness of the guilt, and the superego-like quality of
the internal object becomes softened, and elements of
forgiveness can develop.
The coming together of good and bad objects, and
of the impulses of love and hate, mark the onset of a
new respect for the reality of external people. Crucially,
absence can begin to be tolerated without it being
marked by a ‘‘bad object.’’ But the beginning of a transformation in many aspects of mental life and development are ushered in (Hinshelwood, 1994). No final
solution to the depressive position problem is found,
and the attempt to deal with aggression against objects
that are also loved and depended upon is a slowly evolving thread all through life.
39 6
In many respects this developmental voyage based
on object-relations supplants the progress through
Freud’s libidinal phases. The achievement of reality
testing (secondary process) is a comparable moment
in development to that of the depressive position.
Guilt is conceptualized in a slightly different way by
Freud, as deriving from the strict superego (the only
internal object that Freud attends to—Freud, 1923),
and this contrasts with guilt from a damaged internal
object in the theory of the depressive position.
For classical psychoanalysts, the notion of the
depressive position and its place in the development of
the infant, disregards the classical descriptions of the
libidinal phases. In addition the early onset—in the
first six months of life—is argued to be improbably
early, for such a sophisticated set of emotional reactions. The integration that Melanie Klein described is
then attributed to an age of two or three years when
the mature Oedipus complex arrives.
However, for many non-Kleinian analysts a developmental scheme based on object-relations is compatible and complementary to the libidinal phases.
ROBERT D. HINSHELWOOD
See also: Alpha function; Ambivalence; Anaclitic depression; Archaic; Depression; Emotion; Fragmentation;
Imago; Infant development; Infantile psychosis; Learning
from Experience; Manic defenses; Melancholia; Neurosis;
Oedipus complex, early; Paranoid position; Paranoidschizoid position; Psychoanalytic Treatment of Children;
Reparation; Selected fact; Splitting of the object; Symbolic equation; Thought-thinking apparatus.
Bibliography
Heimann, P. (1942). Sublimation and its relation to processes of internalization. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 23, 8–17.
Isaacs Susan. (1940). Temper tantrums in early childhood
and their relation to internal objects. International Journal
of Psycho-Analysis, 21, 280–293. Republished in S. Isaacs
(1948), Childhood and after. London: Routledge.
Klein, Melanie (1935). A contribution to the psychogenesis
of manic-depressive states. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 16, 145–174. Reprinted in The writings of Melanie
Klein, vol. I. (1975). London: Hogarth, 262–289.
———. (1940). Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 21,
125–153. Reprinted in The writings of Melanie Klein, vol. I.
(1975). London: Hogarth, 344–369.
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DEPRIVATION
DEPRIVATION
Psychoanalytically, deprivation is the reduced fulfillment of a desire or need that is felt to be essential. Sigmund Freud (1927c) considered deprivation the result
of the frustration of a drive that could not be satisfied
because of a prohibition, and he was particularly interested in sexual deprivation. Later, psychoanalysis
focused on the maternal deprivation caused either by
the final or temporary absence of the mother or by her
difficulty in providing primary care for the infant—a
deprivation likely to have irreversible effects on the
child’s development.
For the infant, deprivation, as the result of an
intrapsychic process related to needs or desires,
assumes various forms. It is modulated by the reaction
of the primary object, the mother, as well as the
moment when the deprivation is produced, its duration, or even the attitude of mother substitutes.
The importance given to reality and its traumas
compared to the reality of the representational world
forms the basis of the differences among psychoanalytic theories. For example, psychoanalysts have studied
the effects of ‘‘quantitative deprivation,’’ when the
infant must confront the physical absence of the primary maternal object from birth, a condition known
as hospitalism (Spitz, 1945), or after the establishment
of a bond, a condition known as anaclitic depression
(Spitz, 1946), which includes the phases of fright, despair, and separation. During these three phases, the
infant is primarily searching for the lost anaclitic
object, then, overcome with despair, enters into a
situation of more or less pronounced denial, depending on the level of structuration of the internal object
and the duration of separation. This process involves
directing diffuse but unbearable aggressive impulses
against the self, hatred of the incorporated internal
object, and deprivation of the maternal breast accompanied by deprivation of the (oral) apparatus that
would enable the infant to use it. Sometimes there is
also a deprivation of all creative ability and the dissolution of the integrative process together with the inhibition or dissociation of impulses (Winnicott, 1984).
‘‘Qualitative deprivation’’ has also been described,
and occurs when the infant is presented with an object
that prevents him from experiencing his impulses in
an acceptable form because they are uncontrolled.
This object does not assume the contradictory role of
ensuring the satisfaction of the infant’s needs and
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pushing him toward autonomy and does not understand his signals or his thoughts. Operating behaviors
and idealizing systems dominate this form of motherchild relationship (Kreisler., 1992) to prevent transient
personal difficulties, struggles, and traumas from
becoming mental pathologies, especially depressive
and schizophrenic.
Forms of ‘‘mixed deprivation’’ are also known,
where the interruption of maternal care and inadequate support are the basis of narcissistic collapse and
weakness during the process of separationindividuation.
The effects of affective deprivation (Bowlby, 1951)
have been studied among infants placed in institutions, hospitals, or foster homes (Winnicott, 1984),
and in the context of family life. This has led to observation of depression and borderline and antisocial
pathologies such as psychosis. Françoise Dolto has
described the sudden and long-lasting dissociation
found to exist following early hospitalization or
repeated changes of care providers—without any possible reparation of the image of the body or the subject. The infant can regress to a state in which his vital
needs are satisfied in a context where subtle, verbal,
mimetic, or motor exchanges no longer take place.
Having become autistic, the child’s impulses no longer
have an outlet and result in teratological symbolization
through hallucination.
Léon Kreisler has studied depression (blank and
empty) during periods of qualitative deprivation,
especially their development on the psychosomatic
level. Other authors have ascribed important narcissistic pathologies (feelings of emptiness, captive selfimage, lack of confidence), along with the intolerance
to frustration that provokes the transition to action,
which is manifested during adolescence. Donald Winnicott has studied the dynamics of the antisocial act
and the accompanying feeling of hopeful suffering. ‘‘In
fact,’’ he writes, ‘‘deprivation does not deform the
organization of the ego as in psychosis but pushes the
infant to force the context to recognize the deprivation
and . . . the antisocial act manifests itself when the
infant begins to create an object relationship and
invest a person.’’
GRAZIA MARIA FAVA VIZZIELLO
See also: Abandonment; Anaclisis/anaclitic; Analytic
psychodrama; Breakdown; Developmental disorders;
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DESEXUALIZATION
Frustration; Hospitalism; Maternal care; Self-mutilation
in children; Stranger; Transference depression.
Bibliography
Bowlby, John. (1951). Maternal care and mental health. Geneva: WHO Monographs.
Kreisler, Léon. (1992). La prospettiva psicosomatica nella
psicopatologia del lattante. In Fava, V.G., and Stern, D.
(Eds.), Modèles psychothérapiques au premier âge. Paris:
Masson.
Spitz, René (1945). Hospitalism: an inquiry into the genesis
of psychiatric conditions in early childhood. Psychoanalytic
Study of the Child, 1, 53–74.
Spitz, René. (1946). Anaclitic depression. Psychoanalytic
Study of the Child, 2, 313–342.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1984). Deprivation and delinquency.
London: The Winnicott Trust.
Further Reading
Shengold, Leonard. (1989). Soul murder: the effects of childhood abuse and deprivation. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Wilson, N. (2002). Depression and its relation to light deprivation. Psychoanalytic Review, 89, 557–568.
Winnicott, Donald. (1984). Deprivation and delinquency.
London: Tavistock.
DESEXUALIZATION
‘‘Desexualization’’ may be most easily understood
through a discussion of its antonym, ‘‘sexualization’’
(Freud, 1905d). From an analytic point of view, sexualization is a response on the one hand to the endogenous imperatives of the sexual instinct and on the other
to the exogenous imperatives of the encounter with
the object and its otherness. The sex drive comes into
play at the boundary of the biological body and the
psyche, tracing signs of its libidinal energy on the
body. The body then becomes ‘‘erogenous,’’ and bears
the stamp of pleasure and unpleasure it experiences
from encounters between a bodily source and a complementary object, the prime example of which is the
encounter of mouth and breast.
The object, which is partial but complementary to
the instinctual source, is present-absent as soon as
mental life begins. Through its presence it participates
in the experience of pleasure; its frustrating absence
39 8
will push the mental subject toward the initial hallucinatory experience, which, interacting with perception,
will constitute the basic of ideation. Sexualization and
objectification are coexistent and coalescent. Sexualization is both a manifestation and an effect of the sexual impulse that libidinally cathects the object in a way
that is both quantitative and qualitative, as reflected in
the strength and the emotional form of the objectcathexis.
In Freud’s first theory of the instincts, sexualization
is subservient to and anaclitically dependent on the
self-preservation that governs biological and mental
life. Because of the paths taken by the object-libido,
sexualization operates not only with respect to the
object, but also with respect to the ego in the shape of
the withdrawal of narcissistic libido. We may thus
assume the existence of a desexualization of the object
that goes hand in hand with the sexualization of the
ego, and conversely.
If, for Freud, the sexual and the infantile are constitutive of the unconscious, it is strictly because of
repression that they are preserved on this underlying
level and separated from the conscious one. On the
conscious level, the sexualizing activity of the psyche is
not systematically apparent; signs of anticathexis and
reaction formation may be discerned in manifest psychic contents that are desexualized while their latent
inscriptions in the unconscious remain sexual. The
gamut of psychic formations, including not only
symptoms, be they hysterical, obsessive, or phobic, but
also dreams, parapraxes, and slips, may appear to be
‘‘desexualized’’ yet betray, as compromise formations,
latent sexual aspects that are accessible through free
association. Childhood phobias are a case in point.
The fear of a wild or domestic animal appears in the
conscious mind as the repercussion of a traumatic
event, associated with a concrete experience, but in
fact it may be the transposed expression of, say, a guilty
unconscious wish to have sexual relations with one’s
mother. In that case it will also express a fear of castration by the father, which is experienced as the prohibition of that wish.
Desexualization can thus be viewed as a conscious
mental process that leaves repressed sexualization
intact in the unconscious. Whence the importance of
the preconscious as a meeting ground, a place where
desexualization—characterized by the repression of
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D E S O I L L E , R O B E R T (1890 –1 966)
ual activities and aroused during analysis by free association—can come together.
The Freudian concept of sublimation can help us
understand the process of desexualization. It indicates
a change of aim and object, which become social
rather than sexual, and a shift from the pleasure principle to the reality principle. The sublimation of sexual
impulses is associated with their plasticity; desexualization is in a way the precondition of access to socialization. Another psychic process, idealization, accounts
for the transformation of the object, which, brought to
perfection thanks to narcissistic projection, then
becomes a model for identification.
The second theory of the instincts, and the second
topography of the psychic apparatus that resulted from
it, round out our understanding of the phenomena of
desexualization. What is often called the great turning
point of 1920 led Freud to rethink his instinct theory,
taking into account a realm ‘‘beyond the pleasure principle’’ which he described in terms precisely consistent
with the Nirvana principle, one of the basic tendencies
of the psyche underpinning the compulsion to repeat
and the push for a return to the inert and inanimate.
Alongside the sexual instincts, therefore, and indeed predating them, another category of instincts, the death
instincts, now needed to be considered. This meant that
a tendency to non-sexualization and to deobjectification
was present from the beginning of the development of
the mind, a tendency that could serve as a focal point for
desexualization now conceived as a return to the inert
and the inanimate, as a kind of paradoxical desire for
non-desire. The Freudian conception of primal masochism proposes a fundamental psychic structure involving the coalescence of sexual and death instincts.
Masochism is fundamentally the organizer of autoeroticism as it is of narcissism, and it is at once the motor
and consequence of instinctual fusion. As a sexualizing
factor it may be a ‘‘guardian of life,’’ but it can also be
lethal, fostering desexualization and leaving the field
open, as it were, to the death instinct. The work of melancholy that is present, more or less, in every depressive
situation, includes the effects of desexualization and
deobjectification: the tendency to suicide represents the
most extreme form of the desire for non-desire and the
victory of the death forces characteristic of this ultimate
form of desexualization.
The notions of sublimation and idealization were
also changed and refined by Freud’s new conceptualization of instinctual dualism and of the functioning of
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the mind. Processes of identification, and more specifically primary identification, now presupposed a
desexualization that can facilitate the transmutation of
object-cathexes into the new instinctual vicissitudes
implied by sublimation and idealization.
Although in the analytic literature the term ‘‘desexualization’’ later received more systematic treatment
by Heinz Hartmann in the context of the ‘‘desexualized ego,’’ as applied to adaptation to the social environment, it still seems important to distinguish clearly
between a neurotic kind of desexualization characterized by repression of the sexual impulses, or by their
sublimation and the idealization of the object, from a
psychotic process engendered by the leveling effects of
the death instinct on the sexual instincts.
In sum, as a result of the stimulation they represent
relative to instinctual defusion, the psychic phenomena of desexualization are most clearly bound up, specifically, with the processes of unbinding, decathexis,
and deobjectification; they also have a dialectical relationship with processes of identification.
MARC BONNET
See also: Ego and the Id, The; Ego autonomy; ‘‘On the
History of the Psychoanalytic Movement’’; Self, the; Sublimation; Superego.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 125–245.
———. (1920g). Dr. Anton von Freund. SE, 18: 267 seq.
———. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 12–59.
Hartmann, Heinz. (1964). Essays on ego psychology. New
York, International Universities Press. (Original work published 1939)
Further Reading
Goldberg, Arnold. (1993). Sexualization and desexualization. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 62, 383–399.
DESOILLE, ROBERT (1890–1966)
Robert Desoille, a French engineer, psychotherapist,
and creator of the concept of the ‘‘directed daydream,’’
was born on May 29, 1890, in Besançon, France, and
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DESTRUDO
died on October 10, 1966, in Paris. Born into a family
of military officers, Desoille studied engineering as a
young man. In 1923 E. Caslant initiated him into an
experimental technique of mental imaging, which he
felt had psychoanalytic applications. He worked out
his theory over the course of seven volumes.
In Exploration de l’Affectivité Subconsciente par la
Méthode du Rêve-éveillé [Exploration of subconscious
emotions using directed daydreams] (1938), he studied the relationship between symbolism, invention,
and memory, demonstrating the advantages of his
method for exploring sublimation. He built on the
work of Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav
Jung, and Roland Dalbiez.
In Le Rêve-éveillé en Psychothérapie (The directed
daydream in psychotherapy; 1945), he made reference to Jung’s collective unconscious. For him, the
psyche consists of two poles: the Freudian id and the
self, which consists of the limit of what sublimation
can obtain. The conscious ego shifts between the id
and the self as a possible representation. In the
directed daydream, transference is expressed and
resolved.
In Théorie et Pratique du Rêve-éveillé Dirigé (Theory
and practice of the directed daydream; 1961), Desoille
moved toward a ‘‘rational psychotherapy’’ and developed a Pavlovian conception of neurosis. Through the
directed daydream, he held, poorly adapted reflexes
are dissolved and new dynamic stereotypes are formed,
initially in the imagination.
Upon its appearance a number of authors—including Charles Baudouin, Gaston Bachelard, Juliette
Favez-Boutonier, Françoise Dolto, and Daniel
Lagache—took an interest in Desoille’s work. Moreover, it has continued to generate commentary and
further analysis since its introduction.
———. (1961). Théorie et pratique du rêve-éveillé-dirigé.
Geneva: Mont-Blanc.
———. (1971). Marie-Clotilde. Une psychothérapie par le
rêve-éveillé-dirigé: un cas de névrose obsessionnelle. Paris:
Payot.
———. (1973). Entretiens sur le rêve-éveillé-dirigé en psychothérapie. Paris: Payot.
DESTRUDO
The Freudian concept of ‘‘destrudo’’ is one of a group
of concepts that appeared fleetingly in Sigmund Freud’s
work and subsequently disappeared, although it is not
always easy to identify the reasons for their disappearance. In the present case the situation is clearer since
from an energy perspective Freud has always refused to
postulate a ‘‘destrudo,’’ that is, an energy specifically
associated with the death drive, even though the term
makes its appearance in The Ego and the Id (1923b).
Freud did not want to associate the duality of the
drives with a duality of energies, since for him there
was no energy dualism, but with a kind of energy
monism, that of the libido. He subsequently abandoned use of the term ‘‘destrudo,’’ which would have
risked implying the existence of an energy dualism.
On several occasions Jean Laplanche has returned
to this problem of terminology (1970, 1986). Destrudo
does not appear in Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand
Pontalis’s The Language of Psychoanalysis.
BERNARD GOLSE
See also: Ego and the Id, The; Death instinct (Thanatos);
Libido; Weiss, Edoardo.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 12–59.
JACQUES LAUNAY
See also: Directed daydream (R. Desoille); Fantasy.
Bibliography
Desoille, Robert. (1938). Exploration de l’affectivité subconsciente par la méthode du rêve-éveillé: sublimation et acquisitions psychologiques. Paris: J. L. d’Artrey.
———. (1945). Le rêve-éveillé en psychothérapie: essai sur la
fonction de régulation de l’inconscient collectif. Paris: Presses
universitaires de France.
40 0
Laplanche, Jean. (1970). Vie et mort en psychanalyse. Paris:
Flammarion.
———. (1986). La pulsion de mort dans la théorie de la
pulsion sexuelle.La Pulsion de mort (pp. 11–26). Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
DETERMINISM
The most general meaning of ‘‘determinism,’’ one
applicable in most contexts, is the condition of being
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DETERMINISM
determined. If we understand determinateness to be a
qualification of an object, determinism sees this determinateness initially as identification of the object (by
several processes) and then as a causal response to a
request for an explanation of why. All scientific or theoretical research thus necessarily presupposes determinism, but not in the sense of merely naming or the other
operations of contemporary language, since the conditions for the initial application of language are not determinant. The meaning customarily given to determinism
is determination, through the principle of causality, of
the objective conditions for a phenomenon to occur.
Initially, the concept of determinism (Determinismus) arose within German theological and moral
thinking, where it served narrow requirements related
to predestination and was used to provide dogmatic
answers; it did not have an objective theoretical meaning as such. Then in nineteenth-century scientific
positivism, the ‘‘condition of determination’’ became
associated with an empirical or descriptive principle of
causality based on the primacy of observation, and not
on explanation in the strict sense. Subsequently, for
experimental science, determinism came to be considered a condition for the conduct of science itself, that
is, as the epistemological principle of scientific knowledge. In this way determinism became normative. For
example, physiological determinism claims to decide
between the normal and the pathological in medicine,
as shown by Georges Canguilhem.
Determinism, without being explicitly referred to,
has been the ideal of mechanics since the seventeenth
century. Projected onto objects made to satisfy the
demand for causality, determinism ended up requiring
that all phenomena satisfy the principle of ontological
objectivity assumed in nature. Quantum physics, however, led to a retrenchment of this principle of establishing the conditions of determination, at least on the
microphysical scale. Chaos theory has accentuated this
point of view. In the sphere of the psyche, when Sigmund Freud attempted to explain dreams by psychoanalysis, he assumed a notion of psychic determinism
in his theory of intentionality. He thus shifted the doctrine of causality in the direction of a theory of intentionality that assumed the existence of a subjective
causality beyond or alongside objective causality, as
shown by Pierre-Henri Castel in his introduction to
Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.
Determinism essentially informs all theoretical or
scientific research. So how can we explain the fact that
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modern philosophical thought, at least since Kant and
Fichte, is so strongly opposed to it? Natural determinism, after serving as the principle of Spinoza’s immanent metaphysics, has come to dominate science. This
domination reveals that the term has undergone both a
confinement and an unwarranted extension in twentieth-century thinking. The confinement of the term to
natural science constrains philosophers of freedom
from examining the conditions that determine what
they say. In the nonclassical sciences, confinement of
the term to well-behaved natural sciences subjects
intellectuals to indeterminacy complexes that seriously
inhibit their theoretical inventiveness and subjects
them to denigration. Freudian psychoanalysis, for
example, is denigrated by positivist psychology and the
various forms of psychological, organicist, and physicalist reductionism. As a result, Freudian psychoanalysis
continues to search for an epistemological legitimacy
based on theoretical models of the natural sciences, as
was shown by Paul-Laurent Assoun. In physics, Max
Planck and Werner Heisenberg created a quantum physics that was indeterminate from the point of view of
classical determinism (as formulated by Pierre Simon
Laplace). Because they were under the ideological spell
of the old determinism, they could not completely
accept their own discoveries as good science. There
were two reasons for this situation: first, the concept of
determinism arose not in the minimalist causal sense
given above but in a theological sense, and second, ever
since classical mechanics, the degree of determination
that scientific objectivism has achieved has delimited
the meaning and norm of determinism. Because they
exclude identity and assume the differential nature of
the symbolic, the status of the psyche and, even more
so, the structuralist approach to the subject as taken by
Jacques Lacan show that objective legality and causality
could not serve as paradigms for everything we talk
about. This is especially so for the unconscious, which,
although ‘‘structured like a language,’’ is not structured
as a determining cause.
A robust determinism must renounce naturalist
metaphysics, which has continued to control its principles. A new philosophy of ‘‘determined’’ freedom
can be developed without indeterminism. Freud’s
determined freedom led Jean-Paul Sartre, probably
wrongly, to reject the Freudian unconscious and to
confront a ‘‘natural determinism’’. All of Freud’s
efforts, contrary to Jung’s, clearly attempted to establish a paradoxical materialism that went beyond
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DETSKI DOM
philosophical idealism and the old materialisms, dialectic or otherwise.
DOMINIQUE AUFFRET
See also: Instinct; Neurosis, choice of the; Psychic causality; Psychogenesis/organogenesis; Psychopathology of
Everyday Life, The; Complementary series.
Bibliography
Assoun, Paul-Laurent. (1981). Introduction à l’épistémologie
freudienne. Paris: Payot.
Castel, Pierre-Henri. (1998). Introduction à ‘‘L’interprétation
du rêve’’ de Freud. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Canguilhem, Georges. (1989). The normal and the pathological (Carolyn R. Fawcett, Trans.). New York: Zone Books.
Kojève, Alexandre. (1990). L’idée du déterminisme dans la
physique classique et dans la physique moderne. Paris: Hachette. (Original work published 1932.)
Koyré, Alexandre. (1957). From the closed world to the infinite universe. New York: Harper.
Lacan, Jacques. (1966). Écrits. Paris: Seuil.
DETSKI DOM
The Detski Dom (Children’s Home, also known as
the Solidarity International Experimental Home) was
a kind of boarding school and experimental laboratory designed to help model the future ‘‘new man,’’
the builder of communism. It opened in August 1921
in the center of Moscow and shared with the Psychoanalytic Institute the magnificent former home of
Stepan Ryabushinsky. Though Ivan Ermakov, president of the Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, was
officially responsible for the home, Vera Schmidt ran
day-to-day operations. During a period filled with
revolutionary ideas, in the broadest sense of the
term, an attempt was made to merge Freudianism
and Marxism. For many of Ermakov’s friends this
involved using psychoanalysis, ‘‘a powerful method
of liberating man from his old reductive shackles,’’ to
create individuals who conformed to the ideals of the
new society. At this time the new discipline of ‘‘pedology’’ was established.
Vera Schmidt ran the home on a theoretical, as well
as practical, level. For Schmidt, an adept of Freud,
early childhood was a critical period in the formation
and evolution of the future adult. Accordingly,
40 2
children were admitted to the home between two and
four years of age. Initially, the twenty-four residents
were cared for by fifty-one staff members. The children
lived there permanently, parents visiting only periodically. The residents came from various social backgrounds. They included Schmidt’s son Volik
(mistakenly referred to in some publications as Alik).
After 1925 residents included many children of party
bureaucrats, government officials, the Komintern, and
even the youngest of Stalin’s two sons, Vassili.
High-ranking visitors and inspectors found the
environment pleasant; the staff calm, attentive, and
considerate; the children clean and properly dressed;
the rapport with teachers good; and the physical and
psychological state of the children healthy. Moreover,
in spite of external unrest, the home was well financed.
Contributors included the State Department of
Finance, the Union of Manual and Intellectual Workers of Germany (from which the name Solidarity International was derived), and some of the children’s
families. Otto Schmidt, Vera’s husband and publisher
of The Library of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, allocated a portion of the profits from the publishing
house to the home.
Vera Schmidt organized periodic meetings of the
teachers, who kept daily logs with detailed observations and prepared personal reports, diagrams, and
graphs detailing the evolution of each child. Staff organized wake-up activities: drawing, découpage, modeling with clay, educational games. One of the purposes
of the study was to examine infantile sexuality as well
as various forms of impulse display.
Professional psychotherapists, including Sabina
Spielrein, treated the children. Though Vera Schmidt
did not have any psychoanalytic training, her publications on the experiment and the methods used at the
home (which she herself translated into German)
attracted high regard even from Anna Freud in Vienna,
according to some sources. In early 1923 the Schmidts
went to Vienna, where they met Sigmund Freud, Otto
Rank, Karl Abraham, and other analysts.
Although the trip was successful (the Russian Psychoanalytic Society became a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association), back in Moscow
the situation deteriorated for the home. The staff, with
Vera Schmidt at its head, continued to request psychoanalytic training. United until then, the staff began to
argue among themselves. In mid-1923 the number of
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residents fell from twenty-four to twelve, and the staff
was reduced to no more than eighteen members. The
Solidarity International Experimental Home had to
confront serious financial problems (exacerbated by
the fact that assistance from Germany ceased). Moreover, the institution began receiving unfavorable publicity in the local press. In late 1923 and early 1924 a
struggle broke out about the future of the Home.
Several committees were dissolved and wild rumors
circulated, most of which were based on an incorrect
understanding of childhood sexuality. Aron Zalkind,
the father of pedology and a Marxist-Freudian defector, wrote in 1926, ‘‘The sexual must be subjected to
the class principle.’’
Ideological resistance grew, and the home became
its first victim, followed by psychoanalysis and pedology. Having become a nursery school, the institution
had assumed an elitist character. On August 14, 1925,
the Narkompros (Ministry of Public Education)
ordered the experimental home closed. Later, during
the 1930s, the house on Malaya-Nikitskaya Street
became the personal residence of Maxime Gorky.
Today the magnificent building houses the Gorky
museum.
IRINA MANSON
See also: Marxism and psychoanalysis; Pedagogy and psychoanalysis; Russia/USSR, Schmidt, Vera Federovna.
Bibliography
Etkind, Alexander. (1997). Eros of the Impossible: The History
of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Noah Rubins and Maria
Rubins, Trans.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Palmier, Jean-Michel. (1982). La psychanalyse en Union
soviétique. In Roland Jaccard (Ed.) Histoire de la psychanalyse (Vol. 2). Paris: Hachette.
DEUTICKE, FRANZ (1850–1919)
Franz Deuticke, a Viennese publisher, was born on
September 9, 1850, and died on July 2, 1919. In 1878
he and Stanislaw Töplitz took over the Viennese bookstore of Karl Czermak, together with the modest
publishing house that was part of it. After Töplitz’s
departure in 1886, he became the sole owner of the
Franz Deuticke Company. Using the funds from the
bookstore, the company devoted its first years mostly
to publishing books on medicine and the natural
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sciences. Among the authors published were several
professors from Sigmund Freud’s university, including
Theodore Meynert, Salomon Stricker, Max Kassowitz,
and Heinrich Obersteiner. After having published a
series of manuals and monographs in medicine and
the natural sciences, Deuticke expanded his list
between 1880 and 1890 to include scientific reviews
and periodicals such as Zentralblatt für Physiologie,
Jahrbücher für Psychiatrie, and Monatsschrift für Kinderheilkunde. Around this time he also became interested in the young science of economics.
After the turn of the century, Deuticke further
broadened his publishing list to include scholarly
books, law books, and psychoanalytic works. Freud’s
first contacts with Deuticke took place within the
context of his own translation projects: the translation of Jean Martin Charcot’s Nouvelles conférences
sur les maladies du système nerveux (Neue Vorlesungen
über die Krankheiten des Nervensystems [1886]),
which appeared in 1886 and was included in volume
one of the translation of the Conférences policliniques
(Poliklinischen Vorträgen [1894]), the translation of
Hippolyte Bernheim’s La suggestion et son effet thérapeutique (Die Suggestion und ihre Heilwirkung
[1888]) and Bernheim’s Nouvelles études sur l’hypnotisme, la suggestion et la psychothérapie (Neue Studien
über Hypnotismus, Suggestion und Psychotherapie
[1892]). In 1891 Freud also entrusted the young and
enterprising publishing house with his first monograph, Zur Auffassung der Aphasien (On Aphasia: A
Critical Study, 1891).
Until the outbreak of the First World War, Deuticke was, with rare exceptions, Freud’s most important publisher, and his company can rightly be
considered the first publisher of psychoanalysis. In
1895 Deuticke also published Studien über Hysterie
(Studies on Hysteria, 1895), written in collaboration
with Josef Breuer, and in 1900, Die Traumdeutung
(The Interpretation of Dreams). On Freud’s recommendation Deuticke also published some of Freud’s
scientist friends, such as Wilhelm Fliess, and later a
number of psychoanalytic authors, such as Carl Gustav Jung. The company even took the risk of publishing the first psychoanalytic periodical: Jahrbuch für
psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen
(1904–1914). To promote the new science, Freud
became editor of the first series of works on psychoanalysis: Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde
(Writings on applied psychology).
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D E U T S C H , F E L I X (1884 – 1964)
At the start of the First World War, Hugo Heller
positioned himself to be a publisher devoted to Freudian psychoanalysis, while Franz Deuticke Company,
then run by Franz’s son Hans, increasingly became a
forum for publications by dissident psychoanalysts.
After the war Deuticke published both Jung and, after
his break with Freud, Otto Rank.
LYDIA MARINELLI
See also: Heller, Hugo Imago. Zeitschrift für die Anwendung der Psychoanalyse; Interpretation of Dreams, The;
Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse.
Felix grew increasingly confident within analysis,
and back in Boston he attracted a number of devoted
disciples. He also taught at the Smith College of Social
Work. He was attracted by clinical possibilities other
than strict analysis, and he hoped to be able to make a
science of technique.
He published articles on psychosomatic medicine,
and Applied Psychoanalysis, on the objectives of psychotherapy. Deutsch was one of the creators of psychosomatic medicine, and a leader in exploring new techniques of psychotherapy. He was also, for the period in
1923 when Freud first contracted cancer of the jaw, his
personal physician.
Bibliography
PAUL ROAZEN
Grubrich-Simitis, Ilse. (1996). Back to Freud’s texts: Making
silent documents speak (Philip Slotkin, Trans.). New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press. (Original work published 1993)
See also: Deutsch-Rosenbach, Helene; Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung.
Hall, Murray G. (1985). Österreichische Verlagsgeschichte,
1918–1938. Vienna: H. Böhlau.
Bibliography
Deutsch, Felix. (1949). Applied psychoanalysis: Selected objectives of psychotherapy. New York: Grune and Stratton.
DEUTSCH, FELIX (1884–1964)
Felix Deutsch, psychoanalyst and physician, was born
in 1884 in Vienna, and died on 1964 in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
Deutsch was educated at the University of Vienna.
His family was Jewish and he developed firm Zionist
convictions. In 1908 he became a doctor; internal
medicine was always his specialty. Felix Deutsch met
his future wife Helene, also a psychoanalyst, in Munich
in 1911. Within a year they were married, and they
remained married fifty-two years.
Deutsch had an artistic personality; he painted and
composed, and was an excellent piano player. His
musicality played a role in a contribution to psychotherapy that he made in America. He found he
learned a lot about patients by provoking associations
through repeating words, since tone had such meaning
for him. As a therapist he learned to use his natural
directness, and childlike inquisitiveness, to become an
excellent interviewer.
Helene and their son moved to Boston in September 1935, and Felix joined them in early 1936. Between
the fall of 1939 and the spring of 1941 Felix accepted
an invitation to be the first professor of psychosomatic
medicine at Washington University in St. Louis.
40 4
DEUTSCH-ROSENBACH, HELENE
(1884–1982)
Helene Deutsch, psychoanalyst and physician, was
born October 9, 1884 in Przemysl, Poland, and died
March 29, 1982 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Helene was the daughter of Jewish parents, but she
grew up a Polish nationalist. Although formal schooling was impossible in Poland for a woman, private
tutoring enabled her to enroll at the University of
Vienna in 1907. From the outset she was interested in
a psychiatric career. She received her medical degree
from the University of Vienna in 1913.
As early as 1898 she was involved with a much older
man who was a Social Democratic leader, Herman Lieberman. He was married, however, and a divorce in
those days was politically out of the question.
While spending a year in Munich in 1910–11, studying with Emil Kraepelin, Helene finally broke off with
Lieberman, who since 1907 had been a deputy from
Poland in the Parliament at Vienna. In Munich she had
met her future husband Felix Deutsch, and they were
married in 1912. Women could not then hold clinical
psychiatric appointments at the University of Vienna,
but Professor Julius Wagner Ritter von Jauregg had
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made a great impression on her. Once World War One
broke out physicians were needed by the Austrian
military, and Helene found new and welcome responsibilities thrust upon her. She functioned as one of
Wagner-Jauregg’s assistants, a post to which as a
woman she could not formally be appointed. In the fall
of 1918 Deutsch left Wagner-Jauregg’s clinic in order to
undertake a personal analysis with Freud, which lasted
about a year. While for some, particularly Freud’s
exceptionally talented male pupils, he could be a burden to their independent development, Deutsch found
that Freud released her most creative talents. She could
write as Freud’s adherent and at the same time fulfill
her own needs for self-expression. She was not a mere
imitator of Freud’s, but within his system of thought
she was able to express her own individual outlook.
The 1920s proved to be Deutsch’s most creative period; she emerged as one of the most successful teachers
in the history of psychoanalysis. In 1924 she became the
first to head the new Vienna Psychoanalytic Training
Institute, which meant that between 1924 and 1935
(when she left for Boston, MA) she had to assess all who
came to Vienna for instruction in analysis. She was
much sought after both as a training analyst and a supervisor; her seminars were remarkable experiences for students, and her classes were remembered as spectacles.
In Vienna Deutsch’s case load became two-thirds
American, and in 1930 she visited the United States to
attend the First International Congress of Mental
Hygiene. She was already looking around for a new
position. One problem was the future possibilities of
her husband Felix, an internist who had also been
Freud’s personal physician when he first contracted
cancer in 1923. It turned out that Boston was the best
place for the family, because a new psychoanalytic
training institute was being founded there, and at the
same time Dr. Stanley Cobb was creating a psychiatric
department at the Massachusetts General Hospital.
Cobb was interested in psychosomatic medicine,
Felix’s special field, so Cobb was eager to attract them
both. Helene came over in the fall of 1935 with their
son, and Felix arrived in Boston in early 1936.
Helene’s stylishness, combined with the force of her
personality, allowed her to attain a unique status in
Boston. Many of the analysts involved in setting up the
Boston institute had been her students abroad at a
time when she was already one of Freud’s favorites.
In 1925 Helene Deutsch became the first analyst to
publish a book on the psychology of women. The
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interest that she and Karen Horney showed in this subject prompted Freud, who did not like being left
behind, to write a number of articles on women himself. Deutsch’s insistence on the importance of maternity made her a pioneer.
At the end of World War II, she published her twovolume Psychology of Women (1944–45). She was especially interested in the conflict between maternal and
erotic feelings in women, and she was acutely aware of
how much she herself had missed in both realms. She
felt that, in human terms, she had paid dearly for her
professional commitment. Deutsch placed much
emphasis, meanwhile, on the real conflicts of young
women. Her works are heavy with the kind of cases
one might expect never to see dealt with by a psychoanalyst. It was her view that in order to understand
pathological behavior one must first have a clear idea
of what normal behavior was like. For Deutsch, the
fact that women had a more intense inner life meant
that they were a unique source of human potential.
Her best-known clinical concept was that of the ‘‘asif ’’ personality, a notion that allowed her to spotlight
the origin of women’s particular ability to identify
with others. Her theories also helped her better understand her own ties to Freud and Lieberman.
In Deutsch’s view, the crucial danger created by
female masochism was that of victimhood, though the
threat was potentially offset by the countervailing
force of a healthy self-esteem. Horney criticized
Deutsch’s view of women, charging that she had fallen
prey to biological reductionism through her neglect of
social factors. Deutsch felt secure enough, however, to
reply only in the most elliptical way. After all, she had
held the fort in Vienna in the wartime, and her students had included the most notable among those of
Freud’s students who had remained loyal.
In 1973 Helene Deutsch published a set of memoirs,
Confrontations with Myself, which constitutes an
important testimonial to the history of Vienna and of
the beginnings of psychoanalysis.
PAUL ROAZEN
See also: Maternal care.
Bibliography
Deutsch, Helene. (1944–45). The psychology of women, Vols.
1 and 2. New York: Grune and Stratton.
405
DEUTSCHES INSITUT
F Ü R
PSYCHOLOGISCHE FORSCHUNG. . .
———. (1967). Neuroses and character types. New York:
International Universities Press.
———. (1973). Confrontations with myself. New York: W.W.
Norton.
———. (1992). The therapeutic process, the self, and female
psychology. (Paul Roazen Ed.) New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction.
———. (1994). Psychanalyse des fonctions sexuelles de la
femme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
DEUTSCHES INSITUT FÜR
PSYCHOLOGISCHE FORSCHUNG UND
PSYCHOTHERAPIE (GÖRING INSTITUTE)
The Deutsches Institut für Psychologische Forschung
und Psychotherapie (German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy) in Berlin was the first
independent institution for training in, research on,
and practice in psychotherapy. It represented a significant realization of the aims of medical and nonmedical
psychotherapists in Germany, an ethical capitulation
to the threats and opportunities presented by the Nazi
regime, and a controversial continuity of professional
development into the postwar period.
The institute was founded in 1936 as a registered
association under the supervision of the Ministry of
the Interior. Its founding came about as a result of the
desire of a number of psychotherapists in the German
General Medical Society for Psychotherapy under
Matthias Heinrich Göring to functionally unite the
various schools of psychotherapy in an organization
independent of the control of university psychiatrists
and Nazi health activists, as well as the aim of the Nazi
party and government to destroy the ‘‘Jewish’’ German
Psychoanalytic Society without disposing of the practical benefits of psychoanalysis. Although officially
dedicated to the creation of a Neue Deutsche Seelenheilkunde (New German Psychotherapy) in line with
Nazi ideals and Germanic tradition, the so-called Göring Institute functioned more significantly as a locus
for the development and application of generally
short-term psychotherapeutic techniques in service to
state, society, military, and business in Nazi Germany.
The institute was initially funded by the psychotherapists themselves, but in 1939 the German
Labor Front assumed formal supervision over the
institute and poured a great deal of money into its
operations. This support was increasingly supplemen40 6
ted by money from the Luftwaffe (German Air Force)
and from German industry and business. Individual
psychotherapists and psychoanalysts also worked
under the aegis of the SS (Schutzstaffel) and the Wehrmacht (German Army). In 1942 the institute became a
member of the Reich Research Council, which, under
the leadership of Herman Göring, was to mobilize
science for the war effort. In 1944 followed the creation
of the Reichinstitut für Psychologische Forschung und
Psychotherapie im Reichsforschungsrat (Reich Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy in
the Reich Research Council), the final organizational
manifestation of the Göring Institute. The institute
came to an end in May 1945 with the end of the Second
World War.
Psychoanalysts at the institute were prominent in
the outpatient clinic inherited from the German Psychoanalytic Society. In teaching, training, and practice,
the Jungians, Adlerians, and Freudians maintained a
degree independence from each other. Most of the
Freudians, out of a combination of preference and
position at the institute, adopted a neo-Freudian
emphasis on social adjustment and short-term therapy. Gerhard Scheunert was Göring’s first choice to
head the clinic because of his expertise in short-term
methods. The ‘‘neo-analysis’’ of Harald SchultzHencke was also influential. Many German analysts of
the postwar period practiced and/or trained at the
Göring Institute. Some, like Harald Schultz-Hencke,
Felix Boehm, and Carl Müller-Braunschweig, were
heavily criticized after the war for their involvement
with a Nazi-sponsored entity.
Of all the groups at the institute, the psychoanalysts
had the most political difficulty under Nazism because
of their identification with Freud, a Jew. In 1938, as a
protective measure in the wake of the November
pogrom, their group was designated simply as ‘‘Work
Group A.’’ With the arrest of outpatient director John
Rittmeister in 1942, this group was formally dissolved
and the psychoanalysts’ activities at the institute were
further camouflaged.
GEOFFREY COCKS
See also: Germany Allegemeine Ällegemeine Ärztliche
Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie; Berliner Psychoanalytische Poliklinik; France, Göring, Matthias Heinrich;
Laforgue, René; Second World War; Müller-Braunschweig, Carl; Rittmeister, John Friedrich Karl; SchultzHencke, Harald Julius Alfred Carl-Ludwig.
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DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES
Bibliography
Cocks, Geoffrey. (1997). Psychotherapy in the Third Reich:
The Göring Institute (2nd edition). New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers.
Lockot, Regine. (1985). Erinnern und Durcharbeiten: zur
Geschichte der Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie im Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.
DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS, THE
In this book, conceived in 1922 and published in
1924, Sándor Ferenczi and Otto Rank were reacting
against the practical fallout (transference and resistances in psychoanalytic treatment) from Freud’s
ideas on repetition compulsion and analysis of the
ego.
According to the authors, the psychoanalytic movement gave in to a desire to claim to ‘‘know too much’’
and thus was diverted from its earliest ‘‘active’’ orientations. Psychoanalysts had developed incorrect technical precepts and were clinging to rigid or obsolete
rules with regard to the transference.
The authors argued that the psychoanalyst’s role is
to ‘‘condition the unity of the process,’’ to act as a catalyst for the transference, and to encourage repetition
by partly playing the role of the parental imagos. In
this way, unconscious memory traces can finally be felt
by the patient, transformed into ‘‘actual memories’’
(remembering/remembrance/recollection), and interpreted upon dissolution of the transference. It is lived
experience that carries conviction, the true source of
knowledge and the guarantee of therapeutic ‘‘effectiveness.’’
However, the analyst’s ‘‘desire to learn and to
teach,’’ they held, led to errors in technique such as
‘‘fanaticism of interpretation’’ or seeking to confirm
knowledge. By situating resistance on the side of the
transference and the patient’s narcissism, analysts
increase the patient’s unconscious guilt, masking their
own difficulties in integrating negative transference
and their narcissistic countertransference.
The future of the discipline, the authors said,
depended on the ‘‘elimination of intellectual resistances.’’ ‘‘Training analysis is in no way different from
therapeutic analysis’’ and should not be reserved for
medical doctors. Family physicians could be given special training (including hypnosis, provided it was
better understood) that would contribute to mass
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prophylaxis for psychiatric conditions. The authors
emphasized therapeutic use of repetition in the transference, whereas Freud saw it above all as an obstacle
to the process, since for him interpretation was the privileged therapeutic tool. This marked the beginnings
of a schism.
Rank broke with the Committee. Ferenczi replaced
his ‘‘active’’ method—based on an increase in tensions—with a principle of ‘‘laissez-faire’’ or ‘‘relaxation,’’ which Freud opposed after 1930.
This book introduced ideas and controversies
that were taken up by later authors (Michael
Balint, Donald W. Winnicott, Harold F. Searles, Jacques Lacan): the therapeutic use of object relations
and regression; the analyst’s ‘‘discretion’’ (caution
in interpretation); the analyst’s resistances and the
role of countertransference; interest in training for
physicians; and the risks inherent in ‘‘training’’
analysis.
CORINNE DAUBIGNY
See also: Active technique; Counter-transference; Ferenczi, Sándor; Rank (Rosenfeld), Otto; Technique with
adults, psychoanalytic; Training analysis; Training of the
psychoanalyst.
Source Citation
Ferenczi, Sandor, and Rank, Otto. (1925). The development
of psychoanalysis (Caroline Newton, Trans). New York:
Nervous and Mental Disease Pub. (Original work published 1924)
Bibliography
Balint, Michael. (1968). The basic fault: therapeutic aspects of
regression. London: Tavistock.
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1968). Thalassa: a theory of genitality
(Henry Alden Bunker, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1924)
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1926). Contra-indications to ‘‘active’’
psychoanalytical technique. In Further contributions to the
theory and technique of psycho-analysis (J. Rickman, Comp.
and J. I. Suttie, et al., Trans.). London: Hogarth.
Freud, Sigmund. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE,
18: 1–64.
DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES. See Processes of
development
407
DEVELOPMENTAL DISORDERS
DEVELOPMENTAL DISORDERS
Symptomatic disorders of early childhood
(disorders relating to sleeping, eating, and psychosomatic disorders such as infantile asthma):
without excluding possible organic etiologies,
these disorders should always be considered as
the causes and effects of dysfunctions in the
family structure and can, in serious cases, jeopardize the life of the baby.
Disorders in psychological development resulting
from dysfunctions of the motor or sensory systems that may be congenital or may have developed prematurely (epilepsy, cardiopathies,
cerebral motor infirmities, blindness or amblyopia, deafness, etc.).
Disorders with a neurotic structure (hysterical or
obsessional functioning, states of anxiety): here
we must distinguish between the ‘‘normal’’ infantile neurosis, resulting from the oedipal drama,
and childhood neuroses that call for specific
interventions. Many cases present a more localized symptomatology, to be considered in the
context of neurotic organization: persistent bedwetting, eating disorders, language problems and
problems with fine motor skills, intellectual inhibitions (which can be mistaken for mild or moderate mental handicaps), academic phobias or
failure, etc.
Borderline states and psychopathic structures
(Misès, 1990). Perverse structures are rare in children; in adolescents and adults they indicate serious disorders in the processes of identification
and must be understood in the light of the subject’s history.
Finally, many disorders in children can be understood in terms of deprivation or serious alterations in the environment, primarily in the family
(premature separation from the mother, alcoholism and/or sexual aggression by the father, maltreatment); even in the absence of a pathological
condition in the parents, problems relating to
adoption or medically assisted procreation may
justify the intervention of a psychoanalyst. In all
these cases, even more than those previously
mentioned, it is the whole family, over and above
the individual subject, that needs to receive care.
The term ‘‘developmental disorders’’ describes alterations in the normal process of development and any
functional structures resulting from those alterations.
As early as Studies on Hysteria (1895d), Freud conceived of psychoneuroses as functional structures that
had been altered by factors having a premature effect
on the normal processes of psychogenesis. He thus
developed a theory of the etiology of hysteria whereby
psychic trauma (a sexual aggression) occurred at an
early age but did not take full effect until puberty
(1894a and 1896b). He also attributed a similar etiology to obsessional neurosis (1895c). After 1897 he
admitted that the causative moment of a neurosis
could equally well derive from fantasies or from real
events, and he maintained throughout his work that
the pathological structure thus constituted was explicable in terms of fixations and regressions. Three
major clinical texts illustrate this thesis: Little Hans
(1919b), The Rat Man (1919d), and The Wolf Man
(1918b [1914]). Beginning in about 1908, he extended
this system to the psychoses—which he considered to
be narcissistic neuroses—despite certain theoretical
difficulties, as witnessed by his conversations with
Jung.
After Freud, psychoanalytical thinking spread particularly to the field of psychiatry and especially to
infant and child psychiatry, which it contributed to
creating. It would take a major comprehensive study
to review the developmental disorders that psychoanalysis can envisage treating with one or another of its
specific modes of action (whether a classic analysis,
face-to-face psychotherapy, or psychoanalytic psychodrama), or with other modes of action (psychiatric,
educational) guided by a psychoanalytical approach to
the disorder. A classification of these developmental
disorders is presented in Traité de psychiatrie de
l’enfant et de l’adolescent (Treatise on child and adolescent psychiatry), edited by Serge Lebovici, René Diatkine, and Michel Soulé (1995), and the following is
based on its main sections:
Disorders resulting from disturbances in the
early mother-child relationship: these disorders
(particularly in cases of infantile autism or psychosis) from the pre-oedipal period affect the
very foundations of personal identity and the
development of a distinct, autonomous, and permanent Self.
40 8
In this entire field, but no doubt more so in cases
that strike us by their severity (infantile autism, for
instance), there are controversies and polemics that
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D E V E R E U X , G E O R G E S (1908 –1 985)
oppose psychoanalysts (and those who speak in their
name, sometimes making outrageous claims) and
organicists intent on ignoring the specifically psychic
and relational dimensions of the issue in question.
Reconstructing the subject’s past remains one of the
major pathways in the psychoanalytic approach to disorders. Dysfunctions in the present structure of a
given person are analyzed with reference to the developmental stages of that structure and by referring to a
model of normal development.
The practice of analyzing children has greatly contributed to defining such developmental models. It is
worth noting in this regard that some authors (André
Green) criticize the use in certain developmental models
of an ad hoc ‘‘fictitious baby’’ and stress structure (synchronic organization) rather than history (diachronic).
ROGER PERRON
See also: Abandonment; Adolescent crisis; Autism; Autistic capsule/nucleus; Deprivation; Identity; Infantile psychosis; Prematureness; Prepsychosis; Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality.
Bibliography
Freud Sigmund. (1894a). The neuro-psychoses of defence.
SE, 3: 41–61.
———. (1895c). Obsessions and phobias: Their psychical
mechanism and their aetiology. SE, 3: 69–82.
———. (1896b). Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses
of defence. SE, 3: 157–185.
dispersed according to Mohave funeral rites in Parker,
Arizona. Dobo assumed the name Georges Devereux
in 1932, the same year he converted to Catholicism.
He spent his childhood and adolescence in Lugos
(Transylvania), his birthplace, which was annexed by
Romania in 1919. He was the youngest of three children; the eldest committed suicide during adolescence.
Devereux’s family was well off and cultivated, polyglot,
and riven with conflicts. His pro-German mother systematically objected to the pro-French sentiments of
the rest of the family.
Devereux displayed considerable musical talent as
a child, both as a pianist and composer, and he
wrote poetry. He left Bavaria for Paris in 1926, frequented Parisian literary circles, and formed friendships with a number of famous individuals among
them, including Klaus Mann. In 1927 he published
poems and essays, written in German, in French
avant-garde journals like Eugène Ionesco’s Transitions. He oscillated between lifestyles and professions:
bookseller, writer, physicist, chemist, mathematician,
sociologist, ethnologist. In Paris during the early thirties, he studied with Marcel Mauss and Lucien LévyBruhl, and then with Alfred Kroeber at the University
of California, Berkeley. From there he left on his first
expedition to live among the Mohave Indians, to
whom he remained emotionally and scientifically
attached. The following year he traveled to the high
plateaus of Indochina to study the Sedang Moi
(1933–1935).
DEVEREUX, GEORGES (1908–1985)
His experiences in the field led him to psychoanalysis and transcultural psychiatry in 1938. Ethnopyschoanalysis and ethnopsychiatry developed in
response to the cultural relativism of the time. Devereux was in Paris at the end of the Second World War,
where he served in the U.S. navy, and began his own
psychoanalysis with Marc Schlumberger. After returning to the United States, he worked with Karl Menninger at the Menninger Clinic at the University of Kansas
at Topeka, from 1946 to 1953. Indian veterans suffering from traumatic neuroses were his patients. He
practiced psychoanalysis and became a member, in
1952, of the International Psychoanalytic Association
(IPA) and the Philadelphia and New York Psychoanalytic Societies. He taught at Temple University in
Philadelphia.
Georges Devereux, an ethnopsychoanalyst, was born
György Dobo on September 13, 1908, in Transylvania,
Hungary, and died in Paris in 1985. His ashes were
Devereux returned to Paris in 1963. He became a
member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris in
1964, and taught ethnopsychiatry and psychoanalysis
Lebovici, Serge, Diatkine, René, and Soulé, Michel. (1995).
Nouveau traité de psychiatrie de l’enfant et de l’adolescent.
Second edition. Paris: P.U.F.
Misès, Roger. (1990). Les Pathologies limites de l’enfance.
Paris: P.U.F.
Further Reading
Tyson, Phyllis & Tyson, Robert. (1990). Psychoanalytic theories of development: An integration. New Haven/London:
Yale University Press.
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D I A T K I N E , R E N É (1918 –1 997)
at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
and, occasionally, at Oxford University.
Devereux’s published works comprise more than
four hundred contributions. His articles, reports, and
monographs range from a detailed descriptive approach
to the psychopathology and therapeutic practices of the
Mohave and Sedang peoples, to the psychoanalytic
interpretation of Greek mythology, to considerations of
the mental disturbances of Western societies, and
the methodological difficulties in the social sciences.
He was in contact with American anthropologists,
including Margaret Mead and Ralph Linton, but never
abandoned his analytic approach. He introduced methodological concepts such as ‘‘complementarity’’ and
‘‘transculturalism’’ and opened new fields of investigation by integrating psychoanalytic, psychiatric, ethnological, and mythological explanations.
SIMONE VALENTIN
See also: Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry.
Bibliography
Devereux, Georges. (1953). Cultural factors in psychoanalytic therapy. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 1, 4, 629–655.
———. (1970). Essais d’ethnopsychiatrie générale Paris,
Gallimard,.
———. (1985). Ethnopsychanalyse complémentariste. Paris,
Flammarion. (Original work published 1972)
———. (1978). L’ethnopsychiatrie. Ethnopsychiatrica 1, 1,
7–13.
Devereux, Georges; and Simon, Bennett. (1976). Dreams in
Greek tragedy. An ethno-psychoanalytical study. Berkeley,
Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Hook, R. (Ed.) (1979). Fantasy and symbol; studies in
anthropological interpretation, essay in honor of George
Devereux. London: Academic Press.
DIATKINE, RENÉ (1918–1997)
René Diatkine, a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was born on April 6, 1918, in Paris, where he died
on November 2, 1997. He was born into a Russian Jewish family (from the region of Vitebsk) that emigrated
to France during the early part of the twentieth
century. He began studying medicine in 1939 and
continued through World War II, during which he was
41 0
mobilized twice. When not on active duty, he lived in
Marseille, where he established his first significant professional contacts, most notably with Rudolph
Loewenstein.
In 1946, as soon as the war was over, Diatkine
became a physician and trained in psychiatry and psychoanalysis in Paris, where he settled permanently. He
worked as an intern, then as a senior psychiatrist at the
children’s hospital Hôpital Necker des enfants malades
in Professor Georges Heuyer’s department. During
this period he met Julian de Ajuriaguerra, with whom
he opened a practice to treat language and motor disturbances. He and Ajuriaguerra also worked together
to open a center for observing children, where they
collaborated with language educators and psychomotor and language trainers. At the same time, Diatkine
began his analytic training, undergoing analysis with
Jacques Lacan. He became an associate member of the
Société psychanalytique de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic
Society) on June 26, 1951, and a full member on July
1, 1952, after having resumed analysis with Sacha
Nacht. He participated in the critical dialogue that
expanded the field of French psychiatry, which until
then had been restricted to asylums. It was at this time
that Diatkine established what were to become the key
interests of an extremely active career.
In 1958, together with Serge Lebovici and Rosine
Crémieux, he established the journal La psychiatrie de
l’enfant (Psychiatry of the child). That same year, with
Serge Lebovici, Philippe Paumelle, and others, he
founded the Association de santé mentale (Mental
Health Association) in Paris. There in 1963 he helped
establish the Centre Alfred-Binet, a psychoanalytic
institution for children.
In 1972 Diatkine, together with Julian de Ajuriaguerra and Serge Lebovici, founded a children’s line as
part of the series Le fil rouge, published by Presses universitaires de France.
In Geneva and Paris, Diatkine helped develop a
system of adult care for schizophrenic patients. In
Geneva he was appointed associate professor in 1972,
then part-time professor, and finally honorary professor in 1991. He continued to lead seminars until
1995.
In addition to his institutional commitments, Diatkine was active in the Paris Psychoanalytic Society. In
1953 he became director of the Centre de consultations et de traitements psychanalytiques (Center for
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DIFFERENCES
Psychoanalytic Consultation and Treatment) of the
new Institut de Psychanalyse in Paris. That same year
he participated in supervisory committees of the International Psychoanalytical Association, working to
spread the use of psychoanalysis in Spain and Portugal.
In 1964, under the auspices of the Paris Psychoanalytic
Society, he instituted the annual Deauville Colloquium, known after his death as the René Diatkine
Colloquium. In 1968 he was president of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society and remained active in its teaching
committees and candidate training programs.
In 1982, with Marie Bonnafé, he founded Actions
culturelles contre les exclusions et les ségrégations
(Cultural Activities to Counter Exclusion and Segregation), a unique organization providing access to books
to children and parents living in marginalized or poor
communities. That same year Diatkine created Les
cahiers du Centre Alfred-Binet (Journal of the Alfred
Binet Center).
Diatkine wrote extensively: his list of publications
includes more than four hundred titles. From the
1950s he progressively developed his ideas. Since then
his approach was recognized as highly different, even
though his work was still influenced by contemporary
neuropsychology, especially the research of Julian de
Ajuriaguerra. His work helped establish foundations
for a new form of child psychoanalysis. His book La
psychanalyse précoce (Precocious psychoanalysis;
1972), written in collaboration with Janine Simon,
remains an important text on child psychoanalysis.
In it he developed his notion of the role of primal
fantasies. Several of his studies were significant for
the evolution of French psychoanalytic thought after
World War II: ‘‘Étude des fantasmes chez l’enfant’’
(Fantasies in children), in collaboration with Serge
Lebovici (1954), ‘‘Aggresivité et fantasmes d’agression’’ (Aggression and aggression fantasies; 1964),
‘‘Rêve, illusion et connaissance’’ (Dreams: illusion
and understanding; 1974), ‘‘Introduction à une discussion sur le concept d’objet en psychanalyse’’
(Introduction to a discussion of the object in psychoanalysis; 1989).
While maintaining his individual practice, Diatkine developed original techniques for expanding
the application of psychoanalysis: individual psychodrama, collaboration with teams of multidisciplinary
caregivers, techniques of language reeducation, field
work, coordinated programs involving teachers and
librarians. He explained how links between the norINTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
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mal and the pathological could be used to escape
overly rigid classifications, questioned the ‘‘ravages of
fate,’’ and worked to reestablish the historical continuity that dissolves during a difficult adolescence.
Emphasizing latent mental potential, he insisted on
the possibility of psychic reorganization, and transmitting, rather than teaching, the richness and discipline of psychoanalytic thought; he fought against
reductionism.
FLORENCE QUARTIER-FRINGS
Notion developed: Prepsychosis.
See also: Aggressiveness/aggression; Centre Alfred-Binet;
Centre de consultations et de traitements psychanalytiques Jean-Favreau; Character neurosis; Child psychoanalysis; France; Indications and contraindications for
psychoanalysis for an adult; Maternal reverie, capacity
for; Société psychanalytique de Paris et Institut de psychanalyse de Paris; Stammering; Technique with children, psychoanalytic.
Bibliography
Aguirre Omar, José-Maria, and Guimon Ugartechea, José.
(1994). Vie et œuvre de Julian de Ajuriaguerra. Paris: Masson.
Bonnafé, Marie. (1994). Les livres c’est bon pour les bébés.
Paris: Calmann-Lévy.
Diatkine, René. (1964). Agressivité et fantasmes d’agression.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
———. (1974). Rêve, illusion et connaissance. Revue française de psychanalyse, 38 (5–6), 769–820.
———. (1989). Introduction à une discussion sur le concept d’objet en psychanalyse. Revue française de psychanalyse, 53 (4), 1037–1043.
Diatkine, René, and Simon, Janine. (1972). La psychanalyse
précoce. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Lebovici, Serge, and Diatkine, René. (1954). Étude des fantasmes chez l’enfant. Revue française de psychanalyse, 18
(1), 108–155.
Lebovici, Serge, Diatkine, René, and Soulé, Michel. (1985).
Traité de psychiatrie de l’enfant et de l’adolescent. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Quartier-Frings, Florence. (1997). René Diatkine. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
DIFFERENCES. See Narcissism of minor
differences
411
DIPSOMANIA
DIPSOMANIA
acts (drinking, whether or not associated with dromomania) are central to the obsession.
The term ‘‘dipsomania’’ was used in clinical psychiatry.
It is not a psychoanalytic term but was used on occasion by Sigmund Freud and other psychoanalysts. The
classic definition of ‘‘dipsomania’’ is that of Valentin
Magnan (1893): Preceded by a vague feeling of malaise
and a burning sensation in the throat, dipsomania is a
sudden need to drink that is irresistible, despite a short
and intense struggle. The crisis lasts from one day to
two weeks and consists of a rapid and massive ingestion of alcohol or whatever other strong, excitatory
liquid happens to be at hand, whether or not it is fit
for consumption. It involves solitary alcohol abuse,
with loss of all other interests. These crises recur at
indeterminate intervals, separated by periods when the
subject is generally sober and may even manifest
repugnance for alcohol and intense remorse over his
or her conduct. These recurring attacks may be associated with wandering tendencies (dromomania) or
suicidal impulses. Although ‘‘dipsomania’’ means
compulsive thirst, the use of the term is reserved for
the compulsive intake of alcoholic beverages.
In a letter of January 11, 1897, Freud cited the case
of ‘‘a man of genius’’ who ‘‘had attacks of the severest
dipsomania from his fiftieth year onwards’’ and who
was ‘‘a pervert and consequently healthy’’ until that
point (1950a [1887–1902], p. 240). The man’s crises
were heralded by catarrh, hoarseness, and diarrhea
(‘‘the oral sexual system’’), all of which represented
bodily ‘‘reproduction of his own passive experiences’’
and brought together desensitization, repetition, and
mastery. Freud compared this substitution of compulsive drinking for the sexual instinct to the substitution
that culminates in the passion for gambling. In this letter to Fliess, Freud outlined an intergenerational psychopathology. During the same period he published,
in succession, ‘‘Heredity and the aetiology of the neuroses’’ (1896a) and ‘‘Sexuality in the aetiology of the
neuroses’’ (1898a).
The term was introduced by Dr. C. W. Hufeland in
1819 in his preface to Trunksucht (Dipsomania), a
study of the phenomenon by C. von Bruhl–Cramer.
Even as early as 1817 the Italian physician Salvatori
had identified a ‘‘furor to drink.’’ All of these authors
contrast dipsomania and chronic alcoholism.
Freud alluded to dipsomania in his correspondence
with Wilhelm Fliess (Freud to Fliess, January 11, 1897,
and ‘‘Draft K’’) and in his ‘‘Further Remarks on the
Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’’ (1896b). He saw dipsomania as a secondary symptom of a defense against an
obsessive thought that forms when the compulsion is
displaced from that thought onto the motor impulses
directed against the thought. In more exact terms, the
compulsion, emanating from the ego, is mobilized
against the affects linked to the obsession, as a measure
of protection against and desensitization to suffering
induced by these affects and as a means of obtaining
pleasure. This need for alcohol is a substitute for an
associated repressed sexual activity of an autoerotic
kind, namely masturbation, which Freud, in a letter to
Fliess dated December 22, 1897, calls ‘‘the one major
habit, the Ôprimal addiction’ ’’ (1950a [1887–1902],
p. 272). The drunken stupor represents both a desensitization of the ego to painful affects and the pleasure
of active mastery of experiences of passivity. Motor
41 2
There is little elaboration of this notion in Freud’s
subsequent writings. However, in considering epileptic
fits and pathological gambling as they relate to (autoerotic) sexuality and death in ‘‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’’ (1928b), Freud provided, without designating
them as such, insights into the alcoholic’s crises: ‘‘He
never rested until he had lost everything’’ (p. 191).
‘‘The irresistible nature of the temptation, the solemn
resolutions, which are nevertheless invariably broken,
never to do it again, the stupefying pleasure and the
bad conscience which tells the subject that he is ruining himself (committing suicide)—all these elements
remain unaltered in the process of substitution’’
(p. 193).
In this essay Freud proposes the hypothesis of an
abnormal mechanism of discharge of the instincts,
posited organically, that operates both in histolytic or
toxic brain disease and in cases of inadequate control
over the psychic economy when energy levels reach a
certain threshold. This mechanism is closely related to
the sexual processes, understood as ‘‘fundamentally of
toxic origin’’ (p. 180), and enables the ego to ‘‘get rid
by somatic means of amounts of excitation which it
cannot deal with psychically’’ (p. 181). The meaning
and intentionality of such crises (drunkenness, coma,
or deep sleep) are well known: Such ‘‘deathlike’’ (p.
182) states express an identification with a dead person, in either reality or fantasy, the latter being more
significant (boys, in their fantasies, usually wish for
the death of the father). The dipsomania crisis,
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preceded by an aura of supreme happiness, liberation,
and triumph, has a punitive value: the subject is dead,
like the person the subject wished dead. This is similar
to the situation of the brothers of the primitive horde
and relates to totemic ritual.
In the view of Otto Juliusburger (1913), dipsomaniacs who seek out the company of ‘‘lower-class’’
drunks in this way demonstrate their subjection to
sadomasochistic instincts. Edward Glover (1932) compared dipsomania to an obsessive ceremonial (less
obvious in solitary drinkers) and saw it as an ‘‘artificial’’ manic-depressive syndrome (with more direct
sadism and a less severe oral fixation). Similarly, Otto
Fenichel (1945) saw a link between pathologically
impulsive characters and ‘‘the ego’s morbid syntonic
impulses,’’ expressed on the economic and dynamic
levels as manic-depressive disorders characterized by
alternating acts and remorse. These impulses are seen
as (futile) attempts to master old experiences through
repetition and active dramatization, to master guilt,
depression, and anxiety. John W. Higgins (1953) and
William J. Browne (1965) emphasize the passage from
thought to motor action, a return to the mother, an
incorporation of the mother’s breast, and denial of
passivity. For Charles Melman (1976), aversion therapies that seek to create new boundaries are actually
aggravating factors in dipsomania. In an observation
based on just two interviews, Jean-Paul Descombey
(1992) relates the case of a young dipsomaniac who
engages in a repetitive ritual of a ‘‘tournament of
grand dukes’’ with his various brothers and sisters,
begun from when he discovered the body of his dead
mother; autoerotism and the death instinct are
condensed in the subject’s comment ‘‘I must finish
myself off.’’
The notions of somalcoholosis (P. Fouquet, 1955)
and alcoholism (Edmund Jellinek) are synonymous
with dipsomania. Alcoholepsy, or alcoholic seizures
(P. Fouquet, 1970) is a critical episode in a chronic
alcoholic; associated forms of dromo-dipsomania have
been described. Bulimic behaviors, which are comparable to dipsomania, are sometimes associated with it.
Alimentary orgasm (Sándor Radó, 1933), which has a
euphoric pharmacogenic effect, is provoked by the
ego, which thus rediscovers its broadest narcissistic
dimension.
The relative dearth of studies of dipsomania is
explained by the fact that dipsomaniacs are often
approached only in single interviews in hospital
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emergency rooms, where they tend to end up; there
is rarely any follow-up. Nevertheless, as a particular
form of alcohol abuse, dipsomania is of interest in
that it involves a kind of epitome and condensation
of various aspects of alcoholism: a compulsion for
repetition; a short-circuiting of psychical working
through by acting out an undeclared depressive state;
the problematic interplay of desensitization and
attempted mastery; and autoerotism and selfdestructive, potentially lethal actions. There are two
possible dangers here: overdistinguishing dipsomania
from other forms of alcoholism and, alternatively,
failing to perceive its specificity. The same is true for
transitory alcohol abuse and drunkenness in ‘‘normal’’ subjects, which are insufficient in and of themselves to account for alcohol addiction, whether or
not dipsomania is present. A dynamic approach
must go beyond organicist views, which attempt to
link dipsomania to manic-depressive psychosis or
epilepsy, and take into account the connections suggested in clinical practice. Finally, Freud, in ‘‘Dostoevsky and parricide’’ (1928b), though he does not
explicitly cite alcoholism (from which Dostoyevski
himself was not immune), nevertheless proposes a
toxicity-based theory of sexuality and the neuropsychoses (Descombey, 1994).
JEAN-PAUL DESCOMBEY
See also: Addiction; Alcoholism.
Bibliography
Browne, William J. (1965). The alcoholic bout as an acting
out. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 34, 420–437.
Descombey, Jean-Paul. (1992). Alcoolisme: dépression ou
addiction? Information Psychiatrique, 68, (4), 338–345.
———. (1994). Précis d’alcoologie clinique. Paris: Dunod.
Fenichel, Otto. (1945). The psychoanalytic theory of neurosis.
New York: Norton.
Freud, Sigmund. (1896b). Further remarks on the neuropsychoses of defence. SE, 3: 162–185.
———. (1928b). Dostoevsky and parricide. SE, 21:
177–196.
———. (1950a [1887–1902]). Extracts from the Fliess
papers. SE, 1: 173–280.
Glover, Edward. (1932). On the aetiology of drug addiction.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 13, 298–328.
413
DIRECT ANALYSIS
Magnan, Valentin. (1893). Leçons cliniques sur les maladies
mentales: état mental du dipsomane (2nd ed.). Paris: L.
Bataille.
Mijolla, Alain de, and Shentoub, Salem A. (1973). Pour une
psychanalyse de l’alcoolisme. Paris: Payot.
Radó, Sándor. (1926). The psychic effects of intoxication:
attempts at a psychoanalytic theory of drug addiction.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 7, 16.
DIRECT ANALYSIS
Direct analysis is a therapeutic technique developed
by John Rosen for the treatment of schizophrenics.
Rosen began from the basic postulate that serious
pathologies have their origins in inadequate or poor
maternal care. As the result of such care, the patient
is psychically a baby and must be treated as such,
with unconditional love from a caregiver. This lead
Rosen in some cases to assume the nearly continuous
care of a single patient for several weeks, and sometimes several months, while actively trying to shake
up or pierce the patient’s defensive shell through socalled ‘‘direct’’ interventions (including violent physical contact).
Rosen’s position was appealing because of its
optimistic slant (its assumption that if the therapist
does not know where he is going, the patient’s
unconscious would), because of the courage and
sacrifice required of the therapist (whose personal
life was thereby relegated to the background), and
without doubt because of the generous but
obviously simplistic nature of the etiological theory
involved. At its most extreme, Rosen’s technique is
not so very different from that proposed by Sándor
Ferenczi before Freud convinced him to abandon it.
Yet on a theoretical level, Rosen’s theory obviously
misinterprets the central role of conflict in psychic
pathology, and on a practical level, his technique
ignores the obvious risks of uncontrolled countertransference.
ROGER PERRON
See also: Schizophrenia.
DIRECTED DAYDREAM (R. DESOILLE)
The notion of the directed daydream refers to a product of the imagination, an expression of a waking
oneiric state, used in the 1930s by Robert Desoille for
therapeutic purposes; he later gave it the name directed
daydream (or directed waking dream).
The directed daydream is an active mobilization of
the imagination in a relaxed setting by means of suggestions of climbing and descending, for the purpose
of exploring ‘‘subconscious affectivity’’ and gaining
access to the ‘‘superior part of the mind that is not
exclusively colored by instinct.’’ Imaginary space
appears in this context as a metaphor for mental space.
The approach’s theoretical development extends from
Freudian sublimation (1938) to a Pavlovian conception of the search for new, dynamic stereotypes
(1961), by way of a Jungian mobilization of archetypes
(1945).
At the beginning of the 1970s, practitioners of the
directed daydream technique in the Groupe International du Rêve Eveillé en Psychanalyse (GIREP;
International group of the directed daydream in psychoanalysis) integrated the Freudian unconscious into
their practice and theory. This gave rise to an analytical
practice known as the ‘‘directed daydream in psychoanalysis.’’ This involved allowing images to form as
spontaneously as possible, creating an imaginary space
based on the idea of moving or traveling, describing to
the analyst the scenes that unfold, and having the
patient describe his associated feelings. Treatment
comprised two inseparable and interactive elements:
producing the directed daydream and putting it into
words, and the associative work of exploring its meaning in relation to memories, nocturnal dreams, and
fantasies; constructions and interpretations operated
on a metaphorical level. Psychoanalytic in its reference
to the unconscious and to various Freudian and postFreudian concepts, this treatment is distinctive in
terms of its procedures and its view of the therapeutic
relationship, according to which the dynamics of the
directed dream treatment imply analysis of the transference. Among the approach’s main theoretical orientations are the following:
Bibliography
Rosen, John. (1953). Direct analysis. New York: Grune and
Stratton.
41 4
Nicole Fabre, for whom the space of the directed
daydream, a joint creation, facilitates the expression of old problem areas and partakes of sublimation in the Freudian sense.
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DISAVOWAL
Roger Dufour, who emphasizes the specular
function of the directed daydream: the patient
works on the relationship between speech, the
body, and the Imaginary—a relationship that is
basic to mental dynamics.
Gilbert Maurey, who locates the directed daydream at the metaphorical boundary between the
Imaginary and the Symbolic as a mediator for
access to the unconscious, the treatment being
worked out in terms of the Real-SymbolicImaginary triad.
Jacques Launay, who emphasizes the role of
movement in the imaginary space and its ability
to invigorate the primary process.
Jean Guilhot and Marie-Aimee Guilhot, who
describe the directed daydream as an instrument
for change through the visualization of reparative
or innovative experiences within an analytic and
transpersonal perspective.
JACQUES LAUNAY
See also: Desoille, Robert.
Bibliography
Dufour, Roger. (1978). Écouter le rêve. Le Rêve-éveillé-dirigé
analytique. Écoute et repères de l’Inconscient. Poésie et mythe
en psychanalyse. Paris: Robert Laffont.
Fabre, Nicole. (1985). Les voies et les fins d’une analyse
R.E.D. Le Rêve-éveillé-analytique. Toulouse, France: Privat.
Guilhot, Jean, and Marie-Aimée Guilhot. (1987). Analyse,
activation et action thérapeutique. Vers un intégralisme analytique et prospectif. Paris: E. S. F.
Launay, Jacques. (1983). Le Rêve-éveillé et l’Inconscient. La
Serrure et le Songe. Paris: Economia.
Maurey, Gilbert. (1995). Le Rêve-éveillé en psychanalyse. De
l’imaginaire à l’Inconscient. Paris: E. S. F.
DISAVOWAL
The term ‘‘disavowal’’ (Verleugnung), often translated
as ‘‘denial,’’ denotes a mental act that consists in rejecting the reality of a perception on account of its potentially traumatic associations. The notion of disavowal
made its appearance rather late in Freud’s work. For
years he was content to describe the little boy’s refusal
to recognize the absence of a penis in a little girl, as
observed in clinical practice, without employing a
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specific term. Thus, in his ‘‘On the Sexual Theories of
Children’’ (1908c) and in the case history of ‘‘Little
Hans’’ (1909b), he noted the phenomenon and
described it in terms of a rejection of perceptual evidence. Little boys, he argued, do not doubt ‘‘that a
genital like [their] own is to be attributed to everyone
[they] know. . . . This conviction is energetically maintained by boys, is obstinately defended against the contradictions which soon result from observation, and is
only abandoned after severe internal struggles (the castration complex).’’ The period concerned, lasting
approximately from three to five years of age, Freud
dubs the ‘‘phallic stage’’ in view of the narcissistic
hypercathexis of the idea of the penis by which it is
usually characterized—especially in the little boy, who
finds it unthinkable that anyone worthy of respect
should be without a penis, least of all his mother.
The little girl cannot similarly reject the perception
of her own lack of a penis. However, in certain young
girls, Freud notes ‘‘the hope of some day obtaining a
penis in spite of everything and so becoming like a
man may persist to an incredibly late age and may
become a motive for strange and otherwise unaccountable actions.’’
Freud’s first reference to the term was in the ‘‘Wolf
Man’’ case history (1918b [1914]; see also 1914a),
where he conceived of disavowal as operating between
at least two regions of the ego which invalidated one
another. Thus one region might accept the symbolic
character of castration and sexual difference while the
other embraced the all-or-nothing logic of the phallic
structure, and everything proceeded as though the two
spheres had no influence upon each other at all.
Beginning with the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916–17a), Freud began systematically using
the verb verleugnen to refer to the mental act of rejecting a perception as inconceivable—which James Strachey translated as ‘‘to disavow.’’ The noun form—die
Verleugnung (disavowal)—was not used to designate
the metapsychological concept until a little later
(1925h). It was mainly in his late work, in ‘‘A Short
Account of Psychoanalysis’’ (1940a [1938]) and ‘‘The
Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense’’ (1940e
[1938]), that Freud sought to anchor the specificity of
disavowal by situating it within the particular topography of the split ego.
In ‘‘The Infantile Genital Organization’’ (1923e),
Freud reasserted that only the male organ played a
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DISAVOWAL
significant role in the mind of the child of either sex
around three years of age. The child could understand
the absence of a penis only as the result of castration. It
was therefore the manner in which the initial disavowal was overcome that determined the castration
complex to which the individual would become subject. Returning to this crucial question in ‘‘Psychical
Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between
the Sexes’’ (1925j), Freud presented castration as a
result of a ‘‘deferred action,’’ the threatening nature of
the possible absence of the penis assuming its full mental force only after a more or less extended period of
disavowal.
Freud also noted that the persistence of such disavowal beyond the phallic period, into adolescence
and adulthood, could lead to a form of mental illness:
‘‘The process I would like to describe as denial [Verleugnung] . . . appears to be neither rare nor very dangerous for the mental life of the child, but in adults it
could lead to psychosis.’’
Moreover, Freud had published two observations of
young men in whom denial of the lack of a penis
appeared to determine the outbreak of psychotic
symptoms (1914a). The first was the famous ‘‘Wolf
Man,’’ whom Freud claimed had ‘‘dismissed’’ [verwarf—see ‘‘Foreclosure’’] the ‘‘reality [sic] of castration,’’ that he ‘‘refused to know anything about it, in
the sense of repressing it. He did not actually pass
judgment as to whether it existed or not, [castration]
but effectively it did not.’’ This rejection, as inconceivable, of the possible absence of the penis was what
triggered the patient’s returning hallucination of a severed little finger. For Freud, then, the psychotic ego
disavowed perceptual reality in a way somewhat akin
to the way a neurotic repressed certain instinctual
demands.
But Freud subsequently went on to broaden his
clinical work on disavowal well beyond the realm of
psychosis. In ‘‘Fetishism’’ (1927e) he reported a case of
two young men each of whom denied the death of his
father. However, Freud notes, neither of them developed a psychosis, even though a ‘‘a piece of reality
which was undoubtedly important has been disavowed
[verleugnet], just as the unwelcome fact of women’s
castration is disavowed in fetishists.’’
He then returned to the notion of the splitting of
the ego (already discussed in the Wolf Man case history), presenting it as the topographical corollary of
41 6
the mechanism of disavowal: the possible juxtaposition in the psyche of at least two incompatible mental
attitudes that appeared to have no influence on one
another. It was no longer a question, therefore, of
treating disavowal as the disavowal ‘‘of ’’ something
but rather as a mutual disavowal, a disjunction
‘‘between’’ two discrete realms of the split ego. Similar
disavowals were common, Freud noted, and not
merely among fetishists. In his later works Freud
maintained that disavowal was present to varying
degrees in psychosis, perversion, and very possibly too
in all normal subjects. He offered an instance from his
personal experience in a public letter to Romain Rolland (‘‘A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,’’
1936a, p. 245).
It was also in his paper on ‘‘Fetishism’’ that Freud
showed that disavowal, unlike repression, did not
erase the idea or perception in question but only its
meaning; this was why he rejected the term ‘‘scotomization’’ proposed by René Laforgue (1927e, pp. 153–
54). Disavowal was in fact a suspension of the function
of judgment, of that same attributing judgment he felt
was decisive in the formation of the ego. As a consequence of his methodological concern more clearly to
distinguish disavowal and repression, he ended by suggesting that repression treated the affect as disavowal
treated the idea, which may be taken to mean that
repression no more eliminates the affect (it is only displaced) than disavowal erases the idea (whose meaning
alone remains obscure).
This having been said, it is important to recognize
that all the clinical illustrations of disavowal supplied
by Freud over a thirty-year period are based on two
canonical illustrations: the disavowal of women’s lack
of a penis and the disavowal of the death of the father.
Disavowal is thus always a disavowal of absence, which
is why it is so important in the process of symbolization. In fact, Freud specifies as a prerequisite of symbolization the ability to represent the object to oneself
as something that can be absent: an object, he says, can
only be symbolized in absentia. The disavowal (of
absence) therefore constitutes a fundamental obstacle
to the very process of constructing psychic reality, and
in this it is quite distinct from negation, which operates as the starting point of the (preconscious) mental
recognition of something: disavowal and negation are
radically different in their logical functions.
Disavowal, as opposed to negation, is a narcissistic
expedient whereby the individual seeks to avoid
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DISCHARGE
acknowledging absences or shortcomings of key parental figures (castration of the mother, death of the
father). In practice, however, it transpires that persistent disavowal hardly allows the subject to overcome
the traumatic burden of the representations in question; indeed the potential latent virulence of these
representations appears rather to be made permanent
by the invalidation of possible symbolic links. Moreover, whatever suffering disavowal and splitting may
spare the subject’s consciousness is generally proportionately visited upon those around him.
In the treatment of patients afflicted by enduring
disavowal, everything suggests that they want to leave
the responsibility of thinking what is for them
unthinkable, of integrating what they cannot integrate,
up to the ‘‘other’’ member in the therapeutic relationship. This occurs primarily through the mechanism of
projective identification, which requires considerable
psychic expenditure on the part of that other person,
often within a very painful experiential realm. This
kind of detour through the mental economy of the
therapist is seemingly a necessary but not sufficient
condition for the subject’s successful integration of
such elements into a symbolic interplay thanks to
which the pleasure principle can again become
effective.
Jacques Lacan in his seminar on ‘‘Object Relations’’
(1956–1957), talks about disavowal (he uses the
French ‘‘démenti’’) as a fundamental mechanism of the
so-called perverse structure, with its characteristic
manner of treating castration: simultaneously rejecting
and accepting it. He employs the term ‘‘foreclosure’’ to
refer to the mechanism of symbolic denial, which he
feels is a key factor in psychosis.
BERNARD PENOT
See also: Fetishism; Negative, work of the; Repudiation.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a fiveyear-old boy (‘‘Little Hans’’). SE, 10: 5–147.
———. (1914a). Fausse reconnaissance (‘‘déjà raconté’’) in
psychoanalytic treatment. SE, 13: 201–207.
———. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile
neurosis. SE, 17: 1–122.
———. (1925j). Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes. SE, 19: 241–258.
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———. (1927e). Fetishism. SE, 21: 147–157.
———. (1936a). A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis. SE, 22: 239–248.
———. (1940e [1938]). Splitting of the ego in the process
of defence. SE, 23: 271–278.
Lacan, Jacques. (1956–1957). Le séminaire-livre IV, la relation d’objet. Paris: Le Seuil.
DISCHARGE
An economic term borrowed from a physicalist epistemological model, ‘‘discharge’’ was used by Sigmund
Freud in his theorization of how the psychic apparatus
deals with excitation. The notion of discharge thus
refers to an outward release of the energy produced in
the psychic apparatus by excitations, whether these are
external or internal in origin.
By virtue of its economic orientation, this notion is
part of the metapsychological approach and speaks to
the quantitative dimension in Freud’s model. Freud
discussed discharge when he described the pleasure/
unpleasure principle: the pleasure of discharge, the
unpleasure of retention. We should recall that according to Freud, the source of the instinct is a state of excitation in the body and its aim is to eliminate this
excitation. Obviously, the concept of discharge implies
as a corollary the notion of tension, or charge. Pleasure
and unpleasure probably depend less upon an exact
level of tension than upon the rhythm of variation in
tension. The principle of pleasure/unpleasure is thus
considered a particular case of Gustav Fechner’s ‘‘tendency toward stability,’’ that ‘‘tendency’’ becoming in
this instance the ‘‘principle of consistency.’’
Consistency is said to be achieved by means of the
discharge of the energy already present, but also by the
avoidance of factors that might increase the quantity
of excitation. The principle of consistency is indeed
basic to Freud’s economic theory and is closely linked
with the pleasure principle. The psychic apparatus, in
this view, also tends to cancel out excitations or reduce
them to a minimum, and Freud, following Barbara
Low, called this the ‘‘Nirvana principle,’’ which works
in tandem with the principle of inertia. It is in this
realm that the forces of Thanatos lurk; moroever, it
was in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), where
the death instinct is introduced, that Freud explicitly
formulated the principle of consistency and related it
to the Nirvana principle.
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DISINTEGRATION, FEELINGS
OF
(ANXIETIES)
Discharge can be total or partial; it can be appropriate or it can contribute to psychopathological, even
psychodramatic disorders. The notion thus appears in
Freud’s discussions of ‘‘abreaction’’ or ‘‘acting-out,’’
when there is insufficient regulation of excitation by
the psychic apparatus. Another possibility is discharge
into the body, which suggests the mysterious leap from
the psychic to the somatic, the notion of somatic compliance, and the phenomenon of conversion. Freud
also mentioned the pathogenic role of defective discharge in considering the model of actual neurosis, and
in presenting the hypothesis of the damming up of the
libido to explain the phenomenon of hypochondria.
Still in the context of discharge, the soma as an internal
safety-valve has been viewed as a way of handling tensions that cannot be worked through or that are too
massive—in short, a kind of somatic ‘‘acting-in.’’
ALAIN FINE
See also: Cathartic method; Emotion; Excitation; Free
energy/bound energy; Fusion/defusion of Instincts; Pleasure/unpleasure principle; Primary process/secondary
process; Principle of constancy; Psychic energy; Quantitative/qualitative; Reality principle; Repression; Thought;
Trauma; Unpleasure; Working through.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1914c). On narcissism: an introduction.
SE, 14, 67–102.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18,
1–64.
———. (1926d [1925]). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety.
SE, 20, 75–172.
Marty, Pierre, et al. (1968) Le cas Dora et le point de vue
psychosomatique. Revue française de psychanalyse, 32, 4.
DISINTEGRATION, FEELINGS OF
(ANXIETIES)
The expressions feelings of disintegration and disintegration anxieties refer to a feeling of extreme anxiety
that the personality is ‘‘falling to pieces’’ or disintegrating into elements that are no longer connected
together. This serious form of depersonalization has
been described in the psychoses, particularly schizophrenia. It has been mainly evoked, however, with
regard to the earliest stages of the infant’s development
and their consequences.
41 8
Following Melanie Klein’s description of the schizoid-paranoid position in ‘‘Notes on Some Schizoid
Mechanisms’’ (1946), the notion of fragmentation
appeared in theoretical descriptions and psychoanalytic
clinical practice to characterize the anxieties inherent
in that position. Under the influence of the death drive,
and introjected in the form of the persecutory breast or
penis, archaic defenses produce a major splitting of the
self considered in terms of bad internal objects. This
defensive mechanism is accompanied by feelings of
destruction, annihilation, or fragmentation of the ego
that have been interpreted by some as a precursor to
castration anxiety. Linked to deprivation, privation,
and frustration, only the introjection of a good object
can restore the cohesion of such a fragmented self, by
creating a path toward the depressive position.
These psychopathological notions have been taken
up by Kleinian authors such as Donald Winnicott,
although in his case greater importance is granted to
the environment, particularly the mother. Esther Bick
returned to the notion of fragmentation through her
observations of infants, and Wilfred R. Bion makes it a
constant, to varying degrees, of the psychotic part of
all personalities, with the ever-active threat of ‘‘catastrophic change.’’
Pierre Marty describes another form of fragmentation in his work on ‘‘essential depression,’’ and Heinz
Kohut views it as one of the main elements in the
pathologies of the self. Jacques Lacan, meanwhile,
reverses the Kleinian positions by viewing the archaic
anxieties of the ‘‘fragmented body’’ as the consequence
of castration, which is by definition inscribed within
the real from the beginning.
See also: Anxiety; Breast, good/bad object; Castration
complex; Essential depression; Foreclosure; Fragmentation; Paranoid-schizoid position; Privation; Psychotic
part of the personality; Schizophrenia.
Bibliography
Klein, Melanie. (1975). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. reprinted 1975 in: The writings of Melanie Klein (Vol.
3, 1946–1963, p. 1-24). London: Hogarth. (Reprinted from
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27: (1946), 99–
110.)
Kohut, Heinz. (1971). The analysis of the self. New York:
International Universities Press.
Lacan, Jacques. (1962-63). Le séminaire-Livre X: L’angoisse.
Unpublished.
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DISMANTLING
DISINTEGRATION PRODUCTS
A psychoanalytical theory founded on the development of the Self postulates a stage of development at
which its integration is achieved. This stage is characterized by a subjective feeling of continuity in time and
space, and simultaneously by an ease of communication between body and mind. Before one reaches this
stage, there is the psychological equivalent of separate
zones of operation, characterized by distinct zones of
pleasure and activity. A return to this previous stage of
disparate activity amounts to a form of disintegration:
any integration already achieved is undone. This disintegration is manifested by the emergence of isolated
activities that are non-communicative and unlinked
and involve isolated parts of the body, pleasure felt in
one isolated zone, and an isolated ideational preoccupation. This can take various forms: hallucinatory
thoughts, repetitive motor activity and/or hypochondriacal ruminations. This phenomenon can assume
alarming dimensions, but it can easily be overcome by
means of a rapid reintegration brought about by a
connection, described as a Self-object relation, which
serves to restore this temporarily lost state of cohesion.
From this point of view, the appearance and disappearance of psychotic symptomatology can be
explained by the shift from an integrated Self to the
emergence of products of disintegration. The particular cause of this regressive movement is some form of
narcissistic wound: in other words, it stems from
wounds to the Self that are serious enough to produce
a downward spiral involving fragmentation. The
appearance of products of disintegration in the course
of psychological treatment is considered to be the
result of the loss of a Self-object, which is the equivalent of a break in the Self/Self-object relation—a break
which is in turn experienced as a narcissistic wound.
ARNOLD GOLDBERG
See also: Fragmentation; Self-object.
Bibliography
Kohut, Heinz. (1977). The restoration of the self. New York:
International Universities Press.
DISMANTLING
The term dismantling, introduced by Donald Meltzer,
refers to a very primitive defense mechanism involving
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dissociation of the perceptual apparatus ‘‘by a passive
process that allows the various senses, specific and
general, internal and external, to attach to whatever
object is most stimulating at the moment’’ (Meltzer,
1975/1991)—for example, a light, a sound, or an odor.
Meltzer used this term for the first time in a paper
delivered at a meeting of the British Psychoanalytical
Society in June 1969, ‘‘The Origins of the Fetishistic
Plaything of Sexual Perversions’’ later published in his
second book, Sexual States of Mind (1973, pp. 107–113).
He took the idea of the dismantled object from the psychoanalytic treatment of children who had suffered
from early infantile autism. He defines dismantling as
‘‘the most primitive working of obsessional mechanisms’’ (p. 108). Unlike the splitting processes described
by Melanie Klein, which make use of the sadistic drives,
dismantling, which is reversible at any time, instead
relies on a relaxation of the attention function.
The author invented this term with reference to the
notion of ‘‘consensual validation’’ defined by Harry
Stack Sullivan, which is very close to Wilfred R. Bion’s
idea of the ‘‘common sense.’’ Meltzer’s proposed idea
involves a dissolution of such constructions, leading to
the creation of a multitude of unisensory objects. He
emphasizes that the implementation of such a defense
mechanism suppresses genuine relational experiences
and thus their introjection. In the first publication, he
hypothesizes that dismantling is also seen in sexual perversions where the exciting objects (fetishes) are ‘‘dismantled objects’’ used in their purely sensorial aspect.
The notion of dismantling is then taken up in greater
detail in Meltzer’s 1975 book Explorations in Autism,
where he shows the massive use of this defense mechanism in autism proper, explaining the stereotypes of
sensory autostimulation under the influence of the repetition compulsion. He demonstrates a more complex use
of this phenomenon in postautistic obsessionality and in
obsessional states in general. Meltzer argues that dismantling, which is beyond consensuality or within its dissolution, does not belong to the spectrum of projective
identification but rather belongs within the notion of
‘‘adhesive identity’’ positing a two-dimensional space,
proposed by Esther Bick (1975).
Some French authors (J. Bégoin, 1994; D. Ribas,
1994; D. Maldavsky, 1995) have compared dismantling
to decathexis in the Freudian sense, and it is indeed
possible to do so: The former can be considered as a
very primitive form of the latter. Dismantling also
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DISORGANIZATION
seems to be at work in the self-soothing behaviors
described by Claude Smadja (1993) and Gérard
Szwec (1993). These authors compare this mechanism
with the abnormal, destructive primary masochism
that Benno Rosenberg (1991) describes as ‘‘centered
around excitement in and of itself . . . and the gradual
abandonment of the object.’’ Frances Tustin also shares
this view in Autistic States in Children (1981), in which
is described an autosensuality, differentiated from
autoerotism, in autistic maneuvers and its exacerbation into self-directed sadism in certain cases.
GENEVIÈVE HAAG
See also: Autism; Autistic defenses.
Bibliography
Bégoin, Jean. L’être, l’espace et le temps: les travaux de
D. Meltzer sur l’autisme (1975). In Roger Perron and
Denys Ribas (Eds.), Autismes de l’enfance (pp. 91–114).
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Bick, Esther. (1986). Further considerations on the functioning of skin in early object relations: Findings from infant
observation integrated into child and adult analysis. British
Journal of Psychotherapy. 2, 292–299.
Meltzer, Donald. (1990). Sexual States of Mind. Perthshire,
Scotland: Clunie Press. (Original work published 1973)
Maldavsky, David. (1995). A propos du noyau autistique
précoce chez l’homme aux loups. Journal de la Psychanalyse de l’enfant, 17, 125–142.
Meltzer, Donald, et al. (1991). Explorations in Autism. Perthshire, Scotland: Clunie Press. (Original work published 1975)
———. (1973). Sexual states of mind. Perthshire, Scotland:
Clunie Press.
Ribas, Denys. (1994) Repérages métapsychologiques dans
l’autisme infantile. In Roger Perron and Denys Ribas
(Eds.), Autismes de l’enfance (pp. 129–147). Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
Rosenberg, Benno. (1991). Masochisme mortifère et masochisme gardien de la vie. Paris: Presses universitaires de
France.
Smadja, Claude. (1993). Á propos des procédés autocalmants
du Moi. Revue française de psychosomatique. 4, 9–26.
Szwec, Gérard. (1993). Les procédés autocalmants par la
recherche répétitive de l’excitation (les galériens volontaires). Revue française de psychosomatique 4, 27–51.
Tustin, Frances. (1981). Autistic states in children. London:
Routledge.
42 0
DISORGANIZATION
The concept of disorganization is not specifically Freudian. It is part of a semantic field that constitutes one
of the contemporary currents of psychoanalysis,
namely the psychosomatic economy of Pierre Marty. It
refers to a set of mental transformations, which at each
step cause the psychic apparatus to lose its structures
of meaning and reduce its capacity for impulse
expression.
We find similar concepts in Freud, primarily in his
work on actual and traumatic neurosis. In 1894, in
Manuscript E on anxiety (1950a), and in 1895, in his
article, ‘‘Detaching a Syndrome of Anxiety Neurosis
from Neurasthenia’’ (1895b), he created a new classificatory entity, anxiety neurosis, for which he provided
a clinical description and formulated a psychological
hypothesis. His hypothesis involves a breakdown in
the connection between somatic sexual excitation and
‘‘thing representations’’ in the unconscious. The first
anxiety theory postulates the accumulation of somatic
sexual excitation. Among the psychic obstacles to
somatopsychic communication, Freud gives three possible mechanisms: repression, the difference between
somatic sexuality and psychic sexuality, and degradation (of the libido). This last mechanism can be compared to the concept of disorganization. In 1920, in his
essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), Freud
developed his economic hypotheses concerning traumatic neurosis. He states that, faced with the traumatic
irruption, ‘‘Cathectic energy is summoned from all
sides to provide sufficiently high cathexes of energy in
the environs of the breach. An Ôanticathexis’ on a
grand scale is set up, for whose benefit all the other
psychical systems are impoverished, so that the
remaining psychical functions are extensively paralysed or reduced’’ (p. 30).
Since Freud we have come to understand actual
neurosis as one of the modalities of traumatic neurosis, and its psychoanalytic study is a major component
of the analysis of psychosomatic behavior.
In 1967, in an article titled ‘‘Régression et instinct
de mort: Hypothèses à propos de l’observation psychosomatique,’’ Marty systematically described for the
first time the two major processes of somatization: the
path of regression and the path of progressive disorganization. While the process of somatization through
regression culminates in reversible ‘‘crises,’’ the process
of somatization through progressive disorganization
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leads to progressive illnesses that can result in death.
This last process is supported, according to Marty, by
the action of the death instinct and is generally accompanied by depression and an externalized mode of
existence.
In Les mouvements individuels de vie et de mort in
1976 and in L’ordre psychosomatique in 1980, Marty
situated the concept of disorganization within the general framework of his theory of individual evolution,
which refers to the counter-evolutionary movement
caused by the precedence of the death drive over the
life drive. This apparent precedence is generated by a
traumatic context that has an impact on what is generally the psychic organization of character. The process
of disorganization is generally made possible by the
lack of points of fixation capable of serving as psychic
and somatic obstacles. Consequently, the concept of
disorganization is distinct from that of regression,
with its points of fixation, or attachment.
CLAUDE SMADJA
See also: Disintegration, feelings of, (anxieties); Essential
depression; Mentalization; Psychogenesis/organogenesis;
Psychosomatic; Regression; Traumatic neurosis.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1895b). Detaching a syndrome of anxiety
neurosis from neurasthenia. SE, 3: 0–115.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle.SE, 18:
7–64.
———. (1950a [1887–SE, 1: 173–280.
Marty, Pierre. (1967) Régression et instinct de mort:
Hypothèses à propos de l’observation psychosomatique.
Revue française de psychanalyse, 30, (5–6), pp. 1113–1126.
———. (1976). Les Mouvements individuels de vie et de
mort, vol. I, Essai d’économie psychosomatique. Paris: Payot,
‘‘Sciences de l’homme.’’
———. (1980). Les Mouvements individuels de vie et de
mort, vol. II, L’Ordre psychosomatique. Paris: Payot,
‘‘Sciences de l’homme.’’
DISPLACEMENT
For Freud, displacement (a primary process) means
the transference of physical intensities (1900a, p. 306)
along an ‘‘associative path,’’ so that strongly cathected
ideas have their charge displaced onto other, less
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strongly cathected ones. This process is active in the
formation of hysterical or obsessional symptoms, in
the dream work, in the production of jokes, and in the
transference.
Between 1887 and 1902 the concept of displacement
appeared several times in Freud’s writings (in Drafts K
and M in his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, in
the ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’’ [1950c
(1895)], and in The Interpretation of Dreams [1900a]).
It was introduced in connection with his clinical work,
apropos of the analysis of neurotic symptoms and
paranoia. In Draft M (1950a), Freud described the
types of displacement that result in compromiseformations. He distinguished ‘‘Displacement by association: hysteria.; Displacement by (conceptual) similarity: obsessional neurosis (characteristic of the place
at which the defence occurs, and perhaps also of the
time).; Causal displacement: paranoia’’ (p. 252).
In addition, in his search for a model of psychic
functioning still informed by the scientific thinking
and medical research of the time, Freud noted: ‘‘Hysterical repression evidently takes place with the help of
symbol-formation, of displacements on to other neurones. We might think, then, that the riddle resides
only in the mechanism of this displacement, and that
there is nothing to be explained about repression
itself ’’ (1950c [1895], p. 352). Displacement, at work
to a pathological degree in hysteria, ‘‘is thus probably a
primary process, since it can easily be demonstrated in
dreams’’ (Ibid., p. 353).
It was in fact Freud’s analysis of the dream work
that led him to discover the importance of displacement. He noted in The Interpretation of Dreams that:
a) ‘‘The consequence of the displacement is that the
dream-content no longer resembles the core of the
dream-thoughts and . . . the dream gives no more than
a distortion of the dream-wish which exists in the
unconscious’’ (p. 308); b) Dream distortion can be
‘‘traced . . . back to the censorship which is exercised by
one psychical agency in the mind over another. . . .
dream-displacement comes about through the influence of the same censorship’’ (p. 308); and c)
‘‘[A] transference and displacement of psychical intensities occurs in the process of dream-formation’’
(pp. 307–308).
The notion of displacement did not see much
further development. In his various revisions to his
theories on dreams, Freud focused more on the
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TRANSFERENCE
separation of images from the affects that had been
attached to them, on the vicissitudes of these affects
(displacement, conservation, metamorphosis), and on
the fate of images (stripped of affect) in relation to the
‘‘sensory intensity of the image presented’’ (1900a,
p. 306, n. 1). But it was above all in the process of
refining the analysis of the transference during treatment and its different manifestations—lateral, indirect, and direct transference (Freud, 1915a; Sandór
Ferenczi, 1909/1994; Michel Neyraut, 1974)—that the
notion of displacement was expanded. It was further
explored, too, by such authors as Jacques Lacan (1957/
2002; 1958/2002) and Guy Rosolato (1969) who took
as their starting point the work of linguists (Ullmann,
1952; Jakobson and Halle, 1956) on the relationship
between signifier and signified, and on metonymy
(displacement by contiguity) and metaphor (displacement by substitution).
Displacement is often linked to substitution. Not
infrequently, this link is made without an adequate
distinction being drawn in temporal terms between
substitution where there is an immediate exchange
based on the disavowal of one of the two poles
involved (perceptual, hallucinatory, or conceptual substitutions), and substitution where deferred action
comes into play.
———. (1915a). Observations on transference love (Further
recommendations on the technique of psychoanalysis III).
SE, 12: 157–71.
———. (1950a [1887-1902]), Extracts from the Fliess
papers. SE, 1: 173–280.
———. (1950c [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology.
SE, 1: 295–391.
———. (1985c [1887-1904]). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904( Jeffrey M. Masson, Ed. and Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard
University Press.
Jakobson, Roman, and Halle, Morris. (1956). Fundamentals
of language (4th ed.). The Hague, New York: Mouton.
Lacan, Jacques. (2002). The agency of the letter in the
unconscious or reason since Freud. In Écrits: A selection
(Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original
work published 1957)
———. (2002). The signification of the phallus. In Écrits: A
selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.
(Original work published 1958
Neyraut, Michel. (1974). Le transfert. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Rosolato, Guy. (1969). Essais sur le symbolique. Paris:
Gallimard.
Ullmann, Stephen. (1952). Précis de sémantique française.
Bern: Francke.
ELSA SCHMIDT-KITSIKIS
See also: Actual neurosis/defense neurosis; Amphimixia/
amphimixis; ‘‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old
Boy (little Hans)’’; Cathexis; Day’s residues; Defense
mechanisms; Dream symbolism; Dream work; Ego and
the Mechanisms of Defence, The; Forgetting; Hysteria;
Interpretation of dreams; Interpretation of Dreams, The;
Jokes; Latent; Masculinity/femininity; Metonymy;
Myths; Neurotic defenses; Obsessional neurosis; Overdetermination; Phobias in children; Primary process/
secondary process; ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology,
A’’; Signifier/signified; ‘‘Splitting of the Ego in the Processes of Defence, The’’; Substitutive formation; Symbolization, process of; Symptom-formation; Unconscious,
the.
DISPLACEMENT OF THE TRANSFERENCE
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1909). Introjection and transference. In
Final contribution to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis Michael Balint (Ed.). London: Karnac Books.
Displacement of the transference, also called lateral
transference, is a defense in which transference is
directed away from the analyst to a third party or an
activity that both conceals and represents undesirable
aspects of the transference. The idea of displacement
of the transference originated in Freud’s technical writings. In ‘‘On beginning the treatment’’ (1913), Freud
cautioned analysts about sessions that were too infrequent, which allowed the analysis to wander down side
paths, and about patients who discussed their treatment with close friends every day, which would cause a
‘‘leak’’ in the analysis and the transference. In ‘‘Remembering, repeating, and working-through’’ (1914), he also
said that the patient’s transference is revealed ‘‘not only
in his personal attitude to his doctor but also in every
other activity and relationship which may occupy his life
at the time’’ (p. 151).
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams.
Part 1, SE, 4: 1–338; Part 2, SE, 5: 339–625.
Later, other authors (for example, Daniel Lagache
and Michel Neyraut) mentioned displacement of the
Bibliography
42 2
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DISQUE VERT, LE
transference when discussing transference, usually
speaking of it as resistance of a sort. Not until the work
of Alain Gibeault and Evelyne Kestemberg (1981) was a
positive role attributed to it. For these authors, the
displacement of the transference prevents only the
awareness of the transference, not the analysand’s
unconscious cathexis in the analysis and with the analyst. In the analysand, the external object nevertheless
maintains a symbolic link with the analyst and really
represents the internal-object relation resulting from
the repetition of an infantile experience. These authors
nevertheless recognize that the displacement of the
transference, even if it is sometimes useful (notably in
cases of character neurosis, where it moderates the
direct confrontation with an archaic imago that is too
threatening), may also interrupt the analytic process if
it becomes too fixed and impervious to interpretations.
In the work of François Duparc, the displacement
of the transference has been linked to analysands’ difficulties in representing traumatic experiences in their
histories and in connecting the affects mobilized by
treatment to sufficiently elaborated representations.
Thus the displacement of the transference could be
considered as a less apparent aspect of negative transference, that is, of the invisible transference that Freud
complains about in ‘‘Analysis terminable and interminable’’ (1937) in connection with his analysis of
Sándor Ferenczi. Lateralization of the transference
would be a primary defense and counter-cathexis of a
nonrepresentable or not yet represented experience.
By means of a displacement of the transference, the
patient might be trying to protect the analyst from a
violent discharge in the transference, which the analyst
could not bear without a traumatizing countertransferential reaction.
One can describe a range of transferences, according to their greater or lesser lateral aim: the direct
transference, which in the case of traumatic material
induces disturbing and strange counter-transferential
experiences; transference on a model, which is more
protective because the model is the inert part of the
transference that limits the involvement of nonrepresentable experiences; and finally displacement of the
transference, which aims at protecting both the patient
and the analyst from a traumatic outbreak.
FRANÇOIS DUPARC
See also: Counter-transference; Negative therapeutic reaction; Transference.
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Bibliography
Duparc, François. (1988). Transfert latéral, transfert du
négatif. Revue française de psychanalyse, 52 (4), 887–898.
Freud, Sigmund. (1913). On beginning the treatment (further
recommendations on technique of psycho-analysis I). SE,
12: 121–144.
———. (1914). Remembering, repeating, and workingthrough (further recommendations on the technique of
psycho-analysis II). SE, 12: 145–156.
———. (1937). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 209–253.
Gibeault, Alain, and Kestemberg, Evelyne. (1981). Le personnage tiers. Cahiers du Centre pour la psychanalyse et la
psychothérapie, 3, 1–84.
DISQUE VERT, LE
In 1924 Le Disque vert, a Belgian review founded and
directed by the poet and writer Frédéric Van Ermengen, known as Franz Hellens (1881–1972), published a
special issue devoted to ‘‘Freud et la psychanalyse,’’
confirming Sigmund Freud’s belief that ‘‘interest in
psychoanalysis has spread to writers in France.’’
(1925d) It is significant that at this time very few of
Freud’s writings were accessible in French.
A message from Freud, dated February 26, 1924,
introduced the issue: ‘‘Of the many lessons lavished
upon me in the past (1885–1886) by the great Charcot
at the Salpêtrière [1885–1888], two left me with a deep
impression: that one should never tire of considering
the same phenomena again and again (or of submitting to their effects), and that one should not mind
meeting with contradiction on every side provided
one has worked sincerely.’’
There were approximately forty-five contributors to
the special issue, all with different opinions, positive
and negative, about psychoanalysis, providing an
important overview of the attitudes toward psychoanalysis in France. Among the contributors were writers (M. Arland, R. Fernandez, V. Larbaud, H. R.
Lenormand, J. Rivière, Philippe Soupault, René Crevel,
Henri Michaux), psychoanalysts (Angélo Hesnard,
René Laforgue, René Allendy), psychiatrists and psychologists (E. Claparède, L. Lapicque, Y. Le Lay).
According to Edmond Jaloux, many writers were
hostile to Freud’s theories because ‘‘they saw in
them an attack on the classical conception of human
423
DISTRESS
personality.’’ For Jacques de Lacretelle, although some
subscribed to the new field, many could not, ‘‘because
its ideas take place in a field that is almost new to
them, one they are only beginning to make use of: the
unconscious.’’
Louis Lapicque, who then held the chair of general
psychology at the Sorbonne, had no hesitations: ‘‘I
have to admit that the ideas of the Viennese professor, although they were sufficiently amusing for me
to acquaint myself with them superficially, did not
seem to be scientific material and I do not feel capable of discussing them seriously.’’ Étienne Rabaud,
professor of biology at the Sorbonne, had a similar
opinion: ‘‘Within being unaware of Freudianism, I
haven’t taken the time to make a serious study of it;
my limited examination has not left me with a desire
to continue.’’ Georges Dwelshauvers, director of the
laboratory of experimental psychology in Catalonia,
suspected fraud: ‘‘He has been inspired by the clinics
of Charcot and his school, and the work, so rich in
written material, of doctors Raymond and Pierre
Janet. He is their student and continues their tradition. And do we know who the real author of psychoanalysis was? It was J. Delboeuf, the psychologist
from Liege.’’
The partisans remained undecided. Professor Henri
Claude, head physician at the Clinique des Maladies
Mentales at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, the first and
only hospital that employed psychoanalysts, wrote, ‘‘It
is mostly psychologists and writers who have been discussing Freud’s work and that of his followers, faithful
or dissident, and who, leaving the primitive framework of medicine, have decided to criticize the extension of the doctrine, especially the theory of pansexual
symbolism, to all manifestations of intellectual activity. In place of these glosses, we would have preferred
reliable personal research, free of prejudice, imbued
with the spirit of scientific observation.’’ He added,
and René Allendy was in agreement, ‘‘I feel, like Adler
and Stekel, that we should not lead those unfamiliar
with psychoanalysis to believe that Freudian pansexualism is all there is to the field.’’ ‘‘Pansexualism’’ and
‘‘symbolism’’ were signs of Freudianism’s disgrace,
even though, as Edmond Jaloux so reassuringly
remarked, ‘‘there are few repressed individuals in
France.’’
Angélo Hesnard indicated the prevailing pessimism of the time: ‘‘Current French opinion about
Freud remains inconclusive . . . It will never be
42 4
favorable to him for, whatever he may think—and in
spite of his work with Charcot—the Master of
Vienna has remained, in his work, quite remote from
French attitudes. And in the extreme and naı̈ve way
it confuses facts and theory, doctrine and method,
psychoanalysis will never convince anyone except
those who have the courage and scientific probity to
experiment with it themselves and adapt it to the
French mind.’’
Along with Édouard Claparède, Albert Thibaudet, a
writer, who had already written a positive article in
April 1921 in the Nouvelle Revue française, was more
optimistic. He wrote, ‘‘I only want to say that I see
Freud as a man who has entered a long corridor, filled
with disorder, with poorly catalogued, poorly lit,
poorly interpreted objects, but which holds treasures
for the museums of the future and for the literature of
today.’’
André Gide, on June 19, 1924, wrote, after closing
the copy of Le Disque vert he had been reading in the
train that carried him to Cuverville, ‘‘Oh, how annoying Freud is; it seems to me that we managed quite
well without him in discovering his America! . . . What
he adds, most of all, is his audacity, or, more exactly,
he relieves us of a certain false and tiresome modesty.
But there is so much that is absurd in this imbecile of
genius!’’
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
Source Citation
Le Disque vert (1924). Freud et la psychanalyse, 2nd year,
June 1924.
Bibliography
Gide, André. (1953). The Journals of André Gide. (Justin
O’Brien, Trans.) New York: Knopf.
Mijolla, Alain de. (1984). Quelques avatars de la psychanalyse en France. Lecture du Disque Vert (June 1924). L’Évolution psychiatrique, 49, 3, 773–795.
DISTRESS. See Helplessness
‘‘DISTURBANCE OF MEMORY ON THE
ACROPOLIS, A’’
Sigmund Freud had begun corresponding with
Romain Rolland in 1923, and this open letter is the
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‘‘ D I S T U R B A N C E
acme (and indeed the end) of their exchange. In it,
Freud relates a personal experience dating from his
first visit to Athens, in 1904. He had climbed the Acropolis in company with his brother Alexander, who was
ten years his younger—the same age, in fact, as Rolland—and in front of the Parthenon he was overtaken
by a feeling of strangeness, of a sense that ‘‘this is too
good to be true.’’
In 1904 Freud was bringing his relationship with Wilhelm Fliess to a close in an atmosphere of conflict. A
transference to Fliess had provided him with the support
needed for his original self-analysis, and it was not until
1936, relying now on a transference to Rolland, that he
was able to analyze this episode. The few pages of the letter here under consideration are a self-analytical summary of an entire lifetime, and they retrace the path
followed by Freud’s whole work, with two Frenchmen
standing for the beginning and end points respectively:
at the beginning, Charcot (suggested by Freud’s use of
several French psychiatric terms of the period); and, at
the end, Romain Rolland.
The letter resembles an analytic session, with Freud
addressing an alter ego to whom he seems to have lent
his pen, thus handing off the role of analyst (Kanzer,
Mark, 1969). Oedipal themes are in evidence: guilt
about having surpassed the father and conquered the
mother (Athens, after Paris and Rome) by producing a
work of whose value Freud was well aware. The feeling
of strangeness (or ‘‘derealization’’) might stem from
the emergence of unconscious material (or ‘‘sensations’’) split off as a result of the trauma experienced
by Freud at the age of two, when his young brother
Julius died. Here Freud’s letter mirrors Rolland’s evocation—in his Voyage Within, which he began writing
right after his visit to Freud in 1924—of the death of
his sister Madeleine when he was five, and the long
mourning of his mother that followed. Freud’s letter is
also a response (itself deferred) to his French friend
concerning the inner reality of that oceanic feeling
whose existence in himself Freud had at first denied
(in Civilization and Its Discontents [1930a], p. 65);
here he stresses the feeling’s traumatic aspect—
perceived only when there is no longer a split between
the two levels of mental functioning involved.
Feelings of strangeness also arise from the gulf
separating Freud’s integration into German culture
(the Acropolis being associated with the cult of antiquity of the Goethe years) and the sotto voce reference
to the destroyed temple in Jerusalem, a foundation of
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Freud’s Jewishness; the first title given this letter,
namely ‘‘Unglaube [disbelief or incredulity] auf de
Akropolis,’’ is certainly evocative of Freud’s identity as
an atheist Jew, and suggests a kind of Spinozist collusion with his churchless Christian correspondent.
But if the hallowed nature of the site (see Freud,
1927c) harks back to religion—the chief topic of the
Freud-Rolland correspondence—in a more secular
sense it summons up the origins of sublimation as a
latent theme of the dialogue between these two great
creators. The Erlebnis, Freud’s experience of the Acropolis, bespoke the rush of emotion that assailed him
on this high place as his life’s work was just getting
under way; by 1936 Freud could look back in tranquility on the road behind him.
To his correspondent, likewise well on in years and
nearing the end, Freud sends a message that is also a
meditation on death—and on immortality. Embedded
within it is the fantasy that he might climb up to the
Acropolis accompanied by a winner of the Nobel
Prize—a distinction which Freud, discreetly, had not
abandoned hope of attaining himself. The resolution
of Freud’s transference to Romain Rolland would free
up a vital energy sufficient to inspirit a cluster of last
writings developing many of the themes touched upon
in this open letter.
HENRI VERMOREL
See also: Déjà-vu; Depersonalization; Disavowal; Freud,
Jakob Kolloman (or Kelemen or Kallamon); Freud, Sigmund (siblings); Illusion; Memory; Oceanic feeling;
Rolland, Romain Edme Paul-Émile; ‘‘Uncanny, The.’’
Source Citation
Freud, Sigmund. (1936a). Brief an Romain Rolland: Eine
Erinnerungsstörung auf der Akropolis. In Almanach der Psychoanalyse 1937, Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer
Verlag, pp. 9–21; GW, 16, 250–57; A disturbance of memory
on the Acropolis: An open letter to Romain Rolland on the
occasion of his seventieth birthday. SE, 22: 239–48.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1927c). The future of an illusion. SE, 21,
1–56.
———. (1930a). Civilization and its discontents. SE, 21,
57–145.
Kanzer, Mark. (1969). Sigmund and Alexander Freud on the
Acropolis. American Imago, 26, 324–54.
425
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ET
D É B A T S
Parat, Catherine. (1988). Dynamique du sacré. Lyon: Cesura.
Vermorel, Henri and Vermorel, Madeleine. (1993). Sigmund
Freud et Romain Rolland. Correspondance 1923–1936.
(Alain de Mijolla, Ed.). Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
DOCUMENTS ET DÉBATS
The Association psychanalytique de France (APF), or
French Psychoanalytic Association, has, since it was
formed in 1964, published a Bulletin intérieur; this
name was retained until 1970, when it became Documents et Débats (Documents and Debates). Originally
its purpose was to publish reports of internal discussions and the annual general meeting. Editorial
responsibilities initially belonged to a committee presided over by Jean Laplanche, who entrusted JeanLouis Lang, vice president, with the role of editor.
Looking through past issues of the review provides
an illuminating survey of the world of publishing; the
quality of the paper, print, and typography make for
pleasant reading. The cover design has changed over
the years—from Bordeaux red to dark green, from carmine red to light gray, the color of the present volume,
which is devoted to Gradiva. In 1991, with Raoul
Moury as president, Documents et Débats underwent
its latest design overhaul.
Organization of the magazine is unique. The editor
changes whenever a new board is elected. The editor
accepts but does not suggest material for publication.
Distribution is restricted exclusively to members and
analysts undergoing training. The review serves a unifying role in a profession that tends to isolate analysts:
the text is edited in Lyon and printed in Paris; editors
have come from Bordeaux, Lyon, Nantes, and Paris.
Issues appear on a regular basis and mark the progress of the association. Every year an issue is devoted
to the publication of official documents, reports of the
annual meeting, national and international reunions
at which association members have participated ex
officio. A second issue publishes the texts of papers
given throughout the year as part of the biannual
meetings and scientific get-togethers.
There have also been special issues devoted to the
work of individual colleagues at the time of their
death. There have been homages to Daniel Lagache
(1975), Angelo Bejarano (1981), Georges Favez
(1982), and Victor Smirnoff (1995). Occasionally,
42 6
special issues have been proposed on particular
topics—‘‘La psychanalyse en société’’ (Psychoanalysis
in Society) (1985), ‘‘APF and IPA’’ (1987), ‘‘A.P.F. au
passé-présent’’ (The A.P.F. in the Past and in the Present) (1988), ‘‘La formation’’ (Training) (1990)—
introducing discussion within the association. However, in spite of the number of requests, it appears that
this method of exchange is not necessarily the most
appropriate or the most popular.
Psychoanalysts in the APF have often helped
found psychoanalytic journals. The list of their editorial contributions is long and includes Nouvelle
Revue de psychanalyse (New Review of Psychoanalysis), Psychanalyse à l’université (Psychoanalysis in the
University), L’Écrit du temps (The Writing of Time),
La Revue internationale de psychopathologie (International Review of Psychopathology), L’Inactuel, Le
Journal de la psychanalyse de l’enfant (The Journal of
Child Psychoanalysis), Le Fait de l’analyse (The Fact
of Analysis), and Libres Cahiers pour la psychanalyse
(Psychoanalytic Notebooks). These publications have
created forms of discussion and research outside the
APF that have strengthened the identity of Documents
et Débats.
The bulletin remains the vehicle for disseminating
information about the association and promotes the
circulation of texts among members to solicit and support scientific research. In this way Documents et
Débats contributes to maintaining a serious dialogue
that any association worthy of the name must have.
JEAN-YVES TAMET
See also: Association psychanalytique de France.
DOLTO-MARETTE, FRANÇOISE
(1908–1988)
Françoise Dolto-Marette, a French psychoanalyst, was
born in Paris on November 6, 1908, and she died there
on August 28, 1988. Dolto’s Enfances (Childhoods;
1986) and Autoportrait d’une psychanalyste (Selfportrait of a woman psychoanalyst; 1989) tell the story
of how a little girl born into a middle-class family at
the turn of the twentieth century became a doctor and
psychoanalyst. The two books recount the traumatic
loss of a beloved nanny when she was a few months
old; the death at the front on July 10, 1916, of her
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uncle Pierre, who was her godfather and whom she
thought of as her ‘‘fiancé’’; and the death of her older
sister, Jacqueline, when she was eleven. At her first
communion, her mother asked her to pray to save her
sister, who contracted bone cancer at the age of eighteen. ‘‘I would never have become a psychoanalyst,’’
she wrote, ‘‘were it not for this grief that upset the
whole family. I think I would have become a doctor in
any case, because I had wanted to since I was eight, but
I would not have become an analyst if my sister had
not died and if I had not experienced my mother’s
pathological mourning, my father’s suffering and
bewilderment, and the pain of my brother Pierre, the
oldest of the boys.’’ René Laforgue, her analyst, noted a
‘‘family neurosis’’ extending across the generations in
her family. Part of this family neurosis was a ‘‘myth of
the savior’’: Dolto’s paternal grandfather died while
rescuing five women in a railway fire, and her maternal
grandfather, a prisoner in 1870, was ‘‘saved by his sister
disguised as a peasant girl.’’
Dolto began her analysis with Laforgue in 1931,
and he subsequently encouraged her to get involved in
child analysis, at which she was very gifted, according
to Sophie Morgenstern. Her supervisors were Heinz
Hartmann, Angel Garma, Rudolph Löwenstein, René
Spitz, John Leuba, and Morgenstern. She was elected
to membership in the Société psychanalytique de Paris
(Paris Psychoanalytic Society) on June 20, 1939, about
the time of the publication of her thesis in medicine,
Psychanalyse et pédiatrie (Psychoanalysis and pediatrics; 1971b).
At the Hôpital Trousseau, Dolto worked for a
short time in Jenny Aubry’s pediatric ward. Then
after Édouard Pichon’s death, she took over and ran
his consultancy from 1940 to 1978. She ran the consultancy in innovative ways and independently of the
psychiatry ward, and she opened it to analysts
wishing to train in child analysis. Numerous participants can attest to the quality of her input and to
what they learned by watching her work with children and their parents. She was the first analyst to
modify the therapeutic setting by bringing in ‘‘witnesses’’ who rarely contributed, one of them taking
notes and the others playing a role analogous to that
of a Greek chorus. Here she began accepting infant
patients, which was most unusual at the time. At
offices in Paris she engaged in the same sort of practice with children from the Antony nursery and state
foster homes.
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In tandem with these activities, she started a Tuesday-evening study seminar on children’s drawings and,
on two Thursdays per month, a seminar in child analysis for psychoanalysts and therapists. She led the seminar for nearly fifteen years. During its last years, the
seminar brought together as many as several hundred
participants.
At the time of the first split in the French psychoanalytic movement, Dolto—along with Jacques Lacan,
Daniel Lagache, and Juliette Favez-Boutonier—
founded the Société française de psychanalyse (French
Society of Psychoanalysis) in 1953. For the 1960 congress on female sexuality in Amsterdam, she wrote ‘‘La
libido génitale et son destin féminin’’ (Genital libido
and its vicissitudes in women; 1996b). From 1947 she
published numerous articles in the socialist journal La
revue de l’union des femmes françaises, and later in Les
études carmélitaines, Psyché, and the journal of the
École des parents (Parents’ school). She worked at the
Centre Étienne-Marcel from its inception and published in Le coq-héron, and in 1971 published Dominique: the analysis of an adolescent, a case history of the
treatment of a ‘‘retarded’’ patient.
In 1964 she was a follower of Jacques Lacan during
the creation of the École freudienne de Paris. At that
time the International Psychoanalytical Association
excommunicated the Lacanians, forbidding them to
teach and train analysts. On August 2, 1962, Serge
Lebovici, addressing the executive committee of the
International Psychoanalytical Association in Edinburgh, demanded that they separate ‘‘the wheat from
the chaff ’’ and accused Dolto of being what she was,
neither a Kleinian nor a follower of Anna Freud. In
Dolto’s case, the reasons for the excommunication still
have not been clearly explained. One can only conclude that a great injustice was committed.
Her radio programs, beginning in 1976 and listened
to by parents all over France, established her as an analyst in touch with society and actively engaged in the
cause of children. The list of her contributions is
extensive: her work with the deaf, her active support of
the Neuville schools, her long preface to Maud Mannoni’s book, Le Premier rendez-vous avec le psychanalyste, her decisive influence in the training of educators
and childcare workers, her contributions in support of
children’s rights. She also actively participated in
numerous colloquia and meetings: Naı̂tre et ensuite
(Birth and Afterwards), within the framework of the
Groupe de recherche et d’étude du nouveau-né
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D O L T O - M A R E T T E , F R A N Ç O I S E (19 08 –198 8)
(Group for the Research and Study of Newborns), and
the Bordeaux conference Enfants et souffrance (Children and suffering). These many innovative experiments have given her an original and incontrovertible
place in the history of relations between psychoanalysis and society. Her concepts of the ‘‘unconscious body
image,’’ female libido, and ‘‘symbolic castration,’’
debated by the psychoanalytic community, were, for
her students, ‘‘valuable tools that were indispensable
in the clinical treatment of very young children or
patients in great distress.’’ They were the fruit of a life
devoted to ‘‘hearing’’ the needs of infants when they
are still incapable of speech but can expresses themselves in their own ways.
The creation of a welcome facility for little ones
accompanied by their parents (founded in January
1978), later the Maison verte de Paris (which opened
in January 1979), attests to the efforts of Dolto and her
collaborators at the Centre Étienne-Marcel—Pierre
Benoı̂t, Colette Langignon, and Bernard This—to promote, together with Marie-Noëlle Rebois, MarieHélène Malandrin, Nelba Nasio, Claude This, and all
those who came later, the prevention of early childhood emotional disturbances. This innovation by a
group of analysts and educators, recognized by the
Fondation de France (Foundation of France), led to
many other welcome facilities in France and other
countries.
A three-volume collection of Dolto’s radio programs, Lorsque l’enfant paraı̂t (When the child appears;
1990), first appeared in 1977, 1978, and 1979. Her
other publications include The Jesus of psychoanalysis: a
Freudian interpretation of the Gospel (1979); in 1981, La
difficulté de vivre (The difficulty of living; 1995), Au jeu
du désir (The play of desire), and Les évangiles et la foi
au risque de la psychanalyse (The Gospel and faith in
the light of psychoanalysis; 1996a); in 1982, Séminaire
de psychanalyse d’enfants (Seminar on child analysis);
in 1984, L’image inconsciente du corps (The unconscious body image); in 1985, La cause des enfants (The
cause of children) and Solitude (1987b); in 1987, Tout
est langage (Everything is language; 2002), L’enfant du
miroir (The child of the mirror), and Dialogues québecois (Quebec dialogues); and in 1992, Inconscient et destin (The unconscious and fate) and Quand les parents
se séparent (When parents separate). Many aspects of
Dolto’s career show that this clinician and internationally renowned psychoanalyst sought to make her ideas
accessible to all. After her death on August 25, 1988,
42 8
many of her contributions were published, and the
Association archives et documentation Françoise Dolto
was established in Paris in 1990.
BERNARD THIS
Works discussed: Flower Doll: Essays in Child Psychotherapy; Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie (psychoanalysis and
pediatrics).
See also: Armand Trousseau Children’s Hospital; Child
psychoanalysis; École freudienne de Paris; France; Psychanalyse, La; Puberty; Société française de pscyhanalyse;
Technique with children, psychoanalytic.
Bibliography
Dolto, Françoise. (1971a). Dominique: the analysis of an
adolescent. New York: Outerbridge and Lazard.
———. (1971b). Psychanalyse et pédiatrie. Paris: Seuil. (Originally published 1939)
———. (1981). Au jeu du désir: essais clinique. Paris: Seuil.
———. (1982). Séminaire de psychanalyse d’enfants. Paris:
Seuil.
———. (1984). L’image inconsciente du corps. Paris: Seuil.
———. (1985). La cause des enfants. Paris: R. Laffont.
———. (1986). Enfances. Paris: Seuil.
———. (1987a). Dialogues québecois. Paris: Editions du
Seuil.
———. (1987b). Solitude. Paris: Vertiges du Nord.
———. (1989). Autoportrait d’une psychanalyste. Paris:
Seuil.
———. (1990). Lorsque l’enfant paraı̂t. Paris: Seuil. (Originally published 1977–1979)
———. (1992). Inconscient et destins. Paris: Seuil.
———. (1995). La difficulté de vivre. Paris: Gallimard. (Originally published 1981)
———. (1996a). Les évangiles et la foi au risque de la psychanalyse. Paris: Gallimard.
———. (1996b). La libido génitale et son destin féminin. In
her Sexualité féminine. La libido génitale et son destin féminin. Paris: Gallimard. (Originally published 1964)
Dolto, Françoise, and Angelino, Inès. (1988). Quand les parents se séparent. Paris: Seuil.
Dolto, Françoise; Baldy Moulinier, Claude; Guillerault, Gérard; and Kouki, Elisabeth. (2002). Tout est langage. Paris:
Gallimard. (Originally published 1987)
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D O O L I T T L E - A L D I N G T O N , H I L D A (H. D. ), (1886 –1 961)
Dolto, Françoise, and Nasio, Juan-David. (1987). L’enfant du
miroir. Paris: Rivages.
Dolto, Françoise, and Sévérin, Gérard. (1979). The Jesus of
psychoanalysis: a Freudian interpretation of the Gospel.
(Helen R. Lane, Trans.) Garden City, NY: Doubleday. (Original work published 1977)
DON JUAN AND THE DOUBLE
In 1914 and 1922, Otto Rank published two essays in
German in Imago: The Double and Don Juan. Rank
was inspired to write The Double after seeing a film by
H. H. Ewer, The Student of Prague, and a presentation
of Mozart’s Don Giovanni led him to write Don Juan.
As the author himself noted, ‘‘In both texts, there is a
question of problems going back to the most remote
origins of mankind, which continue to have a profound influence on art.’’ These problems are ‘‘the relationship between individuals and their own ego and
the threat of its complete destruction by death.’’
Rank was a particularly prolific writer with an
extensive knowledge of literature and anthropology, as
shown by these two essays and alluded to in his belief
that ‘‘the creative artist is, from the psychological
point of view, the extension of the hero of prehistoric
humanity.’’ In The Double he explores the theme of the
double in literature as a kind of shadow, reflection,
portrait, twin, or even duplication of mental life
resulting from amnesia or manipulation (as in Robert
Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). Rank
examines various possibilities, including the terrible
consequences if the shadow is lost and the independent double persecutes the ego.
Sigmund Freud in his essay ‘‘The Uncanny’’
(1919h) noted that Rank had succeeded in explaining
the surprising evolution of the theme of the double.
‘‘For the Ôdouble’ was originally an insurance against
the destruction of the ego, an Ôenergetic denial of the
power of death,’ ’’ but, Freud adds, ‘‘such ideas have
sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from
the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of
the child and of primitive man. But when this stage
has been surmounted, the Ôdouble’ reverses its aspect.
From having been an assurance of immortality, it
becomes the uncanny [unheimlich] harbinger of
death’’ (1919h, p. 235).
Referring to the myth of Narcissus and to the narcissistic hero Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture
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of Dorian Gray, Rank notes that the hero’s misfortune
follows from his disposition to narcissism, which turns
him into the prisoner of his double. The double then
becomes a rival in sexual love or appears in superstitious belief as a terrifying messenger of death, a devil, or
an anti-ego, destroying rather than replacing the ego.
The essay on Don Juan (1922/1975) is also related
to the theme of the double. Rank asserts that it is
impossible to consider the legend of Don Juan solely
in Freud’s sense and explain it by the father complex
(p. 86). Rank shows that the division of the personality
into the master Don Juan and the valet Leporello is a
‘‘necessary part of the artistic presentation of the hero
himself ’’ (p. 50), for ‘‘[b]y inhibiting the will of his
master, whose thirst for action he continually keeps in
check with uncanny irony, he is characterized as the
critical-ironic part of the ego’’ (p. 59). Starting from
the idea of ‘‘avenging death’’ Rank also develops interesting perspectives on cannibalism.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Double,
‘‘‘Uncanny,’ The.’’
the;
Rank
(Rosenfeld),
Otto;
Source Citation
Rank, Otto. (1971). The double: a psychoanalytic study
(Harry Tucker Jr., Trans.). Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press. (Original work published 1914)
Rank, Otto. (1975). The Don Juan legend (David G. Winter,
Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original
work published 1922)
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1919h). The uncanny. SE, 17: 217–256.
Lieberman, E. James. (1985). Acts of will: the life and work of
Otto Rank. New York: Free Press.
DOOLITTLE-ALDINGTON, HILDA (H.D.),
(1886–1961)
The American poet Hilda Doolittle was born on September 10, 1886, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and died
in Zurich in September 1961. From her analysis with
Freud during 1933–1934 she left a diary, a written
homage to Freud: Tribute to Freud, (1944), which
represents a precious account of their warm and positive analytic relationship.
429
D O O L I T T L E -A L D I N G T O N , H I L D A (H. D. ), (1886 –1 961)
The only daughter of four children, her father was
Charles Leander Doolittle, a professor of astronomy
who, in 1897, began teaching at the University of
Pennsylvania. There Hilda discovered her calling as a
poet, encouraged by her relationship with Ezra Pound,
who at age 20, just a year older than she, had just been
appointed instructor. Although her father forbade her
to carry on a relationship with Pound, who would
soon be expelled for immorality, Hilda kept up a correspondence with him that in 1911 brought her to
Europe, where she would spend the rest of her life. She
went initially to England with Frances Gregg, with
whom she had a homosexual liaison, and soon met
Richard Aldington, a poet six years younger than
herself.
H.D. published her first poems in 1913, and married Aldington the same year. The couple lost their
first daughter in 1915, but a second daughter, named
Perdita in memory of the first, was born on March 31,
1919. Hilda’s favorite brother, Gilbert, was killed in
France in 1918, and her father, seriously affected by
the news, died a year later. In 1919, H.D.’s marriage
ended, as did her brief but intense friendship with D.
H. Lawrence.
When H.D. had suffered post-partum depression
after the birth of her daughter, she owed her recovery
to Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), an energetic novelist
and poet who became her companion and took her
and Perdita to live in Greece. While living in Corfu,
H.D. suffered an episode of depersonalization, an
experience that held no particular interest for Havelock Ellis, who was in some measure attracted to her.
She also had a hallucinatory vision of ‘‘writing on the
wall’’ that Freud characterized as a ‘‘dangerous symptom’’ when she told him about it. This vision may
explain the mild and tender positive countertransference behavior that Freud adopted toward her.
Bryher, who had been analyzed by Hanns Sachs,
acquainted H.D with psychoanalysis. An initial effort
at analysis with Mary Chadwick in the spring in 1931
was a failure, but it led H.D. to begin treatment in
Berlin with Sachs, who subsequently introduced her to
Freud. By then well-known for her imagist verse, H.D.
sought analysis to remedy a sense of sterility in her
writing.
Freud had read some of her work, including
Palimpseste, before their first meeting on Wednesday,
March 1, 1933. In the diary she kept of her analysis (in
43 0
spite of his disapproval—he viewed it as resistance),
she described him as ‘‘like a curator in a museum . . .;
he is like D. H. Lawrence, grown old but matured and
with astute perception. His hands are sensitive and
frail’’ (1974, p 116). From the beginning of treatment
Freud brought her to see his collection of antiquities and showed her a small statue of Athena:
‘‘This is my favorite,’’ he remarked (p. 118). ‘‘You are
the only person to have ever entered this room and
looked at the objects before looking at me.’’
This first session set the tone of an analysis in which
Freud quickly interpreted that ‘‘not only did I want to
be a boy but I wanted to be a hero’’ (p. 120). His interventions made him into ‘‘the grandfather godfather,
god-the-father’’ (p. 120). He told her at one point, ‘‘I
was thinking about what you said, about its not being
worthwhile to love an old man of seventy-seven,’’ and
H.D. wrote, ‘‘I had said no such thing and told him so.
He smiled his ironical crooked smile. I said, ÔI did not
say it was not worthwhile. I said I was afraid.’ But he
confused me. He said, ÔIn analysis, the person is dead
after the analysis is over—as dead as your father’’’
(p. 141).
Freud also confided in her that ‘‘I do not like being
the mother in transference—it always surprises and
shocks me a little. I feel so very masculine’’ (pp. 146–
147). H.D.’s mother had traveled with her and Aldington when they were lovers, and later lived with her in
Europe for long periods in the 1920s before her death
in 1927; Freud viewed her as the root cause of H.D.’s
confusion and homosexuality.
After three months of analysis, H.D. left Vienna on
June 15, 1933. When she returned at the end of October, to remain until December 1, she was concerned
about the rise of Nazism; she immediately perceived
the danger that it posed for ‘‘the Professor.’’ Once
again, describing in unparalleled fashion during the
next five weeks of exceptional sessions, she sketched a
poetical and moving portrait. She did so without concessions; attracted by the strange and bizarre, by
astrology and belief in paranormal phenomena, she
sometimes confronted the convictions of an old man.
For his part, Freud hoped to introduce into her mental
universe the father figure and finally succeeded. ‘‘We
have gone into deep matters,’’ he told her after one session (p. 177); after another, he said, ‘‘Today we have
tunneled very deep.’’ (p. 18).
H.D. had further sessions in 1936 and 1937, rather
more as psychotherapy, with Walter Schmideberg.
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‘ ‘D O S T O Y E V S K Y
Until his death she never failed to send Freud gardenias for his birthday. In 1944 she wrote her memoir, first entitled Writing on the Wall , which
appeared in 1956 as Tribute to the World. Soon after
World War II, H.D. turned toward spirituality and
underwent a severe mental breakdown and deep
depression.
Moving to Switzerland in the late 1940s, H.D.
enjoyed a productive and successful career in the last
years of her life, publishing several books of poems,
memoirs, and short stories that brought her considerable attention in literary circles in the United States. A
hip fracture in 1960 left her handicapped until her
death on September 27, 1961.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Literature and psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Appignanesi, Lisa, Forrester, John. (1992). Freud’s women.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Doolittle, Hilda. (1974). Tribute to Freud. Boston: David R.
Godine.
Holland, Norman N. (1973). ‘‘Freud and H.D.’’ International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 50, 309–315. Reprinted in
Freud as we knew him. (pp. 449–462). (Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek, Ed.). Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. (2002). Analysing Freud: letters
of HD, Bryher and their circle. New York: New Directions.
DORA. See ‘‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of
Hysteria’’ (Dora/Ida Bauer)
‘‘DOSTOYEVSKY AND PARRICIDE’’
Freud distinguished Dostoyevsky the writer, Dostoyevsky the neurotic, Dostoyevsky the moralist, and
Dostoyevsky the sinner. Freud regarded Dostoyevsky
the writer as unassailable, placing his work alongside
Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
The moralist Freud dismissed, for Dostoyevsky
confined himself to being the sinner, subject to the
czar and God, even while he oscillated between faith
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AND
PARRICIDE’’
and atheism. Sadistic toward the outside world where
small things were concerned, and toward himself
where large things were concerned, Dostoyevsky
finally appeared to be a masochist, ‘‘that is to say the
mildest, kindliest, most helpful person possible’’ (p.
179). But for Freud there is more: Dostoyevsky’s projections into his characters—violent, egocentric, criminal—bear witness to his identification with them. The
sexual attack on the young girl as related to Strakov,
would support this view, as would Dostoyevsky’s passion for gambling.
Dostoyevsky’s impulsive character interfered with
his neurosis, and as a result, his ego lost its unity, a
condition that expressed itself in his so-called epilepsy. This condition was, however, no more than a
symptom of his neurosis, hystero-epilepsy, a serious
form of hysteria. Freud pointed out the memory difficulties associated with such epilepsy and the limited
understanding of the disease at the time. Dostoyevsky’s affliction appears to have been a case of the
ancient morbus sacer (sacred illness) or a clinical variant. Its link with psychic life does not interfere with
‘‘complete mental development and, if anything, an
excessive and as a rule insufficiently controlled emotional life’’ (p. 180), characteristic of Dostoyevsky’s
mental functioning. The mechanism of his abnormal
instinctual discharge, organically preconditioned, was
made available to his neurosis, and through somatic
means, it eliminated any excitation not psychically
contained.
For Freud, Dostoyevsky’s first, slight attacks
harked back to childhood and did not assume a true
epileptic form until after the traumatic event of the
murder of his father by Russian peasants. Psychoanalysis showed that this was the keystone of Dostoyevsky’s neurosis, and the parricide of the Karamazovs
reflects this. Dostoyevsky’s anxieties about death,
which he experienced in his youth, together with his
states of lethargic sleep, would indicate that Dostoyevsky identified with the dead or with someone
whose death he desired, and may have triggered a
mechanism of self-punishment.
Freud then returns to his hypothesis about the murder of the father in the primitive horde, humanity’s
primal crime, which is reproduced in fantasy in every
individual: the little boy, in his ambivalent relationship
to his father (fear of castration or tenderness), must
renounce his desire to possess the mother and eliminate the father, but a sense of unconscious guilt
431
D O S U Z K O V , T H E O D O R (18 99 –198 2)
remains. In Dostoyevsky, a strong bisexual disposition
conditioned and reinforced his neurosis, intensifying
his defense against a ‘‘remarkably harsh’’ father. Thus
the relationship between Dostoyevsky and the paternal
object was transformed into a relationship between the
ego and the superego. Once the murder of his father
had given a sense of reality to such repressed desires,
epilepsy followed.
Source Citation
The atmosphere indicates the liberation experienced, whereas the punitive dimension is confirmed
in jail, where Dostoyevsky’s crises do not disappear
but at least no longer weaken him, in spite of the
injustice of the punishment: the czar has replaced the
father. Dostoyevsky took this one step farther: the
epileptic is the parricide—the culmination of his
identification with common, political, and religious
criminals—but the gambling debt, satisfying the need
for self-punishment, enables him to write and succeed as a novelist.
Green, André. (1992). Le double double: Ceci et cela. In his
La déliaison: Psychanalyse, anthropologie et littérature (pp.
299–311). Paris: Belles Lettres.
Curiously, at the end of this article on Dostoyevsky,
Freud also analyzed Stefan Zweig’s short story
‘‘Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman.’’ Freud
sees this short story as the fantasy of a young man
(also a gambler), in which his mother initiates him
into sexual life to protect him from masturbation, a
compulsion Freud assumed to be present in
Dostoyevsky.
Freud spent two years (1926–1928) reluctantly writing this article on ‘‘the cursed Russian,’’ whom he
claimed not to have liked. His work led to discussions
with Theodor Reik and Stefan Zweig. The article did
not cause much of a stir when it was published, and
the question of epilepsy failed to generate interest.
Freud’s ambivalence toward the writer’s ‘‘pathological
nature’’ attests to a certain rivalry with Dostoyevsky
over the latter’s exploration of the unconscious, but
may also indicate Freud’s parricidal wishes toward
Jean Martin Charcot, the father of hystero-epilepsy,
wishes quite different from Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy.
Freud’s interpretation of the onset of Dostoyevsky’s
crisis remains questionable, as does his interpretation
of the father’s ‘‘murder.’’ At the time (1928), Dostoyevsky’s past was still largely unknown.
MARIE-THÉRÈSE NEYRAUT-SUTTERMAN
See also: Self-punishment; ‘‘Creative Writers and DayDreaming’’; Literary and artistic creation; Parricide;
Zweig, Stefan.
43 2
Freud, Sigmund. (1928b). Dostoyevsky and parricide. SE,
21, 173–196.
Bibliography
Drouilly, Jean. (1977). Freud et Dostoı̈ewski. Évolution psychiatrique, 42, 1, 127–140.
Marinov, Vladimir. (1990). Figures du crime chez Dostoı̈ewski. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Neyraut-Sutterman, Marie-Thérèse. (1970). Parricide et épilepsie: À propos d’un article de Freud sur Dostoı̈ewski.
Revue Française de Psychanalyse, 34, 4, 635–652.
Tellenbach, Hubertus. (1976). Phénoménologie de l’intrication entre épilepsie et changement de la personnalité à
l’exemple du prince Myichkine de Dostoı̈ewski. Psychanalyse à l’Université, 1, 2, 341–354.
DOSUZKOV, THEODOR (1899–1982)
Theodor Dosuzkov, a physician and practicing psychoanalyst, was born on January 25, 1899, in Baku,
then Russia, and died in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on
January 19, 1982. He was the only child of a jurist aristocrat father and a Jewish mother.
The October 1917 revolution surprised the family
in Saint Petersburg. They fled before the Red Army
and finally arrived at Novorossiisk in 1919. There
Theodor Dosuzkov took his baccalaureate and met his
future wife, with whom he left the country in 1920
bound for Prague via Constantinople. The Prague government was offering grants to Russian students. He
studied medicine from 1921 to 1927 and then worked
in the university neurology clinic, specializing in neurology and psychiatry.
Through a circle of Russian intellectuals he met
Nicolai Ossipov, who awakened his lifelong interest
in psychoanalysis. When Ossipov died in 1934,
Dosuzkov inherited his library and his correspondence with Freud. Internal intrigues prevented
Dosuzkov from winning a university appointment.
Disappointed, he left the university clinic and opened
his own clinic in 1934 and practiced as a neurologist
and psychoanalyst. He finished his psychoanalytic
training in Prague with Annie Reich and then with
Otto Fenichel.
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DOUBLE BIND
Dosuzkov survived the German occupation of Czechoslovakia from 1939 to 1945, during which he continued to teach and practice psychoanalysis in secret as
the only properly trained psychoanalyst in all of Czechoslovakia. Subsequently, he received the professional
and moral support of his students in 1946. He then
reestablished the Society for the Study of Psychoanalysis, resumed contact with colleagues in other countries, and was appointed training analyst by the
International Psychoanalytic Association. From 1946
to 1948 Dosuzkov and his students engaged in intense
scientific and therapeutic activity. In 1947 and 1948
Dosuzkov published articles in the Annales de psychanalyse (Annals of psychoanalysis), but the 1949
volume never appeared because of the putsch in 1948.
Dosuzkov had to go underground again. In 1968, during the Prague Spring, he was finally able to work
openly for a short time.
Dosuzkov’s interests and scientific activity are
important in the study of neuroses and in applied psychoanalysis. Dosuzkov forged the notion of scoptophobia as a fourth psychoneurosis and worked on other
phobias, which he interpreted in relation to urethral
erotism. He also wrote works popularizing psychoanalysis. His work had an immense influence on the introduction of psychoanalysis in Czechoslovakia. He was
an indefatigable proponent of psychoanalysis among
specialists and to the general public. He was recognized as a representative of the discipline, defending
its viewpoints with fervor, even during politically disturbed periods. He was also important for his scientific
contributions. As a student of Fenichel, Dosuzkov
took an interest in the psychology of the instincts.
Owing to his work, psychoanalysis has survived in
Czechoslovakia to the present day.
He died in an accident in a railway yard closed to
traffic. The circumstances surrounding his death have
never been explained.
EUGÉNIE FISCHER AND RENÉ FISCHER
See also: Czech Republic.
Bibliography
Dosuzkov, Theodor. (1965). Skoptophobie: die vierte Übertragungsneurose. Psyche, 19, 537–546.
———. (1965). Über die drei Haupttypen des neurotischen
Stotterns. Acta XIII Congressus therapia vocis et loquelam,
Vienna.
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———. (1969). Zur Frage der Dysmorphophobie. Psyche,
23, 683–699.
———. (1975). Idrosophobia: A form of pregenital conversion. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 64, 253–265.
———. (1979). Skoptophobie bei männlichen und weiblichen Patienten. Psyche, 33, 620–633.
DOUBLE BIND
Gregory Bateson coined the term double bind in 1956.
In trying to understand the characteristic effects of
communication in schizophrenics’ families, Bateson
and his collaborators identified a specific constraining
interaction, the paradoxical injunction that they called
the double bind.
The double bind fits into one of the three types of
paradox, the pragmatic paradox. The effects of the
paradox in human interactions were first described by
Gregory Bateson, Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley, and John
H. Weakland in a document entitled Toward a Theory
of Schizophrenia, published in 1956. Bateson and his
collaborators were looking for sequences of interpersonal experience that could lead to a type of behavior
that would justify the diagnosis of schizophrenia.
This is one of the typical cases constructed by Paul
Watzlawick from real clinical facts: A mother buys two
neckties for her little boy, one green and one blue. The
next day the child is in a hurry to sport the green necktie. The mother: ‘‘So you don’t like the blue tie I gave
you?’’ The next day the boy puts on the blue tie and
draws the symmetrical response: ‘‘So you don’t like the
green tie I gave you?’’ So, on the third day, the child tries
to find a compromise solution in order to satisfy his
mother’s two demands: he puts on the two ties together.
And his mother comments: ‘‘You poor boy, you’re out
of your mind. You’re going to drive me crazy.’’ This
paradoxical injunction, where the double bind mechanism is particularly obvious, clearly shows the annihilating effects on the person at the receiving end.
Antonio J. Ferreira (1960) described one particular
form of double bind, the split double bind, observed
in the families of young delinquents. The expression
‘‘prescribe the symptom’’ was first introduced in Bateson’s group’s work on family therapy in schizophrenia.
The group showed the paradoxical nature of this technique: the therapeutic double constraint. From a
structural point of view, a therapeutic double constraint is the mirror image of a pathogenic double con433
DOUBLE,
THE
straint. The therapist formulates an injunction of such
a structure that it reinforces the behavior that the
patient expects to see disappear. A patient presenting
persistent headaches (in-depth medical examinations
revealed nothing) transmitted the following message
through her symptoms and her earlier relations with
doctors: ‘‘Help me but I won’t let you help me.’’
The therapist understood that given the history of
physicians’ ‘‘failures,’’ any allusion to the help that
psychotherapy could provide would predestine the
treatment to fail. The patient therefore had to face the
fact that her state was incurable. All that the therapist
could do was help her learn to live with her pains.
In the nineteen-seventies the notion of paradox was
introduced into clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis
from several different directions, largely due to Didier
Anzieu’s article on Transfert paradoxal (Paradoxical
transfer) (1975) and Paul-Claude Racamier’s work on
humor and madness (1973), and later on schizophrenics’ paradoxes (Congress of Romance-Language Psychoanalysts, 1978).
JEAN-PIERRE CAILLOT
See also: Paradox; Schizophrenia; System/systemic.
Bibliography
Anzieu, Didier. (1975). Le transfert paradoxal. Nouvelle
revue de Psychanalyse, 12, 49–72.
Bateson, Gregory; Jackson, Don D.; Haley, Jay; and Weakland, John (1956). Toward a theory of schizophrenia.
Behavioral Science, 1, 251–254.
Ferreira, Antonio J. (1980). Double lien et délinquance.
Changements systémiques en thérapie familiale. Paris: E.S.F.
(Original work published 1960)
Racamier, Paul-Claude (1992). Le génie des origines. Psychanalyse et psychoses. Paris: Payot.
Watzlawick, Paul; Beavin, Janet Helmick; and Jackson, Don
D. (1967). Pragmatics of human communication. New York:
W.W. Norton.
DOUBLE, THE
The double refers to a representation of the ego that
can assume various forms (shadow, reflection, portrait, double, twin) that is found in primitive animism
as a narcissistic extension and guarantee of immortality, but which, with the withdrawal of narcissism,
43 4
becomes a foreshadowing of death, a source of criticism and persecution.
The figure of the double dates back to primitive
civilizations, as shown in legend, but it is also found
throughout literature. It was Otto Rank who in his
essay on the double (1914) was the first to develop this
idea in psychoanalysis, and Sigmund Freud quotes
him at length in ‘‘The Uncanny’’ (1919). However, the
idea of the doubling of consciousness is present in his
first texts on hysteria (1893, 1895), and the unconscious itself is introduced by Freud as a second consciousness capable of producing dreams, parapraxes,
and so on. The theme of the double is taken up by
Freud and integrated in his concept of the uncanny.
‘‘The Ôuncanny’ is that form of terror that leads back to
something long known to us, once very familiar’’
(1919), but has become terrifying because it corresponds to something repressed that has returned. ‘‘The
double,’’ Freud wrote citing Heinrich Heine, ‘‘has
become an image of terror, just as, after the collapse of
their religion, the gods turned into demons.’’ (1910).
Rank’s study of the double has two aspects: anthropological and psychopathological, the latter being
approached through literature and the personality of
authors. For anthropology, the double is omnipresent
as a representation of the soul and therefore a guarantor of survival. It also helps us understand the nature
of sacrifice, such as the cannibalistic incorporation of
the son by the father (Chronos) because the son has
drawn to himself the father’s image or shadow. The
double is similarly the origin of certain taboos, and
Rank notes the evolution between the narcissistic
claim of immortality and the acceptance of the genetic
continuity of parents through their children, which is
at the origin of totemism. ‘‘It is no longer the double
itself (the shadow) that continues to live but the
spirit of a dead elder who is reborn in the embryo’’
(Rank, 1914).
In literature (E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allen Poe,
Guy de Maupassant, Alfred de Musset, Fyodor Dostoevsky), Rank points out the description of a paranoid state revolving around the persecution of the ego
by its double and compares these imaginary creations
to their authors’ symptoms, through which the theme
of the double reveals a psychopathological dimension
(epilepsy, splitting of the personality). Similarly, Freud
noted that an older form of narcissism that has been
overcome can continue to have an effect by changing
into a ‘‘moral conscience’’ susceptible of being split off
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from the ego, as seen, for example, in delusions of
being watched.
The double is also found, although on a different
plane, in real or imagined twins and, more generally,
in twin brothers. The paradox of identity versus alterity arises here together with—in the case of the doubles of myth who are not brothers (Achilles and
Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades)—the narcissistic foundations of friendship. This can be contrasted with the
tragic destiny of Narcissus, who drowned while looking at his own reflection. The theme of the double
appears, therefore, to be susceptible to very broad
interpretation, similar to the primal narcissism from
which it originated.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Don Juan and the Double; ‘‘‘Uncanny,’ The’’.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund (1919h). The Uncanny. SE, 17: 217–256.
Rank, Otto (1914). The double: A psychoanalytic study.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1971.
(1992). Topique, 49.
DOUBT
The distinction between doubt as an instrument of
rational thought and pathological doubt was known
to philosophers (Descartes, Spinoza) long before
Freud, and had long been studied as a symptom or
syndrome in psychiatry. Théodule Ribot defined
doubt as ‘‘a conflict between two tendencies in
thought, incompatible and antagonistic, without any
possible reconciliation, into a succession of positive
and negative judgments about the same subject that
does not culminate in a conclusion’’ (1925). In his
study on obsessional neurosis, Freud noted that
‘‘[a]nother mental need . . . obsessional neurotics . . . is
the need for uncertainty in their life, or for doubt’’
(1909d, p. 232).
Freud first discussed doubt in his work on dreams
where he saw it as a mark of resistance and an indication to the analyst of the significance of the repressed
element to which it related. But for the most part
Freud considered doubt in the context of obsessional
neurosis, where it applied to events that had already
occurred, and could be seen above all as an expression
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of ambivalence, a repudiation of the instinct for mastery as sublimated into an instinct for knowledge
(1913i, p. 324).
The etiology of doubt as a symptom is analyzed at
length in the case history of the ‘‘Rat Man’’ (1909d).
Freud summarized it in a letter of April 21, 1918, to
Lou Andreas-Salomé: ‘‘The tendency to doubt arises
not from any occasion for doubt, but is the continuation of the powerful ambivalent tendencies in the pregenital phase, which from then on become attached to
every pair of opposites that present themselves’’ (1966/
1972, p. 77).
Obsessional thought, however, to characterize it
more accurately, has three somewhat different aspects:
uncertainty, hesitation, and doubt. Uncertainty can be
viewed as that voluntary blurring of references, which
underpins the aversion for watches, for example.
Doubt, for its part, is an internal perception of indecision, which just like hesitation is associated with the
volitional sphere, whereas uncertainty belongs to the
cognitive and doubt to the affective. These three
aspects do not necessarily function simultaneously, as
witness the fact that we can be certain yet unable to
decide on action; at the same time, action can overcome hesitation in the absence of the slightest certainty about the reasonableness of that decision. The
essence of wisdom would be to achieve certainty before
abandoning hesitation—the precise attribute obsessionals find it so hard to adopt (Mijolla-Mellor, 1992).
Apropos of the Rat Man, Freud mentions the ‘‘predilection for uncertainty’’ of obsessional neurotics
who turn their thoughts to ‘‘those subjects upon
which all mankind are uncertain and upon which our
knowledge and judgments must necessarily remain
open to doubt’’ (1909d, p. 232–33). This tendency
extends to easily accessible knowledge, seemingly as a
form of protection against the risk of knowing. In fact
the obsessive neutralizes any idea, any decision, by
evoking its opposite. Thus hesitation and the predilection for uncertainty constitute the cognitive aspect of
the impossibility of choosing, an attitude that serves to
delay action indefinitely. The obsessive is paralyzed by
ambivalence, immobilized by two instinctual impulses
directed at the same object.
What is the source of this ambivalence? Since it is
too general a concept to determine the ‘‘choice of neurosis,’’ Freud offered a hypothesis based on constitutional factors: ‘‘The sadistic components of love have,
435
DREAM
from constitutional causes, been exceptionally strongly
developed.’’ And in terms of individual history, these
‘‘have consequently undergone a premature and all
too thorough suppression’’ (1909d, p. 240).
Serge Leclaire (1971) has made significant contributions to our understanding of the nature of doubt in
the obsessive individual, which he sums up rather
laconically as ‘‘He doubts because he knows.’’
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Certainty; Intellectualization; Mahler, Gustav
(meeting with Sigmund Freud); ‘‘Notes upon a Case of
Obsessional Neurosis’’ (Rat Man); Obsession; Obsessional neurosis.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1909d). Notes upon a case of obsessional
neurosis. SE, 10: 151–318.
———. (1913i). The disposition to obsessional neurosis: a
contribution to the problem of choice of neurosis. SE, 12:
311–326.
Freud, Sigmund, and Andreas-Salomé, Lou. (1972). Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé; letters. (Ernst Pfeiffer, Ed. and William and Elaine Robson-Scott, Trans.).
New York: Harcourt Brace. (Original work published
1966)
radical departure for he claimed that hysterical
symptoms were the expression of ‘‘conflicts,’’ and that
dreams were the product of a ‘‘dream work.’’ In both
cases there was no weakening of psychic activity but
quite the opposite, an intense activity driven by the
opposition between wishes and psychic defense
mechanisms. The radical nature of Freud’s position
was illuminated by his divergence from Josef Breuer,
who saw hysteria as the product of ‘‘hypnoid states’’
brought on by a weakening of organizing mental activity and a concomitant decrease in what Pierre Janet
called ‘‘mental tension’’ (Freud and Breuer, 1895d).
Freud conceived his theory of dreams very early. His
exposure to the work of Charcot and later to that of
Bernheim was undoubtedly a contributing factor. In
1892 he noted that many dreams ‘‘spin out further
associations which have been rejected or broken off
during the day. I have based on this fact the theory of
Ôhysterical counter-will’ which embraces a good number of hysterical symptoms’’ (1892-94a, p. 138).
(‘‘Counter-will,’’ meaning an opposition to the satisfaction of desire for moral reasons, was a conceptual forerunner of repression.) The ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’’ (1950c [1895]) introduced a number of ideas
about dreams that were later expanded and refined.
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1992). Le Plaisir de pensée. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Between 1897 and 1900 Freud, with moral support
from his correspondent Wilhelm Fliess, conducted the
self-analysis that gave birth to psychoanalysis. For the
most part, that self-analysis drew on Freud’s own
dreams (Anzieu, 1975/1984), and in due course those
same dreams supplied a large portion of the material
of The Interpretation of Dreams.
DREAM
Freud’s dream theory may be summarized as
follows:
Janet, Pierre. (1909). Les Névroses. Paris: Flammarion.
Leclaire, Serge. (1971). Démasquer le reel. Paris: Le Seuil,
‘‘Champ freudien.’’
The dream, guardian of sleep, provides disguised satisfaction for wishes that are repressed while we are
awake; dream interpretation is the ‘‘royal road that
leads to knowledge of the unconscious in psychic life.’’
Such, in highly condensed form, is Freud’s theory as
set forth in the founding work of psychoanalysis, The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900a). As Freud himself
pointed out, this was a revolutionary thesis.
The only scientists interested in dreams during the
late nineteenth century were psychologists looking for
‘‘elements’’ of mental activity or psychiatrists interested in hysteria and hypnosis. All of them saw dreams
as nothing more than degraded products of a weak
and thus dissociated psyche. Freud’s approach was a
43 6
1. The dream expresses a wish unsatisfied during
the waking state, whether because of a conscious
objection or, more frequently, because of repression, in which case the wish is unrecognized.
During sleep, the psychic apparatus finds its natural tendency, which is to reduce tension, that is,
to experience pleasure. The dream, like hysterical
symptoms, slips, parapraxes, and so on, is a sign
of the return of the repressed. Freud went further
still, claiming that every dream was the fulfillment of a wish, which obviously invites an objection about unpleasurable dreams and anxiety
dreams. On several occasions Freud rebutted this
objection, continuing to analyze such dreams
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until he isolated a wish behind distress or anxiety, which he claimed were merely expressions of
resistance and conflict. Truth to tell, his argument was not always persuasive. On the basis of
necessarily fragmentary material, it sometimes
gave an impression of the ad hoc. Freud was able
to overcome this difficulty only much later,
when he introduced the repetition compulsion
that lay ‘‘beyond the pleasure principle’’ (1920g).
2. Two circumstances favor this return of the
repressed. The first is the inhibition of perception and motricity during sleep, protecting the
dreamer against the dangers of actual satisfaction. This results in a ‘‘topographical regression,’’
that is, the excitation flows back unto the psyche
and reinforces the dream-work. The second circumstance is that sleep weakens the censorship.
3. A measure of censorship remains, however, and
often allows satisfaction of a disguised kind only.
This is the function of the ‘‘dream-work.’’ This
work employs the mechanisms of condensation
and displacement (primary processes) before
proceeding to generate images (representability).
Then, by means of secondary revision, the
‘‘dream façade’’ is improved to provide a plausible meaning; i.e., the manifest content of the
dream, which is quite different from the underlying meaning, that of the ‘‘latent dreamthoughts.’’ The dream work is a form of thinking,
but its rules are very different from those that
prevail in the logical thought of the waking state:
dreams know nothing of contradiction.
4. The dream thus provides an outlet for libidinal
pressure. It is the ‘‘guardian of sleep’’ since, without its intervention, the pressure would awaken
the dreamer.
5. The dream’s raw materials are ‘‘day’s residues’’
(events, thoughts, or affects from the recent
past) and physical sensations that occur during
sleep. But its ‘‘real’’ content is reactivated infantile memories, especially those of an oedipal
kind: the dream is a regression to an infantile state.
These tenets underpin dream interpretation, whose
aim is to render meaningful elements in the dream’s
manifest content (to restore their latent meaning), on
the basis of the dreamer’s associations. Freud insisted
that any ‘‘key to dreams,’’ that is, any list of symbolic
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equivalents of supposedly general value, be excluded.
He did, however, recognize some universal ‘‘symbols,’’
transmitted by culture, and some ‘‘typical dreams’’ to
be met with in many dreamers (dreams of nudity, for
example).
ROGER PERRON
See also: Action-(re)presentation; Agency; Alpha
function; Anticathexis/counter-cathexis; Beta-elements;
Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Breton, André; Censorship;
Certainty; ‘‘Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest’’; Compromise formation; Condensation; Contradiction; Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘‘Gradiva’’;
Subject’s desire; Directed daydream (R. Desoille);
Displacement; Dream and Myth; Dream interpretation;
Dream’s navel, the; Convenience, dream of; Nakedness,
dream of; ‘‘Dream of the Wise Baby;’’ Dream screen;
Dream symbolism; Dream work; Ego ideal; Ego states;
Forgetting; Formations of the unconscious; Functional
phenomenon; Hypocritical dream; Hysteria; Infantile,
the; Inferiority, feeling of; Interpretation of Dreams, The;
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Isakower phenomenon, Jokes; Latent; Latent dream thoughts; Letter,
the; Logic(s); Manifest; Metaphor; ‘‘Metapsychologic
Supplement to the Theory of Dreams’’; Metonymy; Mnemic trace/memory trace; Mourning, dream of; Myth;
Myth of the Birth of the Hero, The; Narcissistic withdrawal; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Nightmare; Night terrors; Oedipus complex; On Dreams;
Overdetermination; Primal scene; Primary process/secondary process; ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology, A’’;
Psychic reality; Psychic temporality; Psychoanalysis of
Dreams; Punishment, dream of; Purposive idea; Reality
testing; Regression; Repetition; Repetitive dreams; Representability; Representation of affect; Reversal into the
opposite; Reverie; Schiller and psychoanalysis; Screen
memory; Secondary revision; Secret; Self-state dream;
Somnambulism; Substitutive formation; Surrealism and
psychoanalysis; Telepathy; Thing-presentation; Thought;
time; Training analysis; Trauma; Typical dreams; Unconscious, the; Wish/yearning; Wish fulfillment; Wish, hallucinatory satisfaction of a; Work (as a psychoanalytical
notion).
Bibliography
Anzieu, Didier. (1984). The group and the unconscious. (Benjamin Kilborne, Trans.). London and Boston: Routledge &
Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1975)
Diatkine, René. (1974). Rêve, illusion et connaissance. (Rapport). Réponse aux interventions. 1107–1108. Nouvelle
revue de psychanalyse, 38 (5–6), 769–820. P.L.R. Congrès
XXXIV ‘‘Le rêve.’’ Madrid, 1974.
437
DREAM INTERPRETATION
———. (1892–94a). Preface and footnotes to the translation of Charcot’s ‘‘Tuesday Lectures.’’ SE 1: 129–144.
The driving force of the dream, unconscious
wishes, are rooted in childhood, notably in oedipal conflicts.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18:
1–64.
The ‘‘dream material’’ is supplied by ‘‘day’s residues’’—usually recent events of waking life.
The dream work transforms this material by
means of the primary processes of condensation,
displacement, and visual representation, followed
on occasion by a secondary elaboration that perfects the ‘‘dream façade.’’
Having once transformed into the ‘‘manifest content of the dream,’’ the ‘‘latent dream-thoughts,’’
now unrecognizable, are able to cross the barrier
of censorship.
The scenes thus created have, for the dreamer, all
the characteristics of reality; they are hallucinatory in nature.
The logic governing the dreamwork is very different from that of waking life, and the dream’s
manifest content is often incoherent, filled with
bizarre or absurd elements.
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The Interpretation of Dreams. SE,
4–5.
———. (1950c [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology.
SE, 1: 281–387.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1981). Frontiers in psychoanalysis:
between the dream and psychic pain. (Catherine Cullen and
Philip Cullen, Trans.). London: Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psycho-Analysis. (Original work published
1977)
Further Reading
Blum, Harold P. (2000). The writing and interpretation of
dreams. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 17, 651–666.
Lansky, Melvin R. (Ed. ). (1992). Essential papers on
dreams. New York: New York University Press.
Lewin, Betram. (1955). Dream psychology and the analytic
situation. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 24, 169–199.
Reiser, Morton. (1997). The art and science of dream interpretation: Isakower revisited. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 45.
Solms, Mark. (1995). New findings on the neurological
organization of dreaming: Implications for psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 64, 43–67.
DREAM INTERPRETATION
The procedure of dream interpretation is based on the
theory of the dream’s functions and of the dreamwork
outlined in Freud’s great work The Interpretation of
Dreams (1900a). This book was based in large part on
Freud’s own self-analysis of 1896–1897, in which
dream interpretation played a leading role (Anzieu,
1975).
For Freud, dream interpretation is based on several
basic principles:
Every dream represents a wish as fulfilled. Thanks
to a relative relaxation of censorship in sleep, a
dream expresses repressed desires whose satisfaction is forbidden during the waking state. The
conflicts involved may be expressed in unpleasant
or anxiety-provoking dreams, however.
43 8
Interpretation relies on these principles, but it also
needs the dreamer’s associations. He or she is therefore
asked to associate as freely as possible, to elicit details
of the day’s residues used in the dreamwork, to explicate the displacements and condensations, and to
understand the choice of the visual images that make
up the manifest content. In this way the thoughts
latent beneath that manifest contest, the wishes and
conflicts underlying the dream, can be unearthed. Special attention should be paid to bizarre or absurd
details, for these indicate points where the dream’s
work of distortion has been less effective. At the same
time, however, Freud cautioned against concentrating
on the latent and ignoring the manifest content
(1916–17f).
For Freud, the interpretation of dreams was the
‘‘via regia,’’ the royal road leading to the unconscious.
On several occasions in The Interpretation of Dreams,
he noted that the procedure should be carried to the
extreme, yet the examples he provided could hardly
be said to adhere to this recommendation—presumably because these are for the most part his own
dreams, and he may have been reluctant to expose
the most intimate aspects of his personal life. It is in
any case doubtful that such an exhaustion of meaning is conceivable or even desirable. Dream interpretation may well be the royal road to the unconscious,
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but the unconscious is inexhaustible. Nor is it desirable for either patient or analyst to claim that the
moment has arrived when there is nothing more to
be said.
Finally, there are two points that need underscoring:
Waking interpretation never deals directly with
the dream but rather with a dream narrative, that
is, a verbal summary of mainly visual images produced in the waking state. The result is often an
over-elaboration of the ‘‘material’’ offered for
interpretation (Diatkine, 1974).
During an analysis, some dreams are responses to
and echoes of an earlier session or a preparation
for a future session. Every such dream bears the
stamp of the transference, and this must not be
overlooked.
ROGER PERRON
See also: Anagogic interpretation; Anticipatory ideas;
‘‘Autobiographical Study, An’’; ‘‘Constructions in Analysis’’; Demand; Doubt; Dream; Five Lectures on PsychoAnalysis; ‘‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’’
(Dora/Ida Bauer); Free association; Freud’s Self-Analysis;
‘‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’’ (Wolf Man);
Hermeneutics; Interpretation; Irma’s injection, dream of;
Secrets of a Soul; Over-interpretation; Psychoanalytic
Treatment of Children; Self-analysis; Sudden involuntary
idea.
Bibliography
Anzieu, Didier. (1986). Freud’s self-analysis (Peter Graham,
Trans.). London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. (Original work published 1975)
Diatkine, René. (1974). Rêve, illusion et connaissance. (Rapport). Réponse aux interventions pp. 1107–1108. Revue
Française de Psychanalyse. 38 (5–6), 769–820.
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams,
Parts I and II. SE, 4–5.
———. (1916–1917f). A metapsychological supplement to
the theory of dreams. SE, 14: 217–235.
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1981). Frontiers in psychoanalysis: between the dream and psychic pain (Catherine
Cullen and Philip Cullen, Trans.). London: Hogarth and
the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. (Original work published
1977)
DREAM, LATENT CONTENT OF THE. See Latent
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DREAM-LIKE MEMORY
Psychic reality is the subject of psychoanalysis. It is
important to distinguish psychic from external reality,
which we perceive through our senses. Wilfred R. Bion
refers to psychic reality as O. In his 1970 work Attention and Interpretation he focused attention on the
necessity for analysts to actively disengage from anything that might saturate their minds with sense data
or elements rooted in sensorial data, in order to free
the mind for psychic reality as much as possible. However, this psychic reality has no sensorial qualities as
such, even though it must use sensorial forms to represent itself: anxiety has no color, no taste, no smell. He
therefore suggested that analysts be ‘‘without memory
or desire’’ because memory and desire are linked to
sensorial elements and if analyst’s minds remain
attached to these elements they are no longer available
to receive the unknown, the mystery, that is, to be in
contact with O.
Bion distinguished, however, between two forms
of memory: ‘‘recalled memory’’ which corresponds
to the usual conception of memory, what we know
in advance, what we can remember consciously
about an event or a person, about the patient who
comes for the session, for example; and the ‘‘dreamlike memory’’ that springs into the analyst’s mind in
the course of the session, without any conscious
effort at recollection. This second type of memory is
the form that psychic reality takes in order to be
representable in the here and now of the session. It
has nothing to do with remembering events from
the past: ‘‘Recalled memory saturates the psychoanalyst’s preconceptions and obscures the goals to the
single point where clarity of judgment coincides
with the field where it is exercised: the ongoing session [. . .]. Dream-like memory is the memory of
psychic reality and is the stuff of analysis’’ (Bion,
Wilfred R., 1970, p. 70).
Wilfred R. Bion went a step further when he
declared that the aim of analysis is not only a knowledge of O but ‘‘becoming O,’’ insofar as psychic reality
cannot be known but only ‘‘be been.’’ He therefore
asks analysts not only to be without desire, without
memory, but also without knowledge, in order to promote in so far as possible this ‘‘becoming O’’ that he
calls ‘‘evolution.’’
DIDIER HOUZEL
439
DREAM, MANIFEST CONTENT
OF THE
See also: Attention; Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht; Transformations.
almost mad adult changes the child, so to speak, into a
psychiatrist [. . .]. It is unbelievable how much we can
still learn from our Ôwise children,’ the neurotics.’’
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred R. (1970). Attention and interpretation.
London: Tavistock Publications.
Grinberg, León, Sor, Dario, and Tabak de Bianchedi, Elizabeth. (1991). New introduction to the work of Bion. Northvale, NJ-London: Jason Aronson, 1993.
Symington, Joan, and Symington, Neville. (1996). The clinical thinking of Wilfred Bion. London: Routledge.
DREAM, MANIFEST CONTENT OF THE. See
Manifest
‘‘DREAM OF THE WISE BABY, THE’’
‘‘The Dream of the Wise Baby’’ is a one-page text that
Ferenczi wrote in 1923. It is a description of a typical
adult dream, not a fantasy or a myth, regardless of any
analogy with the episode of Jesus teaching the doctors
of the Law. It recounts a very young child, a neonate, a
baby with glasses, who is teaching adults. Although
Freud makes no mention of it in the final edition of
The Interpretation of Dreams in 1926, he does write:
‘‘Dreams are so closely related to linguistic expression
that Ferenczi has truly remarked that every tongue has
its own dream-language. It is impossible as a rule to
translate a dream into a foreign language and this
is equally true, I fancy, of a book such as the
present one.’’
A footnote to Ferenczi’s text introduces the notion
of children’s ‘‘effective knowledge’’ [tatsächliches Wissen] of adult sexuality. If the dream is repeated often it
illustrates what Ferenczi was later to call the ‘‘traumatolytic function of the dream’’ more than a sensual
reminiscence that the infant may have enjoyed when at
the breast. This knowledge poses a question: Is it a
knowledge that is linked to a visual or auditory perception, to an autoerotic excitation, or to an intuition
in relation with a primal fantasy? The answer was clear
for Ferenczi: It is a knowledge that is linked to facts
and to prematuration consequent to trauma, thus to
an experience of suffering. In ‘‘Confusion of Tongues’’
(1933/1955) he wrote: ‘‘The fear of the uninhibited,
44 0
PIERRE SABOURIN
See also: ‘‘Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the
Child’’; Infantile sexual curiosity.
Source Citation
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1923). Der traum vom ‘‘gelehrten Säugling.’’ Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse,
IX, 70.
Bibliography
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1955). Confusion of tongues between
adults and the child. The language of tenderness and of
passion. In Final contributions to the problems and methods
of psycho-analysis (pp. 156–167). London: Hogarth. (Original work published 1933 [1932])
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams.
Parts I and II. SE, 4–5.
DREAM SCREEN
It was Bertram D. Lewin, in his article ‘‘Sleep, the
Mouth and the Dream Screen,’’ who proposed calling
upon ‘‘an old familiar conception of Freud’s—the oral
libido—to elucidate certain manifestations associated
with sleep’’ (1946, p. 419).
‘‘The dream screen, as I define it,’’ wrote Lewin, ‘‘is
the surface on which a dream appears to be projected.
It is the blank background, present in the dream
though not necessarily seen, and the visually perceived
action of ordinary manifest dream contents takes place
on it or before it. Theoretically it may be part of the
latent or the manifest content, but this distinction is
academic. The dream screen is not often noted or
mentioned by the analytic patient, and in the practical
business of dream interpretation, the analyst is not
concerned with it’’ (p. 420).
In developing his argument Lewin referred to the
Isakower phenomenon, recalling that psychoanalyst
Otto ‘‘Isakower interprets the large masses, that
approach beginning sleepers, as breasts’’ (p. 421).
Lewin expanded on this insight as follows: ‘‘When one
falls asleep, the breast is taken into one’s perceptual
world: it flattens out or approaches flatness, and when
one wakes up it disappears, reversing the events of its
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entrance. A dream appears to be projected on this flattened breast—the dream screen—provided, that is,
that the dream is visual; for if there is no visual content
the dream screen would be blank, and the manifest
content would consist solely of impressions from
other fields of perception’’ (p. 421). At the end of his
article, Lewin offered this summary: ‘‘The baby’s first
sleep is without visual dream content. It follows oral
satiety. Later hypnagogic events preceding sleep represent an incorporation of the breast (Isakower), those
that follow occasionally may show the breast departing. The breast is represented in sleep by the dream
screen. The dream screen also represents the fulfillment of the wish to sleep’’ (p. 433).
Today, over and above the attempt to link sleep and
oral libido, the notion of the dream screen should no
doubt be viewed in conjunction with the idea of the
introjection of ‘‘containers,’’ and with Didier Anzieu’s
discussion of the ‘‘skin ego,’’ with his concepts of the
skin as a ‘‘projective’’ or ‘‘writing surface’’ (1985, p.
40), and even with his view of the dream’s function as
a film or pellicle.
At all events, the dream screen is an aspect of the
dream-work which operates as a ‘‘non-process,’’ and
which as such calls for no specific interpretation.
BERNARD GOLSE
See also: Cinema and psychoanalysis; Dream; Dream
work; Isakower phenomenon, Negative hallucination;
Skin-ego; Sleep/wakefulness.
Bibliography
Anzieu, Didier. (1989). The skin ego. (Chris Turner, Trans.).
New Haven and London: Yale University Press. (Orignal
work published 1985)
Lewin, Bertram D. (1949). Sleep, the mouth and the dream
screen. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 15, (4), 419–34.
DREAM SYMBOLISM
In the context of psychoanalysis, the idea of symbolism
in dreams should be understood in three ways: (1) as
pertaining to relatively constant and universal correspondences between the symbol and what it symbolizes
within a given culture (and in the view of some, no
doubt, within all cultures); (2) as pertaining to symbol/
symbolized correspondences specific to a given dreamer and a given dream; and (3) as pertaining to the
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processes of symbolization that give rise to the aforementioned correspondences.
In Chapter 6 of his Interpretation of Dreams (1900a),
Freud devoted a section to ‘‘Representation by Symbols in Dreams.’’ Anyone who read only this section,
however, would have a completely mistaken view of
the Freudian approach to the interpretation of dreams.
For what Freud dealt with here, in essence, were correspondences of the first kind defined above, that is to
say representations (to be met with especially in ‘‘typical dreams’’) whose meanings seemed so invariable
from one dreamer to the next that they could be taken
as read, even without reference to the subject’s associations. For example, any long or pointed object, any
weapon (but also a hat) stood for the penis, and hollow objects for the vagina or, more generally, a
woman’s body; similarly, going up a staircase or flying
represented sexual excitement, erection or coitus,
coming out of a tunnel meant birth, a tooth being
pulled related to masturbation, and so on. Nor were
these equivalences exclusive to dreams, for they
occurred widely too in stories, myths, and folklore, a
fact tending to confirm their universal validity. Verbal
connections were very common in this context. In the
case of masturbation, for instance, vulgar locutions in
German embodied a similar symbolism: ‘‘Sich einen
ausreissen,’’ literally ‘‘to pull oneself out,’’ meant to
masturbate (pp. 348n, 388), and so on.
The sheer profusion of examples given by Freud in
this section might suggest to an incautious reader that
The Interpretation of Dreams is nothing but another
‘‘dream-book’’; in reality, of course, the entire work is a
protest against the ‘‘decoding’’ approach to dream interpretation. Indeed Freud repeatedly stresses that, even if
an initial interpretation may be based on a sort of apriori table of correspondences, a symbol is always
modulated by the mental activity of the particular dreamer. For symbols ‘‘frequently have more than one or
even several meanings, and, as with Chinese script, the
correct interpretation can only be arrived at on each
occasion from the context.’’ (p. 353). Beyond the very
first or ‘‘symbolic’’ reading, therefore, it was essential, in
Freud’s view, to draw out the dreamer’s associations.
The dream work is the task of inserting into each
dream the wish which lies at its origin, without offending the conscious mind. Representations in dreams are
constructed in the two phases of this transformation:
the primary-process phase (condensation, displacement,
considerations of representability) and the phase of the
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DREAM WORK
secondary revision which completes the transformation
by giving consistency and an acceptable meaning to the
manifest text of the dream. The meaning of a given
representation can therefore as a general rule be established solely by working in reverse, by de-condensation,
so to speak, by re-placing what has been displaced, and
so on, on the basis of the associations of the dreamer
and the intervention of the analyst.
Processes of symbolization organize the dreamwork. Consequently, the whole of The Interpretation of
Dreams, indeed all Freud’s writings on dreams, may be
considered to have them as their subject; beyond that,
these processes constitute the very core of Freud’s
metapsychology (Gibeault, 1989).
Works on dreams since Freud have been extremely
numerous, dealing notably with the issue of the articulation between ‘‘general symbols’’ and ‘‘individual
symbols.’’ Ernest Jones (1916/1920) was one of the
first to take up this discussion.
ROGER PERRON
See also: Dream; Interpretation of Dreams, The; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Symbol; Symbolism;
Translation.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4–5.
Gibeault, Alain. (1989). Destins de la symbolization. Revue
française de psychanalyse, 49 (3), 1493–1617.
Jones, Ernest. (1920). The theory of symbolism. In Papers on
psychoanalysis. New York: W. Wood. (Original work published 1916)
Pasche, Francis. (1960). Le symbole personnel. In À partir de
Freud. Paris: Payot.
DREAM WORK
Freud introduced the notion of ‘‘dream work’’ to
clearly emphasize that the dream is not the result, as
was generally thought to be the case, of a weakened
state of mental activity producing incoherent fragments, but, on the contrary, the outcome of very complex psychic work.
This was the notion that was articulated in The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), based on a fundamental hypothesis: the dream represents a fulfillment
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of desires that are repressed in waking life, but this realization is typically disguised so as to pass through censorship during sleep. The ‘‘dream work’’ is responsible
for this disguise.
The ‘‘materials’’ used in this process are essentially
of two types: residues of the day, that is to say ‘‘mnemonic traces’’ of events, thoughts, affects, etc., of waking life (usually recent), and bodily sensations during
sleep (hunger, thirst, pain, etc., but particularly erotic
excitation). The source of the dream, however, is to be
found in conflicts and wishes of childhood—oedipal
conflicts prominent among them .
The dream work proceeds in two phases. The first
phase is that of the primary processes: ‘‘condensation,’’
resulting in compressing into a single image disparate,
even contradictory material (events, personages,
representations, affects, etc.); ‘‘displacement,’’ whereby
an affectively neutral representation is substituted for
another, and finally visual imagery is primarily the
mode of representation for thoughts, affects, and sensation. There is the passage into images itself, or
‘‘representability’’: the dream is made up of essentially
visual sensorial images. Condensation and displacement use a stock of easily available images, which are
residues of the day.
The first phase of the dream produces the manifest
content, which is the unrecognizable translation of the
‘‘latent thoughts’’ that can be made conscious through
analysis. However, the manifest content has to be subjected to a secondary revision upon awakening in
order to create a superficial coherence in the remembered and repeated dream.
It is significant that while Freud described these primary and secondary processes as the two phases of the
dream work, he also considered them as the two processes governing mental activity: the ‘‘primary processes,’’ characterized by the free flowing of an unbound
energy; and ‘‘secondary processes,’’ dominated by
rational intellectual activity and bound energy. Consequently, there is a wide chasm between the primary and
secondary processes that can be revealed by dissection of
the dream work (Neyraut, 1978, 1997).
ROGER PERRON
See also: Cinema and psychoanalysis; Dream; Jokes and their
Relation to the Unconscious; ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’;
Neurotic defenses; Representability, work of; Symptomformation; Work (as a psychoanalytical notion).
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Bibliography
Grinstein, Alexander, (1968). On Sigmund Freud’s dreams.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Neyraut, Michel. (1978). Les logique de l’Inconscient. Paris:
Hachette.
‘‘DREAMS AND MYTHS’’
This essay is an exercise in applied psychoanalysis:
reference can be made to introduction to the ‘‘Essays
in Applied Psychoanalysis’’ written by Sigmund Freud
in the first edition of Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s
‘‘Gradiva’’ (1907a [1906]), as well as to Freud’s essay
‘‘Creative Writers and Day-dreaming’’ (1908e [1907]).
Abraham’s essay can be compared to Franz Riklin’s
‘‘Réalisation de désir et de symbolisme dans le conte’’
(Desire and symbolism in tales; 1908).
Abraham compared collective myths with dreams
and located the following similarities: both make use of
symbolic imagery; both are the products of human fantasy aimed at the fulfillment of wishes; both are subject
to censorship and the same defense mechanisms:
‘‘Myths are what survives of the psychic life of peoples;
dreams are individual myths,’’ he wrote. This same
theme was subsequently discussed by Otto Rank, Theodor Reik, and Géza Róheim before interest in it faded.
JOHANNES CREMERIUS
See also: Abraham, Karl; Applied psychoanalysis and the
interaction of psychoanalysis; Dream; Myth; Mythology
and psychoanalysis; Primitive.
Source Citation
Abraham, Karl. (1949). Dreams and myths: a study in race
psychology. In Selected papers of Karl Abraham, M.D..
(Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey, Trans.). London:
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis. (Original work published 1909)
interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this
is because we become aware during the work of
interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of
dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which
moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot
where it reaches down into the unknown’’ (p. 525).
This careful formulation seems to contradict Freud’s
whole approach to analyzing dreams, which is to take
the analysis as far as possible. As he later wrote when
discussing the Wolf Man’s dream, ‘‘It is always a strict
law of dream interpretation that an explanation must
be found for every detail’’ (1918b, p. 42n).
It is therefore unsurprising that Freud, rather than
accept ‘‘the unknown’’ as a barrier, should wonder
whether a given patient’s resistance indicated failure
stemming from the inadequacy of the analyst or of the
analytic method themselves. In ‘‘Notes on Dream
Interpretation’’ (1925i) he returned to the issue, pondering ‘‘the limits to the possibility of interpretation of
the interpretable’’ (p. 127). There he stressed, ‘‘Those
dreams best fulfil their function [to satisfy a wish in
spite of the ego] about which one knows nothing after
waking’’ (p. 128) or that are quite simply forgotten.
They therefore appear to be uninterpretable. All the
same, ‘‘it sometimes happens, too, that after months
or years of analytic labour, one returns to a dream
which at the beginning of the treatment seemed meaningless and incomprehensible but which is now, in the
light of knowledge obtained in the meantime, completely elucidated’’ (p. 129).
ROGER PERRON
See also: Analyzability; Incompleteness; Over-interpretation;
Real, the (Lacan); Surrealism and psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Dadoun, Roger. (1972). Les ombilics du rêve. Nouvelle revue
de psychanalyse, 5, 239–254.
Further Reading
Wangh, Martin. (1954). Day residue in dream and myth. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2, 446–452.
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4: 1–338; 5: 339–625.
———. (1918b). From the history of an infantile neurosis.
SE, 17: 1–122.
DREAM’S NAVEL
———. (1925i). Some additional notes on dream interpretation as a whole. SE, 19: 123–138.
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), Freud wrote,
‘‘There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly
Rosolato, Guy. (1978). La relation d’inconnu. Paris:
Gallimard.
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DRIVE/INSTINCT
‘‘The whole flux of our mental life and everything that
finds expression in our thoughts are derivations and
representatives of the multifarious instincts [drives]
that are innate in our physical constitution’’ (Freud,
1932c, p. 221).
‘‘[T]he ‘‘instinct [drive]’’ appears to us as a concept
on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as
the psychical representative of the stimuli originating
from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a
measure of the demand made upon the mind for work
in consequence of its connection with the body’’
(Freud, 1915c, pp. 121–122).
The German verb Treiben generally means ‘‘to set
into motion’’; its earliest meaning was ‘‘to drive cattle.’’
The verb was also used to refer to getting plants to
grow, to stamp metal, to drill a mineshaft, to practice
languages, to do business, to spend money, to act up—
German uses Treiben for each of these. Likewise to propel someone into flight, to push someone to the limit,
or to feel pressured to do this or that.
The noun Trieb shows the same range of force and
diversity. Sprout, shoot, or offshoot, for plants;
impulse, tendency, penchant, inclination, and instinct
for animals and humans—these are all described by
the word Trieb, which also becomes pejorative when
someone gives in to his or her appetites. Triebleben
means ‘‘instinctual life,’’ and Triebhaft means ‘‘instinctive.’’ In physics, Trieb means ‘‘motor force,’’ and it
appears in a number of compounds such as Triebfeder,
‘‘mainspring,’’ Triebkraft, ‘‘driving force.’’ Triebstoff, literally ‘‘driving stuff,’’ means ‘‘fuel.’’
Although James Strachey chose to translate Trieb by
‘‘instinct,’’ the English word ‘‘drive,’’ like its German
counterpart, is in everyday use. It involves the inherent
principle of change and activity in living beings. From
a dynamic point of view, it is very similar to the
ancient Greek concept of physis. In 1780, Schiller
wrote about Trieb in an essay that was well known to
Freud and included the passage, ‘‘The animal drives
awaken and expand the intellectual drives.’’ Freud
often quoted Schiller’s poem ‘‘Die Weltweisen’’ when
referring to ‘‘the influence of the two most powerful
motive forces—hunger and love’’ (1899a, p. 316).
Freud coined more than forty-five expressions based
on the word Trieb, such as Triebkonflikt, Strachey’s
‘‘instinctual conflict.’’ Further, he qualified drives in
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myriad ways, including the sexual drives, the
ego-drives, the drive for self-preservation, the aggressive
drives, the drive for power, the drive for mastery, the
destructive drive, the life-drive, the death-drive, the drive
for knowledge, and the social drive. This list does not
even include the classification of the partial drives. Nor
does it refer to the theory of the drives, Freud’s Trieblehre.
Finally, Trieb designates either the dynamics underlying
a specific mental dynamic, in which case Freud spoke of
a drive or drives manifested in ‘‘instinctual impulses’’
(1915c, p. 124); or, alternatively, it designates an overarching dynamic, in which case he referred to the drive
or to the life-drive and the death-drive.
Language provides us with a constant aspect of the
meaning of ‘‘drive’’: the motor principle inherent in
living organisms that underlies, in the last instance, all
their actions. A drive is activity.
As soon as the concept of libido was introduced, in
1894, as psychical sexual excitation, a rough sketch of
the sexual drive became necessary so that the ‘‘concept
of the mechanism of anxiety neurosis can be made
clearer’’ (Freud, 1895b [1894], p. 108). At first, the sexual drive belonged to the conceptual level. It signified
a relatively continuous change of phase and location
that transformed the energy of the organic sexual processes into psychical sexual energy, or libido. The sexual drive refers to this transition and its dynamic; it is
the conceptual referent of the libido.
Three constants soon appeared. Drive and theory:
‘‘drive’’ is a fundamental concept, necessary for the
dynamic understanding of psychical processes. It is
inferred from its effects, just like magnetic or gravitational fields in physics. Drive and biology: the theory of
the drive is the part of psychoanalytic theory that, since
it is founded on somatic processes, borders on biology
(Brown-Séquard’s experiments of 1899 were not
unknown to Freud). Drive, sexuality, and libido: Freud’s
entire work is concerned with the sexual drive. Regardless of the structural oppositions into which it is introduced, it remains the preeminent dynamic referent of
human mental life, and as such, is expressed as libido.
Though Freud was later to sharpen and to elaborate
it, the concept of the drive was transgressive as early as
1894, and in at least three different senses:
1. It highlighted the importance of sexuality in
human mental life.
2. It subverted the body/mind dualism.
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3. And by so doing, it reestablished, in the manner
of Aristotle and contemporary mathematicians
and physicists, the primacy of the dynamic
factor in the realization of stable and individuated forms.
Freud distinguished three successive ‘‘steps’’ in the
theory of the drives: an ‘‘extension of the concept of
sexuality,’’ ‘‘the hypothesis of narcissism,’’ and the ‘‘assertion of the regressive character of [drives]’’ (1920g,
p. 59). We can trace these steps in his major works: first,
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d); next,
‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’ (1914c) and the
metapsychological papers of 1915, published in 1924;
and finally, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g). The
first step dissected the sexual drive into component partial drives and emphasized the importance of infantile
sexuality. The second step generated new psychic formations of larger dimensions, beyond the basic level, such
as the ego and narcissism. At this stage, a difficulty developed regarding the drive’s dualism; nevertheless, the
drive, its pressure, and its psychical representatives were
clearly defined. The third step established the life-drive
and the death-drive, a dualism of vast proportions
under which all of mental life and all matter was now
subsumed. At each step, Freud expanded the drive’s
domain without abandoning previous knowledge or
more limited perspectives.
Freud’s ‘‘thorough study of the . . . essential characters of the sexual [drive] and . . . the course of its development’’ (1905d, p. 173), took him far beyond both
language and tradition, and on the basis of this research
he founded the dynamics of psychoanalysis. The theory
of the drives was so crucial that Freud—in contrast to
his practice with his other fundamental works—
continually revised the Three Essays as the theory
evolved, until the edition of 1924, which introduced
such concepts as the phallic stage and primary masochism. Nevertheless, the elements constituting the
theory of psychoanalysis could have been taken as
established as early as 1905, if we can rely on Freud’s
recollection in 1924: ‘‘They are: emphasis on instinctual
life (affectivity), on mental dynamics, on the fact that
even the apparently most obscure and arbitrary mental
phenomena invariably have a meaning and a causation,
the theory of psychical conflict and of the pathogenic
nature of repression, the view that symptoms are substitutive satisfactions, the recognition of the etiological
importance of sexual life, and in particular of the
beginnings of infantile sexuality’’ (1924f, p. 198).
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These factors depend on the theory elaborated in
the Three Essays, as the order of their enumeration
indicates. The sexual drive was first dissociated from
its ‘‘natural’’ object, an adult of the opposite sex, and
then broken down into partial drives that appear in
infancy, the oral drive, the anal-sadistic drive, and so
on. They are defined by their source, which is a bodily
erogenous zone; their aim, which is the cessation of
their excitation through discharge; and their object,
which is the most variable factor. The possible paths
that they can take are diverse: foreplay in adult sexual
activity; repression and symptomatic expression in the
neuroses; fixation and exclusivity in the perversions;
and finally all the defensive formations—reactionformation, inhibition as to their aim, sublimation, and
so on. Thus the diversity of adult sexuality is clarified
by its ‘‘polymorphously perverse’’ infantile development—and the opposition between the normal and
the pathological is eliminated. The two stages in the
constitution of human sexuality, first early childhood
and then puberty, explain the ‘‘damming up’’ of the
drive’s energy and the psychical development of the
individual by the establishment of defenses at
the expense of the sexual drives. ‘‘The simplest and
likeliest assumption as to the nature of the instincts
would seem to be that in itself an instinct is without
quality, and, so far as mental life is concerned, is only
to be regarded as a measure of the demand made upon
the mind for work’’ (1905d, p. 168). The variability
and plasticity of the drive’s dynamics are essential to
this work, since it views the development of the person
and of culture on the course of drive development.
Regarding the enlargement of the concept of sexuality, Freud wrote: ‘‘These facts could be met by drawing a
contrast between the sexual instincts [drives] and ego
instincts [drives] (instincts [drives] of self-preservation)
which was in line with the popular saying that hunger
and love make the world go round: libido was the manifestation of the force of love in the same sense as was
hunger of the self-preservative [drive]. The nature of the
ego instincts remained for the time being undefined
and, like all the other characteristics of the ego, inaccessible to analysis’’ (1923a [1922], p. 255). As one component of psychic conflict, the drives of the ego were therefore indispensable.
Proceeding with the investigation of the drives in
1911 with the Schreber case, Freud at first saw himself
as ‘‘defenseless,’’ because the concept of libidinal
investment in the ego seemed to undo the dualism of
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D R I V E /I N S T I N C T
the drive. ‘‘Thus the instincts [drives] of self-preservation were also of a libidinal nature: they were sexual
instincts [drives] which, instead of external objects,
had taken the subject’s own ego as an object. . . . The
libido of the self-preservative instincts was now
described as narcissistic libido and it was recognized
that a high degree of this self-love constituted the primary and normal state of things. The earlier formula
laid down for the transference neuroses consequently
required to be modified, though not corrected. It was
better, instead of speaking of a conflict between sexual
instincts and ego instincts, to speak of a conflict
between object-libido and ego-libido, or, since the nature of these instincts [drives] was the same, between
the object cathexes and the ego’’ (1923a [1922],
p. 257).
From 1914 to 1920, there is no longer a dualism of
the drive. The continuous and constant pressure of the
drive—along with the pleasure principle—was sufficient to generate the psychic dynamics as well as the
diversity of psychical formations (by means of anticathexis and primal repression). ‘‘By the pressure
[Drang] of an instinct [drive] we understand its motor
factor, the amount of force or the measure of the
demand for work which it represents. The character of
exercising pressure is common to all instincts [drives];
it is in fact their very essence’’ (1915c, p. 122). In universalizing the drive as a potential state underlying the
psyche, Freud also accounted for the way in which
drives manifest themselves: They are the workings of
the drive in the unconscious, and the twofold determination of its representatives revealed by repression:
ideas and quota of affect.
Dissatisfied with this situation, which is monist at
the dynamic level and dualist in the effects it brings
about (though such a dualism is common in any qualitative dynamics), Freud hypothesized: ‘‘On the ground
of far-reaching consideration of the processes which
go to make up life and which lead to death, it becomes
probable that we should recognize the existence of two
classes of [drives], corresponding to the contrary processes of construction and dissolution in the organism’’ (1923a, p. 258). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920g), he constructed a space in which the substrate
is inert matter plus living substance, on which the two
types of dynamics act. One refers to pure stability: the
death-drives. The other refers to a continuity and to a
flexible stability in living beings that continue to exist:
the life-drives, or Eros. This space accommodated a
44 6
psychical apparatus that was enlarged to include the
id, ego, and superego, in which the fundamental drives
appeared as libido, as destructiveness and masochism;
or even, as Freud put it: ‘‘For the opposition between
the two classes of instincts we may put the polarity of
love and hate’’ (1923b, p. 42).
From that point on, this model of the dynamics and
space of the drive was sufficient. But the theory of the
life-drives and death-drives still included propositions
too diverse to fit within this model. Several factors
remained to be accommodated: the necessity of constructing a space of sufficient dimensions to accommodate all the psychical processes; the fundamental
idea of the plurality of the dynamics of psychical work;
and finally the necessity of introducing, at the dynamic
level, the stability, and even the stabilization, that constitutes, via the ‘‘fixation’’ of a drive, the essence of
symptoms and the constraint of repetition. Thus the
death-drive includes, among other things, the
‘‘instinctual’’ aspect of the drive. Even though this distinction between drive and instinct is obscured in English by Strachey’s translation, the death-drive
integrates the ‘‘conservative’’ and ‘‘regressive’’ nature
of instinct. Moreover, this model emphasizes the
essential role of the repression of destructive drives in
cultural development; it explains the process of the
internalization of aggression in the superego; and it
explains the origin and the dangers of guilt feelings.
The prevailing qualitative dynamics recognizes what
could be called, borrowing a term from the mathematician Seifert, the ‘‘fiber spaces’’ in drives. These include
the dynamics out of which the actual forms of the drive
develop. From this point of view, it is obvious that any
psychoanalytic concept depends, in the final instance,
on the theory of the drives. Thus it is consistent that
the first ontogenesis of the purified ego appeared in
‘‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.’’ Moreover, it was
necessary that this paper opened the metapsychology
and preceded the essays on repression, the unconscious, dreams, and mourning and melancholia. Likewise, it was necessary to propose the theory of lifedrives and death-drives in order to construct the
second topography. The pleasure principle itself
depends on the death-drive. The constant updating of
the Three Essays makes it obvious that the theory of the
drive is at the basis of the entire theoretical edifice.
What is missing in the theory of the drives is a
dimension that would accommodate all of psychical
dynamics and economics—for example, reality, to
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which Freud conceded an economic and dynamic
status that he continually returned to during the years
1923–1925. He reevaluated its role in the constitution
of the neuroses and psychoses, and then he reworked
the theory of anxiety, and described a realistic anxiety
(Realangst).
The transgressive features of the drive, listed above,
indicate the ways in which it has been critiqued. The
accusation of pansexualism is easy to refute: ‘‘. . . it is a
mistake to accuse psycho-analysis of Ôpan-sexualism’
and to allege that it drives all mental occurrences from
sexuality and traces them all back to it. On the contrary, psycho-analysis has from the very first distinguished the sexual instincts [drives] from others which
it has provisionally termed Ôego-instincts [drives]’ . . .
and even the neuroses it has traced back not to sexuality alone but to the conflict between the sexual
impulses and the ego’’ (1923a, pp. 251–252).
In the field of psychoanalysis, it is far more common
to reproach Freud for his ‘‘biologism,’’ his supposed
emphasis on biology as opposed to the unconscious or
language. And thus idealism and the mind/body dualism are reintroduced.
The primacy of dynamics, which places psychoanalysis within the larger tradition of scientific modernism
(along with thermodynamics, theories of dynamic systems, and qualitative dynamics), has run into several
difficulties. First of all, Treib does not have an etymological correspondent except ‘‘drive’’ where the pressure
disappears after fixed discharge. Instinct has the same
problem, as was demonstrated by Agnès Oppenheimer
in her studies of the British ‘‘object-relations school.’’
Without an adequate term, the concept of das Dynamische is not communicated. Another obstacle was
noted by Freud in 1910: ‘‘The most striking distinction
between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no
doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress
upon the [drive] itself, whereas we emphasize its object.
The ancients glorified the [drive] and were prepared on
its account to honour even an inferior object; while we
despise the activity [of the drive] in itself and find
excuses for it only in the merits of the object’’ (1905d,
p. 149). Language, culture, and the various dominant
epistemologies (for example pragmatism, empiricism,
positivism, and structuralism), by privileging object
relations, mask the dynamic point of view.
Conversely, Ferenczi delved into the dynamics of
the drive audaciously in his Thalassa (1924). Having
the term pulsion at their disposal as a translation for
Trieb from 1910 on, French-speaking analysts—such
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as Jean Laplanche, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, and André
Green—were able to preserve the meaning of the concept and to develop it.
Freud admitted his difficulties with the theory of
the drives. In fact, dynamic science remains to this day
extremely difficult, and the theory of the drives is a
work in progress. According to Freud, even the sexual
drives, which are the most well known, are still
obscure, thanks to their interchangeability. Sublimation remained a difficult concept after Freud (S. de
Mijolla-Mellor, 1992), and research on this topic today
is still centered on the themes that he discovered.
However much we may accept the Freudian point of
view, there is still the death-drive. ‘‘A queer [drive]
indeed, directed to the destruction of its own organic
home!’’ (1933a [1932], pp. 105–106) If all the demands
included in the life-drives and death-drives are admissible (Porte, 1994), a theory of the drives exploiting the
facts of qualitative dynamics would distribute them differently. Nothing obliges us to restrict the number of
dynamics, and we could suppose the existence of ‘‘fast’’
and ‘‘slow’’ dynamics (Kubie, 1960). Fear would count
among the basic affects, along with love and hate, for ‘‘It
is like a prolongation in the mental sphere of the
dilemma of Ôeat or be eaten’ which dominates the
organic animate world’’ (1933a [1932], p. 111).
Elaborating for Einstein ‘‘a portion of the theory of the
[drives],’’ Freud noted, ‘‘It may perhaps seem to you as
though our theories are a kind of mythology and, in the
present case, not even an agreeable one. But does not
every science come in the end to a kind of mythology like
this? Cannot the same be said to-day of your own Physics?’’ (1933b [1932], p. 211). Thus it is in the sense that
every science worthy of the name constructs a mythology,
and then controls its expansion, that Freud can speak of
‘‘Our mythological theory of [drives]’’ (p. 212).
MICHÈLE PORTE
See also: Activity/passivity; Aggressive instinct/aggressive
drive; Anaclisis/anaclictic; Beyond the Pleasure Principle;
Binding/unbinding of the instincts; Compulsion;
Cruelty; Drive, subject of the; Dualism; Economic point
of view; Ego functions; Ethnology and psychoanalysis;
Eros; Erotogenic zone; Fixation; Fusion/defusion of
instincts; Id; Instinct; ‘‘Instincts and Their Vicisssitudes’’;
Instinctual impulse; Instinctual representative (representative of the drive); Look/gaze; Knowledge, instinct for;
Mastery, instinct for; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Object; ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’;
447
DUALISM
Outline of Psycho-Analysis An; Pair of opposites; Principle
of constancy; Prohibition; Reversal (into the opposite);
Sublimation; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality;
Turning around upon the subject’s own self; Turning
around; Voyeurism.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1920g) Beyond the pleasure principle. SE,
18: 1–64.
———. (1923b) The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
———. (1915c) Instincts and their vicissitudes. SE, 14:
109–140.
———. (1932c) My contact with Josef Popper-Lynkeus. SE,
22: 219–224.
———. (1933a [1932]) New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
———. (1895b [1894]) On the grounds for detaching a particular syndrome from neurasthenia under the description
‘‘Anxiety Neurosis.’’ SE, 3: 85–115.
———. (1899a) Screen memories. SE, 3: 299–322.
———. (1924f) A short account of psycho-analysis. SE, 19:
189–209.
———. (1923a [1922]) Two encyclopaedia articles: Psychoanalysis and the libido theory, SE, 18: 235–259.
Freud, Sigmund and Einstein, Albert. (1933b [1932]) Why
war?. SE, 22: 195–215.
Kubie, Lawrence S. Practical and theoretical aspects of psychoanalysis. New York: Praeger, 1960.
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1992). Le plaisir de pensée. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Oppenheimer, Agnès. (1996). Kohut et la psychologie du self.
Presses Universitaires de France.
Porte, Michèle (Ed.). (1994). Passion des formes. Dynamique
qualitative, sémiophysique et intelligibilité. À René Thom.
Paris: E.N.S. Fontenay-Saint Cloud.
Further Reading
Kernberg, Otto. (2001). Object relations, affects, and drives:
toward a new synthesis. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 21,
604–619.
DUALISM
In the history of religion, dualism refers to the eighteenth-century doctrines that see God and the devil as
44 8
two first principles, irreducible and coeternal.
Christian Wolff (1734/1968) classified dogmatic
philosophies into dualistic systems, which separated
the soul from the body as distinct substances, and
monistic systems, both groups being distinct from
skepticism. In anthropology, epistemology, and ethics,
a theory is dualistic when two irreducible principles
can serve as a foundation for the theory.
From ‘‘A case of successful treatment by hypnotism’’
(1892–1893) to his last works, Sigmund Freud envisioned mental processes as resulting from underlying
conflicts, fed by opposing forces: ‘‘Psychoanalysis early
became aware that all mental occurrences must be
regarded as built on the basis of an interplay of the forces
of the elementary instincts’’ (1923a). In the first topographic subsystem, these forces arise from the sexual
instincts in conflict with the ego, or self-preservation,
instincts. Later Freud (1914c) said that they arise from
the object libido in conflict with the ego libido, as well as
from the pressure of the drives. In the second topographic subsystem (after 1920), they arise from the life
and death drives. These forces structure the form and
dynamics of the mental processes.
Although Freud emphasized the existence of two types
of drives in his dualistic approach, he avoids the word
‘‘dualism.’’ Originating in the body, effecting the association of body and mind, and causing physical
changes (conversion) or other types of modifications
(other defenses), the drives create a dualistic dynamic,
though this is not sufficient for saying that psychoanalytic theory is dualistic.
As Freud’s research evolved, the essential polarities
and the role of instinctual dualism changed as well.
When studying the transference neuroses, Freud postulated an ‘‘opposition between the Ôsexual impulses’
directed toward the object and other impulses that we
can only identify imperfectly and temporarily designate with the name Ôego instincts’ ’’ Freud noted the
concordance with the opposition between hunger and
love. He added, ‘‘In the forefront of these instincts, we
must recognize the instincts that serve for the preservation of the individual’’ (1920g). In the first topographic subsystem, these forces arising from instincts
were like vectors applied to quasi points (unconscious
representations). In this way they resembled the structures of classical physics (Freud, 1899a).
Freud’s introduction, between 1911 and 1915, of narcissism, of the ego as agency, of transference (rather than
phenomenological transfer), and of a series of correlative
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terms of considerable scope shows his dissatisfaction
with the former dynamic system. Freud then insisted
that antagonistic forces account for morphogenesis, stabilization, and the evolution (in modern terms, structural stability) of large irreducible structures such as the
ego, the ego ideal, and certain identifications.
Fechner and his hypotheses of stability were of use to
Freud. Contemporary dynamicists provide more
refined instruments for plumbing the depths of Freudian drive dualism while respecting its preconditions.
After a period of confusion when Freud replaced the
dynamics of conflict with the opposition between object
libido and ego, together with the pressure of the drive,
Freud proposed the dualism of the life and death drives.
A chiasma was introduced, since the sex drive, a disturbing toxic force in the first topographic subsystem, was
now integrated in the life drive (germen), while the ego
instincts (soma) were partially integrated in the death
drive. The difficulty that this chiasma creates can be
resolved by assuming that the new dualism, which is
more comprehensive, resolves conflicts between tendencies with different degrees of stability. The ego affects its
own immediate stability by conflicting with the expression of sexuality, which forces the ego to change. The
sexual drive is directed, in the last instance, at the longterm structural stability of the species.
See also: Ambivalence; Beyond the Pleasure Principle;
Demand; Destrudo; Ego-instinct; Fusion/defusion of
instincts; Libido; Life instinct (Eros); Monism; Psychology
of Women. The, A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, The; Psychosomatic limit/boundary.
Drive dualism correlates with a number of conflicts.
These include the polarities of mental life: the economic
polarity of pleasure and unpleasure, the reality polarities
of the ego and the outside world, the biological polarities
of activity and passivity. This last pair introduces the
polarities around which the contrasts between the sexes
develop: active/passive, phallic/nonphallic, masculine/
feminine. In ambivalence there is movement between
love and hate, and ultimately between the life and death
drives; or between the pleasure principle and the reality
(formerly constancy) principle, and ultimately between
the life and death drives.
Laplanche, Jean. (1970). Vie et mort en psychanalyse. Paris:
Flammarion.
The dualism of the life and death drives has often
been rejected or poorly understood. It has been interpreted in an exclusively realist sense (Melanie Klein
and the Paris school of psychosomatics) even though
there was also a theoretical component. The repetition
compulsion and death drive have been unilaterally
interpreted as nondynamic structural formalisms.
Freud’s requirements for drive theory involve dynamically accounting for the simple stability that repetition
implies (for example, in symptoms) while taking into
account the structural stability (always deviating in the
same way) that the majority of mental structures
implement. ‘‘But,’’ according to Freud (1920g), ‘‘in no
region of psychology were we groping more in the
dark [than in the case of the drives].’’ Only Gustav
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MICHÈLE PORTE
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1892–1893). A case of successful treatment by hypnotism. SE, 1: 115–128.
———. (1899a). Screen memories. SE, 3: 299–322.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: an introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18:
1–64.
———. (1923). The libido theory. SE, 18: 255–259.
Wolff, Christian. (1968). Psychologia rationalis. Hildesheim,
Germany: Olms. (Originally published 1734)
DUBAL, GEORGE (1909–1993)
George Dubal, Swiss psychoanalyst and doctor of
theology, was born in Geneva on September 18, 1909,
and died there on March 9, 1993.
He received a Protestant education. Upon finishing secondary school, he commenced university studies at Eugène Pittard’s laboratory, then successively
attended the universities of Strasbourg, Geneva, and
Paris. He took part in the new-schools movement in
French-speaking Switzerland and took a very early
interest in psychoanalytic thinking. At the age of sixteen he experimented with the Jungian method of
free association. ‘‘This method,’’ he wrote in his
memoires, ‘‘enabled me to save a comrade from
suicide.’’
He discovered the psychoanalytic experience from
one of the first Swiss psychoanalysts, Dr. Gustave
Richard of Neuchâtel. He joined Richard, Marguerite
Bosseret, and William Perret in creating ‘‘new schools’’
to forward educational reform. Dr. Richard entrusted
one of his sons to him for psychotherapy. During this
449
D U G A U T I E Z , M A U R I C E (1 893 –19 60)
period Dubal met Charles Baudouin, one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis in Geneva. He went on to
become his friend and collaborator. A course of several
months spent working in Préfargier Hospital introduced
him to the treatment of psychotics. He then encountered
Charles Odier, with whom he undertook psychoanalysis.
In 1933 he corresponded with Freud on the subject of
the libido. He wrote, ‘‘In accordance with the concept of
general relativity, Freud responded to me that he had no
major objection to making a distinction between a general libido and a particular libido.’’
In 1935 he married a psychoanalysis buff who wrote
various works under the name of Rosette Dubal, among
them La psychanalyse du diable (Psychoanalyzing the
devil) in 1953. Dubal and his wife were both committed
to social change and collaborated closely in integrating
into social change a psychoanalytic point of view. His psychoanalytic work within the framework of the cure and
preventive work outside this context were of equal importance to George Dubal. In fact, like Sándor Ferenczi or
Wilhelm Reich, he struggled for the inclusion of psychoanalytic considerations in education and cultural policy.
Before World War II, if we can trust his memories, he
was the only practicing psychoanalyst in Lyons, where
he became the friend and collaborator of Dr. A. Réquet,
head of the Vinatier Clinic. He claims to have introduced psychoanalytic thought to members of the Esprit
Group under Frutiger, the president. He also gathered
around him friends from the Philosophical Society to
discuss the influence of psychoanalysis on philosophical
thought. His pedagogical need to reach the general public spurred him on to write a hundred or so pamphlets
on psychoanalysis, some of which were published.
In 1953 he made the acquaintance of Marie Bonaparte and John Leuba, who invited him to attend the
15th Conference of French-Speaking Psychoanalysts in
Paris and to react to the theory of the instincts propounded by Maurice Bénassy. Two years earlier he had
published in the Revue française de psychanalyse (French
review of psychoanalysis) a much-appreciated paper
titled ‘‘La psychanalyse existentielle de Sartre (Sartre’s
existential psychoanalysis). As early as 1947 in his book
Psychanalyse et connaissance (Psychoanalysis and Knowledge) he had analyzed the limits of a phenomenological
approach and criticized the finalism of a theory of the
instincts as reflected in psychoanalytic practice.
During the events of May 1968, when protests by
students at the Sorbonne became violent and led to
protests at universities across France and strikes by
45 0
French workers, George Dubal defended the students
and called into question the relationship between
knowledge and power, sparing neither psychoanalysts
nor the societies that shelter them. Like some of his
Zurich colleagues, he did not share the ideology of
those who, as he wrote in his memoires, ‘‘try to put
their patients in the party line with respect to power,’’
to the detriment of respect for the individual.
In the French-speaking Swiss psychoanalytic community, in his practice, as a committed author writing
in the journal Construire (Building) and the review
Vivre (Living), and in his conferences at the Artimon,
George Dubal was a creative individual who defied all
forms of man’s indoctrination and stultification of man.
MARIO CIFALI
See also: Switzerland (French-speaking).
Bibliography
Dubal, George. (1947). Psychanalyse et connaissance: L’évolution des psychothérapies et la psychanalyse; Le problème de
l’instinct; Le problème de la connaissance. Geneva, Switzerland: Éditions du Mont-Blanc.
Dubal, George. (1960). Moi et les autres: applications de la
psychanalyse à la pédagogie et à la pensée dialectique. Neuchâtel, Switzerland: Éditions Delachaux et Niestlé.
DUGAUTIEZ, MAURICE (1893–1960)
Maurice Dugautiez, a Belgian civil engineer and psychoanalyst, was born near Tournay in 1893 and died in
Brussels in 1960. He was born and reared in a middleclass, provincial environment where nothing predisposed him to be a pioneer of psychoanalysis in Belgium
except perhaps a passionate curiosity about psychic life.
He was an autodidact and initially very enthusiastic
about hypnotism and suggestion. He gave many lectures
in a socialist politico-cultural forum, which were later
printed in the review Le pédagogue (The teacher).
During this period, in 1933, he met Fernand Lechat
in the course of one of these seminars. The two men
became progressively aware of their common interest
in psychoanalysis and contacted Édouard Pichon, then
president of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, who
encouraged them to do a training analysis with Dr.
Ernst Hoffman, a Viennese refugee in Belgium. After
the silence of World War II, contact was reestablished
with Paris in 1945. Dugautiez and Lechat were invited
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as special students to attend the courses of the Paris
Psychoanalytic Institute, and by 1946 Dugautiez was a
full member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society.
In 1947 Dugautiez and Lechat founded the Belgian
Association of Psychoanalysts, where they began to
train and supervise candidate psychoanalysts. As the
result of intense gassing in World War I, Dugautiez’s
health was fragile and forced him to take a less active
role. The responsibility of directing seminars and editing the Bulletin de l’Association des psychanalystes de
Belgique (Bulletin of the Belgian Association of Psychoanalysts) thus fell to Lechat. Dugautiez, who was
more of a clinician than a theorist, continued to train
Belgian psychoanalysts until the end of his life.
DANIEL LUMINET
See also: Belgium
Bibliography
Dugautiez, Maurice. (1953). J. Leuba n’est plus. Bulletin de
l’Association des psychanalystes de Belgique, 15.
Dugautiez, Maurice. (1953). Réflexions sur l’article ‘‘Les tendances de la psychanalyse à New York’’ du Pr. Reding. Bulletin de l’Association des psychanalystes de Belgique, 16.
OF
VIEW
Freud later put forward the idea that, in addition to
the defenses that work against but within the conflict,
the psyche can implement defense processes that no
longer aim at organizing the means to process the
conflict but at preventing the conflict itself from
appearing. Thus, in addition to repression, which
nevertheless retained a generic value in his mind,
Freud and many of his successors described forms of
projection, denial, even splitting and foreclosure, that
attack the very possibility of the existence of a mental
conflict by trying to expel from the psyche the existence of one of the components of the conflict.
However, it is also one of the fundamental characteristics of Freud’s thinking, as well as that of his
principal successors, to simultaneously affirm that in
spite of the intensity of the expelling forces that can
come to bear on conflicts and their mental representatives, the psyche keeps a trace of what it has tried
to expel from itself in this way. That which is
expelled tends to come back, in one form or another,
often in negative form. Therefore the analysis of
mental dynamics must also focus on the measures
implemented in order to face up to the internal or
external return of what it has sought to remove from
representation.
RENÉ ROUSSILLON
DYNAMIC POINT OF VIEW
Alongside the topographical and economic points of
view, the dynamic point of view is one of the three
major axes of metapsychology. It studies the way in
which the forces that run through the mental apparatus
come into conflict, combine, and influence each other.
See also: Conflict; Metapsychology; Repression; Resistance; Wish fulfillment.
The model for mental dynamics was present in
Freud’s thought from the beginning: it is a direct extrapolation from the dynamic theory of physics in the nineteenth century. It is based on the idea that the mind,
with different forces running through it, is the seat of
conflict between them. In order to decrease or eliminate
the displeasure occasioned by these conflicts, the mental
apparatus uses different mechanisms, repression being
the prototype. By means of repression the mental apparatus changes the topographical location of the ideational representatives of the instincts. It thus protects
itself from the painful or displeasing aspects of its conflicting desires by making some of them or some of their
aspects unconscious. The analysis of the dynamics of
how mental conflicts are processed is thus an essential
component in the practice of psychoanalysis and in
metapsychology, which attempts to describe them.
Freud, Anna. (1936). The ego and the mechanisms of sefence.
London: Hogarth, 1937.
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Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1915d). Repression. SE, 14: 141–158.
Green, André. (1993). Analité primaire dans la relation
anale. La Névrose obsessionnelle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Le Guen, Claude, et al.(1986). Le refoulement (les defenses).
Revue française de psychanalyse, 50 (1), 23–370.
Rosolato, Guy. (1988). Le négatif, figures et modalités. Paris:
Dunod.
Further Reading
Meissner, William W. (1999). Dynamic principle in psychoalysis. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 22,
2–84.
451
E
EARLY INTERACTIONS
The notion of early interactions between the child and
its environment first appeared during the 1970s and
has since become widely accepted. The further development of the concept corresponds very closely with
the spread of knowledge concerning what is now
referred to as the psychology, psychopathology, and
psychiatry of the baby (or nursing infant).
The concept was put forward by developmental
psychologists and is generally contested by psychoanalysts insofar as it refers more to the field of interpersonal relations than to intrapsychic problems in the strict
sense of the term. Psychoanalysts prefer to speak of
‘‘interrelations,’’ a term they use in reference to the
constitution of the child’s imagos and the progressive
establishment of its mental representations (of self,
object, and object relations).
However, the term early interactions is now very
widely used. It is based on a new vision of the nursing
infant, a vision that first appeared toward the end of
World War II. Although before that time babies were
very largely considered by professionals to be eminently passive beings engaged almost exclusively in
oral and digestive functions, they slowly came to be
described as being much more active in the relationship and already having an intensely social orientation.
They were recognized as having many skills, particularly the personal capacity to engage a relationship
with its caregiving adult or, on the contrary, to withdraw from this relationship. Infants use some of these
skills spontaneously in their daily lives while others,
on the contrary, remain potential, as if in abeyance or
on reserve, being manifest only in experimental situations (free motricity, early imitation).
It is this notion of active skills and relational reciprocity (in spite of the indisputable dissymmetry
between the psychic organization of very young infants
and adults) that gave rise to the concept of an interaction. From being seen as a passive consumer, the baby
increasingly came to be considered as an evolving
human being. This shift in focus can probably be
linked on the one hand to adult guilt feelings with
regard to children at the end of the last world war and,
on the other, to intensified research into the earliest
stages of psychic development as a result of the exacerbating urgency of our quest for origins.
In reality the concept of early interactions covers different levels of facts. Five different levels are classically
distinguished in a baby’s interactive system: biological
interactions, ethological interactions, whether instinctual or behavioral, affective or emotional interactions,
fantasy interactions and, lastly, the so-called symbolic
interactions. Early interactions really only related to the
first four levels, the last one being more concerned with
children who have already acquired the use of language.
Biological interactions come into play very largely
during intra-uterine life and are generally referred to
as ‘‘feto-maternal interactions.’’ They continue to a lesser degree after birth, particularly in the form of
breast-feeding.
Behavioral interactions facilitate the various postural adjustments (in his own day Henri Wallon spoke
about the ‘‘stimulating dialogue’’ between the mother
and child), as well as the attunement of a certain number of biological rhythms (for example, regulating the
contractions of the muscle cells in the mother’s mammary glands with the rhythms of the baby’s crying).
They require no humoral mediators.
453
E C K S T E I N , E M M A (1 865 –19 24)
Affective and emotional interactions enable both
the mother (or, indeed, the father for that matter) and
the child to harmonize their emotional state with that
of the other. The main mechanism coming into play
seems to be the process of affective attunement
described by Daniel N. Stern.
The level of fantasy interactions has been the subject of the liveliest debates with psychoanalysts insofar
as they contest the very idea of the action of fantasies
and stress the fundamental dissymmetry in the organization of psychic processes in the adult and the child.
The process of affective attunement also appears here
as the best current candidate for the role of messenger
in these fantasy interactions, a study of which is
obviously essential with regard to inter- and transgenerational transmission. In fact this level of fantasy
interactions poses the whole question of its role in
relation to the complex mechanisms of identification
and projective identification.
In Anglo-Saxon countries the study of early interactions continues to be very largely the domain of developmental psychologists (T. B. Brazelton, A. J. Sameroff,
R. N. Emde), whereas in other countries, particularly in
France, a whole research trend came into being in the
wake of Serge Lebovici’s (1983) work, mainly in an
effort to integrate this concept of early interactions into
the data of classic psychoanalytic metapsychology.
The following are the main questions currently
raised by the concept of early interactions: Can the different types of interactions between the baby and its
environment be considered as first forms or precursors
of future object relations? How is the change effected
from the interpersonal level to the intrapsychic level?
What is the role of these interactions in the child’s relation to intersubjectivity? Is there not a danger that the
question of interactions will lead to a sort of metapsychology of presence to the detriment of the role of
absence and the excluded middle?
BERNARD GOLSE
See also: Infant observation; Infant observation (direct);
Lack of differentiation; Lebovici, Serge Sindel Charles;
Tenderness.
Bibliography
Lamour, Martine, and Lebovici, Serge (1989). Les interactions du nourrisson avec ses partenaires. Encyclopédie
45 4
medico-chirurgicale (Vol. Psychiatrie). Paris: E.M.-C., fasc.
37-190-B-60.
Lebovici, Serge. (1983). Le nourrisson, la mère et le psychanalyste. Paris: Le Centurion.
Sameroff, Arnold J., and Emde, Robert N. (1989). Relationship disturbances in early childhood. A developmental
approach. New York: Basic Books.
Stern, Daniel N. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant.
A view from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology.
New York: Basic Books.
Stevenson-Hinde, J., and Simpson, M. J. A. (1981). Mothers’
characteristics, interactions, and infants’ characteristics.
Child Development, 52, 1246–1254.
ECKSTEIN, EMMA (1865–1924)
Between 1892 and 1893 Emma Eckstein was one Sigmund Freud’s most important patients and, for a short
period of time around 1897, became a psychoanalyst
herself. She was born on January 28, 1865, in Vienna
and died on July 30, 1924. Eckstein belonged to a
family that the Freuds were friendly with. One of her
brothers, Frederick, was a Sanskrit specialist; another,
Gustav, was a leading member of Karl Kautsky’s Austrian socialist party. Aside from some cryptic passages
concerning her (1937c), Freud never published her case
history. In his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895),
Freud presented her phobia of stores in the chapter
‘‘Hysterical Proton Pseudos,’’ but the manuscript was
never published during Freud’s lifetime.
In early 1895, finding that analysis could not eliminate Eckstein’s compulsion for masturbation, which
resulted in dysmenorrhea and stomach pains, Freud
turned to Wilhelm Fliess for help. Fliess, basing his
thinking on his theory of a ‘‘nasal reflex neurosis,’’
operated on her nasal concha but left fifty centimeters
of gauze inside her nose. The error was repaired by
Professor Rozanes in Vienna, but Fliess felt he had
been wronged because Freud had called in another
physician to attend to Eckstein’s problem. Freud
attributed the accident to Eckstein’s hysteria (1985, letter 56 et seq.), but she remained disfigured. Freud
resumed his analysis of her and provided some
improvement, and this motivated her to become a psychoanalyst in 1897. In December Eckstein confirmed
that she had been seduced by her father (1985, letter
150), which Freud had doubted as late as September of
that year.
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Freud continued his relationship with Eckstein. He
was furious to learn that Eckstein, during an operation
for a myoma, had undergone a hysterectomy. He
refused to resume analysis in November 1905. Meanwhile, Eckstein had published a small book on the sexual education of children (1904), in which she does
not mention Freud. She seems to return to a theory of
ancillary seduction, and she viewed infantile sexuality
from a constitutional point of view: sucking and masturbation. From this time on a relapse forced her to
take to her bed, where she remained until her death
nineteen years later.
BERTRAND VICHYN
See also: Irma’s injection, dream of.
Bibliography
Anzieu, Didier. (1986). Freud’s Self-Analysis (Peter Graham,
Trans.). London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psycho-analysis.
Eckstein, Emma. (1904). Die Sexualfrage in der Erziehung des
Kindes. Leipzig, Germany: Modernes Verlagsbureau, Curt
Wigand.
Freud, Sigmund. (1895). Project for a scientific psychology.
SE, 1: 281–387.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 209–253.
———. (1985). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to
Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson,
Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University
Press.
———. (1987). A phylogenetic fantasy: Overview of the
transference neuroses (Axel Hoffer and Peter T. Hoffer,
Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. (1984). The assault on truth.
New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Schur, Max. (1972). Freud: Living and dying. New York:
International Universities Press.
ÉCOLE DE LA CAUSE FREUDIENNE
After the failure of the negotiations between the Société française de psychanalyse (French Society for Psychoanalysis) and the International Psychoanalytical
Association over whether to recognize Jacques Lacan
as a training analyst, two groups were founded. One
was the Association psychanalytique de France
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(French Psychoanalytic Association), which was
founded on May 26, 1964, and became a member of
the International Psychoanalytical Association even
though it included a number of Lacanians. The other
was the École française de psychanalyse (French
School of Psychoanalysis), founded by Jacques Lacan
on June 21, 1964. The school was renamed the École
freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris) when
its bylaws were filed with the police on September 24
of the same year. Lacan dissolved this school by a letter
dated January 5, 1980, though its legal dissolution was
not voted on until September 27, 1980.
Then on February 21, 1980, with his ‘‘letter to the
thousand,’’ which was a call to follow him, Lacan
founded the Freudian cause, which he entrusted to
Solange Faladé, Charles Melman, and Jacques-Alain
Miller to direct. Following much discord and many
departures, including the resignations of Faladé and
Melman, Lacan established, as his base, the École de la
Cause freudienne (ECF, School of the Freudian
Cause). Its statutes were modified on September 24,
1993.
The ECF is the largest and most important Lacanian association in France. It has international connections with a number of other schools through the
Association mondial de la psychanalyse (World Association of Psychoanalysis), founded in Paris in 1992.
The ECF is represented by Jacques-Alain Miller,
Lacan’s son-in-law and literary executor, and is led by
a directorate of five members (who serve terms of two
years and are responsible for its administration) and a
council (which guides its orientation). The school has
two levels of membership: member analyst of the
school, a permanent title, and analyst of the school, a
temporary title. These titles are holdovers from the old
École Freudienne de Paris. Also, a practicing analyst
can declare his or her practice within the school without the school certifying it.
The Association de la Cause freudienne (Association of the Freudian Cause) was founded on November 1, 1992, to gather the fifteen regional associations
of the ECF, most of which publish a journal or bulletin. Through the Association mondial de la psychanalyse and the Association de la fondation du champ
freudienne (Association for the Foundation of the
Freudian Field), founded by Lacan in 1979 and directed by his daughter Judith Miller, the Lacanian movement has an official presence in twenty-six foreign
countries (and an especially important presence in
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Latin America). Two organizations have split off from
the ECF: the École de psychanalyse Sigmund Freud
(The Sigmund Freud School of Psychoanalysis), which
was founded in May 1994 and which revived the
experiment of the pass (See Daniel Lagache, ‘‘On the
Experiment of the Pass’’ [1973]), and the Forums du
champ lacanian (Forums of the Lacanian Field), which
was founded in May 1999 by three former presidents
of the ECF.
The ECF publishes a semiannual journal, Cause
freudienne, and a monthly newsletter.
JACQUES SÉDAT
See also: École Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of
Paris); France; Lacan, Jacques-Marie Émile; Movement
lacanien français.
ÉCOLE EXPÉRIMENTALE DE BONNEUIL
The École expérimentale de Bonneuil (Experimental
school of Bonneuil) was founded on September 12,
1969 under the leadership of Maud Mannoni.
In his seminar, Jacques Lacan had asked analysts to
take a somewhat closer interest in what went on in
hospitals, in the belief that analytic discourse could be
used to subvert the workings of these structures. In
this context, Maud Mannoni began an institutional
experiment at the Institut médico-pédagogique (Medical training institute) in Thiais, France. This experiment enabled her to produce Le Psychiatre, son ‘‘fou’’
et la psychanalyse (The psychiatrist, his ‘‘madman’’ and
psychoanalysis; 1970), exposing the ways in which psychoanalysis betrays its vocation by participating in the
institutional order. Her earlier works were The Backward Child and His Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study
(1964/1972), in which she showed that in seeking to
treat the symptom the patient’s needs were denied,
and The Child, His ‘‘Illness,’’ and the Others (1967/
1970), where she showed that the vision of the ‘‘sick
person’’ is warped by one’s preconceptions.
Mannoni’s encounter with the anti-psychiatrists
confirmed her ideas: They, too, were rebelling against
any ideology based on ‘‘managing’’ madness, and were
returning to Sigmund Freud’s suggestion that for the
patient, delusions are an attempt at reconstruction.
This break with medical thinking occasioned a focus
on the idea of segregation that was operative in the
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traditional psychoanalytic institution and entailed
grouping patients into broad categories in psychiatric
clinical work.
This principle of nonsegregation that presided over
the opening of the Bonneuil facility was made concrete
in its ideal mode of operation: One third of the children
were autistic or psychotic children, one third were mentally deficient or emotionally disturbed, and one third
were suffering from neuroses of varying degrees of
severity. This mode of operation made it possible to
maintain a mix of symptomatologies that opened up
dynamic perspectives, underscoring by this very fact the
negative consequences of segregation for the subject,
even when segregation was given a new guise and sanctioned by medicine under the name ‘‘mental illness.’’
That term implies as an alternative a hypothetical
‘‘mental health,’’ which has no place in a psychoanalytic
perspective. The fundamental notion of ‘‘breaking out’’
is situated within this ethos of nonsegregation.
A place that is open to the outside rather than a
self-enclosed institution cut off from the world (an
organism created by normative forces acting against
the emergence of foreclosed alternatives, to whose detriment this normativity has been maintained), the
École expérimentale de Bonneuil was accredited as an
outpatient hospital with nighttime intake facilities on
March 17, 1975, with a capacity of twenty-six children,
ages six to eighteen. Daily practice at Bonneuil is based
on a psychoanalytic approach. Theory allows for the
work of retrospective interpretation that examines
individual pathways and institutional avatars. This
constant back-and-forth movement between theory
and praxis—in particular in the numerous work
groups—characterizes the analyst’s place in the institution. That place is thus a paradoxical one: Practice is
not what establishes analysts in their role, but it is
what determines their specific place in this setting and
the journey they will make with these troubled children. Cooking, running errands, working alongside
artisans or farmers, completing schoolwork, and taking workshops—these activities are seen as so many
mediations that make it possible to escape from an
imaginary situation in which relations between adult
and child are built without reference to any third
party. The other possibility created is that the children
can become the agents in a story that at some point
converges with their own. What makes this legible is
the putting into place of a framework, not in the sense
of institutional rules, but rather a structure that
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provides a sense of bearings and facilitates questioning, to guarantee that work will be ongoing. On March
12, 1980, an experimental family placement service
was established for patients from eighteen to twentyfive years old. Since September 1, 1995, family placement has existed for patients older than twenty-five.
MICHEL POLO
See also: Infantile psychosis; Infantile schizophrenia;
Mannoni-Van der Spoel, Maud; Technique with children,
psychoanalytic.
Bibliography
Mannoni, Maud. (1972). The backward child and his mother:
a psychoanalytic study. (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). New
York: Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1964)
———. (1970). The child, his ‘‘illness,’’ and the others. New
York: Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1967)
———. (1970). Le psychiatre, son ‘‘fou’’ et la psychanalyse.
Paris: Seuil.
ÉCOLE FREUDIENNE DE PARIS
(FREUDIAN SCHOOL OF PARIS)
On June 21, 1964, Jacques Lacan founded the École
française de psychanalyse (EFP, French School of Psychoanalysis), which, without changing its initials, was
quickly renamed the École freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris). The meeting to found the new
school was held in the home of François Perrier, the
same place where the Quatrième Groupe (the Fourth
Group, an offshoot of the EFP) would be founded in
1969. The gathering was attended by about fifty members of the Société française de psychanalyse (SFP,
French Psychoanalytic Society), which would not formally be dissolved until January 1965. Lacan chose the
word ‘‘school’’ in reference to the ancient schools of
philosophy: ‘‘certain places of refuge, indeed bases of
operation against what might already be called the discontents of civilization’’ (Lacan, 1964/1990, p. 104).
The School’s ‘‘Founding Act’’ was completely different
from that of any other psychoanalytic institution.
Lacan announced the School’s project in a solemn
tone: Its task would be ‘‘a labor which, in the field
opened up by Freud, restores the cutting edge of his
discovery’’ (p. 97). In order to do this, he made new
distinctions in the field of psychoanalysis by creating
three divisions, the direction of which he personally
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undertook: the division for ‘‘pure psychoanalysis . . .
which is and is nothing but . . . the training analysis’’
(p. 98), the division for ‘‘applied psychoanalysis,
which means therapeutic and clinical medicine’’ (p.
99), and the division for ‘‘taking inventory of the Freudian field,’’ which would ‘‘undertake to publish those
principles from which analytic practice is to receive its
[scientific status]’’ (p. 99). Such a distinction between
pure and didactic psychoanalysis on the one hand and
the therapeutic field on the other could logically only
lead to a recourse to science in order to legitimize psychoanalysis. Thus in the ‘‘Founding Act’’ the idealization of science that would later lead to the matheme
was already on the horizon. It had already lead Lacan
in 1955 to imagine the ‘‘recognition of psychoanalysis,
as either a profession or a science’’ on the basis of a
‘‘principle’’ (Lacan, 1966, p. 325).
The School recognized three categories of members,
which did not in any way correspond to the traditional
forms of membership in a psychoanalytic society. The
rank of Analyst of the School (AE) was initially held by
those who had been full members of the SFP, their
task was the ‘‘doctrinal elaboration of training analysis.’’ To become an AE, one had to make a request to
the ‘‘jury of approval.’’ The Analyst Member of the
School (AME) were directly named, without a personal solicitation, by a ‘‘jury of reception’’ that guaranteed their ‘‘professional ability’’ based on the ‘‘approval
of their training analyst, the advice of their supervisor
or supervisors, and accounts of the candidate’s practice.’’ It was specified that, ‘‘in regard to the psychoanalytic treatments undertaken under his or her direction,
the analyst is only authorized by him- or herself ’’
(Annuaire EFP 1977). This sentence contributed to
serious misunderstandings when its second half was
taken to be a formula by which one could become an
analyst, while in context it is clear that it is only a matter of being authorized in the session. The third category is that of the practicing analyst (A.P.), who
declared their practice to the EFP without being
sanctioned by it. Finally, it was also possible to be a
member of the School without being an analyst by participating in its work and research.
The first board of directors that led the EFP was
made up of Piera Aulagnier, Jean Clavreul, Jacques
Lacan, Serge Leclaire, François Perrier, Guy Rosolato,
and Jean-Paul Valabrega. Each of them left the board
successively, and some of them left the School altogether, with the exception of Jean Clavreul, who was a
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member of the last board of directors to be formed
(1967), and Lacan, president of the 1967 board, with
Solage Faladé as vice-president, Éric Laurent as secretary and administrator of cartels, Jacques-Alain Miller
as administrator of cartels, Charles Melman and Christian Simatos—longtime secretary of the School—as
administrators of teaching, Claude Conté and Irène
Roublef as administrators of publication, and René
Bailly as assistant treasurer.
The EFP was officially established as a non-profit
organization when its first set of bylaws, which were very
concise, were filed on September 24, 1964. The members
of the corporate board were lay people, friends of Lacan’s.
In 1969, in an effort to have the School recognized as a
state-approved agency, more detailed bylaws were filed
by Solange Faladé, but in 1970, the Council of State
turned down the School’s application.
During its fifteen years of existence, the EFP went
through a series of institutional crises over policies
and theoretical issues. On December 1, 1965, François
Perrier resigned from the board of directors over the
question of training, and on March 31, 1967, he proposed the formation of a ‘‘college of analysts’’ focused
on the clinic. Jacques Lacan responded with his ‘‘Proposition of October 9, 1967, on the Psychoanalyst of
the School’’ in which he suggested his procedure of
‘‘the pass.’’ This proposal led to the 1968 departure
of Guy Rosolato, who rejoined the Psychoanalytic
Association of France (AFP). The first split within the
Lacanian movement itself soon followed, with the
departures of Piera Aulagnier, François Perrier, and
Jean-Paul Valabrega during discussions on the pass at
the Lutetia Assizes during January 1969. They took
with them about twenty members of the School.
The departures of such eminent members caused
disruptions within the School. Bit by bit, a rift developed between the EFP and the Department of the
Freudian Field at Vincennes, which was founded by
Serge Leclaire in 1968 and taken over by Jacques Lacan
and Jacques-Alain Miller at the end of 1970. This rift
led to an implied division between the EFP’s clinical
analysts and the young analysts at Vincennes, whose
academic training in psychoanalysis set them apart.
This younger group became the vehicle for the logical
orientation of Lacan’s later career, especially after the
founding of the journal Ornicar? by Jacques-Alain
Miller in 1975. The Deauville Assizes on the experiment of the pass, held in January 1978, gave ample evidence of the failure of what Lacan had hoped would be
45 8
the primary institutional procedure of the School. It
was also at this time that Lacan began to suffer from
serious neurological problems (progressive aphasia).
In the end, the EFP collapsed on legal grounds. An
extraordinary general assembly convened on September
30, 1979, to expand the corporate board from seventeen
to twenty-five members and to elect a new board. But
on January 5, 1980, in a letter addressed to the members
of the School and read at his seminar, Lacan announced
the dissolution of the School. This letter prompted
Michèle Montrelay and twenty-seven other members to
file a lawsuit claiming irregularities in the September
meeting. A provisional administrator was named by the
Paris municipal court on January 25, 1980. In 1980,
three extraordinary general assemblies met without
attaining a statutory majority until finally, on September 27, the dissolution of the EFP was passed.
When it was founded in June 1964, the EFP
included about 100 members. In January 1980, membership stood at more than 600, a number that testifies
to the vitality of French Lacanianism in that era.
JACQUES SÉDAT
See also: École de la Cause freudienne; France; Italy;
Lacan, Jacques-Marie Émile; Mouvement lacanien français; Ornicar?; Pass, the; Splits in psychoanalysis; Training
analysis.
Bibliography
Dorgeuille, Claude. (1981). La Seconde Mort de Jacques
Lacan. Paris: Actualité freudienne.
Lacan, Jacques. (1966). Écrits. Paris: Seuil.
———. (1990). Founding act. In Television: A challenge to
the psychoanalytic establishment (Joan Copjec, Ed.). New
York: Norton. (Original work published 1964)
———. (1995). Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School (Russell Grigg, Trans.). Analysis,
6, 1–13. (Original work published 1968)
Roudinesco, Élisabeth. (1997). Jacques Lacan (Barbara Bray,
Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. (Original
work published 1993)
ECONOMIC POINT OF VIEW
Along with the topographical and dynamic points of
view, the economic point of view is one of the three
main axes of metapsychology. It deals with psychic
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events in terms of the intensity of the forces that run
through them and animate them.
This concept was present in Freud’s early thinking
and appears in his first metapsychological formulations. It then assumed increasing importance during
the evolution of his theoretical thinking and his conception of psychopathology. It is based on the hypothesis, much criticized in recent times, that the mental
apparatus is invested with forces that are specific to it
(instincts) and which can vary in intensity, either
"constitutionally", or as a result of reinforcements
linked to the vicissitudes of development (particularly
trauma). These primary forces can oppose each other,
combine together, and form complex amalgamations
and alliances with each other. The economic point of
view is an attempt to describe this interplay of forces
and the resulting intensities.
After 1920, the economic approach assumed
increasing importance in Freud’s thinking because of
the clinical difficulties encountered in non-neurotic
cases. The metapsychological notions that Freud then
developed attributed a centrally determinant role to
the economic point of view in the genesis and maintenance of pathological conditions and their different
structures.
In the same way that the concept of instincts is criticized by certain psychoanalysts who prefer more
contemporary concepts that focus on information,
representation, or signifiers (Widlöcher, D., 1997), the
economic point of view has also elicited certain theoretical reservations. However, it is difficult to see how
to modify this aspect of metapsychology, which is
directly linked to the question of instincts, without seriously jeopardizing the whole of the corpus. Moreover,
clinical work makes us sensitive to variations in
instinctual intensity and investment which would be
difficult to explain without recourse to the economic
point of view and the binding and unbinding of
instincts.
RENÉ ROUSSILLON
See also: Cathexis; Discharge; Excitation; Fusion/defusion; Libido; Pleasure/unpleasure principle; Primary process/secondary process; Principle of consistency; ‘‘Project
for a scientific psychology, A’’; Protective shield, breaking
through the; Psychic energy; Quantitative/qualitative;
Repression; Sum of excitation; Trauma; Traumatic
neurosis.
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Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123-243.
———. (1915c). Instincts and their vicissitudes. SE, 14:
141-158;
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1-64;
Green, André. (1995). La causalité psychique. Entre nature et
culture. Paris: Odile Jacob.
Widlöcher, Daniel. (1997). Les nouvelles cartes de la psychanalyse. Paris: Odile Jacob.
Further Reading
Lustman, Seymour L. (1968). The economic point of view
and defense. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 23, 189–
203.
Meissner, William W. (1995). The economic principle in
psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought,
18, 197–292.
ÉCRITS
Until the publication of his Écrits (Writings), Jacques
Lacan’s only published book was his doctoral thesis in
medicine, De la psychose paranoı̈aque dans ses rapports
avec la personnalité (On paranoid psychosis in its relations with personality; 1932), written from a psychiatric, rather than psychoanalytic, perspective.
In the 1960s Lacan was asked by several of his students and by his friend François Wahl, of the publishing house Seuil, to collect his writings in a single
volume. The considerable success of De l’interprétation, essai sur Freud (Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on
Interpretation), by Paul Ricœur, in 1965 and then that
of Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things), by
Michel Foucault, in 1966 prompted him to prepare a
collection of his articles.
He omitted all his work from before the war, notably his article ‘‘La vie mentale’’ (Mental life; 1938)
from volume eight of the Encyclopédie française (the
alternate title of which, ‘‘The Family Complexes in
the Formation of the Individual,’’ only appeared on
the cover of an off-print). He did, however, make an
exception for a text written in 1936 for Marienbad,
where he delivered his lost lecture on the mirror stage
to the congress of the International Psychoanalytic
Association.
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In the collection, he slightly modified his articles,
often without any indication of the changes. He introduced the book with a recollection of his medical and
psychiatric origins, ‘‘De nos antécedents’’(On my antecedents), and preceded ‘‘Discours de Rome’’ (Rome
discourse) of 1953 with a brief text that indicated the
consequences of this discourse for the psychoanalysis
of the future, ‘‘Du sujet enfin en question’’ (On the
subject who is finally in question).
Écrits was published in the third trimester of
1966 by Seuil. The book very quickly achieved critical acclaim and was widely reviewed and debated in
the press. It included a ‘‘Classified Index of the
Major Concepts’’ by Jacques-Alain Miller. This index
introduced a logical dimension to Lacanism that
was emphasized from 1975 on. In the introduction
to the index Miller wrote, ‘‘According to my conception of these Écrits, it is to our benefit to study
them as forming a system. . . . For my own part, not
needing to concern myself with the efficacy of the
theory in [the clinic], I will encourage the reader by
proposing that there is no outer limit to the expansion of formalization in the field of discourse’’ (pp.
358–359).
A measure of the influence of Écrits is that it has
been translated in to numerous languages. Moreover,
it was followed by a sequel, Autres Écrits, published in
June 2001. In that volume Jacques-Alain Miller collected nearly all of Lacan’s articles from before 1939,
such as ‘‘Les complexes familiaux dans la vie de l’individu’’ (Family complexes in the formation of the individual; 1938). Also included are the version of the
‘‘Discours de Rome’’ (Rome discourse) circulated in
the proceedings of the IPA congress (1953) and all the
texts that appeared after the publication of Écrits up to
that of ‘‘L’étourdit’’ (Stunned; 1972), Lacan’s last published article.
JACQUES SÉDAT
See also: École freudienne de Paris (Freudian School
of Paris); France; Lacan, Jaques-Marie Émile; Structuralism and psycho- analysis.
Source Citation
Lacan, Jacques. (1966). Écrits. Paris: Le Seuil. Schriften.
Olten, Switzerland: Walter-Verlag, 1973–1980. Écrits: A
Selection. (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: Norton,
2004.
46 0
Bibliography
Dor, Joël. (1994). Nouvelle bibliographie des travaux de Jacques Lacan. Paris: Éditions et Publications de l’École
Lacanienne.
Lacan, Jacques. (1938). La vie mentale. Encyclopédie française, Vol. 8.
———. (1973). L’étourdit. Scilicet, 4, 5–52.
———. (2001). Autres écrits (Jacques-Alain Miller, Ed.).
Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Roudinesco, Elisabeth. (1990). Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985 (Jeffrey Mehlman, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
EDER, DAVID MONTAGUE (1866–1936)
David Montague Eder, an English psychoanalyst, was
born in August 1866 in London, where he died on
March 30, 1936. He studied medicine in London,
opened a practice as a general practitioner and, with
Clara Grant, started the first school clinic as a result of
his interest in education. He met Ernest Jones in 1904,
but it was his enthusiasm that stemmed from his reading ‘‘Little Hans’’ in 1909 that led him to psychoanalysis. In 1911 he gave the first psychoanalytic conference
in Great Britain, which scandalized members of the
British Medical Association. After becoming an analyst
in 1912, he met Jung and translated two of his works
into English: Diagnostiche Assoziationsstudien (Diagnostic Association Studies) and Versuch einer Darstellung der psychoanalytischen Theorie (The Theory of
Psychoanalysis). In 1913 he traveled to Vienna to be
analyzed by Freud, who sent him to Viktor Tausk.
Eder was successively analyzed by Tausk, by Jones,
and, after an attempt with Karl Abraham, by Sándor
Ferenczi, with whom he shared the illusion of the ‘‘perfectly analyzed analyst.’’ Eder also introduced the work
of Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon in Great Britain.
Eder was involved in a number of political and
social issues. He argued against the unfairness of the
Mental Deficiency Bill. Associated with Zionist literary
and political circles through his Jewish family (he was
a cousin of the writer Israel Zangwill and a friend of
D. H. Lawrence; his wife, Edith, was the sister of the
analyst Barbara Low), he embraced the Zionist cause.
In 1915 Eder joined the army as a doctor and was
stationed in Malta, then at a neurological clinic in London. He published a book about his experiences entitled
War-shock (1917), which focused on wartime neuroses
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and their treatment. In 1920, while living in Palestine,
he worked with Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, and led seminars in analysis (with Dorian Faigenbaum). This represented the first appearance of analysis
in Israel prior to the arrival of Max Eitingon. He later
became an elected representative of the Zionist Executive in Palestine and served from 1921 to 1927.
Eder distanced himself from Jung’s ideas. In 1923 he
joined the British Psychoanalytic Society, where he held
numerous positions: first as secretary, then as director of
the Institute of Psychoanalysis and director of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis. In 1932 he was elected president of the medical section of the British Psychological
Society.
He was the first to use psychoanalysis to treat a case
of stuttering, which is described in ‘‘Das Stottern eine
Psychoneurose und seine Behandlung durch die Psychoanalyse’’ (Stuttering: a psychoneurosis and its treatment through psychoanalysis; 1913). His theoretical
works comprise some thirty articles, covering subjects
that include dreams and resistance (1930), the psychological problems of eugenics and birth control, the
economy and future of the superego (1929), the father’s
animosity toward the son, and Jewish rituals (1933).
This ‘‘political pugilist’’ and ‘‘liberator by vocation’’
(as Edward Glover described him) was also a passionate advocate of psychoanalysis, which he introduced
into schools and prisons. Sigmund Freud confided to
Barbara Low that he represented ‘‘a rare blend of intrepid courage and an absolute love of truth, together
with tolerance and a great capacity to love.’’
MICHELLE MOREAU RICAUD
See also: Great Britain; Israel; Low, Barbara
Bibliography
Eder, David. (1913). Das Stottern: eine Psychoneurose und
seine Behandlung durch die Psychoanalyse. Internationale
Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse, 1.
———. (1917). War shock. London: W. Heineman.
———. (1929). On the economics and the future of the
super-ego. International Journal of Psycho-analysis, 10,
249–255.
———. (1930). Dreams—as resistance. International Journal of Psycho-analysis, 11, 40–47.
———. (1933). The Jewish phylacteries and other Jewish
ritual observances. International Journal of Psycho-analysis,
14, 341–375.
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Glover, Edward. (1945). Eder as a psychoanalyst. In Joseph
Burton Hobman (Ed.), David Eder: Memoirs of a modern
pioneer. London: Victor Gollancz.
Hobman, Joseph Burton (Ed.). (1945). David Eder: Memoirs
of a modern pioneer. London: Victor Gollancz.
EGO
The notion of das Ich (literally ‘‘the I’’) was present in
Freud’s thought from the earliest days of psychoanalysis, but over the years it underwent serious theoretical
modifications, often connected to advances in clinical
practice. The term had long designated the self-conscious
person as a whole, but in 1923 Freud assigned it the
role of an agency of the mental apparatus with a mediating and regulatory function vis-à-vis the id, the
superego, and external reality. He would always, however, allow a measure of ambiguity to persist with
respect to the two meanings, and it was only after his
death that they were disentangled and promoted separately in contradistinction to one another. With the
stress placed by the proponents of ego psychology on
the ego’s adaptative functions, the notion tended to be
upstaged by the ‘‘self,’’ the ‘‘I,’’ or the ‘‘subject.’’
To begin with, then, Freud tended to employ ‘‘das
Ich’’ in a sense akin to that of the philosophers, that is
to say as a synonym for ‘‘conscious person.’’ Only later
did he reserve the term for a portion of the mental personality, in accordance with his constant concern to
distinguish analysis from synthesis. But the German
word remained ambiguous, along with its use in
Freud’s writing, and its translation into other languages inevitably occasioned problems and debates.
The choice of ‘‘ego’’ by the translators of the Standard
Edition has been challenged, by Bruno Bettelheim
among others: ‘‘To mistranslate Ich as Ôego’ is to transform it into jargon that no longer conveys the personal
commitment we make when we say ÔI’ or Ôme’’’ (Bettelheim, p. 53). As for the early French psychoanalysts,
they hesitated between ‘‘ego’’ and ‘‘le Moi’’ before
plumping for this last term in preference to either
‘‘ego’’ or ‘‘Je.’’
Very early on in his thinking, contemporary
research on ‘‘split personality,’’ that is to say, on the
dissociation of consciousness, along with his own use
of hypnosis, led Freud to place the ego qua consciousness in the position of an active judge in the conflicts
underlying psychopathological symptoms. In his article on ‘‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’’ (1894a), he
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emphasized the ‘‘task which the ego, in its defensive
attitude, sets itself of treating the incompatible idea as
Ônon arrivée’’’ (p. 48). The following year, he described
the ego at length in biological terms, in the ‘‘Project
for a Scientific Psychology,’’ (1950a [1895]), as a group
of neurones designed to control primary processes and
avoid unpleasure: ‘‘the ego is to be defined as the totality of the psi cathexes at the given time’’ (p. 323). As
thus characterized, the ego was no longer synonymous
with the whole person: Its future role as a psychical
agency was foreshadowed, and it was already responsible for regulating energy flows, a task that would to fall
to it more and more clearly in the psychological
context.
Freud’s ‘‘first topography,’’ founded on the distinctions between the Conscious, the Preconscious, and
the Unconscious, made no essential appeal to the ego,
which makes its appearance in The Interpretation of
Dreams mainly as the bearer of the wish for sleep or
else as a key actor at the center of the masquerade in
which, as censor, it itself cloaks unconscious wishes:
‘‘Dreams are completely egoistic. Whenever my own
ego does not appear in the content of the dream, but
only some extraneous person, I may safely assume that
my own ego lies concealed, by identification, behind
this other person; I can insert my ego into the context.
On other occasions, when my ego does appear in the
dream, the situation in which it occurs may teach me
that some other person lies concealed, by identification, behind my ego. In that case, the dream should
warn me to transfer on to myself, when I am interpreting the dream, the concealed common element
attached to this other person. There are also dreams in
which my ego appears along with other people who,
when the identification is resolved, are revealed once
again as my ego. These identifications should then
make it possible for me to bring into contact with my
ego certain ideas whose acceptance has been forbidden
by the censorship. Thus my ego may be represented in
a dream several times over, now directly and now
through identification with extraneous persons’’
(1900a, pp. 322–23). The ‘‘my ego’’ here stood for ‘‘the
representation of myself’’ in the sense of identity. This
early link made by Freud between the ego and processes of identification is noteworthy.
Over the next fifteen years Freud developed the
notion, not so much in topographical terms, for in
that sense the ego remained within the PreconsciousConscious system, but in dynamic and economic
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terms, especially with respect to its role in the regulation of pleasure/unpleasure. The notion of ‘‘ego
instincts,’’ also known as ‘‘self-preservative instincts,’’
as distinct from the ‘‘sexual instincts,’’ was introduced
by Freud as early as 1910; he observed that the two
classes of instincts ‘‘have in general the same organs
and systems of organs at their disposal’’ (1910i, pp.
215–16). Even if, not long before, he had ironized on
‘‘His Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every daydream and of every story’’ (1908e, p. 150), Freud now
deemed external reality one of the constraints that the
ego was obliged to confront. In ‘‘Formulations on the
Two Principles of Mental Functioning,’’ he drew a distinction between a ‘‘pleasure ego,’’ related to the
infant’s attempts to achieve a hallucinatory satisfaction
of its wishes, and a ‘‘reality ego’’ developed over time
in response to life’s failure to supply satisfaction: ‘‘Just
as the pleasure-ego can do nothing but wish, work for
a yield of pleasure, and avoid unpleasure, so the
reality-ego need do nothing but strive for what is useful and guard itself against damage’’ (1911b, p. 223).
The ego was thus being presented more and more as
an essential working part in the regulation of a complex mental system.
In the same year of 1911, the problem of psychotic
patients led Freud, stimulated in this regard by Jung’s
research on the issue, to complete his first reflections
on narcissism and identification, begun in his study of
Leonardo da Vinci the year before. In his ‘‘PsychoAnalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a
Case of Paranoia,’’ he argued that dementias, especially
schizophrenic dementia, should be seen as involving
‘‘the detachment of libido’’ from the external world
and its ‘‘regression on to the ego’’ (p. 76), in memory
of that time when ‘‘a person’s only sexual object [was]
his own ego’’ (p. 72). In ‘‘The Claims of Psycho-Analysis
to Scientific Interest,’’ he offered this summary of his
view of the nature of the neuroses: ‘‘The primal conflict which leads to neuroses is one between the sexual
instincts and those which maintain the ego. The neuroses represent a more or less partial overpowering of
the ego by sexuality after the ego’s attempts at suppressing sexuality have failed’’ (1913j, p. 181).
Alfred Adler’s theories were doubtless not without
their influence, too, on the questions Freud was asking
himself at this time, even if he felt that Adler underestimated the importance of unconscious processes, and
wrote to Jung on March 3, 1911: ‘‘I would never have
expected a psychoanalyst to be so taken in by the ego.
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In reality the ego is like the clown in the circus, who is
always putting in his oar to make the audience think
that whatever happens is his doing’’ (Freud/Jung Letters, p. 400). We know that Freud would modify this
view later, but for now he kept the emphasis on the
socius: ‘‘psycho-analysis has fully demonstrated the
part played by social conditions and requirements in
the causation of neurosis. The forces which, operating
from the ego, bring about the restriction and repression of instinct owe their existence essentially to compliance with the demands of civilization’’ (1913j,
p. 188).
this was what distanced Freud from the theories of
Jung, who had just parted company with him—it was
essential not to confuse ‘‘homage to a high ego ideal’’
with the sublimation of the libidinal instincts (p. 94).
In the first case repression was reinforced, according to
Freud, whereas in the second sublimated instinctual
satisfaction made repression unnecessary. As for the
‘‘special psychical agency which performs the task of
seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal
is ensured and which, with this end in view, constantly
watches the actual ego and measures it by that ideal’’
(p. 95), this was clearly the adumbration of the future
superego.
In 1912 Freud could still describe the ego as synonymous with the mental personality as a whole, as he
did in a letter to Ludwig Binswanger of July 4, 1912: "I
have long suspected that not only the repressed but
also the dominant aspect of our life, the essence of the
ego, is unconscious though not inaccessible to the
conscious" (1992 [1908-38], p. 90). But his paper ‘‘On
Narcissism: An Introduction’’ (1914b) marked the
turning-point which endowed the ego with a new significance in theory as in practice: ‘‘Thus we form the
idea of there being an original libidinal cathexis of the
ego, from which some is later given off to objects, but
which fundamentally persists and is related to the
object-cathexes much as the body of an amoeba is
related to the pseudopodia which it puts out. . . . We
see also, broadly speaking, an antithesis between egolibido and object-libido’’ (pp. 75–76). Another observation of Freud’s raised an issue which has never since
ceased being debated, that of the genesis of the ego:
‘‘we are bound to suppose that a unity comparable to
the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start;
the ego has to be developed’’ (pp. 76–77). The distinction between ego instincts and sexual instincts was
preserved, even if Freud stressed that ‘‘the hypothesis
of separate ego-instincts and sexual instincts (that is to
say, the libido theory) rests scarcely at all upon a psychological basis, but derives its principal support from
biology’’ (p. 79). In this same text another idea too was
introduced into the theory of analysis, that of the ideal
ego against which the actual ego is measured: ‘‘Repression . . . proceeds from the self-respect of the ego. . . .
This ideal ego [Idealich] is now the target of the selflove which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego.
The subject’s narcissism makes its appearance displaced on to this new ideal ego [Dieses neue ideale Ich]
which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of
every perfection’’ (pp. 93–94). At the same time—and
In 1915 Freud added the following observation to
the third edition of his Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality: ‘‘In contrast to object-libido, we also
describe ego-libido as Ônarcissistic’ libido. . . . Narcissistic or ego-libido seems to be the great reservoir from
which the object-cathexes are sent out and into which
they are withdrawn once more; the narcissistic libidinal cathexis of the ego is the original state of things,
realized in earliest childhood, and is merely covered by
the later extrusions of libido, but in essentials persists
behind them’’ (1905d, p. 218). In this perspective, progression from auto-erotism to genital heterosexuality
could include a moment characterized by a narcissistic
or even a homosexual object-choice. In the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud went on to
evoke a possible view of the ego’s strength which was
destined to have not a little influence on the postFreudian theory of psychoanalytic technique: ‘‘A person only falls ill of a neurosis if his ego has lost the
capacity to allocate his libido in some way. The stronger his ego, the easier will it be for it to carry out that
task. Any weakening of his ego from whatever cause
must have the same effect as an excessive increase in
the claims of the libido and will thus make it possible
for him to fall ill of a neurosis’’ (1916–17a [1915–17],
p. 387). The suggestion that a weak ego needed
‘‘strengthening’’ gained considerable currency among
analysts after the Second World War, along with the
idea of the therapeutic alliance which it was felt should
be achieved between the therapist and the healthy part
of the patient’s ego. Both Melanie Klein and Jacques
Lacan, each in their own way, contested this approach.
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During the 1915–1920 period, Freud’s theory of the
ego underwent many refinements as his metapsychological papers and summarizing lectures of introduction to psychoanalysis continued to synthesize his
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thought. But it would be a mistake to overlook the fact
that in a good number of his theoretical speculations
the coexistence of old and new ideas was still quite
possible, and that contradictions often appear if
Freud’s formulations are placed side by side. Thus in
1918, on the point of unveiling a completely new view
of the ego, Freud could still write: ‘‘the neurotic patient
presents us with a torn mind, divided by resistances.
As we analyze it and remove the resistances, it grows
together; the great unity which we call his ego fits into
itself all the instinctual impulses which before had
been split off and held apart from it. The psychosynthesis is thus achieved during analytic treatment
without our intervention, automatically and inevitably. We have created the conditions for it by breaking
up the symptoms into their elements and by removing
the resistances’’ (1919a [1918], p. 161).
It would not be long, however, before the said
‘‘great unity’’ was dismantled. His reflections on schizophrenia led Freud to create the class of ‘‘narcissistic
neuroses.’’ Those on melancholia brought forth the
category of ‘‘narcissistic identification,’’ meaning the
identification of the ego with a lost object: ‘‘Thus
the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as
though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this
way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss
and the conflict between the ego and the loved person
into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego
and the ego as transformed by identification’’ (1917e
[1915], p. 249). It was from this time, too, that identification took on an ever greater significance in Freud’s
account of the ego’s genesis and development. It was
said, after all, to be the earliest mode of objectcathexis. And identification was invoked by Freud, in
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c),
as the bond that structures all social organization.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, however, was the text
that contained the first hint of Freud’s abandoning the
psychical apparatus as described in 1900: ‘‘it is certain
that much of the ego is itself unconscious, and notably
what we may describe as its nucleus’’ (1920g, p. 19).
Furthermore, the introduction of the death instinct in
the same work rendered obsolete Freud’s earlier distinction between ego instincts and sexual instincts, for
both self-preservation and the relief of tension due to
unpleasure now fell within the remit of a death instinct
which the ego appeared to serve, whether in its inhibiting and repressive functions or in resistances, observed
46 4
during treatment, that were linked to the repetition
compulsion.
Three years later, in The Ego and the Id (1923b),
the ego finally achieved the status of an important
agency in the description of the mental personality.
The starting point of this work was the assertion that
‘‘A part of the ego, too—and Heaven knows how
important a part—may be Ucs., undoubtedly is Ucs.’’
(p. 18). The old account based on the Cs./Pcs./Ucs.
schema was discarded, these substantives to be confined henceforward to a solely adjectival use denoting
properties, but the processes described earlier to
explain ‘‘coming to consciousness’’ remained valid:
unconscious thing-presentations still had to be
brought into connection with word-presentations in
order to become conscious (see ‘‘The Unconscious’’
[1915e]). The ego was now described as wearing a
‘‘cap of hearing,’’ the origin of perception and of the
memory traces that perpetuated it.
The Ego and the Id views the ego primarily as a surface differentiation of the id under the influence of the
external world; it conveys the demands of the external
world to the instinctual agency of the id, with which it
remains in permanent contact at its base. As a messenger of reality, the ego replaces the reign of the pleasure
principle by that of the reality principle, imposing the
constraints of the social environment. It is the agent of
the repression (or the sublimation) of the instincts, of
the censorship of dreams, and the cause of resistances
to the treatment, and it manages object-cathexes and
controls motility. All these responsibilities do not preclude a certain passivity of the ego. Recalling the tale of
Itzig, who does not know where he is going, and says
‘‘Ask my horse!’’, Freud writes: ‘‘Thus in its relation to
the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in
check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own
strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he
is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it
where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in
the habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if
it were its own’’ (p. 25).
But ‘‘The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is
not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection
of a surface’’ (p. 26). This idea was elaborated by Freud
in a note added to the English translation of The Ego
and the Id published in 1927: ‘‘the ego is ultimately
derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those
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springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be
regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the
body, besides, as we have seen above, representing the
superficies of the mental apparatus’’ (p. 26n). (Here it
is possible to discern the origins of the ‘‘skin-ego’’
described by Didier Anzieu in 1985 [Anzieu, 1989]).
The ego derives energy from narcissistic libido, and in
this connection Freud evokes the possibility of a libido
(even an Eros) that is ‘‘desexualized’’ or ‘‘sublimated,’’
‘‘displaceable and neutral’’—and, one can only suppose, not easily reconcilable with the theses of ego psychology on an autonomous and conflictless ego. At all
events, according to Freud, ‘‘The narcissism of the ego
is . . . a secondary one, which has been withdrawn from
objects’’ (pp. 44–46).
The importance of processes of identification is
much emphasized in The Ego and the Id. Identification
is the basis of the earliest object-cathexes and retains
this function first in the form of incorporation and
later as identification proper. (As early as 1909 Sándor
Ferenczi had described the growth of the ego in terms
of introjection.) But the fate of object-cathexes is that
they must be abandoned in the course of a person’s
history, and Freud concludes in this connection that
the mechanism of melancholia is universally applicable. Thanks to narcissistic identification, the abandoned object is perpetuated within the ego, which
seeks on this basis to make itself loved by the id: ‘‘I am
so like the object’’ (p. 30). Freud is thus able to frame
the following proposition, so often misread since: ‘‘It
may be that this identification is the sole condition
under which the id can give up its objects. At any rate
the process, especially in the early phases of development, is a very frequent one, and it makes it possible
to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate
of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the
history of those object-choices’’ (p. 29). As we shall
see, the restriction here, that only the ‘‘character’’ of
the ego and not the ego as a whole is involved in this
process, would often be overlooked subsequently; all
the same, Freud’s evocation of the succession—even
the contradictory coexistence—of object identifications in the case of ‘‘multiple personalities’’ (pp. 30–
31) shows just how much the ego remains the seat of
identifications for him.
We should note lastly in this context that the Other,
as object, made its definitive entrance into psychoanalytic theory in The Ego and the Id, opening the way to
the discussion of ‘‘object relations’’ that was to have a
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greater and greater effect on practice in the future.
And, along with the Other, the past, tradition, and
intergenerational transmission, or in other words the
ego’s primal identifications with the two parents,
which were also placed at the origin of the other
agency described, the superego.
The distinction between individual and ego is nevertheless very clearly drawn: ‘‘We shall now look upon an
individual as a psychical id, unknown and unconscious,
upon whose surface rests the ego, developed from its
nucleus the Pcpt. [perception-consciousness] system.
If we make an effort to represent this pictorially, we
may add that the ego does not completely envelop the
id, but only does to the extent to which the system
Pcpt. forms its [the ego’s] surface, more or less as the
germinal disc rests upon the ovum. The ego is not
sharply separated from the id; its lower portion merges
into it’’ (p. 24).
As we know, each of the hypotheses set forth in
The Ego and the Id was subject to theoretical developments, often divergent ones, in later years. Freud
himself never ceased working on them, as when, in
‘‘Neurosis and Psychosis,’’ he offered a ‘‘simple formula. . . which deals with what is perhaps the most
important genetic difference between a neurosis and
a psychosis: neurosis is the result of a conflict between
the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous
outcome of a similar disturbance between the ego and
the external world’’ (p. 149). Or when, in ‘‘The Economic Problem of Masochism,’’ he clarified the point
that ‘‘the function of the ego is to unite and to reconcile the claims of the three agencies which it serves;
and we may add that in doing so it also possesses in
the super-ego a model which it can strive to follow’’
(1924c, p. 167). Again, in ‘‘Negation,’’ Freud recalled
that ‘‘the original pleasure-ego wants to introject into
itself everything that is good and to eject from itself
everything that is bad. What is bad, what is alien to
the ego and what is external are, to begin with, identical’’; and also that ‘‘The other sort of decision made
by the function of judgement—as to the real existence of something of which there is a presentation
(reality-testing)—is a concern of the definitive
reality-ego, which develops out of the initial
pleasure-ego. It is now no longer a question of
whether what has been perceived (a thing) shall be
taken into the ego or not, but of whether something
which is in the ego as a presentation can be rediscovered in perception (reality) as well’’ (1925h, p. 237).
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EGO
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud would
underscore the ego’s functions in the regulation of the
instincts, giving back to the idea of ‘‘defense mechanisms’’ a place that had long been usurped by the notion
of ‘‘repression.’’ He also modified his theory of anxiety,
assigning it a source in the ego, which, when confronted by danger, triggered anxiety as a signal and so
mobilized defensive processes: ‘‘whereas I formerly
believed that anxiety invariably arose automatically by
an economic process, my present conception of anxiety as a signal given by the ego in order to affect the
pleasure-unpleasure agency does away with the necessity of considering the economic factor.’’ It was probable, Freud added, that ‘‘the earliest repressions as well
as most of the later ones are motivated by an ego-anxiety
of this sort in regard to particular processes in the id’’
(1926d [1925], p. 140).
The question of the ego was raised directly or indirectly, and new considerations on the subject were
adduced, throughout Freud’s later work. The notion
of ‘‘disavowal’’ (1927e) and the study of perversions,
even more than the descriptions in Civilization and Its
Discontents (1930a [1929]) and An Outline of PsychoAnalysis (1940a [1938]), were what led Freud to his
last great formulation concerning the ego—that on the
‘‘splitting of the ego’’: Faced by a conflict between the
instinctual demand for masturbatory pleasure and
the apprehension of the reality of the threat of castration, the child embraces two contradictory positions
simultaneously, ‘‘at the price of a rift in the ego which
never heals but which increases as time goes on. The
two contrary reactions to the conflict persist as the
centre-point of a splitting of the ego. The whole process seems so strange to us because we take for granted
the synthetic nature of the processes of the ego. But we
are clearly at fault in this. The synthetic function of the
ego, though it is of such extraordinary importance, is
subject to particular conditions and is liable to a whole
number of disturbances’’ (1940e [1938], p. 276).
On the clinical plane, the ego’s role was defined by
Freud in the conclusion to the twenty-third of the New
Introductory Lectures—a passage that has caused a very
great deal of ink to flow, especially in France. The
‘‘therapeutic efforts of psycho-analysis,’’ Freud writes,
are ‘‘to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of perception
and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate
fresh portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall
be. It is a work of culture—not unlike the draining of
46 6
the Zuider Zee’’ (1933a [1932], p. 80). Freud returned
to the matter in ‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’: ‘‘As is well known, the analytic situation consists
in our allying ourselves with the ego of the person
under treatment, in order to subdue portions of his id
which are uncontrolled—that is to say to include them
in the synthesis of his ego. The fact that a co-operation of
this kind habitually fails in the case of psychotics affords
us a first solid footing for our judgement. The ego, if we
are to be able to make such a pact with it, must be a normal one. But a normal ego of this sort is, like normality
in general, an ideal fiction. The abnormal ego, which is
unserviceable for our purposes, is unfortunately no fiction. Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the
average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in
some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent; and
the degree of its remoteness from one end of the series
and of its proximity to the other will furnish us with a
provisional measure of what we have so indefinitely
termed an Ôalteration of the ego’’’ (1937c, p. 235).
Anna Freud, in The Ego and the Mechanisms of
Defence, published in 1936, was the first to revisit and
round out her father’s hypotheses. This was the start of
a series of studies by Anna Freud centered on the psychology of the ego, sometimes to the detriment of the
interpretation of unconscious fantasies. In 1939, Heinz
Hartmann laid the groundwork of what the psychoanalytical migration to the United States would
develop into ego psychology thanks to the work of
Ernst Kris, Rudolph Loewenstein, David Rapaport,
Paul Federn, and so many others. So influential was
ego psychology that for a time this theoretical orientation appeared to constitute the most thoroughgoing
expression of Freudian orthodoxy.
In point of fact, Hartmann’s idea of the ‘‘autonomy’’ of the ego, which he proposed as early as 1939,
was in contradiction with Freud’s views on the origins
of this mental agency, which for him could never be
anything but conflicted, bound up as it was with the
relations between instinctual demands and the
requirements of external reality. According to Hartmann, certain functions of the ego developed independently of the id and were essentially in the service of
the individual’s adaptation to the environment; the
socialization factor was also underlined by Erik Erikson (1950). The notion of ‘‘primary narcissism’’ and
that of a gradual development of the ego and its object
relationships then became the subject of lively debate,
notably with the Kleinian analysts.
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For Melanie Klein, the ego and its object relationships existed from birth, as witness the early split
between good and bad objects or the mechanisms of
projection and projective identification, which manifested themselves right away. Klein’s use of the term
‘‘self ’’ should also be noted; her students and followers
called upon it more and more, feeling that it helped
distance them from the over-‘‘mechanistic’’ account of
the ego put forward by the American school. Things
were not so simple, however, for the Americans too
adopted the idea of a self—Heinz Kohut even invented
a ‘‘self psychology’’—and some of them sought to give
identity priority over the haze in which Freud had ultimately left the definition of the ego as distinct from
the notion of the person. In a parallel development,
the stress placed on ‘‘object relationships’’ by AngloSaxon authors (W. R. D. Fairbairn, Margaret Mahler,
Otto Kernberg) or French ones (Maurice Bouvet)
shifted theoretical and above all clinical interest away
from the state of an ego in need of cure and onto the
vicissitudes of the pregenital and genital relations
established by a subject who repeated these in the
transference.
In France, there was no sarcasm too biting for
Jacques Lacan when it came to the proponents of ego
psychology, and he based himself on his theory of
organization by language to place the ego resolutely in
the realm of the Imaginary. His notion of the ‘‘mirror
phase,’’ first proposed in 1936, was intended to
account for the constitution, by means of specular
identification, not of the ego but rather of an ‘‘I’’
which foreshadowed the significance assumed later in
his theory by the ‘‘subject’’ (Lacan, 1977 [1949]). He
nonetheless devoted his 1954–55 Seminar to ‘‘The Ego
in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis’’ (Lacan, 1993 [1981]). Piera Aulagnier, for her
part, abandoned the notion of the ego in favor of a
concept of the ‘‘I’’ different from Lacan’s.
Present-day psychoanalysis is clearly more interested in synthetic approaches to the individual and the
individual’s relationship to others than in the ego as
the frontier agency to which Freud accorded so much
importance, as described above. No doubt the considerable extension of the psychoanalytic approach to
psychotic patients has contributed to this tendency to
globalize the person and be less attentive to an ego
conceived as ‘‘weak’’ or ‘‘in pieces.’’ There can be no
doubt, either, that the emphasis placed on the adaptive
functions of the ego has in the eyes of many amounted
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to a bastardization of psychoanalysis favoring more
and more ‘‘psychotherapeutic’’ or even political goals,
and thus running counter to the liberation that Freud’s
discoveries imply. At all events, it is vital to keep in
mind what clinical and therapeutic issues underlie and
determine such theoretical divergences, namely adaptation to reality, the interpretation of unconscious fantasies, social adjustment, autonomy/disalienation, and
so on.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Binding/unbinding of the instincts; Cathectic
energy; Defense mechanisms; Depersonalization; Ego
and the Id, The; Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, The;
Ego alterations; Ego (analytical psychology); Ego autonomy; Ego boundaries; Ego (ego psychology); Ego feeling; Ego functions; Ego ideal; Ego ideal/ideal ego; Egoinstinct; Ego interests; Ego-libido/object-libido; Ego
Psychology and Psychosis; Ego psychology; Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation; Ego-syntonic; Federn, Paul; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego;
Hartmann, Heinz; I; Id; Identification; Identity; Infantile omnipotence; Kris, Ernst; Loewenstein, Rudolph
M.; Megalomania; Narcissism; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’; Outline of Psychoanalysis, An; Passion; Perception-consciousness (Pcpt.-Cs.); Pleasure ego/reality ego;
Primary identification; ; Psychoanalytic treatment; Purified-pleasure-ego; Structuralism and psychoanalysis;
Self (analytical psychology); Self-hatred; Self-image;
Self-preservation; Skin-ego; ‘‘Splitting of the Ego in the
Process of Defence, The’’; Superego; Therapeutic alliance; Tube-ego.
Bibliography
Anzieu, Didier. (1989 [1985]). The skin ego. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press.
Bettelheim, Bruno. (1983). Freud and man’s soul. New York:
Knopf.
Erikson, Erik H. (1950). Childhood and society. New York:
Norton.
Freud, Anna. The ego and the mechanisms of defence. (1937
[1936]). London: Hogarth.
Freud, Sigmund. (1894a). The neuro-psychoses of defence.
SE, 3.
———. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4–5.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE, 7.
———. (1908e). Creative writers and day-dreaming. SE, 12.
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EGO, ALTERATION
OF
THE
———. (1910i). The psycho-analytic view of psychogenic
disturbances of vision. SE, 11.
———. (1911b). Formulations on the two principles of
mental functioning. SE, 12.
———. (1911c). Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia. (Dementia paranoides). SE, 12.
———. (1913j). The claims of psycho-analysis to scientific
interest. SE, 13.
———. (1914b). On narcissism: An introduction. SE, 14.
———. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14.
Freud, Sigmund, and Ludwig Binswanger. (1992 [1908–
38]). The Sigmund Freud-Ludwig Binswanger correspondence (Gerhard Fichtner, Ed.; Arnold J. Pomerans, Trans.).
New York: Other Press, 2003.
Hartmann, Heinz. (1939). Essays on ego psychology. New
York: International Universities Press, 1964.
Lacan, Jacques. (1993). The ego in freud’s theory and in the
technique of psychoanalysis: 1954–1955. (Sylvana Tomaselli,
Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published
1981)
Lacan, Jacques. (2004). The mirror stage as formative of the
function of the i. In Écrits: A Selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.).
New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1949)
———. (1916–17a [1915–17]). Introductory lectures on
psycho-analysis. SE, 15–16.
———. (1917e [1915]). Mourning and melancholia. SE, 14.
———. (1919a [1918]). Lines of advance in psycho-analytic
therapy. SE, 17.
Further Reading
Busch, Fred. (1995). The ego at the center of clinical technique. Northvale, NJ: Aronson Inc.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18.
Gray, Paul. (1994). The ego and the analysis of defense.
Northvale, NJ: Aronson Inc.
———. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18.
Marcus, Eric. (1999). Modern ego psychology. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, 47, 843–872.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19.
Opatow, Barry. (1993). On the drive-rootedness of psychoanalytic ego psychology. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 74, 437–458.
———. (1924b). Neurosis and psychosis. SE, 19.
———. (1924c). The economic problem of masochism.
SE, 19.
———. (1925h). Negation. SE, 19.
———. (1926d [1925]). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety.
SE, 20.
———. (1927e). Fetishism. SE, 21.
Orgel, Shelley. (1995). K. R. Eissler’s "Effect of structure ego on
analytic technique.". Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 64, 551–570.
Pine, Fred. (1990). Drive, ego, object, and self. New York:
Basic Books.
Wallerstein, Robert. (2002). The growth and transformation
of American ego psychology. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 50, 135–170.
———. (1930a [1929]). Civilization and its discontents.
SE, 21.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable.
SE, 23.
———. (1940a [1938]). An outline of psycho-analysis.
SE, 23.
———. (1940e [1938]). Splitting of the ego in the process
of defence. SE, 23.
———. (1950a [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology.
SE, 1.
Freud, Sigmund, and Jung, Car. (1974a [1906–13]). The
Freud/Jung letters (William McGuire, Ed.; Ralph Mannheim and R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
46 8
EGO, ALTERATION OF THE
The term ‘‘alteration of the ego’’ refers to changes that
the ego undergoes as a function of age or as a result of
neurotic or psychotic injuries with which it must deal.
This idea was evoked several times in Freud’s work.
Though it was referred to in ‘‘On Narcissism: An
Introduction’’ (1914c), the mention was brief, for
Freud had not as yet taken up the ego as an object of
investigation. This was during the period when he
went so far as to compare the ego to ‘‘a clown in the
circus’’ (1914d, p. 53). Once the important part played
by the ego in the unconscious was recognized, the
function of defense took on great significance as the
origin of alterations of the ego (1937c).
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EGO (ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY)
Later, with the advent of ego psychology, whether
that of Heinz Hartmann or that of Paul Federn, the
concept of ‘‘alteration of the ego’’ came fully into its
own. In the first place, these changes were seen to constitute a continual mental process, extending from the
primordial form of sucking at the breast to the most
complex forms of scientific thinking. This process may
be observed most clearly at turning points in life, as
for example during the transition from childhood to
adolescence or from adolescence to adulthood. Similarly, even though the change is far slower and more
subtle, there is certainly a difference between the ego
of the adult and that of the individual in old age.
On another level, the ego can be modified as a consequence of neurotic or psychotic disturbances. In the
case of neurosis, the mechanisms of defense become so
significant that the ego is obliged to transform itself,
even though such transformation is never so far-reaching
as it is when a psychotic process comes into play. The
critical difference between these two kinds of alteration is that in neurosis there is no apparent splitting of
the ego, whereas in the case of psychosis such splitting
is evident. A split ego, obviously, is an altered ego. In a
highly cathected narcissistic ego, transformations are
harder to observe, save perhaps a certain behavioral
rigidity. It is when the ego collapses under strong pressures that alterations occur. Alterations of the ego, it
should be noted, are an aspect of the normal psychology, as well as of the pathology, of the ego.
ERNST FEDERN
See also: Ego; Ego psychology.
Bibliography
Anzieu, Didier. (1986). Some alterations of the ego which
make analyses interminable. International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 68, 9–19.
Freud, Sigmund. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction.
SE, 14: 67–102.
———. (1914d). On the history of the psycho-analytic
movement. SE, 14: 1–66.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 209–253.
EGO (ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY)
Carl Gustav Jung proposed the following definition of
the ego: ‘‘By ego I understand a complex of ideas
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which constitutes the centre of my field of consciousness and appears to possess a high degree of continuity
and identity. Hence I also speak of an ego-complex’’
(Jung, 1921, p. 425).
Jung actually conceives the ego-complex (or complex of the ego; Ichkomplex) as both a content and a
condition of consciousness, which is definitive
because, he writes, ‘‘a psychic element is conscious to
me only in so far as it is related to my ego-complex’’
(p. 425).
The restriction of the ego to the field of consciousness is particularly significant for Jung and the development of his analytical psychology because in his
diagnostic studies of associations in 1904 he had
already been able to demonstrate unconscious complexes affecting the conscious mind and capable of
causing disturbances in ego functioning. It was this
work that had formed the basis for his agreement with
Freud and his psychoanalytic theories.
However, following his break with Freud in 1913,
Jung embarked on a clearer elaboration of his own
psychological theories. His personal experience had
led him to emphasize the extremely important role of
a firm anchoring of the conscious viewpoint in the ego
because, as he explained, the ego not only has to manage the conflicts with the external world but also to
confront intrapsychic material that manifests and
operates from the unconscious.
His entire interest was henceforth directed at investigating the contents of the unconscious. This led him
to the following discovery: To the extent that the ego
approaches unconscious material in a way that is both
receptive and critical, it becomes clear that an organizational element is at work there, such that dreams, for
example, can be considered to interrelate with a meaningful process of transformation. This suggested the
obvious hypothesis that it is not only our conscious
ego that possesses a capacity for organization, initiative and purpose: It is in fact the development of our
personality in its entirety, including our potential for
consciousness, that is ‘‘directed’’ by a center operating
in the unconscious.
To distinguish it from the ego, Jung called this center the ‘‘Self.’’ To the definition of the ego-complex
quoted above, he therefore added the following point:
‘‘But inasmuch as the ego is only the centre of my field
of consciousness, it is not identical with the totality of
my psyche. . . . I therefore distinguish between the ego
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and the self, since the ego is only the subject of my
consciousness, while the self is the subject of my total
psyche, which also includes the unconscious’’ (p. 425).
Jung devoted himself principally to the interaction
between the ego and the unconscious and to the question of discovering how the ego can gain experience of
a Self that is subordinate to it. He demonstrated that
this is a task that belongs to the individuation process
in the second half of life, which presupposes and
requires the existence of a strong enough ego that can
allow itself to be substantially influenced by the Self
without thereby succumbing to a loss of boundaries
that would be pathological if not psychotic. Something
that Jung did not undertake to explain at great length
was the question of knowing how it is that the Self, as
a guiding agency of psychic development, stimulates
and guides an appropriate maturation of the ego, and
it is principally his successors who have worked on this
(Neumann, 1963/1973; Fordham, 1969).
MARIO JACOBY
See also: Animus-anima; Collective unconscious (analytical psychology); Compensation (analytical psychology);
Ego; Numinous (analytical psychology); Self (analytical
psychology); Shadow (analytical psychology).
Bibliography
Fordham, Michael. (1969). Children as individuals. London:
Hodder & Stoughton.
Jacoby, Mario. (1990). Individuation and Narcissism: The
Psychology of the Self in Jung and Kohut (Myron Gubitz,
Trans.). London and New York: Routledge. (Original work
published 1985)
———. (1904–1906). Experimental researches. Coll. Works,
Vol. II. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
———. (1921). Psychological types. Coll. Works, Vol. VI.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Neumann, Erich. (1973). The child: structure and dynamics
of the nascent personality (Ralph Manheim, Trans.). London: Hodder and Stoughton. (Original work published
1963)
EGO AND THE ID, THE
Published in German in 1923, The Ego and the Id was
the work in which Freud sought to summarize in the
most explicit manner the far-reaching metapsychological revisions he made to his theory in the 1920s. The
47 0
text begins by recalling the basic distinctions of the
topographical theory: distinctions among the conscious, the preconscious (descriptively unconscious
but susceptible of becoming conscious), and the
dynamic unconscious (the repressed, which can
become conscious only by penetrating the barrier of
repression, for example, by means of the psychoanalytic method).
In this work Freud emphasized that the resistances
of the ego, as encountered in the work of analysis,
were themselves in part unconscious. So even if the
conscious-unconscious opposition was still an essential point of reference, the unconscious could no
longer be considered a psychic agency. Freud thus had
to revisit the whole topographical system of his theory.
Freud concerns himself first with the characteristics
of the ego, its relationships with the perceptionconsciousness system and with language, which underpin the possibility of material becoming conscious.
Sense perceptions are immediately conscious; thought
processes become conscious through their links with
the auditory traces of verbal residues (or word presentations), which endow those processes with a perceptual
dimension. Internal perceptions, more deeply seated
and elemental than external ones, derive from the pleasure-unpleasure series of sensations and become conscious directly, without any recourse to words, by projecting themselves onto the surface of the body.
The crucial point in Freud’s argument concerns
feelings. Analytic experience reveals that feelings may
occasionally become conscious solely because the ego
refuses to discharge them. This idea leads to the paradoxical notion of ‘‘unconscious feelings’’ (notably, the
feeling of guilt). The ego thus emerges as an agency
derived essentially from the body: Linked to perception and to the body envelope, it is sometimes
described as ‘‘a surface entity,’’ but also as ‘‘the projection of a surface’’ (1923b, p. 26).
Freud’s rejection of the unconscious as a system led
him to include in the mental apparatus the id, which is
far more extensive and less organized than just the
repressed. He described the id as the great ‘‘reservoir’’
of the instincts, which originate in the somatic realm
and express themselves there as dynamic impulses
seeking discharge solely in accord with the dictates of
the pleasure principle. The ego is that part of the id
which has been modified by the influence of the external world: ‘‘For the ego, perception plays the part
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EGO
which in the id falls to instinct’’ (1923b, p. 25). Freud
compares the relationship of the ego to the id to that
of a rider to his mount: Often the rider’s energy is
insufficient for him to do more than lead the horse
where it wants to go.
To his structural theory Freud also introduced a
third agency, reflecting the fact that the ‘‘highest’’ mental activity, notably that of the moral conscience, may
be unconscious. The superego (or ideal ego), as evoked
several years earlier in On Narcissism: An Introduction
(1914c), is the outcome of a differentiation within the
ego; the formative mechanism is narcissistic identification with a lost object (1917e [1915], pp. 241, 249–
251). Internalization of the object in the ego facilitates
replacing the instinctual cathexis of the object with a
change in the ego that renders it similar to the object
and thus capable of pleasing the id and being narcissistically cathected. The establishment of the superego
depends on a mechanism of this sort: Obliged to
renounce the cathexes characteristic of the Oedipus
complex, the child redirects them onto the ego while
identifying with the parents, at once desired and
feared. The postoedipal superego, though essentially
paternal in character, forms on the basis of two identifications (maternal and paternal), combined in one
way or another. These secondary identifications (secondary, that is, to the instinctual cathexes that they
replace) continue to reinforce a set of primary object
identifications whose point was ‘‘to be [like] the
other’’ rather than to ‘‘have’’ the other.
This web of identifications, reflecting the child’s
long dependency on the parents, gives a permanent
character to the infant’s relation to primordial objects
and the dual protective and punitive significance of
that relation. By treating the superego as a mental
agency that ‘‘dominates’’ the ego, Freud accentuated
the idea that the superego is just as immune as the id
to a complete appropriation by the ego.
The tension between the ego and the superego manifests itself as a sense of guilt. The largely unconscious
nature of the superego sheds light on negative therapeutic reactions, which, according to Freud, express a
need for punishment (an unconscious feeling of guilt)
that is satisfied by illness and suffering.
The superego is the agency whereby the heritage of
civilization, which individuals must reappropriate for
themselves, is transmitted. Here Freud recalled the thesis of Totem and Taboo (1912–1913a) concerning the
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AND THE
ID, THE
genesis of guilt and of the social bond created by the
killing of the primal father, a thesis with profound
implications for religion. The superego, projected and
writ large, is the seed from which all religion springs.
The topography of psychic agencies thus outlined
was inseparable from Freud’s new conception of
instinctual dualism. According to this conception, first
set forth in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), Eros
encompasses the instincts for self-preservative and sex
(the conflict between them no longer being considered
primary), whereas the death instincts express a primary self-destructiveness mediated by sadism, which
redirects the death instincts outward in a partial fusion
with erotic impulses. The essential characteristic of
these two groups of instincts is their conservatism: The
life instincts aim to preserve life by binding life with
ever vaster wholes; the death instincts strive for a
return to an inanimate state by unbinding and reducing tension to zero (the Nirvana principle).
Life presents itself as an unending struggle between
the two kinds of instincts, always more or less blended
or fused. But the process of identification, a consequence of the desexualization and transformation of
cathexes into narcissistic libido, is accompanied by a
diffusion that may ultimately result in the superego’s
becoming ‘‘a pure culture of the death instinct’’ (1923b,
p. 53), as in melancholia. The same circumstances also
enable the ego to sublimate the instincts, in conformity
with the requirements of the ideal: The ego, with its
‘‘free’’ (narcissistic) energy, can transform love into hate
(paranoia) or hate into love (homosexuality) (1923b,
pp. 43–44).
In concluding The Ego and the Id, Freud attempts to
sum up the ‘‘dependent relationships’’ of the ego,
which has to serve three masters at the same time. As
can be seen in the clinical aspects of the sense of guilt,
the superego draws sustenance from the renunciations
it requires, becoming more severe as aggression is displaced and turned against the ego. With respect to the
id, the ego seeks to satisfy instinctual demands while
simultaneously seeking to subject them to its will. And
as for the external world, the ego is linked to it by
being anchored in perception and by the workings of
the reality principle, which constrains its use of
judgment.
Three dangers and three types of anxiety are correlated with these three masters of the ego: moral anxiety
(arising from conscience), neurotic anxiety (arising
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EGO
AND THE
MECHANISMS
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DEFENCE, THE
from instincts), and realistic anxiety (arising from the
reality principle). Freud emphasized the fact that the
fear of death, seemingly so real, in fact derives from
‘‘moral’’ anxiety, itself the result of castration anxiety
and of loss of love.
to create what she called a ‘‘psychoanalytical psychology.’’ At the same time the schoolteaching career that
she embarked upon before becoming a psychoanalyst
would seem to be the origin of the pedagogical cast of
her written work and her practice as a child analyst.
The Ego and the Id is a difficult text, not least
because it is extremely concise as a result of its synthesizing ambitions. Freud himself was less than satisfied
with it. The work was a recapitulation of ideas
advanced by Freud since the completion of his metapsychology, and more particularly since Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920g), but its implications would
emerge only gradually with the appearance of later
articles, most notably ‘‘The economic problem of
masochism’’ (1924c), where Freud assessed the consequences of the repetition compulsion and the death
instinct on the concept of the pleasure principle.
The frame of reference of The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence is Freud’s second topography (structural
theory). The subject of the book is the defenses developed by the individual ego in order to confront or avoid
the conflicts provoked by the id in its relations with the
ego and the superego. Anna Freud approaches psychoanalytic technique and theory, along with defensive formations, from the specific perspective of the observation
of the ego through the mental conflicts in which it is
involved. Thus the ego in its relations with the id and
with the outside world—relations which may be the
source of unpleasure or of feelings of fear—is analyzed
in the light of its avoidance mechanisms (the various
forms of negation), in the light of its aggressive or
altruistic strategies. Special significance is assigned to the
phenomena of puberty and to the defense mechanisms
triggered by the re-emergence of sexuality at that time.
JEAN-LUC DONNET
See also: Ego; Id; Superego; Topographical point of view.
Source Citation
EGO AND THE MECHANISMS
OF DEFENCE, THE
Anna Freud considers it the analyst’s task, ‘‘in relation
to the ego, to explore its contents, its boundaries, and its
functions, and to trace the history of its dependence on
the outside world, the id, and the superego; and, in relation to the id, to give an account of the instincts, i.e. of
the id contents, and to follow them through the transformations which they undergo’’ (p. 5). The fact is that
when id derivatives make incursions into consciousness,
the ego is prone to ‘‘counterattack’’ by deploying defense
mechanisms (p. 7). But while the analyst is aided by the
tendency of id derivatives to surface, at the same time no
help is to be obtained by analyzing the ego’s defenses, for
these can be reconstructed only by reference to the
effects they produce in the patient’s associations.
According to Anna Freud, the analysis of resistance to
transference and the analysis of the compulsion to repeat
need to be refined by analysis of the resistances of the
ego. The purpose of these various psychoanalytical procedures is to bring into consciousness the ego’s unconscious defenses, which are liable to strengthen the
patient’s hostility toward the analyst.
This work was first published in Vienna in 1936 and in
English translation in London the following year, two
years before Sigmund Freud’s death. The whole of Anna
Freud’s work was marked by her clearly stated desire to
win scientific status for psychoanalysis. With this in
mind, she sought to integrate analysis into psychology,
Anna Freud subjects the ego’s defenses to meticulous scrutiny and inventories their varieties on the
basis of Freud’s descriptions. The list is as follows:
regression, repression, reaction-formation, isolation,
undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the
self, and reversal into the opposite. To these Anna
Freud, Sigmund. (1923b). Das Ich und das Es, Leipzig-WienZürich, Internationaler psychoanalytischer Verlag; G.W.,
XIII, 237–289; The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1912–1913a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–
161.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
———. (1916-17g [1915]). Mourning and melancholia. SE,
14: 237–258.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1–64.
———. (1924c). The economic problem of masochism. SE,
19: 155–170.
47 2
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EGO AUTONOMY
Freud adds a tenth defense mechanism, namely sublimation or the displacement of instinctual aims.
Anna Freud’s work, and in particular the book with
which we are here concerned, has directly nourished a
line of thinking that might be called a ‘‘psychoanalysis of
consciousness,’’ and that has achieved its greatest success
in the United States thanks to the proponents of ego psychology (Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein, 1964); most
importantly, however, it has indirectly made possible a
psychological use of the findings of Freudian psychoanalysis in a number of areas, among them the field of what
is known as ‘‘psychoanalytical pedagogy’’ and that of
so-called personality testing.
ELSA SCHMID-KITSIKIS
See also: Defense; Ego.
Source Citation
Freud, Anna. (1937). The ego and the mechanisms of defence
(Cecil Baines, Trans.). London: Hogarth. (Original work
published 1936)
Bibliography
Hartmann, Heinz, Kris, Ernst, and Loewenstein, Rudolf M.
(1964). Papers on psychoanalytic psychology. New York:
International Universities Press.
Moll, Jeanne. (1989). La pédagogie psychanalytique. Origine
et histoire. Paris: Dunod.
Sandler, Joseph. (1985). The analysis of defense: the ego and the
mechanisms of defense revisited. New York: International
Universities Press.
EGO AUTONOMY
Heinz Hartmann introduced the concepts of primary
and secondary ego autonomy in 1939, and elaborated
on them in later writings (Hartmann, 1964). Within
the framework of his description lies a conflict-free
sphere of the ego. The notion of ‘‘ego autonomy’’
implies that the ego and the id derive from a common
matrix where certain ego precursors prefigure functions destined to develop autonomously, independently of the instincts and their vicissitudes.
Primary and secondary autonomy involve two sets of
hypotheses, which together constitute the conflict-free
ego sphere. Hartmann replaced Freud’s view that the
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ego grows out of the id with the hypothesis that both
ego and id are derived from a common undifferentiated medium.
Related concepts are change of function, neutralization, automatization, and ego interests. Hartmann
focused especially on the autonomy of specific ego
functions, and stressed that ego autonomy is relative,
since both primary and secondarily autonomous components can be drawn into conflict.
Prior to Hartmann, psychoanalytic theory held that
all psychic mechanisms and processes result from the
effects of the influence of life experience on the instinctual drives. In primary autonomy, Hartmann
identified constitutional factors influencing ego development in addition to instinctual drives and external
reality. The ego apparatuses of perception, object comprehension, intention, thinking, and language capacity
are all congenital, and are influenced by maturation
and learning. But they are neither derived from conflict, nor are they developmentally dependent on conflict. Even so, these structures of primary autonomy
can become caught up in conflict, resulting in inhibition of their functioning. This formulation took some
of the explanatory burden off the concept of
sublimation.
In secondary autonomy, behaviors and attitudes
which are initially associated with a conflict between
drive manifestations and defenses can become detached
from their sources. This takes place through a change
of function, made possible by a de-sexualization and a
de-aggressivization of the associated mental energy.
The degree of secondary autonomy is defined by how
resistant the trend is to regressive re-instinctualization.
More generally, both the stability of secondarily autonomous functions and ego strength can be defined by
the capacity of the various ego functions to withstand
regression in the face of a focal conflict. Insufficient
secondary autonomy interferes with the ability to
bind id strivings, and increases vulnerability to ego
regression.
Neutralization is seen as the basis for secondary
autonomy of ego interests, habits and skills, while ego
interests include sets of ego functions that mostly
entail secondary autonomy. They encompass what
Freud called the ego instincts. Two ego interests in
conflict are an example of an intrasystemic conflict.
Secondary autonomy is seen to be established through
the structure-building process called automatization,
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EGO BOUNDARIES
by means of the change of function via neutralization.
Automatisms are ego apparatuses, somatic and preconscious, that are adaptive themselves, or are utilized by
adaptive mechanisms.
Federn employed the term ego to refer to a person’s
ongoing bodily and psychic experience, the ‘‘I,’’ the self,
one’s identity. This phenomenological description can be
contrasted with that of the ego in Freud’s structural model.
David Rapaport (1951/1967; 1957/1967) saw a reciprocal relationship between the ego’s autonomy from
the drives on the one hand, and from the environment
on the other. Autonomy from the drives is insured by
the reality-related autonomous apparatuses, and from
the environment by the endogenous drives.
Victor Tausk (1919/1933), in his paper on the
‘‘influencing machine,’’ first utilized the concept of the
regressive loss of ego boundaries as a symptom of schizophrenia. Paul Federn (1926/1952; 1928) viewed ego
boundaries as a key element in all ego functioning and
postulated a boundary between the ego and the external world, which is subject to perception. He further
extended the boundary concept by identifying an
internal boundary between the ego and the unconscious, open to introspection.
Hartmann’s formulations of ego autonomy have
been highly influential in psychoanalysis. Most of his
contributions stand, but serious questions have subsequently been raised about the scientific status and
validity of energy transformations, which are part of
the neutralization-deneutralization hypothesis.
MARVIN S. HURVICH
See also: Ego; Ego (ego psychology).
Bibliography
Bellak, Leopold; Hurvich, Marvin; and Gediman, Helen.
(1973). Ego functions in schizophrenics, neurotics and normals. A systematic study of conceptual, diagnostic and therapeutic aspects. New York: Wiley.
Hartmann, Heinz. (1939). Essays on ego psychology. New
York: International Universities Press, 1964.
———. (1939). Ego psychology and the problem of adaptation. New York: International Universities Press, 1958.
Hartmann, Heinz, Kris, Ernst, and Loewenstein, Rudolph
M. (1964). Papers on psychoanalytic psychology. New York:
International Universities Press.
Rapaport, David. (1967). The autonomy of ego. In M. Gill
(Ed.), The collected papers of David Rapaport (p. 357–367).
New York: Basic Books. (Original work published 1951)
———. (1967). The theory of ego autonomy: A generalization. In M. Gill (Ed.), The collected papers of David Rapaport (p. 722–744). New York: Basic Books. (Original work
published 1957)
In agreement with Freud, Federn understood the
earliest differentiation between external and internal to
result from body movements. Such a distinction eventually results in the establishment of dynamic (continually expanding and contracting) ego boundaries.
Federn’s concept of ego boundary is closely associated with his other key concepts of ego feeling, ego
state, and ego cathexis. Both ego boundary and ego feeling require for their maintenance an ego cathexis,
which may be a blend of three kinds: libidinal, destructive, and self-preservative. When the inner boundary is
critically weakened or lost, the return of repressed ego
states falsifies reality and can result in delusions and hallucinations. When the cathexis of the outer boundary is
weakened or lost, the sense of reality is disturbed, and
external objects are discerned as unknown, strange, and
unreal. Federn utilized his concepts of ego boundaries
and sense of reality to clarify such phenomena as
estrangement, depersonalization, delusions, hallucinations, dream experience, and drug effects.
Edith Jacobson (1954) has employed ego boundaries in psychoanalytic conceptualizations of the
boundary between self and object representations. A
remaining challenge is to work out the relationships
among inner, outer, and self-object boundaries.
MARVIN S. HURVICH
EGO BOUNDARIES
Ego boundaries, a key concept in the theory of Paul
Federn, form a necessary basis for distinguishing real
from not real. Federn saw it as a kind of sense organ
that differentiates what is part of the ego at a given
moment from all other psychic elements.
47 4
See also: Ego; Ego psychology.
Bibliography
Bergmann, Martin S. (1963). The place of Paul Federn’s ego
psychology in psychoanalytic metapsychology. Journal of
the American Psychoanalytic Association, 11, 97–116.
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EGO (EGO PSYCHOLOGY)
Federn, Paul. (1928). Narcissism in the structure of the ego.
International Journal of Psycho-analysis, 9, 401–419.
See also: Ego; Ego (ego psychology).
———. (1952). Ego psychology and the psychoses. New York:
Basic Books. (Original work published 1926.)
Bibliography
Jacobson, Edith. (1954). The self and the object world: Vicissitudes of their infantile cathexes and their influence on
ideational and affective development. Psychoanalytic Study
of the Child, 9, 75–127.
Tausk, Viktor. (1933). On the origin of the ‘‘influencing
machine’’ in schizophrenia. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2,
519–556. (Original work published 1919)
EGO, DAMAGE INFLICTED ON THE
A conception of the ego as a decisive agency of the
mind was the point of departure of psychoanalytical
ego psychology, which teaches that the ego may have a
normal development (the approximate meaning of
‘‘normal’’ being ‘‘socially adapted’’). According to
Heinz Hartmann, adaptation is an essential task of the
ego, one performed in a conflict-free, autonomous
dimension of the ego distinct from the dimension of
the ego dominated by the instincts. But this independent domain of the ego is liable to suffer many sorts of
damage, whether at the beginning of life or later on.
The most recent research on infancy has shown that
one of the causes of such damage is a lack of adequate
bonds with the mother or mother substitute. Genetic
causes no doubt also play a part, but in this area the
state of our knowledge is still rudimentary.
Apart from bonds with the mother or mother substitute, there are particular social conditions that can inflict
severe damage on the ego, damage that in some cases is
irreparable. The later in life that these injuries occur, the
easier it is for the ego to repair them with dispatch. But if
instinctual forces have inflicted added damage, then the
ego may not prevail, because the libido is too weak or
a destructive instinct is too powerful.
According to Paul Federn, damage of this kind may
be sustained as a result of an early breakdown of ego
boundaries. Where these boundaries are not well
developed, they may at any time be overwhelmed by
the destructive instinct, and death or suicide may
ensue. Both these eventualities are possible in the
course of childhood. In adolescence and adulthood,
suicide is always the result of injuries to the ego; in old
age, however, these considerations no longer apply.
ERNST FEDERN
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Weiss, Edoardo. (1951). Paul Federn’s scientific contributions: In commemoration. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 32 (4), 1–8.
———. (1952). Introduction to Paul Federn’s ego psychology
and the psychoses. New York: Basic Books.
———. (1966). Paul Federn: the theory of the psychoses. In
Franz Alexander, Samuel Eisenstein, and Martin Grotjahn
(Eds.), Psychoanalytic Pioneers. New York: Basic Books.
EGO (EGO PSYCHOLOGY)
The theories of the ego grouped under the rubric of
‘‘ego psychology’’ originated in Vienna before the Second World War and were developed in the United
States by virtue of the migration of their chief proponents, namely Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and
Rudolf Loewenstein. To these names must be added
those of Paul Federn, of Hermann Nunberg, and of a
good many other authors who helped give wide currency to conceptions of the ego that were destined to
attract violent criticism, in France, from Jacques
Lacan.
The substantival ‘‘das Ich’’ was so common in
German (as was its equivalent in various other languages), that Freud, in the early part of his career,
when he was actively searching for the new, paid it little mind. To begin with, Freud took the ego to be an
indivisible unity, largely coextensive with the body,
and therefore with consciousness. As Goethe had written, ‘‘To produce in oneself a new and better ego, thus
to construct oneself as permanent, to live in oneself
and create’’ (‘‘Ein neues besseres Ich in uns erzeugen, uns
so ewig bilden, in uns fortleben und schaffen’’).
In 1914, however, Freud would write that the ego
may at times ‘‘play the ludicrous part of the clown in a
circus’’ (1914d, p. 53). We may say, in other words,
that from the historical point of view psychoanalysis
did not undertake an investigation of the ego before
the First World War: Psychoanalysis was the science of
the unconscious, whereas for Freud the ego belonged
to the realm of consciousness. The notion of the ego
is very hard to circumscribe and it has a different
meaning for each psychological theory, so here we
shall confine ourselves to the psychoanalytic sense.
The translation of the term into languages other than
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EGO (EGO PSYCHOLOGY)
German further complicates the issue. The great confusion in English stems from the use of the Latin ‘‘ego’’
rather than the English ‘‘self ’’ or ‘‘me.’’ In French there
is ambiguity too, between ‘‘le je’’ and ‘‘le Moi.’’
Freud believed that the ego developed like a skin
over the unconscious (or, in his later accounts, over
the id) and that it was not present from birth. The
phenomenon of narcissistic cathexis led him to conclude that the ego was in part unconscious. The
Unconscious/Preconscious/Conscious scheme thus
came to seem inadequate, and Freud spent fifteen
years working out a new subdivision of the mind into
id, ego, and superego—‘‘agencies’’ that his followers
treated as structures. This was an error, for structures
are static, whereas agencies are dynamic.
The origin of the ego became an essential issue for
psychoanalysis, and has been responsible in part for
the latter growth of research into early childhood. Historically speaking, after Freud’s death the notion of the
ego eventually became the central preoccupation of
psychoanalysis, to the detriment of the id. One reason
for this was the increase of ego disturbances as compared with neurotic complaints, at least among analytic patients. Such disturbances were seen as the cause
of perversions and other human behavioral problems.
Certainly, the aphorism ‘‘Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in
meiner Brust’’ (‘‘Two souls reside, alas, in my breast’’)
had long been familiar, but it had engaged no clinical
application. Further research into the psychology of
the ego was undertaken in Freud’s wake, first by Anna
Freud—who indeed began during her father’s lifetime—and then by Heinz Hartmann and Paul Federn.
According to Freud, the formation of the ego was a
process that grew out of the bonds established with the
mother or mother-substitute. Those bonds could in
fact be looked upon as subject-object relationships,
after the fashion of the English school. From its beginnings, the ego was the agency of the mind whose task it
was to address the realities of life. Only thanks to the
love and continual care of the mother or mothersubstitute could adaptation to reality be achieved.
Freud felt that this normally occurred during the third
year of life, when the child’s ego was ready to adapt
itself also, beyond the family circle, to the outside
world as represented by the kindergarten.
The ego’s development did not stop at this point,
however, but continued into adulthood, continually
exposing the ego to innumerable dangers which
47 6
orientated it in this way or that. Genetic factors surely
played a major role, even if this could not as yet be
proved. Anna Freud emphasized that its development
in childhood shaped the most important portion of the
ego. Only when this development was arrested or when
it regressed was therapeutic intervention called for.
In summary, the ego may be described as that
agency which protects the id and which must come to
terms with the demands of the superego. It represents
in large part the individual’s social environment,
although it is also strongly determined in its development by familial factors. A lack of love and acknowledgment during the first years of life may have two
kinds of consequences: an autonomous ego may
develop which is concerned only with itself, which is
narcissistically cathected, and which is capable of
achieving remarkable successes in reality without making genuine contact with other individuals or with
society; alternatively, the ego may wither, failing either
to fashion links with the outside world or to draw
satisfaction from within. Between these two extremes
every imaginable intermediate situation—or ‘‘ego
state’’—may be met with. But such ego states also
depend on an outside world with the capacity to transform the ego-ideal into an ideal ego which, as early as
the third year of life, allies itself with the superego to
form an agency of great power in the life of the
individual.
Thus the earliest object relationships produce distinct character types: an ego strong in its narcissism
but socially ill-adapted; an ego that is weak, and undeveloped in all respects; or an ego that is bound to a
strong superego and thus able to assert itself in the
world. This last type is represented by highly religious
individuals and probably constitutes the commonest
form of human life.
The psychoanalytic psychology of the ego was inaugurated in 1923 with the publication of Freud’s major
work The Ego and the Id (1923b). For Freud, the ego
was intimately linked to the body, thus ensuring the
basic unity of the human being. Assuming that everyone knew what the ego was, he offered no definition
and confined himself to describing its functions. In
1929 Hermann Nunberg developed the notion of the
ego’s synthetic function. Whereas Freud thought that
after an analysis synthesis occurred spontaneously,
Nunberg showed that it was in fact the work of the
ego, whose essential task was to bring together the various tendencies of the human individual and place
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them in the service of social life. Nunberg felt that the
higher functions dependent on the ego, such as artistic
and scientific activity, were in fact governed by it;
Freud for his part thought they remained under the
influence of the id, like a horseman on his mount.
world. An accurate English translation of Ich would
have been ‘‘self’’; the use of the Latin ‘‘ego’’ turned
Ichpsychologie into ‘‘ego psychology—into something
both strange and foreign-sounding. And ‘‘self,’’ meanwhile, was translated into German as the Selbst.
In 1930, Anna Freud published a book dealing with
other ego functions, notably the defenses. She argued
that a set of human behaviors arose from the need to
fend off danger, and that responsibility here fell to the
ego. One of the most important defense mechanisms was
identification with the aggressor as a way of conjuring
away threats, but of course this ploy was not always successful. Repression, forgetting, and the splitting of the
ego were other defensive tactics. The positive ego functions were synthesis and identification with the ideal ego.
Paul Federn’s approach here was very different to
Hartmann’s. Drawing on his experience of analyzing a
schizophrenic artist as early as 1905, as well as on his
observations of other mental patients, and of himself,
Federn concluded that the ego was the feeling of ‘‘Ich bin
Ich selbst,’’—‘‘I am I myself,’’ the sense of self-identity in
time in space. He thus posed the question not in terms of
the function but rather in terms of the essence of the ego.
After Freud’s death, Heinz Hartmann expanded
some ideas that he had presented earlier, proposing
that the ego’s most significant function was adaptation, made possible by virtue of the ego’s two forms:
on the one hand, the ego ruled by the instincts, and on
the other, an ego free of conflict, which Hartmann
called the self. For Hartmann the ego was entirely
defined by its functions. He also held that a conflictfree ego was present from birth. Aberrant human
behavior was in large measure the result of a failure to
adapt to social conditions. This outcome occurred
quite independently of the instincts, and it also had
constitutional determinants. The ‘‘autonomous’’ ego
could be overwhelmed by the aggressive instinct,
which was the path to psychosis.
See also: Adaptation; Alterations of the ego; Cathectic
energy; Ego; Ego autonomy; Ego boundaries; Ego feeling;
Ego Functions; Ego interests; Ego psychology; Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation; Ego states; Egosyntonic; Federn, Paul; Hartmann, Heinz; Identity; Kris,
Ernst; Loewenstein, Rudolf M; Psychosexual development; Self; Self psychology; Self-image; Self-representation; Stage (or phase); United States.
This account was defining for psychoanalytic ego
psychology after the Second World War. It brought
psychoanalysis back towards academic psychology, as
also closer to individual psychology. It tended to make
it more compatible with sociology and opened the way
for it to become a natural science. It supplied the foundation for a psychoanalytic sociology that would trace
the development of the social ego from infancy to old
age, an approach pioneered in Erik Erikson’s book
Childhood and Society (1950). This conception of the
ego also constituted a link to behavioral studies and
relied on the observations of Jean Piaget, whose work
on the development of intelligence in children buttresses the notion of an ‘‘autonomous ego.’’ Finally,
Hartmann’s ego psychology led eventually to the psychology of the self developed by Heinz Kohut.
Hartmann’s approach was in part the result of the
transplantation of psychoanalysis to the English-speaking
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ERNST FEDERN
Bibliography
Erikson, Erik H. (1950). Childhood and society. New York:
Norton.z
Federn, Paul. (1926). Ego-psychology and the psychoses
(E. Weiss, Ed.). New York: Basic Books, 1952.
Freud, Anna. (1936). The ego and the mechanisms of defence.
(Cecil Baines, Trans.). London: Hogarth, 1937.
Freud, Sigmund. (1914d). On the history of the psychoanalytic movement. SE, 14: 1–66.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
Nunberg, Hermann. (1930). The synthetic function of the
ego. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 7.
EGO FEELING
Ego feeling is central to Paul Federn’s ego psychology,
together with ego boundary and ego state. It is one’s
experience of one’s own bodily and mental existence, a
phenomenological description of a connected psychic
sensation, and involves the experience of space, time,
and causality as an entity.
It is the experiential aspect of the ego boundary, the
feeling by which the person is able to sense what is ego
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EGO FUNCTIONS
and what is non-ego, and thus, what is real and not
real. Paul Schilder also focused on the phenomenology
of ego experience, especially in depersonalization and
the experience of time. Federn (1926/1952) affirms a
connection between his conception of ego feeling and
Schilder’s (1923/1953) concept of body schema.
For Federn, ego feeling is the simplest but also the
most extensive psychic state present in the personality.
Through a process of egotization, bodily and psychic
elements attain ego feeling and inclusion within the
ego boundary. He described bodily ego feeling (motor
and sensory memories pertaining to one’s person),
mental ego feeling (reflecting inner perceptions), and
superego feeling (the superego being an ego state with
its own boundaries). Federn demonstrated how interrelationships among these different ego feelings
change in different states of consciousness, such as in a
normal awake state, in falling asleep and waking up, in
dreams, in fainting, in ecstasy, in regression, and in the
major psychopathological conditions.
An ego feeling pervades one’s whole being while one
is awake. But under conditions of fatigue, sleep, illness,
and psychosis, the ego feeling is prone to serious restrictions. Ego feeling is intact when the ego is cathected,
and is absent when there is no cathexis. Repression
results in a depletion of ego cathexis. Disturbances in
ego feeling reflects changes in ego cathexis and may
result in severe anxiety and other mental symptoms,
especially feelings of estrangement and depersonalization. Depersonalization involves de-egotization and is
related to a fixation in the development of ego feeling.
Mental ego feeling is experienced as located inside
the bodily ego during waking. In sleep, bodily ego feeling is the first to vanish, then superego feeling, while
mental ego feeling remains the longest. There is an
absence of ego feeling during states of dreamless sleep.
The formulation of the concept of ego feeling is one
of Paul Federn’s most original and valuable contributions, and presents a challenge to psychoanalytic theorists to utilize its potential.
MARVIN S. HURVICH
See also: Ego; Ego (ego psychology).
Bibliography
Bergmann, Martin S. (1963). The place of Paul Federn’s ego
psychology in psychoanalytic metapsychology. Journal of
the American Psychoanalytic Association, 11, 97–116.
47 8
Federn, Paul. (1952). Ego psychology and the psychoses. New
York: Basic Books. (Original work published 1926)
Pao, Ping-Nie. (1975). The place of Federn’s ego psychology
in a contemporary theory of schizophrenia. International
Review of Psychoanalysis, 2, 467–480.
Schilder, Paul. (1953). Medical psychology (David Rapaport,
Trans.). New York: International Universities Press. (Original work published 1924)
Weiss, Edoardo. (1960). The structure and dynamics of the
human mind. New York: Grune and Stratton.
EGO FUNCTIONS
Sigmund Freud, and later Anna Freud, assigned to the
ego tasks that involve the management of instincts and
defenses against them. Some of their successors,
among them Robert Waelder (1936), treated these
tasks as ‘‘functions’’ that the ego was expected to fulfill.
Thus such functions as integration, synthesis, and so
on, were eventually distinguished. According to Heinz
Hartmann, the ego should be evaluated according to
how it performs these functions.
It is hard to say what the primitive function of the
ego might have been, but, historically speaking, selfpreservation is not only a function of the ego but also
an instinct in its own right, originating in the ego—in
short, an ego instinct. Freud first presented the concept of an ego instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920g), where he also developed his theory of the
death instinct. Briefly, the instinct for self-preservation
can be subdivided into positive tendencies governed
by the libido or Eros and negative tendencies subject
to the death instinct. This account of the functions of
the ego, which Freud himself always considered to be
only a speculative hypothesis, was never accepted by
more than a handful of analysts, even among those
who granted the existence of aggressive and destructive
instincts.
In the psychoanalytical ego psychology of 2005,
these issues have ceased to carry much weight. The ego
described in terms of its functions is no longer envisaged in the same way. True, Anglo-American psychoanalysis recognizes the notion of the death instinct,
but the Anglo-American use of it is somewhat different from Freud’s.
One essential function of the ego, according to
Freud, is to synthesize all the impulses and energies of
body and mind. This synthesis depends entirely on the
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EGO IDEAL
strength of the two psychic forces of the libido and the
destructive, or death, instinct. To begin with, Freud
(1930a, p. 117) had adopted Friedrich Schiller’s antithesis of love and hunger, with love being equivalent to
the libido and hunger standing for the self-preservation
instinct. During the 1920s Freud replaced this idea by
postulating the ego’s synthetic function.
Another important ego function was defense and the
signaling of danger. Danger might come from within
(from the id), from without (from reality), or even
from the superego. Against these threats the ego could
defend itself in a variety of ways, depending on the individual. Among the ego’s defensive functions were identification with the aggressor, forgetting, disavowal, and
repression. Recognition, reflection, and above all action
were also ego functions, yet the ego could feel pain, as
in states of mourning or joy, and thus serve as vector of
the emotions. The body ego, as the locus where instinctual impulses are discharged, was liable to come under
the sway of the instincts, which could lead to brief
depressions or to chronic mental illness.
Freud held that as a general rule the ego was the dominant mental agency, so long as it was functioning normally. Ego malfunction, in contrast, led to deep anxiety,
and the weaker the ego the greater the anxiety. For this
reason infantile anxiety was a normal state, whereas in
adults it was a signal of danger. Its absence—loss of the
feeling of anxiety—constituted a serious mental disturbance. Enumeration of the ego’s functions pointed up
the importance of the ego as an agency. Because it
brought so many functions together, the ego was central
to treatment and the nucleus of resistance. Freud recognized the ego as a major obstacle to psychoanalysis.
After Freud’s death, ego psychology underwent considerable development, partly to the detriment of id
psychology. This was a deviation in that when Freud set
out on his research program, he was interested exclusively in unconscious mental life, in the depths of the
mind, in a cauldron of energies that fulfilled no specific
functions. Yet such energies are capable of modifying
the ego in important ways, whether for good or for evil.
ERNST FEDERN
See also: Ego; Ego (ego psychology).
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE,
18: 1–64.
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———. (1930a). Civilization and its discontents. SE, 21:
57–145.
Hartmann, Heinz. (1956). The ego concept in Freud’s work.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 37, 425–438.
———. (1958). Ego psychology and the problem of adaptation (David Rapaport, Trans.). New York: International
Universities Press. (Original work published 1939)
———. (1964). Essays on ego psychology. New York: International Universities Press.
Waelder, Robert. (1936). The principle of multiple function:
observations on over-determination. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 5, 45–62.
EGO IDEAL
The concept of the ego ideal appeared for the first time
in Sigmund Freud’s ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’
(1914c). The ego ideal takes the place of the narcissism
lost during childhood and promises the possible realization of narcissism in the future. Freud’s concept of
the ego ideal provided support for other, earlier concepts, such as moral conscience, censorship, and selfesteem, and made possible an original understanding
of the formation of a mass movement and its relationship to a leader (1921c).
The ego ideal and superego, together with the ideal
ego, form a group of agencies that should be clearly
distinguished, even though Freud sometimes used the
first two interchangeably. Freud introduced the superego in The Ego and the Id (1923b). It enabled him to
distinguish the normative aspect of the psyche (the
superego) from the motivational aspect directed
toward a goal (the ego ideal). Originally, however, the
two aspects were present in the ego ideal, which was
also not differentiated from the ideal ego. This lack of
differentiation reappeared in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933a [1932]), where the ego
ideal became a function of the superego.
The ego ideal is formed when the child, through the
crucial influence of parents, educators, and others in the
environment, is forced to abandon its infantile narcissism. This is made possible by the formation of this substitute, the ego ideal, which leaves open the possibility
that in the future the child will be able to rejoin ego and
ideal. This development of the child’s ego ideal, here conflated with the superego, occurs through the child’s identification with the parents or, more precisely, with the
parents’ superego. In The Ego and the Id (1923b), Freud
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EGO IDEAL
indicates that the superego develops from identification
with the paternal model. For identification to take place,
the erotic component has to be sublimated. As a result, it
no longer has the strength to bind the destructive component of the psyche. All of this creates a libidinal split.
Consequently, the superego becomes harsh, even selfdestructive. Out of this arises a feeling of unconscious
guilt, and in melancholia the child finds the same ego
ideal, dissociated from the ego, raging against it.
The ego ideal demands that the subject make changes
to achieve the ideal, but the existence of the ego ideal
does not mean that the subject has succeeded in achieving this goal. ‘‘A man who has exchanged his narcissism
for homage to a high ego ideal has not necessarily on
that account succeeded in sublimating his libidinal
instincts’’ (1914c, p. 94). Thus, the idealist may refuse to
see reality, including that of his own libidinal experience,
even though he has not sublimated anything, in the sense
of modifying the goal and object of the drive.
being subjected to whatever represents this now collective ego ideal. The consequences are well known. ‘‘The
criticism exercised by that agency [the ego ideal] is
silent; everything that the object does and asks for is
right and blameless. Conscience has no application to
anything that is done for the sake of the object; in the
blindness of love remorselessness is carried to the pitch
of crime. The whole situation can be completely summarized in a formula: The object has been put in the
place of the ego ideal’’ (1921c, p. 113).
Daniel Lagache (1961), in discussing the structure
of the personality, identified the notion of ‘‘heroic
identification,’’ the narcissistic ideal of omnipotence,
which allowed him to explain certain aspects of criminal behavior. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1985)
identified various possible outcomes for the ego ideal,
perverse as well as creative.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
To the extent that the ego ideal is conflated with the
superego, it includes the moral conscience, which continuously compares the actual ego with the ego ideal.
Similarly, dream censorship and repression can be associated with the ego ideal. In fact, the ego ideal comprises
all the restrictions to which the ego must submit to conform with the image detached from its own narcissism
and projected before it. The ego ideal is not only a critic;
when something in the ego coincides with the ego ideal,
it can also produce a sensation of triumph, in which
self-esteem is enhanced.
See also: Alienation; Character neurosis; Collective psychology; Heroic self; Ego ideal/ideal ego; Narcissistic
transference; Self-image; Shame.
When the ego ideal is replaced by an idealized
object, the ego ideal can be short-circuited in inciting
the ego. ‘‘It is even obvious in many forms of lovechoice,’’ Freud wrote, ‘‘that the object serves as a substitute for some unattained ego ideal of our own’’
(1921c, p. 112). This notion led Piera Aulagnier (1979)
to develop the concept of alienation, where the relationship is libidinal in nature since it involves another
subject, an object (gambling or drugs, for example), or
even an activity (sports, work).
Freud, Sigmund. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction.
SE, 14: 67–102.
With the concept of the ego ideal, Freud considerably
enriched the understanding of group psychology. Starting from an analysis of the relation between hypnotizer
and hypnotist, he defined the group as ‘‘a number of
individuals who have put one and the same object in
the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego’’ (1921c,
p. 116). All in the group are then collectively capable of
48 0
Bibliography
Aulagnier, Piera. (1979). Les destins du plaisir: Aliénation,
amour, passion. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine. (1985). The ego ideal: A psychoanalytic essay on the malady of the ideal (Paul Barrows,
Trans.). London: Free Association Books. (Original work
published 1975)
———. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on
psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
Lagache, Daniel. (1961). La psychanalyse et la structure de la
personnalité. Psychanalyse, 6, 5–54.
Further Reading
Blos, Peter. (1974). The genealogy of the ego ideal. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 29, 43–88.
Deutsch, Helene. (1964). Some clinical considerations of the
ego ideal. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 12, 512–516.
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Milrod, David. (1990). The ego ideal. Psychoanalytic Study
of the Child, 45, 43–60.
Rosenfeld, Herbert. (1962). The superego and the ego-ideal.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 43, 258–263.
Sandler, Joseph. et al. (1963). The ego ideal and the ideal
self. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 18, 139–158.
Schafer, Roy. (1967). Ideals, the ego ideal, and the ideal self.
Psychological Issues, 18, 129–174.
EGO IDEAL/IDEAL EGO
The two notions of ideal ego and ego ideal might seem
to be used interchangeably by Freud. However, their
first appearance in ‘‘On Narcissism’’ (1914c) showed
them to be different insofar as the ideal ego is taken to
be the recipient of the self-love that the ego enjoyed in
infancy. The distinction is between reality and an idealization of that reality, enforced by the fact that from
infancy on, that reality seems forever lost. The ego
ideal, on the other hand, is a dynamic notion: The person, as Freud wrote, seeks to regain the narcissistic perfection of its infancy under the new form of the ego
ideal, which is deferred as a goal to be attained in the
future. Thus the ideal ego could be seen as the nostalgic survival of a lost narcissism, while the ego ideal
appears to be the dynamic formation that sustains
ambitions towards progress.
The ideal ego is a modification of infantile narcissism and the omnipotence that accompanies it. What
differentiates it from the ego ideal is that in the case of
the latter, the ego only obtains the self-esteem that it
yearns for by obeying the injunctions arising from
what Freud later called the superego. On the other
hand, the ideal ego is not completely equivalent with
the ego since omnipotence is lost with infantile narcissism. Such omnipotence is only partially regained in
daydreams and fantasies that make the person a hero
and victor. The difference here is that the ego ideal,
which is closely related to the superego, is not formed
on the basis of an illusory omnipotence, but modeled
after that of the parents, and more precisely after the
superego and its ideals. The ideal ego thus appears to
be a way of short-circuiting the work that the ego ideal
requires by assuming that its goals, or any others that
might be still higher, have already been attained.
Hermann Nunberg defined the ideal ego as the combination of the ego and the id. This agency is the outcome of omnipotent narcissism and is manifested as
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pathology. Daniel Lagache (1961) developed the implications of this notion of the ideal ego, notably in terms
of delinquency. The ideal ego appears in contrast to the
superego and is linked to the primary identification
with another being who is invested with omnipotence,
as is the case with the infant’s identification with the
phallic mother. Lagache emphasizes that in adolescence
‘‘the ideal ego is reinvested or its investment is strengthened, often by new identifications with eminent people.
The adolescent identifies him- or herself anew with the
ideal ego and strives by this means to separate from the
superego and the ego ideal’’ (Lagache, pp. 227–28).
Lacan took up Lagache’s analysis of the concept in
these terms: ‘‘In a subject’s relation to the other as an
authority, the ego-ideal, obeying the law to please, leads
the subject to displease himself as the price of obeying
the commandment; the ideal ego, at the risk of displeasing, triumphs only by displeasing in spite of the commandment’’ (1966, p. 671). For Lacan, the ideal ego is a
narcissistic formation linked to the mirror stage.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Graph of Desire; Identification; Imaginary; Imaginary identification/symbolic identification; L and R
schemas; Law of the father; Optical schema; Self-image;
Unary trait.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1914c). On Narcissism: An Introduction.
SE, 14: 67–102.
Lacan, Jacques. (1966). Écrits. Paris: Seuil.
———. (2004). Écrits: A selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New
York: W. W. Norton.
Lagache, Daniel. (1961). La psychanalyse et la structure de la
personnalité. In Oeuvres IV, 1956–1962. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982.
Nunberg, Hermann. Principles of psychoanalysis. New York:
International Universities Press, 1955.
EGO IDENTITY
It is too easy to see a patient only as a group of symptoms. Rather, according to Erik Erikson, the main
issue is to determine whether it is a question of a
person having a neurosis, or of the neurosis ‘‘having’’
the person. He insisted on the need to see fears and
anxieties as two very different things: The former
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apprehensions focus on realistic responses to dangers,
whereas the latter, provoked by dysfunction in the
internal controls, magnify obstacles without providing
the means to surmount them.
Adaptive responses that are appropriate to reality
are all too likely to be discounted if one understands
the ego as being essentially a collection of defenses
against the internal drives. The key, according to
Erikson, is to seek in the ego the organizational capacities that create the strength necessary for reconciling
discontinuities and ambiguities.
Like Sigmund Freud, Erikson envisioned an unconscious ego. But like other post-Freudians, he emphasized that the ego has a unifying function and ensures
coherent behavior and conduct. The ego does not only
have a negative function, that of avoiding anxiety; it
plays as well the positive role of ensuring efficient functioning. The ego’s defenses are not necessarily pathogenic: Some are adaptive, while others are the source of
maladaptations. It is true that anxiety and feelings of
guilt can disrupt adaptation. Moreover, the external
environment has its own inherent deficiencies. But in
attempting to measure the strength of the ego, Erikson
did not limit himself to the earlier psychoanalytic norm
and seek, in a personality, only that which is denied or
cut off. Rather, he was interested in measuring the limit
that the individual’s ego is capable of unifying.
Early in his work Erikson called this identity ‘‘ego
identity’’ after the model of Freud’s ‘‘ego ideal.’’ As a
subsystem of the ego, identity’s task is to choose and
integrate self-representations derived from childhood
psychosocial crises. Too often, in the history of psychoanalysis, there has been a tendency to forget that on the
clinical level, the ego was posited as an enduring agent
of selection and integration that plays a central role in
the sound functioning of the personality. This inner
‘‘synthesizer,’’ which silently organizes a coherent experience and guides action, is precisely what is so often lacking in present-day patients. By contrast, the patients of
the earliest psychoanalyses were for the most part suffering from inhibitions that prevented them from being
what they were, or what they believed themselves to be.
PAUL ROAZEN
See also: Erikson, Erik Homberger; Identity.
Bibliography
Erikson, Erik H. (1950). Childhood and society. New York:
W. W. Norton.
———. (1959). Identity and the life cycle. New York: International Universities Press.
———. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. New York: W. W.
Norton.
Roazen, Paul. (1976). Erik H. Erikson: The power and limits
of a vision. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
The ego protects the person’s indivisibility, and
everything that underlies the strength of the ego adds
to its identity. If Freud understood identity as being in
part acquired, this was due to the very particular types
of patients he had treated.
EGO-INSTINCTS
For Erikson, identity is what maintains in the individual inner solidarity with the ideals and aspirations
of social groups. The ego has a general balancing function: It puts things in perspective and prepares them in
view of possible action. The strength of the ego, as
Erikson conceived it, explains the difference between
the feeling of being whole and the feeling of being fragmented. In the best of cases, it enables the individual
to understand that the feeling of being at one with
oneself comes through growth and development.
In Freud’s first theory of the instincts (or drives), the
ego-instincts were contrasted with the sexual ones. In
psychic conflict, a portion of instinctual energy is placed
at the service of the ego. But even though their aim is the
self-preservation and the self-affirmation of the individual, the ego-instincts nevertheless provide anaclitic support to the sexual drive. Freud later replaced this first
opposition by another, that between the life instinct and
the death instinct, assigning both the ego-instincts and
the sexual instincts to Eros (the life instinct).
In addition to a feeling of continuity, according to
Erikson, every individual needs a sense of novelty,
obtained only through the leeway inherent in an
assured identity. By ‘‘leeway,’’ he meant maintaining in
our experience a centrality, an evident self that, alone,
enables us to make fully aware choices.
The term appeared first in the Minutes of the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society for March 10, 1910, where it was
stated that reaction was made up of the ‘‘vicissitudes of
the ego instincts,’’ and soon after in Freud’s ‘‘The Psycho-Analytic View of Psychogenic Disturbance of
Vision’’ (1910i): ‘‘From the point of view of our
48 2
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attempted explanation, a quite specially important part
is played by the undeniable opposition between the
[instincts] which subserve sexuality, the attainment of
sexual pleasure, and those other [instincts] which have
as their aim the self-preservation of the individual—the
ego-[instincts]’’ (p. 214). Freud stated the idea more
clearly apropos of the Schreber case: ‘‘We regard the
[instinct] as being the concept on the frontier-line
between the somatic and the mental, and see in it the
psychical representative of organic forces. Further, we
accept the popular distinction between ego-[instinct]
and a sexual [instinct]; for such a distinction seems to
agree with the biological conception that the individual
has a double orientation, aiming on the one hand at
self-preservation and on the other at the preservation of
the species’’ (1911c [1910], p. 74). The sources of the
ego-instinct are excitations emanating from the great
organic functions, such as nutrition and vision, that
ensure the continuation of life. The ego-instinct is thus
quickly obliged to take the reality principle into
account, and this consideration gives rise to the idea of
a reality-ego that ‘‘need do nothing but strive for what is
useful and guard itself against damage’’ (1911b, p. 223).
Thanks to Freud’s researches into narcissism, the
notion that instinctual pressure was a kind of energy
(earlier described as ‘‘interest’’), led to the idea that egolibido, or narcissistic libido, was the ‘‘great reservoir’’
from which object-cathexis is sent out and into which it
may be withdrawn. The object of the ego-instincts is at
first the object of need (food), and later anything that
can contribute not only to strengthening the ego’s own
operations, but also to inhibiting the primary process
by the binding of ideas. Thus, secondarily, the ego
becomes the object of libidinal cathexis. Its aim is selfpreservation and the self-affirmation of the individual.
In 1915, Freud, showed that ‘‘only primal
[instincts]—those which cannot be further dissected—can lay claim to importance’’ (1915c, p. 124).
He then distinguished between two classes of primal
instincts: ‘‘the ego, or self-preservative, [instincts] and
the sexual [instincts]’’ (p. 124). The sexual instincts are
at first ‘‘attached to the [instincts] of self-preservation,
from which they only gradually become separated; in
their choice of object, too, they follow the paths that
are indicated to them by the ego-instincts’’ (p. 126).
In ‘‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’’
(1917a [1916]), Freud drew a parallel between the
libido, as the force of the sexual drives, and hunger
and the will to power as the power of the ego-instincts.
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He then derived a certain category of neuroses from
the conflict between the ego-instincts and the sexual
instincts. Since the introduction of narcissism in 1914,
however, he had contrasted two types of libido
connected with the sexual drives, one type that was
directed towards the object and the other that was
directed towards the ego. The opposition between
object-libido and ego-libido eventually replaced the distinction between ego-instincts and sexual instincts and
paved the way for Freud’s final theory of the instincts.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), where
Freud formulated his theory of the death instinct, he
wrote: ‘‘The upshot of our enquiry so far has been the
drawing of a sharp distinction between the Ôegoinstincts’ and the sexual instincts, and the view that
the former exercise pressure towards death and the latter towards a prolongation of life. But this conclusion
is bound to be unsatisfactory in many respects even to
ourselves’’ (1920g, p. 44).
In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a [1929]),
Freud elaborated on the antithesis between egoinstincts and the object-instincts (p. 117). Then, in
‘‘The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,’’ the
thirty-first lecture of the New Introductory Lectures
(1933a [1932]), he specifically named the ego-instincts
as a resisting force, insofar as they repelled and
repressed the claims of sexual life (p. 57). In the thirtysecond lecture, ‘‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life,’’ he
attributed to the ego-instincts the same qualities as to
the sexual instincts, apart from hunger and thirst,
which were ‘‘inflexible, admit of no delay, [and] are
imperative’’ (p. 97).
Though Freud continued to contrast ego-instincts
and sexual instincts until 1920, the dualism between
the life and death instincts inevitably relegated the
ego-instincts to a subsidiary note. But some ambiguity
remained, however, in Freud’s second topography (or
‘‘structural theory’’), for in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), he subsumed the ego-instincts under the
death instinct while still maintaining that they were at
least partly libidinal in character.
PIERRE DELION
See also: Amae, concept of; ‘‘Claims of Psychoanalysis to
Scientific Interest’’; Drive/instinct; Ego; Ego autonomy;
Ego-libido/object-libido; Hatred; Need for causality; Psychogenic blindness; Regression; Schiller and psychoanalysis; Self-preservation; Suicide.
483
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Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1910i). The psycho-analytic view of
psychogenic disturbance of vision. SE, 11: 209–218.
———. (1911b). Formulations on the two principles of
mental functioning. SE, 12: 213–226.
———. (1911c [1910]). Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (Dementia
paranoids). SE, 12: 1–82.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: an introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
———. (1915c). Instincts and their vicissitudes. SE, 14:
109–140.
———. (1917a [1916]). A difficulty in the path of psychoanalysis. SE, 17: 135–144.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1–
64.
———. (1930a [1929]). Civilization and its discontents. SE,
21: 57–145.
——— (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on
psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
Nunberg, Hermann, and Federn, Ernst. (1962–1975). Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. New York: International Universities Press.
Further Reading
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, and Bethelard, Faith. (1999). The
hidden history of the ego instincts. Psychoanalytic Review,
86, 823–852.
Even if it is rare, Freud’s use of ‘‘ego interests’’
demonstrates that in his work he by no means neglected
to take the ego into account. It is true, however, that
Freud long concentrated his attention on the depths of
the unconscious part of the mind, as shown by the epigraph he chose for The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a):
‘‘Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo’’ (‘‘If I
cannot move the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal
Regions’’), from the Aeneid (7.312). He thus declined to
attend to the ‘‘higher world’’ of which the ego was an
integral part. He nevertheless acknowledged that exploring the depths of the psyche represents a threat to the
ego, that it is in the ego’s interest to recognize nothing
beyond the conscious realm. But if this interest becomes
too strong, overwhelming the functions that the ego is
responsible for in company with the id and the superego, then behavioral problems will likely arise. Otherwise stated, it is in the ego’s interest to establish a working balance with the id and the superego, but if for
whatever reason the ego is so strongly cathected that it
no longer heeds either the id or the superego—a state
known as ‘‘narcissism’’—then there will occur disturbances of the kind that characterize what are now called
‘‘borderline cases,’’ disturbances that Freud considered
unsuitable for psychoanalytic treatment.
With these considerations as his starting point,
Heinz Hartmann brought to the fore a particular
group of tendencies of the ego—the ‘‘ego interests’’—
embracing several disparate behaviors such as egoism,
the pursuit of the ‘‘useful,’’ that is, of wealth, prestige,
or power, but also that of intellectual acquisition.
EGO INTERESTS
The notion of ego interests points up a distinction
between what serves the ego and what may harm it or
place it in danger, as for example the pressures of the
id, the commands of the superego, or simply love of an
external object.
Freud used the term at least twice in his writings,
once in the twenty-sixth Introductory Lecture, ‘‘The
libido theory and narcissism’’ (1916–1917a, p. 414)
and again in the paper ‘‘Analysis terminable and interminable’’ (1937c). In both contexts, Freud used the
concept of the ego to mean an autonomous agency of
mental life that makes no secret of its interests and can
defend itself against the id and the superego. This
defense can go as far as a refusal of all analysis, thus
putting the treatment in jeopardy. In such cases one is
confronted by resistance from the ego.
48 4
ERNST FEDERN
See also: Ego; Ego (ego psychology).
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900). The interpretation of dreams
(Parts 1–2). SE, 4: 1–338; 5: 339–625.
———. (1916–1917a). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis (Parts 1–3). SE, 15: 9–239; 16: 243–463.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 209–253.
EGO-LIBIDO/OBJECT-LIBIDO
In ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction,’’ Freud introduced a major modification in psychoanalytic theory,
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particularly in libido theory, by making a distinction
between two forms of libidinal cathexis: ego-directed
and object-directed.
It was Carl Gustav Jung’s studies on psychosis that
led Freud to deepen and develop his own theory of the
libido, which had hitherto been regarded solely as the
energic expression of the outwardly-directed sexual
drives, leading to a break with his former student. At a
period when there was a clear theoretical distinction
between the sexual drives and the self-preservative
drives, the case of the psychotic, cut off from reality
and withdrawn into the self, seemed to substantiate
the view (held by Jung) that the libido could be
separated from sexuality and therefore had to be considered as a form of energy that was close to Henri
Bergson’s concept of élan vital.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), Freud
commented that agreeing with ‘‘innovators like Jung
who, making a hasty judgement, have used the word
Ôlibido’ to mean instinctual force in general’’ gives too
much credence to ‘‘critics who have suspected from the
first that psycho-analysis explains everything by sexuality’’ (p. 52). He then gave a response in theoretical
terms in ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’ by suggesting that the libido initially cathected the ego, which he
called ‘‘primary narcissism’’ and that it was only at a
second stage that it was directed at the external world
and towards the objects targeted by the drives: ‘‘Thus
we form the idea of there being an original libidinal
cathexis of the ego from which some is later given off
to objects, but which fundamentally persists and is
related to the object cathexes, much as the body of an
amoeba is related to the pseudopodia which it puts out
. . . We see also . . . an antithesis between ego-libido and
object-libido’’ (1914c, pp. 75–76). In the same work, he
went on to explain: ‘‘I should like at this point expressly
to admit that the hypothesis of separate ego-instincts
and sexual instincts (that is to say, the libido theory)
rests scarcely at all upon a psychological basis, but
derives its principal support from biology’’ (p. 79).
In the years that followed, Freud refined his description of this ego-libido that was soon to be called ‘‘narcissistic libido’’ by theorizing that it was possible for it
to be turned back from an objectal current on to an ego
that had itself become a love object: ‘‘secondary narcissism.’’ He also drew a distinction between the repression in the transference neuroses, consisting in
withdrawal of libido from consciousness and involving
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tions’’ from repression in the narcissistic neuroses,
‘‘which consists in the withdrawal of libido from the
unconscious thing representations, which is of course a
far deeper disturbance’’ (1965, p. 206; letter to Karl
Abraham dated December 21, 1914).
From Beyond the Pleasure Principle onwards, the
emphasis shifted from the conflict between egodirected and object-directed libidinal drives to the
conflict within the ego between Thanatos and Eros, as
the concept that then subsumes the life drives in a constant attempt at cohesion (1920g).
Having assigned to the ego the role of ‘‘the great
reservoir from which the object-cathexes are sent out
and into which they are withdrawn once more’’ (p.
218) in a 1915 addendum to the Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality (1905d), Freud later modified this
proposition in his elaboration of the structural theory
and wrote: ‘‘we must recognize the id as the great
reservoir of libido’’ (1923b, p. 30, n. 1) and: ‘‘At the
very beginning, all the libido is accumulated in the id,
while the ego is still in process of formation or is still
feeble. The id sends part of this libido out into erotic
object-cathexes, whereupon the ego, now grown stronger, tries to get hold of this object-libido and to force
itself on the id as a love-object. The narcissism of the
ego is thus a secondary one, which has been withdrawn
from objects’’ (p. 46). It is this secondary ‘‘ego
narcissism’’ that is observed in psychotic states and
narcissistic neuroses (dementia praecox, paranoia,
melancholia, as Freud specified in his article ‘‘The
Libido Theory’’ [1923a], written for the Encyclopaedia
Britannica), in which the subject withdraws his libidinal cathexes from objects.
Should the metaphor of the ‘‘accumulators’’ found
in the controversial book Thomas Woodrow Wilson,
Twenty-Eighth President of the United States: A Psychological Study (1966 [1938]) be attributed to Freud?
This text certainly states: ‘‘We have noted that the
libido of the child charges five accumulators. Narcissism, passivity to the mother, passivity to the father,
activity toward the mother and activity toward the
father, and begins to discharge itself by way of these
desires. A conflict between these different currents of
the libido produces the Oedipus complex of the little
boy’’ (p. 39).
The theoretical uncertainties relating to the sources
of the libido and consequently to the validity of the
opposition between the self-preservative ‘‘ego drives’’
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and the narcissistic ego-libido, a point on which Freud
and Jung diverged, have led to a certain amount of
debate and criticism, especially among Englishlanguage authors such as Heinz Hartmann, Rudolph
Loewenstein, Michael Balint, and Heinz Kohut. This
debate has given rise to most of the post-Freudian theories concerning narcissism and the distinction to be
drawn between the ‘‘ego’’ and the ‘‘self.’’
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Libido.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18:
1–64.
———. (1923a). Encyclopedia article: The libido theory.
SE, 18: 255–259.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
Freud, Sigmund, and Abraham, Karl. (1965). A PsychoAnalytic Dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl
Abraham 1907–1926. (Hilda C. Abraham and Ernst L.
Freud, Eds.; Bernard Marsh and Hilda C. Abraham,
Trans.). New York: Basic Books.
Freud, Sigmund, and Bullitt, William C. (1966b [1938]).
Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Twenty-eighth President of the
United States. A Psychological Study. London-New York:
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1967.
Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1974). The
Language of Psycho-Analysis (Donald Nicholson-Smith,
Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1967)
EGO PSYCHOLOGY
Publication of The Ego and the Id (1923b), where
Freud initially described the tripartite model of id,
ego, and superego as the key macrostructures of the
mind, ushered ego psychology into psychoanalytic
theory. Precursors can be found in Freud’s earlier publications: the ‘‘Project’’ of 1895; The Interpretation of
Dreams; the metapsychological papers of 1915 on
instincts, repression, and the unconscious; and the
works on narcissism, mourning, and group
psychology.
48 6
Freud’s book on anxiety (1926d) elaborated the
structural theory of ego psychology and played a key
role in its evolution. Its new model for symptom formation saw symptoms as arising from compromises
among conflicts of the id, ego, and superego. This new
formulation of the workings of the mental sphere was
introduced as a revision Freud’s topographic model,
an earlier theory centered on the relationship of mental contents to consciousness. For Freud, the antagonism between what is dynamically unconscious and
what is conscious, and the significance of this difference for psychopathology, is fundamental to psychoanalysis. But he came to realize that both the repressed
and repressing forces, as well as the sense of guilt, are
unconscious—a clinically significant factor that he
wanted to highlight. Freud saw that to enhance theoretical clarity and more accurately conceptualize the data
from clinical psychoanalytic work, he needed a new
framework for the mind.
In the inner workings of the theory, the id, which
includes much of what had been the dynamic unconscious in the topographic model, operates as a primary
process and is the major repository of psychic energy,
the instincts, and a significant portion of what has
been repressed, except for the unconscious aspects of
the ego and the superego. The id seeks satisfaction
of basic needs and wishes. The superego, in contrast,
issues moral directives, self-reproach, and selfpunishment and establishes values and ideals. Freud
saw the ego as a coherent set of mental functions and a
distillation of abandoned object cathexes. It represents
reality, curbs impulses, and seeks the best compromise
among the claims of the id, the superego, and the
external environment. Freud’s concept of the ego has
many different aspects and functions.
Delineating these aspects and functions constituted
a major task for psychoanalytic theorists for the following half century and beyond. Anna Freud’s (1936/
1966) depiction and organization of the major
mechanisms of defense emphasized the defensive
aspects of the ego. She stated the principle that id, ego,
and superego derivatives merited equal attention from
the psychoanalyst. Hartmann’s (1939/1964) notion
that primary and secondary ego are autonomous delineated the ego as a substructure of the mind defined
by its functions: broadly, its defensive, autonomous,
and synthetic functions and their interrelations.
Therapy in the topographic model centers on making the unconscious conscious, and uncovering
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universal-drive-related fantasies related to the various
psychosexual stages of development. Therapy in ego
psychology seeks to increase the scope of the ego at the
expense of that of the id and, as a clinical correlate, to
understand how the subject uniquely deals with danger and inner conflicts, encompassing id impulses,
superego responses, and defensive, adaptive, and integrative ego solutions. Another technical implication of
ego psychology is that the therapist should pay close
attention to the organization and detail of conscious
content while listening for its unconscious substrate.
The emphasis on defense also brought into focus the
issue of character resistance, systematically developed
by Wilhelm Reich. Exploring character resistance later
became an aspect of ego-psychology technique.
Increasing knowledge of ego development and its relation to early object relations played a key role in the
evolution of psychoanalytic ego psychology.
Current psychoanalytic approaches derived from
ego psychology are Jacob A. Arlow’s delineation of the
unconscious fantasy, Charles Brenner’s focus on conflict and compromise formation, and Paul Gray’s
development of close monitoring of the defensive process. Otto Kernberg has provided an integration of ego
psychology and object-relations theory.
MARVIN S. HURVICH
Bibliography
Arlow, Jacob, and Brenner, Charles. (1964). Psychoanalytic
concepts and the structural theory. New York: International
Universities Press.
Freud, Anna. (1966). The ego and the mechanisms of defence
(Rev. ed.). New York: International Universities Press.
(Original work published 1936)
Freud, Sigmund. (1923). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
———. (1926). Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety. SE, 20:
75–172.
Hartmann, Heinz. (1964). Essays on ego psychology. New
York: International Universities Press. (Original work published 1939)
Further Reading
Holt, Robert R. (1975). The past and future of ego psychology. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 44:550–576.
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PSYCHOSES
Kris, Ernst. (1951). Ego psychology and interpretation in
psychoanalytic therapy. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 20,
15–30.
Wallerstein, Robert. (2002). The growth and transformation
of American ego psychology. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 50, 135–170.
EGO-PSYCHOLOGY AND THE PSYCHOSES
Ego-Psychology and the Psychoses consists of Edoardo
Weiss’s compilation of sixteen of Paul Federn’s papers
on ego psychology, his primary field. Federn (1871–
1950), a member of Freud’s inner circle, was one of the
first psychoanalysts to treat psychotics. His psychoanalytic understanding was influenced by a phenomenological focus, his definition of the ego was experiential,
and his major concepts were ego feelings, ego boundaries and ego states. As he understood it, in schizophrenia the ego is too weak to sustain the dominance
of advanced ego states essential for mature functioning, due to overly-strong fixations on primitive ego
states. Federn saw the prodromal phase of psychosis as
beginning with a loss of ego cathexis, while Freud
(1911c [1910]) emphasized the withdrawal of object
cathexis. Federn supported his position by the observation that psychotics may maintain object interest in
the presence of feelings of estrangement. Part of the
difference in their respective formulations lay in the
fact that Freud was attempting to explain the rapid
appearance of delusions following a traumatic disappointment, while Federn focused on the incremental
development of delusional ideas.
Federn recognized that psychotics were capable of
strong transferences, which rendered them analyzable,
but he also emphasized the challenge presented by the
psychotic’s mal-developed ego, idiosyncratic understanding of reality, and excessive, pathological narcissism. Federn held that these factors require a different
application of psychoanalytic knowledge than the
approach developed for the neurotic. His detailed
treatment recommendations for psychotics were based
on the implications of ego weaknesses. Regarding the
understanding of the treatment of psychoses, Federn’s
concept of ego feelings preceded later interest in the
sense of self, his view of faulty ego cathexis anticipated
deficit theories of schizophrenia, and his work on the
outer ego boundary shed light on contemporary con487
EGO PSYCHOLOGY
AND THE
PROBLEM
OF
ADAPTATION
cerns with narcissistic object relations. His phenomenological insights and the problems with which he
grappled have been of more lasting value than some of
his detailed theoretical formulations.
MARVIN HURVICH
See also: Ego alterations; Ego; Ego (Ego psychology); Ego
feeling; Federn, Paul.
Source Citation
Federn, Paul. (1952). Ego psychology and the psychoses.
(Edoardo Weiss, Ed.). New York: Basic Books.
Bibliography
Bergmann, Martin S. (1963). The place of Paul Federn’s
ego psychology in psychoanalytic metapsychology. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 11, 97–
116.
Freud, Sigmund. (1911c [1910]). Psychoanalytic notes on an
autobiographical account of a case of paranoia. SE, 12: 3–
82. London: Hogarth Press.
Pao, Ping-Nie. (1979). Schizophrenic disorders: Theory and
treatment from a psychodynamic point of view. New York:
International Universities Press.
Weiss, Edoardo. (1966). Paul Federn: The theory of the psychoses. In F. Alexander, S. Eisenstein and M. Grotjan
(Eds.), Psychoanalytic pioneers (pp. 142–159). New York:
Basic Books.
EGO PSYCHOLOGY AND THE PROBLEM
OF ADAPTATION
This work by Heinz Hartmann, some one hundred
pages long, was presented to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1937, then published in book form in
1939. David Rapaport’s English translation appeared
in 1958. The ideas presented by Hartmann were
already well known by then in the United States thanks
to the German version, although in Europe, because of
the Second World War, they gained wide currency only
in the 1950s.
With these nine chapters, Hartmann extended
Freudian psychoanalysis to the entire field of the psychology of consciousness, and in so doing brought
aspects of modern ego psychology into that field for
the first time. As his starting point, he took the idea
that the ego was determined by its functions, thus
48 8
avoiding the question of its essence. According to
Hartmann, the ego had many conflict-free functions
whose basic task was adaptation to the external world.
The ego and the id had emerged originally from a
common matrix; obliged to define the boundaries
between them, they created a zone of conflict whose
essential raison d’être was defense. Simultaneously, a
conflict-free zone developed that was dedicated fundamentally to adaptation to the outside world, and
which included the body.
In this way psychoanalytic research was opened up
to somatic and social phenomena and to all scientific
disciplines concerned with these areas: primarily, the
study of behavior, academic psychology, sociology,
and anthropology. Although adaptation has features
in common with defense, it is a function of a completely different order. It is the part played by resistance,
above all, which distinguishes the two. The hypothesis
of a conflict-free ego implies an autonomous status for
that agency within a psychoanalytical psychology of
the ego on a par with other human sciences.
ERNST FEDERN
See also: Adaptation; Defense mechanisms; Ego; Ego
autonomy; Ego (ego psychology); Ego psychology;
Desexualization; Hartmann, Heinz; Internal/external
reality; United States.
Source Citation
Hartmann, Heinz. (1958). Ego psychology and the problem
of adaptation (David Rapaport, Trans.). New York: International Universities Press. (Original work published
1939)
EGO STATES
An ego state is a coherent organization of cathected
mental contents and related affects that are experienced as within the ego boundary at a given point in
time. Federn’s (1926/1952) concept of ego states is
related to Schilder’s (1930/1951) discussion of varieties
of conscious experience and to David Rapaport’s
(1951/1954) view of states of consciousness. Federn’s
use of the construct ego state underscores mental
content.
Ego states are correlated with particular ego boundaries, and the current contents included within a given
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EGO-SYNTONIC
boundary will determine a particular ego state. Conversely, given ego states include particular qualities of
ego experience. Ego states range from developmentally
primitive to advanced. Any ego state may be repressed,
and thus de-egotized. When a conflicting idea is
repressed, the ego state in which it is found will also be
repressed. For a repressed memory to become emotionally meaningful, there must be recall of the whole
ego state in which it is embedded. A repeatedly
cathected ego state may become dominant, and when
this ego state is repressed, a fixation point is created.
Fixations are associated with highly rigid ego boundaries. Activation of a particular ego state will result
when there is a regression to that fixation point.
Manifest dream elements may primarily signify, in
addition to unconscious fantasies, repressed ego states.
The very concept of pathological fixations implies the
notion of a number of repressed ego states. The
unconscious segment of the ego consists of all
repressed ego states. An active ego state reflects how
one is presently experiencing oneself.
Ego states succeed one another, but a person may
also experience different ego states at the same time.
Even so, in most cases, one is aware of only one ego
state at a given time. In ego states characterized by fatigue, sleep, illness, and psychosis, the ego feeling is
often seriously restricted. In general, the greater the
mental disturbance, the more the person’s functioning
is limited by current ego states. Such a person is unable
to do in one ego state what he can do in another.
Regression to earlier ego states is one of the main
pathological features of psychosis.
Schilder, Paul. (1951). Studies concerning the psychology
and symptomatology of general paresis. In David Rapaport
(Ed.), Organization and pathology of thought. New York:
Columbia University Press. (Original work published
1930)
Weiss, Edoardo. (1960). The structure and dynamics of the
human mind. New York: Grune and Stratton.
EGO-SYNTONIC
The notion of ego syntony plays an important part in
psychoanalytic ego psychology. The implication of the
term is that the ego represses only those tendencies
with which it is at odds, that is, with which it is incompatible. Freud used the term only once, in the encyclopedia article ‘‘Psycho-Analysis,’’ which first appeared
in Max Marcuse’s Handwörterbuch der Sexualwissenschaft (Manual of sexual sciences). ‘‘Since these
impulses are not ego-syntonic,’’ he wrote, ‘‘the ego has
repressed them’’ (1923a, p. 246).
Obviously, compatibility between the ego and the
id must vary according to the individual and also as a
function of cultural and social affiliation. Sexual relations, for example, were long condemned by the
Catholic Church unless their purpose was procreation.
This position has gradually changed, but it is worth
recalling that as recently as a hundred years ago Protestant circles subscribed to the same idea. In Asian societies attitudes towards sexuality are very different,
although there too change is under way.
Federn, Paul. (1952). Ego-psychology and the psychoses
(Edoardo Weiss, Ed.). New York: Basic Books. (Original
work published 1926)
If much of sexuality is rejected by the ego of Westerners, this is not to say that other instinctual tendencies
are likewise ‘‘ego-dystonic,’’ and therefore repressed. In
many aspects of aggression one can also see wide individual differences, depending not only on social position
but also on historical period. In fact, if one considers
the course of history from a psychological point of
view, it is reasonable to say that up until the end of the
Second World War most men experienced a resort to
violence, even to killing, as perfectly ego-syntonic. In
countries where the death penalty is still in use, as in
the United States, inflicting this sanction on criminals
is generally ego-syntonic, whereas in other countries
this attitude has changed radically within the ego, and
capital punishment is condemned by most people.
Rapaport, David. (1954). The autonomy of ego. In Robert P.
Knight and C. R. Friedman (Eds.), Psychoanalytic psychiatry and psychology. New York: International Universities
Press. (Original work published 1951)
In the psychotherapy of present-day individuals,
the therapist thus needs to bear in mind the historical
trend for the ego to repress destructive impulses when
it encounters them. Indeed, it is possible that sexual
MARVIN S. HURVICH
See also: Ego; Ego (ego psychology).
Bibliography
Bergmann, Martin S. (1963). The place of Paul Federn’s ego
psychology in psychoanalytic metapsychology. Journal of
the American Psychoanalytic Association, 11, 97–116.
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489
EINFALL
impulses will become fully ego-syntonic, even as the
ego rejects destructive wishes. In short, what is egosyntonic and what is ego-dystonic must be determined
in a historical, cultural, and social context.
ERNST FEDERN
See also: Ego; Ego (ego psychology).
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1923a). Psycho-analysis. SE, 18: 234–254.
EINFALL. See Sudden involuntary idea
EISSLER, KURT ROBERT (1908–1999)
Physician and psychoanalyst Kurt Robert Eissler was
born in Vienna on June 2, 1908, and died in New York
on February 17, 1999.
Eissler was a Freud scholar of distinction, one of the
most accomplished psychoanalysts of his generation,
and a prolific and original writer. He was immensely
learned, and a captivating and engaging speaker whose
somewhat wry but engaging sense of humor augmented
the liveliness with which he enriched discussion. His
interests were wide ranging. The arts always appealed to
him: His knowledge of them was extensive and he
spoke and wrote of them with learning and wisdom.
His book on Leonardo da Vinci (1962) was followed by
his two-volume psychoanalytic study of Goethe (1963),
and he made important contributions to the study of
Hamlet (1953, 1968) and Freud’s approach to literature
(1968). He wrote about ageing and death, and his book,
The Psychiatrist and the Dying Patient (1966), is of permanent value. In all, he wrote twelve books and nearly
one hundred papers, among which his studies of psychoanalytic technique attracted wide attention. His
writings cast light on many subjects, of which schizophrenia, dream analysis, female sexual development,
memory and lightning calculation, psychological factors in hypertension, esophageal spasm, psychology of
jealousy, body image disturbances, and suicide will
serve as more or less typical random examples.
Eissler studied psychology at the University of
Vienna. He took his Ph.D. in 1934 and his M.D. in
49 0
1937. After training at the Viennese Psychoanalytic
Institute, he joined the Viennese Psychoanalytic
Society. There he became an assistant to August Aichhorn, a pioneer in the study and treatment of adolescent delinquency, whose Wayward Youth became a
classic text. Following the Anschluss in 1938, Eissler
left for Chicago and obtained the diploma of the
American Board of Psychiatry. During the Second
World War, in 1943, he became a captain in the US
Army Medical Corps, specializing in neuro-psychiatry.
That autumn, his brother Erik was killed in a concentration camp, though it was only later that Eissler
learned of his fate.
He moved to New York when the war ended, and
set up in private practice. In 1949, he edited Searchlights on Delinquency, dedicated to his old teacher
Aichhorn. In 1952, he was one of the founders of the
Sigmund Freud Archives, deposited in the Library of
Congress, Washington, DC, and it was as its tireless
secretary that he collected so many invaluable documents about, by, or related to Freud and his associates.
In this unending task he was greatly helped by Anna
Freud, in the context of a warm relationship of mutual
esteem. He had known her from Viennese days, and
she found his friendship a great comfort. He established the Anna Freud Foundation in the United
States, also in 1952, thus facilitating tax-free donations
for the benefit of the Hampstead Child Therapy
Course in London, and the associated clinic she had
just set up. He strongly supported the work of what
quickly became the world’s leading center for child
analytic training and for child analytic research. Anna
Freud was secure in the knowledge that the Freud
Archives were in safe hands, and that Eissler’s devotion
to all that her father stood for was absolute. She was
grateful, too, for the invaluable assistance that he gave
to Ernest Jones in his extensive three-volume biography of Freud, and to the help he gave to James Strachey
in preparing the standard edition of Freud’s psychological works.
Eissler was actively and deeply concerned about the
growing flood of uninformed Freud criticism and the
publicity it attracted. In particular, he objected to the
misinterpretation of the early seduction theory. While
Freud never denied that seduction in childhood had
serious consequences for development, he was obliged
to abandon his views of its role in the etiology of hysteria. Certainly, he would have hated the ‘‘recovered
memory syndrome.’’ All this is well known to serious
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E I S S L E R - S E L K E , R U T H (1906 –1 989)
students of psychoanalysis, but Eissler brought to the
bare facts an erudition that cast fresh light on the
entire issue. An unexpectedly bitter dispute over his
successor to the Archives, stemming from allegations
that Freud had suppressed the truth about his early
seduction theory, achieved wide publicity, while Eissler’s refutation of the charges failed to be given due
weight. Some other criticisms of Freud sprang from
misunderstandings within the profession, and these
were subject to Eissler’s searching scrutiny. Again, this
did not always attract the attention it deserved.
Eissler could not be said to be optimistic, either
about psychoanalysis in particular or civilization in
general. The Fall of Man (1975) makes melancholy
reading. But, when reaffirming his pessimism during
conversation, he would often add: ‘‘You have to go on
fighting.’’ He was certainly no idolater of Freud or
Anna Freud, but vigorously defended those principles
without which, he felt, psychoanalysis would cease to
be psychoanalysis.
He was sometimes accused of imposing undue
restrictions on access to the Freud Archives. Peter Gay,
for example, in his biography of Freud (1988), after
praising Eissler for his diligence in historical research,
accused him of ‘‘an addiction to secrecy’’ (p. 784) in
making a great deal of Freud’s correspondence unavailable to scholars. That view is widespread, and Eissler (1993) felt obliged to defend the policy pursued by
the Archives—a policy, he argued, seriously misrepresented. It was not, he said a matter of secrecy, but of
making material available only to scholars and translators who were committed to accuracy: He pointed to
the mischief already done by misreadings (not necessarily wilful) of Freud’s difficult script, and pointed to
the ‘‘glaring inaccuracies’’ in some translations previously published. It is a matter of some importance to
read Gay’s charges (p. 784f) and Eissler’s reply (1993,
pp. 202f, 212f) in full, in view of the widespread misunderstandings of the position then taken by the
Freud Archives.
Eissler retained to the end an old-world charm and
the courtesy and consideration of a Viennese gentleman. His stimulating observations were matched by a
lively interest in the activities and opinions of his visitors, and his warm hospitality was a delight to those
who knew him. His wife Ruth, for many years an editor
of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, died in 1989.
CLIFFORD YORKE
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See also: Eissler-Selke, Ruth; Lehrinstitut der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung; Leonardo da Vinci and a
Memory of his Childhood; New York Psychoanalytic Institute; Pankejeff Sergueı̈; Sigmund Freud Archives; Tausk,
Viktor; War neurosis.
Bibliography
Eissler, Kurt R., (Ed.) (1949). Searchlights on delinquency:
New psychoanalytic studies. New York: International Universities Press.
Eissler, Kurt R. (1953). On Hamlet. Samiksa: 7: 85–202.
———. (1955). The psychiatrist and the dying patient. New
York: International Universities Press.
———. (1962). Leonardo da Vinci. Psychoanalytic notes on
the enigma. New York: International Universities Press.
———. (1963). Goethe: A psychoanalytic study 1775–1786.
Two vols. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
———. (1968). Freud’s approach to literature — explaining
and understanding. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 23,
141–77.
———. (1968). Fortinbras and Hamlet. American Imago:
25, 199–223.
———. (1975). The fall of man. Psychoanalytic Study of the
Child, 30, 589–646.
———. (1993). Three instances of injustice. New York: International Universities Press.
Gay, Peter (1988). Freud: A life for our time. London and
Melbourne: Dent.
EISSLER-SELKE, RUTH (1906–1989)
A physician and psychoanalyst, Ruth Eissler-Selke was
born February 21, 1906, in Odessa and died October 7,
1989, in New York. She was born into a Jewish family,
her father being the director of a German bank and
then a grain exporter. After moving several times and
attending schools in Odessa, Hamburg, and Danzig,
Eissler-Selke completed her studies in 1925 in
Freiburg-im-Briesgau. She studied medicine at the
University of Freiburg, graduating in 1930. She specialized in psychiatry and, following graduation, practiced in Heidelberg and Stuttgart. Her dissertation,
which she defended at the University of Heidelberg in
1932, was entitled ‘‘Medical Histories of Six Cases: The
Contribution of Social Hygiene to the Question of
Alcoholism and Tuberculosis.’’
491
E I T I N G O N , M A X (188 1 –1943 )
After Hitler came to power, Eissler-Selke went into
exile in 1933 in Vienna and worked at the psychiatric
hospital in Rosenhügel. In December 1933, she
requested admission to the training institute of the
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and began an analysis
with Theodor Reik. After Reik’s emigration to the
Netherlands, she turned to Richard Sterba for her analysis. She was accepted as a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1937. While in Vienna she met
Kurt R. Eissler, a doctor, philosopher, and later a psychoanalyst. They were married in 1936.
In March 1938, Kurt and Ruth Eissler emigrated to
the United States and settled in Chicago. She became a
member and training analyst of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society and worked as a child psychiatrist at
the Michael Reese Hospital. During the Second World
War, she was a consulting physician in an institution
for young delinquent women in Chicago. In 1948 she
and her husband moved to New York and she became
a member of, and training analyst with, the New York
Psychoanalytic Society. From 1951 to 1957 she was
secretary, then vice president of the International Psychoanalytic Association and, from 1950 to 1958, one
of the editors of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child,
an annual publication founded in 1945 by Anna
Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and Ernst Kris.
Aside from her teaching activities and psychoanalytic publications, she wrote poetry and a novel (unpublished), as well as several short stories. In 1976, to
celebrate her seventieth birthday, a collection of her
poems in German was published in New York.
ELKE MÜHLLEITNER
See also: Eissler, Kurt Robert.
Bibliography
Eissler-Selke, Ruth. (1946). About the historical truth in a
case of delusion. Psychoanalytic Review, 33, 442–459.
———. (1949). Observations in a home for delinquent
girls. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 3–4, 449–460.
———. (1976). Gezeiten: Gedichte in deutscher Sprache.
New York: Abaris Books.
Eissler-Selke, Ruth, Blitzstein, N. Lionel, and Eissler, Kurt R.
(1950). Emergence of hidden ego tendencies during dream
analysis. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 31,
12–17.
49 2
Mühlleitner, Elke. (1992). Biographisches Lexikon der Psychoanalyse (Die Mitglieder der Psychologischen MittwochGesellschaft und der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung
1902–1938). Tübingen: Diskord.
EITINGON, MAX (1881–1943)
Max Eitingon, a medical doctor, was born in Mohilev,
Russia, in 1881 and died in Jerusalem on July 3, 1943.
He was cofounder and presidentof the Berlin Psychoanalytic Polyclinic (1920–1933), director and patron of
the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag (1921–
1930), president of the International Psychoanalytic
Association (1927–1933), founder and president of the
International Training Committee (1925–1943), and
founder of the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society (1934)
and of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Israel.
Eitingon was born into an orthodox Jewish family.
His father, Chaim Eitingon, had a large successful fur
business, with a store in New York City. Max was the
last of his four children (the others where Esther,
Fanny, and Vladimir). Around 1893, when he was
twelve, the family moved to Leipzig, Germany, where
Chaim became a generous patron to the Jewish community, financing the construction of a hospital and a
synagogue. In 1929 he was ruined by the stock market
crash and died in Leipzig in 1932.
Educational problems, most likely associated with
his stuttering, prevented Max from taking classes at
the local high school, and he became a student in a private school that had a curriculum based on the study
of modern languages. He learned to speak ten languages and later was able to take medical notes in several languages and dialects. However, because he did
not have an opportunity to take his baccalaureate
exams, he was not allowed to enroll in medical school
and had to obtain a degree equivalent to the baccalaureate. He studied at various universities in Halle,
Heidelberg, and Marburg, where Hermann Cohen, a
specialist in Judaism, taught.
After this educational odyssey he began his medical
studies in 1902 at the University of Leipzig. Eitingon
completed everything but his dissertation when he left
to become an intern at the Burghölzli Clinic in Zurich.
Eugen Bleuler, head of the clinic, sent Eitingon to
Freud with a patient because he wanted to discover
what a psychiatrist could learn from a psychoanalyst.
The ‘‘Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society’’
note the presence of ‘‘Mr. Eitingon, of Bleuler’s clinic,
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E I T I N G O N , M A X (1881 –1 943)
as guest’’ at the Wednesday evening meetings of January 23 and 30, 1907.
Eitingon was the first doctor from the Burghölzli
Clinic to meet Freud. He served as an intermediary
between Freud and psychiatry, but also asked to see
him privately as a patient. Between 1908 and 1909 he
underwent a five-week analysis during evening walks
with Freud, a somewhat unusual venue for psychoanalysis. This was Freud’s first training analysis. We can
assume that Eitingon discussed with Freud his relationship with his father and his inhibition about working. Presented these difficulties of Eitington’s, Freud,
who was very indulgent in his countertransference,
appears to have been inclined to make Eitingon a
‘‘doctor of psychoanalysis.’’
Eitingon, with the help of Carl Jung, finally managed to complete his dissertation: ‘‘Effect of an epileptic
attack on mental associations.’’ He settled in Berlin,
where his father’s fortune provided him with a life of
comfort and ease among the intellectual and artistic
elite of the city. On April 20, 1913, he married Mirra
Jacovleina Raigorodsky, an actress from the Moscow
Art Theater. During this period he had some time to
help Karl Abraham introduce psychoanalysis to Berlin.
During the First World War, Eitingon became an
Austrian citizen and joined the army as a physician.
He was sent to Prague, Kassa, Iglo, and Miskolc (his
birthplace), where he recommended Sándor Ferenczi
as an expert for a military trial. In the hospitals Mirra
worked with him as a volunteer nurse. He successfully
treated cases of war trauma with hypnosis and was
decorated several times for his work. He attended
meetings of the Budapest Psychoanalytic Association,
worked with Ferenczi on a psychoanalytic clinic, and
attended the 1918 psychoanalytic congress.
At the end of the war, faced with an unstable political climate in Hungary, Eitingon left for Berlin,
where he began his lifelong commitment to psychoanalysis. He had become a close friend of Freud in
1910 and remained his confidant during difficult
times. In Freud’s words, he was the ‘‘first messenger
[of psychoanalysis] to approach a solitary man
[Freud].’’ With Ferenczi he played the role of a supportive disciple throughout the war years. A reliable
individual, he was in a sense an administrator of the
Freudian enterprise, resolving any problems that
arose in the various local psychoanalytic societies
(Zurich, for example).
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He replaced Anton von Freund as a member of the
Secret Committee (of Freud’s supporters) and continued his work in introducing psychoanalysis. In 1920
he took over work that had been done in Budapest and
succeeded in creating a polyclinic in Berlin, whose
construction he entrusted to Freud’s son, Ernst, an
architect. He financed the polyclinic out of his personal fortune and ran it with the help of Karl Abraham
and Ernst Simmel until the rise of National-Socialism
in 1933.
The polyclinic was the first center in the world for
treating patients with the Freudian psychoanalytic
method and the first training institute for young analysts. The clinic trained candidates from all over the
world to address the mental and social problems of
postwar Europe. The curriculum lasted two years, then
three, and comprised three separate tracks: theory,
personal analysis, and supervised analysis.
After the death of his father, a cerebral thrombosis
left him paralyzed in the left arm. On June 13, 1933,
Eitingon presented Ferenczi’s funeral elegy in Budapest. Ruined, handicapped, and no longer able to
bear the persecution in Berlin, he left Germany, on
Freud’s advice, in September 1933. Because of his
Zionist sympathies, he decided to emigrate to Palestine. He settled in Jerusalem, on Balfour Street, and
there founded the Palestine Psychoanalytic Association (1934). In spite of Freud’s support, he failed to
obtain a chair in psychoanalysis at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
In 1938 he was involved in a court case in Paris (the
‘‘Plevitskaya affair’’) and suspected of being a Soviet
spy. Vladimir Nabokov used this episode for the short
story ‘‘The Assistant Producer.’’ Marie Bonaparte and
René Laforgue testified on Eitingon’s behalf. Despite
the French government’s official acknowledgement of
‘‘strategic error,’’ he was again accused of being a spy,
this time posthumously, in the United States in 1988.
A new controversy followed, but Eitingon’s reputation
was cleared (Moreau Ricaud, 1992).
Eitingon was the author of some thirty articles,
including ‘‘Genie, Talent und Psychoanalyse’’ (1912),
‘‘Gott und Vater’’ (1914), ‘‘Ein Fall von Verlesen’’
(1915), and twelve reports to various international
psychoanalytic congresses, from Berlin 1922 to Paris
1938.
MICHELLE MOREAU RICAUD
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See also: Berliner Psychoanalytiche Polyklinik; Berliner
Psychoanaltisches Institut; Germany; International Psychoanalytic Association; Internationale Zeitschrift für
(ärztliche) Psychoanalyse; Israel; Lay analysis; ‘‘Lines of
Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy’’; Secret Committee; Technique with adults, psychoanalytic; Training
analysis.
Bibliography
Draper, Theodore. (1988, April 14). The mystery of Max
Eitingon. New York Review of Books, 35 (6), 32–43.
Eitingon, Max. (1912). Genie, Talent und Psychoanalyse.
Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, 2, 539–540.
Eitingon, Max. (1914). Gott und Vater. Imago, 3, 90–93.
———. (1915). Ein Fall von Verlesen. Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 3, 349–350.
———. (1922). Zur psychoanalytischen Bewegung. Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 8, 103–106.
———. (1923). Report of the Berlin Psychoanalytical Polyclinic. Bulletin of the International Psychoanalytical Association, 4, 254.
Moreau Ricaud, Michelle. (1992). Max Eitingon (1881–
1943) et la politique. Revue internationale d’histoire de la
psychanalyse, 5, 55–69.
ELASTICITY
‘‘The Elasticity of the Psychoanalytic Technique’’ is the
title of a paper that Sándor Ferenczi gave to the Budapest Psychoanalytic Society, and which was first published in 1928. In essence he described the procedure he
had introduced in his paper on the ‘‘contra-indications
of the active technique’’ (1926), in which he recommended using relaxation to reduce tension in certain
difficult cases. In two other articles from the same period (‘‘Family Adaptation to the Child’’ and ‘‘The Problem of the End of Analysis’’) he dealt with difficulties
in the educational environment. The question became
one of how far the idea of elasticity could be taken. In
1967, Michael Balint would write on Ferenczi’s problem, ‘‘His earlier experiences had familiarized him
with two models: one was the classic technique with its
objective and benevolent passivity, and apparently
imperturbable and unlimited patience; the other was
the active technique with its well-directed interventions
founded on attentive observation and empathy.’’
In the 1928 paper, Ferenczi developed the technical
importance of tact in deciding on the right moment to
49 4
communicate to the patient any conjectures the analyst may have made, ‘‘based essentially on the dissection of our own Self.’’ He stressed the notion of modesty, which should be ‘‘the expression of the
acceptance of the limits to our knowledge,’’ and to this
end he preferred from the beginning of treatment to
adopt a rather pessimistic attitude, in order to avoid
creating enthusiastic confidence in the future patient,
a confidence that often camouflaged ‘‘a healthy dose
of distrust.’’ Nothing could be more harmful, he continued, ‘‘than the attitude of a schoolmaster or an
authoritarian doctor.’’ He thus spoke of Einfühlung
(feeling-with, empathy) as of a rule, from which he
deduced the necessity, for the analyst, of developing ‘‘a
rigorous control of his own narcissism and intense vigilance with regard to his own affective reactions.’’ Analysts would have to ‘‘guess when the patient’s esthetic
sentiments have been offended by our own attitude’’
and, supporting this displeasure, behave like those little ‘‘culbutos’’ (small figures with lead ballast in their
base that always return to a vertical position). Ferenczi
proposed ‘‘a perpetual oscillation between feelingwith, self-observation and judgment activity.’’
He concluded this reflection on the countertransference with a ‘‘metapsychology of the technique,’’ denouncing the ‘‘fanaticism of interpretation as
an infantile disease of analysis’’ because, in order
for patients to become free of all emotional binds,
they must ‘‘abandon, at least provisionally, all sorts
of superegos, including that of the analyst.’’ This
position borders on ‘‘a demand for elasticity in the
analysts themselves,’’ a ‘‘metapsychology of the analysts.’’ This then makes it absolutely essential to comply with the second rule of psychoanalysis, already
problematic at the time, that analysts must themselves be analyzed.
PIERRE SABOURIN
See also: Active technique; Ferenczi, Sándor; Tact; Technique with adults, psychoanalytic.
Bibliography
Balint, Michael. (1967). Introduction. In Sándor Ferenczi,
Oeuvres complètes (Vol. 4). Paris: Payot, 1982.
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1926). Contre-indications de la technique
active. In his Oeuvres complètes (Vol. 3, pp. 389–428).
Paris, Payot.
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ELISABETH
———. (1926). Le problème de l’affirmation du déplaisir.
In his Oeuvres complètes (Vol. 3, pp. 389–428). Paris:
Payot
———. (1928). The elasticity of psycho-analytic technique.
In M. S. Bergmann and F. R. Hartman (Eds.), The evolution
of psychoanalytic technique. New York: Basic Books.
ELEMENTI DI PSICOANALISI
Published by Ulrico Hoepli (Milan, Italy) in 1931,
Edoardo Weiss’s work was the first complete and accurate exposé of psychoanalysis in Italy. Freud spoke
approvingly of the work of his Italian disciple when he
wrote in his preface that the book recommended itself
to anyone who was able to appreciate the ‘‘seriousness
of a scientific effort,’’ the ‘‘honesty of the researcher,’’
and the ‘‘skills of the teacher.’’ Some chapters were
translated into German in the Psychoanalytische Bewegung. A second edition appeared in 1932, and a third in
1936. The most recent edition was published in 1985.
The book is based on five lectures given by Weiss in
Trieste, Italy, at the initiative of the local medical association in the spring of 1930. He covered the following subjects: (1) the nature of psychoanalysis and the concept
of the id and unconscious inhibition, (2) symbolism,
(3) the origin of the superego and social and religious
sentiments, (4) drive theory, (5) psychic systems. In an
appendix Weiss added a glossary of basic psychoanalytic
vocabulary in Italian, with approximately ninety terms
accompanied by their German equivalent. This small
dictionary was the first, and for a long time the only,
instrument of its kind available in Italy.
Although Weiss attempted to summarize Freud’s
thought, he did not simply reproduce it passively. He
introduced a conceptual neologism, the ‘‘inhibitory id,’’
to refer to the oldest part of the superego and the feeling
of unconscious guilt that accompanies it. The problem
of unconscious guilt appears clearly in the fourth lecture, where he describes Freud’s death impulse and
refers to Ernst Federn’s statement concerning the intermediate character of the life and death drive.
The Elementi was a qualitative leap over the handful
of works on psychoanalysis available in Italy until
then, works that were often badly informed and tendentious. Therein lies its historical importance.
ANNA MARIA ACCERBONI
See also: Italy; Weiss, Edoardo.
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Source Citation
Weiss, Edoardo. (1931). Elementi di psicoanalisi. Milan:
Ulrico Hoepli.
Bibliography
Accerboni, Anna Maria. (1985). Un’opera che si raccomanda
da sé. In Edoardo Weiss, Elementi di psicoanalisi. Pordenone, Italy: Studio Tesi.
ELISABETH VON R., CASE OF
‘‘Fräulein Elisabeth von R.’’ is the pseudonym Freud
gave to Ilona Weiss, a young woman of Hungarian origin, whose case is described in the Studies on Hysteria
(1895d) and whom he treated in the fall of 1892 and
July 1893. The third daughter in a well-to-do Hungarian family, Elisabeth von R. was twenty-four years old
when Freud treated her in the autumn of 1892 for
pains in her legs and difficulties walking, problems she
had been experiencing for two years. He confirmed the
diagnosis of hysteria that had been made and noted
that ‘‘if one pressed or pinched the hyperalgesic skin
and muscles of her legs, her face assumed a peculiar
expression, which was one of pleasure rather than
pain. She cried out—and I could not help thinking
that it was as though she was having a voluptuous tickling sensation—her face flushed, she threw back her
head and shut her eyes and her body bent backwards’’
(1895d, p. 137).
After an initial period of four weeks during which
he prescribed electrical treatments, he suggested to
her the use of a cathartic cure that ‘‘turned out, however, to be one of the hardest that I had ever undertaken’’ (1895d, p. 138). Resistant to hypnosis, the
patient stretched out with her eyes closed but was
able to move, open her eyes, and sit up. Freud then
applied his ‘‘concentration technique,’’ the same one
he was using on another patient of his at the time,
Miss Lucy R.
It was this that persuaded Freud that she was hiding
a secret, but her initial remarks had no effect in spite
of their dramatic nature. Her family history was characterized by heart disease and the death of her father,
whom she deeply loved, for whom she ‘‘took the place
of a son and a friend with whom he could exchange
thoughts’’ (1895d, p. 140). Freud understood that her
illness had begun with pains in her legs, which first
occurred while she was caring for her sick father, even
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ELISABETH
VON
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OF
though she was not aware of them until two years after
his death. The sickness and death of her sister, who
was also afflicted with heart disease aggravated by
pregnancy, followed by a quarrel between her brothersin-law, had coincided with the two years of the development of her illness.
the young woman’s mother, who confirmed that she
had suspected as much. The treatment concluded in
July 1893 with the appeal to the mother for assistance.
This was to have repercussions later on, since the
daughter rebelled and refused to see Freud again
because he had betrayed her secret.
During this period of the treatment, she repeated to
Freud that she was not doing better in spite of her confession and Freud remarked that ‘‘when she looked at
me as she said this with a sly look of satisfaction at my
discomfiture, I could not help being reminded of old
Herr von R.’s judgment about his favorite daughter—
that she was often Ôcheeky’ and Ôill-behaved’’’ (1895d,
p. 141).
Freud, confident in his treatment, notes with pleasure: ‘‘In the spring of 1894 I heard that she was going
to a private ball for which I was able to get an invitation, and I did not allow the opportunity to escape me
of seeing my former patient whirl past in a lively
dance’’ (1895d, p. 160). When he prepared the case
study for the Studies on Hysteria, he learned from Wilhelm Fliess (to whom he had given it to read) on July
14, 1894, that she had just gotten engaged.
An improvement occurred when she herself provided the source of her hysterical conversion: Her
pains began at the spot on her thigh where, every
morning, her father placed his inflamed leg so she
could change his bandages. From then on ‘‘her painful
legs began to Ôjoin in the conversation’ during our analyses’’ (1895d, p. 141), a period of abreaction when,
Freud writes, ‘‘I sometimes followed the spontaneous
fluctuations in her condition; and I sometimes followed my own estimate of the situation when I considered that I had not completely exhausted some portion
of the story of her illness’’ (1895d, p. 149). He then
experimented with the phenomenon that would soon
modify his conception of psychotherapy: ‘‘In the
course of this difficult work I began to attach a deeper
significance to the resistance offered by the patient in
the reproduction of her memories and to make a careful collection of the occasions on which it was particularly marked’’ (1895d, p. 154). It was on her account
that he used publicly for the first time (this information is found six months later in Draft H, dated January 24, 1895, in 1950a) a key theoretical concept: ‘‘it
can be shown with likelihood that complete conversion also occurs, and that in it the incompatible idea
has in fact been Ôrepressed’ [verdrängt], as only an idea
of very slight intensity can be.’’
In the spring of 1893 a sharp pain reoccurred when
she heard, in a room adjacent to Freud’s office, her
brother-in-law who had come to pick her up. This
enabled Freud to track down her ‘‘secret’’—she had
fallen in love with her brother-in-law. She had grown
closer to him as a result of her sister’s illness, and upon
her death was unable to repress the thought that he
was now free. In spite of his patient’s denials, Freud
insists on, and goes so far as to solicit the testimony of
49 6
Elisabeth von R., if we are to believe her daughter’s
revelations, told the story somewhat differently. ‘‘She
described Freud as Ôjust a young, bearded nerve specialist they sent me to. He had tried ‘‘to persuade me that
I was in love with my brother-in-law, but that wasn’t
really so.’’ Yet, her daughter adds, Freud’s account of
her mother’s family history was substantially correct,
and her mother’s marriage was happy.’’ (Gay, p. 72).
It was in this context that Freud wrote, ‘‘This was my
first complete analysis of a hysteria. It allowed me for
the first time, with the help of a method that I would
later use as a technique, to eliminate psychic material in
layers, which I like to compare to the technique of
unearthing a buried city’’ (1895d, p. 139). Yet the treatment is less important historically for the spectacular
discovery of the ‘‘love secret’’ that is revealed than
because it demonstrates to Freud the mechanism of
conversion, his link to a father with whom he identifies
without yet drawing the relevant conclusions, and the
resistance he must overcome through belief in his
method, in order to eliminate, beyond the relative freedom of association he allows his patient, through
speech, layer by layer, the psychic material that blocks
the return of repressed memories.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Cathartic method; Erotogeneity; Phlyogenesis;
Resistance; Studies on Hysteria.
Bibliography
Ellenberger, Henri F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry.
New York: Basic Books.
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E L L E N B E R G E R , H E N R I F R É D É R I C (1905 –1 993)
Freud, Sigmund. (1950a [1887–1902]). Extracts from the
Fliess papers. SE, 1: 173–280.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
Gay, Peter. (1988). Freud: A life for our time. LondonMelbourne: Dent.
ELLENBERGER, HENRI FRÉDÉRIC
(1905–1993)
Henri Frédéric Ellenberger, physician, psychiatrist, and
historian of psychoanalysis, was born in Nanolo, Rhodesia, on November 6, 1905, and died in Montreal on
May 1, 1993. He was born into a family of Swiss protestants. His father, Victor Ellenberger, a naturalist and
anthropologist, was a member of the Société des missions évangéliques de Paris (Society of Evangelical
Missions of Paris), and his mother, Évangéline Christol, was the daughter of a pastor.
Ellenberger completed his medical studies in Strasbourg, France, and it was there that he was introduced
to historical research. He moved to Paris to specialize
in psychiatry and, after being appointed a resident in
psychiatry, worked at the Sainte-Anne Hospital alongside Henri Ey. In November 1930 he married Esther
von Bachst, a Russian émigrée with a passion for zoology, and they had four children.
Ellenberger settled in Poitiers, but because he was
not a naturalized French citizen, in 1941 he emigrated
to Switzerland . He worked as a psychiatrist at the Breitenau Hospital in Schaffhausen and was part of the
Jung Circle in Zurich, through which he met Carl Gustav Jung. In 1950 he began a training analysis with
Oskar Pfister, who was then seventy-seven years old. In
1952 he traveled to the United States, met Karl Menninger, and was appointed professor at the Menninger
School of Psychiatry in Topeka, Kansas. In 1953 he
encountered immigration problems, and in 1959 he
moved to Montreal, where he became a professor of
criminology at McGill University.
In 1962 he began the historical research that
resulted in the publication of The Discovery of the
Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic
Psychiatry in 1970 . In contrast with the oral tradition
of the history of psychoanalysis and Ernest Jones’s biography of Sigmund Freud, and in spite of the paucity
of documentation, Ellenberger’s work provided a
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detailed history of the theories and practices that,
since antiquity, made use of the forces of what would
come to be theoretically designated as the unconscious. Ellenberger traced the ‘‘dynamic’’ tradition in
psychiatry back to Franz Mesmer. In this tradition he
placed Jean Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, Sigmund
Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Gustav Jung. Ellenberger
wanted to show that the hagiographies of Freud were
mistaken: Freud did not receive some heavenly illumination. Rather, his theories are only one link, albeit an
important one, in a tradition that included sorcerers,
shamans, the Catholic confession, Alfred Schopenhauer, and Gustav Fechner.
After learning about Ola Andersson’s discovery of
the true story of Emmy von N., which Ellenberger published, he continued working as a historian of psychoanalysis, intent on removing the doubts and omissions
that littered a historiography divided between worship
and calumny. His position has been judged by a number
of psychoanalysts as unfavorable to Freud and psychoanalysis, for it served as a point of departure for several
openly hostile research efforts. Although his attitude
was seen as largely negative, especially in Freudian circles, where his work received a poor reception, he
remained a dedicated researcher, conscious of establishing the first principles of a psychiatric historiography
that stood in marked contrast to a cult of hero worship.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Anna O., case of; Emmy von N., case of; Moservon Sulzer-Wart, Fanny Louise; Pappenheim, Bertha.
Bibliography
Ellenberger, Henri Frédéric. (1970). The discovery of the
unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.
———. (1972). L’histoire d’Anna O.: étude critique avec
documents nouveaux. Évolution psychiatrique, 37 (4), 693–
717.
———. (1977). L’histoire d’Emmy von N. Évolution psychiatrique, 42 (3/1), 519–540.
Micale, Mark S. (1993). Henri Ellenberger and the origin of
European psychiatric historiography. In Henri Ellenberger,
Beyond the unconscious: essays of Henry F. Ellenberger in the
history of psychiatry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press 1993.
Roudinesco, E. (1994). Présentation. In Henri F. Ellenberger,
Histoire de la découverte de l’inconscient. Paris: Fayard.
497
E M B I R I K O S , A N D R E A S (19 01 –197 5)
EMBIRIKOS, ANDREAS (1901–1975)
Andreas Embirikos, a poet and psychoanalyst, was born
on September 2, 1901, in Braı̈la, Romania, and died in
1975 in Athens. His father’s family was originally from
the island of Andros. His mother was born in Russia. He
had three brothers. Shortly after his birth, the family
settled on the island of Syros, then in Athens, where
Embirikos completed his secondary education and
enrolled at the University of Athens to study philosophy.
Between 1926 and 1931 he lived in Paris. Interested in
psychoanalysis, he underwent analysis with René Laforgue and made contact with the surrealists. He became
friends with André Breton. After his return to Athens in
1931, he worked for a while as director in the shipping
company that belonged to his father, but he soon left his
position to devote his life to poetry and psychoanalysis.
Embirikos, the first psychoanalyst in Greece, was
actively involved in psychoanalysis from 1935 until the
end of 1950. In 1947 he was one of the founding members of the first psychoanalytic group in Greece and in
1950 was made a member of the Paris Psychoanalytic
Society.
His friends referred to Embirikos as ‘‘brilliant and
unlike anyone else.’’ One might assume that he combined the glory of the poet with the perseverance of
the psychoanalyst, but this was not the case. In 1951,
believing he was under the threat of a lawsuit for practicing therapy without a medical license, Embirikos
closed his psychoanalytic practice. He had been badly
treated by the police at the end of the civil war and
now believed he had become a target of the medical
establishment. He left for Paris.
Kourias, Eri, and Kourias, Georges. (1984). Un cas de pratique psychanalytique relié à une errance hyperréaliste: La
psychanalyse et la Grèce. Athens: Société d’études de la culture néohellénique et de l’éducation.
Revue Hartis. (1985). A series of articles dedicated to
Andréas Embirikos. 17–18.
Tzavaras, Athanase. (1981). Andréas Embirikos et la psychanalyse. Bulletin de la Société d’études de la culture néohellénique et de l’éducation, 5.
Zavitzianos, Georges. (1981). Andréas Embirikos, psychoanalyst. Le mot, 20.
EMDEN, JAN EGBERT GUSTAAF VAN
(1868–1950)
Jan van Emden, Dutch physician and psychoanalyst,
was born in Paramaribo, Surinam, on August 5, 1868,
and died in the Hague on March 23, 1950, aged 82. He
was trained as a medical doctor at the University of
Leiden and received his degree in 1896 for his dissertation ‘‘Bijdragen tot de kennis van het bloed’’ (Contributions to knowledge of the blood). Van Emden met
Freud in 1910 when the latter was vacationing in
Noordwijk, the Netherlands, and they subsequently
became good friends. During the First World War van
Emden functioned as intermediary between Freud and
Ernest Jones, who was instrumental in introducing
psychoanalysis in England, and also arranged for Anna
Freud’s return to Vienna.
ANNA POTAMIANOU
In 1912, after a short training with Freud, van
Emden established himself in the Hague as one of the
first practicing psychoanalysts there. He was a member
of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society from 1911 to
1914. One of the founders of the Nederlandsche vereeniging voor psycho-analysise (Dutch society for
psychoanalysis) in 1917, he was chairman from 1919–
1929. In 1934 he became president after the split of the
society and the founding of the Vereeniging van psychoanalytici in Nederland (New Dutch society of
psychoanalysis).
Embirikos, Andréas. (1950). Un cas de névrose obsessionnelle
avec éjaculations précoces. Revue française de psychanalyse.
Van Emden’s contributions to psychoanalysis are
modest. He was a regular participant in the Congresses
of the International Psychoanalytical Association, at
which he presented four papers (in 1913, 1918, 1924,
and 1925). As a member of the Dutch society for psy-
Two years later Embirikos returned to Greece to
devote himself to his poetry. He was a prolific poet
and produced work of high quality. His poetry was a
broad erotic fresco with occasional references to psychoanalysis. His only psychoanalytic publication
appeared in 1950: ‘‘Un cas de névrose obsessionnelle
avec éjaculations précoces.’’ Embirikos married twice.
He died at the age of seventy-four from lung cancer.
See also: Greece.
Bibliography
49 8
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EMMY
choanalysis, he gave a number of presentations. He
translated two works of Freud into Dutch: Five Lectures on Psycho-analysis and Thoughts for the Times on
War and Death.
JAAP BAR AND CHRISTIEN BRINKGREVE
See also: Netherlands.
Bibliography
Brinkgreve, Christien. (1984). Psychoanalyse in Nederland:
een vestigingsstrijd. Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers.
Van Emden, Jan. (1912a). Over psycho-analyse. Leiden,
Netherlands: Van Doesburgh. (Translation of Sigmund
Freud, Five lectures on psycho-analysis.)
———. (1912b). Selbstbestrafung wegen abortus. Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, 3, 647.
———. (1917). Beschouwingen over oorlog en dood. Leiden,
Netherlands: Van Doesburgh. (Translation of Sigmund
Freud, Thoughts for the times on war and death.)
———. (1925). Zur Bedeutung der Spinne in Symbolik und
Folklore. Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 11,
512–513.
EMMA, CASE OF. See Eckstein, Emma
EMMY VON N., CASE OF
Frau Emmy von N. was the pseudonym given by Sigmund Freud in the Studies on Hysteria to his patient
Fanny Moser, who was born Fanny Sulzer-Wart in
1848 and died in 1925. In her autobiography her
daughter Mentona speaks of ‘‘the famous professor
that [her] mother went to see in Vienna’’ (referring to
either Josef Breuer or Rudolf Chrobak), who soon
referred the patient to ‘‘his first assistant,’’ Doctor Sigmund Freud. ‘‘He was small and thin, his hair was
blue-black, large black eyes, he looked timid and very
young. He made a profound impression on me.’’ (in
Ellenberger, Henri F., 1977).
On May 1, 1889, during her first visit, Freud
described his meeting with this forty-year old woman,
which would have made her seven years younger than
Freud: ‘‘This lady, when I first saw her, was lying on a
sofa with her head resting on a leather cushion. She
still looked young and had finely-cut features, full of
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N. , C A S E
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character. Her face bore a strained and painful expression, her eyelids were drawn together and her eyes cast
down; there was a heavy frown on her forehead and
the naso-labial folds were deep. She spoke in a low
voice as though with difficulty and her speech was
from time to time subject to spastic interruption
amounting to a stammer.’’ He also noted the clicking
sound she made with her tongue when upset.
This intelligent but very anxious patient provided
him, without his awareness, with a premonitory indication of the future therapeutic framework when she
cried out: ‘‘Keep still!—Don’t say anything!—Don’t
touch me!’’ She made use of this incantatory remark
on several occasions, whenever she was frightened by
some particularly terrifying memory, but Freud, after
ten days of therapy, decided to eliminate it through
the use of suggestion, which he succeeded in doing.
His treatment was consistent with customary practice, which consisted in her case of a stay at a clinic,
separated from her two daughters, with whom she did
not get along. Freud prescribed warm baths and massages twice a day. The patient was completely accessible to hypnosis and, in this state, recounted the origin
of the delusional fears and visual hallucinations (rats,
frogs) from which she suffered, retracing them to her
childhood. ‘‘My therapy consists in wiping away these
pictures, so that she is no longer able to see them
before her. To give support to my suggestion I stroked
her several times over the eyes.’’
The systematic pursuit of her memories enabled
Freud to state that the case of Emmy von N. was the
first in which he had employed the ‘‘cathartic method.’’
One day, when she was irritated, the patient also made
a remark whose practical consequences Freud did not
fail to draw. She asked him to stop interrupting her
with questions and to allow her to speak freely. At the
time Freud still played the role of the grand magician,
the antithesis of the future psychoanalytic attitude,
and his authority was necessary to erase the patient’s
pathogenic memories through the process of
suggestion.
It is interesting to note that there exists an 1894
note Freud added to the case history—this still a year
before the dream of the injection given to Irma—in
which he indicates that he wrote down his own dreams
and traced them back to two factors: ‘‘(1) to the necessity for working out any ideas which I had only dwelt
upon cursorily during the day—which had only been
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EMOTION
touched upon and not finally dealt with; and (2) to the
compulsion to link together any ideas that might be
present in the same state of consciousness. The senseless and contradictory character of the dreams could
be traced back to the uncontrolled ascendancy of this
latter factor.’’ Although here is evident a clear glimpse
of clinical intuitions that, in retrospect, appear anticipatory, at this point Freud’s therapy continues to be a
blend of such ‘‘purgative retellings’’ and electrotherapy.
Freud’s notes stop on June 20 and Emmy von N.
apparently left, quite improved, for her château in
Switzerland. Freud visited her on July 18, traveling
along the road to Nancy, where he was to meet Hippolyte Bernheim.
In January 1890 Emmy had a relapse. She went to
see Breuer, complaining of nervous disturbances from
which her daughter was suffering and blaming Freud
and Chrobak. She was so agitated that they had her
admitted to a sanatorium, from which she ended up
escaping with the help of a woman friend. No doubt
she came to represent one of the cases Freud referred to
later to explain why he abandoned hypnosis: ‘‘On one
occasion a severe condition in a woman, which I had
entirely got rid of by a short hypnotic treatment,
returned unchanged after the patient had, through no
action on my part, got annoyed with me; after a reconciliation, I removed the trouble again and far more
thoroughly; yet it returned once more after she had
fallen foul of me a second time.’’ (1916–17a [1915–17])
In May 1890, the anniversary of his first therapy,
she came back to see Freud for additional therapy,
which lasted eight weeks—until July. She felt better
but suffered from mental confusion, ‘‘storms in her
head,’’ and insomnia, and the clicking tic and stammering had reappeared. Freud analyzed the origin of
the return of these symptoms and again succeeded in
eliminating them.
In the spring of 1891 Freud saw Emmy von N. at her
home, where he stayed for several days to help resolve
the problems she was having with her older daughter.
She was feeling better but Freud resumed the therapy
to eliminate her phobia of train travel. Because she
claimed to be less docile than before, that is less
attached to him, he reestablished his authority and his
position through his little drama of being a hypnotist,
which he exposed with such candor that it is obvious
he was entirely unaware of his unconscious motives.
50 0
In an addendum that dates from 1924, Freud reports
that, several years after this last visit, he met a doctor
with whom she had behaved as she had with him: easy
to hypnotize in the beginning then irritable and subject
to relapses: ‘‘It was a genuine instance of the Ôcompulsion to repeat.’’’ He added that around 1920 her elder
daughter had written him to request a report, because
she wanted to initiate a lawsuit against this ‘‘cruel
tyrant’’ who had chased away her two children.
It has become fashionable to question Freud’s diagnoses, and the case of Emmy von N. is no exception:
melancholia, schizophrenia, nervous tics, the neurosis
of a rich and idle woman, according to the various
reports. Although Anna O. alone was successfully treated and managed to create an exemplary life for herself, Henri F. Ellenberger has remarked that it was
Emmy’s daughter, Mentona Moser, who benefited
from the intellectual and social emancipation her
mother never achieved.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Andersson, Ola; Cathartic method; Ellenberger,
Henri Frédéric; Free association; Moser-von SultzerWart, Fanny Louise; Psychoanalytic treatment; Studies on
Hysteria.
Bibliography
Andersson, Ola. (1962). Studies in the prehistory of psychoanalysis. Stockholm: Svenska Bokförlaget.
Ellenberger, Henri F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry.
New York: Basic Books.
———. (1977). The story of ‘‘Emmy von N.’’: A critical study
with new documents. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993.
Freud, Sigmund. (1916–17a [1915–17]). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. Parts I & II, SE, 15-16.
Micale, Mark S. (Ed.). (1993). Beyond the unconscious. Essays
of Henri F. Ellenberger in the History of Psychiatry.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
EMOTION
The word emotion is derived from the Latin emovere,
‘‘to set in motion.’’ It initially referred to the idea of
physical movement and then assumed a figurative
meaning associated with mental movement.
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EMPATHY
The term is infrequently used in psychoanalysis,
where the term affect, derived from German Affekt, is
preferred. Sigmund Freud, however, in a text written
in French in 1895, used the expression ‘‘état émotif ’’
(‘‘emotive state’’) to designate what was translated in
the German editions as Affekt. It is with the theoretical
developments associated with Kleinian psychoanalysis
that the term emotion reappeared. The reasons for the
change are significant.
Freudian metapsychology is centered on the study
of the mental apparatus, which is considered, if not as
an isolated entity, at least as one that can be isolate. In
the Freudian model the mental apparatus is charged
with drives, whose effects—affect and representation—
are observable. Affect corresponds to the quantitative
aspects, and mental representations correspond to the
qualitative aspects of the drives. Positive affects accompany the satisfaction of drives, negative affects accompany the state of tension within the mental apparatus
(pleasure/unpleasure principle). The object of satisfaction, that is, the object that triggers the discharge of the
impulse, is contingent, vicarious. For Daniel Widlöcher, the affect refers to internal regulatory functions of
the mental apparatus: a discharge of impulses and signals intended to provide information to the mental
apparatus, as Freud suggested in his second theory of
anxiety, and that emotion adds a third reference, that
of communication with the external object, ‘‘a modality of expression intended to inform others of a particular situation, laden with value for the subject.’’
It should come as no surprise therefore that the theories assigning greater importance to object relations
have given a central place to the concept of emotion.
Compared to affect, it contains levels of additional
complexity, because it is a means of communicative
exchange between self and other, through its behavioral (especially facial) expressions, which have been
extensively studied by specialists in development and
cognitive function, and because it refers to nuanced
qualitative aspects rather than simply quantitative
aspects combined with a positive or negative valence.
Melanie Klein insisted on the extreme nature of the
baby’s emotions at the start of its extra-uterine existence, associated with love and hate relations directed
at the (partial) object in what she called the
‘‘paranoid-schizoid position.’’ Later, when the infant
achieves the ‘‘depressive position,’’ emotions become
more nuanced, hate is tinged with guilt, love with
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tion an essential role in his description of the intrapsychic world as a world of relations between internal
or interiorized objects. For Bion the links between
internal objects are emotional links, just as the links
between the subject and its external objects are emotional in nature. He chose three types of emotional
links: these correspond to love relations (L link =
love), hate relations (H link = hatred), and knowledge
relations (K link = knowledge). The first two, L and H,
are emotional links; these are unstable and associated
with splitting. The K link is the psychoanalytic link par
excellence and has the advantage of stability. It does
indeed involve an emotional link, in the sense that it
corresponds to an emotion associated with uncertainty and the tension experienced in the face of the
unknown in anticipation of meaning. Psychoanalytic
therapy develops K links.
DIDIER HOUZEL
See also: Concept; Darwin, Darwinism, and psychoanalysis; Shame; Links, attacks on; Love-Hate-Knowledge
(L/H/K links); Memories; Paranoid-schizoid position;
Quota of affect; Unconscious as Infinite Sets: An Essay in
Bi-Logic, The.
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred. R. (1962). A theory of thinking. International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, XLIII, 4–5; in Second Thoughts,
London: Heinemann, 1967.
Freud, Sigmund. (1895c [1894]). Obsessions and phobias:
their psychical mechanism and their aetiology. SE, 3:
69–82.
Klein, Melanie. (1952). Quelques conclusions théoriques au
sujet de la vie émotionnelle des bébés. In M. Klein, P. Heimann, S. Isaacs, and J. Riviere (Eds.), Developments in psychoanalysis (pp. 187–253). London: Hogarth Press.
Widlöcher, Daniel. (1992). De l’émotion primaire à l’affect
différencié. In P. Mazet and S. Lebovici (Eds.) Émotions et
Affects chez le bébé et ses partenaires (pp. 45–55). Paris:
Eshel.
EMPATHY
Empathy is the capacity for concrete representation of
another person’s mental state, including the accompanying emotions. The English term is a translation of
501
EMPTY FORTRESS, THE
the German word Einfühlung, coined in 1873 by the
German philosopher Robert Vischer. Vischer used it
to refer to a modality of aesthetic sensibility. In contrast to the theory that categorized objective qualities
inherent in the object as beautiful, Vischer described
the subjective nature of an experience where beauty
resulted from the projection of human sensibilities
onto natural objects. Theodor Lipps (1851–1914), a
philosopher who taught in Munich, gave empathy a
broader, psychological range, attributing to this form
of intuition access to knowledge of another’s subjectivity. It is in this sense, and most likely from reading
Lipps, that Sigmund Freud used the term, which was
still uncommon at the time.
Freud used the term in a number of his essays. He
used it for the first time in Jokes and Their Relation to
the Unconscious (1905) in relation to the economic
explanation of the pleasure associated with humor.
He returned to it several times to refer to a form of
intuitive understanding of others essential to psychoanalytic communication. For Freud, however, the
term had no specific psychoanalytic meaning but
rather a general psychological meaning, moreover,
one that was still poorly understood. This is likely
one reason that James Strachey did not feel the need
to propose a single English translation; the other reason being that the term empathy, which had already
been proposed in 1909 by the psychologist Edward
Bradford Titchener and taken up by Ernest Jones, did
not generate much enthusiasm from Strachey. In
France the term emphatie come back into use following the publication of the translation of Freud’s
works under the direction of Jean Laplanche. This
resulted in the misunderstanding of a precise concept
for Freud, in particular, in his correspondence with
Sándor Ferenczi.
The concept did not become important until 1960,
when Ralph Greenson studied it, no doubt influenced
by the interest in countertransference that occurred
after the work of Heinrich Racker and Paula Heimann.
Since then a number of studies have emphasized the
importance of the concept for communication during
analysis. There have been some reservations arising
from what was felt to be the somewhat obscure and
slightly irrational nature of the phenomenon. Other
authors (Buie, 1981; Widlöcher, 1993) have tried to
specify the psychological mechanisms operating in this
complex form of intuitive understanding, specifically
emphasizing the role of identification and inference.
50 2
From the metapsychological perspective, the debate
continues between those who assign empathy a decisive role in the discovery of the unconscious and the
therapeutic activity of the psychoanalyst (Heinz
Kohut) and those who deny that empathy can play a
role in identifying the unconscious.
DANIEL WIDLÖCHER
See also: Counter-identification; Counter-transference;
Elasticity; Greenson, Ralph; Identification; Kohut, Heinz;
Lebovici, Serge Sindel Charles; Projective identification;
Self, the.
Bibliography
Buie, Dan H. (1981). Empathy: Its nature and limitation.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 29,
281–307.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905). Jokes and their relation to the
unconscious. SE, 8: 1–236.
Greenson, Ralph R. (1960). Empathy and its vicissitudes.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 41, 418–424.
Widlöcher, Daniel. (1993). L’analyse cognitive du silence en
psychanalyse: Quand les mots viennent à manquer. Revue
internationale de psychopathologie, 12, 509–528.
Further Reading
Kohut, Heinz. (1959). Introspection, Empathy, and psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association,
7, 459–483.
Orange, Donna. (2002). There is no outside: Empathy and
authenticity in psychoanalytic process. Psychoanalytical
Psychology, 19, 686–700.
Pigman, George W. (1995). Freud and the history of empathy. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 76, 237–256.
Schwaber, Evelyn. (1981). Empathy: A mode of analytic listening. Psychoanalytical Inquiry, 1, 357–392.
Shapiro, Theodore. (1981). Empathy: A critical reevaluation. Psychoanalytical Inquiry, 1, 423–448.
Shaughnessy, Patrick. (1995). Empathy, working alliance:
Mistranslation of Freud’s "einfuhling". Psychoanalytical
Psychology, 12, 221–232.
EMPTY FORTRESS, THE
The saga of The Empty Fortress began in 1952. Two
years earlier, in his book Love Is Not Enough, Bruno
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Bettelheim had reported his first findings concerning
the disturbed children in the school he had directed in
Chicago since 1944. That book had captured the interest of thousands of Americans. The popularization of
psychoanalysis was in full bloom in the United States,
and psychiatric research was very much in fashion.
High hopes seemed in order: Americans had defeated
Hitler; surely they could overcome madness. There
was no shortage of research funding, and in 1956,
ahead of Anna Freud’s Hampstead Nurseries, Bettelheim received a five-year Ford Foundation grant of
$342,500 to finance his study of autism. The Empty
Fortress is based in part on the reports that Bettelheim
submitted to the Ford Foundation each year.
It was hardly automatic that autistic children were
referred to Bettelheim’s Orthogenic School, which was
run like a family home and where diagnostic labels
and psychiatric drugs were forbidden. ‘‘If you give
them drugs,’’ Bettelheim wrote, the children ‘‘cannot
believe that you really want them to be the way they
would like to be. If you manipulate their bodies like
that, how could they fail to think that you also want to
manipulate their minds?’’ (personal communication,
1980). After a great deal of discussion with his colleagues, in 1950–1951 Bettelheim finally received a few
‘‘children who don’t speak’’ (as their playmates would
call them), children whose pathology Margaret Mahler
distinguished from other forms of infantile psychosis
at the 1951 Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Amsterdam.
The first sentence of Bettelheim’s book sums up his
credo: ‘‘Much of modern psychology seeks to know
about others; too much of it, in my opinion, without
an equal commitment to knowing the self. But I
believe that knowing the other—which is different
from knowing about the other—can only be a
function of knowing oneself’’ (p. 3). This was the foundation on which he trained (sometimes very roughly)
the educators in his school. The sentiment also illustrates
the secret of Bettelheim’s remarkable clinical intuition.
While observing the wolf-child–like behavior of little
Anna, Bettelheim writes, he was struck by the parallel
between his own experience of concentration camps and
his therapeutic work (pp. 7–8). Anna had been born in
Poland during the Second World War to Jewish parents
who did not get along but were obliged to live together,
holed up in an earthen cellar and afraid to make the
slightest sound. By the age of ten, the little girl, now
mute, had almost killed her young brother several times.
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No treatment facility would keep her more than a few
hours; even a psychiatric hospital had been unable to
cope with her for more than a month. In her eyes Bettelheim recognized a terror that he himself could never forget—the terror of someone placed in an environment
that seeks to destroy him without his knowing why or
whether he will ever escape. Bettelheim had been evoking this ‘‘extreme situation’’ since his article on Buchenwald (1943). In The Empty Fortress he defined it, for the
first time, as a situation ‘‘when we ourselves respond to
an external danger—real or imagined—with inner maneuvers that actually debilitate us further’’ (p. 77). Later
he added that in the face of an extreme situation, the
individual rejects his normal personality because his
ordinary reactions are now liable to place his life in danger (1980, pp. 11, 116). Convinced that, however senseless little Anna’s actions might seem, they in fact had
meaning, Bettelheim studied her symptoms closely
enough to be able to make the striking claim that he was
describing autism as if from the subject’s point of view.
Traditionally, autistic subjects are characterized in
terms of their shortcomings. In The Empty Fortress, by
contrast, the children are alive and active, and each of
their gestures is understood as an attempt to reduce
their suffering. The three case histories that Bettelheim
recounted in detail, those of Laurie, Marcia, and Joey
(the ‘‘boy-machine’’ who could not move or even say
hello without first ‘‘plugging himself in’’ with an imaginary cord to an equally imaginary wall-socket),
make such a powerful impression on readers that they
often forget the first part of the book, ‘‘The world of
encounter,’’ in which Bettelheim gives an account of
the birth and decline of the self.
The first hundred or so pages of the book, permeated with notions of the ‘‘self psychology’’ then being
developed by Heinz Kohut, are nevertheless the
strongest ever written by Bettelheim on mental illness. They even prompted Donald Winnicott to
make the following somewhat ruffled remark: ‘‘I find
him difficult to read simply because he says everything and there is nothing to be said that one could
be certain has not been said by him. But I must read
him because he can be exactly right, or more nearly
right than other writers. This applies especially to his
opening chapters in The Empty Fortress’’ (1989,
p. 246n).
This book made Bettelheim famous worldwide; it
also defined him narrowly as a specialist of autism. He
was partly responsible for this, for he inflated his suc503
ENCOPRESIS
cess rate to help quiet his behaviorist opponents. His
overriding priority was to give voice to the mental suffering of his patients and remind the medical world of
the respect it owed to such suffering. The Empty Fortress was in effect a clinical sourcebook, and it had a
decisive effect on the evolution of institutional attitudes towards autism.
NINA SUTTON
See also: Autism; Bettelheim, Bruno; Infantile schizophrenia; Technique with children, psychoanalytic.
Source Citation
Bettelheim, Bruno. (1967). The empty fortress: Infantile autism and the birth of the self. New York: Free Press.
Bibliography
Bettelheim, Bruno. (1943). Individual and mass behavior in
extreme situations. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 38, 417–452.
———. (1950). Love is not enough. New York: Free Press.
———. (1980). Surviving and other essays. New York:
Vintage.
Lyons, Tom Wallace. (1979). The pelican and after: A novel
about emotional disturbance. Richmond, VA: Prescott, Durrell and Co.
Mahler, Margaret S. (1952). On child psychosis and schizophrenia: Autistic and symbiotic infantile psychoses. In R.
Eissler et al. (Eds.), Psychoanalytic study of the child (Vol.
7). New York: International Universities Press.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1989). Psycho-analytic explorations.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
ENCOPRESIS
Encopresis is the name for problems with control of the
anal sphincter after the age when such control is normally acquired (two or three years). The condition may
be primary or secondary after a period of continence,
and is characterized by bowel movements, usually during the daytime, under socially unacceptable conditions and excluding true incontinence, as produced by
organic disorders of the sphincter or its related nerve
structures. The term, used in clinical pediatric psychiatry, was introduced by Siegfried Weissenberg in 1926.
50 4
A clearer understanding of this symptom can be
achieved by considering it in relation to the erotogenicity of the anal zone (Freud, 1905d), with its various
components, including excitation of the mucous
membranes and the pleasures derived from expulsion
and muscular control. Michel Soulé views the erotization of retention as the central phenomenon. Nonrenunciation of these instinctual satisfactions is rooted
in the individual’s conflictual relations with the people
surrounding him during the period of toilet training—that is, the anal-sadistic stage, which is focused
on issues of possession, on mastery of one’s own body,
and of others. The child’s stools are cathected as a part
of his or her own body and as representing internal
objects; the subject refuses to give them up for
exchange and instead saves them, often owing to a
deficiency in symbolization that impedes the displacement of interest onto other objects. Anxiety plays a
role, sometimes manifesting itself as a genuine defecation phobia with archaic contents, such as the destruction of internal objects, or the destruction of links,
often in connection with the traumatic effects upon
the child of intrusive parental fantasies or existential
events involving loss.
Symptoms of encopresis can also arise from an
inadequate cathexis of the body on the part of a child
subject to some forms of deprivation. The secondary
gains are proportionate to the involvement of the
child’s entourage: maintaining regressive ties to the
mother; feelings of omnipotence; masochistic gratification. The failure of repression and the nonestablishment of reaction-formations attest to the
resistance of pregenital fixations to oedipal resolution
—the definitive aim of toilet training, according to
Anna Freud. Although encopresis can have a bearing
on all types of psychopathology in the child, ranging
from psychosis or perversion to quasi-normality, Bertrand Cramer has noted that the majority of cases
involve neurosis.
GÉRARD SCHMIT
See also: Anality; Coprophilia; Eroticism, anal; Gift;
Infantile neurosis; Libidinal stage; Mastery; Pregenital;
Psychosexual development.
Bibliography
Cramer, Bertrand, et al. (1983). Trente-six encoprétiques en
thérapie. Psychiatrie de l’enfant, 26, 2, 309–410.
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ENCOUNTER
Freud, Anna. (1965). Normality and pathology in childhood:
assessments of development. New York: International Universities Press.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 130–243.
Soulé, Michel, et al. (1995). Les troubles de la defecation. In
S. Lebovici, R. Diatkine, and M. Soulé (Eds.), Nouveau
traité de psychiatrie de l’enfant et de l’adolescent (Vol. 4, pp.
2679–2700). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Weissenberg, Siegfried. (1926). Über Enkopresis. Zeitung der
Kinderpsychiatrie, 1, 69.
ENCOUNTER
The word encounter designates the coming together of
two elements, fortuitous or not, that are going to have
an impact on each other. This notion is central to the
theories of Piera Aulagnier, as it correlates to potentiality (psychotic potentiality). ‘‘To live is to experience in
a continuous way what results from the situation of
encounter,’’ she wrote in 1975 (p. 2).
The notion of encounter in the wider sense of the
word for psychoanalysis concerns everything that has
the character of an event, when it seems as if it is not
predetermined. Nevertheless, Freud had demonstrated
that an event has no sense and meaning, except as a
part of a preexisting structure. Therefore the event
never has a purely objective meaning, even if it results
from an encounter that comes from the outside. Such
an event has, in fact, already been shaped by the psyche
according to mnemonic traces anterior to the encounter. Piera Aulagnier, however, accorded the notion of
encounter a more fundamental meaning, that of a permanent rapport established between the body and the
psyche, or between the subject’s psyche and that of
the mother. The relation between the psyche and
the world is born at the time of the primordial event of
the encounter.
Aulagnier opted to situate the inaugural encounter
at the beginnings of the rapport between the mouth
and the breast, a prototype of what she called the
‘‘complementary object-zone’’ (1975/2001, p. 19). ‘‘At
the moment when the mouth meets the breast it meets
and swallows a first mouthful of the world’’ (p. 15).
The representation that the psyche has of itself will be
a function of further encounters, either the encounter
of the psyche with the body, on the one hand, or with
the productions of the maternal psyche on the other.
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Nevertheless, every encounter confronts psychic activity with an overload of information, up to the point
where whatever was unrecognized returns to refute the
representation (for example, the frustration of the real
breast being missing, when a presence of the breast has
been hallucinated).
This shows why the notion of encounter has been a
useful one: It is opposed, in fact, to representations of
the mother/infant relation in terms of fusion or dyad.
Piera Auglagnier, on the contrary, affirmed that in the
two psychic spaces, that of the mother and of the
child, ‘‘the same object, the same experience of
encounter will be inscribed by using two forms of writing and two heterogeneous relational schemata’’ (1975/
2001, p. 15).
The notion of the ‘‘encounter’’ is also a necessary
complement of ‘‘potentiality’’, since it is precisely on
the occasion of the encounter that potentiality can be
actualized. In this context it is close to the notion of
the event, when the latter is thought of as a triggering
cause. However, in the context of psychosis, Aulagnier
proposed a more specific definition of encounter:
‘‘The passage from a potential state of identificatory
conflict to one that is manifest can result from an
encounter that takes place long after childhood is past;
an encounter between the subject and another, to
whom is imputed the same power, which in childhood
was exerted by actors in a reality scene of such a nature
that it was not internalized at the time’’ (1984).
It is evident that the notion of encounter allows
Aulagnier to avoid any overly strict determinism, one
that would isolate a particular moment, in the subject
or family environment, to account for its later psychic
destiny.
In one of her last writings, dating from 1990, and so
liable to serve as a conclusion, she remarked: ‘‘The
essence of the relation of cause and effect in the psyche
. . . is that it is the effect alone that can make a cause of
the event. Now this effect is not fixed once and for all;
it is itself the effect of an encounter, to be recalled,
renegotiated, reinterpreted by future experiences. Only
over the course of a long and arduous work of reinterpretation of lived experiences and past traces can a
current experience reactualize things, or the I transform its past—to make of it the source and cause of its
present’’ (1992 [1990]).
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
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E N R I Q U E Z - J O L Y , M I C H E L I N E (1 931 –19 87)
See also: Alienation; L’Apprenti-historien et le Maı̂tre-sorcier. Du discours identifiant au discours délirant [Apprentice historian and the master sorcerer, the]; Ideational
representation; Pictogram; Primal, the; Psychotic
potential.
Bibliography
Aulagnier, Piera. (1984). L’Apprenti-historien et le Maı̂tresorcier. Du discours identifiant au discours délirant. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
———. (1992 [1990]). Voies d’entrée dans la psychose.
Topique, 49. 7–29.
———. (2001). Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram
to Statement. (Alan Sheridan, Trans.). East Sussex Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge. (Original work published 1975).
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1998). Penser la psychose. Une
lecture de l’oeuvre de Piera Aulagnier. Paris: Dunod.
ENRIQUEZ-JOLY, MICHELINE (1931–1987)
Micheline Enriquez, a French psychoanalyst, was born
on September 11, 1931, in Châlons-sur-Marne and
died in an automobile accident on October 18, 1987,
in Vaux-le-Pénil. She spent her childhood and adolescence in Sézanne, where she attended grammar school
and high school. She passed her baccalaureate degree
in modern literature. In 1949 Enriquez went to Paris
to study at the Institut de psychologie (Institute of
Psychology), where she obtained diplomas in applied
psychology, psychopedagogy, and psychopathology,
and at the Sorbonne, where she obtained a certificate
in social psychology. She also studied Russian at the
École des langues orientales (School of Oriental Languages) and took courses at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Paris Institute of Political Studies).
After working with Professor Jean Maisonneuve
(social psychology) on the process of affinity and evaluating training activities, she was appointed a psychologist at the mental health clinic of Paris Medical
School (under Professor Jean Delay of the Centre psychiatrique Sainte-Anne). She worked with Professors
Pierre Pichot, Thérèse Lampérière, and J. Perse, with
whom she wrote a study on hysteria. She also worked
at the Versailles Hospital.
She underwent her training analysis with Serge
Leclaire of the Société française de psychanalyse
(French Society for Psychoanalysis) before the 1964
split that led Jacques Lacan to found the École freudi50 6
enne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris). Her monitor
was Piera Aulagnier. She joined the École freudienne at
the time of its creation but, at the time of a second
split, participated in the creation of the Quatrième
groupe, Organisation psychanalytique de langue française (Fourth Group, Francophone Psychoanalytic
Organization) in 1969. She served as secretary for analysis and secretary for research before becoming vice
president in 1985 and president in 1986. She underwent a second analysis with Serge Viderman. For several years she was responsible for teaching projective
techniques at the Institut de Psychologie (Institute for
Psychology) at the University of Paris.
Enriquez wrote a number of articles in the review
Topique and in the Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse. She
was awarded the Maurice Bouvet Prize in psychoanalysis
in 1978 for three of her articles: ‘‘D’un corps à l’autre:
réflexions sur le masochisme’’ (1971), ‘‘Fantasmes
paranoı̈aques: différence des sexes, homosexualité, loi
du père’’ (1974), ‘‘Analyse possible ou impossible’’
(1977a). She contributed an article to Comment
l ’interprétation vient au psychanalyste (1977b) and, in
1984, published Aux carrefours de la haine. Her last
published work, ‘‘L’enveloppe de mémoire et ses
trous’’ (1987), appeared shortly after her death. Two of
her essays, ‘‘Le délire en héritage’’ and ‘‘Incidence du
délire parental sur la mémoire des descendants,’’ a
transcription completed the day before her death, were
published in 1993.
As shown by the case studies she wrote, her work is
based on her analytic practice and reflects on violence,
lethal withdrawal of cathexis, the desire for historical
and psychic reality, suffering, and the conditions for
harmonious treatment, which, while not excluding the
expression of negative affects, can mobilize life
impulses and stimulate thought in analyst and analysand alike.
Enriquez provided new insights into paranoia,
masochism, and what she referred to, after the Marquis de Sade, as apathy. She showed that paranoiacs
and masochists eroticize suffering and hatred, and she
found in paranoia and masochism the mechanisms of
their object choices. Those who are apathetic reject
affect and hatred to distance themselves from others in
order to survive. She insisted on the need for the child,
when confronted by delusional speech from one of its
parents, to negotiate the violence imposed to avoid
repeating it. She stressed the importance of a common
memory between analyst and analysand, a condition
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for remembering to be fruitful and for access to history. For Enriquez, everything that fell within the
sphere of love and reciprocity was capable of struggling against the spread of evil that resulted in anger
against the self or others.
Enriquez has been referred to as one of the most
highly esteemed psychoanalysts in France, where her
clinical work and theoretical contributions were
highly regarded, independently of her institutional
associations. She was a member, since its foundation, of the Association internationale d’histoire de
la psychanalyse (International Association of the
History of Psychoanalysis). Issue no. 42 of Topique,
‘‘Mémoire et réalité’’ (1988), was dedicated to her
memory. Her work has been translated into English,
Spanish (she is well known in Argentina), Italian,
and Greek. Her influence in Brazil continues to
remain strong.
EUGÈNE ENRIQUEZ
See also: Intergenerational; Pain; Psychic envelopes; Quatrième groupe (O.P.L.F.), Fourth group; Secret.
Bibliography
Enriquez, Micheline. (1971). D’un corps à l’autre: Réflexions
sur le masochisme. Topique, 7–8, 85–118.
———. (1974). Fantasmes paranoı̈aques: Différence des
sexes, homosexualité, loi du père. Topique, 13, 23–58.
———. (1977a). Analyse possible ou impossible. Topique,
18, 49–62.
———. (1977b). Libres pensées. In Robert Barande (Ed.),
Comment l’interprétation vient au psychanalyste (pp. 95–
104). Paris: Aubier Montaigne.
———. (1980). Du corps de souffrance au corps en souffrance. Topique, 26, 5–27.
———. (1984). Aux carrefours de la haine: Paranoı̈a, masochisme, apathie. Paris: Éditions de l’Épi.
———. (1987). L’enveloppe de mémoire et ses trous. In
Didier Anzieu et al. (Eds.), Les enveloppes psychiques. Paris:
Dunod.
———. (1993a). Le délire en héritage. In René Kaës et al.
(Eds.), Transmission de la vie psychique entre générations.
Paris: Dunod.
———. (1993b). Incidence du délire parental sur la mémoire des descendants. In René Kaës et al. (Eds.), Transmission de la vie psychique entre générations. Paris:
Dunod.
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Enuresis is incomplete, or total lack of, bladder control
in children past the age of four to five years, when
bladder control is normally achieved. It is considered
primary when a child has never been consistently dry.
In secondary nocturnal enuresis, bedwetting begins
after a period of adequate bladder control and suggests
regression due to such traumatic factors as separation,
loss, or illness. Enuresis is distinguished from genuine
organic urinary incontinence. Enuretic urination, as a
rule, is nocturnal and involuntary. It may be also associated with daytime events.
As a disorder that attracts the interest of a number of
medical specialists, enuresis has spawned a variety of
hypotheses concerning its etiology. The deep sleep of
the enuretic child has been implicated, though without
evidence of any unusual sleeping habits, save increased
resistance to specific waking stimuli. The bladder capacity of the enuretic child is usually normal, although in
some cases an immature bladder has been demonstrated, and this can cause a nocturnal surge in bladder
pressure. In a few cases, disorders (or delayed maturation) of circadian rhythms due to secretion of antidiuretic hormones may disrupt, or delay the development of,
the normal relationship between diurnal and nocturnal
production of urine, and this can produce functional
nocturnal polyuria. Finally, studies of families and twins
have established a genetic component.
Although psychological and environmental factors
have often been investigated, a specific psychological profile for enuresis has not yet emerged. Complicating matters is that relevant factors differ according to whether
the symptom is an isolated one or forms part of a more
complex clinical picture and a definite psychopathology.
Freud emphasized the libidinal dimension of primary enuresis. Beginning with the case of Dora (1905e
[1901]), he interpreted enuresis as a substitute for genital gratification, noting consistent links between enuresis and fire, a theme that he discovered in dreams as
representative of frightening, aggressive, or erotic
drives. As the gratification of an organic need, Freud
suggested, urination counts as one of the autoerotic
and infantile pleasures; the infant renounces it only
with reluctance under the pressure of toilet training
(1916–1917a [1915–1917]).
Even if this classical conception must be viewed
today in connection with other considerations, psychotherapy of enuretic children often demonstrates the
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ENVY
relevance of Freudian intuition. Gérard Schmidt and
Michel Soulé (1985) stress the significance of primary
enuresis in the libidinal economy of the enuretic child,
together with various direct instinctual gratifications
that indicate continued and persistent eroticization of
urination. Gains in controlling secondary enuresis are
correlated with reactions of the child’s caregivers and
the availability of other means of gratification.
The study of the psychological factors involved in
enuresis must take into account several factors implicated in successful toilet training: (1) the gradual
maturation of control over the somatic functions, with
individual inborn variations; (2) the affective investment in excretory functions in different stages of libidinal development; and (3) interactions with the
environment, ranging from the child’s privileged relationship with its mother to familial and social customs
concerning the child’s acquisition of sphincter control.
GERARD SCHMIDT
See also: Eroticism, urethral; Institut Max-Kassowitz.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905e [1901]). Fragment of an analysis of
a case of hysteria. SE, 7: 1–122.
———. (1916–1917a [1915–1917]). Introductory lectures
on psycho-analysis. SE, 15–16.
Kreisler, Léon. (1977). Enurésie. In Encyclopédie médico-chirugicale (Vol. Pédiatrie, fasc. 4101-G-95). Paris: Encyclopédie medico-chirurgicale.
Schmit, Gérard, and Soulé, Michel. (1985). L’énurésie infantile. In Serge Lebovici, René Diatkine, and Michel Soulé
(Eds.), Nouveau traité de psychiatrie de l’enfant et l’adolescent (pp. 1751–1770). Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
Further Reading
upon, parts of the object felt to be good. It attacks
aspects of the libido—love, constructiveness, integration—simply because of their life-giving characteristics. This notion first appears in Envy and Gratitude
(Klein, 1957).
Freud was uncertain about the clinical usefulness of
the concept of the death instinct. Klein found ways of
showing its clinical relevance, especially in her work
with children. The primary destructive force, the death
instinct, aims at destroying the ego. Freud (1926) recognized that the ego needs to escape this very early experience of threat, and that it can do so by projecting the
death instinct outwards. Thus the ego contrives to see
the danger to itself as coming from external objects. This
danger may then coincide, he thought, with some real
external threat. As Klein (1932) added, the external
object may be a harsh critical parent (then internalized
as a persecuting superego). Then the external enemy can
be attacked, as can other aspects of the death instinct
turned against an external object. In both these processes
of establishing outwardly directed impulses, the libido
may fuse to some degree with the death instinct.
Later and in contrast with the above, Klein
described a very different manifestation of death
instinct: primary envy. In this instance the destructive
force is directed against an external object that is not a
threat but a good object, typically the mother’s breast,
which feeds and comforts. To the external good object
is attributed a wish for life and a wish to preserve life
in the ego. In this case, the good object represents a
part of the libido projected into an external object.
And it is attacked there by impulses derived from the
death instinct now turned away from the ego itself.
The death instinct, directed against those (libidinal)
parts of the ego concerned with the wish to live,
remains a destructive force against them when they are
projected. Klein’s view is a generalization and extension of Freud’s notion of penis envy.
ENVY
Klein developed the idea of the death instinct in
terms of relations to the object and to the self. Rosenfeld (1971) described states in which the ego is dominated by aspects of the death instinct. Since Freud’s
theory of the death instinct was never fully accepted,
Klein’s idea of envy was also contentious (Joffe, 1969).
Envy represents a primary kind of evil, and it is difficult often to accept such a state in an innocent infant.
Envy is a primitive force in the personality that is
opposed to, and therefore mounts destructive attacks
Others have attributed aggression in infancy and
childhood to frustration of libidinal impulses. Wilfred
Blum, Harold P. (1970). Maternal psychopathology and
nocturnal enuresis. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 39, 609–619.
Calef, Victor, Weinshel, Ed, et al. (1980). Enuresis: A functional equivalent of a fetish. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 61, 295–306.
50 8
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Bion described paroxysms of aggression arising in
infants when an infant’s insistent projection meets an
uncontaining mother frightened by the infant’s fear of
death. Here the anger of frustration can appear much
like envy.
ROBERT D. HINSHELWOOD
See also: Envy and Gratitude; Links, attacks on; Logic(s);
Narcissistic neurosis; Oral-sadistic stage; Primary object.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1926). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety.
SE, 20: 75–172.
Joffe, Walter. (1969). A critical review of the envy concept.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 50, 533–545.
Klein, Melanie. (1932). The psycho-analysis of children. London: Hogarth.
———. (1957). Envy and gratitude: A study of unconscious
forces. London: Hogarth Press.
Rosenfeld, Herbert. (1971). A clinical approach to the
psycho-analytic theory of the life and death instincts: An
investigation into the aggressive aspects of narcissism.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 52, 169–178.
Segal, Hanna. (1993). Review of A dictionary of Kleinian
thought. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 74,
417–419.
ENVY AND GRATITUDE
Envy and gratitude is the last of Melanie Klein’s major
contributions to psychoanalytic theory. She presented
a paper, ‘‘A study of envy and gratitude,’’ at the Geneva
International Congress of Psycho-Analysis in 1955.
This was later expanded into a short book for publication in 1957.
From her first publications Melanie Klein reported
that a major source of anxiety from the beginning of
life is destructiveness. At first she was interested in
aggression and the paranoid cycles of fear and violence
as the origins of anxiety (Klein, 1929a). Later she
understood anxiety in terms of damage to internal
objects (the depressive state), which then gave rise to
guilt (Klein, 1935). Still later she understood selfdirected aggression, in the form of splitting and fragmentation of the ego itself, to arise from the death
instinct (Klein, 1946). The ego, as it begins to develop,
protects itself from its inherent self-destruction by an
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immediate projection onto an external object of that
destructiveness toward the life-affirming side of the
ego (Klein, 1932).
Finally, in 1957 she developed a new understanding.
Envy projects onto an external object the affirmation
of life and attacks it there. Envy, which Klein referred
to as ‘‘primary envy,’’ is an attack on life itself in the
form of an external object that represents the wish to
keep the ego alive and hence on which the ego is
utterly dependent. Those attacks are achieved, in fantasy, by the very earliest methods available to the
infant: orally scooping out the good object, the
mother’s breast. She believed that primary envy is
the process underlying other forms of envy, including
penis envy.
The consequence for the infant is that it has difficulty in finding a good object in the external world
that, when introjected, can be definitely and stably
good to the ego. However, there is also the libido, and
in its earliest form, it too relates to the external source
of life in a powerful surge of feeling that Klein later
called ‘‘gratitude.’’
Envy, however, causes trouble and leaves potentially
disturbing traces in the later personality. For this reason, Klein and her colleagues subsequently concentrated on envy. Klein regarded envy as such an early
and primary mode of defense against the selfdestruction of the death instinct as to be a constitutional, or innate, reaction.
With this stand she called down great criticism on
herself. The death instinct was always contentious;
Freud regarded it as silent. A primary source of aggression against objects was held by many to be unnecessary, as frustration of libido was a sufficient source and
explanation. And many, perhaps most, analysts found
it impossible to conceive of a bounded ego operating
in relation to a clearly defined external object.
Throughout her career Klein had had to confront disbelief of her observations on violence and aggression
in children. To postulate innate violence as the first
force preoccupying the infant redoubled that disbelief.
The publication of these contentious ideas came,
ironically, at a time when Klein might have felt satisfied that her psychoanalytic work was becoming
appreciated. After the controversial discussions with
Anna Freud in the early 1940s, the group of her close
associates and colleagues had been reduced to a handful, with a number of students. By 1952 her views had
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EPISTEMOLOGY
survived, and her papers from the controversial discussions were published in book form. Her ideas had
also developed enormously with experimental work
on the psychoanalysis of schizophrenia.
Colleagues marked her seventieth birthday with a
festschrift containing the papers of fifteen contributors
apart from herself (Klein et al., 1955). At this moment
of success her new book on envy (1957) brought more
setbacks. The pace of her ideas had gone so fast that
many followers became increasingly reserved about
their support. Paula Heimann (1962) and Donald
Winnicott (1965) made a distinct break from Klein at
this time. In contrast, those who remained loyal to
Klein fervently embraced the idea of envy.
From then to the present (2004), allegiance to the
concept of envy has been a kind of badge of membership
in the Klein group within the British Psycho-Analytical
Society. Because of these group allegiances, the concept
has been seriously studied only by Klein’s followers.
ROBERT D. HINSHELWOOD
See also: Envy; Klein-Reizes, Melanie.
Source Citation
Melanie Klein. (1957). Envy and gratitude: A study of unconscious forces. London: Hogarth Press. Reprint: (1975). The
writings of Melanie Klein, Vol. 3: Envy and gratitude and
other works, 1946–1963 (pp. 176–235). London: Hogarth
Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Bibliography
Heimann, Paula. (1962). Contribution to the discussion of
‘‘The curative factors in psycho-analysis.’’ International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 43, 228–231.
Klein, Melanie. (1929a). Infantile anxiety situations reflected
in a work of art and in the creative impulse. International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 10, 436–443.
———. (1957). Envy and gratitude: A study of unconscious
forces. London: Hogarth Press.
———. (1975). The Writings of Melanie Klein. London:
Hogarth.
Klein, Melanie, Heimann, Paula, and Money-Kyrle, Roger.
(1955). New directions in psycho-analysis. London: Tavistock
Publications.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1965). The maturational processes
and the facilitating environment: studies in the theory of
emotional development. London: Hogarth and the Institute
of Psycho-Analysis.
EPISTEMOLOGY. See Psychoanalytic epistemology
ERIKSON, ERIK HOMBURGER (1902–1994)
Erik Homburger Erikson, American psychoanalyst,
was born on June 15, 1902 in Frankfurt-am-Main, and
died on May 12, 1994, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Erikson was the son of a Danish mother and
unknown father. His step-father was a German pediatrician in Karlsruhe, and after Erikson left home his
mother and step-father, both Jewish, moved to
Palestine. In Vienna, Anna Freud became Erikson’s
analyst in 1927, and he graduated as a child analyst
from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in 1933.
Artistically inclined, Erikson said that he was first
attracted to Freud’s ideas by the magnificence of his
German prose.
He entered Freud’s circle in the summer of 1927,
when he was working as a painter of children’s portraits without any firm professional goals. An old
school friend was at that time the director of a small
progressive school in Vienna run by Dorothy Burlingham and Eva Rosenfeld, both close friends of
Anna Freud.
———. (1935). A contribution to the psychogenesis of
manic-depressive states. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 16, 145–174.
Most of the children at the school were in psychoanalytic treatment, and a number of the parents were
undergoing analysis. Erikson was hired to paint the
portraits of the four Burlingham children. After a brief
period as a tutor, Erikson was asked whether he would
consider becoming a child analyst—a profession he
had not heard of before.
———. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
By the end of 1933 Erikson had settled in Boston,
Massachusetts. He worked in private practice as a
———. (1929b). Personification in the play of children.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 10, 171–182.
———. (1932). The psycho-analysis of children. London:
Hogarth.
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child analyst, the first male in that field. He also was
associated with the Harvard Psychological Clinic
under Henry A. Murray, and did research at Yale. In
1939 Erikson became an American citizen, changing
his name from his step-father’s Homburger to the selfcreated Erikson. Later he moved to Berkeley, California where he became one of the founders of the San
Francisco Psychoanalytic Society. After a 1951 loyalty
oath controversy at the height of the McCarthy period,
Erikson resigned from the University of California and
moved to the Austin Riggs Center in western Massachusetts. In 1960 he accepted a prestigious university
professorship at Harvard College.
Always uncomfortable in academic life, since he
himself was without any formal training aside from
being an analyst, Erikson retired from Harvard in the
early 1970s to return to California where he worked at
the Mt. Zion Department of Psychiatry in San Francisco. In 1987 he returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts. where an Erikson Center was established under
Harvard’s auspices. Erikson’s final days were spent at a
nursing home at Harwich on Cape Cod, near Cotuit
where he and his wife Joan had long had a summer
home.
Erikson’s Childhood and Society first came out in
1950, and was reprinted more than any of his other
books. Young Man Luther (1958) was a study in psychoanalysis and history, as Erikson treated Luther as
an innovative psychologist whose Christian teachings
complemented those of classical analysis. While Identity and the Life Cycle (1959) was a collection of his
papers on ego psychology. Insight and Responsibility
(1964) was a set of papers on the ethical implications
of psychoanalytic insight. Gandhi’s Truth (1969), a
prize-winning book, sought the origins of militant
non-violence in Gandhi’s life. Erikson also gave the
1973 Jefferson Lectures in the Humanities, which
appeared as Dimensions of a New Identity (1974). Life
History and the Historical Moment (1975) was another
collection of essays, and so was A Way of Looking at
Things (1987).
Erikson used his concept of ego identity in order to
move psychoanalytic theory away from Feud’s libido
approach; Erickson saw society as a constructive
source of ego strength. Erikson also developed the
notion of psychohistory as part of his effort to bring
psychoanalysis into the modern social sciences.
PAUL ROAZEN
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Work discussed: Childhood and Society.
Notion developed: Ego identity.
See also: Burlingham-Rosenfeld/Hietzing Schule; Ego
(ego psychology); Identity; Principle of identity preservation; Psychobiography; Psychohistory; United States.
Bibliography
Erikson, Erik H. (1950). Childhood and Society. New York:
W. W. Norton.
———. (1958). Young Man Luther. New York: W. W. Norton.
———. (1959). Identity and the Life Cycle. New York: International Universities Press.
———. (1964). Insight and Responsibility. New York: W. W.
Norton, 256 p.
———. (1969). Gandhi’s Truth. New York: W. W. Norton.
EROS
In ancient Greece the word Eros referred to love and
the god of love. In his final theory of the drives, Sigmund Freud made Eros a fundamental concept referring to the life instincts (narcissism and object libido),
whose goals were the preservation, binding, and union
of the organism into increasingly larger units.
Eros the unifier is opposed to, and yet was blended
into, the death instinct, an antagonistic force leading
to the destruction, disintegration, and dissolution of
everything that exists. ‘‘In this way the libido of our
sexual instincts would coincide with the Eros of the
poets and philosophers which holds all living things
together’’ (Freud, 1920g, p. 50).
The term Eros, understood as a life instinct antagonistic to the death instinct, appeared for the first time
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), where Freud
used it to establish a dynamic polarity that would
define a new instinctual dualism. Freud wrote, ‘‘Our
speculations have suggested that Eros operates from
the beginning of life and appears as a Ôlife instinct’ in
opposition to the Ôdeath instinct’ which was brought
into being by the coming to life of inorganic substance.
These speculations seek to solve the riddle of life by
supposing that these two instincts were struggling
with each other from the very first’’ (p. 61). In this
essay Freud refers to the doctrine of the Greek physician and philosopher Empedocles of Agrigento
511
EROS
(c. 490–430 B.C.E.), for whom the production of all
things results from the interplay of two forces, Love
and Discord, conceived of as the impersonal forces of
attraction and repulsion.
Yet Freud’s theoretical innovation is more than the
pure speculations of philosophy, biology, or physics.
Revision of his concepts was called for by his experience in psychoanalytic practice. He posited within the
organism a primal masochism derived from the action
of the death instinct to account for certain clinical
problems: ambivalence in affective life, nightmares
associated with traumatic neurosis, masochism, and
negative therapeutic reactions.
Freud’s uses of the term Eros (86 of 88 occurrences,
according to Guttman’s Concordance) is contemporary
with his final theory of the instincts developed after
1920. The word itself, with its multiple meanings,
enabled Freud to combine many things that he had
previously separated and contrasted: love between the
sexes, self-love, love for one’s parents or children,
‘‘friendship and love among mankind in general,’’
‘‘devotion to concrete objects and abstract ideas,’’ and
partial sexual drives (component instincts). This
expanded concept of love led Freud to evoke, on several occasions (1920g, 1921c, 1924c, 1925e [1924]),
‘‘the all-inclusive and all-preserving Eros of Plato’s
Symposium’’ (1925e, p. 218).
Although the concept of Eros, properly speaking,
emerged late in Freud’s work, this did not prevent him
from claiming that all his earlier discoveries about
sexuality can be seen in terms of Eros. Psychoanalysis
showed that sexuality did not conceal ‘‘impulsion
towards a union of the two sexes or towards producing
a pleasurable sensation in the genitals’’ (1925e, p. 218),
and that sexuality was thus different from genitality.
Though the term Eros does not appear in the original texts, two notes, one from 1925 in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) and the other from 1920 in
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), reinforce the use of ‘‘Eros’’ as a synonym for ‘‘sexual’’ in
the discovery of psychoanalysis: ‘‘The situation would
be different if Ôsexual’ was being used by my critics in
the sense in which it is now commonly employed in
psychoanalysts—in the sense of ÔEros’’’ (1900a, note
1925, p. 161). Freud even justified his failure to use the
word earlier: ‘‘Anyone who considers sex as something
mortifying and humiliating to human nature is at liberty to make use of the more genteel expressions ÔEros’
51 2
and Ôerotic.’ I might have done so myself from the first
and thus spared myself much opposition. But I did not
want to, for I like to avoid concessions to faintheartedness. One can never tell where that road may lead one;
one gives way first in words, then little by little in substance too’’ (1921c, p. 91). Occurrences of the terms
‘‘Eros’’ (after 1920) and ‘‘eroticism’’ (after 1894) overlap in Freud’s writings without ever leaving the field of
sexuality.
Freud early on recognized the erotic character of
repressed representations that lie at the heart of neurotic symptoms. He cites ‘‘the case of a girl, who blamed
herself because, while she was nursing her sick father,
she had thought about a young man who made a slight
erotic impression on her’’ (1894a, p. 48), and who is
then constrained to treat this unwanted representation
of a sexual nature as if it had ‘‘never occurred.’’ Freud
conceived mental conflict as a moral conflict in which
the troublemaker Eros stirs up trouble in the form of a
symptom. He saw sexuality as a trauma that goes far
beyond the well-known scenes of sexual seduction.
Eros forces the ego to defend itself and thus participates in the division and fragmentation of the psyche.
Repressed erotic representations later return in the
form of symptoms or compromise formations that
substitute for sexual activity or ‘‘precipitates of earlier
experiences in the sphere of love’’ (1910a, p. 51). Such
instances of deferred or aborted love are remote from
sexual attraction and genital activity. Sexuality exists
from infancy, is fundamentally perverse and polymorphous, and consists of a bundle of partial sexual drives
that seek satisfaction independently of one another, in
autoerotic fashion. The oral drive, for example, is seen
as a mouth that kisses itself.
The 1920 footnote in Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality retroactively referring to Eros (1905d, p. 266n)
serves Freud’s theoretical interests: to recognize infantile
sexuality as something distinct from genitality, to
emphasize the diphasic nature of sexual life, and to provide the concept of the drives with a mythical status,
infantile in appearance and dominated by an ongoing
and insatiable quest. Here Eros appears to conflict with
the ego’s instinct for self-preservation. The Oedipus
complex determines the outcome of this conflict through
the possibilities it offers for orienting the libido toward a
sexual object (one that is no longer only sexual) by
means of the phallus. The Oedipus complex is responsible for ensuring that the subject becomes satisfied in love
after the reorganization at puberty, when the partial
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drives (component instincts) are enlisted in the service
of an organized genital apparatus. Failing this, the subject will fall ill unless an alternative object is found
through sublimation.
Eros is not only a cause of symptoms but can also
become the means for their relief. The theoretical
model of Eros as healer is beautifully illustrated in
Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘‘Gradiva’’ (1907a
[1906]).
Love was also at the center of the psychoanalytic
experiment from the time of its initial discovery via
transference. In the middle period of the development
of psychoanalysis (1912–1915), the homage to love in
Delusions and Dreams would butt up against its limitations in a theory of transference, which shows love to
support resistance to remembering, and hence to analysis. Moreover, Freud discovered in cases of sexual
impotence of psychological origin that a conflict exists
between the ‘‘affectionate current’’ and the ‘‘sexual
current’’: ‘‘Where they love they do not desire, and
where they desire they cannot love’’ (1912d, p. 183).
This text anticipates Freud’s comments in ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’ (1914c). In this text, Freud saw
the narcissistic libido as conflicting with erotic love of
the object: Narcissus versus Eros. The ego claims a
place among the sexual objects, and the selfpreservation instincts have a libidinal nature. What
distinguishes Eros is its link with objects: ‘‘A strong
egoism is a protection against falling ill, but in the last
resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and
we are bound to fall ill, if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love’’ (1914c, p. 85).
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920g) overturned these earlier constructions. The theory of a death
instinct, which worked in silence, forced Freud to combine the ego instincts and sexual instincts directed at
objects, grouping them under the umbrella of a single
force whose goal was union: Eros. Such an Eros is no
longer a troublemaker, a divisive agent that disturbs the
mental apparatus. It is the power of creation, of reproduction; it makes existence possible and postpones the
return to an inorganic state. When discussing the lifepreserving sexual instincts (object libido and ego),
Freud explicitly refers to the myth of Eros recounted by
Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. But the life and
death instincts rarely come into play in isolation: They
form various amalgams in which each attempts to make
use of the other’s strength to its own advantage. Freud
shows that moral masochism, for example, ‘‘becomes a
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classical piece of evidence for the existence of fusion of
instinct. Its danger lies in the fact that it originates from
the death instinct and corresponds to the part of that
instinct which has escaped being turned outwards as an
instinct of destruction. But since, on the other hand, it
has the significance of an erotic component, even the
subject’s destruction of himself cannot take place without libidinal satisfaction’’ (1924a).
In Freud’s last work, it is as if the scandal of the discovery of sexuality was displaced in favor of the theoretical innovation of the death instinct. Eros as the
embodiment of Aristophanes’ myth or Empedocles’
theories appears to get the better of Eros as the embodiment of desire, an Eros whose birth is given in the
myth recounted by Diotima in The Symposium.
Jacques Lacan distances, without completely separating, love and desire (Eros). Love is the mirage in
which desire is caught. The phallus is the fulcrum
between the object that gives rise to desire and the part
of the subject, minus language, that is forever lost.
‘‘Therefore, to love is to give what one does not have,
and we can only love by acting as if we don’t have,
even if we do’’ (Lacan, 1991).
ROLAND GORI
See also: Animus-Anima (analytical psychology); Beyond
the Pleasure Principle; Binding/unbinding of the instincts;
Civilization and Its Discontents; Drive/instinct; Genital
love; German romanticism and psychoanalysis; Libido;
Life instinct (Eros); Marcuse, Herbert; Myth; Sexuality.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1894a). The neuro-psychoses of defence.
SE, 3: 41–61.
———. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4: 1–
338; 5: 339–625.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
———. (1907a [1906]). Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s
‘‘Gradiva.’’ SE, 9: 1–95.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18:
1–64.
———. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
513
EROTICISM, ANAL
———. (1924a). Letter to Le Disque Vert. SE, 19: 290–290.
———. (1924b [1923]). Neurosis and psychosis. SE, 19:
147–153.
———. (1924c). The economic problem of masochism. SE,
19: 155–170.
———. (1925e [1924]). The resistances to psycho-analysis.
SE, 19: 211–222.
Guttman, Samuel A. (1984). The concordance to ‘‘The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund
Freud’’ (2nd ed.). New York: International Universities
Press.
Lacan, Jacques. (1991). Le séminaire. Book 8: Le transfert.
Paris: Seuil.
EROTICISM, ANAL
The term anal eroticism is defined as sexual pleasure
predominantly linked to the excitation of the anal
sphincter and the functions of excretion in infancy.
In his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, Freud
observed that sexually-based emotional discharges originating in the anal region, like those in the mouth
and throat, had ceased by the time the normal person
reached adulthood (letter of November 14, 1897,
1950a). He continued, ‘‘the memory of [stimulation]
will produce by deferred action . . . not a release of
libido but of an unpleasure’’ (p. 269). In January of
1898, he sent his friend a summary of his ‘‘Drekkologie’’ (1985c [1887–1904], p. 291), a neologism that he
coined during his self-analysis to designate the science
of filth.
In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905d), Freud described how the child’s sexual activity could be anaclitically supported by the anal zone:
sexual activity in the infant is propped up by another
physiological function, namely defecation; this
occurred in accordance with Freud’s general conception of anaclitic erogenous zones. There were, in his
view, three erogenous zones that could thus prop up
physiological functions: oral, anal, and genital. Freud
noted that to a certain degree the excitability linked to
these zones could remain connected to genitality
throughout life. The human sexual drive was thus a
highly complex mechanism, produced by the contributions of numerous components, of partial drives.
One of those components was anal eroticism, which
defines one of the pregenital organizations of the
libido. Freud wrote that ‘‘The playing of a sexual part
51 4
by the mucous membrane of the anus is by no means
limited to intercourse between men: preference for it is
in no way characteristic of inverted feeling’’ (1905d, p.
152). He thus initiated all the psychoanalytic research
that would later define the role of anal masturbation
in relation to the constitution of the ego in both men
and women.
In ‘‘Character and Anal Erotism’’ (1908b), Freud
described a specifically anal character. As with all other
elements of eroticism, a part of the excitation contributes to sexuality while another part was diverted
from sexual aims and directed towards other ends by
the process of sublimation. He recognized the traits of
the anal character (orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy) as the results of the sublimation of anal eroticism. In particular, the way of handling money merges
with psychic interest in excrement, the product of the
anal zone.
Freud suggested in a letter to Sándor Ferenczi that
anal eroticism might have the same relation to hypochondria as sadism did to obsessional neurosis. In
‘‘The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis’’ (1913i), he
suggested that the passive current of sexuality was fed
by anal eroticism, while activity coincided with sadism. The accentuation of anal eroticism during the
pregenital stage of organization could predispose a
man, in the genital stage, to homosexuality.
Within the framework of a discussion of stages of
the libido, anal eroticism was at the center of the dialogue between Freud and Karl Abraham. Their common
research led to Freud to write, among other essays,
‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’ (1916–1917g [1915]).
One of melancholia’s striking characteristics derives
from an anal eroticism which is torn from its connections and regressively transformed. For Freud, the
regression connected with this illness allowed him to
discover the importance of anal eroticism and its
involvement with relationship to the object, whether
this was expressed in terms of retention or expulsion.
Freud’s writings on narcissism and object relations
were clarified by this insight. In his article ‘‘On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism’’
(1917c), he hypothesized that defecation provided the
infant with its first opportunity to choose between a
narcissistic attitude and one of object-love. Stubbornness and obstinacy came from the narcissistic persistence of anal eroticism. The stool was the object of a
loss that gave rise to feelings of ambivalence. Toilet
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training supplied a model for object relations, for the
ego latched on to this experience, which would color its
future relationships. Later Freud theorized, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a), that ‘‘Anal erotism . . .
succumbs in the first instance to the Ôorganic repression’ which paved the way to civilization’’ (p. 100n).
Anal eroticism and its links with introjection and
projection were studied clinically by Karl Abraham.
According to him, each of the two early stages of psychosexual development, the oral and the anal,
included a substage. The ambivalence arising during
the second, oral-sadistic substage of the oral stage was
reinforced during the immediately following analsadistic substage (Abraham, 1924/1949). Freud later
(1933a [1932]) adopted Abraham’s substages, characterizing the first as destructive and the second as possessive and conservative with respect to the object.
The work of Abraham and Freud made it possible
to understand how ‘‘the fear of becoming poor . . . is
derived from anal erotism’’ (1917e, p. 252). This idea
inspired Melanie Klein (1935) when she conceptualized the tendencies to idealize and denigrate of the
object, and also the manic defenses related to such
regressive states that would eventually define her
notion of a paranoid-schizoid position.
Ernest Jones (1918), for his part, took up the connections between anal erotism and the capacity for
concentration as the origin of thought. Leonard Shengold (1985) asserted that an excess of control prevented anal erotism from being manifested. This
excess was dehumanizing because of links that forced
narcissism and anal erotism into a deobjectalizing
regression.
Note that anal eroticism should be seen in relationship with the mastery of the ego functions and with
the mastery wielded over the object as separate from
the subject. André Green (1993/1999) has considered
the importance of primary anality for subjectivation
and its influence on the object relation.
DOMINIQUE J. ARNOUX
See also: Anality; Castration complex; Character formation; Coprophilia; Erotogenicity; Feces; Gift; Libidinal
stage; Mastery; Money in the psychoanalytic treatment;
‘‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’’ (Rat Man);
Pregenital; Psychosexual development; Stage (or phase);
Symbolization, process of.
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Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1949). A short study of the development of
the libido, viewed in the light of mental disorders. In
Selected papers of Karl Abraham (pp. 418–501). London:
Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1924)
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1913i). The disposition to obsessional neurosis: A
contribution to the problem of choice of neurosis. SE, 12:
311–326.
———. (1916–1917g [1915]). Mourning and melancholia.
SE, 14: 237–258.
———. (1930a [1929]). Civilization and its discontents. SE,
21: 57–145.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on
psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
———. (1985c [1887–1904]). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (Jeffery M. Masson, Ed. and Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard
University Press.
Green, André. (1999). The work of the negative (Andrew
Weller, Trans.). London: Free Association. (Original work
published 1993)
Jones, Ernest. (1948). Anal-erotic character traits. In Papers
on psycho-analysis (5th ed.). Boston: Beacon Press. (Original work published 1918)
Klein, Melanie. (1935). A contribution to the psychogenesis
of manic-depressive states. In The writings of Melanie Klein
(Vol. 1, pp. 262–289). (Reprinted from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, (1935) 145–174.)
Shengold, Leonard. (1985). Defensive anality and anal narcissism. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 66, 47–74.
EROTICISM, ORAL
Sexual pleasure that is linked predominantly to the
excitation of the oral cavity and the lips, first experienced through an infant’s feeding, is defined as oral
eroticism.
Freud spoke of the ‘‘oral sexual system’’ as early as
his letters to Wilhelm Fliess (letter of January 3, 1897,
in 1950a, p. 222). Sucking was from then on considered as a sexual activity, and the lips, together with the
surrounding area, as the oral erogenous zone. The sexual drive acquires an autonomy vis à vis the vital functions (nutrition) which support it, and satisfies itself
in autoerotic fashion. Freud remarked that this
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EROTICISM, URETHRAL
excitability may remain, to a certain degree, linked to
genitality. The human sexual drive can appear therefore
as a highly complex montage, born of the confluence of
numerous factors, some of which are drives known as
‘‘partial,’’ which at the beginning were independent.
One of the components of the pregenital organization of the libido, consequently, issued directly from
oral erotism. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905d), Freud distinguished between two pregenital
phases: the oral or cannibal phase and the anal-sadistic
phase. He added: ‘‘[During the oral phase] the sexual
aim consists in the incorporation of the object—the
prototype of a process which, in the form of identification, is later to play such an important psychological
part’’ (p. 198). This constituted, therefore, a way of
relating to the object (note of 1915).
In his article, ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia,’’ (1916–
1917g) Freud described identification as a ‘‘preliminary
stage of object-choice, that it is the first way—and one
that is expressed in an ambivalent fashion—in which
the ego picks out an object’’ (p. 249). It would like to
incorporate the object, and that by way of devouring it.
Therefore in the phase of the oral organization of the
libido, the loving attachment to the object still coincides
with the annihilation of the latter, as Freud affirmed in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g).
Melanie Klein would later connect an oral fixation,
in both sexes, to sucking the father’s penis, with the
exacerbated phase of sadism.
DOMINIQUE J. ARNOUX
See also: Anal-sadistic stage; Anorexia nervosa; Basic Neurosis, The-oral regression and psychic masochism; Breastfeeding; Bulimia; Depression; Dream screen; Drive, partial; Erotogenicity; Libidinal stage; Melancholy; Oedipus
complex, early; Orality; Pregenital; Psychosexual development; Stammering; Sucking (oral stage) Transitional
object; Transitional object, space; Weaning.
Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1924). The process of introjection in melancholia: Two stages of the oral phase of the libido. In
Selected papers in psychoanalysis. (Douglas Bryan and Alix
Strachey, Trans.). London: Hogarth Press.
———. (1924). Melancholy and obsessional neurosis: Two
stages of the anal-sadistic phase of the libido. In Selected
papers in psychoanalysis (Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey,
Trans.). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1916–1917g). Mourning and melancholia. SE, 14:
237–258.
In ‘‘The Economic Problem of Masochism,’’
(1924c) he emphasized that the existence of masochism is expressed erogenously, in all phases of libido
development; erogenous masochism often changes its
psychic dress. So, ‘‘The fear of being eaten up by the
totem animal (the father) originates from the primitive oral organization’’ (p. 165).
———. (1924c). The economic problem of masochism. SE,
19: 155–170.
Karl Abraham, in ‘‘A Short Study of the Development
of the Ego, Based on an Analysis of Mental Problems’’
(1924), said that sadistic drives always have a special affinity with anal eroticism, rather than oral eroticism.
———. (1950a). Extracts from the Fliess papers. SE, 1: 173–
280.
In terms of relation to the object—the mother—
from the point of view of the child, never gave enough
milk; it is ‘‘as though they had never sucked long
enough at their mother’s breast,’’ said Freud in his article, ‘‘Female Sexuality’’ (1931b, p. 234). Taking up the
conclusions of Karl Abraham of 1924, Freud conceived
of two stages in the oral phase, one pre-ambivalent
regarding the breast, the second oral-sadistic; linked to
the development of dentition and characterized by the
appearance of ambivalence, which will be intensified
in the following phase, that of anal-sadism (1933a).
51 6
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18:
1–64.
———. (1931b). Female sexuality. SE, 21: 221–243.
———. (1933a). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
Klein, Melanie. (1932). The psychoanalysis of children. London: Hogarth.
EROTICISM, URETHRAL
Urethral eroticism is characterized by pleasure associated with micturition (or urination). In ‘‘Character
and Anal Erotism’’ (1908b), Freud wrote, ‘‘We ought
in general to consider whether other charactercomplexes, too, do not exhibit a connection with the
excitations of particular erotogenic zones. At present I
only know of the intense Ôburning’ ambition of people
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who earlier suffered from enuresis’’ (p. 175). In ‘‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’’ (1905e
[1901], p. 74), Freud emphasized the pleasure and erotic significance of micturition and considered enuresis
as equivalent to masturbation. In his Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), he specified that urethral eroticism occurs more particularly in the ‘‘second
phase of infantile masturbation,’’ the phallic phase.
In ‘‘Character and Anal Erotism’’ (1908b), Freud
returned to the idea that enuresis is the source of intense
ambition. The character traits that persist are either the
unchanged continued primal drives or their sublimation,
or reaction formations that conflict with primal drives.
Freud emphasized the connections between urethral eroticism and ambition in Civilization and Its Discontents
(1930a [1929]) and between fire and genital eroticism in
‘‘The Acquisition and Control of Fire’’ (1932a).
In ‘‘The Narcissistic Evaluation of Excretory Processes in Dreams and Neurosis’’ (1949), Karl Abraham
later pursued a similar line of thought when he noted
that subjects inclined to urethral eroticism have a
sense of unlimited power, believing that they can create or destroy any object.
In ‘‘Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict’’ (1928),
Melanie Klein emphasized a specifically urethral form
of sadism in which fantasies contribute to difficulties
of sexual potency in men and unconsciously help attribute a cruel role to the penis.
DOMINIQUE J. ARNOUX
See also: Enuresis (bedwetting); Oedipus complex, early;
Wish for a baby.
Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1949). The narcissistic evaluation of excretory processes in dreams and neurosis. In Selected papers of
Karl Abraham, M.D. (Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey,
Trans). London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psycho-analysis. (Original work published 1920)
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1905e [1901]). Fragment of an analysis of a case of
hysteria. SE, 7: 1–122.
———. (1908b). Character and anal erotism. SE, 9: 167–
175.
———. (1930a [1929]). Civilization and its discontents. SE,
21: 57–145.
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———. (1932a [1931]). The acquisition and control of fire.
SE, 22: 183–193.
Klein, Melanie. (1928). Early stages of the Oedipus conflict.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 9, 167–180.
Further Reading
Bass, Alan. (1994). Aspects of urethrality in women. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 63, 491–517.
EROTOGENIC MASOCHISM
Erotogenic masochism is the primary, biological, and
constitutional masochism that results from libidinal
excitation, which provides the physiological basis. It is
the psychic superstructure that supports the other
forms of masochism, feminine and moral, that Freud
described along with it in ‘‘The Economic Problem of
Masochism’’ (1924c).
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d)
Freud noted that ‘‘it may well be that nothing of considerable importance can occur in the organism without contributing some component to the excitation of
the sexual instinct’’ (pp. 204–205). Earlier, he had specified that in the case of pain, in particular, a quantitative factor was added to the qualitative factor characteristic of the erotogenic zones.
Freud explained in ‘‘The Economic Problem of
Masochism’’ that erotogenic masochism, as ‘‘pleasure
in pain,’’ subverts the pleasure principle, which would
otherwise tend toward the zero excitation characteristics of the Nirvana principle and would be ‘‘entirely in
the service of the death instincts’’ (p. 160). He further
elaborated that the portion of the death instinct that
the libido has not diverted outward toward objects
remains inside the organism and ‘‘with the help of the
accompanying sexual excitation . . . becomes libidinally
bound there. It is in this portion that we have come to
recognize the original, erotogenic masochism’’ (pp.
163–64). It is thus vestigial evidence of the earliest
fusion of the instincts, which, by a kind of assimilation, binds the essential core of the death instinct that
continually threatens the individual’s existence.
According to Freud in this essay, erotogenic masochism is present in all of the developmental phases of
the libido: the oral stage, as manifested in the ‘‘fear of
being eaten up by the totem-animal (father)’’ (p. 165);
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EROTOGENIC ZONE
the anal-sadistic stage, especially with the erotogenic
role of the buttocks (the wish to be beaten by the
father); the phallic stage, as shown by the traces of
(disavowed) castration in masochistic fantasies; and
finally the genital stage, in ‘‘characteristically female’’
situations, namely, ‘‘being castrated, or copulated
with, or giving birth to a baby’’ (p. 162).
It can be noted that in this libidinal sequence, Freud
mentioned only the father as the object of masochistic
desire, including during the oral stage, when this is
manifested in the form of a defense—the fear of being
devoured—whereas it is the wish to be beaten that is
used as an example for the following stage. This attests
to Freud’s difficulty in conceptualizing early relations,
including masochistic ones, with the mother. However, the fact that he was dealing with early developmental stages is not what caused the difficulty, as he
did not hesitate at the time, in 1924, to posit erotogenic masochism as being primary in psychic life.
Melanie Klein did not concur with this explanation,
which construed anxieties about being devoured in
terms of an erotogenic masochism that would cause the
subject to wish for them. Given her emphasis on projection onto an object, conceived as present almost from
the outset—and despite both her taste for the archaic
and her agreement with the second theory of the
instincts—she theorized them as anxieties about retaliation for oral sadism, in a view that is thus closer to secondary masochism, the existence of which, moreover,
Freud recognized.
DENYS RIBAS
See also: Masochism.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1924c). The economic problem of masochism. SE,
19: 155–170.
EROTOGENIC ZONE
Any part of the body susceptible of becoming excited,
of being a seat of pleasure, is an erotogenic zone. Freud
nevertheless used the term to refer primarily to a num51 8
ber of specific areas, notably, the genitals, mouth, and
anus. These zones he saw as locations of particular
instincts known as ‘‘component instincts.’’ In neurosis,
on his account, nongenital erotogenic zones come to
function as substitutes for the genitals. The idea of erotogenic zones was inseparable from the theory of libidinal stages, each of which, at a certain age, is fixed
upon a particular zone.
Freud found support in the work of the pediatrician
S. Lindner for his assertion that the child pursues the
kind of sucking that develops anaclitically from feeding at the breast, for the pleasure obtained from excitation of the oral erotogenic zone. ‘‘The child’s lips, in
our view, behave like an erotogenic zone, and no
doubt stimulation by the warm flow of milk is the
cause of the pleasurable sensation’’ (1905d, p. 181).
Sexual activity centered on an erotogenic zone rests
first on its utility for self-preservation but is subsequently repeated independently of that function. Erotogenic zones are thus seen as the source of the sexual
instinct, its place of origin, and (for the appropriate
instinct) its place of residence.
Freud nevertheless broadened his definition of an
erotogenic zone well beyond its original link with a
bodily function, noting that ‘‘any other part of the skin
or mucous membrane can take over the functions of
an erotogenic zone, and must therefore have some
aptitude in that direction’’ (1905d, p. 183). An area
may be affected by chance as the child explores the
body and discovers its potential for pleasure through
an association with the simultaneous pleasure of sucking. For the adult who represses the sexual nature of
the genitals, this opens up the regressive possibility of
instating any part of the body as an erotogenic zone.
In this case, hysterogenic zones present the same characteristics as erotogenic ones.
How is pleasure produced at the level of the erotogenic zone? The pressure of the need for satisfaction,
which is of central origin, is projected outward, stimulating a peripheral erotogenic zone, whose manipulation, in a manner analogous to sucking on the breast,
relieves the feelings aroused and so generates satisfaction. The erotogenic zone may also be stimulated
directly, in which case it by itself creates a need, which,
to be satisfied, calls for further stimulation of the zone
in question.
Each particular erotogenic zone (the mouth, anus,
genital organs) is wedded to a habitual stimulation
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that will vary according to the life stage reached. Like
the labial zone before it, the anal zone is eroticized by
means of an anaclitic dependence on a corresponding
bodily function, in this case excretion. The genital
zone (the penis in the case of a boy, the clitoris in that
of a girl) first becomes erotogenic through an anaclitic
relationship with the function of micturition, the first
sexual excitation of this zone constituting the point of
departure for a normal sexual life. Freud (1908b) associated specific character types with adult fixations on
the erotogenic nature of this or that zone.
The sexual life of early childhood is not confined to
the stimulation of erotogenic zones, for so-called component instincts can emerge independently of those
zones. The instinct to see and be seen, even though it
is not autoerotic in nature and calls for an outside
object, may turn the eye into the equivalent of an erotogenic zone. Likewise, the cruelty component of the
sexual instinct, which seems at first even more independent of the erotogenic zones, is in fact linked to the
instinct for mastery and to the musculature. By contrast, the skin of the buttocks, because of the chastisements it so often receives, can easily become an erotogenic zone and the site of passive masochistic pleasure.
With the introduction of narcissism, Freud added an
important dimension to the theory of erotogenic zones
by joining it with the ego-libido: ‘‘We can decide to
regard erotogenicity as a general characteristic of all
organs and may then speak of an increase or decrease of
it in a particular part of the body. For every such change
in the erotogenicity of the organs there might then be a
parallel change of libidinal cathexis in the ego’’ (1914c,
p. 84). The withdrawal of libido into the ego and the
libido’s cathexis of organs, as erotogenic zones now
become painful and sensitive, may be thought to underlie hypochondria, and in such cases of hypochondria,
health can be restored only by redeploying libido to
objects external to the subject’s own body.
The erotism aroused in these zones is essentially
polymorphous in the young child. Save in the case of
perversion, the child’s erotism is later unified under the
primacy of the genital zone, but the fate of this infantile
sexuality varies: repressions, reaction-formations, and
sublimations come into play as ways of dealing with the
excitations emanating from the erotogenic zones, excitations that are normally unusable, or largely unusable,
for the adult. In such cases, the instinctual object of the
drive is often modified. Sándor Ferenczi (1916) showed,
for instance, that an interest in money was founded on
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the anal erotogenic zone and the possibility of establishing a symbolic link between feces and money.
In this light, and in view of the potentially infinite
number of transformations of instincts deriving from
the erotogenic zones, it is fair to say that any form of
human activity might be attributable to erotogenic
sources. The psychoanalytic theory of the erotogenic
zones appears to fall under the rubric of autoerotism,
for it is the component instincts, independent of these
zones, that are said to be directed straight at the object.
Yet, as has often been pointed out, it would seem impossible to dissociate the emergence of these multiple erotogenic zones from pleasure-generating encounters with
the object, especially in the context of maternal care.
It is worth mentioning that theorists since Freud
have considered other erotogenic zones, such as those
that affect the functions of respiration and hearing.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Anaclisis/anaclitic; Anality; Anal-sadistic stage;
Autoeroticism; Body image; Breastfeeding; Character formation; Cruelty; Drive/instinct; Erotogenicity; Eroticism,
oral; Exhibitionism; Feminine sexuality; Libidinal stage;
Libido; Masochism; Masturbation; Maternal; Object,
choice of/change of; Oedipus complex; Orality; Organization; Organ pleasure; Pictogram; Pregenital; Primary
object; Psychosexual development; Sexuality; Skin; Stage;
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
Bibliography
Ferenczi, Sándor (1916). Stages in the development of the
sense of reality. In his Contributions to psycho-analysis.
Boston: Richard Badger.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1908b). Character and anal erotism. SE, 9: 167–
175.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
EROTOGENICITY
The term erotogenicity designates the capacity of any
part of the body, whether muco-cutaneous surfaces or
internal organs, to become the site of sexual excitation.
Rarely used by Freud, the term first appeared in
‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction.’’ (1914c) Freud
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EROTOGENICITY
wrote: ‘‘Let us now, taking any part of the body,
describe its activity of sending sexually exciting stimuli
to the mind as its ‘‘erotogenicity,’’ and let us further
reflect that the considerations on which our theory of
sexuality was based have long accustomed us to the
notion that certain other parts of the body—the ‘‘erotogenic’’ zones—may act as substitutes for the genitals
and behave analogously to them. We have then only
one more step to take. We can decide to regard erotogenicity as a general characteristic of all organs and
may then speak of an increase or decrease of it in a particular part of the body. For every such change in the
erotogenicity of the organs there might then be a parallel change of libidinal cathexis in the ego’’ (p. 84).
This term erotogenicity, or erogeneity, appeared contemporaneously with a conceptual change whereby
Freud partitioned the libido (into the ego libido and
narcissistic libido), this being indispensable in order to
explain the processes at work in the psychoses, the
‘‘actual neuroses’’ (particularly hypochondria), and
love life. This energetic and quantitative meaning of
erogenicity is directly linked to the concepts of libido,
ego, and object. It would thus modify though not
replace the qualitative conception of the erogenous
zones from which it derived and which were previously
defined as the sources of the autoerotic component
instincts (partial drives).
Freud very early recognized the sexual excitability
(Erregbarkeit) of certain parts of the body apart from
the genital zones, in the strict sense, and referred to
these as erogenous zones. This expression is derived
from Charcot’s hysterogenic zones, a term used to designate ‘‘more or less delimited regions of the body, on
which pressure or merely rubbing determines, more or
less rapidly, the phenomenon of the aura, which is
sometimes succeeded, if we continue to apply pressure, by an hysterical attack. These points, or rather
these surfaces, also have the property of being the seat
of permanent sensitivity.’’ (Charcot, 1890). When
speaking of the case of Elisabeth von R. in Studies on
Hysteria, Freud extended the meaning of hysterogenic
zone by giving it its full value as a corporal inscription
of a mnemic trace and describing the sexual pleasure
within the conversion symptom. Elisabeth von R’s
pains always started from a particular point on the
right thigh and the analysis revealed that her father
used to rest his leg there when she was caring for him.
Freud states: "In this way she gave me the explanation
that I needed of the emergence of what was an atypical
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hysterogenic zone" (1895d, 148). The notion of hysterogenic zone came to be modified between Charcot
and Freud because it now meant a place with a sexual
‘‘stimulability’’ (Reizbarkeit) that was determined by
the subject’s history and not by anatomy.
The equivalence between erogeneity and hysterogeneity is clearly defined in two of Freud’s letters to
Wilhelm Fliess, one dated December 6, 1896, in which
the term erogenous zone appears for the first time, the
other dated November 14, 1897, in which he wrote: ‘‘I
have often suspected that something organic played a
part in repression; I have told you before that it is a
question of the attitude adopted to former sexual
zones. . . . We must suppose that in infancy sexual
release is not so much localized as it becomes later, so
that zones which are later abandoned (and possibly
the whole surface of the body) stimulate to some
extent the production of something that is analogous
to the later release of sexuality’’ (p. 232). These sexual
zones that are abandoned in the course of development constitute infantile sexuality proper, and are
recathected in perversions and neuroses. In Three
Essays Freud shows that through the action of displacement and condensation these erogenous zones ‘‘then
behave exactly like the genitals (1905d, p. 183) and
produce the symptoms that are conceived of as substitutes for sexual satisfaction. The paradigm is that of
hysteria: ‘‘erotogenic and hysterogenic zones show the
same characteristics’’ (1905d, p. 184).
He then goes on to describe the development phases
of infantile sexual organization (oral, anal, and phallic). The erogenous zones are the source of the component sexual impulses that seek autoerotic satisfaction
until they are subordinated to and take part in genital
activity. Freud’s model for the excitation of the erogenous zones is based on the erection, including the tension (unpleasure) it mobilizes, and the demand for
discharge (pleasure) that it prescribes. The fact that
certain parts of the body are predestined to be erogenous is explained by the Freudian concept of anaclisis.
The term is used to designate the relationship of leaning and implication that exists between the sexual
instincts and the needs of self-preservation. For example, Freud postulates for the oral instinct that, ‘‘the
satisfaction of the erotogenic zone is associated, in the
first instance, with the satisfaction of the need for
nourishment’’ (1905d, p. 181).
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tion of erogeneity in 1914 toward an energy-based and
quantitative model where the hysteria paradigm is
replaced by that of hypochondria. It was now the
whole body that behaved like a male genital organ.
The distribution of the libido and its capacity to go
beyond the frontiers of narcissism conditioned suffering and love equally.
Inhibition, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d) describes
the relationship between the ego-function of an organ
and erogeneity: ‘‘It has been discovered as a general
fact that the ego-function of an organ is impaired if its
erotogenicity—its sexual significance—is increased. It
behaves, if I may be allowed a rather absurd analogy,
like a maid-servant who refuses to go on cooking
because her master has started a love-affair with her’’
(pp. 89–90). Freud gives other examples of inhibitions
following a risk of conflict between the ego and the
superego, as when profit and success are prohibited
and when failure satisfies a need for self-punishment.
Thus, in the second theory of the instincts erogeneity
is equivalent to a libidinal satisfaction that can be
accomplished up to and including self-punishment
and self-destruction as in, for example, moral
masochism.
child’s body by another. The mother who caresses her
child’s dimple with her finger inscribes a difference there,
a flaw, a point of focus, an erogenous center: ‘‘What
makes the erotogenic inscription possible is the fact that
the caressing finger is itself, for the mother, an erotogenic
zone. This finger, in its essential libidinal value, can be
called a ‘‘letter-holder’’ or inscriber to the extent that, as
an erotogenic zone of the mother, a letter fixes into its
flesh the interbal of an exquisite difference’’ (p. 50).
ROLAND GORI
See also: Erotogenic zone; Fetishism; Hypochondria;
Inhibition; Libidinal development; Organ pleasure.
Bibliography
Charcot, Jean Martin. (1890). Oeuvres complètes. Leçons sur
les maladies du système nerveux. Paris: Progrès Médicale.
Freud, Sigmund. (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 48–
106.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
The Freudian notion that erogenous activity is
anaclitic in relation to the satisfaction of the fundamental needs of self-preservation favored the theoretical illusion of a progressive organization of instinctual
stages with maturation being almost biologically
determined. This conceptual model compromises the
importance of the Other and its constitutive intervention in infantile sexuality. By referring to anaclisis in
another sense, the choice of love object being based on
the model of the mother who feeds or the father who
protects, Freud’s 1914 text introduces another perspective, but not without some hesitation and aporia.
———. (1914d). On the history of the psycho-analytic
movement. SE, 14: 1–66.
Jacques Lacan (1964-1966) developed a theoretical
model that denies the genetic point of view of instinctual stages and its ‘‘naturally’’ programmed organization. He writes: ‘‘There is no relation of engendering
between one component instinct and the next,’’ and
states: ‘‘The passage from the oral instinct to the anal
is not produced by a process of maturation but by
means of the intervention of something that has nothing to do with instincts—by the intervention, the
reversal, of the demand of the Other.’’
EROTOMANIA
Serge Leclaire (1968) demonstrated that erogeneity
depends closely on the ‘‘sexual value’’ projected onto the
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———. (1926d). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. SE,
20: 75–172.
Lacan, Jacques. (1966). Position de l’Inconsuent. Écrits.
Paris: Seuil. (Original work published 1964)
Leclaire, Serge. (1999). Psychoanalyzing: on the order of the
unconscious and the practice of the letter. (Peggy Kamuf,
Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original
work published 1968)
Erotomania, the ‘‘delusion of being loved,’’ is a morbid
fascination that is clinically classified as a form of delusion, accompanied by insistent demands and jealousy.
Emil Kraepelin associates it with the paranoid psychoses and Sigmund Freud interprets it psychoanalytically (1911c [1910]). For Freud the inverse projection
of erotomania serves as a defensive function against
latent homosexuality:
Another element is chosen for contradiction in
erotomania, which remains totally unintelligible on
521
ERYTHROPHOBIA (FEAR
OF
BLUSHING)
any other view: ÔI do not love him—I love her.’ And
in obedience to the same need for projection, the
proposition is transformed into: ÔI observe that she
loves me.’ ÔI do not love him—I love her, because
SHE LOVES ME.’ Many cases of erotomania might
give an impression that they could be satisfactorily
explained as being exaggerated or distorted heterosexual fixations, if our attention were not attracted
by the circumstance that these infatuations invariably begin, not with any internal perception of loving, but with an external perception of being loved.
But in this form of paranoia the intermediate proposition ÔI love her’ can also become conscious,
because the contradiction between it and the original proposition is not a diametrical one, not so irreconcilable as that between love and hate: it is, after
all, possible to love her as well as him. It can thus
come about that the proposition which has been
substituted by projection (Ôshe loves me’) may make
way again for the Ôbasic language’ proposition ÔI
love her’ (1911c [1910], pp. 63–64).
The initial core can be traced back to the narcissistic
root through idealization (projection of the subject’s
ideal ego), split personality, and double bind
situations.
In 1920 Gatian de Clérambault defined his conception of erotomanic delusion in a letter to the Société
Clinique de Médecine Mentale (Clinical society of mental medicine) as the ‘‘coexistence of two delusions: persecution and erotomania.’’ In 1921 he isolated ‘‘pure
erotomania’’ within the context of emotional delusion.
This emotional syndrome, which is generated by feelings of pride, desire, and hope, revolves around a ‘‘fundamental postulate’’: ‘‘It is the object that began and
that loves the most or that loves alone.’’ This revelation,
generally found in women, initiates the phase of hope.
A number of topics are derived from this, for example,
the belief that ‘‘the object cannot experience happiness
without being loved.’’ From then on their protection,
their efforts at closeness, and indirect manifestations of
their love are combined with paradoxical behavior patterns. Interpreted as hardships and especially as demonstrations of love, they appear as persecutory during the
stages of spite and bitterness that are part of a chronic,
persistent development. The associated erotomania is a
fluid entity, an expression of a paranoid, a schizophrenic psychiatric condition.
In spite of our clinical (found in DSM IV) and psychopathological understanding, there have been few
52 2
therapeutic advances for such patients, who are often
intrusive and consequently rarely succeed in attracting
attention for very long.
MICHEL DEMANGEAT
See also: Delusion; Mathilde, case of; Paranoia; Passion;
Persecution; ‘‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’’; Psychoses, chronic and delusional.
Bibliography
Demangeat, Michel. (1999). Historisation et structure dans
les névroses passionnelles. Bordeaux: Cahiers de Trait.
Freud, Sigmund. (1911c [1910]). Psycho-analytic notes on
an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides). SE, 12: 1–82.
Clérambault, Gatian de, and Brousseau, Albert. (1987).
Coexistence de deux délires: Persécution et érotomanie
(présentation de malades). In Œuvres psychiatriques (p.
323). Paris: Frénésie. (Reprinted from Bulletin de la Société
clinique de médecine mentale Dec. 1920.)
Perrier, François. (1967). L’érotomanie. In P. AulagnierSpairani et al., Le Désir et la Perversion (p. 129–162). Paris: Le
Seuil.
Rosolato, Guy. (1980). Clérambault et les délires passionnels. Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse, 21, 199–213.
ERYTHROPHOBIA (FEAR OF BLUSHING)
Erythrophobia or ereuthrophobia describes a pathological fear of blushing in public.
In the Minutes of the Psychoanalytical Society of
Vienna (Nunberg and Federn, 1962–75) the session of
February 3, 1909, was devoted to ‘‘A case of compulsive
blushing’’ presented by Alfred Adler in the presence of
Freud, Paul Federn, Max Graf, Edouard Hitschmann,
Albert Joachim, Otto Rank, Isidor Sadger, and Fritz
Wittels.
According to Freud, we cannot classify this state
among the sexual neuroses because it is situated somewhere between anxiety hysteria and paranoia. These
two assertions are to be found in the comments he
made after Adler’s conference: ‘‘Erythrophobia consists of being ashamed for unconscious reasons [. . .].
The first thing these patients were ashamed of was
usually masturbation; more generally, the secret of
their precocious knowledge with regard to sexuality.’’
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And: ‘‘Neuroses cannot be expressed with a single current but only by a pair of opposites which are shame
and rage in this case. Only the coexistence of these
active and passive current explains the case of erythrophobia: it is the meeting of these two currents that
produces the attack.’’
Ernest Jones, for his part, distinguished between
‘‘ereuthrophobia,’’ the fear of blushing, and ‘‘erythrophobia’’ or fear of the color red (1913).
BERNARD GOLSE
Marty, this abrasion of libidinal bonds and impression
of fragmentation constitute the very definition of the
death instinct (it should be recalled that Marty envisions the death instinct as a deficiency of individual
movements of life without the opposing destructive
charge carried by the death instinct as theorized by Sigmund Freud). However, adds Marty, ‘‘although essential depressives thus seem always to carry phenomena of
death within themselves, the libido seems to be extinguished only when life is extinguished, except in certain
rare cases.’’ In such cases, he contends, the ego ceases to
exist as an agency within the psychic apparatus.
See also: Phobias in children; Phobic neurosis.
Bibliography
Jones, Ernest. (1913). Pathology of morbid anxiety. Papers
on Psychoanalysis. London: Bailliere, Tindall & Cox, 1918.
Nunberg, Hermann; and Federn, Ernst. (1962–75). Minutes
of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. New York: International Universities Press.
ESSENTIAL DEPRESSION
The notion of essential depression was introduced by
Pierre Marty in his 1966 article ‘‘La dépression essentielle,’’ shortly after the notion of ‘‘operative thought,’’
and it became a clinical construct in the treatment of
psychosomatic disorders. The term essential depression
emerged after ‘‘depression without an object’’ and is a
more appropriate name than the latter because the
phenomenon it describes constitutes the very essence
of depression.
Essential depression involves a reduction in the level
of both object-libido and narcissistic libido, without
any positive economic counterpart, and thus without
any libidinal connection at the relational level; this distinguishes it from other depressions of the neurotic or
even psychotic type. This specificity of the relational
mode with the investigator, an analogue for the overall
relational mode, indicatesa diagnosis of this type of
depression, which can be difficult to detect. Everything
seems to take place without visible emotion, flattening
any underlying drama or internal conflict. This absence
of any nameable affect is comparable to the hypothesis
of alexithymia: We find something like an erasure of the
dynamic capacities of the basic mental functions across
the entire spectrum—the absence of any vital link gives
the impression of a functional breakdown. According to
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Marty subsequently introduced this clinical construct into his work as a pivotal notion, along with
‘‘operative thought’’—all within the framework of ‘‘disorganization’’ that is part of his model of the somatization process. His most extensive account is found in Les
mouvements individuels de vie et de mort. Vol. 2: L’Ordre
psychosomatique (Individual movements of life and
death. Vol. 2: The psychosomatic order; 1980), where
he emphasizes one of the main signs of essential depression: The disappearance of unconscious feelings of guilt
in an ego that only poorly fulfills its roles of linking, distribution, and defense. He once again underscores the
fragility of the preconscious at this stage. The deficit of
this symptom is thus situated within the psyche, and
somatic disturbances are the result within a system that
is defensive and yet disorganizing in response to
trauma. He theorizes that this phase is preceded by an
automatic, diffuse anxiety that is related to anxiety neurosis, which for its part cannot be understood as an
alarm signal that should trigger the mental defenses. In
the first volume of Les mouvements individuels de vie et
de mort, subtitled Essai d’économie psychosomatique
(Essay on psychosomatic economy; 1976), Marty
hypothesizes that the passage into essential depression
occurs through depletion of the ‘‘anxiety apparatus’’ at
the expense of psychic functioning.
ALAIN FINE
See also: Character neurosis; Depression; Disintegration,
feelings of, (anxieties); Disorganization; Mentalization;
Negative, work of the; Operational thinking;
Psychosomatic.
Bibliography
Marty, Pierre. (1966). La dépression essentielle. Revue française de psychanalyse, 30, 5–6.
523
ESTRANGEMENT
———. (1976). Les mouvements individuels de vie et de
mort. Vol. 1: Essai d’économie psychosomatique. Paris:
Payot.
———. (1980). Les mouvements individuels de vie et de
mort. Vol. 2: L’Ordre psychosomatique. Paris: Payot.
ESTRANGEMENT
The term estrangement connotes an idea of novelty or
even bizarreness. Freud, in his essay ‘‘The Uncanny’’
(1919h), added an additional meaning when he emphasized that this feeling, an experience close to a
sensation, is at its peak when it is triggered by the
reappearance of a familiar object that has been forgotten or repressed for a long time. The feeling of
estrangement can be compared to the phenomena of
déjà vu or déjà vécu (previously lived). Although the
concept is developed in The psychopathology of everyday life (Freud, 1901), it is referred to as such only in
his short essay ‘‘A Disturbance of Memory on the
Acropolis’’ (Freud, 1936a).
The concept of estrangement has been extensively
described in classical psychiatry, which views it as a
delusion associated with the inability to recognize a
known object or person. Pierre Janet considered
estrangement to be a disturbance of the reality function and a breakdown in the process of mental
synthesis. Freud, however, distinguished such phenomena (which he also studied) from those described
in the literature, where uncertainty about the nature of
objects (living or dead, human or automata) is voluntarily maintained to create in the reader a feeling of
anxiety, a sense of the uncanny.
Starting from Friedrich Schelling’s idea that the
feeling of estrangement arises from exposure to
something that is revealed but should have remained
hidden, Freud went on to stress the return of the repressed. In terms of symptoms, the feeling of
estrangement appears as an anxiety that something is
about to be revealed. It can be seen as a form of
transgression, like crossing to the other side of an
imaginary line without knowing how or why one got
there. This transgression is not only prohibited by
the superego but is associated with the subject’s identity and simultaneously concerns the limit between
internal and external, the limits among past, present,
and future, and the limit between life and death. The
feeling of estrangement is associated with a mysterious imaginary time before life, which is therefore
52 4
unrecognizable and yet insists on revealing its
familiarity.
Freud had already developed these ideas in Totem
and Taboo (1912–1913a). There he wrote that what is
felt as strange in the outside world initially belonged to
the self and was then projected to the exterior. The
nonself, the object of perception, is only recognizable
through this process of projection (an animist conception of the world). This feeling of estrangement is also
related to the dialectic between the strange and the
familiar among the dead, who are not completely separated from the living but rather continue to hover
around them (the taboo against the dead).
The psychoanalytic feeling of estrangement arises
from a sudden confrontation between a perception of
the outside world and repressed primitive internal perceptions. These internal perceptions are not apprehended as such and appear in the subject’s mental
space only after having been projected onto the outside world. Consequently, they are bound to the
objects that support them. This crossing of a limit,
whether it involves the before or after, the animate or
inanimate, the internal or external, is always associated
with the death drive, whose final goal is the initial
state—an expression of the inertia of organic life.
In ‘‘A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis’’
(1936a), Freud, deepening and restricting the feeling
of estrangement, saw it essentially as a defense
mechanism that attempts to distance something from
the ego (depersonalization) or include something
external (false recognition, déjà vu, previously narrated). The oedipal explanation of Freud’s disturbance
of memory (guilt for surpassing his father, realization
of his desire to escape his family) does not cover all
there is to estrangement.
The feeling of estrangement, which is so difficult to
grasp, is an inherent part of psychoanalysis itself when
it attempts to revivify repressed contents. It is associated with what Freud defined in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (1920g) as the demonic, which characterizes
the repetition compulsion. To a considerable extent, it
has the characteristics of a drive, yet it is hostile to the
pleasure principle. In a sense, estrangement, in its
unconscious dimension, may impose limits on our
understanding, like an iceberg, which remains largely
submerged.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
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ETHICS
See also: Certainty; Déjà vu; Depersonalization;
‘‘Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, A’’; Double,
the; Premonitory dream; Ego; German romanticism and
psychoanalysis; Illusion; Phantom; Repetition; Secret;
Self-consciousness; Telepathy; ‘‘‘Uncanny, The’’’.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1901b). The psychopathology of everyday
life. SE, 6.
———. (1912–1913a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
———. (1919h). The uncanny. SE, 17: 217–256.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18:
1–64.
———. (1936a). A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis. SE, 22: 239–248.
ETHICS
Ethics concerns mores: human moral attitudes in general and, more specifically, rules of behavior and their
justifications. This system of rules attributes values to
behaviors by judging them to be good or bad according to their intrinsic moral qualities or their concrete
social consequences. For Freud, ethics takes up where
totemism and taboos leave off, and constitutes the
basis of all religion.
esteem of the superego. For Freud, the symptoms of
the transference neuroses were substitutes for the
remains of old loves that were forbidden by morality.
The reign of ‘‘civilized morality’’ begins when the
drives are renounced. This forms the basis of religion and
culture. Yet when individuals renounce the drives, they
are deprived of the sexual and aggressive satisfactions
demanded by the id, and so run the risk of neurosis.
This traditional conception of ethics is emphasized
when the German word Ethik is translated as morals or
morality. In what Angélo Hesnard calls ‘‘the morbid universe of guilt,’’ the unconscious feelings of guilt that
cause neurotic symptoms do not relate to the material
reality of the patient’s actions. Neurotic patients are
guilty only of their secret intentions. The psychic reality
of the forbidden and repressed wishes of ‘‘the child that
is in man’’ (Freud, 1910a [1909], p. 36) is accessible to
us by dream interpretation and is realized in the course
of analytic treatment in the love/hate relationship of the
transference. And yet, by reawakening the demons banished by morality, does not psychoanalysis run the risk
of destroying the very foundations of culture, which
always demands sacrifices of the individual?
As early as the Studies on Hysteria (1895a), Freud
analyzed hysterical conversion symptoms as the result
of a conflict between patients’ erotic thoughts and
moral ideals. The adjective ‘‘ethical,’’ ethisch in German, appeared for the first time in 1898 in ‘‘Sexuality
in the Aetiology of the Neuroses.’’ In that essay, Freud
raised the question of whether physicians have the
right to intrude into the sexual lives of their patients
and whether their ‘‘ethical duty’’ might not be ‘‘to keep
away from the whole business of sex’’ (p. 264).
This question leads to another conception of ethics,
one that is specific to psychoanalysis. The ethics of
psychoanalysis is a consequence of how its practice
implements its method and rules. Psychoanalysis does
not aim to make the individual adapted to his or her
environment. In other words, it does not serve the
good; rather, it seeks the truth. When Freud recommended that physicians not give in to the amorous
advances of their patients, he was giving voice less to
traditional morality than to a psychoanalytic ethics
conceived in terms of the requirements of a praxis
founded on a method. The patient, by engaging in
transference love, aggravated by a resistance to remembering, aims to reduce the analyst to a lover. The analyst is ethically bound not to respond, because he does
not mistake the transference for true love. He wants to
frustrate the analysand’s love so that it can be analyzed.
Otherwise, the analyst would become allied with the
resistance. Here moral motives converge with psychoanalytic technique.
The notion of ethics in Freud’s work refers primarily to those moral ideals in the name of which individuals renounce any instinctual impulses that are irreconcilable with the narcissistic ideals of the ego. These
ideals are based on images of loved objects and the
This psychoanalytic notion of ethics serves philosophical, religious, and moral causes. In Moses and
Monotheism (1939a), Freud showed that ethics originates in ‘‘a sense of guilt felt on account of a suppressed hostility to God’’ (p. 134). Using Judaism, he
In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a [1929]),
Freud noted, ‘‘The cultural super-ego has developed
its ideals and set up its demands. Among the latter,
those which deal with the relations of human beings
are comprised under the heading of ethics’’ (p. 142).
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ETHNOPSYCHOANALYSIS
returned to the myth of the murder of the father that
he developed in Totem and Taboo (1912–1913a). Freud
argued that people have always known that at one time
they had a primitive father (which in religion becomes
the godhead) and that they put him to death. The
resulting ‘‘nostalgia for the father’’ reflected an insatiable need to appease a sense of guilt by changing the
father’s prohibitions into ethical obligations. When
sons ingest the dead father’s body, they come to identify with someone whom they simultaneously love and
hate. Thus, the dead father becomes the superego,
demanding self-sacrifice. When the subject obeys the
superego and renounces his sexual and aggressive
impulses, he can both hate and love the parental
authority within himself.
Freud revealed the role that masochism and narcissism play when the drives are reined in by ethics. A
subject who suffers by sacrificing his or her desires to
the supposed demands of the Other feels loved and
chosen by this Other while unconsciously reproaching
the Other for sadism.
Jacques Lacan discussed how the death drive functions in the dialectic between the pleasure principle
and the reality principle. He began by declaring the
prohibition of incest to be the only universal law. All
other rules of morality are merely historical and cultural variations of this law. Desire for the mother can
never be satisfied, even after the murder of the deterring father, because acting out incest would cause the
social order to collapse. For this reason, the ‘‘naturalist
liberation’’ of pleasure fails (Lacan, p. 4), jouissance
remains forbidden, and the prohibition is reinforced
by the work of mourning. The human condition is tragic because the more the subject renounces pleasure,
the more his superego demands greater sacrifices.
Nevertheless, the superego is necessary to produce the
economy of pleasure and to introduce desire into the
world of symbolic mediation.
In the character of Antigone, Lacan found an incarnation of a ‘‘pure and simple desire for death’’ (p.
282). This ‘‘raw,’’ ‘‘inflexible’’ ‘‘kid’’ (pp. 250, 263)
opposes the ethics of the good, represented by Creon.
With her sacrifice, Antigone becomes the pure and
simple relation between being human and ‘‘the break
introduced by the presence of language in the human
life’’ (p. 279). The result is that ‘‘when an analysis is
carried through to its end the subject will encounter
the limit in which the problematic of desire is raised’’
(p. 300).
52 6
Jacques Lacan emphasized the human subject’s debt
to language in becoming human and thus proposed a
psychoanalytic ethic that did not concern itself with
happiness and the good. The idealization of the figure
of Antigone produced a Hegelian imperative to ‘‘pure
action’’ that could conceivably be added to or substituted for traditional ethico-religious ideals. What
Patrick Guyomard refers to as ‘‘the enjoyment of the
tragic’’ must give way to the specific requirements of
psychoanalytic work, a work of mourning that,
according to Conrad Stein, leads to a ‘‘crossing of the
tragic.’’ Thus the ethics of psychoanalysis is a consequence of its specific method.
ROLAND GORI
See also: Boundary violations; Criminology and psychoanalysis; Judgment of condemnation; Kantianism and
psychoanalysis; Seminar, Lacan’s; Transgression; Truth.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1898a). Sexuality in the aetiology of the
neuroses. SE, 3: 259–285.
———. (1910a [1909]). Five lectures on psycho-analysis.
SE, 11: 7–55.
———. (1912–1913a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
———. (1930a [1929]). Civilization and its discontents. SE,
21: 57–145.
———. (1939a). Moses and monotheism: Three essays. SE,
23: 1–137.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895a). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
Guyomard, Patrick. (1992). La jouissance du tragique: Antigone, Lacan et le désir de l’analyste. Paris: Aubier.
Lacan, Jacques. (1997). The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book
7: The ethics of psychoanalysis (1959–1960) (Dennis Porter,
Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1986)
Stein, Conrad. (1995). La traversée du tragique en psychanalyse. Études freudiennes, 35, 33–48.
ETHNOPSYCHOANALYSIS
Ethnopsychoanalysis is a form of psychotherapy that
makes use of two complementary fields of knowledge:
psychoanalysis and anthropology. Early in his career
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Sigmund Freud was careful to test the cultural diversity
of his principal psychoanalytic concepts. The Oedipus
complex, shortly after its introduction, was at the heart
of the controversy between universalism and culturalism, and even today the question remains unresolved.
Bronislaw Malinowski (1927) was one of the first
anthropologists to take an interest in the relation
between the psyche and culture through an analysis of
the Oedipus complex among the Trobriand islanders, a
matrilineal society. After Malinowski, the question was
investigated by Géza Roheim and especially Georges
Devereux (1970/1980, 1972), who further refined the
relation between psychoanalysis and anthropology.
Devereux postulated two fundamentals: psychic universality, toward which every human being tends, and
cultural encoding, which is the effect of a culture on
the content of the mind. Devereux held that researchers
should focus on particulars without speculating about
an abstract universal, which cannot be known a priori
but was frequently inferred.
Ethnopsychoanalysis is based on the methodological
principle of complementarity, which ‘‘does not exclude
any method, any valid theory, but coordinates them’’
(Devereux, 1972). It is pointless to forcibly and exclusively integrate certain human phenomena into the
field of psychoanalysis or anthropology. Human phenomena, Devereux asserted, are so specific that they
require a two-pronged multidisciplinary approach that
can neither be fused together nor carried out
simultaneously.
In France and the United States, Devereux developed a theory of ethnopsychoanalysis based on the
methodological principle of complementarity. Later in
France, Tobie Nathan (1986) provided practical methods for its application, methods that are still being
developed. Some parameters, however, appear to be
well established (Moro, 1998): the need for a group of
therapists in some cases, the importance of the
patient’s native tongue and the need to make a transition to the patient’s language, the need to start from
the patient’s cultural representations, the need to construct intermediate spaces halfway between culture
and psyche that enable the individual to speak more
freely and creatively, the need to modify of the duration of sessions (longer sessions designed to comply
with the cultural temporality of the patient), and so
on. Finally, to encourage discussion, Western therapists must learn to look beyond the Western worldview
and to modify their system of reference.
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In this context it is important to implement, in
addition to the mechanics for analyzing transference
and affective countertransference, a specific method
for analyzing the therapist’s ‘‘cultural countertransference.’’ In concrete terms, at the end of each interview,
the group of therapists should attempt to elucidate the
countertransference of each therapist by discussing the
affects they have experienced, implicit elements, and
theories that led them to believe certain things (inferences), and by planning activities (interventions) at
the individual and cultural levels.
Ethnopsychoanalysis, which integrates the mental
and cultural dimension of human dysfunctionality, is
not a specific method, strictly speaking. Rather, it
involves creating a complex cross-cultural psychotherapeutic setting that allows therapists to step outside of
their own cultures and recognize the cultural differences of emigrant patients.
MARIE-ROSE MORO
See also: Anthropology and psychoanalysis; Balint-Székely-Kóvacs, Alice; Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry;
‘‘Claims to Scientific Interest’’; Devereux, Georges Incest;
Individual; Individuation; Malinowski, Bronislaw Kaspar; Mead, Margaret; Morgenthaler, Fritz; Myth of origins; Róheim, Géza; Transcultural.
Bibliography
Devereux, Georges. (1972). Ethnopsychanalyse complémentariste. Paris: Flammarion, 1985.
———. (1980). Basic problems of ethnopsychiatry (Basia
Miller Gulati, and George Devereux, Trans.). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. (Original work published
1970)
Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1927). Sex and repression in savage
society. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Moro, Marie-Rose. (1998). Psychothérapie transculturelle des
enfants de migrants. Paris: Dunod.
Nathan, Tobie. (1986). La folie des autres: traité d’ethnopsychiatrie clinique. Paris: Dunod.
ETHOLOGY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Ethology is a biology of behavior. It has developed a
nomenclature for describing the behavior of all living
things in their natural environment using an approach
that is naturalistic, experimental, and comparative. It
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describes the structure of a behavioral sequence, its
immediate causes, its adaptive benefits (its function),
and its origin in the evolutionary development of the
species and the biological development of the individual. Ethology has established itself as an observational method in some of the existing social sciences,
including genetics, ethoecology, ethoneurology, ethosociology, etholinguistics, and ethopsychoanalysis.
the unconscious to give shape to the drive and thereby
fashion the words and gestures (Cosnier, 1984) that
act on the other. Interestingly, Jacques Lacan invoked
ethology as early as 1936. His study of such phenomena as animal behavior in front of a mirror and the
‘‘dance’’ of sticklebacks enabled him to develop
the fundamental concepts of the mirror stage and the
interaction of the Real and the Imaginary in humans.
After World War II, René Spitz, faced with the behavioral pathology of abandoned children, following the
work of Anna Freud, studied the genesis of object-relationships and the construction of the ego within a
Freudian perspective. Strongly influenced by Konrad
Lorenz and the then-new theory of cybernetics, he
observed and manipulated the ‘‘eyes-nose-mouth’’ stimulus signal that triggers the suckling’s motor smile.
He subsequently developed the concept of ego organizers and showed how the child’s mastery of the headshake, meaning ‘‘No,’’ marks the behavioral emergence
of the process of symbolization.
The psychoanalytic development an ethological
anthropology allows us to situate man in the living world
by emphasizing how the emergence of symbols and signs
has created a specifically human, historicized world.
In 1958, John Bowlby, then president of the British
Psycho-Analytic Society, described the effects of a lack
of maternal care. These findings showed an ‘‘astonishing convergence’’ (Zazzo, 1974) with the Harlows’
experiments on Rhesus monkeys, which demonstrated
that the affective relationship between a mother and
her infant was built not on nutritional needs but rather
on a primary need for sensory exchange.
At the Twenty-First International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Copenhagen (1959), a stimulating debate
was initiated. Some psychoanalysts felt that experiments
on imprinting, epigenesis, stimulus-signals, synaptic
facilitation, and the behavioral ontogenesis that constructs human ties buttressed the Freudian concept of
drives. Others, however, felt that these ran counter to
Freudian theory, since the idea of attachment as a primary bond contradicted that of an anaclitic relationship
to drives. They also felt that direct observation added
nothing to clear pictures of subject’s mental world that
could be obtained from a historical approach.
In contemporary ethnopsychoanalysis, the ethological method is used to observe the structuring of the
primary bond and to evaluate it in terms of life events
and cultural pressures with, as a base-line, the observation of the ‘‘strange situation’’ (Ainsworth et al., 1978).
The three levels of interaction distinguish the body,
the affect, and the fantasy (Lebovici, 1991), which, as
‘‘psychic representative of the drive’’ (Freud), enables
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BORIS CYRULNIK
See also: Clinging instinct; Imaginary; Instinct; Primary
need.
Bibliography
Ainsworth, Mary D. Salter, Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., and
Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological
study of the strange situation. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
Bowlby, John. (1958). The nature of the child’s tie to his
mother. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39,
350–373.
Cosnier, Jacques. (1984). La psychanalyse, le langage et la
communication. Psychothérapies. 4 (4), 215–222
Harlow, Harry. (1958). La nature de l’amour. Le psychologue
américain, 13, 673–685.
Lebovici, Serge. (1991). La dépendance du nouveau-né. In
Catherine Dechamp–Le Roux (Ed.), Figures de la dépendance, autour d’Albert Memmi (pp. 29–39). Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
Spitz, René A. (1957). No and yes: On the genesis of human
communication. New York: International Universities
Press.
ÉTUDES FREUDIENNES
Études Freudiennes is a journal launched in 1969 by
Conrad Stein, with Lucio Covello as recording secretary and Julien Bigras as Canadian correspondent
(Stein was the French correspondent for the Canadian
journal Interprétation). Its birth resulted from a schism
in the editorial board of L’inconscient, on which Stein
was a key figure, along with Piera Aulagnier-Spairani
(editor in chief) and Jean Clavreul. According to their
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last editorial (no. 8, October 1968), ‘‘The editors have
not been able to agree about the orientation appropriate for a review of psychoanalysis, nor on the part they
would like it to play.’’
The first issue of Études Freudiennes, ‘‘Du côte du
psychanalyste’’ (with the psychoanalyst), came out in
November 1969. The first issue of Topique, ‘‘La formation du psychanalyst’’ (training the analyst), came out
at the same time, with an announcement by Piera
Aulagnier of the creation of a new psychoanalytic
association: the Quatrième groupe, Organisation psychanalytique de langue française (Fourth Group,
Francophone Psychoanalytic Organization).
Stein’s orientation is apparent in his short introduction to ‘‘Le patient inconnu’’ (The unknown patient)
by Theodor Reik. He presents this text as being about
‘‘a kind of truth, unconnected with any school, about
psychoanalysis.’’ This sums up what became the spirit
of the journal.
Études Freudiennes is open to all tendencies in Freudian psychoanalysis, as long as authors show a serious
commitment to psychoanalysis, are creative, and write
well. It takes up questions relating to the training of
psychoanalysts, their course of studies, and their
supervision (nos. 1–2 and 31). Other areas of focus are
the history of ideas (Sigmund Freud, Sándor Ferenczi,
Jacques Lacan), the history of concepts (interpretation,
femininity, transference love), and the practice of psychoanalysis in relation to its principles and the exigencies inherent in Freudian methodology.
From May 1982 (nos. 19–20) to September 1987
(no. 29), each issue gave rise to ‘‘study days,’’ when articles were discussed in the presence of their authors.
Another special feature of Études Freudiennes has been
the ongoing scientific debates, parallel to the published
essays, in which experienced psychoanalysts associated
with the review since its beginnings have encounters
with younger colleagues invited to expound their points
of view independently of ties to any organization and
without fear of censure. This feature has added to its
reputation in France and abroad, where some numbers
have been translated (Italy, Germany, Brazil).
With a history of more than thirty years, Études
Freudiennes has encountered its share of obstacles. Yet
its flexibility in matters relating to the mind has helped
it to overcome them.
DANIÈLE BRUN
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See also: France.
Bibliography
Bataille, Laurence. (1985). D’une pratique. Études Freudiennes, 25, 7–30.
Bauchau, Henry. (1984). La connivence des temps. Études
Freudiennes, 23, 9–20.
Perrier, François. (1994). Thanatol. In his La chaussée
d’Antin (pp. 537–568). Paris: Albin Michel. (Originally
published 1974)
Reik, Theodor. (1969). Le patient inconnu. Études Freudiennes, 1–2, 7–38.
Stein, Conrad. (1994). La traversée du tragique en psychanalyse. Études Freudiennes, 35, 33–48.
Trilling, Jacques. (1973). James Joyce ou l’écriture matricide.
Études Freudiennes, 7–8, 7–70.
EUROPEAN PSYCHOANALYTICAL
FEDERATION
The European Psychoanalytical Federation (EPF) is a
scientific organization that consolidates all the European psychoanalytic societies affiliated with the
International Psychoanalytic Association. In 2002
there were approximately 3,900 individual members in
twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen different languages. It comprises twenty-five societies and three
study groups (the Romanian Group, Belgrade Group,
and Polish Group). A study group is the first level of
integration of a psychoanalytic body within the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), followed
by a provisional society and finally a member society.
The EPF was founded in 1966 by Raymond de Saussure, a well-known member of the Société suisse de
psychanalyse (Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis), with
Evelyne Kestemberg as secretary. The idea of a European psychoanalytic organization was first discussed
at a series of European conferences on training, which
had been organized every two years from 1960. The
need for guidelines for psychoanalytic training in Europe contributed greatly to the creation of a European
organization similar to the American Psychoanalytic
Association, which had a unified training policy.
However, the European societies, concerned about
their autonomy and independence in training matters,
refused to accept this initial proposal and preferred the
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model of a federation of independent societies. The
EPF is administered by an executive board, composed
of an executive committee of seven members (president, president-elect, two vice presidents, secretary,
treasurer, newsletter editor) and the presidents of the
member societies and study groups.
The EPF has always served as a clearinghouse and
forum for psychoanalytic societies in Europe. In this
sense its function is essentially scientific, unlike the International Psychoanalytic Association, which also serves as
a political entity in that it establishes common standards
for training and practice for all member psychoanalysts.
In its bylaws, the EPF has set forth six major goals:
to promote the development of psychoanalysis; to
maintain and improve the standards for practice,
training, and teaching; to promote psychoanalytic
research and distribute information about the theory
and practice of psychoanalysis; to improve communication among psychoanalysts by means of various
publications, newsletters, scientific conferences, and
other meetings; to create a discussion space for scientific fields related to psychoanalysis and other subjects
of concern to psychoanalysts; to promote contacts
between psychoanalysis and other disciplines.
Although initially the EPF limited itself to organizing an annual conference on training and to publishing an annual twenty-page bulletin, in 2004 it
organized more than ten annual or biannual scientific
gatherings: colloquia and conferences on training and
on child and adolescent analysis, a large conference
open to all members and candidates, a clinical seminar
for members, a scientific symposium on a controversial theoretical issue, a seminar and summer university
in Eastern Europe for Eastern Europeans, a clinical
seminar for Europeans and North Americans. As of
2004, was the Bulletin de la Fédération européenne de
psychanalyse (120 pages) is now (in 2004) published
semiannually in the three official languages of the EPF
(German, English, and French) and includes papers
presented at the various conferences held throughout
Europe. These papers reflect contemporary psychoanalytic dialogue and the problems encountered in the
various European psychoanalytic societies.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century the EPF
is at a point where it will have to define its role inside
and outside the world of analysis. European psychoanalytic societies need to address a range of issues, including the professional status of the psychoanalyst
53 0
(psychoanalyst or psychotherapist), the development of
psychoanalysis in Eastern Europe, evaluation of the various methods of training, the difficulties associated with
the many languages in Europe and the EPF’s relation to
diverse cultures and psychoanalytic traditions, and
finally, the role of the EPF in light of the restructuring of
the International Psychoanalytic Association, which, as
an association of individual members, is evolving
toward more adequate representation of the societies
themselves. By providing a forum for discussing these
issues, the EPF has agreed to promote a European psychoanalytic identity that allows for differences among
European psychoanalysts while enabling them to focus
on a limited number of scientific, ethical, and democratic values that reflect the Freudian tradition.
ALAIN GIBEAULT
Bibliography
Diatkine, Gilbert, and Gibeault, Alain. (1996). Le statut du
psychothérapeute et/ou du psychanalyste. Bulletin de la
Fédération européenne de psychanalyse. 46, 119–141.
Gibeault, Alain. (1996). Réalité psychique et réalité externe
dans le processus psychanalytique: 3e Conférence de la
FEP sur l’analyse d’enfant et d’adolescent, Amsterdam,
1996. Bulletin de la Fédération européenne de psychanalyse.
47, 65–70.
———. (1997). La Fédération européenne a trente ans:
Passé, présent, avenir. Psychanalyse en Europe, 49.
Groen-Prakken, Han. (1986). Une organisation psychanalytique européenne: Le quand, le comment et le pourquoi:
un aperçu historique de la fondation et du développement
de la F.E.P. Psychanalyse en Europe, 26–27, 11–65.
———. (1997). Vers une Fédération européenne de psychanalyse: Le développement du mouvement psychanalytique
en Europe centrale et de l’Est, 1987–1996. Psychanalyse en
Europe, 48 (1), 5–25.
EVENLY-SUSPENDED ATTENTION
Evenly-suspended attention describes the necessary
state of the analyst’s mind when listening to the patient
during a psychoanalytic session. It is the mirror image
of the method of free association required of the
patient.
Freud set forth the notion of free-floating attention
in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) in connection
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tude the interpreter must take: ‘‘For the purposes of
our interpretation it remains an essential rule invariably to leave out of account the ostensible continuity
of a dream as being of suspect origin, and to follow the
same path back to the material of the dream-thoughts,
no matter whether the dream itself is clear or confused’’ (p. 500).
His technical prescription is found in ‘‘Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis’’
(1912e): ‘‘[I]t rejects the use of any special expedient
(even that of taking notes). It consists simply in not
directing one’s notice to anything in particular and in
maintaining the same Ôevenly-suspended attention’ (as
I have called it) in the face of all that one hears . . . . It
will be seen that the rule of giving equal notice to
everything is the necessary counterpart to the demand
made on the patient that he should communicate
everything that occurs to him without criticism or
selection. If the doctor behaves otherwise, he is throwing away most of the advantage which results from the
patient’s obeying the Ôfundamental rule of psychoanalysis.’ The rule for the doctor may be expressed: ÔHe
should withhold all conscious influences from his
capacity to attend, and give himself over completely to
his Ôunconscious memory.’ The doctor must put himself in a position to make use of everything he is told
for the purposes of interpretation and of recognizing
the concealed unconscious material without substituting a censorship of his own for the selection that the
patient has forgone’’ (pp. 111–12). The psychoanalyst
must be able to interpret everything he hears in order
to discover everything that the unconscious disguises,
and this without substituting his own censorship for
the selectivity the patient has renounced.
In his 1923 encyclopedia article ‘‘Psycho-Analysis,’’
Freud returned to the topic: ‘‘Experience soon showed
that the attitude which the analytic physician could
most advantageously adopt was to surrender himself
to his own unconscious mental activity, in a state of
evenly suspended attention, to avoid so far as possible
reflection and the construction of conscious expectations, not to try to fix anything that he heard particularly in his memory, and by these means to catch the
drift of the patient’s unconscious with his own unconscious’’ (p. 239). Two years later, in a letter to Ludwig
Binswanger dated February 22, 1925, he tempered the
somewhat excessive aspect of this description: ‘‘In a
more systematic formulation, unconscious must be
replaced with preconscious’’ (2003, p. 179).
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Some authors (notably James Strachey in the Standard Edition) have proposed as alternatives the terms
evenly-suspended or evenly-hovering attention (in
French, both attention également flottante and attention flottante are used). This prescribed attitude for
the analyst has been considered one of the constitutive
elements of the analytic setting. Associated with ‘‘neutrality,’’ it has also been compared with Theodor
Reik’s notion of ‘‘listening with the third ear.’’ Since it
requires that the analyst suspend judgment and eliminate his or her internal resistances and all personal
censorship, it is clear that only prior analysis of the
analyst can ensure that this state is maintained. In this
special state, identifications and projections must be
able to float freely, but some authors have emphasized
the risk of falling asleep if the analyst is too intent on
conforming to it (Fenichel, 1941). This observation
has incited other authors to see in free-floating attention a state of self-hypnosis parallel to that triggered
in the patient by the analytic setting (François
Roustang).
Contrary to the passivity and static aspect suggested
by this description, Joseph Sandler has argued that the
dynamic back-and-forth between this state and the
return to a countertransferential analysis of what is
perceived are conducive to ‘‘free-floating responsiveness’’ in the analyst (Sandler 1976, 1993).
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Framework of the psychoanalytic treatment;
Free association; Fundamental rule; Psychoanalytic treatment; ‘‘Recommendations to Physicians Practising
Psycho-Analysis.’’
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund, and Binswanger, Ludwig. (2003). The Sigmund Freud-Ludwig Binswanger correspondence 1908–
1938. (Arnold Pomerans, Trans.). New York: The Other
Press.
Fenichel, Otto. (1941) Problems of psychoanalytic technique.
(David Brunswick, Trans.). New York: The Psychoanalytic
Quarterly.
Ornstein, Paul H. (1967). Selected problems in learning
how to analyze. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 48,
448.
Sandler, Joseph. (1976). Counter-transference and roleresponsiveness. International Review of Psycho-Analysis 3,
43–47.
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PSYCHIATRY)
———. (1993). On communication from patient to analyst:
not everything is projective identification. International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 74, 1097–1108.
ÉVOLUTION PSYCHIATRIQUE (L’-)
(DEVELOPMENTS IN PSYCHIATRY)
Before becoming the title of the review first published
in 1929, with chief editors Henri Codet and Eugène
Minkowski contributing to the first issues, L’Évolution
psychiatrique was already the title of a collective work
in two volumes (1925 and 1927), directed by Angélo
Hesnard and René Laforgue.
In 1930 a study group was formed around the
nucleus of collaborators in the review. This group contained no fewer than seven of the founding members
of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society in 1926, but it did
not seek to institutionalize psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
was constantly evolving thanks to new acquisitions,
including psychoanalysis which, although it appeared
to be the most innovative, was not the only one, and
the members of the group wanted their discipline,
which was still stuck in declining alienism, to evolve.
The philosophical ideas of the time would also contribute to this movement.
The name chosen was an obvious indication of the
influence of Henri Bergson and his Évolution Créatrice
(Creative evolution; 1907). L’Évolution psychiatrique
(EP) would present the work of Eugène Minkowski,
who published the first French-language volume of
phenomenological psychopathology, Le Temps vécu
(Time lived; 1934), and also Ludwig Binswanger, Karl
Jaspers, and Viktor von Gebsatell. In 1934, Henri Ey
used the review to present Eugen Bleuler’s ideas on
the group of schizophrenic psychoses (1911), an
application of the nascent psychoanalysis to Emil
Kraepelin’s dementia praecox. Jacques Lacan’s thesis,
De la psychose paranoı̈aque dans ses rapports avec la
personnalité (Paranoid psychosis and its relations to
the personality; 1932) is another example of this psychoanalytic rereading of Kraepelin’s entities that was
to renew psychiatry. After the war, the exchanges
between Ey and Lacan were milestones in the life of
the society, which had interrupted its activity during
the German occupation of France and suspended the
publication of the review between 1940 and 1947. On
the occasion of the Journées de Bonneval, Ey brought
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together psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers, and their debates on the psychogenesis of neuroses and psychoses (1946), schizophrenia (1958),
and lastly the unconscious (1960), would go down in
history.
In 1950, L’Évolution psychiatrique organized the
first World Congress on Psychiatry in Paris, the presence of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein testifying to
the importance attached to psychoanalysis. And in
1956 the centenary of Freud’s birth was marked by an
issue devoted to his work.
In 1955, the publication, under the direction of Ey,
of the Traité de psychiatrie (Treatise on Psychiatry) in
the Encyclopédie médico-chirurgicale (Medical and
surgical encyclopedia) written by one hundred and
thirty-two authors, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts
and almost all of the members of L’Évolution psychiatrique, marked a major moment in the history of the
society. The unity in diversity thus realized was shattered soon afterwards, when psychiatry was recognized as a medical specialty distinct from neurology.
The distinction was influenced by various factors:
schisms in Freudian France, progress in psychopharmacology, different ‘‘anti-psychiatries,’’ the success of
behaviorism and cognitivism, and the appearance of
the ‘‘neurosciences.’’ The Seventh World Congress on
Psychiatry, held in Vienna in 1984, could have
declared psychoanalysis dead. For a quarter of a century the astonishing increase in the number of psychiatrists in France caused a multiplication in the
number of societies with one approach and made
L’Évolution psychiatrique the only place where phenomenologists, structuralists, biologists, psychotherapists, cognitivists, and analysts from different schools
could confront each other’s views. It is therefore not
surprising that when psychiatrists again felt the need
to reflect together on recent progress in their discipline, L’Évolution psychiatrique played an essential
role in the creation of the French Federation for Psychiatry (1992).
JEAN GARRABÉ
See also: France; Hesnard, Angélo Louis Marie; Laforgue,
René.
Bibliography
Ey, Henri. (1955). Traité de psychiatrie clinique et thérapeutique, Paris: E.M.-C.
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EXCITATION
EXAMINATION DREAMS
In examination dreams, which Freud considered to be
‘‘typical dreams,’’ the dreamer sees himself back at
school taking an examination.
Freud mentions this type of dream several times in
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a). The dreamer is
embarrassed to see himself as an adult among much
younger fellow students and obliged to retake an examination that he already passed a long time ago. ‘‘It would
seem, then, that anxious examination dreams (which,
as has been confirmed over and over again, appear
when the dreamer has some responsible activity ahead
of him next day and is afraid there may be a fiasco)’’
(1900a, p. 274). The meaning of the dream would be:
‘‘Don’t be afraid of tomorrow! Just think how anxious
you were before your Matriculation, and yet nothing
happened to you’’ (1900a, p. 274).
The interpretation can nevertheless prove to be
more complex: In Chapter 6, Freud recounts one of
his own dreams, an ‘‘absurd dream about a dead
father’’ (1900a, p. 435), which is marked by uncertainty about the dates of his own birth and his father’s
death. Freud analyzes the uneasiness about filiation
and hostility to the father (who in this dream admits
to having been arrested for drunkenness) by associating it with his memory of having been a slow medical
student: ‘‘In my circle of acquaintances I was regarded
as an idler and it was doubted whether I should ever
get through’’ (1900a, p. 450). It is therefore about an
oedipal issue (particularly from the point of view of
rivalry with the father).
Freud never returned to examination dreams, and
the theme seems to have received little attention outside of the United States. However, these dreams are
encountered frequently in clinical practice.
ROGER PERRON
See also: Dream.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams.
Parts I and II. SE, 4–5: 1–625.
Further Reading
Kafka, Ernest. (1979). On examination dreams. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 48, 426–447.
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Ostow, Mortimer. (1995). The examination dream revisited:
A clinical note. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 50, 418–
424.
Renik, Owen. (1981). Typical examination dreams; superego
dreams; traumatic dreams. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 50,
159–189.
EXCITATION
Excitation is a term borrowed from the lexicon of commonplace words derived from the Vulgar Latin excitatio: ‘‘the action of exciting’’; it is used notably in
physics and physiology. Sigmund Freud, and other
psychoanalysts after him, expanded this term for use
in metapsychology, particularly the economic dimensions of that approach. In this usage, the word carries
with it the connotations of the Latin excitare: ‘‘to awaken, wake up, push, or stimulate at the level of the psychic apparatus.’’
This psychic apparatus, the fictional representation
of metapsychological topography, appears as the locus
of reception, transformation, and capacity for adequate discharge of excitation. Even before his analytic
period per se, Freud in ‘‘The Psycho-Neuroses of
Defence’’ (1894a) envisaged the sum of excitation as a
quantum of affect that is spread over the memory
traces of representations. It is in this light that, for
want of a connection with affect, he posits an ‘‘abreaction’’ caused by the excess of excitation. It is also necessary that endogenous excitations reach a certain
threshold in order to become mental excitations. In
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) he conjectures
that ‘‘during certain psychical processes the systems
may be traversed in a temporal sequence determined
by excitation’’
Excitation may be external in origin, in the form of
a stimulus coming from the object or the environment, and the problem becomes the manner in which
it is handled, bound, and evacuated. Here Freud
advances the concept of the ‘‘protective shield’’ that
serves to protect against an overflow of excitation,
which he views as being traumatic. Envisioning
trauma as a ‘‘breaking through of the protective
shield’’ is one of the perspectives he offers. But overflow can also originate internally. In cases where sound
psychic defensive systems are lacking—above all, a failure of defense through repression, which would
prevent satisfaction and discharge toward the outside—the result is the mental symptom as a sign and
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substitute for an instinctual satisfaction that has not
taken place, like a foreign body that keeps producing
phenomena of excitation and reaction in the (mental)
tissue in which it is implanted.
Excitation is thus also included in the register of the
pulsional system. Instinct, a borderline concept
between the psychic and the somatic, is posited as an
excitation for the psyche. It is found in connection
with the terms drive, aim, and source.
Drive: driving factor, the measure of the amount
of impulse toward a particular action or end.
Aim: a satisfaction that is only attainable through
successfully suppressing the very cause of the
initial excitation. Following Freud, we could say
that the psychic apparatus serves the intention of
mastering and eliminating quantities of excitation, whether this excitation arrives from without
or within.
Source: any somatic process in an organ or part of
the body whose excitation is represented in mental
life by the instincts. The raw material of psychic
disturbances is posited as being inherent in this
register of excitation of somatic origin; here we
find the physiological notion of excitation. This
excitation must undergo a process of mental work
to enter into the pulsional system, or indeed must
transform its quantum of energy into mental
energy. If this transformation does not occur,
somatic sexual excitation, for example, ostensibly
remains in that form and does not turn into psychosexual excitation; this is the Freudian approach
to the concept of ‘‘actual (or defense) neurosis,’’
advanced relatively early on. This approach
requires levels of discharge rather than repression
as the constituents of its symptoms.
Beyond a certain threshold of excitation, Freud evokes
the notion of ‘‘libidinal coexcitation,’’ which ostensibly
disappears over time; this is supposedly the point from
which fixation begins. Thus the instincts, in contrast to
stimulus or external excitation, never act as a force of
momentary impact, but rather as an ongoing force.
Thus too, the final goal of mental activity—the tendency
to obtain pleasure and to avoid unpleasure—can be
envisioned, in economic terms, as an effort to master the
masses of excitation that reside in the psychic apparatus.
level—the true ‘‘vicissitude’’ of the instincts, a process
that is above all discernible in the structures of
hysteria. Jean-Paul Valabrega takes up this notion of
discharge through conversion in approaching psychosomatic phenomena, while other authors invoke the
idea of a return of excitation to its earliest source, the
somatic level, in the absence of successful mentalization. In the view of Pierre Marty, the flow of the excitations from the instincts and the drives, essentially
aggressive and erotic, constitutes the central problem
in somatization. He contends that in the absence of
sound regulation by the psychic apparatus and thus
of the possibility for adaptation, the excess or deficit of
excitation causes a trauma that can become the point
of departure for the process of somatization.
Finally, following the introduction of the death
instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), Freud
somewhat reconsiders excitation within the framework
of the life and death instincts. The force and the flow
(or retention) of excitation are reexamined, in light of
the principles of constancy and inertia that he had
already developed but further elaborates here. It should
be recalled that, for Freud, although the animistic
process is automatically regulated by the pleasureunpleasure principle, the economic viewpoint accepts
that the mental representatives of the instincts are
invested with determined quantities of energy and that
the psychic apparatus tends to maintain at the lowest
possible level the sum total of excitations it carries. But
the very essence of instinctual functioning is also envisioned: the tendency toward inertia under the influence
of the death instinct. Repetition compulsion (the
instinct’s instinct, according to Francis Pasche) is arguably a way to deal with the surplus of excitation that is
not bound to the instinct as the result of post-traumatic
defusion. Freud’s example of the repetition of traumatic
dreams provides an illustration of this. In this view, the
aim of repetition compulsion is the extinction of traumatic excitation through exhaustion—and this to the
point of inertia, the aim of the death instinct.
This posited aim enables Freud to propose a notion
drawn from the philosophy of the Far East: the nirvana
principle, whose aim is total discharge—a quasimetaphysical and existential approach that transcends
the metapsychological economic register. This principle takes to its extremes and goes beyond another of
Freud’s principles, the principle of constancy.
The concept of conversion brings with it the enigma
of the leap from mental excitation to the somatic
53 4
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EXPERIENCE
See also: Anxiety; Conversion; Discharge; Erotogenic
masochism; Erotogenic zone; Facilitation; Helplessness;
Pain; Psychic envelopes; Libido; Mania; Mastery; Skinego; Nirvana; Object; Pleasure/unpleasure principle;
Principle of constancy; Primal repression; Protective
shield; Protective shield, breaking through the; Quantitative/qualitative; Quota of affect; Reciprocal paths of
influence (libidinal coexcitation); Regression; Sleep/
wakefulness; Sum of excitation; Trauma; Wish, hallucinatory satisfaction of a.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1894a). The psycho-neuroses of defence.
SE, 3: 45–61.
———. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. Part I, SE, 4:
1–338; Part II, SE, 5: 339–625.
———. (1915c). Instincts and their vicissitudes. SE, 14:
117–140.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18:
7–64.
EXHIBITIONISM
‘‘Exhibitionism’’ commonly denotes a sexual perversion in which satisfaction is linked to the displaying of
one’s genital parts. Psychoanalysis broadens this notion
by acknowledging many early manifestations of this
tendency in the sexual life of the child. Freud showed
how infantile sexuality, prior to the establishment of
the genital functions, was governed by the interplay of
various component instincts which manifest themselves
most often as pairs of opposites and each of which is
linked to a particular erotogenic zone. In this context
exhibitionism is one of the elements of instinctual life,
making its appearance in conjunction with its opposite,
namely pleasure in looking, both being related to the
eye as the relevant erotogenic zone. Seen in this light,
exhibitionism as a perversion in the adult bespeaks
regression to an earlier fixation of the libido.
It was chiefly in his Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality, including the notes added to this work over
its successive editions, that Freud outlined his conception of exhibitionism: ‘‘exhibitionists, . . . if I may trust
the findings of several analyses, exhibit their own genitals in order to obtain a reciprocal view of the genitals
of the other person.’’ A note added in 1920 elaborates:
‘‘Under analysis, these perversions . . . reveal a surprising variety of motives and determinants. The compulsion to exhibit, for instance, is also closely dependent
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on the castration complex; it is a means of constantly
insisting upon the integrity of the subject’s own (male)
genitals and it reiterates his infantile satisfaction at the
absence of a penis in those of women’’ (p. 157 and n.).
The anxiety aroused by the perception of this real lack
of the penis in women—in the mother, for example—
led Freud to describe how, by the mechanism of disavowal, such a perception could be so thoroughly
denied that an object, a fetish, could come to stand for
the absent penis and ‘‘become the chosen object determining the achievement of sexual pleasure’’ (Green,
1990). For Guy Rosolato (1967), ‘‘fetishism is at the
heart of all perversion in that it disavows the difference
between the sexes’’; it must therefore, and a fortiori, be
central to exhibitionism.
Let us note, lastly, that exhibitionism as a manifestation of childhood sexuality is a common phenomenon and a part of sexual play. The desire to show off
the genitals is linked to the needs for reassurance and
knowledge. Child psychologists underline the importance of such play, though they insist that it should be
confined to children of the same age, generally within
a group where the curiosity is shared.
DELPHINE SCHILTON
See also: ‘‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’’; Perversion;
Scoptophilia/scopophilia; Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality; Turning around; Turning around upon the
subject’s own self.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
Green, André. (1990). Le Complexe de castration. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Lebovici, Serge, Diatkine, René, and Soulé, Michel. (1985).
Traité de psychiatrie de l’enfant et de l’adolescent. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Rosolato, Guy. (1967). Étude des perversions sexuelles à partir du fétichisme. In Piera Aulagnier-Spairani, et al., Le
désir et la perversion (pp. 9–52). Paris: Seuil.
EXPERIENCE OF SATISFACTION
In The Language of Psychoanalysis, Jean Laplanche and
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis gave the following definition of
‘‘experience of satisfaction’’: ‘‘Type of primal experience postulated by Freud, consisting in the resolution,
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thanks to an external intervention, of an internal tension occasioned in the suckling by need. The image of
the satisfying object subsequently takes on a special
value in the construction of the subject’s desire. This
image may be recathected in the absence of the real
object (hallucinatory satisfaction of the wish). And it
will always guide the later search for the satisfying
object’’ (1967/1973, p. 156).
The concept of the experience of satisfaction—real or
hallucinatory—is obviously a cornerstone in Sigmund
Freud’s metapsychological construction in that it raises
the issue of the mnemic registration of the encounter
with the object and in that it tries to articulate the problematic of the assuagement of need and the fulfillment
of desire. Freud evoked the experience of satisfaction as
early as the ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’’ (1950c
[1895]): ‘‘The residues of the two kinds of experiences
[of pain and of satisfaction] which we have been discussing are affects and wishful states are affects and wishful
states. These have in common the fact that they both
involve a raising of Qé tension in Y—brought about in
the case of an affect by sudden release and in that of a
wish by summation’’ (pp. 321–322).
Freud also referred to this concept several times in
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), after which it
faded somewhat before reappearing in ‘‘Formulations
on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’’
(1911b): ‘‘It was only the non-occurrence of the
expected satisfaction, and the disappointment
experienced, that led to the abandonment of this
attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination.
Instead of it, the psychical apparatus had to decide to
form a conception of the real circumstances in the
external world and to endeavour to make a real alteration in them. A new principle of mental functioning
was thus introduced’’ (p. 219).
He returned to the concept yet again in ‘‘Negation’’
(1925h) in an attempt to link together the experience
of satisfaction, on the one hand, and the reality principle, on the other: ‘‘[I]t is evident that a precondition
for the setting up of reality testing is that objects shall
have been lost that once brought real satisfaction’’ (p.
238). In other words, not only does the experience of
satisfaction serve as a bridge between need and desire,
it is also the basis for reality testing, which is set in
motion by the absence of the real object and by insufficient compensation for that absence through the reactivation of memory traces.
53 6
The discussion of the experience of satisfaction
thus raises the whole question of primitive hallucination, which Freud, as we know, deemed crucial to the
emergence of the infant’s very first mental representations. Initially, the experience of satisfaction is
linked to the baby’s fundamental immaturity—that
is, its state of helplessness, its primary and fundamental powerlessness (Hilflosigkeit). Incapable on its
own of affecting the tension produced by endogenous excitations, the infant must rely on intervention
by an outside person. (Guy Rosolato would later
interpret this as being the germ of the differentiation
between the realm of need and that of sexual difference and autoerotism.) Satisfaction thus comes to be
associated with the image of the outside object that
has relieved tensions, and when these reappear, there
is an active recathexis of the image of the object.
Should this recathexis be overly intense, it is liable to
produce the same ‘‘indication of reality’’ as the perception itself (hence the possible confusion between
the real and hallucinated object, a confusion that is
at the heart of the dynamics of desire). According to
Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘‘the wish, though it originates with a search for actual satisfaction, is constituted on the model of the primitive hallucination’’
(p. 156). The formation of the ego is what puts an
end to this confusion between hallucination and perception by means of its inhibiting role, which prevents an overly intense recathexis of the image of the
satisfying object.
Involved here are the notions of ‘‘thought identity’’
and ‘‘perceptual identity,’’ which Freud introduced as
early as The Interpretation of Dreams: what the subject seeks through the direct path of hallucination
(thought identity) is invariably something identical to
the perception formerly associated with the satisfaction of a need (perceptual identity).
Recent work has attempted to distinguish between
the experience of satisfaction and the experience of
instinctual gratification, conceived as being broader.
In reality, the main discussions have focused more on
the nature of primitive hallucination than on the
experience of satisfaction itself. Or rather, what is
debated is the place of primitive hallucination in the
process of the emergence of thought. Some authors
have continued to place the absence of the object at
the center of this process, while others have emphasized the presence of the object and its relationship
with the subject or future subject. Clearly, the experiINTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
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ence of satisfaction is what links these two
approaches, the first of which is characteristic of classical psychoanalysts and the second of so-called
developmental psychoanalysts, who in particular
want to introduce attachment theory into their thinking (John Bowlby).
The absence and presence of the object appear in
fact to be fundamentally inseparable, and it is
undoubtedly in the experience of satisfaction that the
dynamic interactions of need and desire, and even of
demand, are most tightly enmeshed.
BERNARD GOLSE
See also: Infantile omnipotence; Pain; Pleasure/unpleasure
principle; ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’’; Symbolization, process of; Wish, hallucinatory satisfaction of a.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4–5: 1–635.
———. (1911b). Formulations on the two principles of
mental functioning. SE, 12: 213–226.
within and to mastering the internal danger before it
has become an external one’’ (p. 235). Freud was
describing the ego’s capacity for internalization, but was
adopting a phylogenetic perspective: ‘‘[I]n the course of
man’s development from a primitive state to a civilized
one his aggressiveness undergoes a very considerable
degree of internalization or turning inwards; if so, his
internal conflicts would certainly be the proper equivalent for the external struggles which have then ceased’’
(p. 244). His essential concern here was to argue for the
dualism of instincts and to suggest that the death drive
is equal in importance to Eros.
It was Anna Freud who introduced the clinical perspective in Normality and Pathology in Childhood,
Assessments of Development (1965/1980). In evaluating
pathology in terms of the type of anxiety and conflict
experienced by the child, she distinguished internalized external conflicts, which correspond to anxieties
linked to fear of object-loss and feelings of guilt, from
conflict she described as ‘‘truly internal’’ (p. 133). The
latter derives from the relationship between the id and
the ego and their conflicting aims. According to her,
only analysis can give access to this type of conflict.
———. (1925h). Negation. SE, 19: 233–239.
———. (1950c [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology.
SE, 1: 281–287.
Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1973). The
language of psycho-analysis (Donald Nicholson-Smith,
Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published
1967)
Rosolato, Guy. (1964). La différence des sexes. Essais sur le
symbolique. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.
DELPHINE SCHILTON
See also: Character neurosis; Group psychotherapies;
Identification; Internal object; Word-presentation.
Bibliography
Freud, Anna. (1980). Normality and pathology in childhood,
assessments of development. New York: International Universities Press. (Original work published 1965)
Freud, Sigmund. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE, 23: 209–53.
EXTERNALIZATION-INTERNALIZATION
The terms externalization and internalization refer to a
specific psychic modality of externalizing and internalizing the object. In general, externalization and internalization do not bear on aspects of the object, but rather
on the relationships and conflicts that are inherent in
the object and that it maintains with other objects.
Therefore, if a given aspect of the object is internalized
or externalized, a relationship is internalized or externalized. In ‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’
(1937c), Freud noted that ‘‘the ego grows accustomed
to removing the scene of the fight from outside to
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EXTROVERSION/INTROVERSION
(ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY)
Extroversion and introversion are, for Carl Gustav
Jung, two typical attitudes of the personality. These
terms describe and distinguish two directions of
energy within consciousness that attract the individual
toward, on the one hand, the external world and its
objects, and on the other hand, the internal world and
its images. This typological distinction is to be understood as a function of the unconscious dynamics particular to each person. It is not intended to group
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E Y , H E N R I (19 00 –197 7)
together specific and superficial traits of individuals in
a characterological way.
The terms extroversion and introversion were first
used in 1913 at the Fourth International Congress of
Psychoanalysis in Munich, the occasion of the last
meeting between Sigmund Freud and Jung and of
their irrevocable rupture. At the time, the terms corresponded to personal concerns: At issue, for Jung, was
understanding the conflicts dividing the psychoanalytic movement. This was the thrust of his lecture
entitled ‘‘The Question of the Psychological Types,’’
which he concluded by opposing Alfred Adler’s theory,
which he termed introverted, to Freud’s theory, supposedly extroverted, in that the one was centered around
a subjective wish (for power), while the other was centered around a sexual quest (for the object). But,
beyond this contrast, the importance that Jung
attached to the typology illustrates one of his main
intellectual choices: the relativization of all theories,
including his own.
Extroversion and introversion coexisted in each
person, according to Jung, but in different modes. In
the normal subject, both were available to consciousness and came into play in alternation to meet the dual
necessities of internal adaptation (the unconscious)
and external adaptation (outer reality). Type—
whether extroverted or introverted—was defined by
the relative predominance of one or the other of the
two attitudes in the realm of consciousness, the other
attitude being partially relegated to the unconscious,
where it acted in a compensatory unconscious mode.
Finally, in pathological personalities, a single attitude
predominated systematically and chronically; the
opposing attitude was inaccessible to consciousness,
and the compensatory role of the unconscious was
manifested only in the form of symptoms.
Extroversion and introversion are in keeping with
Jung’s conception of, and practical approach to, the
unconscious and with Jungian practices. In this perspective, the unconscious is not solely pathogenic, but
also has the potential to create balance, in particular
though its compensatory role: it can bring into conscious awareness thoughts, tendencies, and impulses
that consciousness neglects or rejects. Dreams, symbols, and parapraxes—also in addition to symptoms—
serve as vectors of these unconscious compensations.
Extroversion and introversion cannot be conceived
without four functions that are their modes of expres53 8
sion: thought, feeling, intuition, and sensation. It is
important not to confuse a particular feeling, thought,
sensation, or intuition with the function that mobilizes
it. The former are contents of different values, while the
latter is an operating system that makes it possible to
utilize the corresponding content. Jung situates these
four functions in systems of oppositions. He especially
emphasizes the dynamic relation between the privileged
function, which partakes of the power of consciousness,
and the inferior function, which, by virtue of the fact
that it is relegated to the unconscious, is less differentiated, but also contains a strong potential for change.
The integration of this inferior function into consciousness is one of the paths to individuation.
Among criticisms of these Jungian views, the most
vehement are directed less at the categories of extroversion and introversion than at the functions, their
division into rational-irrational pairs, their number,
and the nature of their opposition.
Admittedly, the typology of attitudes proposed by
Jung and his theory of the functions could be further
refined, but, far from having been conceived after the
fashion of a personality test, they provide the stimulus
for conceptualizing and dealing with the workings of
the psyche as a system that is structurally complex,
dynamic, and ever-evolving.
MARIE-LAURE GRIVET-SHILLITO
See also: Jung, Carl Gustav; Midlife crisis; Psychological
types (analytical psychology).
Bibliography
Hillman, James. (1971). The Feeling Function, in Lectures on
Jung’s Typology. Zürich: Spring.
Jung, Carl Gustav. (1921). Psychological Types. Collected
Works, 6. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Samuels, Andrew. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. London and Boston: Routledge.
Franz, Marie-Louise von. (1971). The Inferior Function, in
Lectures on Jung’s Typology. Zürich: Spring.
EY, HENRI (1900–1977)
Henri Ey, a French psychiatrist and philosopher, was
born on August 10, 1900, and died on November 9,
1977, in Banyuls-dels-Aspres, in the Pyrénées-Orientales
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tion in Sorège, Ey began studying medicine in Toulouse.
He was accepted as an intern at the Asiles de la Seine in
1925 and completed his studies in Paris, where he also
studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and attended classes
by Pierre Janet at the Collège de France. During this period he became friendly with several other interns, in particular, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Mâle, and Julien Rouart.
In 1931, while working at the Clinique des maladies
mentales (Mental Health Clinic) at Sainte-Anne Hospital, Ey, a senior psychiatrist under Professor Henri
Claude, met the first French psychoanalysts invited to
practice there: René Laforgue, René Allendy, and
Éduouard Pichon. These men were among the founders of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (Paris
Psychoanalytic Society). Together with Eugène Minkowski, they were among the first contributors to the
jounnal L’évolution psychiatrique (Psychiatric evolution), launched in 1925 and published since then by
the group of the same name that it gave birth to. The
reference to L’évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution)
by Henri Bergson, who critiqued Freud’s first publications from a philosophical point of view, helps explain
the genealogy of ideas. During the war and occupation
L’évolution psychiatrique suspended activity, but afterward Ey succeeded Minkowski as manager and editorin-chief of the journal.
Ey spent most of his career working in hospitals. In
1931 he was appointed as doctor of psychiatry, his first
and only position, at Bonneval Psychiatric Hospital
(today the Henri Ey Hospital), where he remained
until his retirement in 1970. The only interruption
occurred when he was mobilized as an army doctor
during the war, from 1939 to 1940, and at liberation.
Ey’s theoretical work was devoted to applying to the
study of mental disorders the ideas of the English
neurologist Hughlings Jackson, who was himself
inspired by the organicism of the philosopher Herbert
Spencer (1820–1903). In organicism (not to be confused
with ‘‘organicism’’ in the medical sense), psychic life is
characterized by its hierarchical organization, the development of individual functions, their ontogenesis
(which reflects the order of their appearance among the
species), and phylogenesis. This approach influenced the
neurological work of Sigmund Freud, whose On Aphasia:
A Critical Study (1953) is nothing more than the application of Jackson’s principles to aphasia. In 1938 Ey published, together with Julien Rouart, the Essai d’application
des principes de Jackson à une conception dynamique de la
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neuropsychiatrie (The application of Jackson’s principles
to a dynamic conception of neuropsychiatry), though
Rouart distanced himself from the ideas expressed in the
monograph when it was reissued in 1975.
One of Ey’s last psychoanalytic essays to appear
before the four years of silence that ensued under the
occupation was his ‘‘Réflexions sur la valeur scientifique
et morale de la psychanalyse’’ (Reflections on the scientific and moral value of pyschoanalysis; 1939). The
essay was a response to ideas that Roland Dalbiez had
expressed in 1936 in La méthode psychanalytique et la
doctrine freudienne (Psychoanalytic method and Freudian theory). Ey’s article was a brilliant measured attack
against psychoanalysis as it existed in France, and the
conclusion provides a clear overview of a position he
never wavered from: ‘‘By attempting to reduce psychoanalysis to its exact limits and by showing that it operates within a zone of indeterminacy greater than Mr.
Dalbiez appears to be aware of, we have attempted to be
somewhat more relaxed in our criticism of the ideology
that has crystallized around a major discovery—Freud’s
exploration of the unconscious.’’ Throughout his life Ey
expressed the same reservations, but these reservations
did not prevent him from organizing meetings and discussions that were among the most exhilarating in the
history of psychoanalysis in France.
Ey organized a number of famous conferences at
Bonneval. Two of the best known are the third, ‘‘Le
problème de la psychogenèse des névroses et des psychoses’’ (The problem of the psychogenesis of neuroses and psychoses; 1946), with contributions from
Jacques Lacan, who discussed the organodynamism of
his friend Julien Rouart, and the sixth, ‘‘L’inconscient’’
(The unconscious; 1960), the text of which was published in 1966 after considerable revision.
Ey had little doubt that psychoanalysis was part of
the medical science of psychiatry. It was with this in
mind that he organized the first Congrès mondial de
psychiatrie (World Congress of Psychiatry), which was
chaired by Jean Delay in Paris in 1950. The participants included several of leading names in psychoanalysis at the time: Franz G. Alexander, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan. The congress was so
successful that the organizing association transformed
itself into the World Psychiatric Association, whose
first executive secretary, until 1966, was Ey.
In 1955 Ey edited the first edition of the Traité de
psychiatrie (Treatise on psychiatry) in the Encyclopédie
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E Y , H E N R I (19 00 –197 7)
médico-chirurgicale (Medical-surgical encyclopedia).
He assigned several chapters to some of the best
known analysts of the time, especially those working
on neuroses and psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Jacques Lacan wrote the chapter ‘‘Variantes de la curetype’’ (Treatment alternatives).
See also: Colloque sur l’inconscient; Dalbiez, Roland;
France; Évolution psychiatrique (L’-); Ontogenesis; Phenomenology and psychoanalysis; Pscyhogenesis/organogenesis.
In 1960 Ey published, with Paul Bernard and Charles
Brisset, the Manuel de psychiatrie (Manual of psychiatry), which went through six French editions and
numerous translations. The manual introduced medical
doctors to an approach to psychiatry that transcended
the mechanical, linear model that arose out of medical
organicism at the end of the nineteenth century. Ey
strongly opposed abandoning the ethical dimension of
medicine in the treatment of mental patients, which, in
his view, was happening in the antipsychiatric movement and could be found as well in the misuse of psychiatry for purposes of political repression.
Bibliography
At the end of his professional life, Ey returned to his
home in Catalonia, France, but remained active. There
he wrote the Traité des hallucinations (Treatise on hallucinations; 1973), in which he devotes an important
chapter to the psychodynamic study of hallucinations
and, in an organodynamic approach to psychosis,
introduces the concept of the ‘‘psychic body.’’
JEAN GARRABÉ
54 0
Bonnafé, Lucien; Ey, Henri; Follin, Sven; Lacan, Jacques;
and Rouart, Julien. (1950). Le problème de la psychogenèse
des névroses et des psychoses. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.
Ey, Henri. (1939). Réflexions sur la valeur scientifique et
morale de la psychanalyse: à propos de la thèse de Roland
Dalbiez. Encéphale, 34 (4), 189–220.
———. (1966). L’inconscient: VIe colloque de Bonneval,
1960. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.
———. (1973). Traité des hallucinations. Paris: Masson.
———. (1975). Des idées de Jackson à un modèle organodynamique en psychiatrie. Toulouse, France: Privat.
Ey, Henri; Bernard, Paul; and Brisset, Charles. (1960). Manuel de psychiatrie. Paris: Masson.
Ey, Henri, and Rouart, Julien. (1938). Essai d’application des
principes de Jackson à une conception dynamique de la neuropsychiatrie. Paris: Doin.
Freud, Sigmund. (1953). On aphasia: A critical study
(E. Stengel, Trans.). New York: International Universities
Press. (Original work published 1891)
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FACE-TO-FACE SITUATION
The expression face-to-face situation is used to describe
the sitting arrangement in psychotherapy, as opposed
to psychoanalysis where the patient is on the couch
facing away from the psychoanalyst.
Sigmund Freud’s prescription is clear as early as
1904 when he wrote, in ‘‘Freud’s Psycho-Analytic Procedure,’’ ‘‘Without exerting any other kind of influence
he [the analyst] has them [patients] lie down in a comfortable attitude on a sofa, while he himself sits on a
chair behind them outside their field of vision’’
(p. 250). He was even more explicit in 1913 when he
wrote, in ‘‘On Beginning the Treatment (Technique of
Psycho-Analysis),’’ ‘‘I must say a word about a certain
ceremonial which concerns the position in which the
treatment is carried out. I hold to the plan of getting
the patient to lie on a sofa while I sit behind him out of
his sight. This arrangement has a historical basis; it is
the remnant of the hypnotic method out of which
psycho-analysis was evolved. But it deserves to be
maintained for many reasons. The first is a personal
motive, but one which others may share with me. I
cannot put up with being stared at by other people for
eight hours a day (or more). Since, while I am listening
to the patient, I, too, give myself over to the current of
my unconscious thoughts, I do not wish my expressions of face to give the patient material for interpretations or to influence him in what he tells me. The
patient usually regards being made to adopt this position as a hardship and rebels against it, especially if the
instinct for looking (scopophilia) plays an important
part in his neurosis. I insist on this procedure, however, for its purpose and result are to prevent the transference from mingling with the patient’s associations
imperceptibly, to isolate the transference and to allow
it to come forward in due course sharply defined as a
resistance’’ (pp. 133–134).
The patient’s obligation to lie down, according to
the fundamental rule, is the second of the two main
conditions of treatment that Freud expressed to the
Rat Man, who quickly attempted to transgress it
(Freud, 1909). Sixteen years later, Freud returned to
this issue with Smiley Blanton, as the latter’s Diary of
My Analysis with Freud (1971) reveals: ‘‘The position is
only a matter of convenience, but one point remains
essential: The analysand must not see the analyst’s
face. If it were otherwise, the analyst’s expression
would influence him.’’ In The Fabric of Affect in the
Psychoanalytic Discourse, André Green writes: ‘‘Analytic speech is speech delivered lying down . . . addressed
to a hidden partner’’ (1999 [1973], pp. 232–233).
The broadening of the types of cases in which psychoanalytic treatment has been deemed possible
(psychosis, drug addiction, borderline personality disorders, behavioral disorders, and so on) has modified
this previously inflexible rule and led to proposals that
certain treatments take place face-to-face, known as
‘‘psychoanalytically inspired psychotherapies’’ (Held).
Such therapies have been seen as a means of controlling the narcissistic regression to which the reclining
position on the couch is conducive, along with the
feelings of depersonalization, overwhelming anxiety
states, or mechanisms of defensive rigidification it can
entail. A more rational verbalization is thus encouraged; only psychotics are truly uninhibited in communicating their delusional fantasies in face-to-face
situations. Better mastery over terrifying impulses to
destroy the object can be achieved because of the
541
FACILITATION
constant possibility of seeing that the object—here
represented by the therapist via the transference—is
still present and intact (which at times necessitates, on
the part of the therapist, a no less effective mastery
over his or her own countertransferential anxieties).
The visual gaze intervenes less often as a satisfaction
of voyeuristic or exhibitionistic drives than as a testament to the vigilance and security felt by a patient who
does not have to fantasize the presence, behind him or
her, of an invisible power who sits in judgment and
can at any time, without warning, unleash punishment
or destruction. The making or avoidance of eye contact is a harder burden for the therapist to bear than
for the patient, as Freud noted; behind their elaboration, the crudest countertransferential affects are liable
at any time to manifest themselves in body language,
facial expressions, or a change in attitude that patients
unfailingly perceive and interpret.
Can psychoanalytic treatment, in the full sense of
the term, take place in the face-to-face situation? Opinion is divided on this issue, although the majority of
authors believe that the blocking of fantasies and the
difficulty of developing a transference neurosis within
a face-to-face situation make it unlikely that an
authentic psychoanalytic process can be established.
Certain practitioners begin treatment of difficult cases
with a period of face-to-face interaction, or insert into
classical treatment an interval of face-to-face interaction, which may vary in length, when excessive anxiety
makes it dangerous to proceed with treatment within a
strictly defined psychoanalytic setting. Such an
approach can also be put forward with patients who
return to see a psychoanalyst after having finished
with classical analysis—a situation that is now increasingly in demand—and, in these cases, must address
the often excessive length of treatment and the maintenance of an idealized transference (whether positive or
negative) that has been insufficiently analyzed.
In current practice, it is increasingly common for
psychoanalysts to interact with patients face-to-face,
particularly when only temporary support is required
or because a current life event—a trauma, for example—calls for a type of help that remains on the surface
of the psychic processes, ‘‘at the level of the ego,’’ to use
an accepted phrase.
In the face-to-face situation, where all the parameters of a permanent erotic-aggressive confrontation
seem to converge to produce a pure and simple repeti54 2
tion of a patient’s archaic relational modalities, it is
above all important that the psychoanalyst’s listening
and physical perception of verbal and intraverbal reality, beyond any reductive fantasmatic project, bring
the patient a progressive and profound refutation of
their life-sustaining certainty that ‘‘nothing can
change’’ and that he or she would run tremendous
risks by giving up habitual defenses.
See also: Analytical psychology; Psychoanalytic treatment; Psychotherapy.
Bibliography
Blanton, Smiley. (1971). Diary of my analysis with Freud.
New York: Hawthorn.
Brusset, Bernard. (1991 May–June). L’or et le cuivre. La psychothérapie peut-elle être et rester psychanalytique? Revue
française de psychanalyse, 55 (3).
Freud, Sigmund. (1904a [1903]). Freud’s psycho-analytic
procedure. SE, 7: 247–254.
———. (1909d). Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis.
SE, 10: 151–318.
——— (1913c). On beginning the treatment (Further
recommendations on technique of psycho-analysis I). SE,
12: 121–144.
Green, André. (1999 [1973]). The fabric of affect in the psychoanalytic discourse. London and New York: Routledge.
Held, René. (1964–1965) Rapport clinique sur les psychothérapies d’inspiration psychanalytique freudienne.
Revue française de psychanalyse, 28(special number).
Weissman, Stephen M. (1977). Face to face: The role of
vision and the smiling response. Psychoanalytic Study of
the Child, 32, 421–450.
FACILITATION
Facilitation refers to the repeated passage of an excitation along the same pathway; this brings about a
gradual and permanent decrease in resistance to this
progression, and thus this channel develops into the
preferred pathway for future excitations.
This term was used very early by Sigmund Freud
(1888r, 1892g, 1893k). In the first article, Freud contrasts ‘‘facilitation and inhibition’’ to ‘‘reflex’’ and, in
the two other articles, he separates ‘‘facilitation’’ and
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FACKEL (DIE-)
‘‘inhibition’’ as the two modes of reflex transmission.
The maximal usage of the term, as defined above,
is found in Freud’s 1895 ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology,’’ with its neurological model of mental
functioning.
Josef Breuer, in the Studies on Hysteria (1895),
mentions the ‘‘attentional facilitation’’ invoked by
Sigmund Exner (1894), who was dealing with the
problem of energy and considered attentional facilitation to be pathological. In the ‘‘Project for a Scientific
Psychology,’’ Freud reworked the same notion differently to describe learning operations at the level of the
‘‘w neurons’’and the memory, which tends to establish
a type of operations similar to those of the system
governed by the principle of inertia. In this text, facilitation is conceived as a sort of double of the process of
cathexis, the other important element in the management of bound energy.
Subsequently, Freud all but abandoned the term
facilitation, which he uses only three times in The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), where he opposes it
to ‘‘resistance,’’ and a final time in ‘‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’’ (1920g), where facilitation is defined as
a ‘‘permanent trace of the excitation’’ (p. 26) obtained
through a decrease in the resistance against the progression of excitation.
BERTRAND VICHYN
See also: Binding/unbinding of the instincts; Hypercathexis; ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’’; Psi system;
Signifier; Signifying chain.
Bibliography
Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
Exner, Sigmund. (1894). Entwurf zu einer physiologischen
Erklärung der psychischen Erscheinungen. Vienna.
Freud, Sigmund. (1888r). Rezension von: Phisalix, [CésaireAuguste], Sur les nerfs craniens d’un embryon humain de
trente-deux jours (Compt. rend. CIV, 4, p. 241). In: Zbl.
Physiol., Bd. 1, S. 268.
———. (1892g). Rezension von: Sternberg, [Maximilian],
Hemmung, Ermüdung und Bahnung der Sehnenreflexe im
Rückenmark (Wiener Akad. Sitzber. Juni 1891). In: Zbl.
Physiol., Bd. 5, S. 859f.
———. (1893k). Rezension von: Sternberg, M[aximilian],
Über die Beziehungen der Sehnenreflexe zum Muskeltonus
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(Wiener Akad. Sitzber. Juni 1891). In: Zbl. Physiol., Bd. 6,
S. 24.
———. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. Part I, SE, 4:
1–338; Part II, SE, 5: 339–625.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18:
7–64.
———. (1950c [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology.
SE, 1: 281–387.
FACKEL (DIE-)
A Viennese satirical review published by Karl Kraus,
Die Fackel (The Torch) played an important role in
the intellectual life of the early twentieth century.
From April 1899 until February 1936, it appeared
three times a month, then at least once every four
months. Kraus published it by himself and was the
only writer on the review’s staff after 1911. His primary target was the press and its promoters, who were
the servants of the moneyed classes. Krauss was in
favor of sexual freedom and an ethic of right-speech.
Because of his antimilitarist position during the First
World War, the publication was censored. A number
of Kraus’s articles and aphorisms have been collected
in anthologies.
Sigmund Freud, who was already a reader of the
publication in 1903, is quoted in it for the first time in
1905 with reference to his Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality. In 1906 Die Fackel sided with Freud when he
was accused of plagiarism by Wilhelm Fliess. Freud
wanted to ‘‘join forces with Kraus,’’ who showed an
appreciation for Freud even though believing that art
is more important than science and expressing reservations about the interpretation of dreams.
The tone changed in 1910 after Fritz Wittels, who
had been a prolific contributor to the publication, presented a paper at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
entitled ‘‘The Neurosis of the Torch,’’ in which he caricatures Kraus’s aversion to the Neue Freie Presse as an
expression of a desire to kill his father. Kraus then
sharpened his barbs against psychoanalysis in aphorisms such as, ‘‘Psychoanalysis is a mental disease
for which it assumes it is the therapy’’ (no. 376,
June 1913).
ERIK PORGE
See also: Austria, Wittels, Fritz (Sigfried).
543
FAILURE NEUROSIS
Source Citation
Die Fackel. (H. Fischer, Ed.). Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1968–
1973, nos. 1–922, 39 vols.
Bibliography
Kaufholz-Messmer, Eliane. (1975). Karl Kraus. Paris: Editions de l’Herne.
Kraus, Karl. (1985). Pro domo et mundo. Paris: Gérard
Lebovici.
———. (1986). La nuit venue. Paris: Gérard Lebovici.
Nunberg, Hermann, and Federn, Ernst (Eds.). (1962–1975).
Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. New York:
International Universities Press.
Waldvogel, A. (1990). Karl Kraus und die Psychoanalyse: eine
historisch-dokumentarische Untersuchung. Psyche: Zeitschrift
für Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwendungen, 44(5), 412–444.
FAILURE NEUROSIS
The nosographical category of failure neurosis was created and applied mainly in France, as a result of René
Laforgue’s writings. It is defined in his book Psychopathologie de l’échec (The psychopathology of failure;
1941): ‘‘We thus speak of the failure of an individual’s
emotional life or social activity[. . .]. The person
derives from the affective failure itself the strength and
the voluptuousness that transforms the unhappiness
into happiness.’’.
He used the concept in L’echec de Baudelaire (The
defeat of baudelaire; 1931), and in chapter eleven of
Clinique psychanalytique (Clinical aspects of psychoanalysis; 1936/1984) he described it as a specific
nosographical category. He was then criticized by
Edward Glover in 1939 for following the current
trend among French psychoanalysts of isolating multiple clinical syndromes without putting much effort
into systematizing them into general categories.
Although the chapters devoted to Napoleon and
Hitler disappeared mysteriously during the troubled
period of the Second World War, his book, which
appeared in 1941, took Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
Robespierre as examples in order to review and
develop the psychopathological variations that clinicians encounter. Laforgue also pointed to Freud’s
treatment of the subject: ‘‘Freud was the first to speak
of this syndrome in a short article on Those Wrecked
54 4
by Success but he did not accord to the question all
the importance it deserved.’’
Freud did indeed describe this ‘‘character-type’’
among the causes of resistance to the symptom analysis (1916d). Taking the examples of Lady Macbeth and
Rebecca West, a character in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, he
showed how guilt linked to the possible realization of
forbidden desires could lead to a failure as soon as the
consciously desired goal was achieved in reality. Laforgue continued this oedipal theme, elaborating it from
the notion of the superego (which he called the superI). Because of his work on ‘‘family neurosis’’ (another
syndrome that has since been forgotten), he considered the family environment important.
Failure as ‘‘fear of success’’ translates psychically
into inhibitions, depression, even delusions, or physically into clumsiness or accidents of varying degrees,
perhaps even fatal. These disorders can correspond to
punishment for transgressing a prohibition (appearing
after a significant success) or the impossibility of successfully completing a task required by the ego ideal.
Other forms have been linked to survivor guilt after
the death of a highly cathected object or a catastrophic
experience (the Holocaust, for example). These states
are usually accompanied by a depressed tone but, as
Roy Schafer pointed out, we must be careful not to see
all these subjects as ‘‘masochists’’ because this description would imply a sexualization of suffering, which is
not always present.
The notion of ‘‘fate neurosis,’’ which is quite vague,
somewhat clouded the issue of the failure syndrome,
which suffered further decline after the Liberation,
during the debates around The Psychopathology of Failure, first published in 1941 and reprinted in 1944
despite the fact that it was rejected by Matthias Göring,
from whom Laforgue had requested a translation. Certain considerations, like ‘‘this love of suffering,
whether it translates as persecution or worrying about
money, is one of the characteristic aspects of the Jewish
psychism, as it developed in the ghettoes’’ (1941, p.
42), helped discredit this theory, and since 1945 it has
received only rare and brief mention in psychoanalytic
literature, being generally associated with studies of
adolescence (Mâle; Weil).
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Laforgue, René; Neurosis; Psychopathologie de
l’échec (Psychopathology of failure).
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F A I R B A I R N , W I L L I A M R O N A L D D O D D S (1889 –1 964)
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1916d). Some character-types met with in
psycho-analytic work. SE, 14: 309–333.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
Glover, Edward. (1939). Review of Clinical aspects of
psychoanalysis, by René Laforgue, Hogarth and Inst. Psycho-Anal., London, 1938. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 20, 196–197.
Laforgue, René. (1941). Psychopathologie de l’échec. Marseille: Les Cahiers du Sud.
Laforgue, René. (1984). Clinical aspects of psycho-analysis
(Joan Hall, Trans.). New York: Da Capo. (Original work
published 1936)
Mâle, Pierre. (1971). Quelques aspects de la psychopathologie et de la psychothérapie à l’adolescence. Confrontations
psychiatriques, 7, 103–124.
Schafer, Roy. (1988). Those wrecked by success. In Robert A.
Glick and Donald I. Meyers (Eds.), Masochism: Contemporary psychoanalytic perspective (pp. 81–92). Hillsdale, NJ:
Analytic Press.
Weil, Annemarie P. (1978). Maturational variations and
genetic-dynamic issues. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 26, 461–491.
FAIRBAIRN, WILLIAM RONALD DODDS
(1889–1964)
British physician and psychoanalyst William Ronald
Dodds Fairbairn was born in Edinburgh on August 11,
1889, and died there on December 31, 1964.
Ronald Fairbairn was the only child of middle-class
parents with strict Protestant morals and strong
academic traditions in Scotland. He studied moral
philosophy at Edinburgh University, and divinity and
Hellenistic Greek at Edinburgh, Kiel, Strasbourg and
Manchester.
Fairbairn made the decision to study medicine and
psychotherapy after serving in the First World War. As
a medical student he started analysis with E. H. Connell, and shortly after qualifying began thirty years of
working with war neuroses. Despite being without the
requisite formal training, he began psychoanalytic
work in 1925 and obtained his MD in 1927. In 1926 he
married and began a family; he started his clinical
writing soon after. From 1927 to 1935 he was a lecturer
in psychology at Edinburgh University, his special subject being adolescence, and held a post at the Clinic for
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Children and Juveniles where he treated the delinquent
and sexually abused.
He was introduced to the British Psycho-Analytical
Society by both Ernest Jones and Edward Glover, who
admired his thinking and intellectual rigor. Fairbairn
was elected as associate member of the British PsychoAnalytical Society after presenting a paper to the
Society in 1931. He became a full member in 1938.
During the Second World War he held a post in the
Emergency Medical Service, and later a government
post, while beginning to publish his most important
contributions. Isolated from the conflicts in the British
Psycho-Analytical Society, he was able to develop his
original and independent ideas, and towards the end
of his life was increasingly recognized. Fairbairn’s first
wife died in 1952, and he remarried in 1959.
Fairbairn’s principal contributions can be found in
his book Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality
(1952), and his article ‘‘An Object Relation Theory of
the Personality’’ (1954). Several of these contributions
are outlined below.
Fairbairn moved from a biological model to a psychological one, in which the early unitary ego is genetically geared towards object relationships. Energy is
inseparable from structure in this model, and ‘‘drive’’
is seen as the struggle for integration, individuation
and recognition within a human environment.
He described a theory of development based on a
maturational sequence of relationships throughout
life, from infantile dependence to ‘‘mature dependence.’’ To this he added a theory of endopsychic
structure and its development, in which the ego, as it
becomes attached to different (ideal, exciting, rejecting) aspects of mother, internalizes them and splits
(this is the ‘‘schizoid condition,’’ inevitable and basic).
The ego divides into a ‘‘central’’ ego, partly conscious
and available for real relationships; a ‘‘libidinal’’ ego;
and an ‘‘antilibidinal’’ (‘‘internal saboteur’’) ego, both
unconscious. The central ego also internalizes what
Fairbairn called the ‘‘ideal object,’’ and in order to earn
its approbation develops the ‘‘moral defense’’ of guilt;
it is the central ego, operating in the ‘‘real world’’ and
also in touch with inner structures, that can mediate
between them and lead to the opening up of the inner
world to reality.
Fairbairn also developed a theory of psychopathology based on real environmental failure, in which the
infant internalizes and identifies with the bad aspects
545
FALSE SELF
of its parent(s), and represses the relationships,
together with memory, fantasy, and attached affect.
The type and severity of psychopathology depends on
the degree of splitting and repression required, the
defenses against it, and the amount of remaining central ego available for external relationships. Here there
are implications for psychoanalytic technique, particularly in the understanding of repetition compulsion.
One of the most important founders of objectrelations theory, Fairbairn left work that has been
increasingly influential, both in the United Kingdom
and internationally. Those particularly influenced
include members of the British Independent Group,
attachment theorists, self-psychologists, and intersubjective theorists.
JENNIFER JOHNS
Notions developed: Antilibidinal ego; Quasi-independence/transitional stage.
See also: Breast, good/bad object; Great Britain; Libido;
Object relations theory; Self (true/false).
Bibliography
Fairbairn, Ronald. (1952). Psychoanalytic studies of the personality. London: Tavistock Publications.
———. (1994). From instinct to self: Selected papers of
W. R. D. Fairbairn: Vol. 1, Clinical and theoretical papers.
(David Scharff and Ellinor Fairbairn Birtles, Eds.). New
Jersey: Jason Aronson.
———. (1994). From instinct to self: Selected papers of
W. R. D. Fairbairn: Vol. 2, Applications and early contributions. (David Scharff and Ellinor Fairbairn Birtles, Eds.).
New Jersey: Jason Aronson.
Greenberg, Stephen, and Mitchell, Jay. (1983). Object relations in psychoanalytic theory. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press.
Grotstein, James, and Rinsley, Donald (Eds.). (1994). Fairbairn and the origins of object relations. London: Free Association Press and New York: The Guilford Press.
Sutherland, John. (1989). Fairbairn’s journey into the interior. London: Free Association Press.
FALSE SELF
The false self, in Donald Winnicott’s developmental
schema, refers to certain types of false personalities that
develop as the result of early and repeated environmental
54 6
failure, with the result that the true self-potential is
not realized, but hidden. This idea appears in many
papers and is fully presented in ‘‘The theory of infantparent relationship’’ (Winnicott, 1965c).
From 1945 onward Winnicott described the infant’s
development. In the earliest object relationships the
infant is most of the time unintegrated and absolutely
dependent, requiring at first the mother’s totally reliable and empathic response (primary maternal preoccupation). Later the infant accepts her gradual but
tolerable failures in provision (good enough mothering) and proceeds to ego integration and relative
dependence. ‘‘Not good enough mothers,’’ those who
are unable to satisfy the excited infant’s needs or who
demand an inappropriately integrated response from
an infant unable to give it, Winnicott describes as
impinging and traumatizing. When repeated traumas
occur very early in development, the infant experiences extreme dread or primitive agony, and psychosis
may result. To such a mother, who fails to meet the
infant’s gesture and substitutes one of her own, the
older and more integrated infant responds in a compliant fashion. In this way the infant may develop a
false self that builds up a set of relationships based on
compliance or even imitation, the potential true self
being unrealized and hidden.
Winnicott described five degrees of false self. In the
extreme case, the true self is completely hidden, and
the false self appears authentic and is frequently successful, though failing in intimate relationships. In
nearly normal cases, the false self is bound by the
ordinary restraints necessary for social adaptation.
Winnicott emphasizes a particular type of false self in
which intellectual activity is dissociated from psychosomatic existence.
Winnicott is elusive in style, because he writes from
an object-related point of view. In this viewpoint, the
undifferentiated infant ego exists from the beginning
in a relationship without knowing it, because the sense
of self and other does not yet exist. Winnicott’s developmental approach, of which the concept of a false self
is one aspect, differs from those of Freud and Klein.
He does not directly address instincts in themselves,
for instance, since his focus is on the developing and
dynamic relationship between what will become the
individual and the environment in which that individual will grow. His theory parallels but also differs
from that of Fairbairn. On Fairbain’s theory, environmental failure and lack of early intimacy must result in
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FAMILY
defensive splitting, schizoid mechanisms being the
most basic. From there, there are many subsequent
possibilities in terms of character development and
psychopathology. Winnicott held that one can ameliorate false-self organizations of personality only by
facilitating regression in analysis.
JENNIFER JOHNS
See also: As if personality; Internal object; Lie; Normality;
Self (true/false); Splitting.
Bibliography
Winnicott, Donald W. (1945). Primitive emotional development. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 26.
(Reprinted in his Collected papers: through paediatrics to
psycho-analysis [1958].)
———. (1958). Psychosis and child care. In his Collected
papers: through paediatrics to psycho-Analysis (pp. 219–
228). London: Tavistock Publications. (Original work published 1952)
———. (1965a). Ego distortion in terms of true and false
self. In his Maturational processes and the facilitating environment (pp. 140–152). London: Hogarth and the Institute
of Psycho-Analysis. (Original work published 1962)
———. (1965b). Ego-integration in child development. In
his Maturational processes and the facilitating environment
(pp. 56–63). (Original work published 1962)
———. (1965c). The theory of infant-parent relationship.
In his Maturational processes and the facilitating environment (pp. 17–55). London: Hogarth and the Institute of
Psycho-Analysis. (Original work published 1960)
———. (1975). Through paediatrics to psycho-analysis.
London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of PsychoAnalysis.
———. (1989). Development of the theme of the mother’s
unconscious as discovered in psycho-analytic practice. In
his Psychoanalytic explorations (pp. 247–250). Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
FAMILY
Family is usually defined as a group of persons related
by marriage or blood ties, or even by adoption—and
also by the family bond.
Psychoanalysis contains an implicit concept of
family. It emphasizes the functions of each family
member and the prescriptions and prohibitions
governing the relationships between them, which
influence conflicts, fantasies, and the psychic agencies.
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The family is a unit that consists of something more
than a series of individuals; it is a group to which they
belong and that provides support with its rules, which
are as obscure and powerful as those of the unconscious and that thus ensure the family’s coherence and
cohesion. The family has many purposes: providing
for its members’ material and psychic needs and conceiving and developing the child until his accession as
a subject. Each parent transmits a legacy that the child
will have to negotiate in connection with its wishes.
The family also has a function in terms of play, creating the space and time for leisure and reverie.
Before Freud, doctors took little interest in the
family. The patient was studied in the present, without
reference to childhood history, to the context in which
he had developed, or to his father or mother, except to
identify any hereditary predispositions that would
reinforce the prevailing hypothesis concerning degeneration in mental patients. Freud raised the family to a
preeminent position. However, after he quickly abandoned the seduction theory, the family headed by a
seducer changed its status from a real entity to a theoretical fantasy. Freud still addressed the family as a real
entity in the form of the primal horde (1912–1913a),
with the authoritarian father put to death by his sons
who were excluded from sharing the women. Freud
subsequently returned to this hypothesis as to the origin of culture. For example, his group psychology
(1921c) helped to explain family psychology. It may
even be that he envisaged the functioning of the group
and the crowd as an archaic family dominated by a leader (father) at whom his subjects direct their (ego)
ideal cathexes. This model bears a curious resemblance
to the family of ancient Rome, in which the father was
the uncontested leader around whom the life of the
household revolved. There are some revealing exceptions to this lack of interest in the real family, for
instance, the account that the child’s father gives to
Freud in the analysis of ‘‘Little Hans’’ (1909b). It was
not unusual at the time for a single analyst to treat different members of the same family.
As the real family receded from the picture, the
representations of the parents gained ground, particularly through the increased interest in object
relations. The shifting importance of the family
relates to developments in the theory of trauma.
However, the real problem is discovering not whether
the original theory of trauma was definitively abandoned by Freud but whether it was given anything
547
FAMILY COMPLEX
other than a factual status. It would then not simply
be the presence of the object or the primary maternal
care that contributed to introjections but the parent’s
subjectivity, desires, fantasies, and affects—in other
words, the force of his unconscious desire, which orients the child’s ideals by proposing an ideal that reinforces his self-esteem when he experiences it as an
important part of himself and which awakens the life
of the drives by seducing him.
The analytic theory of the family is based on this
model. It addresses the way in which the reciprocal
cathexes between its members are managed and mobilized. Donald Winnicott explained this unconscious
functioning as a productive network of interrelated
fantasies giving rise to a generative illusion on the part
of the mother and her child, whose attuned psyches
are connected by primary narcissistic identifications.
This generates the concept of the bond: An object relationship would be inconceivable without its counterpart, in other words, without the cathexis that the
external object creates of the former and applies to
him (Eiguer, 1987).
Furthermore, the concept of the bond is complicated by the dual nature of filiation. The family
romance (Freud, 1909c [1908]) is a fantasy in which
the child gives himself another origin by imagining
himself to be adopted or illegitimate. While assuaging
his oedipal anxieties, he seeks, by inventing better or
prestigious parents for himself, to preserve the previous idealization of his own parents. However, in giving himself other parents (or one other) than his own,
he acknowledges an essential dimension of filiation:
The parental roles are not equivalent to the procreative
functions—they can even be independent of these. In
matrilineal cultures in particular, the father’s role of
strict educator reverts to an uncle who is related to the
mother. Although Freud’s discovery relates to a set of
fantasies, this nevertheless accords with the idea of an
underlying imago-based structure. The transgenerational figure of the ancestor ultimately evokes this
spiritual fatherhood in the other of the father, the
fourth family member.
ALBERTO EIGUER
See also: Collective psychology; Intergenerational; Law of
the Father; Psychoanalytic family therapy; Secret; Sociology and psychoanalysis, sociopsychoanalysis.
54 8
Bibliography
Eiguer, Alberto. (1987). La Parenté fantasmatique. Paris:
Dunod.
Freud, Sigmund. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a fiveyear-old boy. SE, 10: 1–149.
———. (1909c [1908]) Family romances. SE, 9: 235–241.
———. (1912–1913a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
———. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
Laforgue, René. (1936). La névrose familiale (IXe Conférence des psychanalystes de langue française). Revue française de psychanalyse, 9 (4), 327–359.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1965). The maturational processes
and the facilitating environment. London: Hogarth and the
Institute of Psychoanalysis.
FAMILY COMPLEX. See Imago
FAMILY ROMANCE
The family romance is a conscious fantasy, later
repressed, in which a child imagines that their birth
parents are not actual but adoptive parents, or that
their birth was the outcome of maternal infidelity.
Typically, the fantasy parents are of noble lineage, or at
least of a higher social class than the real parents.
The family romance (Freud, 1909c[1908]) differs
from children’s sexual theories in that it does not
address general questions about the origins of life but
rather the question, ‘‘Who am I?’’—where ‘‘I’’ denotes
not an agency of the mind (or ego) but the result of an
effort to place oneself in a history, and hence the
attempt to form the basis of a knowledge.
The family romance fantasy has several possible
aims and sources: revenge against frustrating parents;
rivalry with the parent of the same sex; separation
from idealized parents by means of their transformation into fantasy parents; and the elimination of brothers and sisters for competitive or incestuous purposes.
The family romance is built on the basis of the
child’s intuitive knowledge of their parents’ emotions,
although the parents may believe these perfectly conINTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
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F A N O N , F R A N T Z (1925 –1 961)
cealed (see Freud, Totem and Taboo [1912–1913a];
also, apropos of the paranoid’s intuitiveness, ‘‘Some
Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and
Homosexuality’’ [1922b [1921]]).
Other intellectual capacities are necessary for the
creation of a family romance, notably the ability to
compare and to relativize. The fantasy may thus be
considered the result of a basic psychological attainment, that of the right to doubt—here, to doubt the
absolute aspect of parental figures (‘‘Pater semper
incertus est’’). The family romance is, in fact, linked to
the unconscious of the parents. For the father, there
can be only one true father, his own, that of the ‘‘primal horde’’; while the mother associates her child psychologically, particularly her first-born, with her own
oedipal attachments (Mijolla). This first childhood
romance is often maintained in daydreams well
beyond puberty. Its influence is also discernible in the
pleasure novel-readers derive by identifying with different fictional characters.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Cultural transmission; Family; Fantasy; Heroic
self, the; Imposter; Latency period; Myth of the Birth of
the Hero; Myth of the hero; Mythology and psychoanalysis; Substitute/substitutive formation.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1909c [1908]). Family romances. SE, 9:
235–241.
———. (1912–13a]). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
———. (1922b [1921]). Neurotic mechanisms in jealousy,
paranoia and homosexuality, SE, 18: 221–232.
Mijolla, Alain de. (1987). Unconscious identification, fantasies and family prehistory. International Journal of Psychoanalysis , 68, 397–403.
Further Reading
Corbett, Ken. (2001). Nontraditional family romance. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 70, 599–624.
Greenacre, Phyllis. (1958). The family romance of the artist.
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 13, 9–36.
FAMILY THERAPY. See Psychoanalytic family
therapy
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FANON, FRANTZ (1925–1961)
Frantz Fanon was born on July 20, 1925, in Fort-deFrance on the Caribbean island of Martinique and died
on December 6, 1961, in Washington, D.C. He is best
known for his work in fighting against colonization.
Fanon was the son of a native Martiniquan father
(the descendant of slaves and a member of the island’s
middle-class community), and a French (Alsace)
mother (herself the daughter of a mixed marriage).
Between 1939 and 1943 he studied at the Lycée Schoelcher, where he was taught by Aimé César, a poet who
helped destroy the image of the African created by European colonization. In 1943, then a young man, Fanon
became a dissident and agitated against representatives
of the Vichy regime in the Antilles. He traveled to the
island of Dominica to rally the free French forces in
the Caribbean. In 1944 he fought on the European
front. Wounded near the Swiss border, he received a
citation for his courage, signed by Colonel Raoul
Salan, whom he would later fight against in Algeria.
After receiving his baccalaureate at the special session of March 1946, he went to Lyon, France, to study
medicine (1946–1951). After a brief stay in Martinique
at the end of 1951, he returned to Lyon to specialize in
psychiatry under the direction of Professor Tosquelles.
There he met Octave Mannoni. The two men became
friends, but Fanon was highly critical of Mannoni’s
Psychologie de la Colonisation (Psychology of colonization). He became a psychiatrist in June 1953. In 1954
he was appointed to a post in Blida, Algeria. He saw
patients during the day and, at night, participated in
the struggle for Algerian independence. He was
expelled from Algeria in January 1957. At the end of
the summer of 1958, Fanon settled in Tunis to resume
his double life. He died in 1961 from leukemia.
He developed an interest in psychoanalysis fairly
early in his career; he speaks of it in his first book,
Black Skin, White Masks (1967a), published when he
was twenty-seven. His attitude is that of a colonized
subject who, disappointed by racism, grows skeptical
of European universalism. Yet he began this work with
the following statement: ‘‘Only a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem can reveal the emotional anomalies responsible for the resulting complexes.’’ Fanon saw Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and
Carl Gustav Jung as more or less the same. His form of
psychoanalysis is more of a social therapy based on liberation than of a talking cure.
549
FANTASY
His ideas, as represented in his books—Studies in a
Dying Colonialism (1965a), The Wretched of the Earth
(1965a), and Toward the African Revolution (1967b)—
can be summarized as follows: There is a specific
pathology associated with colonization. The core of
the emotional disturbances affecting black people is an
inferiority complex, in the Adlerian sense. The Oedipus complex does not occur in families from the
Antilles. The unconscious, as described by Jung, is collective. Analysis of the social-historical development of
the individual must take precedence over any other
approach. Freud, Jung, and Adler were not thinking
about black people when they formulated their theories. He rejected the idea of determinism, believing
that humankind was abandoned to its own fate.
He was unable to overcome his resistance to psychoanalysis at the time of his premature death at the
age of thirty-six.
GUILLAUME SURÉNA
See also: Martinique; North African countries.
Bibliography
Cherki, Alice. (2000). Frantz Fanon, portrait. Paris: Seuil.
Fanon, Frantz. (1965a). Studies in a dying colonialism (Haakon Chevalier, Trans.). New York: Monthly Review Press.
(Original work published 1958)
———. (1965b). The wretched of the earth (Constance Farrington, Trans.). New York: Grove Press. (Original work
published 1961)
———. (1967a). Black skin, white masks (Charles Lam
Markmann, Trans.). New York: Grove Press. (Original
work published 1952)
———. (1967b). Toward the African revolution: Political
essays (Haakon Chevalier, Trans.). New York: Grove Press.
(Original work published 1964)
FANTASY
A fantasy is a product of the imagination in the form
of a script in the theatrical or cinematic sense and
deployed in support of a wish-fulfillment. It may be a
conscious creation, a daydream created by the subject
to procure an imaginary satisfaction that is erotic,
aggressive, self-flattering, or self-aggrandizing in nature. This wish-fulfilling function likens the daydream,
or reverie, to night dreams, but it may also be com55 0
pared to symptoms or behavior with similar aims. It
must therefore be supposed that all these manifestations have a common origin, namely unconscious
fantasy.
The term Phantasie was part of everyday language,
where it signified ‘‘fancy,’’ ‘‘imagination.’’ It appeared
very early in Freud’s writings, notably in the Studies on
Hysteria (1895d), where he noted the frequency of
daydreams among hysterics. However, the word soon
took on a more precise meaning and the concept was
expanded centrally in the burgeoning science of psychoanalysis. In a letter dated May 2, 1897, to Wilhelm
Fliess, Freud wrote, ‘‘I have gained a sure inkling of the
structure of hysteria. Everything goes back to the
reproduction of scenes. Some can be obtained directly,
others always by way of fantasies set up in front of
them. The fantasies stem from things that have been
heard but understood subsequently, and all their material is of course genuine.’’ (p. 239). Later, in Draft M
(May 25, 1897), we find this: ‘‘Fantasies arise from an
unconscious combination of things experienced and
heard, according to certain tendencies. These tendencies are toward making inaccessible the memory from
which symptoms have emerged or might emerge. . . . As
a result of the construction of fantasies like this (in periods of excitation), the mnemic symptoms cease’’
(1985a [1887–1904], p. 247).
Already, then, at this early moment, Freud posited
unconscious fantasy as the source of the symptom, of
the dream (soon to be elaborated on in The Interpretation of Dreams,1900a), of daydreams, parapraxes, and
so on. But the claim that ‘‘all [this] material is of
course genuine’’ was significantly revised. On September 21, 1897, he famously announced to Fliess, ‘‘I no
longer believe in my neurotica’’ (p. 264)—that is, in an
etiology for hysteria attributable in all cases to a
trauma actually experienced during childhood. This is
not to say that Freud now abandoned his seduction
theory. But in the wake of a sudden disillusionment,
he entered a long period leading to his recognition
that the traumatic event was never recorded exactly
per se, and never endured in unmodified form but,
quite to the contrary, was subject to incessant reworking after the fact. From that moment, indeed, Freud
was convinced that ‘‘there are no Ôindications of reality’
in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish
between truth and fiction that has been cathected with
affect’’ (p. 264); or in other words between historical
(or event-defined) reality and fantasy. It was possible,
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then, that in some cases the hysterical symptom was
the product of ‘‘pure fantasy’’; seduction nevertheless
existed, especially in view of the fact that a child might
read this connotation into ‘‘innocent’’ events.
The birth of the psychoanalytical concept of fantasy
may thus be dated 1897; in Freud’s self-analysis, its
advent coincides with that of the Oedipus complex. As
Freud wrote to Fliess on October 15, 1897, ‘‘I have
found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon of]
being in love with my mother and jealous of my father,
and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood’’ (p. 272). This twin birth was acknowledged by
Freud a quarter of a century later in An Autobiographical Study (1925d): ‘‘When, however, I was at last
obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had
never taken place, and that they were only phantasies
which my patients had made up or which I myself had
perhaps forced upon them, I was for some time completely at a loss. . . . When I had pulled myself together,
I was able to draw the right conclusions from my discovery: namely, that the neurotic symptoms were not
related directly to actual events but to wishful phantasies, and that as far as the neurosis was concerned psychical reality was of more importance than material
reality. . . . I had in fact stumbled for the first time
upon the Oedipus complex’’ (p. 34).
There are references to fantasy throughout Freud’s
work, especially prior to the major theoretical revision
of the 1920s. In his paper on ‘‘Screen Memories’’
(1899a), he revealed the role of adolescent fantasies in
the work of reconstructing childhood memories. The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), based on the idea of
the dream as a wish-fulfillment, was itself a study of
nighttime expressions of fantasy, while Delusions and
Dreams in Jensen’s ‘‘Gradiva’’ (1907a) and ‘‘Creative
Writers and Day-Dreaming’’ (1908e) were centered on
the eruptions of fantasy during waking life. ‘‘Hysterical
Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality’’ (1908a)
was a reconsideration, ten years after its initial formulation, of the theory of symptom production through
fantasy. In spite of its title, ‘‘On the Sexual Theories of
Children’’ (1908c) also examined the role of fantasy:
certain ‘‘theories’’ were constructed by the child to
explain the mysteries of sexuality, conception, and
birth, but they were in effect also imaginary productions similar to reveries. In the ‘‘Wolf Man’’ case history (1918b [1914]), Freud, returning at length to the
problem of the relationship between event-defined
‘‘historical reality’’ and fantasy creation, ended by
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re-embracing the notion of ‘‘phylogenetically’’ transmitted primal fantasies, previously discussed in Totem
and Taboo (1912–1913a). Of special importance too is
the essay ‘‘ÔA Child is Being Beaten’’’ (1919e), where
Freud analyzed the genesis and structure of a particular fantasy in which erotic pleasure was tied to the evocation of punishment experienced by a (different)
child.
The notion of fantasy nevertheless remained rather
vague in Freud’s work. It presented a number of problems for him, especially that of the relationship
between fantasy and representation. More generally,
there was the question of the role played by fantasy in
mentation. For Freud, the instinct was the living
source of all mental activity, as he clearly asserted in
The Interpretation of Dreams. The dream was a wishfulfillment, but the dual action of primary processes
and secondary revision could bring about transpositions and distortions that permitted the latent
thoughts of the dream to cross over into the dream’s
manifest content, to transform from unconscious fantasies into explicit images better able to break through
the barrier of the censorship. In Chapter 7 of The Interpretation, Freud extended this model to psychic work
as a whole in order to account for the transition from
fantasy to mental representation, which were closely
akin because of their common origin. The result, paradoxically, was that the difference between them was
clearly pointed up: whereas the fantasy was an internal
formation, created without reference to reality, mental
representations drew their very substance from their
relationship with the outside world. In ‘‘Formulations
on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’’
(1911b), Freud reiterated that fantasy served the pleasure principle exclusively, while mental representation,
though it might transpose fantasy, answered strictly by
the reality principle. Both the close kinship and the
basic difference between fantasy and mental representation are easy to discern in Freud’s account of hallucinatory wish-fulfillment, where he describes that
founding moment when the infant obtains satisfaction
by hallucinating the real, but absent, agent of satisfaction, and then, since the need remains, begins to
‘‘represent’’ that absence (the representation of the
object arises from its very absence). W. R. Bion was a
leader among those authors who have sought to thus
develop a theory of mental activity designed to illuminate the relationship between fantasy and
representation.
551
FANTASY
The fact remains that back in 1897 Freud ran into a
difficulty that continued to occupy him for the rest of
his life and is still a crucial question for psychoanalysis
in the twenty-first century: If instinctual forces are
indeed the live source of wishes or fantasies, which
mediate them, how can the forms of those wishes be
explained, and more specifically how is it that typical
forms, seemingly derived from a common matrix,
occur very widely among people whose history and
psychic make-up vary considerably? Freud posed this
question repeatedly in his account of the ‘‘Wolf Man’’
(1918b [1914]), where he offered a meticulous, albeit
hypothetical reconstruction of events that took place in
his patient’s life between the ages of eighteen months
and four years old in order to explain his subsequent
pathology. Yet Freud continued to feel that such an
explanation, based on a person’s real history, left something to be desired. He consequently appealed to an
even earlier ‘‘historical reality’’—that of the human
species as a whole: ‘‘It seems to me quite possible that
all the things that are told to us today in analysis as
phantasy . . . were once real occurrences in the primaeval times of the human family, and that children in
their phantasies are simply filling in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth’’ (1916–1917a, p.
371). This echoed the ‘‘fiction’’ Freud had developed in
Totem and Taboo (1912–1913a) according to which, at
the time of the ‘‘primal horde,’’ the sons killed their
father and committed incest with their mother; ever
since, the unconscious memory of that primal drama
has left its stamp on every human being.
It is not unreasonable to have reservations about
this speculation. Nevertheless, clinical psychoanalysis
has verified the role of ‘‘fantasies’’ that can be qualified
as ‘‘primal,’’ however one regards their historicity, in
that they are the basis of every individual fantasy.
Freud mentioned three varieties: ‘‘I call such fantasies—of the observation of sexual intercourse between
the parents, of seduction, of castration, and others—
Ôprimal fantasies’’’ (1915f, p. 269). But this enumeration should not be looked upon as definitive; it should
no doubt include the fantasy of a return to the
mother’s breast (for further discussion of primal fantasies, see Laplanche and Pontalis).
Among post-Freudian developments, Melanie
Klein’s contribution is the most important. Continuing the line of enquiry that Freud opened up in
‘‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’’ (1915c) and reorganized after 1920 by introducing the life and death
55 2
instincts, Klein assigned a leading role to the play of
fantasy in the mental life of young children; indeed,
she even seemed to make the apprehension of reality
subordinate to fantasy in the context of a battle royal
between love and hate that aroused massive anxiety.
The beginning of mental life was envisaged by Klein as
the scene of a tragedy played out by fantasies of invasion, cannibalism, deadly attacks on the breast and by
the breast, explosion, laceration, and so forth. This
approach was further advanced by some of Klein’s
followers, notably Donald Meltzer. Significant theoretical support was supplied by Susan Isaacs in her paper
‘‘On the Nature and Function of Phantasy’’ (1948).
A very different approach was taken by Jacques
Lacan, who compared fantasy to freezing the frame of
a moving picture. In contrast to the Kleinian view, the
emphasis here was on the defensive function of fantasies, which sought to ‘‘freeze’’ the evocation of violent
scenes, and first and foremost those responsible for
castration anxiety. For Lacan, the neurotic fantasy was
an attempt, always fruitless, to respond to the enigma
of the desire of the other. However varied individual
expressions of fantasy themes might be, the aim of
analysis was always to circumscribe the typical basic
fantasy of each analysand, its place and role in the
symbolic structure that determined that analysand’s
particular mode of gratification (jouissance).
Michèle Perron-Borelli (1997) has taken an entirely
different tack, providing a general overview of fantasy
in the context of an original theoretical reformulation
of the problem. Noting that every fantasy is centered
on a representation of action, whether active in nature
(e.g., seducing) or passive (being seduced), she defines
fantasy in terms of a three-part structure comprised of
an agent, an action, and an object of the action. This
structure is analogous, for Perron-Borelli, to the basic
grammatical subject/verb/object pattern; this is no
accident, perhaps, if one accepts that language reflects
the development of thought itself, and its origins in
fantasy. All fantasy activity, therefore, and indeed all
thought, may be conceived of as a system of transformations of this basic structure by a variety of means:
changing of places by the subject and the object relative to the action (change from activity to passivity or
vice versa), the replacement of the object or the subject, the assumption by the subject of the viewpoint of
an outside observer; and so on. In this view, the subject
comes into being and develops by virtue of these transformations themselves. At a deeper level, the startingINTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
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point is sought in a ‘‘primal fantasy matrix’’ in the
autoerotic life of the infant.
ROGER PERRON
See also: Act/action; Adolescent crisis; Amnesia; Anxiety;
Archaic mother; Autism; Body image; Castration complex; Combined parental figure; Creativity; Depression;
Family; Fantasy, formula of; Fantasy (reverie); Graph of
Desire; Group analysis; Idea/representation; Identification; Identification fantasies; Internal/external reality;
Internal object; Masochism; Myth of origins; Mythology
and psychoanalysis; Need for causality; Neurotica; Object
a; Oedipus complex, early; Perversion; Phallic woman;
Pregnancy, fantasy of; Primal fantasies; Primal scene; Primal, the; Projective identification; Real trauma; Reparation; Rescue fantasies; Reverie; Screen memory; Seduction scenes; Symptom-formation; Unconscious fantasy;
‘‘Vagina dentata,’’ fantasy of.
OF
———. (1925d [1924]). An autobiographical study. SE, 20:
1–74.
———. (1985c [1887–1904]). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Ed. and Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap/
Harvard University Press.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Joseph. (1895d). Studies on
hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
Isaacs, Susan. (1948). On the nature and function of phantasy. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 29, 73–97.
Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1968). Fantasy and the origins of sexuality. International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 49, 1ff. (Original work published 1964)
Perron-Borelli, Michèle. (1997). Dynamique du fantasme.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Perron-Borelli, Michèle, and Perron, Roger. (1997). Fantasme, Action, Pensée. Algiers: Éditions de la Société algérienne de psychologie.
Bibliography
Fain, Michel. (1971). Prélude à la vie fantasmatique. Revue
française de psychanalyse 35 (2–3), 291–364.
Further Reading
Freud, Sigmund. (1899a). Screen memories. SE, 3: 299–322.
Hayman, Arlene. (1989). What do we mean by a ‘‘phantasy’’?
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 70, 105–114.
———. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4–5.
———. (1907a). Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s ‘‘Gradiva.’’ SE, 9: 1–95.
———. (1908a). Hysterical phantasies and their relation to
bisexuality. SE, 9: 156–166.
Sandler, Joseph, and Sandler, Anne–Marie. (1994). Phantasy
and its transformations: A contemporary Freudian view.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 75, 387–394.
Shapiro, Theodore. (1990). Unconscious fantasy: Introduction. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association,
38, 39–46.
———. (1908c). On the sexual theories of children. SE, 9:
205–226.
———. (1908e). Creative writers and day-dreaming. SE, 9:
141–153.
———. (1911b). Formulations on the two principles of
mental functioning. SE, 12: 213–226.
FANTASY, FORMULA OF
———. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile
neurosis. SE, 17: 1–122.
In his early seminars, especially Object Relations
(1956–57), Jacques Lacan primarily conceived of fantasy as deriving from psychic projection that screened
a more painful image. He compared it to a freezeframe, where an immobile image is often used to conceal the traumatic image that will come next. Thus he
first conceived of fantasy as a defensive structure
designed to protect against the perception of ‘‘lack’’ in
the maternal other, thus of castration. A study of the
different forms of the fantasmatic defense allow for a
better understanding of psychical structures.
———. (1919e). ‘‘A child is being beaten’’: A contribution
to the study of the origin of sexual perversions. SE, 17:
175–204.
Following leads found in Freud’s writings—especially ‘‘The Wolf Man’’ (1918b [1914]) and ‘‘A Child
is Being Beaten’’ (1919e)—Lacan questioned the
———. (1912–13a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
———. (1915c). Instincts and their vicissitudes. SE, 14:
109–140.
———. (1915f). A case of paranoia running counter to the
psycho-analytic theory of the disease. SE, 14: 261–272.
———. (1916–17a). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. SE, 15–16.
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FANTASY (REVERIE)
relation between the fantasy and fixation on perceptual traces. He also addressed the larger question of
memory. He determined that fantasy need not be
radically opposed to memory. Instead, he suggested
that fantasy might rework memory depending on the
pressure of unconscious desire and the defensive strategies of the subject. Thus Lacan stressed that fantasy
fundamentally worked to transform memories of real
events.
In particular, he emphasized that the subject is
always represented in fantasy, as in the dream, in a
more or less obvious way. In fact, the fantasy stages a
certain relation and mode of interaction between the
subject and the object of desire. Thus conceived, fantasy is a complex structure, a kind of scenario, as
opposed to the simple hallucination of an object.
Lacan proposed a general formula for it: S/} a. Here
the diamond, }, formalizes the specific relation that
the subject of the unconscious, S/, which is ‘‘divided’’
by its relation to the realm of signifiers, maintains with
the object ‘‘little a,’’ the ‘‘lost’’ object, the ‘‘detached’’
remainder of the first operation of symbolization by
the parental other. The famous list of Freudian
‘‘detachable’’ objects (breast, feces, penis, baby), to
which Lacan added the voice, the gaze, and the phoneme, all constitute object-causes of desire (objects a)
that are not representable as such. The subject will
spend all his or her life searching for various imaginary
and concrete intermediary objects to take their place
in the realization of desire.
In April 1961, in his seminar on the Transference,
Lacan tried to define the various types of fantasies:
The hysteric aspires to a master. The obsessional’s fantasy involves an indefinite metonymic substitution.
And the pervert’s fantasy seeks to radicalize the subject/other split, so that it can be enjoyed; this fantasy
tends to take the form a}S/.
In his fundamental text, ‘‘The Subversion of the
Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian
Unconscious’’ (1960), Lacan tried to place fantasy in
the genesis of the psychic apparatus by locating it
within his ‘‘graph of desire.’’ The major difficulty here
is that the object of the drive, the object of physiological need, and the object of narcissistic love/hate maintain with each other a relation of fundamental and
irreducible heterogeneity.
For Lacan, the psychoanalytic treatment must
locate the subject’s more or less unconscious
55 4
‘‘fundamental fantasy.’’ At the same time the subject’s
particular mode of enjoyment is exposed, and freed as
much as possible from the desire of the Other, in relation to which the fantasy is always a compromise formation. The objective of any treatment is always to
produce a change in the subject’s defensive processes,
to remove obstacles in order to allow the subject access
to his or her own enjoyment.
Lacan fully recognized the power of the image in
fantasy, but he insisted on the fact that its functional
value derives from the place that it comes to occupy in
the larger symbolic structure. In other words, its value
derives from the fact that the image in question (a
representation of something unconscious) must be
able to play its role as a signifier. On this point, Lacan
launched an unceasing attack on (primarily Kleinian)
currents in psychoanalysis that tended to consider the
fantasy as a production of images that were assumed
to be symbols in their own right. He devoted an entire
year of his seminar (The Logic of Fantasy, 1966–67) to
unraveling the theoretical implications of the inscription of fantasy in the unconscious signifying structure.
Most notably, he insisted that fantasy would perform
the essential function of ‘‘knotting’’ the psychical registers of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real—and
thus of constituting what Freud called ‘‘psychic
reality.’’
BERNARD PENOT
See also: Fantasy.
Bibliography
Lacan, Jacques. (1991). Le Séminaire-Livre VIII, Le Transfert.
(1960–61). Paris: Seuil.
———. 1994. Le Séminaire-Livre IV, La Relation d’objet.
(1956–57). Paris: Seuil.
———. (2002). Écrits: A selection. (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New
York: W. W. Norton.
———. Unpublished. Le Séminaire-Livre XIV, La Logic du
fantasme. (1966–1967).
FANTASY (REVERIE)
The term reverie refers to an imaginary representation
created to help realize a desire. The term Phantasie was
used by Freud to designate such mental activity collectively, whether conscious or unconscious. In French
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the term fantasme prevailed in psychoanalytic use, for
it was felt that the term fantaisie was too marked by
current usage, where it connotes the idea of capriciousness or gratuitousness. However, following
Daniel Lagache (1964), the term fantaisie came to refer
to imaginary conscious or preconscious creations,
without ignoring their continuity with the unconscious fantasies they reflect.
Daydreams, which everyone experiences, are the
clearest examples of conscious or preconscious reveries. In general they explicitly satisfy a desire, providing some form of imaginary satisfaction, whether it be
erotic, aggressive, ambitious, self-aggrandizing, or
uplifting. It is not even unusual for people to visualize
painful or humiliating experiences to their own advantage. In all these cases the narcissistic dimension of the
process is obvious.
There are references to such daydreams in the Studies on Hysteria (1895d), primarily in the case study of
Anna O., written by Josef Breuer. Freud wrote about
daydreams in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a).
For example, when analyzing his dream about the
‘‘botanical monograph,’’ he relates a daydream during
which he imagines that, afflicted by glaucoma, he travels incognito to Berlin for an operation and experiences considerable pleasure in listening to the surgeon
extol the anesthetic qualities of cocaine (thus being
compensated for the pain Freud experienced through
being too late to be recognized as the one who discovered its properties). The ‘‘fantasies (Phantasien),
or daydreams, are the immediate predecessors of hysterical symptoms. . . . Like dreams they are wishfulfillments; like dreams they are based in large part on
our infantile experiences; like dreams they enjoy a certain relaxation of the censorship for their creations.’’
According to Freud, a daydream is initially the
expression of an unconscious fantasy; then, it is used
as available material among the latent thoughts used
by dreams. However, as he noted, there is an essential
difference between night dreams and daydreams: the
first is hallucinatory, the second is not, and the person
remains more or less clearly aware that his daydream is
a an escape from a reality that is not completely
suspended.
This distinction can be blurred or even disappear
entirely. Freud analyzes this phenomenon in his
detailed commentary on Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva
(1907a). In the same period, in ‘‘Creative Writers and
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Daydreaming’’ (1908e [1907]), he discusses the function of daydreaming in the genesis of the literary work,
and later, in ‘‘Family Romances’’ (1909c [1908]), he
foresees the situation where daydreams are used by the
child to avoid the oedipal conflict by imagining
himself to be adopted, to be really the child of a king
and queen.
Robert Desoille (1961) developed an original
method of psychotherapy based on the development
and analysis of the patient’s daydreams during therapy.
For some patients and under certain circumstances,
analytic psychodrama can create scenarios that are
related to daydreams.
ROGER PERRON
See also: ‘‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’’; Creativity; Ego ideal; Family romance; Fantasy; Phylogenetic
Fantasy, A: Overview of the Transference Neuroses; Psychoanalysis of Fire, The; Reverie; Unconscious fantasy.
Bibliography
Anargyros-Klinger, Annie; Reiss-Schimmel, Ilana; Wainrib,
Steve. (1998). Création, psychanalyse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Desoille, Robert. (1961). Théorie et Pratique du Rêve-éveillédirigé. Geneva: Le Mont-Blanc.
Lagache, Daniel. (1964). Fantaisie, réalité, vérité. Revue française de psychanalyse, 28 (4), 515–538.
FASCINATION
Fascination commonly refers to the act of fascinating
or of being fascinated. To fascinate is to immobilize by
the power of the gaze; as well as to charm, enchant,
dazzle, or even attract or capture someone else’s gaze.
In psychoanalysis the concept was used by Sigmund
Freud to refer to the bondage of love. He used this
term to refer to the paralysis of critical faculties, the
dependence, docile submission, and credulity that
occur when in love, which he compared to what occurs
in the relationship between hypnotist and hypnotized.
The term appears for the first time in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c). Fascination, or love bondage, is the term Freud uses to
describe the most extreme developments of being in
love. It is possible that he borrowed the term from
Gustave Le Bon, whom he quotes and who had noted,
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FATE NEUROSIS
in Psychologie des Foules, that the individual in a crowd
arrives at a particular state that approximates the fascination of the hypnotized for the hypnotist.
Although the first occurrence of the term fascination appears to date from 1921, what Freud describes
is the result of earlier considerations that quickly led
him to associate being in love with the hypnotic state.
Already in 1890, in his article ‘‘Psychical, or Mental,
Treatment,’’ (1890a) referring to the docility, obedience, and credulity of the hypnotized individual, he
had noted that in a situation of this type ‘‘subjection
on the part of one person towards another has only
one parallel, though a complete one—namely in certain love-relationships where there is extreme devotion.’’ In 1910, in a note added to Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality (1905d), he again points out this
connection. In 1918, in ‘‘The Taboo of Virginity,’’
(1918a) he discusses the question of ‘‘sexual bondage,’’
the expression used by Richard von Krafft-Ebing to
define the state of subjugation, dependence, and loss
of will experienced during the course of a sexual
relationship.
In 1921, what he describes with the term fascination
is, therefore, not new, any more than the concordance
he establishes between this state and that of hypnosis:
the same paralysis of critical faculties, the same docility,
the same submission toward the loved object or the
hypnotist. These findings open the way to the problem
of the imaginary relationship of the self to the loved
Other or the authority figure, and lead one to believe
that fascination is essential to the constitution of the
ego—a thesis put forward by Jacques Lacan.
The function of the gaze is central to fascination, so
it is surprising that the term doesn’t appear in the 1922
article on ‘‘Medusa’s Head’’ (1940c). The phenomenon
is similar to the paralysis (of thought, judgment, and
the body) caused, in the myth, by the encounter with
the Gorgon. Here mortal hypnotic fascination reaches
its apogee. The power of the gaze is the bearer and vector of the ‘‘omnipotence of thought,’’ like the phenomenon of the ‘‘evil eye’’ Freud had analyzed in 1919 in
‘‘The ÔUncanny’’’ (1919h). It is also surprising that
although, in 1916, he presents the goddess Baubo as a
representation of castration, or interprets the Medusa’s
head, along with Sándor Ferenczi, as a representation
of the female genital organs and more specifically the
mother, he never explicitly raises the question of fascination and what can cause it, namely, the sight of the
55 6
female genitals and the representation of castration
they bring to mind.
CATHERINE DESPRATS-PÉQUIGNOT
See also: Idealization; Numinous (analytical psychology);
Qu’estce que la suggestion?
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1890a). Psychical (or mental) treatment.
SE, 7: 281–302.
———. (1905a). On psychotherapy. SE, 7: 255–268.
———. (1918a). The taboo of virginity. SE, 11: 191–208.
———. (1919h). The ‘‘uncanny.’’ SE, 17: 217–256.
———. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
———. (1940c). Medusa’s head. SE, 18: 273–274.
Lacan, Jacques. (1975). Le Séminaire-Livre I, Les Écrits techniques de Freud (1954–1955). Paris: Le Seuil.
Le Bon, Gustave. (1995). The crowd / Gustave Le Bon. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publications. (Original work
published 1895)
FATE NEUROSIS
Helene Deutsch developed the notion of ‘‘fate neurosis’’ on the basis of the notion of ‘‘compulsion of destiny’’ (Schicksalszwang), which Freud mentioned at the
end of the third chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g, p. 23). In that work Freud described the
following trait in nonneurotic people: ‘‘The impression they give is of being pursued by a malignant fate
or possessed by some Ôdaemonic’ power; but psychoanalysis has always taken the view that their fate is for
the most part arranged by themselves and determined
by early infantile influences. . . . Thus we have come
across people all of whose human relationships have
the same outcome: such as the benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his protégés,
however much they may otherwise differ from one
another . . . or the man whose friendships all end in
betrayal by his friend; . . . or again, the lover each of
whose love affairs with a woman passes through the
same phases and reaches the same conclusion’’ (pp.
21–22).
Helene Deutsch developed this clinical description
beginning in 1930 in her paper ‘‘Hysterical Fate
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FATHER (NAME
Neurosis’’ (1965), in which she presented a case involving a such neurosis. Hysterical fate neurosis, she
explained, ‘‘is a form of suffering imposed on the ego
apparently by the outer world with a recurrent regularity. The real motive of this fate lies, as we have seen,
in a constant, insoluble, inner conflict’’ (p. 27).
She linked the neurosis to a lack of control over an
anxiety-inducing childhood situation that arose during the genital phase.
The term hysterical fate neurosis then came to be
used in a broader sense to describe individuals who
lack neurotic symptoms but whose history is marked
by repeated painful experiences.
Although some English-speaking writers have
referred to this notion briefly, most psychoanalysts have
moved away from a ‘‘psychopathology of fate’’ that
could not be more clearly defined in metapsychological
terms, despite the efforts of such authors as Jean
Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. In the entry on
fate neurosis in their Language of Psychoanalysis (1967/
1974), they attempted to give it a more precise meaning
and to distinguish it from ‘‘character neurosis,’’ noting
that the experiences characteristic of fate neurosis had
to be ‘‘repeated despite their unpleasant character,’’ had
to ‘‘unfold according to an unchanging scenario,’’ and
had to ‘‘appear to be governed by an external fate,
whose victim the subject feels himself—with seeming
justification—to be’’ (p. 161).
Nevertheless, the notion of fate neurosis continues
to be invoked, essentially for descriptive purposes,
because it implies a holistic view of the individual,
whose past, present, and future are more than a simple
succession of random events.
OF)
Further Reading
Kaplan, Donald M. (1984). Helene Deutsch’s Ôhysterical fate
neurosis’ revisited. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 53, 240–266.
FATHER COMPLEX
The expression father complex was used by Sigmund
Freud in the period 1910–1913 to designate feelings of
guilt and of castration anxiety relating to the father,
and therefore to the Oedipus complex.
The expression first appears in the article ‘‘The
Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy’’
(1910d), when Freud wrote that ‘‘in male patients the
most important resistances in the treatment seem to
be derived from the father complex and to express
themselves in fear of the father, in defiance of the
father and in disbelief of the father’’ (p. 144). He
attributed specifically to Carl Gustav Jung the coinage
of the term complex, and in the same year he used it in
developing the expression ‘‘Oedipus complex,’’ which
was at this time nearly synonymous with ‘‘father
complex.’’
The expression was hardly ever used by Freud
again, except in Totem and Taboo (1912–13a), where it
took on a more specific meaning. Here, in essence, it
referred to the guilt and castration anxiety experienced
by the son in the ‘‘primitive horde’’ after the murder of
the father, which in turn led to the repression of incestuous wishes toward the mother. Transmitted from
generation to generation, this complex explains the
permanence and universality of the Oedipus complex.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
The expression father complex has almost entirely
disappeared from usage in contemporary psychoanalysis.
See also: Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Character neurosis; Deutsch-Rosenbach, Helene; Neurosis.
ROGER PERRON
Bibliography
See also: Oedipus complex.
Deutsch, Helene. (1965). Hysterical fate neurosis. In her
Neuroses and character types (pp. 14–28). New York: International Universities Press. (Originally published 1930)
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE,
18: 1–64.
Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1974). The
language of psycho-analysis (Donald Nicholson-Smith,
Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1967)
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Freud, Sigmund. (1910d). The future prospects of psychoanalytic therapy. SE, 11: 139–151.
———. (1912–13a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
FATHER (NAME OF). See Name-of-the-Father
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FATHERHOOD
FATHERHOOD
Fatherhood has been described as the cause and fulfillment of the father’s creative, protective, and organizing
power in his child. As a physical and symbolic bond
between generations, fatherhood implies the authority
of the father over the child, expressed through the transmission of the name. The sons use this aspect of paternity in the construction of their own individual and
social identities, and in their respect for the law. Fatherhood is the basis of all thought.
Discovering in his self-analysis, through his dreams,
that fatherhood satisfied both his desire for immortality, through his children, as well as his ambivalence
toward his own dead father, Sigmund Freud fathered
psychoanalysis when he published The Interpretation
of Dreams, and established that the desire of Oedipus
to sleep with his mother and kill his father is universal.
Fatherhood is an organizing system indissociable
from the Oedipus complex. It links the law to desire and
to castration. It structures and restrains sexuality,
through the father, who is simultaneously loved, protective, and feared. It condenses conflicts of ambivalence
and the castration anxiety. Fatherhood induces repression and prompts progress: It is an inevitable and indestructible origin and obstacle that unites the scattered ego,
while showing how to overcome ambivalence through
identification with the father. Its dynamic potential is
anchored in the father-mother-child triangle it structures, not in the person of the father who supports the
paternal function. Hans (1909b), in the throes of an
oedipal crisis at four years of age, introjects the cultural
treasure linked to fatherhood into the mythical power of
language and knowledge. He is ignorant of the procreative function: Paternity, as the hidden cause for the production of children, confutes childhood trust, obstructs
independent thought, and betrays the subject’s expectation of protection. A child affected by nostalgia for the
father will displace it onto God.
Fatherhood was considered to have had a phylogenetic origin, recapitulated by ontogenesis (1912–13a).
Having murdered the violent and jealous primal
father, the sons discover the symbolic paternity of the
father in the work of mourning, made up of ambivalence, guilt, and idealization. Retrospective obedience
and the renunciation of the father’s omnipotence are
at the origin of the social contract and the law. For
Freud fatherhood also occupies a central place in the
subject’s genital organization through the father com55 8
plex. Linked to death and sexuality, which it transcends, and serving as an atemporal and structuring
reference point, it channels through its incarnated generating power the diphasic sexual development of the
child-become-adolescent, opening him up to the
effects of Nachträglichkeit, sublimation, and the wish
to become a father in his turn.
Identification is the prototype of this operation;
first, the human subject constitutes itself through ‘‘primal’’ identification with the "father of personal prehistory’’ (1923b), an incorporation of paternity that
includes the mother. Fatherhood then, logically,
enables the subject’s separation from the mother and
authorizes relations of generation, dramatized as arising from a primal triangle, with differentiated parental
imagos. Secondly, the oedipal crisis ends, with the
installation of the impersonal superego.
The bond with the father is essential for a daughter
(1933a). Involved in an intense pregenital relation to
her mother, she enters late into the Oedipus complex,
turning her outwardly directed libido inwards. She displaces her love onto her father, from whom she wants
a child-penis. Her major anxiety, that of being no
longer loved, often keeps her dependent on her bond
with the father. As a mother she offers fatherhood to
the man who is substituting for her father, if she has
transcended her own claim to the phallus.
The bond of fatherhood is connected for the child
with the desire that links the mother to the father.
Paternity exerts itself when the child induces a ‘‘foreigner’’ (1939a) who is the father to adoption. For Jacques Lacan, a failure of this metaphorizing recognition
is responsible for the foreclosure of the Name-of-theFather, which leads to psychosis. Melanie Klein prefigured the oedipal complex through the nipple-object
guiding the child’s access to the breast, a paternity
incarnated at the very heart of maternity.
Fatherhood can be considered as a development
when becoming a father leads to psychic restructuring.
ANN AUBERT-GODARD
See also: Abandonment; Adolescence; Animus-Anima;
Bisexuality; Castration complex; Counter-Oedipus;
Criminology and psychoanalysis; ‘‘Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, A’’; ‘‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’’; Erotogenic masochism; Ethics; Family; Family romance;
Father complex; Freud, Jakob Kolloman (or Keleman or
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F A V E Z - B O U T O N I E R , J U L I E T T E (1903 –1 994)
Kallamon); Future of an Illusion, The; Homosexuality;
Idealization; Identification; Infantile neurosis; Law and
psychoanalysis; Law of the father; Leonardo da Vinci and
a Memory of his Childhood; Myth of origins; Myth of the
Birth of the Hero; Neurotica; Object; Object, change of/
choice of; Oedipus complex; Otherness; Parenthood; Parricide, murder of the father; Penis envy; Pregnancy, fantasy of; Primal scene; Primary identification; Primitive
horde; Scenes of seduction; ‘‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the
Sexes’’; Superego; Totem and Taboo; Totem/totemism;
Wish for a baby.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams.
Part I. SE, 4: 1–338; Part II. SE, 5: 339–625.
———. (1912–13a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on
psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
———. (1939a ). Moses and monotheism: three essays. SE,
23: 1–137.
Lacan, Jacques (1958). The signification of the phallus. In
Alan Sheridan (Trans.), Écrits: a selection (pp. 281–291).
New York: Tavistock Publications.
FAVEZ-BOUTONIER, JULIETTE
(1903–1994)
A psychoanalyst and teacher, Juliette Favez-Boutonier
was born near Grasse, France, in 1903, and died in
Paris on April 13, 1994.
The daughter of teachers in the Alpes-Maritimes, to
which she returned nearly every year until her death,
Favez-Boutonier studied in Grasse and Nice. She later
traveled to Paris to study philosophy at the Sorbonne,
for a while with Léon Brunschvicg. In 1926 she was one
of the first women ever to take the state doctoral exam
in philosophy. She was only twenty-three at the time.
She taught at schools in Chartres and Dijon, while
studying medicine, which was a required preparation
for anyone who wanted to practice psychology at the
time. In 1930 she wrote to Sigmund Freud, who
responded personally on April 11 that ‘‘philosophical
problems and their formulation were so foreign to
him that he didn’t know what to say.’’ In 1938 she
wrote her doctoral dissertation on ambivalence (La
notion d’ambivalence); the text was reprinted in
1972. In 1935 she obtained a job in Paris teaching
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philosophy and it is here that she met Daniel Lagache
and began analysis with René Laforgue, with whom
she remained friends for many years. During the
Occupation, Laforgue entrusted Favez-Boutonier with
the Freud letters he had preserved.
At this time she met with members of the Société
Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP, Paris Psychoanalytic
Society) who had remained in Paris. John Leuba wrote
to Ernest Jones on December 31, 1944, the day after
the Liberation, that new analysts were now beginning
to appear, including ‘‘Mlle Boutonier, a gifted physician and philosopher with a sound technique; she was
monitored by me and I can confirm that she will be
one of the first recruits.’’
For Favez-Boutonier the relations between psychoanalysis and philosophy were complex and, in 1985,
for the reprint of the memorable session held January
25, 1955, by the Société Française de Philosophie
(French Philosophy Society), Juliette Favez-Boutonier
wrote about her experience writing her thesis. Her thesis director was Gaston Bachelard, who was using
psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method as well as a
philosophy. She had said after the publication of her
thesis that she was the first to explore Freudian psychoanalysis in a noncritical way, and she was grateful
to Bachelard who allowed her to express her experience in psychoanalysis within her interest for psychology and philosophy. Her thesis, Anxiety, was published
in 1945 by Presses Universitaires de France and, in
1947, was awarded the Prix Paul Pelliot ‘‘Junior.’’ The
‘‘Senior’’ prize went to Henri Wallon.
While working for the Centre national de la
recherche scientifique (CNRS) she presented several
papers to the SPP and was elected a member in 1946.
Having trained in clinical psychopathology at the
Sainte-Anne Hospital with Georges Heuyer, she was put
in charge of the Centre Psychopédagogique ClaudeBernard, which had been created by Georges Mauco.
She was soon replaced by André Berge, for that same
year she was appointed professor in the humanities
department at the University of Strasbourg.
Close to the circle of analysts around René Laforgue, she participated in meetings and contributed to
Psyché, the review founded by Marie Choisy in 1946.
She argued in favor of ‘‘assistant psychologists,’’ participated in the Section des Psychanalystes d’Enfants,
and tried to promote the creation of psychoanalytic
groups throughout the country, especially in Strasbourg. This led to a conflict with those who were
559
F A V E Z , G E O R G E S (1 901 –19 81)
setting up the future Institut de Psychanalyse de Paris
(Paris Institute for Psychoanalysis). In 1952 she married Georges Favez, one of the future presidents of the
Association Psychanalytique de France (French Psychoanalytic Association).
She intervened on behalf of Mrs. Clark-Williams
during her trial in 1951–1952, believing that ‘‘psychoanalysis was a psychological technique.’’ This position,
joined to her opposition to what she referred to as the
‘‘dictatorship’’ of Sacha Nacht, grouped her with Daniel
Lagache and Françoise Dolto at the beginning of the
1953 split in the French psychoanalytic establishment
and subsequent creation of the Société Française de Psychanalyse (French Society for Psychoanalysis), of which
she would become the first vice president. For ten years
she shared the trials and tribulations of the Society in its
attempts to join the International Psychoanalytic
Association, and was president during its dissolution
following the second split in 1964.
Along with her membership activities, she had her
own practice and taught psychoanalysis. However,
some of her most important work was done within the
French school system. She was appointed a professor
at the Sorbonne in 1955, where she held the chair of
general psychology. Didier Anzieu succeeded her at
the University of Strasbourg. Although she encouraged
work on group psychology, her own interest was clinical psychology, basing many of her ideas on the subject
on those of Daniel Lagache. She appointed Laforgue
the head of her laboratory in 1958. Along with Jacques
Gagey, Claude Prévost, and Pierre Fédida, she was
recognized as a ‘‘clinical psychologist’’ in 1968 after
helping with the creation of the department ‘‘des
Sciences Humaines Cliniques,’’ which was opened at
the University of Paris VII.
Favez-Boutonier’s long life and career were characterized by an intellectual depth and richness that drew
from the wellsprings of philosophy and psychoanalysis, which helped to enrich her clinical work in psychology and psychopathology.
BERNARD GOLSE
See also: Association psychanalytique de France; Centre
psychopédagogique Claude-Bernard; France; Société
française de psychanalyse.
Bibliography
Boutonier, Juliette. (1945) L’Angoisse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
56 0
———. (1955). Séance du 25 janvier 1955 de la Société française de philosophie. In F. Pasche (Ed.), Métapsychologie et
Philosophie, Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
FAVEZ, GEORGES (1901–1981)
Georges Favez, a Swiss psychoanalyst, was born on
February 15, 1901, in Lausanne, Switzerland, and died
on February 15, 1981, in Paris. His family ran a gourmet food store. He had an older sister, who was
unmarried when she died, and from his first marriage
he had a daughter whose three children Favez adored.
After studying in Leipzig and Strasbourg, Favez
wrote his theology dissertation on Luther and worked
as a country pastor in a free evangelical church rather
than in the national church of the canton of Vaud. In
1936 he resumed his studies in Geneva at the Institut
de l’éducation (Institute of Education), then under the
supervision of Edouard Claparède, but he failed to sit
for the final exam, which he felt he did not need for his
future career as a teacher and psychotherapist.
From 1936 to 1938 Favez stayed in Paris with
Georges Heuyer. In 1940 he was analyzed by Heinz
Hartmann in Lausanne. Shortly after the war broke
out, Favez was mobilized, and his analyst went into
hiding and later emigrated to the United States. Favez
divided his time among his psychoanalytic practice,
the Office médico-pédagogique (Medical-Pedagogical
Office), and the Maison d’éducation de jeunes délinquents (Home for the Education of Young Delinquents) in Vennes, Switzerland.
During the first Congrès des aliénistes et neurologistes de langue française (Congress of Francophone
Psychiatrists and Neurologists), held in Lausanne in
1946, Juliette Boutonier, André Berge, and Georges
Mauco visited the first Centre psychopédagogique
français (French Psychopedagogical Center) at the
Lycée Claude-Bernard in Paris in preparation for its
opening. It was at this time that Favez met Boutonier,
who became his wife in 1952. He began making frequent trips to Paris as a consultant and colleague at the
Claude-Bernard center. He commuted regularly
between Lausanne and Paris, and underwent analysis
with Sacha Nacht. He was elected a member of the
Société psychanalytique de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic
Society) in 1948. After his (third) marriage in 1952 to
Boutonier, he settled permanently in Paris, on rue
Descartes.
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F A V R E A U , J E A N A L P H O N S E (1919 –1 993)
At this time, at the home of either Favez or Françoise Dolto, Favez, together with Daniel and Marianne
Lagache and Juliette Favez-Boutonier, formed the
Société française de psychanalyse (SFP, French Society
for Psychoanalysis). Jacques Lacan joined shortly after
its formation. In 1964 the society split into two groups:
the École freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of
Paris), under the supervision of Jacques Lacan, and the
Association psychanalytique de France (APF, French
Psychoanalytic Association), presided over by Daniel
Lagache. Favez was one of the most active partisans for
the association.
Favez devoted a great deal of his energy to the Association psychanalytique de France. He was soon
elected secretary of the selection committee (formerly
the training committee), a position he held for many
years, and was president in 1966–1967. He was convinced that the association had a role to play in the
French psychoanalytic landscape.
In 1966 he began to issue a semiannual newsletter,
which published the psychoanalytic talks of the APF
and reports of association activity. He was actively
engaged in the activities of teaching and transmission
and helped train many APF students. He also did
much to popularize psychoanalysis. For example, after
the war he had a program on Radio-Lausanne and
gave many talks during the Journées des centres psychopédagogiques (Festival of Psychopedagogic Centers) and at SFP and APF events.
In 1971 and 1974 he published two articles that are
still considered important: ‘‘L’illusion et la désillusion
dans la cure psychanalytique’’ and ‘‘La résistance dans
l’analyse.’’ A number of his articles are collected in Être
psychanalyste (1976).
Those who knew Favez remarked on his intelligence, depth, and intellectual clarity. In his work he
constantly emphasized the framework of psychoanalytic therapy and the psychoanalyst’s thoroughness and
resolve. He loved Bach and Mozart, had a wonderful
sense of humor, and enjoyed lively discussion. He was,
according to Didier Anzieu, a man who lived well.
Firmly rooted in clinical practice, he liked to quote
Charles Ferdinand Ramuz: ‘‘We die making claims
about ideas before having made claims to things.’’ He
died in Paris on February 15, 1981, the day of his eightieth birthday.
In 1982 the APF journal Documents et débats
devoted issue number twenty to Favez’s memory. It
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included articles by Jean-Claude Lavie, René Henny,
André Bourguignon, and François Gantheret, together
with a biography by Didier Anzieu.
BERNARD GOLSE
See also: As if personality; Internal object; Normality; Self
(true/false); Splitting.
Bibliography
Favez, Georges. (1971). L’illusion et la désillusion dans la
cure psychanalytique. Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse, 4,
43–54. (Reprinted in his Être psychanalyste [1976])
———. (1974). La résistance dans l’analyse. Nouvelle Revue
de psychanalyse, 10, 193–199. (Reprinted in his Être psychanalyste [1976])
———. (1976). Être psychanalyste. Paris: Dunod.
FAVREAU, JEAN ALPHONSE (1919–1993)
Jean Alphonse Favreau, French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, was born on February 5, 1919, in Bordeaux,
France, and died on May 30, 1993, in Saint-Léger-auxBois, France. Favreau belonged to a Catholic family
that originally came from Guadeloupe. His father, an
obstetrician, became a professor of obstetrics at the
Catholic medical faculty in Lille, France, where Jean
Favreau began his medical training in 1938. His studies were interrupted by the Second World War.
Demobilized in 1940, he finished his studies in medicine in Bordeaux and later in Paris. In Lille he had met
Jeanne-Marie Lejenne, whom he married in 1947. A
physician herself, she became a psychoanalyst in 1957
and died in 1988. They had six children.
Through the lectures (published in the Journal de
Médecine de Bordeaux, June 1913) and books of
Angélo Hesnard owned by his father, Favreau learned
of Sigmund Freud’s theories and was won over. In
1945 he embarked upon what would become a threeyear analysis with John Lueba. In 1948, under the
supervision of Sacha Nacht and Marc Schlumberger,
he began the analysis of his first patients. These cases,
taken in the context of his hospital practice, he did for
free, which he justified in terms of the poverty and
somewhat utopian climate that prevailed in the
postwar period. Viewing free practice as a way of
experimenting with possibilities for treatment under a
different political and economic regime, he focused his
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research on the effect of free treatment on the development and resolution of the psychoanalytic process.
This spirit persisted in the orientation and management of the Centre de consultations et de traitements
psychanalytiques (Center for Psychoanalytic Consultations and Treatment), which was founded by Sacha
Nacht in 1954 and where Favreau served as head physician beginning in 1958. His prior institutional experience dated from 1948, when, with Pierre Mâle, he
helped create a hospital service for children aged six to
ten years that allowed psychoanalysts to treat not just
children but also their families. In this context he
gained work experience consulting with families and
supervising the psychotherapeutic treatment of children. He worked in a similar capacity at the Centre de
consultations et de traitements psychanalytiques until
his death, although he was succeeded as director by
Jean-Luc Donnet in 1989.
Favreau’s work bears the imprint of his practice,
since clinical experience remained at the heart of his
theoretical contributions. Working from cases of adult
analysands, he sought to elucidate the ‘‘fantastic’’ and
metapsychological genesis of the psyche and its successive alterations. The birth of the psyche is traumatic,
he believed. Hence the object of psychoanalysis is
human nature, not psychopathology. He illustrated
this point in a report on the psychoanalytic treatment
of an alcoholic patient emphasizing process rather
than results. This focus on process was an important
consideration for him. He also focused on those
aspects of the development of human sexuality that
are most often passed over in silence because they are
subjected to intense repression and give rise to shameful feelings that wound the subject’s narcissism, aspects
such as anal sexuality and our animal nature in general. In this regard, he, together with his wife, contributed an article titled ‘‘Considérations sur les anomalies
du comportement sexuel chez l’animal’’ (Considerations on Anomalies in Sexual Behavior in Animals;
1964) to a book on animal psychiatry. He was guided
in his theoretical work by Freudian metapsychology
and granted considerable economic importance to the
idea of après-coup (deferred action).
Favreau transmitted his knowledge of psychoanalysis to younger analysts through supervision groups
and seminars. The oral mode of communication was
well suited to his thought because it is closer than writing to the experience of treatment and the emergence
of the unconscious. In his work one thus finds a
56 2
greater concentration on practical aspects of psychoanalysis (such as indications for treatment, the psychoanalytic process, and the training of psychoanalysts)
than on purely theoretical issues. Nevertheless, his
contributions to child psychoanalysis and the study of
children’s emotional problems remain remarkably
relevant and sound. He constantly insisted that the
basis of theory is the drives and language, and he
ascribed a determining role to the dialectical relationship among anxiety, suffering, and pleasure. Favreau
published twenty-two articles, many of them written
collaboratively or given in the form of interviews—yet
another indication of his personable style.
MARIE-THÉRÈSE MONTAGNIER
See also: France; Société psychanalytique de Paris and
Institut de psychanalyse de Paris.
Bibliography
Favreau, D. (1990). Le désir d’enfant dans l’imaginaire de
l’enseignement. Études psychothérapiques, 1 (new series),
115–124.
Favreau, Jean. (1964). Considérations sur les anomalies du
comportement sexuel chez l’animal. In Abel Brion and
Henri Ey (Eds.), Psychiatrie animale (pp. 265–281). Paris:
Desclée, De Brouwer.
———. (1972). La formation des psychanalystes. Études
freudiennes, 5–6, 51–72.
Mâle, Pierre, and Favreau, Jean. (1959). Aspects actuels de la
clinique et de la thérapeutique des troubles affectifs de
l’enfant. Psychiatrie de l’enfant, 2 (1), 148–195.
Ruyer, Danièle. (1991). Psychanalyse et idéal thérapeutique
(interview with Jean Favreau). Revue Française de Psychanalyse, 55 (2), 501–509.
Troisier, Hélène, and Favreau, Jean. (1990). Plaisir et jouissance: chemins et détours (interview with Jean Favreau).
Revue française de psychanalyse, 54 (1), 189–196.
FEAR
The term fear, whose metapsychological status remains
uncertain, was used by Freud, in contrast to anxiety, to
refer to the reaction to some real danger. In several
works Freud discussed the semantic relationship
between the terms Angst (anxiety), Furcht (apprehension, fear), and Schreck (fright). For Freud the distinction between anxiety and fear relates primarily to its
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object, a distinction found in his earliest writings. In
an article from 1895, which discusses the distinguishing characteristics of phobias and obsessions, he differentiates phobias ‘‘according to the object of the fear,’’
while anxiety refers to the emotional state experienced
by the subject, without reference to a specific object
(1895c [1894]). Similarly, in 1916, in his Introduction
to Psychoanalysis (1916–1917a [1915–1917]), Freud,
referring to the use of these terms in popular speech,
indicated that ‘‘anxiety is related to a state with no
direct allusion to an object, while in fear the person’s
attention is precisely focused on the object.’’
In 1920, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g),
Freud emphasized the difference between fear and
anxiety in terms of their relation to danger: Anxiety is
a state characterized by the expectation and preparation for a danger, ‘‘even if unknown,’’ while fear
implies a determinate object. In Inhibitions, Symptoms,
and Anxiety (1926d [1925]), he further insisted on the
association of anxiety with a state of expectancy and
the use of the term fear—‘‘in keeping with current
usage’’—to represent the situation when anxiety has
found an object.
We see that the term fear is quoted with reference
primarily to contemporary language. According to
Catherine Cyssau, fear has no means of representation
and its object does not conform to the criteria for
repression. Although the status of anxiety, as an affect,
occurs early in the development of Freudian theory,
fear is more uncertain and seems to fall mostly within
the context of behavioral description. Moreover, the
opposition between fear and anxiety is hardly ever
mentioned in Freud’s later writings, especially in the
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933a
[1932]), where the theory of anxiety is again discussed.
In fact, another concept appeared in 1916 in Freud’s
writings, that of ‘‘Realangst,’’ which can be translated
as ‘‘realistic anxiety’’ or ‘‘anxiety in the face of a real
danger,’’ and which is contrasted with neurotic anxiety
or the anxiety of desire. In the Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud emphasized the rational and comprehensive nature of realistic anxiety, triggered by the
perception of an external danger, that is, under conditions that can give rise to fear. From then on the fundamental question, to which he would frequently
return, was that of the conditions required for the
emergence of anxiety, a signal triggered by an external
or internal danger.
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In post-Freudian work the concept of fear is essentially used to characterize certain infantile manifestations of anxiety. Anna Freud, in particular, insisted on
the structural differentiation between archaic, or primitive, fears and the phobias. It is important to
remember that the ‘‘fear of the stranger’s face,’’ which,
as described by René Spitz, arises in the infant when it
is between six and eight months old, raises the question of determining if this reaction should be interpreted as a realistic anxiety responding to an external
danger—the face perceived as unknown—or if it is an
expression of unpleasure and the internal threat
caused by the absence of the maternal object.
Fright, or Schreck, which is associated in several
Freudian texts with traumatic neurosis, corresponds to
the effects of a danger for which the subject ‘‘is not
prepared by an earlier state of anxiety’’ (1916–1917a
[1915–1917]). Freud goes on to say that anxiety contains ‘‘something that protects against fright’’ (1920g).
Roger Dorey has remarked that Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), described, in contrast to
the ‘‘primary experience of satisfaction,’’ an ‘‘experience of fright whose origin is external’’ and which
leaves behind a painful memory trace that the primitive psychic apparatus tries to avoid. This flight before
the memory of the present pain, is, according to
Freud, the ‘‘model and first example of psychic repression.’’ Thus, the prototype of fright is nothing but the
experience of object loss, an experience that submerges
the primitive psychic apparatus in excitations it is
unable to control. For Dorey this ‘‘painful memory
image’’ of the absent object forms a representation
that contributes to the formation of the primal
unconscious.
CLAUDE BURSZTEJN
See also: ‘‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy’’
(Little Hans); Annihilation anxiety; Anxiety; Castration
complex; Claustrophobia; ‘‘Confusion of Tongues between
Adults and the Child ’’; Danger; Drive/instinct; Erythrophobia (fear of blushing); Fright; Guilt, feeling of; Incest;
Paranoid position; Phobia of commiting impulsive acts;
Phobias in children; Stranger, fear of.
Bibliography
Cyssau, Catherine. (1997). La peur et les phobies: des névroses d’angoisse à l’hystérie d’angoisse. In A. Fine, A. Le
Guen, A. Oppenheimer (Eds.), Peurs et phobies. Paris:
P.U.F.
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Dorey, Roger. (1988). Le Désir de savoir. Paris: Denoël.
Freud, Sigmund. (1895a [1894]). (1916–1917a [1915–
1917]). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis (Parts I
and II). SE, 15–16.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1–
64.
FECES
In a letter of December 22, 1897, Sigmund Freud
wrote to Wilhelm Fleiss: ‘‘[B]irth, miscarriage, and
menstruation are all connected with the lavatory via
the word Abort (Abortus)’’ (p. 240). In German this
word does effectively carry these different meanings.
Freud was to further develop these reflections in his
‘‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’’ (1905d),
where he describes the phases of libidinal development
from birth onward. The retention of fecal matter initially corresponds with an intention to use it for masturbatory purposes. The whole meaning of the anal zone
is thus reflected in the fact that ‘‘few neurotics are to
be found without their special scatological practices,
ceremonies, and so on, which they carefully keep
secret’’ (p. 187).
or else retains them for purposes of auto-erotic satisfaction and later as a means of asserting his own will’’
(p. 130). The love object that must be renounced (the
mother of childhood), the lost object, will be identified
by the Unconscious with feces, the body’s most intimate product, which must necessarily be relinquished;
this marks the onset of the dynamics of loss, mourning, and melancholia.
Returning to the connection between feces and
money in ‘‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’’
(1918b [1914]), Freud emphasizes that an interest in
money is libidinal rather than rational in character,
and that it thus relates back to excremental pleasure.
The various terms in the sequence filth = money = gift
= child = penis are thus treated as synonyms and represented by shared symbols.
In his ‘‘New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’’
(1933a), Freud completed his views: According to infantile theories of sexuality, the child is born from the intestine as a piece of feces; defecation is the model for the act
of being born. ‘‘A great part of anal erotism is thus carried
over into a cathexis of the penis’’ (p. 101), he writes.
DOMINIQUE J. ARNOUX
However, another link, that between fecal matter
and money, emerged in listening to the discourse of
obsessive patients; this link is expressed in one of the
traits of the anal character, avarice. Freud writes in
‘‘Dreams in Folklore’’ (1958 [1911]): ‘‘How old this
connection between excrement and Gold is can be
seen from an observation by Jeremias: gold, according
to ancient oriental mythology, is the excrement of
hell’’ (p. 187).
See also: Alpha function; Autism; Beta-elements; Castration complex; Coprophilia; Partial drive; Pregnancy, fantasy of; Stammering; Symbolism; Unconcscious concept.
Based on these associations, Freud establishes a
symbolic equation that he phrases as follows: ‘‘[I]n the
products of the unconscious—spontaneous ideas,
phantasies, and symptoms—the concepts faeces
(money, gift), baby and penis are ill-distinguished
from one another and are easily interchangeable’’
(p. 128). When the child perceives that woman does
not have a penis, the latter is conceived as being
detachable and is thus analogous to excrement when it
is separated from the body. In the same text, Freud
underscores the importance of this equivalence in
terms of the object: ‘‘Defaecation affords the first occasion on which the child must decide between a narcissistic and an object-loving attitude. He either parts
obediently with his faeces, Ôsacrifices’ them to his love,
———. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile
neurosis. SE, 17: 1-122.
56 4
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 130-243.
———. (1916-1917e). On transformations of instinct as
exemplified by anal erotism. SE, 17: 125-133.
———. (1933a). New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. SE, 22: 1-182.
Freud, Sigmund, and Oppenheim, David. (1911). Dreams in
folklore. SE, 12: 175-204.
FECHNER, GUSTAV THEODOR (1801–1887)
Gustav Fechner, German physician, physicist, and philosopher, was born on April 19, 1801, in Gross-Sächen,
Prussia, and died in Leipzig on November 18, 1887.
Freud admired Fechner as the pioneer of psychophysics
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chology. Together with his boyhood friend Eduard
Silberstein, Freud attended Fechner’s lectures in
Leipzig in 1874.
Fechner studied medicine at the University of Leipzig. While still a student, he began writing articles
(under the pseudonym Dr. Mises) that satirized contemporary science, and he did not become a practicing
physician after receiving his degree. Instead, he turned
his interest to physics and mathematics. His research
demonstrating the validity of Ohm’s laws in relation to
a galvanic current led to his appointment as professor
of physics in 1834. About 1839 Fechner was forced to
leave his academic post due to an eye ailment that he
attributed to exhausting research in optics. In his
diary, which has been preserved at the University of
Leipzig, Fechner described his experiences while ill
and the existential crisis and depression that followed.
In the wake of his illness, Fechner developed his interest in sensation, the relation of mind to body, and panpsychism. ‘‘The great G. T. Fechner,’’ as Freud called him,
was appointed professor of philosophy and anthropology in 1843. In the course of this second creative period,
he set out the foundations of psychophysics, such as the
Fechner-Weber law, by which he is remembered as a
founder of experimental psychology. His two-volume
Elemente der Psychophysik was published in 1860.
Fechner’s ambitions extended beyond experimental
research. He hoped to organize psychophysics and
metaphysics in a way that united philosophy and the
human sciences. Major works toward fulfilling this
aim include his 1848 article on the pleasure principle
and Einige Ideen zur Schöpfungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte des Organismen (Certain ideas on the creation and development of organisms; 1873). In this latter work Fechner offers the ‘‘principle of constancy’’ to
explain how a progressively ordered and structured
system can evolve from a disorganized state, a notion
that suggests Freud’s famous formula, ‘‘Where id was
there ego shall be.’’ (In this sense Fechner was also a
precursor of the theory of the ego’s self-organization
[see, for example, Prigogine and Glansdorff].)
Although Fechner’s works inspired Freud when he
conceived his concepts of the pleasure principle and
the death instinct (Nitzschke), a systematic study
tends to demonstrate that they were separated by fundamental differences in outlook.
BERND NITZSCHKE
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See also: Alpha function; Autism; Beta-elements; Castration complex; Coprophilia; Partial drive; Pregnancy, fantasy of; Stammering; Symbolism; Unconscious concept.
Bibliography
Fechner, Gustav Theodor. (1848). Über das lustpinzip des
handelns. Zeitschrift für philosophie und philosophische kritik, 19, 1–30; 163–194.
———. (1860). Elemente der psychophysik. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.
———. (1873). Einige ideen zur schöpfungs- und entwicklungsgeschichte der organismen. Leipzig: Bretkopf und
Härtel.
Lowrie, Walter (Ed.). (1946). Religion of a scientist: selections
from Gustav Theodor Fechner. New York: Pantheon.
Nitzschke, Bernd. (1989). Freud et Herbert Silberer:
Hypothèses concernant le destinataire d’une lettre de
Freud de 1922. Revue internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse, 2, 267–277.
Prigogine, Ilya, and Glandsdorf, P. (1973). L’écart à l’équilibre interprété comme une source d’ordre structure dissipatives. Bulletin de la classe des sciences, 59, 672–702.
FEDERACIÓN PSICOANALÍTICA
DE AMÉRICA LATINA
Formerly known as the Coordinating Committee of
Psychoanalytic Organizations of Latin America
(COPAL), the Federación psicoanalı́tica de América
latina (FePAL; Psychoanalytic Federation of Latin
America) brings together the Latin American psychoanalytic societies recognized by the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA).
FePAL’s objectives are as follows: to stimulate the
expansion of member societies and the development
of the psychoanalytic movement throughout Latin
America within the framework of the IPA’s established
rules and stated goals, without prejudice to the autonomy of the organizations in the federation; to represent the common interests of member societies and
their associates before the IPA; to create a forum for
scientific exchange through publications, congresses,
and meetings, among other activities; to facilitate
scholarly exchanges among member organizations, the
establishment of teaching programs, and training
criteria in the various institutes; to encourage the
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spread of psychoanalysis in Latin America; and to
develop and offer advice and assistance to the psychoanalytic movement in areas where there is no member
organization.
The Third Latin American Psychoanalytic Congress
(the two preceding congresses were held in Buenos
Aires, Argentina, and São Paulo, Brazil) was held in
Santiago, Chile, in 1960, under the aegis of the Chilean
Psychoanalytic Association. Ignacio Matte-Blanco was
president of the organizing committee. At the administrative meeting, the decision was made to establish a
Coordinating Committee of Psychoanalytic Organizations of Latin America (COPAL), presided over by
Arnaldo Rascovsky—a veritable impresario for the
idea of bringing Latin America’s psychoanalysts
together as an association.
COPAL was provisionally made up of the representatives of the societies or groups present at the meeting:
for Bogotá (Colombia), Carlos Plata Mújica; for Mexico
City, Avelino González; for Montevideo (Uruguay),
Willy Baranger; for Porto Alegre (Brazil), Cyro Martins;
for Rio de Janeiro (Brazil; Sociedade Brasileira de Rio
de Janeiro), Fabio Leito Lobo; for São Paulo, Darcy de
Mendoça; for Santiago, Carlos Whiting D’Andurrain;
and for Buenos Aires, Arnaldo Rascovsky.
COPAL acted as a pressure group before the IPA
and succeeded in gaining representation on the IPA’s
steering committee. Léon Grinberg was the first Latin
American representative to sit on the steering committee, followed by Avelino González, from Mexico, and
later Luiz Dahleim, from Brazil. They were in turn succeeded by Carlos Plata, from Colombia; David Liberman, from Argentina; and Paulo Grimaldi, from
Brazil. Later, this trend toward authorizing Latin
American participation on the committee stabilized,
and Angel Garma was elected honorary vice president
of the IPA. Latin America’s active political presence in
psychoanalysis worldwide led to the granting of two
vice presidencies for that continent. Thanks to the
active intervention of this group, led initially by
COPAL and later by FePAL, Latin America has
obtained three vice presidencies on the IPA’s governing
board. The first IPA congress in Latin America was
held in Buenos Aires in 1989; the second was held in
Santiago in 1999.
During the 1960s and 1970s, through the efforts of
teaching analysts who traveled to various regions to
disseminate psychoanalytic knowledge, COPAL was
extremely effective in promoting the scientific devel56 6
opment of the discipline, particularly in areas where
the discipline was not yet well developed.
The exercise of political power brought internal
frictions to COPAL , and at the International Congress
of Psychoanalysis held in New York in 1979, a meeting
between the organization’s governing authorities and
its delegates led to the resignation of a number of dignitaries, not without expressions of tensions, attitudes,
and demonstrations that became extremely subjective
in the case of some participants. This institutional crisis led to a new organization with participation of the
societies, established groups, and groups-in-formation. An assembly of delegates was convened in Rio de
Janeiro on June 6, 1980; the delegates approved the
statutes of a new organization called the Federación
psicoanalı́tica de América latina (FePAL), charged
with the scientific development of Latin American psychoanalysis and organization of its congresses and
exchanges between various regions. Primacy was given
to democratic participation, and an order of succession to leadership of FePAL was established and has
been respected ever since. Since its inception, FePAL
has organized ten congresses; it serves as the umbrella
organization for psychoanalysis throughout Latin
America.
The successive presidents of COPAL were: Arnaldo
Rascovky, Marie Langer, Santiago Ramirez, Carlos
Plata Mújica, David Zimmermann, Willy Baranger,
Darcy M. Uchoa, and Fernando Cesarman. FePAL’s
successive presidents include: Joel Zac, Fernando
Cesarman, Néstor Goldstein, Victor Aiza, Fábio Antonio Herrmann, Eustachio Portella Nunes, Alberto Pereda, Saul Peña, Alejandro Tamez Morales, Guillermo
Carvajal, and Cláudio Laks Eizirik (1998–2000).
As of 2004, the federation included twenty-seven
societies and study groups. New realities and the need
for a more flexible and representative structure that
would benefit from a more active participation by the
presidents of member organizations have prompted
debate on the reform of FePAL’s statutes. The congress
held in September 2000 in Gramado, in the state of
Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) was organized around the
theme of ‘‘Psychoanalysis and Culture: Between the
Couch and the Community.’’ The pre-congress teaching workshops held in conjunction with the congress
and focusing on ‘‘Children and Adolescents,’’ ‘‘Myths,’’
and ‘‘OCAL’’ attracted increased participation. At a
meeting in February 2000 in Manaus (Brazil) there
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F E D E R N , P A U L (1871 –1 950)
NAIPAG to mark the opportunity for Latin American
and North American psychoanalysts to come together
to discuss their clinical material and to share and compare their experiences.
The federation is in negotiation with the European
Psychoanalytical Federation (EPF) to resume and establish regularity in the scheduling of FePAL-EPF Clinical
Meetings. FePAL’s Boletı́n (Bulletin) is published every
six months; the Revista Latinoamericana de Psicoanálisis
(Latin American revue of psychoanalysis) was restructured in keeping with the format and policies of the
main international psychoanalytic journals. FePAL offers
societies and study groups the possibility of an annual
scientific exchange with invited participants from other
Latin American institutions, and is considering an
exchange program with analysts in other regions.
In 1998, FEPAL held its XXII congress in Cartagena
de las Indias, Colombia, whose title was Cumbre Psicoanalitica Latino-Americana (Latin American Psychoanalytic Summit), under the presidency of Guillermo Carvajal. Several international authors gave
lectures. In 2000, its XXIII Congress was in Gramado,
Brazil, about Psicanálise e Cultura: Entre o Divã e a
Comunidade (Psychoanalysis and Culture: Between
the Couch and the Community), under the presidency
of Cláudio Laks Eizirik. This was an extremely well
attended congress, where the leading authors of the
analytic field were present, and psychoanalytic
research and the history of psychoanalysis in Latin
America, were formally included in the program, as
well as joint discussions with outstanding members of
Latin American culture. The XXIV Congress was in
Montevideo, in 2002, under the presidency of Marcelo
Viñar, having as main theme Permanencias y Cambios
en la Experiencia Psicoanalı́tica (What is permanent
and what changes in the psychoanalytic experience).
This Congress privileged small groups discussions, was
also very well attended and introduced sending previously all papers by disc to all those registered, so that
there were no formal presentations, but immediate
discussions among the participants. In 2004, the XXV
Congress was held in Guadalajara, Mexico, under the
presidency of Serápio Marcano, with the main theme
Psicoanálisis en Latinoamerica Hoy: Teoria y Práctica
en tiempos de Crisis (Psychoanalysis in Latin America
Today: Theory and Practice in a Period of Crisis).
Several clinical meetings were organized, in recent
years, with North American colleagues, which stimulated fruitful exchanges. In recent congresses, from
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Fepal as well in those organized by the European Federation, and the North American institutions, there
are invited members from the other two regions,
which indicates a growing interchange. Fepal holds its
administrative meetings regularly, publishes its Revista
Latino-Americana de Psicanálise (Latin American
Journal of Psychoanalysis), and has an ongoing scientific program of exchanges among its component
societies. In spite of difficult social and economic
conditions in most countries of Latin America, psychoanalysts and candidates affiliated to FEPAL keep a
continuous and passionate interest and commitment
with psychoanalysis and contribute to its development
both as a theory and a clinical practice.
In the next IPA Congress to be held in Rio de
Janeiro, in July, 2005, the first one in Brazil, the second
Latin American will become the IPA president, Cláudio Laks Eizirik, following the pioneer role of Horacio
Etchegoyen, in 1993.
Beyond these activities, another dimension should
be taken into account: FePAL provides a forum for
meetings and joint reflection on psychoanalytic theory
and clinical practice in the specific context of the particular cultures of the countries it represents and within
the framework of a broader Latin American identity,
with all the challenges currently posed by that
condition.
CLÁUDIO LAKS EIZIRIK
Bibliography
Eizirik, Cláudio Laks. (1998). Porqué Fe.P.A.L.? Boletin
informativo de la Fe.P.A.L. (2nd semester).
Sanchez-Medina, Guillermo. (1998). Sesenta años de psicoanálisis en Latinoamérica. Homepage Federación psicoanalı́tica de América latina.
FEDERN, PAUL (1871–1950)
Paul Federn, an Austrian physician and psychoanalyst,
was born in Vienna on October 13, 1871, and died in
New York on May 4, 1950.
The son of a famous Viennese doctor and nephew
of a celebrated Prague rabbi, Federn was raised in a
family with a longstanding liberal tradition. After
receiving his medical diploma in 1895, he interned in
general medicine with Hermann Nothnagel, who
introduced him to the works of Sigmund Freud.
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F E D E R N , P A U L (1871 –1 950)
Deeply influenced by Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams,
in 1904 he devoted himself to psychoanalysis and, with
Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, and Rudolf Reitler,
became one of Freud’s early disciples.
Federn was as interested in the analysis of social
phenomena as he was in prevention and treatment of
disease. In Zur Psychologie der Revolution: die Vaterlose
Gesellschaft (On the psychology of revolution: the
fatherless society; 1919), he analyzed the challenge to
authority by the postwar generation as unconscious
parricide aimed at creating a ‘‘fatherless society.’’ In
line with his interest in applying psychoanalysis to
public health, in 1926 he published, together with
Heinrich Meng, Das psychoanalytische Volksbuch (Popular psychoanalysis).
Of the Viennese disciples, Federn worked longest
with Freud and was highly esteemed by him. He was
such a loyal supporter of Freud that he was referred to
as the ‘‘Apostle Paul’’ of the psychoanalytic movement.
His position within the Psychoanalytic Society continued to grow over the years. In 1922 he helped Eduard
Hitschmann and Helene Deutsch establish the Vienna
Ambulatorium, and during the 1930s he was one of
the coeditors of the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse and editor of Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse
und Pädagogik. But the most important source of official recognition came from Freud himself, who, in
1924, made him, along with Anna Freud, his official
representative and vice president of the Vienna
Society, a position he held until 1938.
After emigrating to America in 1938, Federn settled
in New York. Though he got recognition for his medical diploma (which he received before 1914), it was
not until 1946 that he was officially recognized as a
training analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He committed suicide after the recurrence of
what he felt was an incurable cancer.
In addition to ego psychology, Federn was interested in the therapy of psychosis. Even his earliest writings, devoted to the sources of sadism and masochism
and typical dream sensations (1914), manifest his
interest in the nature and function of the ego, along
with considerations of narcissism.
The results of Federn’s research took time to come
to fruition, since his ideas about the ego required a
long period of gestation. In 1926 his important essay
‘‘Some Variations in Ego-Feeling’’ appeared, followed
in 1928 by ‘‘Narcissism in the Structure of the Ego,’’
56 8
and in 1929 by ‘‘Das Ich als Subjekt und Objekt im
Narzissmus’’ (The ego as subject and object in narcissism). His phenomenological description of the ego as
experience coinciding with ‘‘ego feeling’’ diverged considerably from Freud’s structural approach. Although
his conclusions were far removed from Freud’s, out of
loyalty Federn preferred to downplay his own theoretical contributions, such as ‘‘ego feeling,’’ the ‘‘sense of
reality,’’ the ‘‘limits’’ and ‘‘states’’ of the ego, ‘‘ego
cathexis,’’ the ‘‘median’’ nature of narcissism, and the
death drive. For although Freud had a great deal of
respect for Federn, he did not value Federn’s theoretical proposals very highly.
In his studies of schizophrenic patients, Federn
came to the conclusion that, far from being excessively
cathected with libido, their egos possessed inadequate
cathectic energy. On Federn’s hypothesis, contrary to
the hypotheses of Freud and Karl Abraham, it was an
absence rather than an excess of narcissistic libido that
determined the psychotic’s problems with the object.
As a result, Federn’s approach to treating psychotics,
described in ‘‘The Analysis of Psychotics’’ (1934) and
other important texts he wrote while in America,
involved supporting the patient’s efforts at integration
by trying to prevent the emergence of the repressed
and by strengthening the patient’s defenses. According
to Federn, transference in psychosis should not be
interpreted. He felt that it was important to avoid
negative transference and to help the psychotic confront problems by means of female support figures.
Although the response to Federn’s ego psychology
was limited, he had several illustrious followers,
including Edoardo Weiss and Hermann Nunberg,
along with a small group of American analysts such as
Bertram D. Lewin, I. Peter Glauber, and Martin Bergmann. In psychiatry the influence of his ideas is
obvious. His ideas also served as a foundation for the
transactional analysis of Eric Berne, who refers to the
theory of ‘‘ego states.’’ Weiss was responsible for the
posthumous publication of Federn’s writings, Ego Psychology and the Psychoses (1952), a book that contributed greatly to spreading the ideas of one of the earliest
and most faithful pioneers of psychoanalysis.
ANNA MARIA ACCERBONI
Work discussed: Ego Psychology and the Psychoses.
Notions developed: Ego boundaries; Ego, damage inflicted
on the; Ego feeling; Ego stages.
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F É D I D A , P I E R R E (1934 –2 002)
See also: Ego (ego psychology); Lehrinstitut der Wiener
psychoanalytischen Vereinigung; Marxism and psychoanalysis; Wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung.
Bibliography
Federn, Ernst. (1972). Thirty-five years with Freud. Journal
of Clinical Psychology, suppl. 32, 18–34.
Federn, Paul. (1914). On dreams of flying. In Hendrik M.
Ruitenbeek (Ed.), The first freudians (pp. 121–128). New
York: Jason Aronson.
———. (1919). Zur psychologie der revolution: die vaterlose gesellschaft. Vienna: Anzengruber-Verlag.
———. (1926). Some variations in ego-feeling. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 7, 434–444.
———. (1928). Narcissism in the structure of the ego. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 9, 401–419.
———. (1934). The analysis of psychotics. International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 15, 209–214.
———. (1952). Ego-psychology and the psychoses (Edoardo
Weiss, Ed.). New York: Basic Books.
Federn, Paul, and Meng, Heinrich. (1926). Das psychoanalytische volksbuch (2 vols.). Stuttgart: Hippocrates.
Pao, Ping-Nie. (1975). The place of Federn’s ego psychology
in a contemporary theory of schizophrenia. International
Review of Psychoanalysis, 2, 467–480.
Weiss, Edoardo. (1951). Paul Federn’s scientific contributions: in commemoration. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 32 (4), 1–8.
———. (1966). Paul Federn: The theory of the psychoses.
In Franz Alexander, Samuel Eisenstein, and Martin Grotjahn (Eds.), Psychoanalytic pioneers (pp. 142–159). New
York: Basic Books.
FÉDIDA, PIERRE (1934–2002)
The French psychoanalyst Pierre Fédida was born in
Lyon, France, on October 30, 1934, and died in Paris
on November 1, 2002. He was a full member and president of the Association psychanalytique de France
(French Psychoanalytic Association), a member of the
International Psychoanalytical Association, and
cofounder, with Daniel Widlöcher, of the Revue International de psychopathologie (International journal of
psychopathology).
He passed the concours d’agrégation, a prestigious
teacher-qualifying exam, in philosophy, and in 1962 he
was appointed to a university-level teaching position.
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He began his clinical training in psychiatry and neuropsychiatry at the age of twenty-three, notably at the
Bellevue Sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, with
Professor Ludwig Biswanger and in Münsterlinger,
Switzerland, with Professor Roland Kuhn. His thinking on the treatment of psychotics was thus stamped
with a distinctive phenomenological orientation that
remained with him throughout his career.
All his psychoanalytic training (both individual
analysis and professional training) took place under
the Association psychanalytique de France, where he
enrolled as a student in the 1960s and entered into
analysis with Georges Favez. Although his background
in phenomenological philosophy initially concerned
some, he quickly established himself in the eyes of professionals as a very astute clinician with an exceptional
mastery of the theory of treatment. After he became a
training analyst, he was elected president of the Association psychanalytique de France in 1988 and undertook significant statutory reforms. Notably, he
expanded the cadre of training analysts to include all
tenured members of the association. He then played
an active role in the European Federation of Psychoanalysis and the International Psychoanalytical
Association, where, from 2000, he was responsible for
contacts with psychologists, psychiatrists, and other
psychoanalytic schools throughout Europe.
Concurrent with these developments, in 1966 he
became senior assistant in clinical psychology at the
Sorbonne with Juliette Favez-Boutonier. This led to
his participation in the events that revolutionized the
French university system in May 1968, with Jean
Laplanche and others soon joining in.
Fédida taught at the Université de Paris VII from
1969 to 2002, and at the university he founded the
Laboratoire de psychopathologie fondamentale et psychanalyse (Laboratory of basic psychopathology and
psychoanalysis). Within the university’s research and
training program in human clinical sciences, which he
helped establish, he served in many scientific and
administrative capacities, including that of program
director.
From the outset he brought a perspective transcending disciplines to his teaching, aiming to critique
and bring together the main approaches in psychopathology, whether phenomenological, biological, or
psychoanalytic. This open approach led him to establish a research laboratory in 1989 and an advanced
degree program in basic psychopathology in 1990,
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FEES
which he wanted to link with biology and then to the
Centre d’études du vivant (Life studies center) at the
Université de Paris VII (where he also served as vice
president from 1987 to 1989). He also traveled widely
to universities abroad, where he established a solid
network of relationships, especially in Brazil and other
Latin American countries.
Fédida wrote a substantial number of works: 320
publications on a wide variety of subjects. In addition
to ten to twelve articles each year from 1962, he
penned such major works as Corps du Vide et Espace de
Séance (The body of the void and the space of the
session; 1977); L’Absence (Absence; 1978), Crise et
Contre-Transfert (Crisis and counter-transference;
1992), Le Site de L’Étranger (The site of the alien;
1995), and Les Bienfaits de la Dépression (The benefits
of depression; 2001). These works have been translated
into many languages. Unifying themes of his work are
the concealed, the stranger within, and enigmatic
knowledge of the self.
A man of dialogue conscious of his own charisma,
Fédida fashioned an atypical discourse combining psychoanalysis, psychopathology, philosophy, literature,
architecture, and art history. His writings present a
complex blend of scientific rigor, human openness,
and confidence in diversity.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Association psychanalytique de France; Countertransference; Favez-Boutonier, Juliette; Groddeck, Georg
Walther; Intergenerational.
Bibliography
Fédida, Pierre. (1977). Corps du vide et espace de séance.
Paris: J.-P. Delarge.
———. (1978). L’absence. Paris: Gallimard.
———. (1992). Crise et contre-transfert. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
———. (1995). Le site de l’étranger. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
———. (2000). Par où commence le corps humain: Retour
sur la régression. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
———. (2001). Des bienfaits de la dépression: Éloge de la psychothérapie. Paris: Odile Jacob.
Fédida, Pierre, and Guyotat, Jean (Eds.). (1986). Mémoires et
transferts. Paris: Écho-Centurion.
57 0
FEES. See Money and psychoanalytic treatment
FEMALE SEXUALITY
Freud’s observations on female sexuality were made
between 1923 and 1933, late in his career. They cannot
be understood without reference to his thesis of the
primacy of the phallus, according to which, for both
sexes, ‘‘only one genital’’—the male one—played a
structuring role (1923e, p. 142). Structurally speaking,
the phallic phase defined the girl as much as the boy,
but the girl’s embrace of the phallic—at once real
(experienced directly), imaginary (fantasized in an
oscillation between power and impotence), and symbolic (thought-cathexis)—was centered on the clitoris.
Even though the Freudian theorization of the girl’s
psychosexual development toward femininity took as
its sole basis the psychosexuality of the boy, Freud continually emphasized the differences between the sexes
in this regard, and hence too the specificity of the
female Oedipus complex.
Penis envy and the castration complex play the
major, organizing roles that made access to femininity possible. As Freud wrote in ‘‘Some Psychical
Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between
the Sexes,’’ little girls ‘‘notice the penis of a brother
or playmate, strikingly visible and of large proportions, at once recognize it as the superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ,
and from that time forward fall a victim to envy for
the penis’’ (1925j, p. 252). This injury, at once phallic and narcissistic, was experienced to begin with as
a personal punishment, then accepted as part of a
broader truth: women do not have them. That the
mother should have omitted to ‘‘give her a proper
penis’’ (1931b, p. 234) constituted the main motive,
specific to the little girl, for transferring her affections to the father. This reversal was more a flight
from the mother than a choice of the father as
object. It was this disillusionment, coupled with the
depreciation of the mother contingent upon the discovery that she was castrated, that occasioned the
abandonment of the relationship with the mother as
object.
The renunciation of phallic activity (clitoral masturbation) allowed passivity to come to the fore: ‘‘The
transition to the father-object is accomplished with the
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help of the passive trends in so far as they have survived
the catastrophe. The path to the development of femininity now lies open to the girl’’ (p. 239). The girl placed
all her hopes on her father, waiting for him to give her
the penis that her mother had ‘‘refused’’ her. The feminine attitude would be reached only if an equivalence
was established between penis and child and the wish for
a penis transformed into the wish for a child.
What Freud had discovered in 1931 was that for
the little girl the mother as dispenser of the earliest
bodily care is the object of a particularly intense and
long-lasting archaic cathexis. He compared this first
bond between mother and daughter to the MinoanMycenaean civilization so long obscured from view
by the civilization of Athens: ‘‘Our insight into this
early, pre-Oedipus, phase in girls comes to us as a
surprise, like the discovery, in another field, of the
Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind the civilization of Greece’’ (p. 226). He immediately pointed up
the ambivalence of this earliest bond: primary homosexuality, the idea of which was to be further
developed by Freud’s successors, was built upon the
amorous or tender current in mother-infant coexcitation, which was nevertheless not devoid of aggressiveness. Attachment and hostility toward the mother
were differently inflected depending on whether they
related to the oral or the anal phase. During the oral
phase, after the withdrawal of the breast, they arose
in response to the little girl’s fears of being devoured,
poisoned or killed by her mother. During the anal
phase, the pleasure associated with various maternal
manipulations was related to the intrusive anal
mother (described by Ruth Mack Brunswick as
arousing the girl’s aggressiveness).
His discovery of a primal coexcitation sensorily
uniting daughter and mother, and of the dramatic rift
that ensued between the two female members of this
initial dyad, supplied Freud with much support for his
conclusion that the mental bisexuality of women was
more marked than that of men. The subsequent route
to femininity was a long one, marked by the detachment from the pre-oedipal mother and calling for
both a change in the erogenous zone cathected (the
shift from clitoris to vagina), and a change of object.
Taking the father as love-object is thus seen as a second
phase in the little girl’s mental development, so that it
is possible to speak of a two-phase oedipal period for
women (Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, Julia Kristeva). Freud
went so far as to say that he saw no dissolution of the
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Oedipus complex in the female. Whereas in the boy the
complex succumbed to the threat of castration, it would
have no end in the case of women and would manifest
itself as such in both the need for motherhood and in
the character of ‘‘females as social beings’’ (p. 230). In
addition to the path leading to the choice of the father
as object, Freud evoked two other possible routes: the
young woman might turn away from sexuality into
neurosis (inhibition), or she might refuse to renounce
the phallus and develop a masculinity complex.
Freud’s phallocentric account, which he took up
again in the New Introductory Lectures on PsychoAnalysis (1933a [1932]), has been widely criticized. In
the first place, a number of psychoanalysts, among
them Karen Horney, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, and
Helene Deutsch, have in particular contested the claim
that penis envy is a primary given rather than a construction developed or used in a secondary way in
response to primitive wishes. At the same time feminists have castigated Freud for incorporating his own
phallocratic and bourgeois prejudices into his theory.
But it must not be forgotten that Freud’s theorizing
here addresses the Unconscious, so that only criticisms
doing likewise have relevance (André, 1994). Furthermore it is essential to bear in mind that according to
Freud the phallic organization in fantasy is based on
the ‘‘infantile’’ genital organization, and that the primacy of the phallus, for the girl as for the boy, is
deemed an aspect of the child’s development and can
in no way be conflated with the adult genital organization. Last, and most important, the idea of phallic primacy must be understood as the primacy of a symbolic
dimension, not an organic one. In his Écrits (1966),
Jacques Lacan describes the dynamics of a human psyche, dependent on language, which necessarily
embraces both the male and the female speaking subject. Even though the ‘‘detachability’’ of the penis
inevitably makes it the ‘‘signifier of the lack,’’ and
hence the symbol of the signifying function itself, men
and women nevertheless relate to it differently. Recent
psychoanalytical research has paid particular attention
to the exploration of this difference, and notably to the
‘‘strangeness of the phallus’’ for the female (Kristeva).
JULIA KRISTEVA
See also: Feminine masochism; Femininity; Femininity,
rejection of; Feminism and psychoanalysis; Gender
identity; Infantile sexual curiosity; Masculinity/femininity; Oedipus complex; Penis envy; Phallic woman; Psy571
FEMININE MASOCHISM
chosexual development; Sexual differences; Sexuality;
Sexualization; Wish for a baby.
Bibliography
André, Jacques. (1994). Sur la sexualité féminine. Paris,
Presses Universitaires de France.
Freud, Sigmund. (1923e). The infantile genital organization.
SE, 19: 141–145.
———. (1925j). Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes. SE, 19: 241–258.
———. (1931b). Female sexuality. SE, 21: 221–243.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on
psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
Kristeva, Julia. (2000). The sense and non-sense of revolt (Jeanine Herman, Trans.). New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000. (Original work published 1996)
Lacan, Jacques. (1966). Ecrits. Paris: Seuil.
Further Reading
Chodorow, Nancy. (1994). Femininities, masculities, sexualities. Freud and beyond. Lexington, KY: University Press of
Kentucky.
Deutsch, Helene. (1946). The psychology of women: I. Girlhood. II. Motherhood. London: Research Books Ltd.
Gilmore, Karen. (1998). Cloacal anxiety in female development. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association,
46, 443–470.
Horney, Karen. (1973). Feminine psychology. New York:
W. W. Norton.
Kleeman, James A. (1976). Freud’s view on early female
sexuality in the light of direct child observations. Journal of
the American Psychoanalytic Association, 24, 3–28.
Silverman, Doris K. (2003). Theorizing in the shadow of
Foucault: Facets of female sexuality. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 13, 243–258.
of masochistic men, who obtain sexual satisfaction
primarily through masturbation. Behind such men’s
need for punishment and humiliation (which form a
transition with moral masochism by way of guilt)
there is an infantile staging of a ‘‘characteristically
female situation’’ that signifies ‘‘being castrated, or
copulated with, or giving birth to a baby’’ (p. 162).
In Freud’s view, the passivity of masochism is linked
to femininity, and the active nature of sadism to virility,
as he wrote in New Introductory Lectures on PsychoAnalysis (1933a [1932]). He first described this connection between active/passive and masculine/feminine in
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d). However, in 1933, taking bisexuality into consideration, he
relativized this opposition and stressed the role of the
instinctual aim: ‘‘to achieve a passive aim may call for a
large amount of activity’’ (p. 115). He also acknowledged that the social repression of aggressiveness in
women could lead to secondary masochistic impulses,
‘‘which succeed . . . in binding erotically the destructive
trends which have been diverted inwards’’ (p. 116).
Freud’s discomfort on the issue of woman’s sexuality
is apparent in his description of feminine masochism in
men, even though his 1924 essay rehabilitates masochism as a form of protection in the individual against
the death instinct and as a factor in the organization of
the ego. Yet we can deduce from his thinking that he
thought that a woman’s intimate acquaintance with
passivity, and thus her capacity for masochism, also
play a part in her strength, and not just in her weakness
stemming from her need for love. Masochism is part of
the intensity of her sexual pleasure, but also of the
strength of her love as a woman and mother.
DENYS RIBAS
See also: Masochism
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
FEMININE MASOCHISM
Feminine masochism, ‘‘an expression of the feminine
being nature’’ (p. 161), is one of the three forms of
masochism described by Sigmund Freud in ‘‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’’ (1924c), along with
moral masochism and primary, erotogenic masochism. Based ‘‘entirely . . . on the primary, erotogenic
masochism’’ (p. 162), feminine masochism, according
to Freud, is clinically accessible through the fantasies
57 2
———. (1924c). The economic problem of masochism. SE,
19: 155–170.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
Further Reading
Bernstein, Isidore. (1983). Masochistic pathology and feminine development. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 31, 467–486.
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Blum, Harold P. (1976). Masochism, the ego ideal, and the
psychology of women. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 24, 157–192.
Bonaparte, Marie. (1935). Passivity, masochism and femininity. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 16, 325–333.
Deutsch, Helene. (1930). The significance of masochism in
the mental life of women. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 11, 48–60.
Horney, Karen. (1935). The problem of feminine masochism. Psychoanalytic Review, 22, 241–257.
FEMININITY
Freud refused to put forward a definition of femininity: ‘‘In conformity with its peculiar nature, psychoanalysis does not try to describe what a woman is . . .
but sets about enquiring how she comes into being’’
(1933a [1932], p. 116). He posits a primary bisexuality
as the starting point for this process.
In Freud’s view, the genesis of femininity differs
from the genesis of masculinity because its linearity is
interrupted. In the pre-oedipal phase, the girl’s libido,
instead of taking the opposite-sex parent as its object,
as the boy does, is directed at the mother as object.
This period is difficult to investigate because of the
‘‘inexorable repression’’ (1931b, p. 226) that overshadows it.
Therefore, the development of girls’ sexuality is studied in an indirect way based on the process that the
boy undergoes. In the early stages a similar path is
traced: ‘‘the little girl is a little man’’ (1933a, p. 118),
with the clitoris being interpreted in the phallic phase
as a miniature penis. Then there are two shifts in perspective, shifts in which there is an explicit moral
imperative. The girl has the duty of turning from the
mother to the father (1939a [1934–1938]): the zone of
sensitivity moves from the clitoris to the vagina, and
there is a change of object to the father.
Reconversion is made possible by the differential
impact of the castration complex on boys and girls. In
boys, the castration complex puts an end to the Oedipus complex. But for girls, the castration complex
makes the Oedipus complex possible.
The girl sees her mother as castrated, while her love
is ‘‘directed to her phallic mother’’ (1939a, p. 126).
This gives rise to a penis envy that later radiates
beyond the desired object to imbue the woman’s psychic life with envy and jealousy. The girl then chooses
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the father as object because he possesses the envied
organ, and this new libidinal orientation is superimposed on the orientation of the mother as object, without replacing it entirely. The woman often transfers
her early relationship with her mother onto her male
partner. The need to anticipate from someone else
what the woman once wanted to possess herself makes
her dependent in a way that leads both to masochism
(with the castigation she receives relating to her position in coitus) and to narcissism (which is expressed in
her greater need to be loved than to love). Presenting
another perspective in ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’ (1914c), Freud stated that following puberty,
women, ‘‘especially if they grow up with good looks,
develop a certain self-contentment’’ that exercises ‘‘a
great attraction for those who have renounced part of
their own narcissism’’ (p. 89).
Although the texts that present a synthetic view of
femininity are focused on lack, Freud’s incursions into
mythology and literature emphasize something
beyond the phallic stage in girls. This something is a
place in the female body characterized by its internal
nature (the ‘‘jewel-case’’) or by disorientation, as in
the sense of the uncanny. The woman then appears not
as an externally definable form but as a ‘‘hollow space’’
(1916–1917a [1915–1917], p. 156) that can receive
what penetrates it. The spatial disorientation is
coupled with a temporal disorientation, in which the
representation of femininity becomes confused with
the notion of birth linked with the fear of death, as if
the third of the Fates had come to embody a femininity that governed all of destiny. Freud’s study of femininity thus diverges into a theoretical synthesis derived
from phallic logic and a representation of femininity
that mythologizes woman as a place—whether of birth
or death—where the processes of life are played out
for every human being.
The idea of taking a foreign element into the self
appears as the crossroads where the representations of
psychoanalysis intersect with those of female sexuality.
When Freud noted how the transference configuration
enabled a repressed element to be taken in, he usually
gave an example—Elisabeth in Studies on Hysteria
(1895d) or Irma with her dream about the injection—
of a patient struggling against accepting a proposed
solution or repressed representation (1900a). Recourse
to these terms had a clear impact on the paper ‘‘Negation’’ (1925h), because acceptance into the ego enabled
repression to be effectively lifted.
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FEMININITY
Freud noted the conjunction between such acceptance and the outcome of female sexuality in ‘‘On the
Sexual Theories of Children’’ (1908c), where he
referred, in connection with the mother representation, to the discovery of the ‘‘cavity which receives the
penis’’ (p. 218). In the moment of affirmation associated with the lifting of repression, the psychic apparatus has to receive the repressed element just as the
female ‘‘hollow space’’ has to receive the penis. This
correlation reappears in ‘‘Analysis Terminable and
Interminable’’ (1937c), where Freud describes the
man’s refusal to accept the cure from the psychoanalyst
as his rejection of femininity. Does a refusal of this
kind arise from the fear of losing masculinity or the
fear of invasion occasioned by opening the self as a
‘‘hollow space’’? Two different definitions of femininity clash at this juncture.
Post-Freudian psychoanalysis both extended and
revised Freud’s lines of approach to femininity. The
phallic primacy attributed to both sexes became a matter of dispute. Karen Horney asserted that the girl discovers vaginal sensations early on. As a result, recourse
to the penis takes on a defensive significance. Ernest
Jones did not consider woman as a form of failed man,
and he related female anxiety not to castration anxiety
but to aphanisis anxiety, the fear of losing her internal
sensitivity. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel challenged the
passive concept of the vagina. She saw the vaginal aim
of incorporation as conferring a capacity for mastery,
as with anality.
Conrad Stein sought to define a specifically feminine outcome by positing ‘‘castration as a negation of
femininity.’’ He argued that insofar as masculinity carries a ‘‘symbolic representation of itself,’’ it is a guardian of identity. In contrast, the female pole, situated
close to being, is governed by a tendency toward
‘‘destruction of the self ’s identity,’’ which, when it
gives rise to anxiety, ‘‘is negated by the act of regarding
woman only as a castrated being.’’ The risk of destruction to which the woman is exposed leads to a focus in
the analysis on the dimension of invasion (André;
Schaeffer).
Is there a fundamental difference between masculine protest and feminine protest organized around a
receptive hollow space? In accordance with some of
Michèle Montrelay’s theories, François Perrier emphasized the girl’s relationship with her mother, in which
her fantasy involvement does not involve risking a part
of herself but diving in head first. To reduce the risk of
57 4
being sucked in, the girl appeals to the male organ, on
which she confers investigative properties. Penis envy
is thus governed not by rejection of femininity but by
the girl’s desire to orient herself in this space.
Wladimir Granoff examined the tendency for theory to construct femininity in negative terms. He
regards femininity as a defense that resembles the
child’s decision to prefer the father to the mother. In
this view, thought needs to turn away from femininity
to construct an intellectualized universe. This turning
away resembles the son-in-law’s prohibition against
turning toward his mother-in-law in Freud’s analysis
and is related to Freud’s invitation to explore, beyond
classical Greek culture, cultures that have been
repressed by ‘‘turning from the mother to the father’’
(1939a, p. 114).
Because the female genital opening is feared as a
place of absence, pubic hair has been ascribed the
function of a veil, though it can equally well belong to
fantasies surrounding fertility and growth, reminiscent
of Demeter (Schneider). Marcel Detienne’s observation concerning the dual character of the founding
sites of Greek culture—‘‘Eleusis is the counterpart of
Athens’’—can be used to inform the study of femininity. Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939a [1934–
1938]), drawing on Aeschylus’s Eumenides, belongs in
the mythical tradition that began with the founding of
Athens. Accordingly, it pays tribute to Athena, a virgin
born without a mother. It might well be appropriate to
unearth those underworld entities that Athena proposes at the end of the tragedy, to lead ‘‘Into the earth/
The cavern timeless as the tomb.’’
MONIQUE SCHNEIDER
See also: Activity/passivity; Castration complex; Dark continent; Female sexuality; Feminine masochism; Femininity, rejection of; Feminism and psychoanalysis; Gender
identity; Masculinity/femininity; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Object, change of/choice of; Penis
envy; Psychology of Women. A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, The; Sexual differences; ‘‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes.’’
Bibliography
André, Jacques. (1995). Sur la sexualité féminine. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine. (1970). Feminine guilt and the
Oedipus complex. In her Female sexuality (pp. 94–134).
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FEMININITY, REJECTION
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. (Originally published 1964)
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4: 1–338; 5: 339–625.
———. (1908c). On the sexual theories of children. SE, 9:
205–226.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: an introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
———. (1916–1917a [1915–1917]). Introductory lectures
on psycho-analysis. SE, 15–16.
———. (1925h). Negation. SE, 19: 233–239.
———. (1931b). Female sexuality. SE, 21: 221–243.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on
psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 209–253.
———. (1939a [1934–1938]). Moses and monotheism:
Three essays. SE, 23: 1–137.
Freud Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
Granoff, Wladimir. (1976). La pensée et le féminin. Paris:
Minuit.
Horney, Karen. (1967). Feminine psychology. New York:
W. W. Norton.
Jones, Ernest. (1950). Early development of female sexuality.
In his Papers on psycho-analysis. London: Bailliere, Tindall
and Cox.
Montrelay, Michèle. (1978). Inquiry into femininity. M/F, 1,
83–102.
Schaeffer, Jacqueline. (1997). Le refus du féminin. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Schneider, Monique. (1992). La part de l’ombre: Approche
d’un trauma féminin. Paris: Aubier.
Stein, Conrad. (1977). La castration comme négation de la
féminité. In his La mort d’Œdipe (pp. 155–183). Paris:
Denoël.
OF
Richards, Arlene K. (1996). Primary femininity and female
genital anxiety. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 44(S), 261–282.
Stoller, Robert J. (1976). Primary femininity. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, 24, 59–78.
FEMININITY, REJECTION OF
Rejection of femininity refers to a man’s rejection of
the feminine elements inherent in his constitutional
bisexuality.
The concept first appeared in Freud’s article ‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’ (1937c), where he
introduced it in his discussion of the ‘‘bedrock’’
beyond which analytic work cannot continue. It also
formed a part of his ongoing argument against the
term proposed by Alfred Adler, ‘‘masculine protest.’’
This bedrock, which takes the form of penis envy in
women, appears in men as a rejection of femininity.
Specifically, what the man rejects is a passive position
towards another man.
The question of the exact nature of this rejected
femininity is taken up again when Freud specifies what
it is that the man is defending himself against: ‘‘He
refuses to subject himself to a father-substitute . . . and
consequently he refuses to accept his recovery from
the doctor’’ (1937c, p. 252). The notion of ‘‘acceptance’’ (Annahme) is related to femininity, but without
reference to the phallic organization. It refers to the act
by which the vagina, as ‘‘cavity,’’ ‘‘receives the penis’’
(1908c, p. 218).
Thus the rejection of femininity might be viewed as
the refusal of inner space (as representative of mental
space as a whole) to admit a foreign body. Jacqueline
Schaeffer (1997) has spoken in this connection of anxiety about a femininity perceived as the ‘‘penetration of
the ego and the body by a stranger, the agent of an
incursion that feeds the constant pressure of the drive.’’
MONIQUE SCHNEIDER
Further Reading
See also: Femininity.
Dahl, Kirsten. (2002). In her mother’s voice: reflections on
femininity and the superego. Psychoanalytic Study of the
Child, 57, 3–26.
Bibliography
Kulish, Nancy. (2000). Primary femininity: Clinical advances
and theoretical ambiguities. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 48, 1355–1380.
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Freud, Sigmund. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE, 23: 209–253.
———. (1908c). On the sexual theories of children. SE, 9:
205–226.
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FEMINISM
AND
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Schaeffer, Jacqueline. (1997). Le refus du feminine. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Schneider, Monique. (1992). La part de l’ombre. Approche
d’un trauma féminin. Paris: Aubier.
FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Freud’s discovery of the unconscious is centrally linked
to the study of female sexuality. In listening to the hysterics, Freud gave them a voice and attributed a meaning to what they said. As Juliet Mitchell noted, feminist
movements have tended to equate what Freud said
about the hysterics and his other female patients as
prescriptions for patriarchal domination of women
rather than understanding his writings as an analysis
of women’s position in patriarchal societies.
Feminist movements, especially in the 1960s and
1970s, were hostile to psychoanalysis, as they viewed it
as a major factor in the oppression of women. The
issues that feminists challenged in psychoanalysis centered on Freud’s formulations of the differentiation
between the sexes, in terms of the association of masculinity with activity and femininity with passivity;
Freud’s emphasis on the existence of penis envy in
women; female masochism; and the emphasis on the
role of the father as opposed to feminists’ reassessment
of the mother-daughter relationship.
Simone de Beauvoir’s La deuxieme sexe (1949) and
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) both
viewed psychoanalysis as regarding women as inferior
and as defining them only with reference to men. Then
in the 1970s another wave of feminist writings, such as
Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970), Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) and Germaine Greer’s The Female
Eunuch (1970), called for changes in society that
would help to eliminate sexual inequality. Mitchell’s
Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1972) was a marker in
the recovery of psychoanalysis, by explaining its revolutionary understanding of women.
From a very early stage, psychoanalysis maintained
that the psychic reality of sex had to be distinguished
from the anatomical reality, that there was no one-toone correlation between biology and psychology. Men
and women are not physically or socially ‘‘made’’ as
male or female but become such.
Initially, however, Freud assumed a symmetry in
the development of what he called the Oedipus
57 6
complex. It was only in an essay written in 1925 that
Freud distinguished between the psychosexual history
of boys and girls and recognized the importance of the
pre-oedipal phase in which boys and girls love the
mother, and both have to relinquish her in favor of
the father (1925j). The girl has to move from loving
her mother to loving her father, whereas the boy gives
up his mother with the understanding that he will later
have a woman of his own. In this model, boys identify
with their fathers as their masculine identity is established. The little boy learns his role as the heir of his
father. The little girl, on the other hand, has to identify
with her mother while at the same time abandoning
her as a love object and turning to her father instead.
For Freud this turning away from the mother is based
on frustration and the disappointment that she cannot
satisfy her mother, and is accompanied by hostility.
The importance of the ‘‘pre-oedipal’’ relationship
with the mother has been more fully discussed since
Freud’s time. More recently interest in the nature of
female identity can be found in the works of Ethel Person, Irene Fast, and Jessica Benjamin in the United
States, as well as in the works of Janine ChasseguetSmirgel, Catherine J. Luquet-Parat, Maria Torok, and
Joyce McDougall in France.
In the 1920s a controversy took place over the perception of femininity. If for Freud libido is identical in
the two sexes, for the English School, feminine libido
is specific. Karen Horney and Ernest Jones participated
in a series of interchanges and opposed Freud’s views
by putting forward a ‘‘positive’’ view of female sexuality, not linked to an idea of a lack. For Jones, femininity’s development is linked to instinctual constitution.
In debate with him, Freud asserted that Jones profoundly misunderstood the fundamental nature of
sexuality and that Jones had returned to a biological
reductionism. Mitchell has pointed out that the
Freud-Jones controversy shifted from the question of
what distinguished the sexes to what each sex has that
is specific to it alone.
Developments in psychoanalytic theory in England,
with the school of object relations, led to an emphasis
on the mother-child dyad, and on motherhood. Psychoanalytic work from an early stage concentrated on
primitive states in infancy, and progressively attention
was paid to the impact of these primitive states on
transference. Melanie Klein’s theory carried on Freud’s
shift in the emphasis from the father to the mother
and the mother’s importance for children of both
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sexes. For her, the relationship of the child to the
mother’s body shaped subsequent emotional life. Particularly, the relationship to the breast is crucial in the
child’s early experiences. Klein’s concepts of introjective and projective identification are metaphors for the
bodily processes of taking in and expelling. According
to Klein, the little girl believes her mother’ s body contains everything that is desirable, including the father’s
penis. As a consequence the little girl is filled with
hatred towards her mother and wishes to attack and
rob the inside of her body. She is then filled with a persecutory anxiety of "having the inside of her body
robbed and destroyed." In 1928 Klein argued that it
was the deprivation of the breast rather than the discovery of the lack of penis that turned the little girl
away from the mother towards the father. Later she
downplayed the child’s original envy of the breast and
wrote about an essentially heterosexual drive in little
girls. Klein’s views on this early relationship between
mother and baby had an impact on some of the early
writings on femininity in the British society, such as
the work of Joan Riviere and Sylvia Payne.
Progressively psychoanalysts from all the groups in
the British Society, inspired by the works of Klein,
Donald Winnicott, Marjorie Brierly and Wilfred Bion,
have emphasised the connection between primary
affective development and object relations. One can
trace these themes throughout the writings of Marion
Burgner and Rose Edcumbe, Egle Laufer, Dinora
Pines, Dana Breen, Joan Raphael-Leff, and Rosine Perelberg. In a more recent collection presenting work of
the three schools of psychoanalysis in the British
Psycho-Analytical Society, Raphael-Leff and Perelberg
stress the primitive tie to the mother and its manifestations in transference and countertransference.
American feminists have perceived psychoanalysis
as reproducing patriarchal inequalities. Nancy Chodorow is one of the most well-known writers in the
United States on the relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism. The Reproduction of Mothering;
Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1978)
introduced the work of Winnicott, W. Ronald Fairbairn, and Harry Guntrip to American readers. Chodorow emphasizes the development of the self in relation to others, stressing the pre-oedipal relationship
between mother and child. She views the function of
mothering as creating an asymmetrical relationship
between boys and girls. The girl has more permeable
boundaries in the relationship with the other because
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of having been mothered by someone of the same gender. Girls are themselves, therefore, more committed
to mothering. Boys, in contrast, develop a sense of self
in opposition to the mother and establish more rigid
boundaries. The masculine sense of self is more
separate.
Jean Baker Miller and Carol Gilligan, from the
interpersonal school of analysis, emphasize women’s
attributes of relatedness, empathy and nurturance
which are viewed as devalued in the male-dominated
culture. These interpersonal theoreticians stress cultural emphases on different attributes for men and
women and are less concentrated on the internal world
of unconscious phantasies and internal object
relationships.
Jessica Benjamin in Bonds of Love (1988) sees both
boys and girls as looking to the father for confirmation
of themselves. While the boy’s identity is confirmed by
the father, the girl in contrast has her identification
with the father’s power denied, and he becomes the
object of her ideal ego. This prevents her from having
a ‘‘desire of her own,’’ and her longing for the father
becomes tinged with masochism. Issues of power and
submission are located in the sphere of relationships.
Chodorow has argued that what all these authors
have in common, in spite of their differences, is the
emphasis on the qualities of the ‘‘self in relation’’ (or
denial of relation). She suggests that this view radically
breaks with an essentialist view of gender and moves
towards a view that perceives masculinity and femininity in a contingent, relationally constructed context. These schools, however, end up by constructing a
more fixed view of femininity and masculinity than
Freud, who basically indicated that there is a fluidity
between masculinity and femininity in both men and
women.
These views can be contrasted with the major
trends in French theories on psychoanalysis and feminism, where there is an emphasis on unconscious fantasies and desire and an attempt to find a language to
express the feminine. Among the French psychoanalysts in particular there is a view that the discovery of
the unconscious in itself reveals the precariousness of
identity in the forces of fantasy and desire. This is the
radical perspective that psychoanalysis can offer to
feminism. The impact of Jacques Lacan’s work pervades the numerous writings, from those who accept
basic tenets of Freudian theory to those who, like Julia
Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Michele Montrelay, Sarah
577
F E N I C H E L , O T T O (1897 – 1946)
Kofman, and Luce Irigaray, remained highly critical of
psychoanalytic assumptions.
Lacan pointed out that the distinction between
penis and phallus is fundamental to Freud’s differentiation between biological and psychic reality. The
phallus exists outside anatomical reality and is the signifier of the mother’s desire. Joël Dor has suggested
that the central question of the Oedipus complex thus
becomes ‘‘to be or not to be the phallus,’’ i.e. to be or
not to be the object of the mother’s desire. The role of
the father also becomes symbolic—he represents the
impossibility of being the object of mother’s desire.
The phallus, unlike the penis, is possessed by nobody
(male or female) and represents the combination of
both sexes.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, McDougall, Torok, LuquetParat, Monique Cournut-Janin, and Jacqueline Schaeffer have all argued from a position inside psychoanalysis. Chasseguet-Smirgel indicated her perception that
the little girl is aware of the existence of the vagina virtually from the beginning, although she also suggests
that this ‘‘knowledge’’ may be held unconsciously, so
that the little girl both knows and does not know. In
her various works, ‘‘penis envy’’ is understood as having a defensive function.
For many of the French feminist writers the body
is the locus of femininity, and numerous writings
attempt to capture its rhythms (such as Luce Irigaray’s Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un). In her book Speculum (1974), Irigaray perceives psychoanalysis as unaware of the historical and philosophical determinants
of its own discourse and unable to analyse its own
unconscious fantasies. Furthermore, being a product
of patriarchal society, it cannot analyse what it owes
to the mother. She consistently puts forward the
view that women in patriarchy have no identity as
women. She also emphasises the relationship of the
little girl to the mother’s body. The girl, says Irigaray,
‘‘has the mother, in some sense, in her skin, in the
humidity of the mucous membranes, in the intimacy
of her most intimate parts, in the mystery of her
relation to gestation, birth and to her sexual
identity.’’
Kristeva relates psychic repression to the actual
structures of language, and describes the pre-oedipal
stage as a play of bodily rhythms and pre-linguistic
exchanges between infant and mother. Kristeva refers
to what Plato, in Timaeus, called the chora as the site of
the undifferentiated bodily space the mother and the
57 8
child share. Within the Oedipus complex it is the symbolic that is dominant; the domain of unified texts,
cultural representations, and knowledge. This distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic is retrospective, as it is only through the symbolic that one
has access to the semiotic. For Kristeva, subjectivity is
founded on a constitutive repression of the maternal,
the chora, the semiotic, and the abject (liminal states,
like pregnancy). Kristeva has been accused of reducing
women to the maternal function, but she is also seen
as providing a deepening in the understanding of the
pre-oedipal.
In these French feminist writings, there is a profound search for the multiplicity which characterizes
femininity (as opposed to masculinity), which may be
expressed in a language which itself attempts to capture the feminine. In a paradoxical way one may be
referred back to Freud’s thinking about hysteria. The
symptoms of the first patient of psychoanalysis, Anna
O., included mutism, paralysis, ‘‘time-missing,’’ and
gaps in memory: all expressing interruptions in the
domain of a reality which is being denied. Psychoanalysis indicates that sexuality is only created through
division and discontinuity, although femininity is the
side that both represents, and tends to be represented
as, the negative (of masculinity).
ROSINE JOZEF PERELBERG
See also: Cinema and psychoanalysis; Femininity; Boundary violations; Psyche. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und
iher Anwendungen.
Bibliography
Mitchell, Juliet. (1974). Psychoanalysis and feminism. Hardsmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.
Raphael-Leff, Joan, and Perelberg, Rosine Jozef (Eds.)
(1997). Female experience: Three generations of British
women psychoanalysts on work with women. London:
Routledge.
Wright, Elizabeth. (1992). Feminism and psychoanalysis: A
critical dictionary. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
FENICHEL, OTTO (1897–1946)
Otto Fenichel, an Austrian physician and psychoanalyst,
was born in Vienna on December 2, 1897, and died in
Los Angeles on January 22, 1946. He was born into a
family of Viennese Jewish lawyers. As a student he took
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F E R E N C Z I , S Á N D O R (1873 –1 933)
part in the Viennese youth movement that had coalesced
around Siegfried Bernfeld. He took an interest in cultural
and educational reform and was especially interested in
information about sexuality and its scientific study.
Released from serving in the military, he began, after the
winter of 1915/1916, to attend Sigmund Freud’s presentations at the University of Vienna, and after 1918 he
participated in discussions held by the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. In February 1919 he organized, at the
university, a Viennese Seminar on Sexology, a working
group to study psychoanalysis and sexual matters. In
1920, while still a student, he was accepted as a member
of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society after his talk on sexual problems in youth movements. He received his medical degree in 1921.
Fenichel began an analysis in Vienna with Paul Federn and continued, after moving to Berlin, with Sándor Radó. In 1926 he became a teacher at the Berlin
Psychoanalytic Institute and that same year organized
a seminar on child psychoanalysis, an open forum on
the problems of clinical and applied psychoanalysis.
He was a member of the German Psychoanalytic
Society from 1926 to 1934. After 1932 some members
of the seminar began discussing psychoanalytic issues
from a Marxist perspective. Fenichel had to flee to
Oslo, Norway, in 1933. There he became secretary of
the Dansk-Norsk Psykoanalytisk Forening (DanishNorwegian Psychoanalytical Society).
In Norway, in the spring of 1934, he continued the
meetings on Marxist psychoanalysis, writing clandestine circular letters that he sent to his colleagues in
exile. By 1945 he had written 119 such letters. In 1935
he moved to the Czechoslovak city of Prague, where he
ran the Prager Arbeitsgemeinschaft (Prague Study
Society), which was associated with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.
After the introduction of National Socialism in
Vienna and the dissolution of the Prague group, in the
spring of 1938 Fenichel and his family left for Los
Angeles. There he joined the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Study Group. In 1942 he helped found the San
Francisco Psychoanalytic Society and in 1944 became
vice president. After 1939 he was an editor of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly. In the summer of 1945 he began
studying psychiatry to obtain his California license at
the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles.
The focus of his interest, which he shared with Siegfried Bernfeld, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and
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others, lie in the development of a form of psychoanalysis that provided sociological explanations and was
capable of making contributions to politics. His most
important work, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, appeared in 1945 and became a key source for analytic training. One of Fenichel’s most important contributions to psychoanalysis, overlooked until 1998,
has been his circular letters, which have shown him to
be an important historiographer of the psychoanalytic
movement.
ELKE MÜHLLEITNER
Work discussed: Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, The.
See also: Addiction; American Imago; Asthma; Berliner
Psychoanalytisches Institut; Boredom; Bulimia; Claustrophobia; Czech Republic; Dependence; Dipsomania;
Evenly-suspended attention; Germany; Indications and
contraindications for psychoanalysis for an adult; Lehrinstitut de Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung;
Narcissism of minor differences; ‘‘Neurasthenia and
ÔAnxiety Neurosis’’’; Norway; Oedipus complex, early;
Politics and psychoanalysis; Stammering; Tics; Transference relationship; Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung; Second World War: The effect on the development
of psychoanalysis; United States.
Bibliography
Fenichel, Otto. (1945). The psychoanalytic theory of neuroses.
New York: W. W. Norton.
———. (1953–1954). The collected papers of Otto Fenichel.
New York: W. W. Norton.
———. (1998). 119 Rundbriefe (1934–1945) (2 vols.).
Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld.
Mühlleitner, Elke. (1992). Biographisches lexikon der psychoanalyse: die Mitglieder der psychologischen MittwochGesellschaft und der Wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung,
1902–1938. Tübingen, Germany: Diskord.
FEPAL. See Federacion psicoanalitica de America
Latina
FERENCZI, SÁNDOR (1873–1933)
A Hungarian neurologist and psychoanalyst, Sándor
Ferenczi was born in Miskolc on July 7, 1873, and died
in Budapest on May 22, 1933. He was the eighth of eleven children of Baruch Fraenkel (who changed his
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F E R E N C Z I , S Á N D O R (1 873 –19 33)
name to Bernát Ferenczi), a bookseller, printer, and
ticket agent, and Róza Eibenschütz, both of whom
were Jews from Galicia, Poland. His father died when
he was fifteen. After studying at the Protestant school
in his home town, Ferenczi went to Vienna to study
medicine, obtaining his diploma in 1894. He became
interested in psychology while still a student.
Ferenczi first practiced medicine at the Rókus Hospital in Budapest and then specialized in neurology at
the Szent Erzsébet (Saint Elizabeth) Hospital. After
1899 he contributed to the medical journal Gyógyászat
(Therapeutics). These early articles demonstrate Ferenczi’s interest in clinical medicine and psychology.
Ferenczi read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams
shortly after its appearance but was not impressed by
the work. A few years later, after he adopted Carl Gustav
Jung’s association test, he became more receptive to
Freud’s ideas, and on February 2, 1908, together with
another Hungarian doctor, he made his first visit to
Freud. This was the beginning of a close friendship
between the two men that lasted until Ferenczi’s death.
In 1908 they began their correspondence (comprising
approximately one thousand four hundred letters), an
exchange that had a profound effect on the history of
psychoanalysis. At the first psychoanalytic meeting,
which took place in Salzburg on April 27, 1908, Ferenczi
presented the paper ‘‘Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy,’’ the
first psychoanalytic work devoted to the subject.
Because many of his friends were writers and artists,
Ferenczi played an active role in the cultural life of
Budapest, which was being swept at this time by currents of modernism. The Freudian ideas for which he
became the spokesman were well received by his writer
friends but rejected by most medical doctors.
To help introduce psychoanalysis to Hungary, Ferenczi gave a number of talks. He gradually became
Freud’s closest disciple and spent a number of summer
vacations with the Freud family, often traveling with
Freud. In 1909, when Freud visited Clark University in
the United States, Ferenczi accompanied him (along
with Jung) and helped prepare his presentations. In
1909 Ferenczi published ‘‘Introjection et transfert’’
(Introjection and transference; 1990a), his first theoretical work.
In 1910, following a suggestion by Freud, he proposed the creation of the International Psychoanalytical Association with Jung as president, and in 1913
founded the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Association
58 0
with István Hollós (a psychiatrist), Lajos Lévy (a doctor), Sándor Radó (a medical student), and Hugo
Ignotus (whose real name was Hugo Veigelsberg and
who was the editor-in-chief of the avant-garde literary
review Nyugat [The Occident]). That same year Ernest
Jones began analysis with Ferenczi.
After experiencing a series of personal problems in
1911 (his interminable hesitation between Gizella
Pálos, a married woman and his mistress since 1905,
and Elma, her eldest daughter), Ferenczi asked Freud
to analyze him. The analysis took place in three parts,
one in 1914 and the other two in 1916. The analysis
was cut short by the First World War, but also by
Freud’s reluctance to get involved in matters he feared,
not without reason, would have negative repercussions
on their relationship. In the end Ferenczi married
Gizella in 1919 without ever completely forgiving
Freud for having influenced his decision. In 1916 Ferenczi undertook the analysis of Géza Roheim and Melanie Klein and played a key role in discovering their
talent.
September 1918 marked the highpoint of psychoanalysis in Hungary. The Fifth International Congress
took place at the Academy of Sciences in Budapest,
with participation of representatives from the government, who were interested in psychoanalytic work on
war neuroses. During the congress, Ferenczi was
elected president of the International Psychoanalytical
Association. A few months later, because of political
and social events in Hungary, which was then independent of Austria, Ernest Jones succeeded him as president. The following year, during the short-lived
Hungarian Commune, Ferenczi obtained a chair in
psychoanalysis at the university. This was taken from
him when the right-wing government under Miklós
Horthy came to power. In 1920 he was also expelled
from the Hungarian medical association.
After 1919 Ferenczi devoted himself exclusively to
the care of his patients and the development of the
psychoanalytic movement. In 1925, with Vilma
Kovács, one of his analysands and students, he worked
out the methods of a system of training, and in 1931
he founded a psychoanalytic clinic, with himself as
director. At the same time he continued his research
and theoretical work, which focused primarily on
technique.
In 1924 Ferenczi and Otto Rank published Entwicklungsziele der Psychoanalyse (The development of
psychoanalysis [1925]). The book was criticized,
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principally by Karl Abraham and Ernest Jones, and
then by Freud. When Rank broke with Freud, Ferenczi
reaffirmed his commitment to Freud and published an
article criticizing Rank’s work. In 1924 he published
Thalassa (1963), a work highly regarded by Freud for
its use of Lamarckian ideas.
In 1926 and 1927 Ferenczi spent six months in the
United States giving lectures and training candidates,
not all of whom were doctors. His position in favor of
lay analysis alienated a large part of the American psychoanalytic community, which was committed to limiting psychoanalytic practice to medical doctors.
Ferenczi’s technical experiments between 1918 and
1932, which were conducted to make psychoanalysis
accessible to patients who showed signs of pregenital
disturbances, created dissension between him and
Freud. The conflict embittered his final years and
affected the entire psychoanalytic community. He gave
his last lecture, ‘‘Confusion of Tongues between Adults
and the Child’’ (1949), in 1932 at the Wiesbaden Congress. Already suffering from pernicious anemia, he
died on May 22, 1933, in Budapest.
Ferenczi made an important contribution to psychoanalytic theory and technique. On the theoretical
level, he introduced the concept of introjection, was
the first to focus on object relations, and developed
theories of trauma and regression. In Thalassa he presented a number of fertile hypotheses on the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of genitality, or a sex life.
Above all, Ferenczi thought of himself as a doctor
and held that it was not up to the patient to present
himself as analyzable but up to the analyst to find suitable techniques for healing his patients. He successively developed several therapeutic techniques:
1. He developed the so-called active technique,
whereby the analysand is asked to do whatever
will promote free associations or to refrain from
doing whatever might impede them.
2. To help mediate the authoritarian nature of the
active method, he developed the technique of
elasticity and permissiveness. Here, pushing tolerance of regression to its extremes, he allowed
the traumatized patient to experience his symptoms anew.
3. He developed what is known as mutual analysis—an attempt doomed to failure and quickly
abandoned—which was intended to spare
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traumatized patients the consequences of misunderstanding and blind spots on the part of the
analyst.
Ferenczi occupies an important place in the development of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory
and played an important role in propagating psychoanalytic ideas and contributing to the understanding
and global awareness of psychoanalysis. His disagreement with Freud during the last years of his life, as well
as the uneasiness caused by the almost superhuman
demands he made on the analyst, have relegated his
work to obscurity for nearly fifty years. However, on
closer examination of the history of the twentieth century, the relevance of his ideas becomes obvious.
Owing to the efforts of Michael Balint, who edited Ferenczi’s collected works, and the appearance in 1988 of
his Clinical Diary, a unique document in the field of
psychoanalysis, the value of his ideas has been recognized wherever psychoanalysis is practiced.
EVA BRABANT-GERÖ
Works discussed: ‘‘Confusion of Tongues between Adults
and the Child’’; ‘‘Development of Psycho-Analysis’’;
‘‘Dream of the Wise Baby, The’’; ‘‘Introjection and transference’’; Thalassa. A Theory of Genitality.
Notions developed: Active technique; Amphimixia/
amphimixis; Elasticity; Introjection; Mutual analysis;
Relaxation principle and neo-catharsis; Tact.
See also: Abstinence/rule of abstinence; ‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’; Anticipatory ideas; Autoplastic;
Benign/malignant regression; Boredom; Boundary violations; Character neurosis; Clark University; Criminology
and psychoanalysis; Erotogenic zone; Homosexuality;
Hungarian School; Hungary; Identification; International Psychoanalytic Association; Knowledge, instinct
for; Lie; Negative hallucination; Neutrality/benevolent
neutrality; Nudity, dream of; Choice of neurosis; Occultism; Omnipotence of thought; Orgasm; Passion; Pleasure
in thinking; Primary love; Psychic causality; Psychoanalytic filiations; Real trauma; Secret Committee; Seduction
scenes; Splitting of the ego; Technique with adults, psychoanalytic; Telepathy; Tenderness; Termination of treatment; Tics; Training analysis; Transference; Transference
depression; Wish, satisfactory hallucination of a.
Bibliography
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1949). Confusion of tongues between
adults and the child. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 30, 225–230.
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FETISHISM
———. (1963). Thalassa: A theory of genitality (Henry
Alden Bunker, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original
work published 1924)
———. (1974). Les fantasmes provoqués. In his Oeuvres
complètes. Psychanalyse (Vol. 3). Paris: Payot. (Original
work published 1924)
———. (1988). The clinical diary of Sándor Ferenczi
(Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. (1990a). Introjection et transfert. In his Oeuvres
complètes. Psychanalyse (Vol. 1). Paris: Payot. (Original
work published 1909)
———. (1990b). Le développement du sens de la réalité et
ses stades. In his Oeuvres complètes. Psychanalyse (Vol. 2,
pp. 51–64). Paris: Payot. (Original work published 1913)
———. (1996). Le traumatisme psychique. In his Oeuvres
complètes. Psychanalyse (Vol. 4, pp. 82–97). Paris: Payot.
(Original work published 1932)
Ferenczi, Sándor, and Rank, Otto. (1925). The development
of psychoanalysis (Caroline Newton, Trans.). New York:
Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co. (Original
work published 1924)
FETISHISM
Fetishism first interested psychoanalysts as a sexual
perversion, in the strict sense. The term referred to a
man’s compulsive use of an inherently nonsexual
object as an essential condition for maintaining
potency and achieving pleasure when having sexual
relations with a person of the opposite sex. This view
emphasizes that perversion, as originally understood,
was viewed as a strictly masculine phenomenon. Freud
presented his thinking on the subject in three texts,
which represented his changing ideas on the subject:
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d),
‘‘Fetishism’’ (1927e), and ‘‘The Splitting of the Ego in
the Process of Defense’’ (1940e [1938]). The views
expressed in those essays are as relevant in the early
twenty-first century as when they were first written.
In all observed cases, the fetish, in the fetishist’s
unconscious fantasy, is a substitute for a woman’s
‘‘penis.’’ It ‘‘completes’’ the woman by making her phallic. Consequently, the woman’s genital organs lose any
erogenous quality, in the eyes of the fetishist, erogeneity
being completely transferred to the fetish. The fetish
becomes the source of excitement, an idealized object
capable of providing sexual pleasure to the fetishist.
58 2
The psychopathological behavior of the fetishist can
be considered exacerbation of a universal anxiety.
Freud saw in this perversion one of the clearest
demonstrations of the difficulty that some men (perhaps all men) experience in accepting the differences
of the sexes.
It has become clear that the most important factor
behind this perversion is castration anxiety experienced
to an extreme degree. Fetishism arises entirely from
defensive measures unconsciously adopted to reject castration and eliminate it from the field of possibility.
Only a part of the man believes that a woman does not
have a penis. So as far as the fetishist is concerned, castration is still possible under these circumstances. But if
both sexes are equipped with a penis, castration cannot
occur in this world. It thus becomes essential to remedy
this unacceptable reality by attributing a penis to the
woman at any cost. Creating such a reality is the primary function of the fetish in the unconscious imagination of the fetishist. The fetishist must then shelter his
fragile mental apparatus from the return of disturbing
sexual perceptions. He does so by choosing as a fetish
an object that is always available, like a high-heel shoe.
One fetishist is quoted as saying, ‘‘Every time I am in
the presence of a naked woman, I imagine a high-heel
shoe; I couldn’t tell what a vagina looks like.’’ As Freud
demonstrated, the fetish makes the woman ‘‘acceptable’’
as an object of sexual love.
Freud considered fetishism important because this
pathological structure can be used to observe the
workings of two important defense mechanisms that
had been partially ignored until then: splitting and
denial. Fetishism enabled Freud clearly to identify the
mechanism of splitting for the first time, that is, splitting of the thinking ego (to be distinguished from the
splitting of the object representation). The fetishist
demonstrates that he can accommodate two clearly
contradictory conceptions of a woman within himself:
a conscious affirmation (‘‘The woman does not have a
penis’’) and an unconscious fetishistic affirmation
(‘‘The woman has a penis’’). The first is unimportant
in the mental representations of the fetishist. These
two modes of thought operate in parallel and have no
effect on one another. The second mode of thought, a
defense mechanism, denies castration, the lack of a
penis, the crucial difference between the sexes. Most
authors see splitting as arising to ensure the continuity
of the denial, though it may be that splitting and continuity of denial occur simultaneously.
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FINLAND
Since splitting and denial are observed in psychosis,
some see fetishism as a protection against an otherwise
threatening psychosis. Fetishism is also thought to protect against homosexuality. We should not conclude,
however, that the fetishist is homosexual. In terms of his
own feelings of identity and his own self-representations
at all levels of thought, he sees himself as a man, a man in
relation to a woman, except that the woman in this case
also has a penis, according to the man’s unconscious
imagination. This is a major difference with the transvestite, who sees himself as a woman, in this case, a woman
with a penis. Overall, in spite of the exceptions encountered, the transvestite is much closer to homosexuality
than the fetishist. Rare cases of fetishism alternating
with homosexuality have been observed, however.
See also: Castration complex; Coprophilia; Disavowal;
Phallic mother; Phallic woman; Psychotic defenses;
‘‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence, The.’’
It follows from the above that fetishism is a sign of
narcissistic pathology, with mental operations functioning at a very archaic level, primarily through the extensive use of primitive identification (which some authors
refer to as ‘‘narcissistic identification’’ or ‘‘projective
identification’’). This assertion is based on the fact that
by endowing the woman (the mother, in the unconscious) with a penis, the fetishist preserves his own sexual organ by identifying with the mother. In doing so,
the fetishist exhibits considerable narcissistic vulnerability regarding the integrity of his physical image.
Lussier, André. (1983). Les déviations du désir: Étude sur le
fétichisme. Revue Française de Psychanalyse, 47 (1), 19–142.
Although opinions are divided, it seems justified to
view the mechanism and structure of fetishism as
resulting from a massive regression following the oedipal stage. The oedipal conflict was traumatic and results
in significant regression to all levels of pregenitality,
accompanied by strong anal and oral components.
These components are manifest in an anxiety of disintegration, which is very noticeable during psychoanalysis.
Another school of thought suggests viewing fetishism as
essentially determined by pregenital conflicts.
Psychoanalytic work in the 1990s has shown that
the fetish can also take on, in most cases, several other
functions in varying proportions. These secondary
functions include protection against trauma and
depression, release from the outward expression of
hostility and contempt while expressing them secretly,
relief from psychosomatic symptoms, control over
separation anxiety. As a partial delusion, fetishism
protects the subject from the delusion. And finally,
fetishism provides access to the maternal breast and
full possession of the idealized mother.
ANDRÉ LUSSIER
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Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1927e). Fetishism. SE, 21: 147–157.
———. (1940e [1938]). Splitting of the ego in the process
of defence. SE, 23: 271–278.
Gillespie, William H. (1964). The psychoanalytic theory of
sexual deviation with special reference to fetishism. In
Ismond Rosen (Ed.), The pathology and treatment of sexual
deviation (pp. 123–145). London: Oxford University Press.
Rosolato, Guy. (1967). Étude des perversions sexuelles à partir
du fétichisme. In Guy Rosolato, Piera Aulagnier-Spairani,
Jean Clavreul, François Perrier, and Jean-Paul Valabrega
(Eds.), Le désir et la perversion (pp. 9–52). Paris: Seuil.
Further Reading
Bak, Robert. (1953). Fetishism. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 1, 285–298.
Greenacre, Phyllis. (1960). Further notes on fetishism. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 15, 191–207.
———. (1969). The fetish and the transitional object. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 24,144–164.
Nersessian, Edward. (1998). A cat as fetish: A contribution
to the theory of fetishism. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79, 713–726.
Renik, Owen. (1992). Use of the analyst as a fetish. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 61, 542–563.
FILIATIONS. See Psychoanalytic filiations
FILM. See Cinema criticism; Cinema and
Psychoanalysis
FINLAND
Psychoanalysis was practically nonexistent in Finland
until it experienced rapid growth during the 1960s.
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FINLAND
The first Finnish psychoanalyst, Yrjö Kulovesi
(1887–1943), underwent analysis with Eduard Hitschmann in Vienna in 1924, then with Paul Federn in
1925. He became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1931 and in 1934 went on to found,
together with the Swedish psychoanalyst Alfhild
Tamm, the Finno-Swedish Psychoanalytic Society,
which was dissolved in 1943 after Kulovesi’s death. A
training analyst, he wrote several articles and an introduction to psychoanalysis, published in 1933.
A number of Finnish psychoanalysts emigrated to
Sweden during the 1940s. After the war most of them
were members of the Swedish Psychoanalytic Society.
They included Stig Björk, Pentti Ikonen, Tapio Nousiainen, and Veikko Tähkä. A few years later Mikael
Enckell, Reijo Holmström, Eero Rechardt, Matti Tuovinen, and Gunvor Vuoristo also traveled to Sweden
for training in analysis. During this same period, three
other psychoanalysts underwent similar training in
Switzerland: Henrik Carpelan in Geneva, and LeenaMaija Jokipaltio and Lars-Johan Schalin in Zurich.
The biggest problem at the time was the shortage of
psychoanalysts in Finland. Psychoanalysts trained
abroad needed certification from the International
Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) to work as training
analysts in Finland. In 1964 Björk and Tähkä, trained
in Sweden and members of the Swedish Psychoanalytic
Society since the mid-1950s, formed a study group
and became recognized as training analysts. The
group, approved by an IPA committee presided over
by Donald Winnicott and composed of members from
Denmark, Sweden, and Great Britain, was formally
recognized in 1967 as a provisional society and became
an IPA affiliate in Rome in 1969. By 1974 there were
already twenty-six candidates in training. Winnicott
was the first honorary member of the Finnish Psychoanalytic Society. At the end of the 1950s, a psychotherapeutic organization, Therapeia, was founded, its
methods inspired by existential analysis.
Academic resistance to psychoanalysis was less
severe in Finland than in the other Nordic countries.
The majority of Finnish psychoanalysts were psychiatrists. Tähkä, a professor of psychiatry at the University
of Turku, twice visited the Austin Riggs Center in the
United States for two years each time. The use of
American ego psychology at the center led him to follow in this tradition, which is obvious from his book
on psychoanalytic therapy (1970). Tähkä was most
interested in research on alcoholism and schizophre58 4
nia. Kalle Achté was a professor of psychiatry and
senior psychiatrist at the University of Helsinki. He
conducted research on persecution and projection as
defense mechanisms. Rechardt worked on psychosomatic illnesses and the evolution of ego psychology
toward self psychology.
Yrjö Alanen, like Tähkä, studied the role of family
factors in schizophrenia and applied psychoanalytic
therapy in a family context. Tuovinen, a psychiatrist and
lawyer, did psychoanalytic research on delinquent behavior and in particular analyzed aggression as a form of
parental murder and suicide. Mikael Enckell, another
important Finnish psychoanalyst, wrote several works
on the Jewish question, the novelist Marcel Proust, the
poet Friedrich Hölderlin, the filmmaker Luchino Visconti, and his own father, the poet Rabbe Enckell.
Finnish psychoanalysis was generally associated
with ego psychology. Carpelan, trained in Geneva, is
one of the few Finnish analysts to have a Kleinian
orientation. He was president of the Finnish Group
Therapy Association.
The traditional theoretical training period for psychoanalysts in Finland was extended from three years
to four. The fourth year of training is devoted to the
study of the relationship between psychoanalysis and
the other sciences and of the theoretical and technical
aspects of psychotherapy.
During the 1980s the Finnish Psychoanalytic
Society (Suomen Psykoanalyytinen Yhdisytts) underwent a period of rapid growth. In 2004 it had as many
members as the Swedish Psychoanalytic Society. In the
early 1980s it began offering training in child analysis,
and in 1983 four candidates entered the program. In
1983 the Finnish Psychoanalytic Society had twentytwo full members, fifty-four associate members, and
twenty-seven candidates. In 1993 there were fortyeight full members, ninety associates, and thirty-seven
candidates.
During the late 1980s, several translations of Freud’s
work were published in Finland.
PER MAGNUS JOHANSSON
Bibliography
Ihanus, Juhani. (1994). Vietit vai Henki. Helsinki, Finland:
Yliopistopaino.
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FIRST WORLD WAR: THE EFFECT
Kulovesi, Yrjö. (1933). Psykoanalyysi. Helsinki, Finland:
Otava.
Laine, Aira, Parland, Helena, and Roos, Esa. (1997). Pssykoanalyysin, uranuurtajat Suomessa. Kemijärvi, Finland: Suomen Psykoanalyyttinen Yhdistys R.Y.
Tähkä, Veikko. (1970). Psykoterapian perusteet: psykoanalyyttisen teorian pohjalta. Porvoo, Finland: Söderström.
FIRST WORLD WAR: THE EFFECT ON THE
DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
In July 1914 Sigmund Freud was more preoccupied
with Carl Gustav Jung’s resignation (‘‘Finally, we are
rid of Jung, that crazy brute, and his acolytes!’’ he
wrote to Karl Abraham on July 26) than the war that
Austria, following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, had declared against Serbia. ‘‘This may be the first time in thirty years that I
feel Austrian,’’ he added. He was so unaffected that he
allowed his daughter Anna to leave for Great Britain at
the beginning of the month. The real problem was
organizing the international congress that was supposed to take place that fall in Dresden, but that ultimately took place four years later in Budapest.
The general conflict let loose in August disturbed
this sense of calm. Freud’s sons weren’t mobilized at the
start of the war, and the progress of German troops
made him hope for an early victory. ‘‘My heart would
be with the combatants if I didn’t know that England
finds itself on the wrong side,’’ Freud wrote on August
2, preoccupied with Anna’s repatriation through
Gibraltar and Genoa, which took place at the end of the
month with the help of Ernest Jones (‘‘he is obviously
our Ôenemy’’’). Martin Freud joined the artillery:
‘‘According to his letter,’’ his father wrote, ‘‘he didn’t
want to lose the opportunity to cross the Russian border without changing his religion.’’ Karl Abraham wrote
to Freud on August 29, 1914, ‘‘The news is excellent
now, isn’t it? The German troops are barely one hundred kilometers from Paris, Belgium has been liquidated, and England is on its last legs. Russia isn’t doing
much better.’’ On September 13 he added, ‘‘During the
next few days, we hope to have favorable news of the
fighting along the Marne. If this ends well, France’s fate
will be pretty much sealed, that is, securing fortified
positions in the southeast will be only a matter of days.’’
The principal concern appears to have been the
publication of Zeitschrift and Imago with the help of
Otto Rank, while Sándor Ferenczi traveled to Vienna at
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the end of September for an analysis with Freud. Freud
had begun writing the ‘‘Wolfman,’’ which was published
in 1918, but his morale was shaken by the announcement on October 17 of the death of Emanuel, his
half-brother, after falling from a train, and then by the
global expansion of the war on November 2.
On December 24, 1914, he wrote to Jones, ‘‘I have
no illusions and realize that the expansion of our
science has now been interrupted, that we are heading
toward a bad period, and that all we can hope for is to
maintain the embers in a few hearths, while waiting
for a more favorable wind to help us build it up into a
blaze. What Jung and Adler have left of the movement
is now crumbling because of the dissension among
nations. The Verein is no more tenable than anything
having an international dimension. Our reviews will
soon cease publication; we may manage to continue
the Zeitschrift. . . . The future of the cause, which is so
dear to you, does not bother me, naturally, but the
immediate future, the only one I can take an interest
in, appears desperately dark and I wouldn’t cast a
stone at the rat abandoning the ship.’’ Because he had
fewer patients, he had more time, and so announced,
‘‘I am again going to try to put whatever I can contribute into a summary.’’
These were the twelve essays on metapsychology
that were to occupy Freud throughout 1915 not only
as a necessary synthesis at a time of upheaval but as an
essential next step in developing his ideas. This followed the publication of ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’ at the beginning of the year, which shook the
foundations of psychoanalytic theory by questioning
the opposition between ‘‘libidinal drives’’ and ‘‘selfpreservation drives.’’ The essay on melancholia was the
subject of extensive correspondence with Karl Abraham, which allowed Freud to stress the fact that in the
future any psychoanalytic explanation of an ‘‘affect
can only be provided through its mechanism, considered from a dynamic, topological, and economic point
of view’’ (letter of May 15, 1915). On that same day he
wrote, ‘‘My work is taking shape. I have completed five
essays: the one on Instincts and their Vicissitudes,
which is of course somewhat dry but essential as an
introduction, and will be justified in the following articles, then Repression, the Unconscious, A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams, and
Mourning and Melancholy. The first four will be published in the Zeitschrift series currently underway; I
will keep the rest for myself. If the war lasts long
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enough, I hope to be able to combine about a dozen
similar essays and publish them, in calmer times, to
the uncomprehending public, with the title Preliminary Essays on Metapsychology. I feel that, overall, this
represents progress. Same genre and same level as section VII of the Interpretation of Dreams.’’ In 1915 he
also published ‘‘Thoughts for the Times on War and
Death’’ (1915b), the first in-depth essay on violence,
hatred, and the illusion of primal kindness, an essay
that provides perspective for the future conceptualization of the death drive. On July 30, 1915, he wrote to
Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘‘It is impossible to say when we
will be able to meet, we, the scattered members of an
apolitical community, nor, when the moment arrives,
will we know the extent to which we have been corrupted by politics.’’
Ernst Freud fought in Galicia, Martin was slightly
wounded, most of Freud’s followers were mobilized
except for Hanns Sachs who had been deferred for
nearsightedness, and meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society became increasingly less frequent. The
fall of 1915 was a busy one. Freud gave a series of lectures that, after being continued during the winter of
1916–1917, formed the basis for the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916–1917a). In December
Rainer Maria Rilke visited Freud and unsuccessful
efforts were made to obtain the Nobel Prize for him.
In January 1916 Freud’s isolation increased with the
departure of Otto Rank for Krakow.
The year 1916 was relatively quiet for psychoanalysis, other than Freud’s sixtieth birthday in May. Like
the rest of the population, Freud had grown weary of
the incessant slaughter, the lies, the cold and hunger.
The first generation of psychoanalysts were scattered
across enemy territory but, being for the most part
mobilized in the medical corps, they largely escaped
death. The first really good news came in 1918 when
Freud discovered Ernst Simmel’s book Névroses de
guerre et Traumatisme psychique. ‘‘Here for the first
time, a German doctor, who relates unequivocally and
without condescension to psychoanalysis, who has
made use of his position to advocate for the treatment
of war neuroses, provides examples to prove it, and
shows himself to be completely honest regarding the
question of sexual etiology. True, he has not followed
psychoanalysis on every point, supports the cathartic
point of view, makes use of hypnosis, a method that
cannot fail to mask the resistance and strength of the
sexual drives; but he alleges with reason the need for
58 6
prompt results and the imperatives of sequential
efforts. I think that with a year of training he would be
a good analyst.’’ Freud went on to write to Simmel,
‘‘few writings by psychoanalytic novices who I do not
know personally have given me as much satisfaction as
your article’’ (February 20, 1918).
The time had come to organize a new congress, the
first since the Munich congress of 1913. Planned to
take place in Breslau, it was ultimately held in Budapest, a city that assumed considerable importance for
Freud, primarily because Anton von Freund, one of his
analysands, provided material and financial support to
the cause of psychoanalysis. ‘‘We are going to become
materially powerful, we will be able to maintain and
develop our publications, have influence; our current
poverty is coming to an end. The man to whom we
owe all this is not only rich, he is also well intentioned,
highly intelligent, and very interested in psychoanalysis. . . . From now on Budapest is going to become the
center of our movement.’’
The Fifth International Congress on Psychoanalysis
was held in Budapest on September 28 and 29, 1918,
and Freud spoke on ‘‘Wege der psychoanalytischen
Therape’’ (The paths of psychoanalytic therapy)—an
essay that was to have considerable influence on the
evolution of the psychoanalytic movement in the next
few years. He planned the extension of psychoanalysis
for social purposes, the need to blend the copper of
suggestion with the pure gold of psychoanalysis, and
introduced the idea of providing free treatment for the
poor, which was to lead, two years later, to the creation
of the Berlin Polyclinic and the Psychoanalytic Institute, which was needed to train psychoanalysts for the
growing number of patients. The congress was a success, especially because the increasing problems introduced by war neuroses attracted the attention of the
government authorities to the benefits of employing
psychoanalytic methods. One month later a revolution
broke out in the Hungarian Republic. Béla Kun’s revolutionary government appointed Ferenczi ‘‘professor
of psychoanalysis’’ on May 12, 1919; he then assumed
direction of the Batizfalvy Sanatorium (from the end
of March to the beginning of August 1919).
The armistice on November 11, 1918 provided considerable relief, but Freud was worried about Martin,
because he had not heard from him. At the end of the
year, he learned that he was a prisoner in Italy and
wouldn’t be released until October 1919. From Great
Britain, Jones wrote on December 21, 1918, ‘‘In
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FIVE LECTURES
Germany and America there has been much progress
of late. Here, psychoanalysis has awakened general
interest in every circle and it is even being taught in
medical schools; the younger generation is impatient
to learn more about it.’’ He went on to say that he was
preparing to ‘‘hunt down the Ôremaining Jungians’’’
and establish the new British Psycho-Analytical Society
and create the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
On April 18, 1919, Freud was able to confirm, ‘‘I am
still standing and in no way hold myself responsible
for the world’s absurdity. Psychoanalysis is flourishing,
I am delighted to learn, on all sides, and I hope that
the science will provide consolation to you as well.’’
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Germany; Great Britain; Hungary; International
Psychoanalytic Association; ‘‘Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy’’; New York Psychoanalytic Institute;
Simmel, Ernst.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund and Abraham, Karl. (1965a). A psychoanalytic dialogue: The letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl
Abraham, 1907–1926. (Hilda C. Abraham and Ernst L.
Freud, Eds. and Bernard Marsh and Hilda C. Abraham,
Trans.). New York: Basic Books.
Freud, Sigmund, and Jones, Ernest. (1993). The complete
correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908–
1939. (R. A. Paskauskas, Ed.). London: The Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press.
Gay, Peter. (1988). Freud: A life for our time. LondonMelbourne: Dent.
FIVE LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
Freud delivered his Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis in
September 1909 at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He had been invited by Stanford Hall in
honor of the university’s twentieth anniversary. He
was accompanied by Carl Gustav Jung, Sándor Ferenczi, and Ernest Jones. Upon their arrival in New
York, he was welcomed by Abraham Arden Brill. These
lectures were a key moment for the recognition and
dissemination of psychoanalysis on an international
level. Freud delivered these five lectures in German,
without notes, and wrote them up later.
The text was published in English in the American
Journal of Psychology in 1910. The work went through
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eight editions in German, and it was translated into
ten languages. In the course of these lectures, Freud
first revealed Josef Breuer’s role in the discovery of psychoanalysis. Freud recapitulated the case of a young
girl (Anna O.) who was suffering from conversion hysteria and whom Breuer had treated. Freud described
how catharsis (remembering traumatic events and
their attendant affects under hypnosis) suppressed
Anna’s symptoms. But he quickly abandoned this
technique. Research on hysteria being carried out at
the same time by Jean Martin Charcot and Pierre
Janet, in Paris, and Hippolyte Bernheim, in Nancy,
allowed Freud to confirm his own theory. He discerned that a symptom is a disguised form of conflict
between the conscious and the unconscious, provoked
by incompatible desires, and he discovered the phenomena of resistance and repression.
Next Freud explained the basis for psychoanalytic
technique: free association and the interpretation of
slips of the tongue and, in particular, dreams, which he
called ‘‘the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious.’’ Making use of free association, the analyst
identifies the latent content hidden behind dreams’
manifest content (the actualization of hidden
repressed desires) and the processes of condensation
and displacement that are an obstacle to understanding the repressed desires.
Freud then approached the central issues of infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex, and the sexual
origins of neurosis. He showed the existence of transference by noting that in the relationship with the
analyst, the patient relives old affects and repressed
desires that have become unconscious and are returned
to consciousness under the influence of transference.
Finally, Freud refuted objections against psychoanalysis
stemming from the fear that the liberation of repressed
desires might endanger morality and social life. He
believed that psychoanalysis, by bringing these desires
back into consciousness, enabled people to accept and
master them—or better yet, sublimate them.
These five lectures, written in a simple, lively style
and filled with anecdotes, describe the origins of
psychoanalysis and the trajectory of Freud’s thinking
up until the end of 1909.
MAÏTÉ KLAHR AND CLAUDIE MILLOT
See also: Clark University.
587
FIXATION
Source Citation
Freud, Sigmund. (1910a [1909]). Five lectures on psychoanalysis. SE, 11: 7–55.
Bibliography
Jones, Ernest. (1953–1957). Sigmund Freud: Life and work.
London: Hogarth.
FIXATION
The notion of fixation involves a certain mode of connection that a drive has with its ideational representatives (its objects) as a function of a primitive phase of
the subject’s sexual organization. This mode of connection is characterized, at the economic level, by the
withdrawal from general circulation of more or less
significant quantities of libido. On the dynamic level it
is marked by the absence of mobility of the drive in
question. On the topographical level, the connection is
inscribed in the unconscious.
In Freud’s work, the idea of fixation is theoretically
associated with four other notions: traumatism,
regression, repression, and predisposition. These form
the successive stages of Freud’s elaboration of the concept of fixation.
The notion of fixation first appeared in a context,
which would later turn up again, that is associated with
Freud’s first work on the psychoneuroses of defense
around the time of the Studies on Hysteria (1895d):
‘‘The traumatic neuroses give a clear indication that a
fixation to the moment of the traumatic accident lies at
their root’’ (1916–17a, p. 274). The fixation to the
trauma accounts for the neurotic disorder and for the
patient’s inability to master the affect contained in the
traumatic events. Thus the first version of fixation is
dominated by the economic dimension.
The notion of fixation next appeared in the Three
Essays (1905d): ‘‘[W]e propose to describe the lagging
behind of a part trend at an earlier stage as a fixation—
a fixation, that is, of the [drive]. . . . [T]he portions
which have proceeded further may also easily return
retrogressively to one of these earlier stages—what we
describe as regression’’ (p. 340).
In the Freudian conception of infantile sexuality,
the sexual function develops according to a graduated
rhythm. A partial drive may either pursue a development that achieves the ability to organize freely circulating energy under the aegis of the oedipal genital
58 8
structures, or stop at some point along the way, lagging
behind by fixing upon an earlier stage of sexual development or a primitive object of satisfaction. In clinical
work, perversions, just like neurotic symptoms, are
evidence of libidinal vestiges from the past.
Fixation appeared in a third context in regard to the
case of Daniel Paul Schreber: ‘‘The libidinal current in
question then behaves in relation to later psychological
structures like one belonging to the system of the
unconscious, like one that is repressed’’ (1911c, p. 66).
For Freud, in fact, the psychical representatives of
component drives are made the object of a fixation
that then falls under repression. Similarly, in the formation of symptoms the return of the repressed goes
back to the very point of fixation to which the libido
has regressed.
Finally, the notion of fixation is associated, in
Freud’s teaching, with that of sexual constitution insofar as it brings together the various ways in which the
different components of the libido are inscribed in the
early stages of its development. Fixation thus represents predisposition as a factor in the etiology of
neuroses.
The notion of fixation can be found in other currents of psychoanalytic thought, particularly in that of
Pierre Marty, whose work represents an original
contribution to the concept. For him, the fixationregression system forms the basis of any functional
organization and has a field of influence that stretches
from mental to somatic functions. In the course of any
psychosomatic disturbance, the presence of fixations,
whether psychical or somatic, constitute the stopping
points of a counter-developmental current, points
from which a psychosomatic reorganization can take
place. According to this point of view, the fixationregression system represents the set of defensive capacities in the development of each individual.
CLAUDE SMADJA
See also: Cathexis; Choice of neurosis; Constitution; Disorganization; Ego states; Libidinal development; Psychic
causality; Psychic temporality; Psychosomatic; Regression; Repression; Self-object; Stage (or phase); Traumatic
neurosis.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
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F L I E S S , W I L H E L M (1858 –1 928)
———. (1911c). Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a Case of paranoia (dementia paranoides). SE, 12: 1–82.
———. (1916–17a). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. SE, 15–16.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d) Studies in hysteria. SE, 2.
Further Reading
Greenacre, Phyllis. (1960). Regression and fixation. Journal
of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 8, 703–723.
Nagera, Humberto. (1964). On arrest in development, fixation, and regression. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 19,
222–239.
FLIESS, WILHELM (1858–1928)
Wilhelm Fliess, a German physician, was born October
24, 1858, in Arnswalde (Markbrandebourg) and died
in Berlin on October 13, 1928. He came from a family
of Sephardic Jews. His mother observed the orthodox
rituals, a tradition her son did not follow. He had a
brother who was stillborn and a sister, Clara, a year
younger, who died of pneumonia when Wilhelm was
twenty. His father was in the grain business and committed suicide when Wilhelm was nineteen years old.
He never spoke of this suicide, neither to Freud—to
whom he related a different version of the father’s
death—nor to his own children, who didn’t discover
the truth until after their own father’s death.
Fliess studied medicine in Berlin; in 1883 he opened
a practice as a general practitioner and then as an otorhinolaryngologist. The number of patients grew along
with his fame. He traveled a great deal, most importantly to Paris, in 1886, a year before meeting Freud,
whose lectures he attended in Vienna. This was the start
of their friendship, which resulted in a lengthy correspondence from 1887 to 1902, reaching its peak in
1899. Fliess married a Viennese woman from among
the circle of Josef Breuer’s patients named Ida Bondy,
and together they had several children: Robert (1895)
who became a well-known psychoanalyst after his emigration to the United States, Pauline (1898), Conrad
(1899), and a stillborn daughter in 1902. Freud was
treated by Fliess and was his enthusiastic collaborator;
the two men met approximately once a year.
Fliess initially thought there was a correlation
between the genital organs and the nose, based on the
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principle of what he called the reflex nasal neurosis. In
May 1895, when his wife was pregnant with their first
child, he had a revelation of the theory of periods as a
solution to the question of when conception occurred
and the determination of the sex of the child. From
that moment on he began constructing his system,
postulating a cosmic harmony governed by the solar
cycles, measured in days and years, between personal,
family, and social events, but also affected by the animal and plant kingdoms. All vital events are determined by two periods, a male period of twenty-three
days, and a female period of twenty-eight days, which
are transmitted from generation to generation, from
mother to child. Added to this bisexual periodicity
was the idea of bilateralism, which represents the
imprint of the simultaneity of the two periods on the
body, the left hand bearing the positive and negative
qualities of the opposite sex. Freud was interested in
several aspects of the theory but doubted the cohesion
of the three features (biperiodicity, bisexuality, and
bilateralism) that were essential for Fliess and its predictive nature, which Fliess viewed as a rejection. He
experienced this as a kind of persecution and in 1900
began distancing himself from his friend although
Freud was not fully aware of it.
Their final break occurred in 1906. At the same
time as the appearance of his major work on the theory of periods, The Course of Life, Fliess wrote a scathing pamphlet, ‘‘Pour ma propre cause,’’ in which he
accused Freud of having served as an intermediary in
the plagiarism of his work by two young Viennese
authors, Hermann Swoboda and Otto Weininger, who
each had appropriated half of his ideas.
After breaking with his friend, Freud destroyed all
his letters from Fliess and developed a theory of paranoia based on these experiences, which he also applied
to Daniel Paul Schreber. Having done so, he failed to
take into account the fact that his friend’s delusion had
first appeared in 1895 and he had encouraged it even
as he took comfort in it. It was almost a reversal of the
accusation of plagiarism to the extent that Fliess copied nature through his unshaken conviction that the
determination of periods mimics natural cycles.
Ignorance and the censorship of the relations
between Freud and Fliess have contributed to a fabricated version of Freud’s self-analysis as the mythic origin of psychoanalysis, which projects a later schema of
standard analytic therapy onto the original discovery.
Fliess was not the analyst of Freud’s unconscious
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FLIGHT INTO ILLNESS
desires, but he represented a kind of precursor of the
subject assumed to have knowledge of biology, and in
doing so helped combine Freud’s desire to be an analyst with a future science (that both men would divide
between them).
After his break with Freud, Fliess continued to
devote himself to his medical practice, caring for several
analysts (Alix Strachey and Karl Abraham among
them), and writing numerous articles, always on the
same subjects, which were anthologized in books. With
Ivan Block and Ernst Haeckel, he was a member of the
Berlin Medical Society for the Sexual Sciences and
Eugenics. He died of intestinal cancer on October 13,
1928. He was eulogized as a great doctor from Berlin.
ERIK PORGE
See also: Bisexuality; Eckstein, Emma; Fackel (Die-);
Freud: Living and Dying; Freud’s Self-Analysis; Germany;
Irma’s injection, dream of; On Dreams; ‘‘Project for a
Scientific Psychology, A’’; Self-analysis; Sex and Character; Splits in psychoanalysis; Swoboda, Hermann; Weininger, Otto.
Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1991). Six lettres inédites à W. Fliess. A.
Buffel, E. Porge. Littoral, 31–32, 247–257.
Fliess, Wilhelm. (1977). Les Relations entre le nez et les
organes génitaux féminins présentées selon leurs significations biologiques (P. Ach and J. Guir, Trans.). Paris: Le Seuil.
(Original work published 1897)
Freud, Sigmund. (1985c). The complete letters of Sigmund
Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904. (J. M. Masson, Trans.).
Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press.
Sulloway, Franck. (1979). Freud: The biologist of the mind.
New York: Basic Books.
unconscious wish-fulfillment and another portion to
the mental structure reacting against the wish’’ (1900a,
p. 569). The concept of gain through illness helps clarify the concept of flight into illness. In a note on the
Dora case, added in 1923, Freud mentioned that ‘‘The
motive for being ill is, of course, invariably the gaining
of some advantage’’ and, further on, ‘‘In the first place,
falling ill involves a saving of physical effort; it emerges
as being economically the most convenient solution
where there is a mental conflict’’ (1905e, p. 43).
Thus, in the case of an hysterical attack, the flight
into illness might serve what Freud calls the ‘‘primary
gain.’’ Aside from the hysterical crisis, Freud noted in
1926 that there are cases in which neurosis is the most
harmless solution to a conflict and, from a social point
of view, represents the most advantageous solution.
For the neurotic, flight into illness is a favorable avoidance of an unsatisfactory reality, a form of self-defense
in the struggle to survive. Freud also noted, along the
same lines, the desire to remain ill.
Insights associated with flight into illness also operate outside the framework of neurosis and neurotic
conflict. As early as 1894 Freud wrote: ‘‘One is therefore justified in saying that the ego has fended off the
incompatible idea through a flight into psychosis’’
(1894a, p. 59). In the contemporary context, some
authors consider somatic symptoms to be a system of
defense and resolution, an avoidance in the face of tension of all kinds.
ALAIN FINE
See also: ‘‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’’
(Dora/Ida Bauer); Gain (primary and secondary);
Somatic compliance.
Bibliography
FLIGHT INTO ILLNESS
The Freudian notion of a ‘‘flight into illness’’ should be
understood in terms of symptom formation and the
primary and secondary gains of illness. The symptom
is regarded here as a secondary defense against unconscious conflict, having value as a compromise between
a wish and a defense.
Early in his work, Freud discussed this kind of
symptom in terms of a psychological conflict, leading
to repression and followed by compromise formation:
‘‘one portion of the symptom corresponds to the
59 0
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4–5.
———. (1905e [1901]). Fragment of an analysis of a case of
hysteria. SE, 7: 1–122.
———. (1926d). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. SE,
20: 75–172.
FLOURNOY, HENRI (1886–1955)
Henri Flournoy, a Swiss medical doctor and psychiatrist, was born on March 28, 1886, in Geneva, where
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F L O U R N O Y , T H É O D O R E (1854 –1 920)
he died on May 6, 1955. He was the son of Théodore
Flournoy. One of his sisters, Ariane, married Raymond
de Saussure. His son, Olivier, became a psychoanalyst
in Geneva. Flournoy studied medicine in Geneva and
then took internships in Berne, Warburg, Munich, and
Baltimore (at Johns Hopkins University). During the
Balkan War, from 1912 to 1913, he served as a Red
Cross doctor. A man of insatiable curiosity from an
early age, he developed an interest in heraldry, to
which he became a devoted amateur.
In 1920 he became a privatdocent and lecturer in
psychopathology at the University of Geneva. He was
president of the Société genevoise de prophylaxie mentale (Geneva Society for Mental Prophylaxis) and of
the Conseil de surveillance des aliénés (Supervisory
Board for Mental Illness) for the canton of Geneva.
In 1922 he opened a psychiatric and psychoanalytic
practice in Geneva. There were four phases to his psychoanalytic training: an initial series of twenty-six sessions with Carl Gustav Jung, a six-month analysis with
Johan Van Ophuijsen in the Netherlands, a threemonth analysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna, and a
final six-month analysis with Hermann Nunberg, also
in Vienna.
As a psychoanalyst, Flournoy contributed to the
development of the young Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis and to the acceptance of psychoanalysis in
Switzerland. In addition to his many articles, in 1949
he published Erreurs et dignité de la pensée humaine.
OLIVIER FLOURNOY
See also: Flournoy, Théodore; France; Société psychanalytique de Genéve; Switzerland (French-speaking); Switzerland (German-speaking).
Bibliography
Flournoy, Henri. (1920). Dreams on the symbolism of water
and fire. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 1 (3),
245–255
———. (1922). Çiva androgyne: contribution à l’étude psychanalytique des principaux symboles et attributs d’une
divinité hindoue. Archives de psychologie, 18.
———. (1932). Le caractère scientifique de la psychanalyse.
Revue française de psychanalyse, 5 (2), 190–200.
———. (1949). Erreurs et dignité de la pensée humaine.
Paris: Le Mont-Blanc.
He was a close friend of Charles Odier, Raymond de
Saussure, and Princess Marie Bonaparte and played an
important role in the Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis.
He was an active, though unofficial, participant in
establishing the acts of incorporation of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society. In 1933 he presided at the eighth
Conférence des psychanalystes de langue française
(Conference of Francophone Psychoanalysts).
FLOURNOY, THÉODORE (1854–1920)
He worked intermittently after 1939, many foreign
patients (mostly from the League of Nations) having
left Switzerland and local demand having fallen off
because of the war climate. As a result, Flournoy concentrated increasingly on psychotherapy.
Interested in philosophy and religion, Théodore
Flournoy spent time in Germany to familiarize himself
with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, whose work
he later taught at the university. After becoming a
medical doctor, he was appointed a professor of physiological psychology at the University of Geneva in
1891.
He was appointed an expert for providing women
who intended to have abortions with advice consistent
with current legal requirements. Flournoy expended
considerable energy in demonstrating that mental distress is a sufficient, more than sufficient, justification
for abortion and advocated legalizing it. This contributed greatly to his celebrity, or notoriety, well beyond
the borders of Switzerland. It was also the origin of an
extensive correspondence with various medical, psychological, and legal publications.
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A medical doctor and professor of physiological psychology at the University of Geneva, Théodore Flournoy was born in Geneva on August 15, 1854, and died,
also in Geneva, on November 5, 1920. He was the son
of Alexandre Flournoy and Caroline Claparède, sister
of the naturalist Édouard Claparède.
His studies of the medium Hélène Smith were
turned into a book, Des Indes à la planète Mars, which
caused a considerable sensation in psychological and
parapsychological circles in Europe and the United
States. In it he described the phenomenon of ‘‘cryptamnesia,’’ forgotten memories that reappear without
being recognized by the subject, who believes they are
new. These memories disappear because of their
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CHILD PSYCHOTHERAPY
association with childhood sexual emotions. These
involve a ‘‘subliminal process capable of achieving a
degree of complexity and extent comparable to the
work of composition and reflection in the thinker or
novelist.’’ They are ‘‘reminiscences or momentary
returns to earlier phases, which have long since been
forgotten and which, normally, should have been
absorbed during the individual’s development instead
of recurring in strange forms.’’
Cryptamnesia is unconscious. ‘‘The unconscious
possesses a marvelous ability for dramatization, personification, and psychological proliferation; it is
endowed with a creative imagination.’’ Flournoy went
on to claim that ‘‘The unconscious, [is a] submerged
sphere from which our instinct for physical and moral
preservation confusedly arise, our feelings about sex,
about spiritual and physical shame, everything that is
most obscure and the least rational in the individual.’’
Concerning dreams, he wrote ‘‘By rising up from our
hidden source, by throwing light on the intrinsic nature of our unconscious emotions, by revealing our
ulterior motives and the instinctive slope of our associations of ideas, the dream is often an instructive
probe into the unknown layers that support our ordinary personality.’’
Flournoy used these hypotheses to explain the
supranormal or parapsychological phenomena he studied. They helped compensate for the obscurity and
misery of everyday life, attempted to realize sexual
desires arising from a forgotten childhood, and served
as defenses against internal threats of madness.
Freud was writing about the process of infantile
amnesia at the same time, and it is clear just how close
Flournoy’s claims were to Freud’s position. However,
unlike Freud, Flournoy does not mention repression
or the return of the repressed—the concept that
enabled Freud to conceive of a dynamic therapy—but
limited himself to cryptamnesia, locating the path to
consciousness in subliminal activity. Like his friends
William James and Frederick Myers, Flournoy did not
treat patients; these men were observers—though that
did not prevent them from proposing hypotheses for
acting on and modifying phenomena.
Concerning the principle of parallelism, Flournoy’s
aims were diametrically opposite those of Freud. Both
men excluded transcendence from their investigations,
but Flournoy did so in the hope of discovering it, free
of human taint, while Freud tried to eliminate it,
59 2
especially in postulating the existence of erogenous
zones at the start of life and the death instinct at the
end, hoping to see the reign of science govern the
study of the mind.
In 1901 Flournoy, with his cousin Édouard Claparède, founded Les Archives de psychologie, a review that
was later taken over by Jean Piaget. He corresponded
with Ferdinand de Saussure, whom he knew personally, along with other well-known linguists. His son
Henri and his grandson Olivier became psychoanalysts. His daughter, Ariane, married psychoanalyst
Raymond de Saussure.
OLIVIER FLOURNOY
See also: Archives de psychologie, Les; Claparede, Édouard;
Cryptomnesia; Flournoy, Henri; Psychology of the Unconscious, The.
Bibliography
Flournoy, Olivier. (1986). Théodore et Léopold: de Théodore
Flournoy à la psychanalyse. Neuchâtel: La Baconnière.
Flournoy, Théodore. (1890). Métaphysique et psychologie.
Geneva: Georg.
———. (1900). Des Indes à la planète Mars. Paris: Le Seuil.
———. (1902). Nouvelles observations sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalie. Les archives de psychologie, I.
———. (1911). Esprits et médiums. Geneva: Kundig and
Fischbacher.
FLOWER DOLLS: ESSAYS IN CHILD
PSYCHOTHERAPY
In an article that appeared in the Revue française de
psychanalyse in 1949, ‘‘Cure psychanalytique à l’aide
de la poupée-fleur’’ (A Psychoanalytic Cure with the
Help of a Flower Doll), Françoise Dolto described her
experience with this green doll—which is often
referred to as a marguerite doll—in the treatment of a
child named Bernadette.
At the age of five Bernadette was already suffering
from anorexia nervosa. She was vomiting up her meals
and spoke in a monotone. She dragged her left leg and
her hand was folded back over her forearm, the consequence of a hemiplegia. She played with toys that she
constantly punished. In the course of the seventh session, she began to speak about the monkey inside her
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that said bad things, and then hammered her tummy
with her fists to make the monkey come out.
Françoise Dolto noticed the child’s interest in flowers, particularly marguerites. When her mother said
that the little girl liked neither her animals nor her dolls,
Dolto responded: ‘‘Perhaps she’d like a flower doll?’’
Bernadette responded, ‘‘Oh, yes, yes, a flower doll!’’ Her
mother was asked to make a faceless doll with no hands
out of green material and to crown it with a marguerite.
In the eighth session, Bernadette came with her
flower doll, which she had named Rosine. She said she
was horrible and naughty. ‘‘Do you know why she’s so
naughty?’’ Bernadette whispered into the analyst’s ear:
‘‘For her being naughty means being nice because she
has an arm and a leg that don’t work. Her way of being
nice is hurting others. She’s not naughty, but she’s ill.
You’re going to treat her!’’ And the doll stayed with the
analyst while the little girl went away quite happy.
When Bernadette arrived for her ninth session, she
came with a teddy bear dressed as a human doll, and
she looked after it tenderly so that it wasn’t too hot.
From the day she left the flower doll for treatment,
Bernadette had changed at home. ‘‘I treated her every
day, you know,’’ Explained Dolto. Then Bernadette
spoke quietly to her doll, listened to her answer, made
her dance on the table, and suddenly cried out in a
modulated voice: ‘‘She’s cured, her arm and legs work
very well! You looked after her very well.’’ Then she
thrust forward her folded-back hand, like a sort of
claw. ‘‘She’s a wolf girl, so when she loves she scratches!
Because the wolf girl is very fond of you she’s going to
show you how strong she is!’’ She began to dig her
nails into the analyst’s skin, saying: ‘‘Don’t be afraid,
she has to see blood because she loves you.’’
From that session onward, Bernadette used her good
right hand to stroke the other hand, and she began to
create many objects with clay, and her behavior changed.
Dolto theorized that the flower doll was the support for
the girl’s narcissistic affects, which were wounded during
the oral stage. Afflicted with serious somatic disorders,
this sick little girl’s oral, then anal, aggression turned
against herself, then projected itself into this human and
plant form without a head, a form that was unable to
speak and not responsible for its actions. Bernadette
used it for her treatment, which gave Dolto the idea of
using it with other children and adults.
BERNARD THIS
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Source Citation
Dolto, Françoise. (1949). Cure psychanalytique à l’aide de la
poupée-fleur. Revue française de psychanalyse, 13 (1), 53–
69.
———. (1950). Á propos des poupées-fleurs (deuxième
partie). Revue française de psychanalyse, 14 (1), 19–41.
———. (1998). Flower dolls: Essays in child psychotherapy.
(John Howe, Trans.). London: Marion Boyars.
FLÜGEL, JOHN CARL (1884–1955)
The English psychoanalyst John Carl Flügel was born
on June 13, 1884, in London, where he died on August
17, 1955. An honorary fellow of the British Psychological Society and an honorary member of the Indian
Psychological Association, he was president of the Programme Committee of the International Congress on
Mental Health in 1948 and president of the psychology
section of the British Medical Association in 1950.
His father was German and his mother English, and
the family had close ties with France; John Carl grew up
learning all three languages. Because of a congenital malformation of his feet, he did not follow a normal school
program, and he attended Oxford University when he
was only seventeen. He studied philosophy and grew
interested in hypnotism, becoming a member of Frederick W. H. Myers’s famous Society for Psychical Research.
He obtained a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford and a
doctorate of science from the University of London,
where he taught as an auxiliary professor from 1929 to
1944 in the experimental psychology laboratory. In
1913 he married Ingeborg Klingberg, who also became
a psychoanalyst and with whom he had a daughter.
Flügel was an active member of the British Psychological Society: he was honorary secretary from 1911
to 1920, honorary librarian from 1911 to 1932, and
president from 1932 to 1935. During the First World
War he made a number of important psychological
contributions to the society. After undergoing psychoanalysis with Ernest Jones, the two became friends,
and Flügel became involved in the refounding of the
British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1919. He also
served as secretary of the International Psychoanalytic
Association from 1919 to 1924. With John Rickman,
Douglas Bryan, and Ernest Jones, he helped create the
International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1920, and
with Ernest Jones and Joan Riviere, he helped translate
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F L U S S , G I S E L A (185 9 –?)
Sigmund Freud’s Vorlesungen (Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis; 1916–1917a [1915–1917]).
———. (1930b). The psychology of clothes. London: Hogarth
Press.
His knowledge of biology, experimental psychology,
and philosophy, and his involvement in psychoanalysis
enabled him to produce a considerable number of literary works, although these works are rarely read in the
early twenty-first century. Ernest Jones wrote to Freud,
‘‘Flügel is certainly not predisposed to self-sacrifice, but
what he does, he does very well and he is our best report
writer. In non-medical circles he is of inestimable value
and always uses his influence for the PAS [Psycho-Analytical Society]’’ (April 10, 1922). He wrote many books
and articles, including The Psycho-Analytic Study of the
Family (1921), which was the third volume (but the
first English contribution) in the then recently created
International Psycho-Analytical Library of Hogarth
Press; ‘‘Psychoanalysis: Its Status and Promise’’ (1930a);
The Psychology of Clothes (1930b); and Man, Morals,
and Society (1945).
———. (1945). Man, morals, and society. New York: International Universities Press.
Upon Flügel’s death, Ernest Jones wrote of his
‘‘good nature, kindness, humor, and fondness for an
exceptionally large circle of good friends.’’ Jones was
less charitable, however, in a letter to Freud dated
December 7, 1921: ‘‘Flügel has excellent written English and is intelligent, but he has two weaknesses. He is
somewhat egotistic and the only thing he enjoys is
doing his own work, not helping others; and he has
not overcome a strong reaction to a sadistic complex
that has paralyzed his efforts to criticize or disagree in
any way, with very rare exceptions. He is thereby
inhibited when he is asked to carry out any work of
this sort (the same holds true for the correction of the
American translation of the Vorlesungen), and he
returned the manuscript almost in the same condition
as it was. A mixture of laziness and inhibition. But he
has to work with the tools available to him and I am
trying to find out what interests him most and what is
most suitable for him (which is to say, not much).’’
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Great Britain.
Bibliography
Flügel, John Carl. (1921). The psycho-analytic study of the family.
London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
———. (1930a). Psychoanalysis: Its status and promise. In
Carl Murchison (Ed.), Psychologies of 1930. Worcester, MA:
Clark University Press.
59 4
Freud, Sigmund, and Jones, Ernest. (1993 [1908–1939]).
The complete correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest
Jones, 1908–1939. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Jones, Ernest. (1956). J. C. Flügel. International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 37, 193–197.
FLUSS, GISELA (1859–?)
Gisela Fluss, born on September 26, 1859, was the
daughter of Ignaz and Eleonora Fluss, a family friendly
with Jakob and Amalia Freud after the Freuds left Freiberg, Moravia. She was the sister of Emil Fluss, who
became a friend and correspondent of Freud during
his adolescence. She is known as Freud’s first ‘‘love
experience.’’ The date of her death is not known.
Gisela met Freud when he was staying with the
family in 1871. Gisela appears to have been associated
with the romantic infatuation that had gripped the
fifteen-year old Freud—Gisela was only twelve—during
his return to his birthplace, an infatuation that Freud
cryptically referred to in ‘‘Screen Memories’’ (1899a).
When he was again in Freiberg the following year,
Freud mentioned Gisela in letters describing his vacation written to his friend Eduard Silberstein (1989a
[1871–1881, 1910]). On August 17, 1872, he wrote,
‘‘So let me just say that I took a fancy to the eldest, by
the name of Gisela, who leaves tomorrow, and that her
absence will give me back a sense of security about my
behavior that I have not had up to now.’’ On September 4 he again wrote to Silberstein: ‘‘I have soothed all
my turbulent thoughts and only flinch slightly when
her mother mentions Gisela’s name at table. The affection appeared like a beautiful spring day, and only the
nonsensical Hamlet in me, my diffidence stood in the
way of my finding it a refreshing pleasure to converse
with the half-naı̈ve, half-cultured young lady.’’
In fact, these letters show that the young Freud harbored greater enthusiasm for Eleonora, Gisela’s
mother, ‘‘a woman none of her children can completely equal.’’ In the letter of September 4, Freud went on
to write, ‘‘She [the mother] can never have been beautiful, but a witty, jaunty fire must always have sparkled
in her eyes, as it does now. Gisela’s beauty, too, is wild,
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I might say Thracian: the aquiline nose, the long black
hair, and the firm lips come from the mother, the dark
complexion and the sometimes indifferent expression
from the father.’’
Allusions to Gisela appeared in letters from 1873
and 1874 but disappeared after Gisela told Freud’s sisters, in 1875, of a trip to Italy. Her engagement in 1874
and her being called an ichthyosaur by students
among themselves remain in dispute. It is known,
however, that on February 27, 1881, in Vienna, she
married a businessman from Presbourg (near Bratislava) by the name of Emil Popper.
There is some mystery about her reappearance in
Freud’s report of his November 18, 1907, session with
the Rat Man, when, instead of the name of his patient,
Freud wrote her name ‘‘Dame Gisela’’ (1955a [1907–
1908]). He added three exclamation points after this
slip, which was never analyzed by Freud and has
remained unexplained.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Silberstein, Eduard.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1899a). Screen memories. SE, 3: 299–322.
———. (1955a [1907–1908]). Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis. SE, 10: 151–318.
———. (1989a [1871–1881, 1910]). The letters of Sigmund
Freud to Eduard Silberstein, 1871–1881 (Arnold J. Pomerans, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1990.
FORECLOSURE
Jacques Lacan used the French word forclusion (foreclosure) to translated the German term Verwerfung,
previously rendered in French as rejet (repudiation).
Sigmund Freud had introduced the term along with
negation (Verneinung) and repression (Verdrängung)
as a defense mechanism.
Foreclosure is a primordial defense because it does
not act on a signifier that is already inscribed within
the chain of signifiers, but rather, it rejects the inscription itself. Foreclosure is thus antithetical to Bejahung
(affirmation).
This operation of repudiation especially affects highly
meaningful signifiers such as the Name-of-the-Father,
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the guarantor of castration. Lacan viewed the foreclosure of this signifier as the characteristic mechanism of
psychosis. In ‘‘On a Question Prior to any Possible
Treatment of Psychosis’’ (Écrits), he wrote: ‘‘I will thus
take Verwerfung to be foreclosure of the signifier. At the
point at which the Name-of-the-Father is summoned—
and we shall see how—a pure and simple hole may
answer in the Other; due to the lack of the metaphoric
effect, this hole will give rise to a corresponding hole in
the place of phallic signification’’ (p. 191). To paraphrase, let us say that when the subject calls upon the
Father to guarantee the law that situates both the subject and his desire in the Other, he encounters only an
echo in a void that triggers a cascade of delusional
metaphors. These readily become organized around the
fantasmatic presence of an authority who is suspected
of having intrusive or criminal intentions; it is as if the
foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father made present in
the Real a malevolent authority desiring to commit sexual abuse or homicide.
Why does foreclosure come about? One explanation
is that the child has been exposed to a mother who has
refused to recognize the law, either because it does not
situate her in accordance with her desires, or because it
compels her to separate herself from its product. It
may also happen that the real father reveals himself to
be incapable of inscribing himself into a symbolic lineage, and consequently invalidates it (cf. Schreber’s
father in ‘‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia [Dementia Paranoides],’’ 1911c). But not infrequently, skipping a
generation, the child of a psychotic couple may validate the Name-of-the-Father on its own, based on
what he finds in language and verifies with the help of
substitute parent figures.
Could specific forms of foreclosure be responsible
for the division of the psychoses into paranoia and schizophrenia? Nothing points to this conclusion, even if
paranoia is an attempt at a cure through the designation
of a real, albeit a persecutory father. This designation
turns the signifier into a sign of certain truth.
Many have asked whether psychoanalytic treatment
can repair a foreclosure. Case histories do not provide
any clear answers.
Let us recall that Schreber, for his part, found a kind
of stabilizing by accepting emasculation as being ‘‘consonant with the Order of Things’’ (p. 48); by becoming
a woman, he could attract the divine presence that
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safeguarded him. Equally interesting are studies of
borderline cases. It seems that the latter more likely
result from a denial or annulment of the Name-of-theFather, with a predictable failure of the law, but
without producing the reshapings of the real (its fragmentation or its investment by a persecutory figure)
that are characteristic of foreclosure.
CHARLES MELMAN
See also: Autism; Castration complex; Parade of the signifier;
Disavowal; Infantile neurosis; Law of the father; Linguistics
and psychoanalysis; Negative, work of the; Negation; Neurosis; Psychoses, chronic and delusional; Psychotic defenses;
Real, the (Lacan); Repudiation; Splitting; Topology.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1894a) Obsessions and phobias: Their
psychical mechanism and their aetiology. SE, 3, 69–82.
———. (1911c) Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides). SE, 12, 1–82.
Lacan, Jacques. (2004). On a question prior to any possible
treatment of psychosis. Écrits: A Selection (Bruce Fink,
Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1955–56)
FORGETTING
In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b), Freud
discussed forgetting under the rubric of psychosis. The
typical example is awareness of having forgotten a
proper noun (a name, for example). Like amnesia
(where one is unaware that one has forgotten), forgetting is the result of repression. The forgotten name
inhabits the preconscious and quickly returns to consciousness. It is attracted by an unconscious mental
complex that primarily operates by displacement.
The concept of forgetting in general is present in
Freud’s earliest works on the theory of neuroses
(1894a, 1895b, 1896a). But in ‘‘The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness’’ (1898b) and The Psychopathology
of Everyday Life, Freud considered forgetting, like slips
of the tongue, to be a parapraxis symptomatic of
ongoing repression. To demonstrate the existence of
the unconscious, Freud uses the example of forgetting
because it was one way of talking about repression
before 1900. Forgetting appears in his first theory of
neuroses, which explains hysteria as a traumatic
59 6
infantile sexual seduction that has to be rejected and
repressed because the child finds it unacceptable.
Forgetting is associated with a painful sense of
awareness (the ‘‘name on the tip of the tongue’’), while
repression is most often unconscious. Forgetting is
associated with the psychology of consciousness and
the preconscious, while repression is associated with
the metapsychology of the unconscious, like memory
traces. As a form of parapraxis, forgetting combines
partial failure with partial success and must be distinguished from the customary psychological form of forgetting, a successful act of repression.
The dreamer who has forgotten his dream tries to
reconstruct it, but in doing so, constructs it anew: ‘‘It
is indeed possible that while trying to retell it, we fill in
the blanks created by forgetting using new material
arbitrarily chosen’’ (Freud, 1900a). We cannot completely remember what is forgotten, and so we prefer to
construct likely hypotheses, capable of introducing
conviction about what was forgotten (Freud, 1937d).
The person who has forgotten a name, by concentrating on it, only reinforces the ongoing repression.
To remember, Freud tells us, we need to abandon the
willful attempt to control what initially appears to be a
cognitive disturbance, a shortcoming, and give in to
the associations that come to mind.
Freud provides an autobiographical example: Forgetting the name of the painter Signorelli during a
conversation, he seeks memories, ideas, and words
similar to the name. These bring to his mind other
paintings with the sensory acuity typical of a screen
memory (an early memory used as a screen for a later
event), along with the names of other Italian painters
(Botticelli, Boltraffio). The value that Freud attributed
to the forgotten name had been transferred to neighboring elements, through displacement, as is the case
with a mnemonic symbol, which is also a form of
metonymy. ‘‘Botticelli’’ is a metonym of Signorelli,
‘‘Botticelli’’ and ‘‘Boltraffio’’ are metonyms of BosniaHerzegovina, which Freud was visiting when he forgot
Signorelli’s name and which is related to the castration
complex involved in this forgetting, since Freud attributes to the Turks in Bosnia-Herzegovina a strong
attraction to sexuality and a considerable castration
anxiety. ‘‘Boltraffio’’ was a metonym of Trafoi, an Italian city where Freud learned of the suicide of one of
his patients, which triggered his thoughts on ‘‘death
and sexuality.’’ The sentence ‘‘Herr, was ist da zu
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sagen? (Sir, what is there to say)’’ reported to Freud by
his interlocutor as reflecting the Turks’ attitude toward
the inevitability of death, evoked their attitude toward
sexuality (‘‘You know very well, Lord, if that fails, then
life has no value’’), the source of psychic conflict and
repression behind his act of forgetting. The representation of death Freud associated with that of castration
(the Turkish sentences imply that a life without sexuality is worth no more than death). Moreover, Herr, present in Herzegovina, refers to Signor (Lord), to the
father figure, and to Herz, the heart, an organ likely to
grow sick and cause death. Forgetting the name of
Signorelli is thus associated with an oedipal dimension
that Freud had discovered through his self-analysis: his
repression of sexuality, his attraction for his mother,
his rivalry with his father, and his ambivalent identification with his father caught up in a desire for parricide and a fear of losing his father.
Freud analyzed two levels at the same time, the psychology of consciousness and the preconscious and
the metapsychology of the unconscious. He thus provided an example of the psychoanalytic method,
although repression is not associated with the name
‘‘Signorelli’’ so much as the unconscious complex he
represents. The names substituted for the forgotten
name are composed of verbal memory traces and
other proper nouns. They are substituted for the
forgotten name through a process that acts on the
phonemic material of words (the signifier) through
association, metonymy, homology, as well as translation from one language to another, metaphor, and
polysemy (Herr has multiple meanings, as does Herz).
In the process of forgetting the name, displacement is
metonymy, and condensation is metaphor.
Forgetting, like remembering, belongs more to the
phenomenology of consciousness than to the metapsychology of the unconscious. As a specific form of parapraxis, it also signifies repression according to popular
convention. Because it occurs in the preconscious and
is attracted by the unconscious, forgetting and the
rediscovery of the forgotten are similar to what occurs
when the subject clearly formulates for himself something he had always known. There have been few
developments in psychoanalysis concerning the preconscious ego. As a result, it is easier to formulate psychoanalytic approaches that emphasize the cognitive
causality of forgetting.
FRANÇOIS RICHARD
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See also: Amnesia; Cryptomnesia; Déjà-vu; Delusions and
Dreams in Jensen’s ‘‘Gradiva’’; Formations of the unconscious; Memory; Moses and Monotheism; Mythology and
psychoanalysis; Slips of the tongue; ‘‘Remembering,
Repeating, and Working-Through’’; Reminiscence;
Repression; Psychopathology of Everyday Life The.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1894a). The neuro-psychoses of defence.
SE, 3: 41–61.
———. (1895b). On the grounds for detaching a particular
syndrome from neurasthenia under the description ‘‘anxiety neurosis.’’ SE, 3: 85–115.
———. (1896a). Heredity and the aetiology of the neuroses.
SE, 3: 141–156.
———. (1898b). The psychical mechanism of forgetfulness.
SE, 3: 287–297.
———. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4: 1–
338; 5: 339–625.
———. (1901b). The psychopathology of everyday life. SE, 6.
———. (1937d). Constructions in analysis. SE, 23: 255–269.
Further Reading
Bach, Sheldon. (2001). On being forgotten and forgetting
one’s self. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 70, 739–756.
FORMATIONS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
Dreams, the forgetting of words and names, slips of the
tongue, parapraxes in general, and jokes are all examples of formations of the unconscious, the forms by
which the unconscious expresses itself. The Formations
of the Unconscious is also the title of Jacques Lacan’s
fifth seminar, given in 1957–1958. The expression also
establishes, as a distinct group, different symptoms that
were all discussed by Freud in his earliest works.
These formations of the unconscious are, in fact,
symptoms, insofar as they are an expression and fulfillment of an unconscious wish. In psychoanalysis, they
constitute the royal road to the unconscious. But
knowledge of the unconscious can only be hypothesized, because ‘‘it is only as something conscious that
we know it, after it has undergone transformation or
translation into something conscious’’ (Freud, 1915e,
p. 166). By proposing a generic expression for the
symptomatic elements that Freud listed, Lacan emphasized that as ‘‘overdetermined’’ and ‘‘structurally iden597
F O R N A R I , F R A N C O (1 921 –19 85)
tical’’ elements, they are ‘‘only conceivable, strictly
speaking, within the structure of language’’ (Lacan,
2004a/1958, p. 260).
Freud isolated two principle mechanisms at work
in the process of unconscious formations: condensation and displacement. Lacan suggested redefining
these mechanisms as ‘‘the two aspects of the signifier’s effect upon the signified’’ (Lacan, 2004b/1957,
p. 152), namely metaphor and metonymy, terms that
had been analyzed by the linguist Roman Jakobson.
The notion of formations of the unconscious is
related to Freud’s ideas of substitute formation, the
return of the repressed, and symptom-formation.
ALAIN VANIER
See also: Graph of Desire; Metaphor; Object a; Overinterpretation; Seminar, Lacan’s; Splitting of the subject;
Subject of the unconscious; Substitutive formation.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4: 1–338; 5: 339–625.
———. (1901b). The psychopathology of everyday life. SE,
6.
———. (1905c). Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. SE, 8: 1–236.
———. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159–204.
Lacan, Jacques. (1998). Le séminaire. Book 5: Les formations
de l’inconscient, 1957–1958. Paris: Seuil.
———. (2002a). The direction of the treatment and the
principles of its power. In his Écrits: A selection (Bruce
Fink, Trans., pp. 215–270). New York: W. W. Norton.
(Original work published 1958)
———. (2002b). The instance of the letter in the unconscious, or reason since Freud. In his Écrits: A selection
(Bruce Fink, Trans., pp. 138–168). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1957)
FORNARI, FRANCO (1921–1985)
Franco Fornari, an Italian surgeon, psychiatrist, and
psychoanalyst, was born in Rivergaro, Piacenza, on
April 18, 1921, and died in Milan on May 20, 1985. A
student and analysand of Cesare Musatti, Fornari went
on to become president of the Società psicoanalitica
Italiana (Italian Psychoanalytic Society) and director
59 8
of the Psychology Institute of the Department of Literature and Philosophy at the State University of Milan.
Fornari introduced the ideas of Melanie Klein to
Italy. In his early writings, to treat schizophrenia and
depression he advocated deepening our understanding
of the primal psychotic dimension by examining the
mental development of the child’s affective life. He
also studied group dynamics and social conflict, his
research on these subjects appearing in an essay titled
Nuovi orientamenti nella psicoanalisi (New directions
in psychoanalysis; 1966).
Fornari’s Kleinian convictions are most apparent in
his wartime research, which gave rise to several interesting psychological studies, including The Psychoanalysis
of War (1974). In this work Fornari located the anxieties
and psychotic fantasies that govern the behavior of individuals in groups, and he revealed the ensuing loss of
responsibility in various social and political situations.
War, he said, arises from the external projection of an
internal danger and the negation of death in the face of
an alleged external persecutory entity, and these forces
make the individual destroy to survive.
Fornari then investigated the theme of sensuality in
relation to affective symbolization. In Genitalità e cultura (Genitality and culture; 1975), he examined the
notion of perversion, determining that culture is the
antithesis not of sensuality but of pregenitality, which
arises from a lack of infantile symbolization and from
destructive impulses dominating in one’s behavior. He
subsequently proposed an evolutionary reading of libidinal development.
Though elements of symbolization are already present in Genitalità e cultura, Fornari directly studied
this topic in Simbolo e codice (Symbol and code; 1976),
I fondamenti di una teoria psicoanalitica del linguaggio
(Foundations of a psychoanalytic theory of language;
1979) and Codice vivente (Living codes; 1981). In these
essays Fornari reexamined psychoanalytic theory in
cognitive terms, establishing the foundation for a psychoanalytic anthropology that could also be of use to
nonpsychoanalysts. He resolved the relation between
body and mind by positing a code that preserves and
transmits information in both directions between
body and mind. Such a code, which he called the ‘‘living code,’’ is assumed in the programming of affects,
which in fact is driven by one’s erotic materiality and
parental bonds. Fornari developed a ‘‘coinemic’’ theory, in which the minimum unit of affective meaning
is the ‘‘coineme.’’ Fornari saw this living code as an
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FORT-DA
instrument and methodology that could be used to
apply psychoanalysis to a broad range of cultural phenomena: speech, images, behavior.
In La riscoperta dell’anima (The rediscovery of the
soul; 1984), Fornari attempted to understand the
human effort to rediscover the primal symbiotic unity
with one’s mother. And in Affetti e cancro (Affects and
cancer; 1985) he investigated the role that psychoanalysis could play in treating incurable diseases.
GIANCARLO GRAMAGLIA
See also: Italy.
Bibliography
Fornari, Franco. (1966). Nuovi orientamenti della psicoanalisi. Milan: Feltrinelli.
———. (1974). The psychoanalysis of war (Alenka Pfeifer,
Trans.). Garden City, NY: Anchor Press. (Original work
published 1970)
———. (1975). Genitalità e cultura. Milan: Feltrinelli.
———. (1976). Simbolo e codice: dal processo psicoanalitico
all’analisi istituzionale. Milan: Feltrinelli.
———. (1979). I fondamenti di una teoria psicoanalitica del
linguaggio. Torino: Boringhieri, 1979.
———. (1981). Il codice vivente: femminilità e maternità nei
sogni delle madri in gravidanza. Torino: Boringhieri, 1981.
———. (1984). La riscoperta dell’anima. Bari: Laterza.
———. (1985). Affetti e cancro. Milan: Cortina.
FORT-DA
‘‘Fort!’’ and ‘‘Da!’’ are exclamations that Sigmund
Freud heard his grandson Ernst utter while playing.
This pair of words—meaning ‘‘Gone!’’ and ‘‘There!’’—
has become shorthand for repetition in early childhood, and for the primary processes that such
behavior mobilizes.
In psychoanalysis, allusions to fort/da refer to the
second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where
in a few celebrated pages Freud described and interpreted a game played by the little Ernst at the age of
eighteen months. At the time, Freud was tackling the
thorny problem of the compulsion to repeat in traumatic neurosis, and this digression into normal
childhood experience was in fact meant to help contextualize the question. Ernst was a ‘‘good little boy,’’
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manifested no particular symptoms, was rather calm
by disposition, and ‘‘never cried when his mother left
him for a few hours.’’ But he ‘‘had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get
hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed. . . . As he did this he gave vent to a
loud, long-drawn-out Ôo-o-o-o,’ accompanied by an
expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and
the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word Ôfort.’’’ Freud interpreted this
behavior as a way of obtaining satisfaction by causing
things to be ‘‘gone.’’ A short time later he observed the
child playing with a reel that had a piece of string tied
around it: He would toss the reel away from him to
where it could no longer be seen, before pulling it back
into view and hailing its reappearance with a gleeful
‘‘Da!’’ (‘‘There!’’). Freud also noticed that the boy
would utter his ‘‘o-o-o-o’’ sound with reference to
himself—notably when, by crouching down below a
mirror, he made his image ‘‘gone.’’ Freud stresses the
fact that the fort part of the game was much of the
time sufficient unto itself, and was ‘‘repeated untiringly’’ by the child (1920g, pp. 14–15).
This observation leads to a number of fundamental
questions: Are we confronted here by a method of
mastering a painful experience by reproducing it oneself in an active manner, as children so often do, for
example when playing frightening games? Or is the
child literally taking revenge for the treatment visited
upon him by redirecting it onto the other, or onto
himself? In the end, the answer is not of any great consequence, for the real problem is the contradiction,
which here is seen to arise very early, between the compulsion to repeat and the pleasure principle. How is it
that satisfaction is to be derived from repeating actions
that have been sources of unpleasurable feelings?
The great interest of this discussion of Freud’s is
that it sums up and condenses his subsequent exploration of the issue of the repetition compulsion. This
very early children’s game shows this compulsion to be
one of the fundamental processes of the psyche, with
two enigmatic aspects, one making manifest ‘‘mysterious masochistic trends’’ that resist all attempts at
analysis (p. 14), the other revealing an irreducible primordial violence that takes an especially virulent form,
according to Freud’s account, when little Ernst, at
thirty months, throws aside a toy and unequivocally
identifies it with his absent father who has been ‘‘sent
to the front’’ (p. 16).
599
F O U L K E S ( F U C H S ) , S I E G M U N D H E I N R I C H (1 898 –19 76)
The fort/da game has inspired very many authors
who have seen it as the embodiment of the institution
of fundamental structures of the infantile psyche,
though their emphasis varies according to tendency or
school. Thus Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott
both drew a number of lessons from it as they sought
to cast light on the origins of the child’s mental life
and develop play techniques for use in child therapy.
For Jacques Lacan, the game expressed the child’s
accession to the symbolic order, and the purpose of
making something appear and disappear was to
replace it with elementary signifiers. Jean Laplanche,
for his part, sees this play as the first attempt to
respond to the adult’s enigmatic messages.
was beneficial to Ernst, for, even though he was not
free from feelings of jealousy upon the arrival of a new
sibling, he was well able to cope with the death of his
mother a short time later. This was not to say, however,
as Freud had noted in discussing ‘‘dreams of the death
of persons of whom the dreamer is fond’’ (1900a, pp.
248ff), that once the subject reaches adulthood, and
becomes aware of the true meaning of death, they will
not be assailed in a deferred way by the guilt-driven
anxiety that is to be seen in so many neuroses.
It must be noted that Freud’s original discussion
actually focused in turn on first one and then another
game, each dominant at a different moment. The first,
at eighteen months, is based on fort, on throwing the
object far away, with the accompanying ‘‘o’’ sound,
and it indicates the pleasure obtained from making the
other disappear, or making oneself disappear, a pleasure that makes it possible to tolerate absence and
reflects the violence that absence implies; this game
endures, for it is still available when, at thirty months,
Ernst is gratified by his father’s going off to war. The
second game is founded on disappearance and reappearance, and shows a quite different kind of pleasure,
that felt by the child when he sees what he had thought
gone forever return from the void, and thus discovers
the possibility of permanence, of continuity—the
necessary basis for introjection and the working out
not only of the symbolic order but also of the imaginary one. As much as the first game, if it is associated
with nothing else, is governed by death-dealing repetition, the second, by contrast, is connected to a
constructive repetition and partakes of a process of
binding and transformation.
See also: Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Childhood; Death
instinct (Thanatos); Infant observation (direct); L and R
schemas; Lost object; Metaphor; Object a; Symbolic, the
(Lacan); Symbolization, process of; Word-presentation.
It is thus the fort game that is the more problematical, in that the subject obtains from the disappearance
of the other or of himself an unconscious gratification
which runs counter to the most fundamental prohibitions. In view of his belief in the omnipotence of
thoughts, the child cannot conceive of death or disappearance otherwise than as the outcome of a wish; he
can form an idea of these concepts solely through seeing and losing sight of objects, so he links these to the
deployment of visual desire, thereby transforming
trauma into pleasure, albeit a forbidden pleasure. In
his account of fort/da play, Freud hints that the game
60 0
GÉRARD BONNET
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams.
Part I, SE, 4: 1–338; Part II, SE, 5: 339–625.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1–64.
FOULKES (FUCHS), SIEGMUND HEINRICH
(1898–1976)
Physician and psychoanalyst Siegmund Heinrich
Foulkes was born on September 1898 in Karlsruhe,
Germany, and died on July 8, 1976 in London.
He was the youngest child of a comfortably-off,
assimilated Jewish family (the Fuchs). After service in
the telephone and telegraph section of the German
army in World War I, he studied medicine at Heidelberg, qualifying at Frankfurt.
Foulkes soon determined to become a psychoanalyst but first spent two significant years as an assistant
to the neurologist Kurt Goldstein. The work centered
on rehabilitation of brain-damaged soldiers from
World War I, who were intensively studied neurologically and with methods derived from Gestalt psychology by Adhemar Gelb. Goldstein’s holistic approach
to the function of the central nervous system later
influenced Foulkes’s concept of the group: as a whole
where each person represents a nodal point in the
group’s network, analogous to the function of the
neurone in the cortical network of the central nervous system.
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In 1928 Foulkes went to Vienna for psychoanalytic
training and postgraduate psychiatry. His analyst was
Helene Deutsch and his supervisors Eduard Hitschmann and Herman Nunberg. Paul Schilder was also a
significant influence. His close friend was Robert
Waelder.
In 1930 Foulkes returned to Frankfurt as director of
the outpatient clinic of the newly founded Frankfurt
Psychoanalytic Institute directed by Karl Landauer.
Erich Fromm and Frieda Fromm-Reichman were colleagues. There were fruitful exchanges in Frankfurt
between psychoanalysts and sociologists, as both the
Psychoanalytic Institute and the Sociological Research
Institute (led by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer) shared the same building. Foulkes developed a
close friendship with the sociologist Norbert Elias
whose theories were influential in his later group analytic theories. During this time he also became
acquainted with the American analyst Trigant Burrow’s writings on group analysis.
Foulkes emigrated to England in 1933. After psychoanalytic practice in London he moved to the provincial town of Exeter, where he first began group
psychotherapy. He further developed group work in
the British Army, notably at Northfield Military Hospital where he collaborated with Thomas Forest Main,
Harold Bridger and others. Foulkes was the principal
architect in transforming the hospital to a therapeutic
community. Wilfred Bion and John Richman had preceded him in their short experiment in group work. In
1948 Foulkes published his Northfield experiences in
his first book where he laid down the bases of group
analytic theory and practice.
His principal contributions, as described in his
book Therapeutic Group Analysis (1964) are the Matrix
and the therapeutic power of mirroring. The Matrix is
the hypothetical basis of all group transactions that
provides the group’s capacity for containment and
holding. Mirroring and resonance are the group’s specific therapeutic factors. The value of communication
is a vital therapeutic factor as well: the ability to translate the language of symptoms into articulate,
exchangeable communications. The therapist’s main
contribution is to facilitate this process. Foulkes valuably emphasizes the therapist’s responsibility to be the
‘‘dynamic administrator,’’ organizing and protecting
the group situation, as well as his responsibilities as
group conductor. Foulkes died during a seminar he
was leading for his senior colleagues.
MALCOLM PINES
See also: Great Britain; Group analysis; Group psychotherapy; Sigmund Freud Institute; Tavistock Clinic.
Bibliography
Foulkes, Siegmund Heinrich. (1964). Therapeutic group analysis. New York: International Universities Press.
FOUR DISCOURSES
After the war Foulkes was a training analyst for the
Anna Freud Group in the British Psychoanalytic
Society and Consultant Psychotherapist at the Maudsley Hospital where he taught generations of psychiatrists the rudiments of both individual and group
psychotherapy. With James Anthony he founded the
Group Analytic Society and later collaborated in
forming the Institute of Group Analysis, both in
London.
In his seminar ‘‘The Other Side of Psychoanalysis,’’
Jacques Lacan introduced four types of discourses.
The discourses are the discourse of the master, the discourse of the hysteric, the discourse of the university,
and the discourse of the analyst. They represent a
matrix in which everything comes in fours. The discourses too are made up of four elements: S1, the master signifier; S2, knowledge; a, surplus enjoyment; and
S/, the subject. Their positions above and below the bar
on either side of the diagram represent four different
values or functions: the agent, the other, the production, and truth.
Foulkes’s approach is that of ‘‘psychoanalysis by the
group’’—developing the group members’ therapeutic
capacities as co-therapists to each other, in contrast to
the approaches of Wilfred Bion and Henry Ezriel’s
‘‘psychoanalysis of the group,’’ or Franz Alexander and
Alexander Wolf ’s ‘‘psychoanalysis in the group.’’
In this fourfold structure, manipulating the minimal signifying chain, S1fiS2, is both necessary and
sufficient to represent the subject, S/, in relation to
both the big Other (the unconscious) and the small
other (the object a as the object cause of desire)
(Fig. 1).
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601
FOURTH ANALYSIS
FIGURE 1
Discourse of the master
Discourse of the university
S1
S2
S2
S
a
S1
a
S
Their positions are:
Discourse of the hysteric
S
S1
a
S2
agent
other
truth
production
Discourse of the analyst
a
S2
S
S1
In each discourse, the agent addresses an other, and
the truth that the discourse seeks is attained through a
certain production. Insofar as there is a connection
between S1 and S2, between the master-signifier and
knowledge—a connection that depends on the essential
mediation of speech—the subject is separated from the
production of the discourse, and this results in a discourse that is always inadequate. In this case an
unbridgeable gap separates the subject S/ and the object a.
If we take the discourse of the master as the starting
point, the four terms generate each of the other discourses by making four successive ninety-degree turns
in a clockwise direction. As each term takes the place of
the agent, it assumes the dominant position and gives
meaning and value to the discourse it generates. S1, the
master-signifier, in the dominant position gives rise to
discourse of the master. S2, knowledge, in that position
produces discourse of the university. S/, the subject, as
agent leads to discourse of the hysteric. In this case, the
symptomatic signifier affects and marks the subject so
that the subject’s body displays the symptom and speaks
metaphorically in the place of the repressed signifier.
And finally, a, the object of desire, in the dominant position produces discourse of the analyst. But it is not
because analysis is the ‘‘science of desire’’ that the analyst
has direct access to the object a. If the analyst can assume
the place of the agent and thus to know something
about the patient’s desire, it is only because the analyst is
not duped into believing the agent’s discourse. Something of the truth of the patient’s desire has a chance to
emerge within the framework of the treatment through
the transference and by means of interpretation.
60 2
These four different social bonds constitute what
Lacan claims is an essential support for communication. The four discourses go beyond speech, but ‘‘without going beyond language’s actual effects’’ (Lacan,
1998, p. 93).
In the 1960s Lacan theorized the four discourses on
the basis of a minute study of the social field that each
discourse both reveals and conceals, because he wanted
to ensure the transmission of psychoanalysis. He certainly knew that the discourses of the master and the
university had existed for a much longer time. He
credited Freud with having discovered the discourse of
the hysteric, but argued that Freud had not known
how to define the discourse of the analyst. So Lacan
attempted to establish this discourse by defining its
occurrence and its effects and by positing its limits so
that analysis could be developed in a community and
be taught in the community on both the theoretical
and clinical levels. Lacan considered the discourse of
the analyst to be one of his original contributions to
psychoanalysis.
JOËL DOR
See also: Matheme; Philosophy and psychoanalysis; Seminar, Lacan’s.
Bibliography
Lacan, Jacques. (1970). Radiophonie. Scilicet, 2–3, 55–99.
———. (1991). Le séminaire, livre XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse (1969–1970). Paris: Seuil.
———. (1998). On feminine sexuality, the limits of love and
knowledge: The seminar, book XX, encore 1972–1973
(Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.
FOURTH ANALYSIS
‘‘Fourth analysis’’ (l’analyse quatrième), a contribution
of the French Fourth Group, or OPLF (FrenchLanguage Psychoanalytical Organization), is a new
approach to the part of analytic training traditionally
known in psychoanalytic societies as ‘‘control’’ or
‘‘supervised’’ analysis. ‘‘Thus fourth analysis is in the
first place a theory of the control analysis and of the
conditions of supervision — a theory never outlined
until now — that takes into account the entire group
of figures and persons involved in it, as well as their
visible and hidden interactions’’ (Topique, 1983). The
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term ‘‘fourth’’ refers not only to the Fourth Group
itself, but also to the number of protagonists, namely,
the analysand, the analyst, the analyst’s analyst, and
the analyst who carries out the fourth analysis.
The term fourth analysis did not appear in the Fourth
Group’s ‘‘Principles and Modalities of Functioning’’ (or
‘‘Blue Book’’ [1969]), even though the idea of a ‘‘multireferential’’ analysis effectively prefigured it. Such a
multi-referential analysis, it was felt, was an adequate
characterization of a key moment of analytic training,
always assuring that training was not to be reduced to
some kind of academic ‘‘curriculum.’’ ‘‘Indeed, as soon
as the candidate takes on his or her first patient, it is no
longer the didactic contract, but also the clinical experience, with all its unknowns, that regulates the relation
of the subject to the unconscious. Thus the patient, who
is only spoken of indirectly, confronts three analysts
with the partiality (in both senses) of their knowledge:
the novice, who is striving towards mastery, but also the
supervisor and the didactician’’ (Topique, 1969). It is
notable that these were still the very terms that the
Fourth Group would later question, specifically the
term supervisor, which is replaced by fourth analyst, and
didactician, which would become ‘‘the analyst of the
analyst’’.
Stress on the multi-referential serves in the first
place to highlight and to clarify the harmful effects
specific to this plurality when it is not recognized as
such. For example, playing the didactician and the
supervisor off against each other, or making what one
expects from the patient dependent on what one
might want to hear or on what one thinks the supervisor wants to hear. Hence the formula that gave birth to
the term fourth analysis: ‘‘There are three chairs and a
fourth unconscious, which language does not express
fully in known dialects’’ (Topique, 1969).
At the same time, the multi-referentiality specific to
fourth analysis is not limited to it, which leads to the
necessity of organizing ‘‘interanalytic sessions’’ with
other analysts of the Fourth Group and possibly analysts from other societies. ‘‘The exemplary character of
this four-term situation does not exhaust the diversity
of third-party references. The candidate must be able,
according to his or her own analytical, theoretical, and
clinical progress, to organize in due course debates of
variable lengths with other analysts’’ (Topique, 1969).
In the supplement to the ‘‘Blue Book’’ produced
by the Fourth Group’s 1970 congress, dedicated
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mainly to the notion of the ‘‘didactic effect,’’ the term
fourth analysis is defined as follows: ‘‘The discipline of
fourth analysis based on multi-referentiality implies
access to the conditions that make the didactic affect
possible: not just some regulatory mechanism
designed to facilitate experimentation, scholarship, or
initiation, but what may be called a topography. . . . To
become an analyst is to gain access to this tetradimensionality of Freudian training as a process’’
(Topique, 1971).
This points up the important idea that the didactic
effect is constructed in a dialectical movement made
possible by the shift from a dual relation to a fourfold
one. The risk of a major alienation, that is, alienation
in knowledge, can thus be counteracted and the didactic effect is defined as never being the direct consequence of the transmission of knowledge.
In 1979, Jean-Paul Valabrega, who had participated
in drafting the ‘‘Blue Book’’ in 1969 and 1970, undertook a more thoroughgoing theorization of fourth
analysis (Valabrega, 1979), which he defined as a ‘‘theory of supervision.’’ He set out ‘‘to better delimit the
Ôanalytic material’ itself and above all to prevent its
potential loss, to insure as much as possible against its
unintended erasure’’ (Topique, 1983).
The principle of the fourth analysis has not been
modified further. On the other hand, it has been integrated into the greater aim of emphasizing the crucial
consideration of the transference and countertransference. The work being carried out on the analysis of the analyst on the basis of fourth analysis allows
for, or at least contributes to, a limitation of countertransferential effects in the treatment, notably the
deafness towards the analysand that comes about
when listening to oneself and not the other overwhelms the analyst’s psychic space.
To reopen and to reinstitute, without ever taking as
given what must be perceived as a process, is in fact the
ideal not only of analytic training, but also of analytic
practice, including that of established analysts. The
existence, and even the necessity, of interanalytic sessions that bring several analysts face to face around a
trainee constitutes a test of each one’s clinical practice;
and, at least in principle, it represents an abiding
recommendation for every analyst after his or her
accreditation. Fourth analysis and interactive sessions,
by virtue of their very stringency, are an effective
response to what Freud (1937c) said in ‘‘Analysis
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‘‘ F R A G M E N T
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OF A
CASE
OF
H Y S T E R I A ’’ (D O R A / I D A B A U E R )
Terminable and Interminable’’ about the necessity of
the analyst’s putting his or her own analysis to work.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: France; Supervised analysis (control case); Training the psychoanalyst.
Bibliography
(1969). La formation du psychanalyste. Topique, 1.
(1971). Travaux récents. Topique, 6.
(1983). Les historiens et leurs versions. Topique, 32.
(1986). Constructions de l’identité. Topique, 38.
Valabrega, Jean-Paul. (1994). La formation du psychanalyste.
Paris: Payot.
‘‘FRAGMENT OF AN ANALYSIS OF A CASE
OF HYSTERIA’’ (DORA/IDA BAUER)
Freud’s case history for Ida Bauer, alias Dora (1905),
covers approximately seventy hours of treatment. The
eighteen-year-old adolescent was forced to go to Freud
by her father, Philip Bauer, who was allegedly most
concerned by her fainting spells and recent suicide
note. Her presenting symptoms included dysponoea,
tussis, nervosa, aphonia, depression, and hysterical
unsociability. Combining anamnestic data, reconstruction, and an extensive analysis of two dreams,
Freud portrays his patient as a young child observing
the primal scene and falling sick from related masturbation. Her subsequent psychic disorder was directly
related to her father’s liaison with Frau K. (Peppina
Zellenka). Philip denied the liaison and, in his own
version of Dora’s analysis, wanted Freud ‘‘to talk Dora
out’’ of her belief. Furthermore, Dora had been traumatized twice by Herr K. (Hans Zellenka). Until therapy she had kept the first traumatic occasion to herself,
and the second was denied by Hans, who, with his wife
and Philip, accused Dora of fabrication. Mrs. Bauer’s
‘‘housewife psychosis’’ and self-absorption further
increased Dora’s alienation and desperation.
Freud attempted to demonstrate to Dora that her
reproaches toward her adulterous father were selfreproaches, rooted in her unacknowledged love for
Hans, who continued to solicit her. Surprisingly, Freud
also wanted Dora to stop resisting and to accept Hans,
for it ‘‘would have been the only possible solution for all
60 4
parties concerned.’’ Dora, however, abruptly terminated
treatment—an action Freud considered as another manifestation of her vengeance. Freud pointed out two other
shortcomings of his handling of the case: he neglected
Dora’s transference, and he overlooked Dora’s homosexual strivings, found at her deepest unconscious level.
Freud’s case history was an organizing clinical
experience for him and for the psychoanalytic movement and stands as a paradigmatic record of both psychoanalysis and contemporary culture. It is Freud’s
longest text on a female patient and also one of Freud’s
memorable trilogy including The Interpretation of
Dreams (1900a) and Three Essays on Sexuality (1905d).
It is the first of Freud’s great analytic cases and the first
involving an adolescent. Ernest Jones called the case ‘‘a
model for students of psychoanalysis,’’ and for Erik
Erikson, it was ‘‘the classical analysis of the structure
and the genesis of a hysteria.’’ Other critics have
described the case as a canonical specimen of conversion hysteria, as Freud’s most graphic demonstration
of psychosomatics, and as the case of Freud’s most discussed in psychiatry and psychoanalysis as well as in
sociology, anthropology, history, and literary criticism.
Granted, Freud’s various theoretical discoveries in
the Dora case, from a practical point of view, must be
reevaluated. Freud either downplayed or entirely disregarded Dora’s triple burden of being a woman, a Jew,
and an adolescent victimized by two pairs of adults. In
his quest to genetically reconstruct the psychic truth,
Freud dismissed Dora’s concern about current historical truth and her need to validate her experience. The
case lacks indispensable desiderata of psychoanalysis
in that there is virtually no interpretation involving
transference and in that indoctrination and forced
association replace free association.
Even as a case of therapy, Freud’s treatment of Dora
was disastrous. By bullying his patient and even wanting her to return to the middle-aged adulterous pedophile who twice traumatized her, Freud subjected her
to a third, iatrogenic trauma. There are further indications of Freud’s counter-transferential perturbation:
he lied twice and misdated the case twice in his prefatory remarks; he repeatedly errs about Dora’s age and
refers to her at different developmental levels (‘‘girl,’’
‘‘child,’’ ‘‘woman,’’ ‘‘female person,’’ ‘‘lady’’); he confusedly traces Dora’s coughing and aphonia to ages eight
and twelve; he attributes to Dora an adult-like love of
Hans during her ‘‘first years’’ in Merano, Italy (she was
there from age six to age seventeen); and he grossly
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misinterprets Dora’s silence as agreement when he
mistakenly tells her that at age seventeen (she was
really fifteen), she was committed to her traumatizing
seducer, much like her mother at the age of seventeen.
According to his own words, he wrote up the case
‘‘during the two weeks immediately following’’ termination; his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess contains
explicit statements that he was writing the case history
between January 10 and 24, a two-week period in 1901.
The implications of the duration of Freud’s composition
have gone completely unnoticed. When Dora decided to
quit therapy two weeks before she actually did, Freud
irritably charged that she was reacting like a maid who
gives a two-week notice before leaving her employer. But
Freud himself unconsciously behaved immaturely during his composition of the case, which partially took on
the character of an acting out, or better yet, a writing
out. His two weeks of writing up the case was a way of
dismissing it and of trying to rid himself of Dora.
As a follow-up to Dora’s treatment, Freud proceeded
to write up her case history. Pertinently, Freud never
considered Dora’s bisexuality and transference together;
his defensive typographic separation of these two
dynamics enabled him to ward off any notion of maternal transference. However, far from dissolving his countransference toward Dora, Freud re-enacted it with the
reader, whom he tried to seduce into agreement.
PATRICK MAHONY
See also: Acting out/acting in; Adolescence; Bauer, Ida;
Cruelty; Flight into illness; Free association; Hysteria;
Identification; Latent dream thoughts; Oedipus complex;
Psychoanalytic treatment; Resolution of the translation.
Secret; Somatic compliance.
Source Citation
Laurent, Éric (1986). Lectures de Dora. In Fondation du
champ freudien, Rencontre internationale, Hystérie et
obsession (pp. 29–42). Paris: Navarin.
Mahony, Patrick. (1996). Freud’s Dora: A historical, textual,
and psychoanalytic study. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
FRAGMENTATION
Fragmentation describes a state of the self that is the
opposite of cohesion. It is a diagnostic sign.
This notion appeared in Heinz Kohut’s 1968 article
‘‘The Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders.’’ A sign of the narcissistic personality,
as compared with the neuroses, fragmentation triggers
disintegration anxiety, a counterpart of castration
anxiety. The fragmentation corresponding to the autoerotic stage is total in psychosis, in contrast to the narcissistic personality, in which the self is cohesive. In
narcissism, transient fragmentation is seen during analysis and during certain periods when the self is vulnerable, such as adolescence.
This notion was developed throughout Kohut’s
work, becoming one of the four fundamental concepts
of self psychology set forth in ‘‘Remarks about the Formation of the Self ’’ (1974). To Kohut, narcissistic
pathology tends to be progressively reduced to variations in the state of the self, which is fragmented at the
preoedipal and oedipal levels. Fragmentation of the
self triggers an intensification of the drives, which are
redefined as products of the disintegration of the self
in the service of its restoration.
Fluctuations in the state of the self are important
clinical data for diagnosis and treatment, but the
drives become secondary to the self.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905e). Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse. Mschr. Psychiat. Neurol., XVIII, p. 285310, 408–467;
G.W., V, p. 161–286; Fragment of an analysis of a case of
hysteria. SE, 7: 1–122.
AGNÈS OPPENHEIMER
Bibiography
See also: Disintegration, products of; Schizophrenia; Self,
the.
Erikson, Erik H. (1964). Insight and responsibility. New York:
W. W. Norton.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4: 1–338; 5: 339–625.
Jennings, Jerry. (1986). The revival of ‘‘Dora’’: Advances in
psychoanalytic theory and technique. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 34, 607–634.
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Kohut, Heinz (1968). The psychoanalytic treatment of narcissistic personality disorders. In The search for the self
(Vol. 1). New York: International Universities Press.
———. (1971).The analysis of the self. New York: International Universities Press.
605
FRAMEWORK
OF THE
PSYCHOANALYTIC TREATMENT
———. (1974). Remarks about the formation of the self. In
The search for the self (Vol. 2). New York: International
Universities Press.
———. (1977). The restoration of the self. New York: International Universities Press.
———. (1984). How does analysis cure? Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
FRAMEWORK OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC
TREATMENT
The ‘‘frame of psychoanalytic treatment’’ refers to the
formal and contractual means necessary for establishing the situation that characterizes psychoanalysis
compared to other forms of psychotherapy. Although
the frame has been at the heart of psychoanalytic practice ever since its origins, considerations of its structure and function are more recent, dating from the
Second World War. One of the first to investigate this
frame was José Bleger in an article entitled ‘‘Psychoanalysis of the Psychoanalytic Frame’’ (Bleger, 1967).
This frame was gradually developed by Freud for
what were often circumstantial or personal reasons,
but he eventually developed a set of uniform recommendations consistent with the theoretical and practical modalities of treatment. As early as 1904 he
described his ‘‘psychotherapeutic method’’: ‘‘Without
exerting any other kind of influence, he invites them to
lie down in a comfortable attitude on a sofa, while he
himself sits on a chair behind them outside their field
of vision. He does not even ask them to close their
eyes, and avoids touching them in any way, as well as
any other procedure which might be reminiscent of
hypnosis. The session thus proceeds like a conversation between two people equally awake, but one of
whom is spared every muscular exertion and every distracting sensory impression which might divert his
attention from his own mental activity’’ (1904a,
p. 250). Nine years later he provided additional details
such as frequency and duration of the sessions and
method of payment—parameters that were as important for proper treatment as the mutual obligations of
free association or the prohibition to act out on the
part of the analysand and free-floating attention or the
rule of abstinence on the part of the analyst (1913c).
The restrictions imposed by the treatment setting
apply to both parties, even if its contractual nature is
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often overlooked in order to emphasize the pseudopower attributed to the psychoanalyst by virtue of the
patient’s masochism. The frame appears to function as
the representative of the incest prohibition in the analytic situation, a prohibition that in fact favors expression and analysis. The frame can be considered an
‘‘excluded middle’’ that hovers over the protagonists
during the session, reminding them that every ‘‘dualistic’’ relationship is illusory, even during moments of
the most intense regression.
Opinions vary regarding these interpretations since
the elements that characterize the frame are rich with
symbolization. José Bleger (1967) distinguishes the
frame within the psychoanalytic situation as a ‘‘nonprocess’’ consisting of ‘‘constants within whose bounds
the process takes place’’ (p. 511), and he locates its origin in the ‘‘most primitive fusion with the mother’s
body’’ (p. 518). He subdivides the frame into two elements: the frame proposed by the analyst and accepted
by the patient, and the frame formed by projections of
the patient’s most primitive symbiotic associations. It
is with this last point that the concepts of ‘‘containercontained,’’ the analyst’s alpha function (Wilfred
Bion), and Donald Winnicott’s ‘‘setting’’ are associated. For Winnicott, the analyst ‘‘expresses’’ his love
for the patient by his reflected interest and his hatred
by his observance of the rites of payment and scheduling (Winnicott, 1958). According to Jean-Luc Donnet,
‘‘the frame is both protection and threat, just as its
symbolization is forced and liberating’’ (1973). Jean
Laplanche, with his image of the psychoanalyst’s ‘‘tub,’’
describes a ‘‘double-wall setting’’ wherein the outside
wall, ‘‘purely legalistic and formal’’ but contractual, is
necessary to preserve the inner wall, which is subject
to the uncertainties of the analytic process and is
needed for sexual issues and the transference neurosis
to manifest themselves (Laplanche, 1987).
The arrangement of the frame for psychotic
patients or as a function of what Lacan and his students refer to as the temporal scansion of the session
introduces the question of its relationship with the
establishment and ongoing coherence of a psychoanalytic process. There are a number of parameters
involved and each of them raises the question of its
role and importance in managing the situation: the
number and duration of sessions (four sessions of fifty
minutes at a minimum according to official American
guidelines, three of forty-five minutes for French
members of the International Psychoanalytic
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Association, shorter for others, longer for Freud), distribution throughout the week (frequent sessions,
sometimes several a day for patients who live far
away), payment (cash or check), accepting third-party
payment or not, problems associated with days off,
with vacations, with changes to the ritual (moving, for
example), the intrusion of the telephone, contact during, or outside, the session (Sándor Ferenczi’s ‘‘active
technique’’ or ‘‘mutual analysis,’’ Michael Balint’s or
Donald Winnicott’s physical holding), and so on.
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Rigid attitudes on one side, transgressive relativism
on the other, reference to the paternal prohibition
against incest versus a conception of the frame as a
womb implying a total return to a primal state, a setting for hypnosis or a condition for workingthrough—the conditions associated with the unique
nature of psychoanalytic treatment possess a nonalienating value only because they are based on a contract that circumscribes them and that can at any
moment be torn up by either of its cosignatories.
In France, Jean Martin Charcot’s legacy gave rise to
bitter disputes on the nature of the mind, and Pierre
Janet’s theories were widely accepted in medical and
philosophical circles. These two factors explain the
poor reception given to Freud’s ideas for many years.
The article that Freud called ‘‘the first article on psychoanalysis written in France,’’ by Doctor René
Morichau-Beauchant, professor of medicine in Poitiers, appeared as late as November 14, 1911, in La gazette des hôpitaux civils et militaires. In 1913 a French
translation of Freud’s essay ‘‘The claims of psychoanalysis to scientific interest’’ in the Italian journal
Scientia went unnoticed.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Abstinence/rule of abstinence; Initial interview(s); Face-to-face situation; Free association; ‘‘Lines
of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy’’; Money and
psychoanalytic treatment; Neutrality, benevolent neutrality; Psychoanalytic treatment.
Bibliography
Bleger, José. (1967). Psychoanalysis of the psycho-analytic frame.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 48 (4), 511–519.
Donnet, Jean-Luc. (1973). Le divan bien tempéré. Nouvelle
revue de psychanalyse, 8, 23–49.
Freud, Sigmund. (1904a). Freud’s psycho-analytic procedure. SE, 7: 247–254.
———. (1913c). On beginning the treatment (Further
recommendations on technique of psycho-analysis I). SE,
12: 121–144.
Laplanche, Jean. (1989). New foundations for psychoanalysis
(David Macey, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
(Original work published in 1987)
Winnicott, Donald W. (1958). Collected papers: Through paediatrics to psycho-analysis. London: Tavistock Publications.
Further Reading
Busch, Fred. (1995). Beginning analytic treatment: Establishing an analytic frame. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 43, 449–468.
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Freud spent several months, from October 1885 to
February 1886, studying in Paris with Jean Martin
Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital. This experience
greatly determined his orientation toward psychopathology. In his article ‘‘Heredity and the Aetiology
of the Neuroses,’’ published in French in 1896 in the
Revue neurologique, the word psychoanalysis appeared
for the first time.
In 1914 Professor Emmanuel Régis and his assistant
Angelo Hesnard, a naval doctor in Bordeaux, wrote
the first book on psychoanalysis, La psychanalyse des
névroses et des psychoses, but the First World War cut
short further interest in the field. It was not until
December 1920 that the Revue de Genève and Éditions
Payot published a French translation of Freud’s essay
‘‘On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’’
(1914).
With Freud’s support, Eugénie Sokolnicka, a Polish
psychiatrist who had settled in France, began analyzing
young psychiatrists working at the Clinique des maladies mentales at the Sainte-Anne Hospital under the
direction of Professor Henri Claude. Psychoanalysis
became fashionable in France around 1921: In October
1921 André Breton traveled to Vienna to meet Freud,
the ‘‘greatest psychologist of our time.’’ Henri-René
Lenormand’s play ‘‘Le mangeur de rêves’’ (1921)
turned out to be a success. And the Belgian journal
Le disque vert published a special issue in 1924
titled ‘‘Freud et la psychanalyse’’ (Freud and
psychoanalysis).
Though the medical profession remained overtly
hostile to psychoanalysis, a number of young psychiatrists interested in psychoanalysis, including René
Allendy, Angélo Hesnard, René Laforgue, and Eugène
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Minkowski, decided to launch a journal that was
clearly psychoanalytic in orientation. The first volume
of Évolution psychiatrique appeared in 1925, followed
by a second in 1927. In 1930 the journal founders
formed a learned society of the same name, which was
still in existence in 2005. In July 1926 these psychiatrists, along with Raymond and Ariane de Saussure,
Édouard Pichon, and Adrien Borel, organized the
Conférence des psychanalystes de langue française
(Conference of French-Speaking Psychoanalysts) in
Lausanne, the origin of the Congrès des psychanalystes
de langues romanes (Congress of Romance Language
Psychoanalysts) and the Congrès des psychanalystes de
langue française (Congress of French-Speaking Psychoanalysts), which take place annually.
On November 4, 1926, the Société psychanalytique
de Paris (SPP; Paris Psychoanalytic Society) was
formed under the guidance and with the assistance
of Princess Marie Bonaparte, Napoleon’s greatgrand-niece, who was being analyzed by Freud and
who later become close friends with him. Her circle
included Eugénie Sokolnicka, Angélo Hesnard, René
Allendy, Adrien Borel, René Laforgue, Georges Parcheminey, Édouard Pichon, and Rudolf Loewenstein.
(The last was a Polish Jewish émigré who, after training at the Berlin Institute, settled in France, where he
became the first and best known teaching analyst. He
was naturalized in 1930.) Also in her circle were a
number of French-speaking Swiss analysts. They
included Charles Odier, Henri Flournoy, and Raymond de Saussure (the son of the linguist), all of
whom made important contributions to the growth of
the new society. The first issue of the Revue française
de psychanalyse appeared on June 25, 1927, and on
January 10, 1934, the Institut de psychanalyse was created and remained active until 1940.
The development of psychoanalysis encountered
some difficulties, however, notably with the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and because
of Freud himself. The French welcomed Freud’s ‘‘psychoanalytic method’’ but in general rejected Freudian
‘‘doctrine,’’ to paraphrase the title of a critical essay by
Roland Dalbiez published in 1936. Because of this tendency, Marie Bonaparte played a crucial role. She was
not a physician, and by being jealously faithful to
Freud, she prevented psychoanalysis in France from
falling completely under the sway of institutional psychiatry (Mijolla, 1988b). She also began translating
Freud’s writings intermittently until 1988, when a
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team led by Jean Laplanche began a new translation of
Freud’s complete works (Mijolla, 1991).
During the 1936 international IPA congress in Marienbad, Czech Republic, the young Jacques Lacan presented a paper titled ‘‘Le stade du miroir’’ (The mirror
stage, or phase). He became a member of the Société
psychanalytique de Paris in December 1938, nine years
after Sacha Nacht (October 1929) and eighteen
months after Daniel Lagache (July 1937), his future
rivals, both of whom, like Lacan, were analyzed by
Rudolf Loewenstein. Though there were few truly
innovative French presentations aside from Lacan’s
paper, many presentations helped spread Freudian
theory and technique, which was for the most part
based on the work of Sándor Ferenczi. The recommendations made by René Laforgue (on scotoma, schizonoia, and family neurosis) went unanswered, as did
the many articles and essays by Angélo Hesnard,
Édouard Pichon, and René Allendy.
Freud received assistance in emigrating from Austria from U.S. Ambassador William C. Bullitt and
Marie Bonaparte, who paid the ‘‘departure tax’’
demanded by the Nazis and saved his antiquities collection. Following his departure from Vienna, Freud
stayed in Paris on June 5, 1938, while waiting to
embark for London. Because of Nazi persecutions,
Jewish psychoanalysts had begun to leave Germany in
1933, usually passing through Switzerland or France.
They included René Spitz and Heinz Hartmann. They
too received help from Marie Bonaparte, as well as
from Anne Berman (Bonaparte’s secretary), René
Laforgue, and Paul Schiff.
On June 13, 1940, the day before Hitler’s troops
entered Paris, Sophie Morgenstern, one of the first
child analysts, committed suicide. The Société psychanalytique de Paris and the Institut de psychanalyse
closed their doors, and the Revue française de psychanalyse ceased publication. There was no overtly psychoanalytic activity in France during the four years of
German occupation. Rudolf Loewenstein succeeded
in leaving for America, where he settled for good.
Marie Bonaparte went into exile in Cape Town, South
Africa. Sacha Nacht, who worked with the Free French
forces, barely escaped deportation. Daniel Lagache
continued teaching in Clermont-Ferrand, where the
University of Strasbourg had temporarily reestablished itself. Paul Schiff joined the troops that would
later liberate Italy and France, while Jacques Lacan,
Françoise Dolto, Marc Schlumberger, and John Leuba
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continued their activities in Paris. Only René Laforgue
attempted, from 1940 to 1942, to create a French section at the Göring Institute, but his efforts were in
vain. His subservient attitude toward the occupation
authorities resulted in his exclusion from the Société
psychanalytique de Paris following liberation (Mijolla,
1988a).
After 1945 psychoanalytic activity resumed in
France. A number of new figures appeared on the
scene: Maurice Bouvet, Serge Lebovici, René Held,
Maurice Bénassy, Francis Pasche. On July 25, 1946, the
annual Congrès des psychanalystes de langue française
(Congress of French-Speaking Psychoanalysts)
resumed in Montreux, Switzerland. In November,
Maryse Choissy founded the Centre d’étude des
sciences de l’homme (Social Sciences Study Center)
and launched the journal Psyché, both of which were
influenced by the Catholicism of Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin. That same year the Centre psychopédagogique Claude-Bernard (Claude Bernard Psychopedagogical Center) was created, with Georges Mauco as
nonmedical director. Juliette Boutonier was the medical director, but she turned the position over to André
Berge in order to replace Daniel Lagache at the University of Strasbourg. Lagache had been appointed to a
position at the Sorbonne, where he created a degree
program in psychology. In 1948 a new publisher,
Presses universitaires de France, began publishing the
Revue française de psychanalyse.
The Cold War began, and the Communist journal
La nouvelle critique published an article in 1949 referring to psychoanalysis as a ‘‘reactionary ideology.’’ The
article, written by four psychoanalysts, one of whom
was Serge Lebovici, reinforced the criticisms made by
Georges Politzer before the war. Years later, between
1973 and 1977, Lebovici was the first French psychoanalyst to be made president of the International Psychoanalytical Association.
The success of psychoanalysis continued to attract
candidates and presented the problem of training
them. Moreover, a suit brought against Margaret
Clark-Williams between 1950 and 1952, a psychoanalyst but not a medical doctor, for illegally practicing
medicine, though concluded in her favor, exposed the
collective responsibility of the psychoanalytic community and the need to establish criteria for practice.
After three years of violent debate, flip-flopping
alliances, and maneuvering between the three French
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leaders who acquired their positions after the war, the
decision to create a new Institut de psychanalyse
caused a split in the Société psychanalytique de Paris.
None of the three were especially interested in making
the institutions democratic, and they waged a kind of
open warfare with one another that would leave scars
on the psychoanalytic community in France for years
to come. Aside from their personal ambitions, they
had opposing ideas about the theory, practice, and
institutional organization of psychoanalysis. Sacha
Nacht wanted to remain faithful to the norms of the
International Psychoanalytical Association and aligned
with medical education. Daniel Lagache favored academic training. The third, Jacques Lacan, developed
original theories and methods of therapy, and the latter, especially his ‘‘variable-length sessions,’’ did not
comply with international standards.
On June 16, 1953, a motion of no confidence was
passed against Jacques Lacan, then president of the
Société psychanalytique de Paris. Daniel Lagache,
Juliette Favez-Boutonier, and Françoise Dolto then
announced that they would be leaving the society to
form the Société française de psychanalyse (SFP;
French Society for Psychoanalysis). Lacan joined
them and was followed by nearly half the students,
who were behind the split. But the defectors, in their
desire to create an institute free of Sacha Nacht’s
authority, had overlooked the fact that they would be
excluded from the International Psychoanalytical
Association and would have to undergo a lengthy
period of scrutiny by the international community
before they could prove their ability to train new analysts (Mijolla, 1996).
In September 1953, the sixteenth Conférence des
psychanalystes de langues romanes took place and, at
the end of the SPP meeting, Lacan presented to the
members of his new society, the Société française de
psychanalyse, his ‘‘Discours de Rome’’ on the function
of language in psychoanalysis.
The Institut de psychanalyse de Paris (Paris Institute for Psychoanalysis) was officially established on
June 1, 1954. Sacha Nacht remained the director until
1962, when Serge Lebovici replaced him. Through the
Centre de diagnostic et de traitements psychanalytiques (Center for Diagnostics and Psychoanalytic
Treatment), run by Michel Cénac and René Diatkine,
Nacht was to become, for nearly thirty years, the symbol of traditional psychoanalysis in France, to the detriment of the Société scientifique, which did not
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return to its former prestige until 1986. To strengthen
its image, the Twentieth International Congress of the
International Psychoanalytical Association was held in
Paris in 1957. The IPA had met there once before, in
1938, and would meet in Paris again in 1973.
Around this time new directions in psychoanalysis
were explored. For example, in Paris in 1958 Philippe
Paumelle, Serge Lebovici, and René Diatkine created
the Association de santé mentale (Mental Health Association), which provided doctors and social workers
with training in psychoanalysis. Also established that
year were the Groupe Lyonnais, the first regional
branch of the Société psychanalytique de Paris, and
the Séminaire de perfectionnement, an annual meeting
for psychoanalysts working throughout France, similar
to the Journées provinciales run by the Société française de psychanalyse.
The rivalry that developed between the two societies promoted the growth of theoretical developments
as well as new institutional forms. The work of Maurice Bouvet is a case in point. Through his writing, Bouvet attempted to counteract the growing interest in the
ideas of Jacques Lacan. Unfortunately, he died at the
early age of forty-nine in 1960. In 1962 an annual prize
in psychoanalysis was created in his name.
There were a number of psychoanalysts for children
working in France at this time. In the Société psychanalytique de Paris there were Serge Lebovici, René Diatkine, Roger Misès, Michel Soulé, Pierre Mâle, Jean
Favreau, Ilse Barande, and Pierre Bourdier. In the
Société française de psychanalyse there were Jenny
Aubry, Françoise Dolto, Maud Mannoni, and Victor
Smirnoff. In the field of psychosomatics were JeanPaul Valabrega (SFP) and the team formed around
Pierre Marty: Michel Fain, Michel de M’Uzan, and
Christian David (all SPP members). David went on to
found the Institut de psychosomatique (Institute of
Psychosomatics). Those working in psychodrama and
group psychoanalysis included Jean and Evelyne Kestemberg, Jean Gillibert, and Robert Barande (SPP),
and Didier Anzieu, Angélo Bejarano, René Kaës,
André Missenard, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (SFP).
Primary representatives in the field of psychogenesis
and the treatment of psychosis were Sacha Nacht and
Paul-Claude Racamier of the SPP, and Jean-Louis
Lang, Serge Leclaire, François Perrier, and Guy Rosolato of the SFP. Worthy of note is that there was a certain coolness in France toward Melanie Klein’s
theories, which remained relatively unknown until the
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1970s, following the work of James Gammil, Jean
Begoin, and Florence Begoin-Guignard.
Jacques Lacan became increasingly important in
French psychoanalysis and as a leader of young analysts. He published articles in La psychanalyse, the SFP
review created in 1955 (the eighth and last number
appeared in 1964), and in 1953 began giving his
famous seminars. The increasingly well-attended sessions were held every Wednesday from 12 noon to 3
p.m., initially at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, then at the
École normale supérieure, and finally at the Paris law
school. On November 7, 1955, in Vienna, he introduced his call for a ‘‘return to Freud,’’ which met with
tremendous success. Interest in the work of Claude
Lévi-Strauss and structuralism during the 1960s contributed to the dissemination of a conception of psychoanalysis unrelated to psychology and without any
therapeutic aims (in 1957 Lacan had spoken of ‘‘excessive healing’’). The impact of Lacan’s ideas can be
judged from the October 1960 Sixth Colloque de Bonneval, organized by Henri Ey on the unconscious. In
the presence of Jean Hyppolite, Maurice MerleauPonty, Eugène Minkowski, Henri Lefebvre, and Paul
Ricoeur, members of the two societies confronted one
another. In that setting the work of a number of
hitherto unknown psychoanalysts came to light:
André Green and Conrad Stein of the Société psychanalytique de Paris, and Jean Laplanche, Serge Leclaire,
and François Perrier of the Société française de
psychanalyse.
Lacan’s success guaranteed him a role within the
Société française de psychanalyse that did not always
sit well with his colleagues, especially since his theoretical development, together with the unusual nature of
his personal practice, made him persona non grata
within the traditional international psychoanalytic
community. There were increasing conflicts within the
SFP over Lacan, and these grew worse as the conditions for the society’s readmission to the Institut de
psychosomatique were communicated to him in 1961
during the twenty-second international congress in
Edinburgh, just as it received the status of a study
group. The SFP was asked to adhere to the guidelines
for didactic analysis and training (four sessions of
forty-five minutes per week and a year of therapy after
the beginning of supervised therapy). Everyone knew
that Lacan would never accept these requirements.
In spite of diplomatic efforts by the three-member
group within the SFP known as the ‘‘troika’’—Wladimir
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Granoff, Serge Leclaire, and François Perrier—the situation grew worse until several members of the SFP,
including some of Lacan’s former analysts, urged that
he, along with Françoise Dolto, be removed from the list
of teaching analysts, a decision that was ratified in
November 1963. This led to a split within the SFP. One
group of members formed the Association psychanalytique de France (French Psychoanalytic Association),
which chose Daniel Lagache as its first president and
was accredited by the Institut de psychosomatique on
July 28, 1965, during the twenty-fourth international
congress in Amsterdam.
On June 21, 1964, Lacan founded the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP; Freudian School of Paris), which,
over a period of sixteen years, became one of the leading
forces in the French psychoanalytic movement. Organized into groups known as ‘‘cartels,’’ it published an
annual list of members. This did not mean that the
organization recognized them as psychoanalysts, for
according to Lacan, ‘‘The psychoanalyst’s authority can
only come from himself.’’ Since the school was intent
on making a difference within the psychoanalytic community, some members were designated ‘‘EFP analysts,’’
and on October 9, 1967, Lacan instituted a test to
enable members to obtain the title. As a result of this
action, Piera Aulagnier, François Perrier, and Jean-Paul
Valabrega quit the École Freudienne de Paris in January
1969 to create the Quatrième groupe, Organisation psychanalytique de langue française (The Fourth Group, or
Francophone Psychoanalytic Organization). (Piera
Aulagnier, in 1967, founded, together with Jean Clavreul and Conrad Stein, the journal L’inconscient, of
which only eight issues were published.) This group
introduced new criteria of membership admission and
methods of training: ‘‘the fourth analysis.’’
Lacan’s claim that ‘‘the unconscious is structured
like a language’’ helped rally to the cause of psychoanalysis Marxists like Louis Althusser and several priests,
including the Jesuit Louis Beirnaert. Subsequently, the
French Communist Party and the Catholic clergy,
both of which had been hostile to Lacan, softened
their position. More significantly, Lacan won over to
his cause the French intelligentsia, along with a number of foreign students, thereby mobilizing the forces
for a media campaign unique in the field of
psychoanalysis.
The ground for Lacan’s success had already been
prepared, as Serge Moscovici showed in his dissertation, ‘‘La psychanalyse: Son image et son public’’
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(Psychoanalysis: its image and public), completed in
1961. In 1958 Jean-Paul Sartre worked on the screenplay for the first film about Freud. Freud: The Secret
Passion, directed by John Huston, appeared in movie
theaters in 1962. Between December 1962 and July
1963, Marthe Robert presented a series of radio broadcasts titled The Psychoanalytic Revolution: The Life and
Work of Sigmund Freud.
The literature on psychoanalysis began to grow. The
Presses universitaires de France published Freud’s letters to Wilhelm Fliess and Ernest Jones’s biography of
Freud in its series Bibliothèque de psychanalyse
(Library of Psychoanalysis), edited by Daniel Lagache
and later Jean Laplanche. In 1961 Gérard Mendel
founded the series Science de l’homme (Science of
Man) at Éditions Payot. This was followed, in 1964, by
the series Le champ Freudien (The Freudian Field),
edited by Jacques Lacan, then by Jacques-Alain Miller,
at Éditions du Seuil, and in 1973 by L’espace analytique (The Analytic Space), edited by Maud Mannoni
and Patrick Guyomard at Denoël. This last press published memoirs about Vienna and the early years of
psychoanalysis in its series Freud et son temps (Freud
and His Time), edited by Jacqueline Rousseau-Dujardin. Gallimard launched the series Connaissance de
l’inconscient (Knowledge of the Unconscious), edited
by Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, as well as the journal Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, which appeared in the
spring of 1970 (it ceased publication in the fall of 1994
with number 50). Laplanche and Pontalis were also
the authors of the celebrated Language of psychoanalysis, first published in 1967. A number of academic
journals were launched at this time: Cahiers pour
l’analyse in 1966, Scilicet in 1968, Topique and Études
freudiennes in 1969, Ornicar? in 1975, Confrontation in
1979, and L’écrit du temps in 1982. In 1965 Paul
Ricoeur published De l’interprétation: Essai sur Freud,
an example of what was most attractive about psychoanalysis to philosophers and academics.
Jacques Lacan’s Écrits appeared at the end of 1966
as part of the series Le champ freudien, published by
Éditions du Seuil. The book achieved considerable
success with the public in spite of the difficulty of the
author’s style and ideas. As the popularity and longevity of Lacan’s seminars show, the École Freudienne de
Paris and Lacanian thought in general began to occupy
an increasingly prominent place in French psychoanalytic circles. Lacan’s ideas soon spread around the
world, especially in South America.
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The student movements of May 1968 were attracted
to a Marxist version of Freud inspired by Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich. In October of that year the
school reforms led to the creation of a department of
psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII in Vincennes by Serge Leclaire and Jacques-Alain Miller,
Lacan’s son-in-law, and a department of clinical social
science at the University of Paris VII. In October 1968
Gérard Mendel, the founder of socio-psychoanalysis,
published La révolte contre le père (A revolt against the
father), an explanation of the student protests. At the
opposite end of the spectrum, in 1969 there appeared
L’univers contestationnaire (The universe of conflict)
by Béla Grunberger and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel,
writing under the pseudonym André Stéphane.
Opposition to psychoanalysis arose with the publication in 1969 in Les temps modernes of ‘‘L’homme au
magnétophone’’ (The man with a tape recorder), with
a commentary by Jean-Paul Sartre. Its publication led
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis to resign from the journal’s
editorial board. In 1972, Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari published Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and Pierre Debray-Ritzen published La
scholastique freudienne, a caricature of past, present,
and future criticisms of psychoanalysis in France.
In the 1970s the French psychoanalytic movement
split into mutually exclusive factions. In 1974 René
Major and Dominique Geahchan created the group Confrontation, which claimed to be independent of the various psychoanalytic societies but over time grew closer to
the Lacanians. They organized animated discussions led
by Serge Leclaire (1977) and representatives of the French
feminist movement, led by Antoinette Fouque (1979).
Although theoretical and clinical advances continued to
be made in the Société française de psychanalyse and the
Association psychanalytique de France, as well as the
Quatrième groupe, public and media attention
focused on Jacques Lacan and his students.
With age, Lacan’s health and productivity declined.
Jacques-Alain Miller undertook the publication of an
‘‘official’’ transcript of Lacan’s seminars (often contested by Miller’s adversaries) and assumed a guiding
role in managing the École Freudienne de Paris, which
displeased Lacan’s older students. In the face of all this
dissension, Lacan, by now quite ill, ordered his school
dissolved on January 5, 1980. This led to a court trial
and the division of his followers into mutually hostile
groups. In his letter to the thousand, Lacan
announced, on February 21, 1980, the foundation of
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the Cause Freudienne. Shortly thereafter Jacques-Alain
Miller founded the École de la cause Freudienne. In
the years that followed the school developed an international reputation and became especially well established in South America. Jacques Lacan died on
September 9, 1981.
In November 1980 Dominique Geahchan helped
create the Collège de psychanalystes (Council of Psychoanalysts), which, despite its name, was not a training organization. It ceased functioning in June 1994.
Following the dissolution of the École Freudienne de
Paris, several new groups came into existence: in 1982
the Cercle Freudien (Freudian Circle) and the Association Freudienne internationale (International Freudian Association); in 1983 the Cartels constituants de
l’analyse Freudienne (Constituent Cartels for Freudian
Analysis), the Convention psychanalytique (Psychoanalytic Convention), and the Mouvement du coût
Freudien (Freudian Cost Movement) the École Lacanienne de psychanalyse (Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis); and in 1986 the Séminaires psychanalytiques de
Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Seminars). Also in 1982 the
Centre de formation et de recherches psychanalytiques
(Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research)
formed around Octave and Maud Mannoni. Its dissolution in 1994 led to the creation, in 1995, of the
Espace analytique (Analytic Space), of which Maud
Mannoni was president until her death in 1998, and
the Société de psychanalyse Freudienne (Freudian
Society for Psychoanalysis), under the direction of
Patrick Guyomard. Many of these associations were
subject to internal dissension and disappeared (at least
in their initial form) during the 1990s.
In France and elsewhere in the world, a crisis followed as a result of the excessive enthusiasm—in particular, excessive psychiatry and excessive ideology—
generated by an idealized image of psychoanalysis.
This enthusiasm was clearly associated with the personality and fame of Jacques Lacan. Subsequently, psychiatrists began to focus on the neurosciences. On
another front, renewed enthusiasm for philosophy and
religion led to a decline in interest in Freudian theory
in the universities. Within the field of psychoanalysis,
interactions over the years among the various psychoanalytic groups, which the first meetings of Confrontation had in its time attempted to establish, began to
overcome the violent splits of the past.
The Société psychanalytique de Paris continued to
assert its authority as the chief French psychoanalytic
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institution, partly through the increased readership of
the Revue française de psychanalyse at a time when a
number of publications ceased publication, many
because of poor sales. In fact, the association came to be
viewed as akin to a public institution by 1997. Around
this time André Green became internationally well
known for his writings on the ‘‘dead mother,’’ ‘‘the narcissism of death,’’ and ‘‘the negative,’’ and Joyce McDougall became well known, especially in North America,
for her work on the concept of normalcy and addiction.
Although less well known, Conrad Stein, following the
publication of his L’enfant imaginaire (The imaginary
child; 1971) and the organization of a number of conferences through Études Freudiennes (Freudian Studies), continued his research on Freud and his criticism
of the institutionalization of psychoanalysis.
Some APF members too made important contributions to the field. Worthy of mention are Guy
Rosolato’s work on the symbolic order and sacrifice,
generalized seduction, and deferred action (a topic
proposed by Jean Laplanche after a detailed reading of
Freud); the theoretical work and fiction of JeanBertrand Pontalis; Daniel Widlöcher’s work on change;
and Didier Anzieu’s research on Freud’s self-analysis,
the ‘‘skin ego,’’ psychodrama, and group analysis, a
field also investigated by René Kaës.
Through the publication of La violence de l’interprétation: Du pictogramme à l’énoncé (The Violence of
Interpretation: From Pictogram to Statement; 1975),
Piera Aulagnier’s work provided original theoretical
material for understanding and treating psychosis
(Mijolla-Mellor, 1998). Although somewhat less synthetic, the work of Octave and Maud Mannoni broadened the scope of psychoanalytic research, especially
in the area of child psychoanalysis, a field greatly influenced by the work of Serge Lebovici, René Diatkine,
and Michel Soulé. Françoise Dolto had a considerable
impact on psychoanalysis in France through her original and provocative ideas, some of which generated
considerable controversy. Her radio presentations and
the creation of the Maisons vertes, psychoanalytic
facilities for children, brought her considerable public
recognition in France, and her books have remained
successful.
A number of other authors—Béla Grunberger,
Michel Fain, Jean Bergeret, Jean Guillaumin, Jean-Paul
Valabrega, Serge Leclaire, François Perrier—made
important contributions to specifically French psychoanalysis, which has been characterized by a tendency
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toward clinically based theorizations and is generally
less empirical than the work of Anglo-American
authors. In particular, Lacanian psychoanalysts have
emphasized the importance of language and are probably closer to postwar French philosophy than any
other branch of psychoanalysis. They have been influenced by thinkers as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel
Foucault, and Jacques Derrida (who included psychoanalysis in the curriculum when he created the Collège
de philosophie in 1983).
Psychoanalysts in France remain unlicensed in spite
of several attempts by the government to institute licensing. Although psychoanalysts have managed to obtain
a number of rights as private practitioners through psychoanalytic associations, it is as accredited psychologists
that they are authorized to practice psychotherapy and
analysis. The attempt in December 1989 by Serge Lebovici, then head of the Association pour une instance, to
create a professional body consolidating all psychoanalysts in France was rebuffed by associations that were
members of the International Psychoanalytical Association. These organizations had no desire to merge with
the numerous practitioners operating in the Lacanian
tradition, because they felt that training requirements
in this tradition were inadequate.
There has been considerable interest in the history
of psychoanalysis as well. In June 1985 the Association
internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse (International Association for the History of Psychoanalysis)
was created. In 1984 this association merged with the
Société internationale d’histoire de la psychiatrie
(International Society for the History of Psychiatry),
created in 1982, to became the Société internationale
d’histoire de la psychiatrie et de la psychanalyse. In
1991, encouraged by Joseph Sandler, the International
Psychoanalytical Association formed an Archives and
History Committee within its organization.
French developments in psychoanalysis have also
expanded and exerted influence outside the country.
One sign of this is the election, in 1999, of Daniel
Widlöcher as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association and of Alain Gibeault as secretary
general, both of whom are French. Although no other
French theoretician has achieved Jacques Lacan’s global
recognition or, like Lacan, has created schools and institutions, the body of theoretical and clinical research in
French is considerable. In spite of the often irreconcilable differences within the French psychoanalytic
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community, this work has continued to enrich the
development of psychoanalysis throughout the world.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
Bibliography
Mijolla, Alain de. (1982). La psychanalyse en France, 1893–
1965. In Roland Jaccard (Ed.), Histoire de la psychanalyse
(Vol. 2, pp. 9–105). Paris: Hachette.
———. (1984). Quelques avatars de la psychanalyse en
France. Évolution psychiatrique, 49 (3), 773–795.
———. (1985). Pulsion d’investigation, fantasmes d’identification et roman familial. Topique, 34, 33–59.
———. (1988a). Psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts in
France between 1939 and 1945. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 12, 136–156, 2003.
———. (1988b). Quelques aperçus sur le rôle de la princesse Marie Bonaparte dans la création de la Société psychanalytique de Paris. Revue française de psychanalyse, 52
(5): 1197–1214.
———. (1991). L’édition en français des œuvres de Freud
avant 1940: Autour de quelques documents nouveaux.
Revue internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse, 4, 209–
270.
———. (1992). France, 1893–1965. In Peter Kutter (Ed.),
Psychoanalysis international: a guide to psychoanalysis
throughout the world, Vol. 1: Europe (pp. 66–113). Stuttgart, Germany: Frommann-Holzboog.
———. (1996). La scission de la Société psychanalytique de
Paris en 1953: quelques notes pour un rappel historique.
Cliniques méditerranéennes, 49/50, 9–30.
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1998). Penser la psychose: Une
lecture de l’œuvre de Piera Aulagnier. Paris: Dunod.
Roudinesco, Élisabeth. (1990). Jacques Lacan & Co.: A
history of psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985 (Jeffrey
Mehlman, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(Original work published in two vols., 1982, 1986.)
monly considered to be the first Brazilian psychiatrist.
Upon his return to São Paulo in 1893, Franco da
Rocha was named hospital practitioner at the Hospicio dos Alienados (a mental hospital created by a
state law in September 1848); prior to his arrival,
only general practitioners had worked at the facility,
and there was no specialization in the treatment of
psychiatric patients. Franco da Rocha was thus a pioneering psychiatrist and the first specialist to work in
a public institution in São Paulo. In 1896 he was
named head physician and director of the Hospicio
dos Alienados.
That same year he succeeded in establishing an agricultural colony for nearly eighty patients in Sorocaba.
This pioneering experiment in the field of work therapy was intended to serve as a pilot for a far more
ambitious project: a welfare institution for the mentally ill near São Paulo. Franco da Rocha received government approval for this project and chose as the site
a plantation near the railway center of Juquery, the
name by which this large psychiatric hospital was first
known. Completed in 1902 and since renamed after its
founder, the hospital is, as of 2005, still in operation,
and many generations of psychiatrists have been
trained there. Franco da Rocha served as director of
the institution until his retirement in 1923.
Franco da Rocha began his teaching activities in the
faculty of medicine of São Paulo in 1913. In 1918 he
became that institution’s first professor of clinical neuropsychiatry. In his courses, he made the earliest presentations on psychoanalytic doctrine in Brazil. His
inaugural lecture in 1919 dealt with Sigmund Freud’s
psychoanalytic theory. Transcribed and published in
the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo on March 20,
1919, under the title ‘‘Do delı́rio em geral’’ (On delusions in general), it marked the beginning of the dissemination of Freudian thought in São Paulo.
Francisco Franco da Rocha, Brazilian physician and
psychiatrist, was born on August 1864 in Amparo, in
the state of São Paulo, Brazil, and died there on April
8, 1933.
In 1920 Da Rocha published O pansexualismo na
doutrina de Freud (Pansexualism in the doctrine of
Freud), a popular scientific work that was well received
by the general public but that provoked a discreet
negative reaction in medical circles. In 1930, on the
advice of Durval Marcondes, he published a second
edition of this book in which he eliminated the word
pansexualism.
Franco da Rocha received his medical degree from
the national faculty of medicine of Rio de Janeiro in
1890; he was a student of Teixeira Brandao, com-
According to Marcondes’s unpublished biography
of Franco da Rocha, ‘‘In the presentations he made at
this institution, he included a Freudian approach to
FRANCO DA ROCHA, FRANCISCO
(1864–1933)
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mental illness, which at the time was something new
for us. This was the beginning, in the scientific circles
of São Paulo, of the move from an exclusively descriptive and organicist psychiatry toward a psychiatry that
was also becoming descriptive and psychodynamic.’’
Although he was a specialist in Freudian doctrine,
Franco da Rocha came into contact with it relatively
late in his career and was thus unable to incorporate it
into his clinical work.
FABIO HERRMANN AND ROBERTO YUTAKA SAGAWA
See also: Brazil.
Bibliography
Briquet, Raul. (1934). Franco da Rocha e a psicanálise: memórias do Hospital Franco da Rocha. São Paulo, Brazil.
Franco da Rocha, Francisco. (1928). A psicologia de Freud.
Revista brasileira de psicanálise, 1: 1.
———. (1930). A doutrina de Freud (2nd ed.). São Paulo,
Brazil: Companhia Nacional.
Perestrello, Marialzira. (1992a). A psicanálise no Brasil:
encontros psicanálise. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Imago.
———. (1992b). Histoire de la psychanalyse au Brésil des
origines à 1937. Frénésie, 2 (10), 283–304.
Sagawa, Roberto Yutaka. (1996). A construção local da psicanálise. Marı́lia, Brazil: Interior-Psicanálise.
During the Second World War, Frankl was arrested
in September 1942 and spent nearly three years in several concentration camps, including a brief stay at
Auschwitz, at Dachau (where he encountered Bruno
Bettelheim), and at Thereisienstadt. Frankl’s parents,
brother, and wife died in the camps. While a prisoner,
Frankl drafted a manuscript that was later published
as The Doctor and the Soul. After being liberated in
1945, he wrote Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager, which sold over a million copies when it was
published in 1947. Translated in English as Man’s
Search for Meaning, Frankl drew on his concentration
camp experience to develop the theory of ‘‘logotherapy,’’ where logos signifies the will to discover meaning
in one’s existence.
After the war Frankly was appointed professor of
psychiatry at the Vienna Neurological Policlinic. A
psychotherapist, he lectured throughout the world and
held numerous visiting professorships. In 1970 the
first Institute of Logotherapy was founded at the
United States International University at San Diego,
California. Subsequently, a number of independent
institutes were founded and as of 2005 operate in
more than 25 countries, including the Viktor Frankl
Institute in Vienna. Frankl wrote over thirty books,
which have been translated into more than twenty-five
languages. ‘‘The meaning of your life,’’ Frankl once
explained, ‘‘is to help others find the meaning of
theirs.’’
JACQUES SÉDAT
FRANKL, VIKTOR EMIL (1905–1997)
Viktor Emil Frankl, Austrian physician, psychoanalyst,
philosopher, and professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School, was
born on March 26, 1905, in Vienna, where he died of
heart disease on September 2, 1997.
Frankl was a twelfth-generation descendant of
Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague who created the Golem, Yossele, to save Jews from the blood
libel. At sixteen, while still a student at the lycée, Viktor sent Freud a text concerning ‘‘the origin of the
mimic movements of affirmation and negation’’
(Frankl, 1997, p. 48), which in 1924 was published in
the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. But Frankl
would turn away from psychoanalytic formulations
in favor of the work of Igor Caruso, humanistic psychology, and existential analysis, of which he was a
founder.
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See also: Austria; Caruso, Igor.
Bibliography
Frankl, Viktor. (1972). Man’s search for meaning: An introduction to logotherapy. Boston: Beacon Press.
———. (1997). Recollections: An autobiography. New York:
Plenum Press.
FREE ASSOCIATION
Free association (considered the ‘‘fundamental rule’’)
is the method used in psychoanalytic treatment. In
free association the patient says whatever comes to
mind without exercising any selectivity or censorship.
It is based on Freud’s deterministic concept of psychic
phenomena: ‘‘We start, as you see, on the assumption,
which he does not share in the least, that these
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spontaneous thoughts will not be arbitrarily chosen
but will be determined by their relation to his secret—
to his Ôcomplex’—and may, as it were, be regarded as
derivatives of that complex’’ (1906c, p. 108–109). The
origin of this new method of therapy can be dated
from Emmy von N’s irritation with Freud for interrupting her when she spoke. The method was not
codified until later and would become the keystone of
the technique of psychoanalytic treatment. There is no
mention of this in the Studies on Hysteria. At that time
a pressure on the forehead was intended to bring forth
an idea or an image with the help of which the cathartic method could be exercised.
The first mention of the fact that redirecting the
patient’s attention can allow connections to emerge
between a forgotten word and repressed ideas appears
in the analysis of the forgetting of ‘‘Signorelli’s’’ name
(1898b). But it is in the chapter on ‘‘The Method of
Interpreting Dreams’’ (1900a) that the process is
described in detail: ‘‘We . . . tell him that the success of
the psycho-analysis depends on his noticing and
reporting whatever comes into his head and not being
misled, for instance, into suppressing an idea because
it stikes him as unimportant or irrelevant or because it
seems to him meaningless’’ (p. 101). The technique
was used in the analysis of Dora and Freud specifies
that he managed to ‘‘the pure metal of valuable unconscious thoughts can be extracted from the raw material
of the patient’s associations’’ (1905e, p. 112). For
example, ‘‘It is a rule of psycho-analytic technique that
an internal connection which is still undisclosed will
announce its presence by means of a contiguity—a
temporal proximity of associations; just as in writing,
if Ôa’ and Ôb’ are put side by side, it means that the syllable Ôab’ is to be formed out of them (p. 39) . . . in a line
of association, ambiguous words . . . act like a point at
a junction (p. 65n) . . . I am in the habit of regarding
associations such as this, which bring forward something that agrees with the content of an assertion of
mine, as a confirmation from the unconscious of what
I have said (p. 57) . . . [the unwillingness on Dora’s
part to follow the rules of dream-interpretation]
coupled with the hesitancy and meagreness of her
associations with the jewel-case, showed me that we
were here dealing with material which had been very
intensely repressed’’ (p. 69n).
It is in ‘‘On Beginning the Treatment’’ (1913c) that
Freud made these ideas explicit: ‘‘One more thing
before you start. What you tell me must differ in one
61 6
respect from an ordinary conversation. Ordinarily you
rightly try to keep a connecting thread running
through your remarks and you exclude any intrusive
ideas that may occur to you and any side-issues, so as
not to wander too far from the point. But in this case
you must proceed differently. You will notice that as
you relate things various thoughts will occur to you
which you would like to put aside on the ground of
certain criticisms and objections. You will be tempted
to say to yourself that this or that is irrelevant here, or
is quite up important, or nonsensical, so that there is
no need to say it. You must never give in to these criticisms, but must say it in spite of them—indeed, you
must say it precisely because you feel an aversion to
doing so. Later on you will find out and learn to
understand the reason for this injunction, which is
really the only one you have to follow. So say whatever
goes through your mind. Act as though, for instance,
you were a traveler sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside.
Finally, never forget that you have promised to be
absolutely honest, and never leave anything out
because, for some reason or other, it is unpleasant to
tell it’’ (p. 135).
This method of free association was often confused
with the association experiments involving stimulus
words that Eugen Bleuler and Carl Gustav Jung were
doing at the same time at the Burghölzli clinic. Even
though he referred to the method in ‘‘Psycho-Analysis
and Establishment of Facts in Legal Proceedings’’
(1906c), Freud was careful to differentiate his own
work from it and, on February 26, 1908, referred to
this technique as a ‘‘coarse method, to which psychoanalysis is far superior’’ (Nunberg and Federn, 1962–
1975, p. 335). But for years commentators, especially
in France, have attributed its use to him.
In 1920, in ‘‘A Note on the Prehistory of the Technique of Analysis,’’ Freud recognized the ‘‘cryptamnesia’’
that led to his claiming to be the inventor of a method,
a description of which he had read when he was fourteen in a text by Ludwig Börne, entitled, ‘‘The Art of
Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days.’’ In it he
stated that the best way for the writer to banish inhibitions and censorship was to write down everything
that came to mind for a period of three days.
Once again we see how an isolated idea that circulates in the popular mind is inadequate on its own and
what developments are needed for it to be integrated
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within a body of thought that transcends it. The
method of free association, by freeing speech in its
search for a hidden truth, has become the principal
method of producing the material for analysis, even if,
through overproduction, the freedom it offers sometimes becomes a form of resistance to any form of
interpretation.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Active imagination (analytical psychology);
Complex; Evenly-suspended attention; Framework of the
psychoanalytic cure; Hermeneutics; Technique with
adults, psychoanalytic; Sudden involuntary idea; Word
association (analytic psychology).
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1906c). Psycho-analysis and the establishment of facts in legal proceedings. SE, 9: 103–114.
Nunberg Hermann, and Federn, Ernst. (1962–1975). Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. New York: International Universities Press
FREE ENERGY/BOUND ENERGY
Freud regarded energy as a capacity with two modes of
functioning: that of free energy, in which energy proceeds towards an immediate and total discharge, and
that of bound energy, in which it is blocked and
accumulates.
Freud used the concept of energy in his theory in an
attempt to explain a point of transition between the
‘‘quantity’’ of energy and the ‘‘quality’’ of the representation. To this end, he addressed the question of energy
in the ‘‘Project’’ (1950a; Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967/
1974; Laplanche, 1976) in a far more radical way than
Josef Breuer had done. There he described ‘‘primary
process’’ as an energic state of disorganization that the
ego on its emergence seeks to regulate during the ‘‘secondary process’’ by managing the energy according to
the constancy principle.
As concerns energy, however, the distinction
clearly does not always work perfectly for Freud
because in this text he only used this term twice and
without the qualification ‘‘bound’’ or ‘‘free.’’
Although Freud’s idea of energy used the inevitably
sexual encounter between the child and the adult as a
metaphor here, unfortunately he combined this with
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a genetic perspective in which primary-process disorganization precedes the organization that characterizes the secondary process. Accordingly, this hierarchical Jacksonian perspective prevented him from
the outset from fully conceiving of the primary process as the result of the absorption of adult sexuality
into the child’s psychic apparatus.
It should also be noted that with its excessively cutand-dried oppositions, the dynamics posited by Freud
are no more satisfactory in relation to the matter of
life. In Freud’s concept of the child, he has no chance
of survival, whether this is in terms of an excessively
organized or an excessively withdrawn system. The
latter perspective very clearly leads to the theory of
narcissism, while the former leads to the conceptualization of the death drive.
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), Freud
reattributed the role of binding to the preconscious.
It is also here that the expression ‘‘cathecting energy’’
appears, described as ‘‘mobile and capable of discharge’’ (p. 597), which conflicts with the theories of
the ‘‘Project,’’ in which cathexis had been conceived
as a way of producing bound states. In fact, this concerns an energy in search of representations and,
furthermore, an ‘‘object.’’ The cathexis of energy is
next conceived (1915d) as an approach to the
unconscious and its decrease (decathexis) is attributed to repression. In ‘‘The Unconscious’’ (1915e),
Freud stated that Breuer had distinguished between
‘‘two different states of energy in mental life; one in
which energy is tonically Ôbound’ and the other in
which it is freely mobile’’ (p. 188). In fact, Breuer
(1895d) had superimposed on psychic states two
types of energy that accorded with the knowledge of
the time but which Freud had gone on to use in a
much more imaginative way. In Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (1920g), still unaware of a further distortion, Freud also attributed the idea to Breuer by
maintaining that he had established the distinction
between ‘‘two kinds of cathexis of the psychical systems or their elements—a freely flowing cathexis
that presses on towards discharge and a quiescent
cathexis’’ (p. 31).
Freud thus established the foundation for his theory of a death drive that unbinds and an Eros that
binds. This could be considered as a diluted view of
sexuality, simultaneously binding and unbinding,
which he had encountered from his first analyses.
The main impetus for this development may be the
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theory of narcissism in which Freud had exalted the
theme of happiness found in love of the external
object, a theme that had already appeared in embryonic form in the ‘‘Project,’’ with its Jacksonian perspective of a possible transition from unbinding to
binding.
FREUD, ALEXANDER GOTTHOLD EFRAIM. See
In conclusion, Freud did not succeed in resolving
the question of free energy or framing it in dialectic
terms because it simultaneously applied to both conscious (1933a [1932]) and unconscious functioning.
The theoretical problem arises, in terms of the conscious, from the perception that leaves no trace and, in
terms of the unconscious, from the primary process. If
free energy cannot be specific, the solution would be
to remove the distinction between free and bound
energy because this adventitious hypothesis, since
Breuer’s proposition, has confused energy and state. In
fact, a system that possesses what can be (wrongly)
described as a disordered state can operate with the
same energy as an ordered system.
Psychoanalyst and pioneer in child analysis, Anna
Freud was born on December 3, 1895, in Vienna, and
died on October 9, 1982, in London.
BERTRAND VICHYN
See also: Psychic energy.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4–5: 1–625.
Freud, Sigmund (siblings)
FREUD, ANNA (1895–1982)
Anna Freud was Sigmund and Martha Freud’s third
daughter and sixth and last child. When she was a year
old, Martha’s sister Minna joined the family. The two
women had carefully defined roles, but a warm and
affectionate Catholic nursemaid, Josefine Cihlarz, to
whom Anna felt very close, took a very active part in
the upbringing of the three youngest children. The
children were treated leniently but firmly: disciplined
behavior and punctuality were emphasized and
expected. Anna Freud displayed these traits throughout her life. Her love of animals may, in part, have
reflected Josefine’s influence.
She started elementary school at six, and at ten
entered the Salka Goldman Cottage Lyceum for girls.
She read widely and wrote poetry. Her remarkable
memory was a major asset at school and throughout
her life; later, as a psychoanalyst, she never forgot the
details of any case reported to her, and could make telling use of them in clinical discussion.
———. (1915d). Repression. SE, 14: 141–158.
———. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159–204.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1–64.
———. (1933a). New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
———. (1950a). Extracts from the Fliess papers. SE, 1: 173–
280.
Freud Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
Laplanche, Jean. (1976). Life and death in psychoanalysis
(Jeffrey Mehlman, Trans.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1974). The
Language of Psycho-Analysis (Donald Nicholson-Smith,
Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1967)
FREE-FLOATING ATTENTION. See Evenlysuspended attention
61 8
She was on holiday in England when war broke out
in 1914. Now an enemy alien, she managed to return
to Austria with the Ambassador and his entourage, traveling by an adventurous route. She trained as an
elementary school teacher at the Lyceum, and her
industry and rare intelligence ensured her appointment to the teaching staff.
She was always a wonderful teacher, but her interest
in psychoanalysis was evident in early adolescence. She
became Librarian of the Viennese Psychoanalytic
Association, and was analyzed by her father—unthinkable perhaps nowadays, but not such a rare event at
this time. She read her first paper (on beating fantasies) to the Association in 1922, and was thereby
granted membership.
Her teaching experience served her well as a pioneer in child analysis. Melanie Klein was already analyzing children in Berlin; but the two leaders in the
field used children’s play differently in their techniINTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
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ques. Anna Freud disputed Klein’s belief that play was
the child’s equivalent of free association in adults, but
this was only one of many later differences. Klein
went to England in 1927 and became a powerful
influence in the British Society. Disparities of view
between the Viennese and British Societies became
pronounced, initially on the basis of child analytic
practice.
Anna Freud’s new ideas, charm, and lifelong capacity for winning collaborators quickly secured her a
large following. Her seminars in Vienna attracted colleagues from Prague and Budapest. A wide range of
disorders were treated and discussed, but Anna
Freud’s attention to normal development matched
her interest in pathology. She believed it was impossible to understand the one without the other. She
applied her growing knowledge to the field of education and gave lectures to teachers and parents. With
her friend and colleague Dorothy Burlingham, she set
up what she called ‘‘a cross between a crèche and a
nursery school,’’ financed by the wealthy psychoanalyst Edith Jackson, for the poorest children in Vienna
who were given both bodily and psychological care.
These experiences fuelled Anna Freud’s interest in the
psychological consequences and concomitants of physical illness and laid a foundation for her interest in
pediatric practice.
Her work with adults fostered her need to know
more about psychiatry and she attended, on a regular
basis, ward-rounds at the University’s Psychiatric
Clinic, headed by Wagner-Jauregg, the Nobel Prize
winner, and staffed by Paul Schilder and Heinz
Hartmann. She retained this interest for the rest of
her life.
Earlier publications were followed by her first book
in 1936, appearing one year later in English as The Ego
and the Mechanisms of Defence. This major work was
the first to distinguish between recognized defenses
against instinctual drive derivatives and defenses
against painful affects, newly observed and described
by her.
The Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, and Princess
Marie Bonaparte and Ernest Jones together secured
safe transfer to London for the Freud family and a
number of associates. Freud, Anna, and other psychoanalysts were admitted to the British PsychoAnalytical Society. Though well received, clinical and
theoretical differences between the two groups were
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pronounced and culminated in a series of controversial discussions between 1941 and 1945. The disagreements were beyond resolution, and two parallel
training courses were set up in recognition of this
fact.
Freud died in 1939 from the cancer of the jaw that
had plagued him for fourteen years, and Anna Freud
was his devoted nurse. She continued to support the
principles behind his psychoanalytic thinking, but she
had a highly original mind and never followed him
slavishly. After the outbreak of war, the predicament of
children made homeless through bombing led her to
establish, with Dorothy Burlingham, the Hampstead
War Nurseries. Careful observations and meticulous
records, made with the help of staff who rarely left the
premises, vastly increased existing knowledge of child
development and problems of residential care. The
findings are collected by Anna and Dorothy in Young
Children In Wartime (1942) and Infants Without
Families (1944).
In 1947 Anna Freud founded a course in child analysis, and in 1952 established the Hampstead Child
Therapy Clinic. With these unequalled facilities clinical research expanded substantially. In this Anna
Freud’s charm and authority served her unsurpassed
capacity to draw staff and students into the work and
make substantial contributions. She herself continued
to publish major papers, but her most important book
was Normality and Pathology of Childhood (1965). Her
writing continued apace, with major contributions to
psychoanalytic diagnosis and to clinical and theoretical understanding of a wide range of developmental
problems and disturbances. Her work in the fields of
education, pediatrics, and family law (Beyond the Best
Interests of the Child), in which she collaborated with
Professors Albert J. Solnit and Joseph Goldstein from
Yale University, won her wide recognition within those
disciplines. She received many honors and was
appointed Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in
1967. Of her many honorary degrees, she was especially proud of the MD from the University of Vienna
(1975) and the PhD from the Goethe Institute in
Frankfurt (1981) where, half a century earlier, her
father had been awarded the Goethe prize for
literature.
By this time Anna Freud was seriously ill with an
advanced anemia of old age, but her mind remained
clear and active throughout the slow physical
deterioration that led to her death. Her ashes were
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F R E U D - B E R N A Y S , M A R T H A (1861 – 1951)
placed next to her father’s at Golders Green crematorium in London.
CLIFFORD YORKE
Work discussed: Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, The.
See also: Abandonment; Adaptation; Adolescent crisis;
Altruism; Andreas-Salomé, Louise (Lou); Austria; Berggasse 19, Wien IX; British Psycho-Analytical Society;
Burlingham-Rosenfeld/Hietzing Schule; BurlinghamTiffany, Dorothy; Childhood; Children’s play; Child psychoanalysis; Controversial Discussions; Defense; Ego
(ego psychology); Externalization-internalization; First
World War: The effect on the development of psychoanalysis; Freud-Bernays, Martha; Freud Museum; Freud, the
Secret Passion; Lay analysis; Gesammelte Schriften; Gesammelte Werke; Gestapo; Goethe (prize); Great Britain;
Hampstead Clinic; Hogarth Press; Identification with the
aggressor; Imago. Zeitschrift für die Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften; Infantile neurosis; Lehrinstitut der Wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung; Masochism; Negative transference; Neutrality/
benevolent neutrality; Phobias in children; Psychoanalytic
Study of the Child, The; Second World War: The effect on
the development of psychoanalysis; Sigmund Freud
Archives; Sigmund Freud Copyrights Limited; Sigmund
Freud Museum; Splits in psychoanalysis; Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud; Telepathy; Transference in children; Unconscious
fantasy; Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung.
Bibliography
Freud, Anna. (1936). Collected writings. New York: International Universities Press.
———. (1968). Acting out. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 49.
———. (1977). Fears, anxieties, and phobic phenomena.
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 32, 85–90.
———. (1979). Personal memories of Ernest Jones. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 60, 285-287.
———. (1980). Introduction. In Sigmund Freud: The analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy. Frankfurt am Main:
S. Fischer.
———. (1981). Insight. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child,
36, 241–250.
Goldstein, Joseph; Freud, Anna; and Solnit, Albert J. (1973).
Beyond the best interests of the child. New York: The
Free Press.
62 0
FREUD-BERNAYS, MARTHA (1861–1951)
Martha Bernays was born on July 26, 1861, the second
daughter of Berman Bernays (1826–1879), a merchant, and his wife Emmeline (née Philipp, 1930–
1910). Isaac Bernays, Martha’s paternal grandfather,
was Chief Rabbi of Hamburg, and Berman continued
the religious tradition. Emmeline Bernays was intelligent, resolute, well-educated, and shared Berman’s
Jewish orthodoxy. Martha obeyed her with true devotion. Berman moved to Vienna in 1869 as secretary to
a well-known economist. Emmeline loved Hamburg
and disliked the move. On December 9, 1879, Berman
died suddenly of a heart attack. Martha became an
intelligent young woman without intellectual pretensions, svelte, attractively pale, and gracious, and she
had a warm personality that brought many male
admirers.
Freud met Martha in April 1882; though previously
uninvolved with women, he quickly fell in love. His
great passion (it was nothing less) was more slowly
returned by Martha, but with unwavering steadfastness, and they were soon engaged. The betrothal was
secret at first, since Freud was without the means to
support a wife. The engagement is well documented
by Ernest Jones (1953), who was privileged to read, in
their entirety, the love letters that almost daily passed
between them. Jones declared that the vast set of letters
‘‘would be a not unworthy contribution to the great
love literature of the world.’’
During the engagement (1882–1886) Freud was at
times despairing, both because of his poverty and his
agonizing attacks of jealousy, not only of men Martha
knew, but even of her mother and brother. Martha, by
contrast, was unchangingly certain of Freud’s love.
Freud’s eldest sister Anna became engaged to Martha’s
brother, Eli, at Christmas 1882, and Freud and Martha
then declared their own commitment. The hardest tribulation came in June, when Emmeline returned to
her former home at Wandsbek, near Hamburg, and
Martha, protesting, went with her. Freud had been
obliged to give up research work, and was struggling to
establish a private practice. Finally, their civil wedding,
on September 13, 1886 at Wandsbek, was not recognised in Austria, where a Jewish marriage was
obligatory, much to Freud’s distaste. In spite of her
upbringing, Martha joined Freud in his religious
antipathy, and Jewish practices formed no part of their
life together.
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The honeymoon was largely spent in Holstein on
the Baltic, and the bride, just 25, and the husband, 30,
settled in Vienna at 8 Maria Theresienstrasse. Their
first child, Mathilde, arrived on October 16, 1887. The
marriage was remarkably happy, with no return of
Freud’s early, intermittent doubts of Martha’s love.
Martha was an excellent wife and mother; both were
devoted parents. Two sons were born: Jean Martin
(after Charcot) on December 6, 1889, and Oliver (after
Cromwell) on February 19, 1891. More space was
needed, and it was at 19 Bergasse that the three
remaining children were born: Ernst (after Brücke) on
April 6, 1892; Sophie on April 12, 1893; and Anna
(after Freud’s sister) on December 3, 1895. Josefine
Cihlarz, a Catholic Kinderfrau, then looked after Anna,
Sophie and Ernst. About a year later, Martha’s sister
Minna, whose fiancé had died, joined the family.
Minna differed from Martha in both looks and
temperament: large as opposed to petite; a little imperious as opposed to retiring; outspoken as opposed to
discrete. But they got on well enough, and ran the
home with clear boundaries between responsibilities.
Freud found Minna an intellectual companion who,
unlike Martha, took an interest in his developing psychological theories. Martha made it her duty to facilitate Freud’s professional work with a supportive daily
routine, and their mutual devotion was unshakeable.
Martha read widely and discussed with her husband
the major works she read. They quoted poetry
together—by Goethe, Heine, Uhland and others.
Martha, whose letters were sometimes in verse, kept
up with current literature to the end of her life. She
entertained well; and distinguished visitors included
Thomas Mann, one of her favorite authors.
There were misfortunes in the family. Martha was
severely ill in 1919, and in the following year Sophie’s
death from a similar illness was a bitter blow. Many
years later the savage disruption of the Anschluss, on
March 11, 1938, signalled the end of life in Vienna.
Through the good offices of Marie Bonaparte and Ernest Jones the family able to move to London, and
accorded diplomatic privileges. Eventually, Martha,
Sigmund Freud, and Anna settled for good at 20 Maresfield Gardens. Dorothy Burlingham was unable to
join for some time; Paula Fichtl, the maidservant, was
first interned in the Isle of Man; and Minna was soon
admitted to a nursing home.
Martha was efficient in the home even without Paula’s help. She did the shopping daily, became well
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known to the local shopkeepers, and remained a hostess of considerable charm to the many visitors.
Although Martha was deeply worried about Freud’s
health, it was Anna who nursed him, making his care a
duty above all others. By March 1939 he began to deteriorate, and died on the 23 September, 1939.
In a response to Margarethe Nunberg’s condolences,
Martha said they would have to live without his goodness and wisdom (Young-Bruehl, 1988). In spite of all
her children’s love, and support from all over the
world, her life, she said, had lost its sense and meaning.
Minna died in 1941, and Martha’s sense of loneliness intensified. At the end of the war came the horrific news of the deaths of members of the Freud family
in concentration camps, of which, hitherto, there had
been no intimation. Bereaved relatives were accommodated and comforted at Maresfield Gardens.
In due course Martha became chronicler of the lives
of herself and her husband, and as such, a unique
resource for biographers, though family letters
remained private. She wrote to friends worldwide, and
composed short poems for family occasions. She
stayed in charge of home and garden but, increasingly
frail as she approached ninety, needed home nursing.
She died on November 2, 1951.
CLIFFORD YORKE
See also: Berggasse 19, Wien IX; Bernays, Minna; Freud,
Anna; Freud, Ernst; Freud, Oliver; Judaism and
psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Jones, Ernest. (1957). Sigmund Freud. Life and work. London: Hogarth.
Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth. (1988). Anna Freud: A biography.
New York: Summit Books.
FREUD, EMMANUEL See Freud, Sigmund
(siblings)
FREUD, ERNST (1892–1970)
Ernst Freud was born on April 6, 1892, in Vienna and
died April 7, 1970, in London. The fourth of six children of Sigmund and Martha Freud, he was named in
honor of Ernst Brücke. As a child there were references
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F R E U D , E R N S T (1892 –1 970)
to him in his father’s correspondence, where Sigmund
Freud discussed the child’s angina and various fevers.
On June 12, 1900, Freud wrote, ‘‘Ernst had a fever
again for four days. He has unflagging energy, even
with a 38.5 [C] fever he continues to cry out: I won’t
be able to get well, I want to get up; it was only at 39.5
[C] that this cantankerous fellow took note and
became amiable.’’
He seems not to have been overly influenced by his
father’s fame and chose his profession without interference. On June 15, 1909, Freud wrote to Oskar Pfister, ‘‘Ernst, who was your favorite and has almost
become ours, is taking his final examination, although
he is suffering from an ulcer of the small intestine and
is not doing well at all. He wants to become an architect. I don’t know if I’m supposed to agree with this.’’
In fact he did become an architect, though he was
often referred to as the ‘‘fortunate child’’ or, as Freud
wrote to his friend Max Eitingon in London in 1938,
‘‘a tower of strength.’’
A militant Zionist, he participated in the Zionist Congress held in September 1913 in Vienna. Along with his
brother Martin, he joined the army in 1914; he left for
Galicia in August 1915 but returned a year later on leave
to see his family, ‘‘as sprightly as ever.’’ He was demobilized without problem but suffered for years from the
results of pneumonia contracted during the war.
After the war he completed his studies at the
Munich Technische Universität and, in December
1919, settled in Berlin, where he became engaged to
Lucy Brasch, marrying her shortly afterward (‘‘Lux,’’
1896–1989). ‘‘To all appearances a good and beautiful
creature,’’ Freud wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé. That
same year Karl Abraham had, on March 13, told his
father that Ernst ‘‘had attained lasting merit in setting
up the clinic [and would be] universally admired.’’
Ernst and Lucy’s first child, Stefan (Stephen) Gabriel, was born July 31, 1921, ‘‘He is my fourth grandson, but I regret the absence of a grand-daughter,’’
Freud wrote to Ernest Jones, who wrote back, ‘‘I was
delighted to learn that Ernst has a son: a new acquisition for Zionism.’’ Lucy, who was not Jewish, ‘‘had
been so sure of having three sons that she decided
from the beginning to give each of them the name of
an archangel in addition to a more earthly first name.’’
(Jones, 1959, III) There followed Lucian Michael on
December 8, 1922, who became a well-known painter,
a friend of Francis Bacon, and of Klemens (Clement)
62 2
Raphael, who was known in Great Britain as a television host, a specialist in gastronomy, and a deputy in
the Liberal Party. Freud met these friends for the first
time in Berlin during Christmas 1925, and it was in
Berlin, while staying with his son, that he was visited
by Albert Einstein and his wife.
The ‘‘architect,’’ as Ernst was known, helped renovate the Tegel clinic between 1927 and 1928. It was also
in 1928 that he worked on the Berlin Psychoanalytic
Institute. On October 22, 1930, Freud wrote to Lou
Andreas-Salomé, ‘‘Today, I gave my son Ernst the
order to send you a thousand marks from the Goethe
prize money he is holding for me.’’
In 1933 the rise of Nazism forced Ernst to emigrate,
in spite of the fact that ‘‘he was sheltered because of his
wife,’’ as Freud wrote to Jones. Moreover, it was
because of his wife that he chose Great Britain, where
he arrived during the summer. On June 3, 1933, Jones
told Sigmund, ‘‘We were able to provide Ernst with
good introductions and he has certainly lived up to his
reputation as being a Glücksind (lucky person). You
have nothing to worry about as far as he is concerned.
We will be delighted to have him in England, even
though I have wondered if, with his bubbly personality, he wouldn’t be better off in France.’’
His integration in British society was not without
difficulties, in spite of the help of Jones, who commissioned him to build a wing for his cottage in 1935–
1936. On October 14, 1937, Arnold Zweig wrote to
Freud, ‘‘I need to get in touch with you and let you
know that I was pleased with my visit to your Ernst in
London. He is tranquil, serene, and full of juvenile
enthusiasm, and his home is delightful in its nobility
and simple modernity.’’
Ernst traveled to Paris to meet his parents when
they arrived in June 1938 and was also close by when
they settled in London. Together with his sister Anna,
he found the house in Maresfield Gardens, where he
had an elevator installed, which Freud needed to reach
his bedroom.
At the time of his father’s death, he was, with Martin and Anna, appointed an executor of the will. He
ran the corporation that was formed to manage the
rights for Freud’s work and, with Lucy’s assistance,
worked on all the major Freud publications that were
to help popularize his work and psychoanalysis in general after the 1950s: his correspondence with Wilhelm
Fliess (1950a), his general correspondence (1960a),
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FREUD, JAKOB KOLLOMAN (OR KELEMEN
and so on. Shortly before his death, in late 1969, he
had the pleasure to be given by Franz Jung, also an
architect, the letters that had been kept by his father
‘‘in a document box covered with linen cloth, on
which had been written in large capital letters,
ÔFREUD LETTERS.’’’
Ernst Freud died on April 7, 1970. After his death,
Ilse Grubrich-Simitis was asked to complete the pictorial biography he had planned to publish and on
which he had worked with Lucy. The work finally
appeared in 1976 as Sigmund Freud: His Life in Pictures
and Words.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Berggasse 19, Wien IX; Berliner Psychoanalytisches Institut; Freud-Bernays, Martha; Sigmund Freud
Copyrights Limited.
Bibliography
Berthelsen, Detlef. (1989). Alltag bei Familie Freud. Die Erinnerungen der Paula Fichtl. Hamburg: Hoffman & Campe.
Gay, Peter. (1988). Freud: A life for our time. LondonMelbourne: Dent.
Jones, Ernest. (1959). Free associations. Memories of a
psycho-analyst. London, New York: Basic Books.
Roazen, Paul. (1993). Meeting Freud’s family. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press.
FREUD, ESTHER ADOLFINE (DOLFI). See Freud,
Sigmund (siblings)
FREUD, JAKOB KOLLOMAN (OR KELEMEN
OR KALLAMON) (1815–1896)
Jakob Freud, the father of Sigmund Freud, was born on
April 1, 1815, (a date arbitrarily chosen by Jakob Freud)
in Tysmenitz (Galicia) and died in Vienna on October
23, 1896. Of his father’s family Freud wrote, ‘‘I believe
they lived a long time in Rhenish territory (Cologne),
that during the persecution of Jews in the fourteenth or
fifteenth century they fled east, and in the nineteenth
century returned from Lithuania, through Galicia, to a
German-speaking country, Austria’’ (1925d).
In the ‘‘Gedenkenblatt,’’ where he entered the birth
date of May 6, 1856, and circumcision on May 13 of
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OR
K A L L A M O N ) ( 1815 –1 896)
the following year of ‘‘my son Schlomo Sigmund,’’
Jakob Freud refers to his grandfather ‘‘Rabbi Ephraim’’
and his father ‘‘Rabbi Schlomo,’’ who died in Tysmenitz on February 21, two months prior to the birth of
Freud, who was given the same first name. The sources
of Freud’s unconscious identifications (Mijolla, 1975/
1981 [1975]) have been traced to the references to
honorifics appearing in this genealogy.
The son of Schlomo Freud and Peppi (Pesel) Hofmann, Jakob had, out of admiration for Bismarck,
chosen the date of April 1 as his birth date, although in
reality the date is assumed to be December 18, 1815.
Born in Tysmenitz, Galicia, he was the eldest of four
children. His younger brother Josef (1825–1897),
arrested in 1865 and condemned in February 1866 to
ten years in prison for trafficking in counterfeit rubles
(Gicklhorn, 1976), was the ‘‘criminal’’ uncle (Verbrecher) who appeared in the Interpretation of Dreams
and caused so much grief for his older brother.
Freud wrote to his fiancée about another ‘‘uncle
from Breslau,’’ Abae. ‘‘He is a younger brother of my
father, a rather ordinary man, a merchant, and the
story of his family is very sad. Of the four children
only one daughter is normal, and married in Poland.
One boy is hydrocephalic and feeble minded; another,
who as a young man showed some promise, went
insane at the age of nineteen, and a daughter went
the same way when she was twenty-odd. I had so completely forgotten this uncle that I have always thought
of my own family as free of any hereditary taint. But
since I have been thinking about Breslau it all came
back to me, and I am afraid the fact that one of the
sons of the other (very unhappy) uncle in Vienna died
an epileptic is something I cannot shift to the mother’s
side, with the result that I have to acknowledge to a
considerable Ôneuropathological taint,’ as it is called’’
(letter of February 10, 1886).
Jakob married young, in 1832. His wife was Sally
Kanner and together they had four children, two of
whom survived. The elder, Emanuel, was born in 1833
(or 1832), followed by Philipp, born in 1836 (or 1834).
A fabric salesman, there are references to a trip Jakob
is supposed to have made with his father Schlomo and
maternal grandfather Siskind Hoffmann to Freiberg in
1838–1839, then of extended stays in 1844–1845 as
‘‘tolerated Jews.’’ He spent several months there before
joining his family in Tysmenitz, then received the
authorization to settle in Klogsdorf, near Freiberg, in
1848. In the ‘‘register of Jews,’’ there is a record from
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FREUD, JAKOB KOLLOMAN (OR KELEMEN
OR
K A L L A M O N ) (1 815 –18 96)
October 31, 1852, that at their home are: Jakob Freud,
thirty-eight, with his wife Rebeka, thirty-two, and the
children, Emanuel, twenty-one, with his wife, eighteen
years, and Filip, sixteen’’ (Sajner, 1968; Gicklhorn,
1976). Mention of this ‘‘Rebeka,’’ rather than ‘‘Sally’’
has led to much wild speculation, but it is possible that
because of an administrative error or for reasons of
concealment, the entry refers to the wife of his brother
Joseph, Rebecca Freud-Rawnial.
Whoever this ‘‘Rebeka’’ may have been, Jakob was
no longer married when he met Amalia Nathanson,
twenty-one years his junior. They were married
according to the Jewish rites in Vienna, on July 29,
1855, before settling in Freiberg in the house at Schlossergasse 117, owned by the locksmith Zajic. In 1857
his wife was referred to as ‘‘the wife of the wool draper’’ (Wollhändlersgattin).
There followed six births in ten years: Sigmund, on
May 6, 1856; Julius, in October 1857, who died the following April; Anna, on December 31, 1858; Regine
Debora (Rosa), on March 21, 1860; Maria (Mitzi), on
March 22, 1861; Esther Adolfine (Dolfi), on July 23,
1862; Pauline Regine (Paula), on May 3, 1864; and
Alexander Gotthold Efraim, on April 15 (or 19), 1866.
Over this period Jakob’s situation changed. Poor
business decisions forced him to emigrate to Leipzig,
and then to Vienna, where he settled permanently. His
sons left for Manchester, England, where they became
prosperous businessmen; his wife and their two first
children joined him in August 1859. Establishing a
permanent residence in Vienna turned out to be extremely difficult, and bad memories of this period stayed
with Sigmund Freud throughout his life.
From this point on nothing is known of Jakob’s
activities or the source of his income, which, although
modest, allowed him to raise his large family and
enabled Sigmund—the talented son he so admired—to
attend school without having to earn a living to help
the family. This mystery became the source of several
malicious assumptions when the counterfeiting operations of Uncle Josef were revealed. The investigation led
all the way to Manchester, although no evidence was
found incriminating Jakob or his two émigré sons.
A tall man, who according to his son resembled
Garibaldi, Jakob was a calm and respected patriarch.
An observant Jew close to the Haskala movement, he
appears to have been more traditional than Freud
claimed. Although it is not known if Sigmund himself
62 4
was bar-mitzvahed, he learned to read with the Philippson Bible, which was presented to him on his
thirty-fifth birthday with a dedication in Hebrew: ‘‘My
dear son Schlomo (Salomo), in the seventh . . . [illegible] of your life, the spirit of the Lord began to move
you [cf. Judges, 13:25], and said to you: Go, read in My
book that I have written, and there will be opened to
you the sources of wisdom, or knowledge and understanding . . .. For a long time the book has been hidden
[kept safe] like the fragments of the Table of the Law in
the shrine of his servant, [yet] for the day on which
you have completed your thirty-fifth year I have had it
covered with a new leather binding and given it the
name ÔSpring up, O Well! Sing ye unto it’ [cf. Numbers
21:17), and offer it to you for a remembrance and a
memorial of love—From your father, who loves you
with unending love—Jacob son of Rabbi [probably
‘‘Reb,’’ meaning Mr., M.K.] Sch. Freud. In the capital
city of Vienna, 29 Nissan 5651, May 6, 1891’’ (Krull,
1979, p. 160).
Martin Freud, his grandson, recalls his amiable nature, and his granddaughter, Judith Bernays-Heller,
recalls, ‘‘[He] divided his time between reading the
Talmud (in the original) at home, sitting in a coffee
house, and walking in the parks. . . . Tall and broad,
with a long beard, he was very kind and gentle, and
humorous in the bargain—much more so than my
grandmother. . . . It was not a pious household, but I
do remember one Seder at which I, as the youngest at
the table, had to make the responses to the reading of
the song about the sacrifice of the kid. I was greatly
impressed by the way my grandfather recited the ritual
and the fact that he knew it by heart amazed me.’’
(1973, p. 336).
For Sigmund, the son, things were less simple.
There are references in The Interpretation of Dreams to
his reprimands, his irritated comment, ‘‘Nothing will
ever come of this boy,’’ the reproaches for his expenditures on books. On several occasions he attributes his
father’s compulsion for earning money to his poor
financial management. For example, on December 18,
1916, he wrote to Karl Abraham, ‘‘I have little to do, so
that at Christmas, for instance. I am again faced with a
blank. Leisure is not good for me, because my mental
constitution urgently requires me to earn and spend
money on my family as the fulfillment of my wellknown father complex’’ (1965a).
He also remembered being terribly disillusioned by
the sight of his father, without saying a word, picking
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F R E U D , ( J E A N ) M A R T I N (1889 –1 967)
up a hat thrown into the mud by an anti-Semite. But
during the republication of the book in 1908, Freud
recognized, ‘‘I understood that it was part of my selfanalysis, my reaction to the death of my father, the
most important event, the most terrible loss in a man’s
life.’’
In fact, after his father’s illness, which began in June
1896, and his death on October 23, Freud wrote to
Wilhelm Fliess, ‘‘He bore himself bravely to the end,
just like the altogether unusual man he had been’’ (letter dated October 26, 1896), and ‘‘By one of those dark
pathways behind the official consciousness the old
man’s death has affected me deeply. I valued him
highly, understood him very well, and with his peculiar mixture of deep wisdom and fantastic lightheartedness he had a significant effect on my life. By
the time he died, his life had long been over, but in
[my] inner self the whole past has been reawakened
by this event. I now feel quite uprooted’’ (letter to
Wilhelm Fliess, November 2, 1896).
However, on February 8, 1897, he remarked,
‘‘Unfortunately, my own father was one of these perverts and is responsible for the hysteria of my brother
(all of whose symptoms are identifications) and those
of several younger sisters. The frequency of this circumstance often makes me wonder.’’ We know that the
doubt would disappear during his self-analysis, which
began in July, and Freud could write, on September 21,
‘‘I no longer believe in my neurotica [theory of the
neuroses]’’ after being confronted by his ‘‘surprise that
in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to
be accused of being perverse.’’ On October 3, shortly
before the anniversary of Jakob’s death, he confirmed,
‘‘the old man plays no active part in my case.’’
But the history of psychoanalysis bears witness to
the fact that Jakob Freud did play a role in the genesis
of Freudian theory and the place given in it to the
representation of the father. And it was to him that, in
1904, standing on the Acropolis with his brother Alexander, Sigmund Freud’s thoughts turned, ‘‘It must be
that a sense of guilt was attached to the satisfaction in
having gone such a long way: there was something
about it that was wrong, that from the earliest times
had been forbidden. It was something to do with a
child’s criticism of his father, with the undervaluation
which took the place of the overvaluation of earlier
childhood. It seems as though the essence of success
was to have got further than one’s father, and as
though to excel one’s father. . . . Our father had been in
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business, he had no secondary education, and Athens
could not have meant much to him. Thus what interfered with our enjoyment of the journey to Athens was
a feeling of filial piety’’ (1936a).
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
Bibliography
Bernays-Heller, Judith. (1973). Freud’s mother and father. In
Freud as we knew him (pp. 334-340). Detroit: Wayne University Press.
Bernfeld, Siegfried, and Cassirer-Bernfeld, Suzanne. (1944).
Freud’s Early Childhood. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic,
VIII, 107–115.
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams.
Part I. SE, 4: 1–338; The interpretation of dreams. Part II.,
SE, 5: 339–625.
———. (1936a). A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis
(An open letter to Romain Rolland on the occasion of his
seventieth birthday). SE, 22: 239–248.
Freud Sigmund, and Abraham, Karl. (1965a). A psycho-analytic dialogue: The letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907-1926 (Hilda C. Abraham and Ernst L. Freud,
Eds.; Bernard Marsh and Hilda C. Abraham, Trans.). New
York: Basic Books.
Gicklhorn, Renée. (1976). La famille Freud à Freiberg.
Études freudiennes, 11–12, 231–238.
Krüll, Marianne. (1979). Freud and his father (Arnold J.
Pomerans, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.
Sajner, Josef. (1968). Sigmund Freuds Beziehungen zu seinem Geburtsort Freiberg (Pribor), und zu Mähren. Clio
Medica, 3, 167–180.
FREUD, (JEAN) MARTIN (1889–1967)
Martin Freud, a lawyer and the eldest son of Sigmund
Freud, was born on December 6, 1889, in Vienna, and
died in 1967 in London. He was named Jean Martin in
honor of Charcot. Writing to Freud, Charcot
exclaimed, ‘‘Best wishes; may he be welcomed; may the
Evangelist and the generous Centurion be propitious
for him; may their names, which are now his as well,
bring him happiness!’’ Later he dropped ‘‘Jean’’ from
his name. Sigmund Freud considered his son Martin
to be ‘‘very intelligent’’ and in his letters to Wilhelm
Fliess, along with news about childhood illness, he
made several references to the poems the boy wrote
between the ages of eight and ten. He was ‘‘a strange
625
F R E U D , ( J E A N ) M A R T I N (1 889 –19 67)
bird; sensitive and good-natured in his personal relationships, completely wrapped up in a humorous
phantasy world of his own.’’ (letter dated July 3rd,
1899, 1985c, p358). This lightheartedness would
remain with him all his life.
After completing his ‘‘matura’’ (equivalent to the
first year of college) in 1908, he entered the university
to study law. An enthusiastic sportsman, ‘‘he had his
face cut in a duel,’’ as Freud informed Carl Gustav
Jung on July 7, 1909. He was also politically engaged
and had joined a Zionist movement, the Kadimah.
In 1910 he joined the Imperial horse artillery as a
so-called one-year volunteer. In January 1911 he broke
his leg in a skiing accident. When the First World War
broke out, he immediately volunteered for the artillery
service and was sent to Galicia in January 1915. After
being slightly wounded in August 1915, he was soon
promoted to lieutenant but was taken prisoner, something his uneasy family didn’t learn about until after
the armistice. ‘‘Martin’s captivity has sapped my
moral. Do you know anyone in Genoa? He is being
held at San Benigno inferiore,’’ Freud wrote to Ernest
Jones on February 18, 1919.
He was released shortly thereafter, and Freud wrote
to Pastor Pfister on October 5, ‘‘My son Martin, barely
back from his captivity in Italy, has made himself a
captive again through his engagement to the young
lady of his choice, the daughter of a Viennese lawyer.’’
On December 7, 1919, he married Ernestine Drucker
(Esti, 1896–1980), with whom he had two children,
Anton Walter Freud, born April 3, 1921, and Myriam
Sophie Loewenstein-Freud, born August 6, 1924.
Because of his background—he had a law degree
and was working in a bank—he became increasingly
involved in Freud’s investments and helped him to
manage his books. When the retirement of Adolf
Joseph Storfer in 1931 revealed the poor financial
situation of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer
Verlag, Martin took control and with his father’s help
appealed to the international community to obtain the
necessary funds for its survival. But in 1936, after the
Nazis had come to power in Germany, they sequestered the firm’s publications and shortly after the
Anschluss did the same in Vienna, where Martin was
troubled by the Gestapo.
Family affairs went badly, for Martin had several
extramarital relations (including a very ambiguous
relationship with an American patient of Freud,
62 6
Dr. Edith Jackson), which his wife didn’t discover until
shortly before their departure from Austria on May 14,
1938.
His wife remained in France with their daughter,
while Martin went on to London, shortly before his
parents. His life there was not simple. From July to
November 1940 he was interned as a ‘‘foreign enemy’’
in a camp near Liverpool, Huyton Camp, under terrible conditions. Freud, in his will, had made Ernst,
Martin, and Anna the executors of his estate, but by
1946 an organization, which was run for many years
by Ernst, was created to ensure the survival of his work
and his memory in the field of psychoanalysis. Martin
had many jobs and ended up running a smoke shop
near the British Museum. In 1958 he published,
against Anna’s advice, his book of memoirs, Sigmund
Freud: Man and Father, which remains one of the primary sources for all biographers of Freud. He died on
April 25, 1967, at the age of seventy-seven.
His wife Esti managed to escape France in 1940
with her daughter Sophie. They left Nice, where
brother-in-law Olivier Freud lived, and traveled to
Morocco, where they boarded a ship for the United
States. She began a practice as a speech pathologist in
the United States, where she lived until her death in
1980. She and Martin were never divorced.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Berggasse 19, Wien IX; First World War: The
effect on the development of psychoanalysis; FreudBernays, Martha; Imago Publishing Company; Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag; Lampl, Hans;
Sigmund Freud Copyrights Limited.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1985c). The complete letters of Sigmund
Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904 (Jeffrey M. Masson, Ed.
and Trans.). Cambridge, MA, London: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.
Freud, Martin. (1958). Sigmund Freud: Man and father. New
York: J. Aronson.
Gay, Peter. (1988) Freud: A life for our time. LondonMelbourne: Dent.
Jones, Ernest. (1959). Free associations. Memories of a
psycho-analyst. London, New York: Basic Books.
Roazen, Paul. (1993). Meeting Freud’s family. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
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FREUD: LIVING
FREUD, JOSEF (1826–1897)
Josef Freud, ten years younger than his brother Jakob
Freud, was born in 1826 in Tysmenitz, Galicia. We
would have had no record of his existence if Freud
hadn’t referred to him in The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900a, chap. 4) in the ‘‘dream of the uncle with the
yellow beard.’’ Freud was quite open in writing, ‘‘For
I have only one uncle, my Uncle Josef. His story was
a sad one. More than thirty years earlier his desire for
gain had misled him into an act severely punishable
by the law, and he was punished accordingly. My
father, whose hair turned gray with grief in a few
days, always used to say that Uncle Josef had never
been a bad man, he had been a numbskull; that was
the expression he used.’’ For decades the complete
story remained unknown, and Ernest Jones’s biography even claimed that ‘‘he was only given a fine, for
the Austrian police records show no sign of his
imprisonment.’’
In reality, on June 20, 1865, Uncle Josef was
arrested by the police as he was about to sell counterfeit rubles. He was involved in an international
money trafficking ring that had contacts in Manchester, where his nephews Emanuel and Philipp Freud
lived. Although suspected, they were never implicated
in the crime. The news was published in the newspapers the following day, but Freud’s name did not
appear. However, during sentencing in February
1866, the Viennese press gave the story considerable
coverage, announcing ‘‘ten years of forced labor for
Freud.’’ He was released after four years for good
behavior, but little is known about what became of
him after that, or about his wife Rebecca, whom he
married in 1849 in Jassy (possibly this is the ‘‘Rebeka’’
who was elsewhere documented as brother Jakob’s
wife). Of their two children, only Deborah is mentioned by name; a friend of Adolfine Freud, she was a
child at the time of his sentencing. He died at the
Rudolf Hospital in Vienna on March 5, 1897 (Peter
Swales, quoted in Grinstein, Alexander, 1990), at
about the time that Freud had his dream.
Requested by Siegfried Bernfeld to inquire about
Freud’s youth, it was the wife of a Viennese professor,
Mrs. Renée Gicklhorn, who unearthed the story,
which came to light when Sigmund Freud was
between nine and ten years old. It is easy to understand the affect this had on the Freud family. Josef,
who had already been referred to as the ‘‘other—very
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DYING
unfortunate—uncle from Vienna’’ in a letter Sigmund wrote to his fiancée in February 1886, twenty
years after the affair, now reappeared—this Verbrecher (criminal), as he is known in one of the most
frequently cited passages from The Interpretation of
Dreams—as the symbol of the obstacle to his
nephew’s ambitions in 1897, the year Freud was so
anxious to become a professor.
It should not come as a surprise that this dramatic
episode from Freud’s childhood has been extensively
written about since its discovery. Freud’s biographers
have provided more or less accurate psychological analyses of the inventor of psychoanalysis, often in the hope
of clarifying what they believe to be cracks in his theory.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Interpretation of Dreams, The.
Bibliography
Gicklhorn, Renée. (1976). Sigmund Freud und der Onkeltraum. Dichtung und Wahrheit. Horn/Ndösterr: F. Berger.
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams.
Part I. SE, 4: 1–338; The interpretation of dreams. Part II,
SE, 5: 339–625.
Grinstein, Alexander. (1990). Freud at the Crossroads. New
York: International Universities Press.
Krüll, Marianne. (1979). Freud and his father. (Arnold J.
Pomerans, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.
Mijolla, Alain de. (1979). ‘‘Mein Onkel Josef’’ à la une!
Études freudiennes, 15–16, 183–192.
Rand, Nicolas, and Torok, Maria. (1995). Questions for
Freud: The secret history of psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
FREUD, JULIUS. See Freud, Sigmund (siblings)
FREUD-KLEIN CONTROVERSIES, THE. See
Controversial Discussions
FREUD: LIVING AND DYING
Dr. Max Schur was a psychoanalytically oriented internist who became Freud’s physician in 1929. He treated
Freud and members of his family until 1939, when Freud
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FREUD MUSEUM
died. Schur then emigrated to the United States. There
many people tried to persuade him to write about Freud,
but he was reluctant to do so out of respect for Freud’s
privacy. When the correspondence between Freud and
Wilhelm Fliess was published in 1950, he was impressed
by the historical and scientific value of his documents on
Freud and agreed to make his notes available to Ernest
Jones, who was preparing a biography of Freud. Disagreeing with some of Jones assessments of Freud’s physical and neurotic symptoms, Schur decided to craft a
‘‘biographical study’’ of Freud’s life, concentrating on his
changing attitudes toward life and death as revealed in
his life, work, and correspondence.
Schur’s book begins with a brief biographical review
of Freud’s early life, incorporating recently published
material that threw light on some of Freud’s reconstructions. Then, subjecting Freud’s descriptions of his symptoms in his letters to Fliess in the early 1890s to a careful
review, he disputes Jones’s conclusion that Freud had a
cardiac neurosis. Schur believed that the most likely
diagnosis was a small coronary occlusion with typical
anginal pains, arrhythmias, and mild cardiac insufficiency, aggravated by nicotine. As is well known, Freud
was addicted to cigars, and he continued to find them
necessary for creative concentration even when they
were clearly contributing to his cancer during his last
years. Schur believed that ‘‘neurotic anxiety was much
less pronounced in Freud than excessive swings of
mood, which at their low ebb had a definate depressive
quality.’’ He also described Freud’s obsessive preoccupation with death and with dying at a certain age. During
the cardiac episode Freud’s relationship with Schur,
which began in mutual admiration, intensified and took
on characteristics of a ‘‘transference-like’’ relationship.
he endured, the tormenting prostheses he had to suffer, and the fortitude and remarkable capacity he
demonstrated to continue to analyze and write despite
everything. When Freud interviewed Schur before
appointing Schur as his physician, he asked for two
promises: that he would be told the truth and nothing
but the truth, and that he would not be required to
suffer unnecessarily. Schur ends with a description of
how he fulfilled the second of these promises.
ROY K. LILLESKOV
See also: Death and psychoanalysis.
Source Citation
Schur, Max. (1972). Freud: Living and dying. New York:
International Universities Press.
Bibliography
Bowlby, John. (1960). Grief and mourning in infancy and
early childhood. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 15, 9–52.
Freud, Anna. (1946). The ego and the mechanisms of defence.
New York: International Universities Press.
Freud, Sigmund. (1926). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety.
SE, 20: 77–174.
Hartmann, Heinz. (1958). Ego psychology and the problem of
adaptation. New York: International Universities Press.
Jones, Ernest. (1953–1957). Life and work of Sigmund Freud.
New York: Basic Books.
Kanzer, Mark (Ed.). (1971). The unconscious today. New
York: International Universities Press.
Loewenstein, Rudolf, et al. (Eds.). (1966). Psychoanalysis: a
general psychology. New York: International Universities
Press.
Schur examines Freud’s self-analysis in the light of
such transference. His discussion of Freud’s ‘‘Irma
dream’’ demonstrates that the dream was also an
unrecognized attempt to exonerate Fliess in order to
preserve Freud’s idealization of Fliess. Schur also
demonstrates how Freud’s self-analysis led to a
breakup of his friendship with Fliess in 1904 and how
ghosts of the relationship continued to haunt Freud in
the form of a preoccupation with death dates based on
Fliess’s numerical periods. Schur also pursues the
broader theme of Freud’s attitudes toward death
throughout Freud’s works, most notably when he discusses Freud’s notion of the death instinct.
FREUD MUSEUM
The last third of Schur’s book is a painfully moving
description of Freud’s cancer, the surgical procedures
The Freud Museum, at 20 Maresfield Gardens in London, was Sigmund Freud’s ‘‘last address on this
62 8
Schur, Max. (1953). The ego in anxiety. In Rudolf Loewenstein (Ed.), Drives, affects, and behavior (pp. 67–103). New
York: International Universities Press.
———. (1969). The background of Freud’s disturbance on
the acropolis. American Imago, 26, 303–323.
Schur, Max, and Ritvo, Lucille B. (1970). The concept of
development and evolution in psychoanalysis. In Lester R.
Aronson et al. (Eds.), Development and evolution of behavior. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
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F R E U D - N A T H A N S O N , A M A L I A M A L K A (1835 –1 930)
planet,’’ as he wrote to Jeanne Lampl-de Groot on
August 22, 1938. He and his family moved in on September 27, 1938, and he died there on September 23, 1939.
After his death his family remained in the house:
the last occupant was his youngest daughter Anna,
who died in 1982. As stipulated in her will, the house
was turned into a museum under the auspices of the
Sigmund Freud Archives and the New-Land Foundation, a charitable fund run by the family of her friend,
the American psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner. The
Museum was opened to the public in 1986.
Its centerpiece is Sigmund Freud’s working environment, preserved as it was during his lifetime. The
study contains his personal library, his collection of
antiquities, and the original couch that witnessed the
discovery of psychoanalysis. When the Freud family
fled from Nazi Austria in June 1938, they arrived virtually empty handed, but all their possessions were
sent on afterwards. Consequently, the Museum contains all their furniture, carpets, pictures, and other
belongings, in addition to Freud’s books and antiquities. Most of his papers were subsequently removed to
the Sigmund Freud Archive at the U.S. Library of Congress. However, copies of many of these documents
remained in the museum, and this copy archive forms
a valuable resource for European scholars. The archive
also includes many of Anna Freud’s papers and related
documents. In addition, the Freud family photo
albums form the center of an extensive photo archive.
The museum attracts fourteen thousand visitors
each year from all over the world. In little over a decade of existence it has also established itself as a workplace and study center, as well as a vibrant memorial to
Freud’s life and work. It hosts regular national and
international conferences on cultural and psychoanalytical themes, as well as lectures and study seminars,
and its education program reaches out to students and
schoolchildren in the local community.
MICHAEL MOLNAR
See also: Sigmund Freud Archives.
Bibliography
Appignanesi, Lisa, and Forrester, John. (1992). Freud’s
women. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Bernfeld-Cassirer, Suzanne. (1951). Freud and archaeology.
American Imago, 8, 107–128.
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Davies, J. Keith, and Botting, Wendy. (1989). La bibliothèque de Freud. In Eric Gubel (Ed.), Le sphinx de Vienne, Sigmund Freud: l’art et l’archéologie (pp. 199–201). Gent,
Belgium: Ludion.
Gamwell, Lynn, and Wells, Richard (Eds.). (1989). Sigmund
Freud and art: His personal collection of antiquities. London: Freud Museum.
FREUD-NATHANSON, AMALIA MALKA
(1835–1930)
Sigmund Freud’s mother, Amalia Malka FreudNathanson, was born, according to family tradition,
on August 18, 1835, in Brody, in Galicia, and died in
Vienna on September 12, 1930.
The daughter of Jacob Nathanson and Sara Widens,
Amalia had three older brothers and one younger
brother, Julius. The Jewish calendar makes Amelia’s
date of birth somewhat uncertain, as Freud once told
Wilhelm Fliess, but it was celebrated the same day as
the birth of Emperor of Austria, Franz Josef, and the
annual national holiday made it the occasion of
humorous family banter.
The Nathansons had lived in Galicia before moving
to Odessa, then to Vienna, where Amalia, at age
twenty, met Jakob Freud. Jakob shared her father’s first
name and was twenty years older than she; they were
married in a synagogue in 1855. She went to live with
him in Freiberg, in Moravia, where on May 6, 1856,
she gave birth to her son Sigmund.
Other children soon followed: Julius in October
1857 (the namesake of Amalia’s younger brother, who
was tubercular, both to die within a year); Anna on
December 31, 1858; Regine Debora (Rosa) on March
21, 1860; Maria (Mitzi) on March 22, 1861; Esther
Adolfine (Dolfi) on July 23, 1862; Pauline Regine
(Pauli) on May 3, 1864; and Alexander Gotthold
Efraim on April 15 (or 19), 1866.
Diagnosed with tuberculosis, Amalia took frequent
cures at Roznau, twenty-five kilometers from Freiberg,
even after moving to Vienna in the wake of Jakob’s
failed financial ventures. In August 1859 she and her
two children left Freiberg on a railway journey that
Freud would recall among his earliest memories during his self-analysis: At the railroad station in Breslau
gas jets made him think of the ‘‘flames of hell’’ and he
also recalled seeing his mother nude (‘‘matrem
nudam’’ [Anzieu, Didier, 1986, p. 14]).
629
F R E U D - N A T H A N S O N , A M A L I A M A L K A (1835 –1 930)
In other of Freud’s memories he recalled his mother
as ‘‘slim and beautiful’’ (Gay, 1988, p. 7), and as teaching him to read and write German. Once, while at
work in the kitchen, she responded to his questioning
the idea that people are made of dust and therefore
mortal by rubbing her hands to elicit the blackish bits
of epidermis. When Freud was about ten years old, he
had an anxiety dream in which he saw his ‘‘beloved
mother with a peculiarly calm, sleeping facial expression, being carried into the room by two (or three)
persons with bird’s beaks . . .’’ (p. 504).
Amalia appears to have been an anxious mother, if
one considers as exemplary the precautions that Freud
took to conceal from her his adolescent plans to travel
to London, or her response to the 1873 cholera epidemic that raged in Vienna while she was staying in
Roznau. But she was also a supportive mother who
foresaw a great destiny for Sigmund, a gifted child to
whom she granted many favors, triggering jealousy
among her other children. Freud would help his
mother financially as soon as he began to earn a living
and, together with his brother, Alexander, he would
continue to support her to the end of her life.
Coquettish as a young woman, she enjoyed card
parties, but Amalia became difficult as she grew older.
According to her grandson Martin Freud, she was a
typical Galician Jewish woman; she ‘‘had great vitality
and much impatience; she had a hunger for life and an
indomitable spirit’’ (1958, p. 11).
After she became a widow, Amalia lived with her
daughter Adolfine (Dolfi), and made yearly trips to
Ischl for her lung ailment. In her home on Grüne
Thorgasse, by family custom, she would receive her
‘‘goldener Sigi’’ and other children and grandchildren
every Sunday.
Freud hid from Amalia the deaths of his daughter
Sophie and her child, Heinele, and he cautiously told
her about surgery on his jaw without mentioning cancer. Indeed, her old age and death presented Freud
with a problem he discussed with Karl Abraham as
early as May 1918: ‘‘My Mother will be eighty-three
this year and is no longer very strong. I sometimes
think I shall feel a little freer when she dies, for the idea
that she might be told that I have died is a terrifying
thought.’’ (Jones, Ernest, 1955, Vol. 2, p. 196) He
brought up the problem again after the death of Max
Eitingon’s mother on December 1, 1929, repeating
almost word for word what he had written to Ludwig
63 0
Binswanger the previous January: ‘‘The loss of a
mother must be something very strange, unlike anything else, and must arouse emotions that are hard to
grasp. I myself still have a mother, and she bars my
way to the longed-for rest, to eternal nothingness; I
somehow could not forgive myself if I were to die
before her.’’ (Freud, 1960, p. 392)
Three days after her death on September 12, 1930,
Freud wrote to Ernest Jones: ‘‘I will not disguise the
fact that my reaction to this event because of special
circumstances been a curious one. Assuredly, there is
no saying, what effects such an experience may produce in deeper layers, but on the surface I can detect
only two things: an increase in personal freedom, since
it was always a terrifying thought that she might come
to hear of my death; and secondly, the satisfaction that
at last she has achieved the deliverance for which she
had earned a right after such a long life. No grief otherwise, such as my ten years younger brother is painfully
experiencing. I was not at the funeral; again Anna
represented me as at Frankfort. Her value to me can
hardly be heightened.’’ (Jones, p. 152)
For all intents and purposes, Freud’s relationship
with his mother may be said to have been excellent
and his comment concerning Goethe is usually cited:
‘‘[I]f a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling
he retains throughout his life the triumphant feeling,
the confidence in success, which not seldom brings
actual success along with it.’’ (Freud 1917b, p. 156)
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Freud, Jakob Kollomon (or Kelemen or Kallamon); Freud, Sigmund (siblings); Judaism and
psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Anzieu, Didier. (1986). Freud’s self-analysis. Madison, CT:
International Universities Press.
Gay, Peter. (1988). Freud: A life for our time. New York:
Doubleday.
Jones, Ernest. (1953–57). Life and work of Sigmund Freud.
New York: Basic Books.
Freud, Martin. (1958). Sigmund Freud: Man and father. New
York: Vanguard Press.
Freud, Sigmund. (1917b). A childhood recollection from
‘‘Dichtung und Wahrheit.’’ SE, 17: 145–156.
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F R E U D , O L I V E R (1891 –1 969)
———. (1960a). Letters of Sigmund Freud. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
FREUD, OLIVER (1891–1969)
Oliver Freud, named after Oliver Cromwell, was the
third son of Sigmund and Martha Freud. Born in
Vienna on February 19, 1891, he died in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in February 1969. His mother’s
favorite, Oliver’s life was less tied to that of his parents
than his other brothers and sisters, in spite of the compliments paid to him by Freud for his precocious interests in mountains and railways and his gift for
construction.
After completing his ‘‘matura’’ (equivalent to the
first year of college), in 1909 he entered the Vienna
Polytechnic, a private school. He graduated with a
degree in civil engineering in 1915. He was not enlisted
when the First World War broke out but was put to
work building a barracks, then a tunnel, until December 1916. After this he was inducted as an officer in an
engineering regiment.
While living in Berlin, Oliver went without work
from 1932 until April 7, 1933. Freud wrote to Ernest
Jones, ‘‘My unemployed son Oliver, whom I have been
supporting for a year, is coming to Vienna tomorrow
to discuss his future. There is little doubt that he will
never find work in Berlin again (he is a civil
engineer).’’
Oliver emigrated to France that same year, 1933. He
first lived in Brittany, near Dinard, then in Paris, where
Freud sent a letter of introduction to Arnold Zweig on
October 25, 1933, ‘‘But I have a son in Paris—Oliver,
who with his wife and child lives in 16me, rue George
Sand. He is a civil engineer, a very talented man [ein
hochbegabter Alleswisser], knows everything, excellent
at his job; nice wife and charming little daughter. I’m
afraid he will not achieve anything in Paris. I’d be very
pleased if you could meet him.’’
In 1934 he went to Nice, where he began working as
a photographer, about which Freud remarked, ‘‘At
least he has found a job that satisfies his passion for
tinkering’’ (letter to Zweig, June 13, 1935). Oliver
remained in Nice, aside from a visit to Vienna in
November 1936, until 1943.
Married in December 1915, he was divorced by September 1916. Sent to Galicia in 1916, then Hungary, he
returned at the end of hostilities and was discharged
on December 2, 1918. In July 1919 Freud remarked
that Oliver was the only one of his three sons who
found work after his return. He lived in Berlin, like
Ernst, and both brothers traveled to Hamburg for the
funeral of their sister Sophie in January 1920.
After obtaining a visa for America in 1942, Oliver,
Henry, and Eva tried to leave France through Spain,
but fear of deportation led them back to Nice, now
under Italian occupation. René Laforgue, whose property of Garéoult was nearby, is said to have helped
them obtain forged papers and leave France for the
United States in 1943.
But the boy was a problem for Freud. He confided
in Max Eitingon on October 30, 1920, that he was
often worried about this son, who ‘‘had been his pride
and secret hope,’’ and suggested that Oliver ‘‘would
need to be analyzed’’ because of the symptoms of
obsessional neurosis. In 1921 Oliver, upon the advice
of Hans Lampl, a fellow student and friend of Martin,
began analysis with Franz Alexander (Roazen, 1993).
But their daughter Eva, who was nineteen years old
at the time, refused to go with them and remained
with her fiancé on the Mediterranean coast. She was
later analyzed by René Laforgue and then by Henri
Stern. She died tragically from septicemia contracted
after an abortion, complicated by a cerebral abscess, in
the Hospital of La Timone in Marseille, on November
4, 1944.
After a stay in Romania, he married Henny Fuchs
(born February 11, 1892, in Berlin, died 1971 in North
America) in Berlin on April 10, 1923. His mother,
Martin, and Anna, after returning from Göttingen to
visit Lou Andreas-Salomé, were present for the marriage. On September 3, 1924, their daughter Eva
Mathilde Freud was born. Freud warmly greeted the
family on Christmas 1924, not wishing to ‘‘delay any
further making the acquaintance of the adorable new
grandchild.’’
Her parents reached Philadelphia, where Oliver
found work as an engineer with the Budd Company.
He and Henny retired in Williamstown, in western
Massachusetts, where he died in February 1969.
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Arnold Zweig wrote to Freud from Haifa on January 21, 1934, ‘‘And since I’ve been here I have been
thinking very much about this son of yours, who is
also too decent to find it easy to adapt himself to life.
It was shattering to observe how he talked most vividly
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FREUD, PHILIPP
and warmly when speaking about his wartime service.
Just like all other men of his generation and of his circumstances who now find that they have to begin all
over again at a time when they are firmly set in their
ways of thought and feeling, habits and ambitions. No
one can take it amiss if these men do not wish to have
anything to do with the contemporary business scene
and prefer to take refuge in memories of a time when a
man (especially a young man) merely needed to risk
his life to be fulfilling all the demands that society
made upon him.’’
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Berggasse 19, Wien IX; Freud-Bernays, Martha.
Bibliography
Gay, Peter. (1988). Freud: A life for our time. LondonMelbourne: Dent.
Jones, Ernest. (1959). Free associations. Memories of a psycho-analyst. London, New York; Basic Books.
Roazen, Paul. (1993). Meeting Freud’s family. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Second, Pierre. (1993). Eva Freud, une vie: Berlin 1924, Nice
1934, Marseille 1944. Trames, 75, 16.
FREUD, PHILIPP. See Freud, Sigmund (siblings)
FREUD, SIGMUND (SIBLINGS)
Sigmund Freud, born May 6, 1856, was Jakob Freud’s
third child. From a previous marriage, in 1832 to Sally
Kanner, he had two sons, Emanuel and Philipp. After
Sally died in 1852, a brief second marriage to a woman
named Rebekka also ended with her death. Jakob’s
third marriage, to Amalie Nathanson on July 29, 1855,
produced eight more children. In addition to Sigismund (Sigmund), the firstborn, were born Julius,
Anna, Rosa, Marie, Adolfine, Pauline, and Alexander.
Freud, Emanuel
Born in 1833 in Tysmenitz in Galicia, then part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, Emanuel Freud worked in
his father’s textile business. In 1852, he married
(Kokach), who was born in Milow in Russia in 1834
(perhaps 1836). In Freiberg he settled a few blocks
from his father’s home at 42, place du Marché. His
63 2
children’s nurse, Monika Zajicova, was said to also
have been Sigismund’s ‘‘Nannie.’’
Freud’s oldest nephew, Johann, was born in Freiberg
on August 13, 1855. I have also long known,’’ wrote
Freud to Fliess in 1897, ‘‘the companion of my misdeeds between the ages of one and two years; it is my
nephew, a year older than myself, who is now living in
Manchester and who visited us in Vienna when I was
fourteen years old. The two of us seem occasionally to
have behaved cruelly to my niece, who was a year
younger’’ (Freud, 1985c, p. 268) ‘‘Until the end of my
third year we had been inseparable; we had loved each
other and fought each other, and, as I have already
hinted, this childish relation had determined all my
later feelings in my intercourse with persons of my
own age’’ (1900a, p. 424). Freud also wrote, ‘‘An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable to my emotional life; I have always been able
to create them anew, and not infrequently my childish
ideal has been so closely approached that friend and
enemy have coincided in the same person; but not
simultaneously, of course, as was the case in my early
childhood’’ (1900a, p. 483). Johann’s whereabouts
cannot be traced after 1919, and what happened to
him in later years is unknown.
On November 20, 1856, Pauline Freud, Sigmund’s
niece, was born in Freiberg; she would die a spinster in
Manchester in 1944. The games she played with John
and Sigmund in the meadow covered in yellow flowers,
which Freud recalled in ‘‘Screen Memories’’ (1899a),
are thought to have taken place during the summer of
1859. Freud’s unconscious fantasy of Pauline’s defloration by John and himself led some to believe that both
boys sexually assaulted the little girl (Krüll, 1979).
Towards 1875, it seems that Jakob Freud had the idea
of sending Sigmund to England with his brothers and
having him marry Pauline.
On February 22, 1859, Bertha Freud was born in
Freiberg. She died accidentally from a fall on a staircase in 1944.
Toward 1859–1860, while Jakob and his family left
Freiberg for Vienna, Emanuel emigrated with relatives
and his brother Philipp to Manchester, England. Solomon Samuel (Sam) Freud, Emanuel’s fourth son, was
born there on June 28, 1860. His correspondence with
Sigmund Freud was eventually published (Freud 1996
[1911–38]. He died in 1945.
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On May 12, 1862, Matilda Freud was born in
Manchester.
In 1900 Freud described Emanuel to Wilhelm Fliess
(Freud 1985c, p. 417) on the occasion of his halfbrother’s trip to Vienna with his son Sam: ‘‘He brought
with him a real air of refreshment because he is a marvelous man, vigorous and mentally indefatigable
despite his sixty-eight or sixty-nine years, who has
always meant a great deal to me.’’
Freud paid visits to Emanuel in August 1875 and
to his sister Rosa in 1884–1885. He went to England
for a second two-week visit to his brothers in September 1908.
Emmanuel died from a fall from a train traveling
between Manchester and Southport on October 17,
1914, just six days before the anniversary of Jacob’s
death—a coincidence noted by Freud.
Marie, Emanuel’s wife, died in Manchester in 1923.
Freud, Philipp
Philipp Freud was born in Tysmenitz around 1835. He
would play an interesting role in his brother’s life that
Freud would only reconstruct in October 1897 during
his self-analysis. It was Philipp who ‘‘locked up Nannie
in prison’’ for stealing shortly before the family’s
departure from Freiberg. He was living across the
street from Freud’s parents and was the same age as
Freud’s mother, Amalie. Some authors have imagined
from Freud’s fantasy that Philipp and Amalie were
together as a ‘‘couple’’ with the suggestion that he had
an affaire with her (Krüll, 1979). He contributed in
any event to the confusion of generations in Freud’s
mind that was only clarified in 1875 during his visit to
England.
Philipp married at about forty years old, in Manchester on January 15, 1873, to Matilda Bloome
(Bloomah), from Birmingham (1839–1925). They
had two children. Pauline Mary (Poppy) was born on
October 23, 1873, married Frederick Oswald Hartwig
and died in Bucklow/Chester on June 23, 1951. Morris Herbert Walter was born on April 2, 1876, and
died in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, on November
28, 1938.
Philipp died in Manchester on August 29, 1911.
Freud (1989a, pp. 126–127) described this part of
his family in an 1875 letter to Eduard Silberstein: ‘‘You
will, no doubt, wish to know about my relatives in
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England and about my attitude toward them. I don’t
think I’ve ever told you much about them. There two
brothers on my father’s side, from my father’s first
marriage, twenty-two years older than I, the older,
Emanuel, having married in early youth, the younger,
Philipp, two and a half years ago. They used to live
with us in Freiberg, where the elder brother’s three
oldest children were born! The unfavorable turn their
business took there caused them to move to England,
which they have not left since 1859. I can say that they
now hold a generally respected position, not because
of their wealth, for they are not rich, but because of
their personal character. They are shopkeepers, i.e.,
merchants who have a shop, the elder selling cloth and
the younger jewelry, in the sense that word seems to
have in England. My two sisters-in-law are good and
jolly women, one of them an English woman, which
made my conversations with her extremely agreeable.
Of those persons in our family whose uncle I may call
myself, you are already acquainted with John, he is an
Englishman in every respect, with a knowledge of languages and technical matters well beyond the usual
business education. Unknown to you, and until
recently, to me, are two charming nieces, Pauline, who
is nineteen, and Bertha, who is seventeen, and a
fifteen-year-old boy by the name of Samuel—which I
believe has been fashionable in England ever since
Pickwick—and who is generally considered to be a
Ôsharp and deep’ young fellow’’ (pp. 126–7).
Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856, the first
of Jacob and Amalie Freud’s eight children.
Freud, Julius
Julius Freud was born in October 1857 in Freiberg,
when Sigmund was eighteen months old. He died the
next April, the same year that Amalie’s brother, Julius’s
namesake, also died.
On October 3, 1897, Freud (1985e, p. 268) wrote to
Wilhelm Fliess about one of the discoveries of his selfanalysis: ‘‘that I greeted my one-year-younger brother
(who died after a few months) with adverse wishes
and genuine childhood jealousy; and that his death left
the germ of [self-] reproaches in me.’’
Bernays-Freud, Anna
Anna Bernays-Freud was born on December 31, 1858,
in Freiberg and died on March 11, 1955, in New York.
Her relationship with her older brother was often difficult, but she was her father’s favorite daughter. In her
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FREUD, SIGMUND (SIBLINGS)
memoirs (Bernays-Freud, 1940), she recalled Sigmund’s
special privileges, the fact that he enjoyed his own room,
and that it was forbidden to play the piano in order not
to disturb him; he also censored what she read.
Anna married Martha’s oldest brother, Eli Bernays
(1860-1923) on October 14, 1883, with whom Freud,
who didn’t attend their wedding, felt for a time resentful regarding his sister’s dowry.
Anna and Eli emigrated in the United States in 1892
with their two children, Lucy, born in 1886, and Judith
born a year earlier. In 1973 the latter, Judith BernaysHeller, published a brief memoir of her visits to grandparents Jacob and Amalie (Bernays-Heller, 1973).
Anna and Eli had three more children: Edward Louis
was born in 1891, and Hella and Martha in 1893 and
1894, respectively.
Eli, who enjoyed a brilliant career in business, was in
charge of Freud’s works in the United States and he had
some disagreements with Ernest Jones concerning their
English translations. After Eli’s death, in 1925 Freud
wrote to his son Edward in reply to the latter’s proposition: ‘‘What deprives all autobiographies of value is their
tissue of lies. Let’s just say parenthetically that your publisher shows American naivete in imagining that a man,
honest until now, could stoop to so low for five thousand
dollars. The temptation would begin at one hundred
times that sum, but even then I would renounce it after
half an hour.’’ On March 8, 1920, he wrote to Ernest
Jones, describing Edward as ‘‘an honest boy when I knew
him. I know not how far he has become Americanized’’
(Gay 1989, p. 568) and in September he announced, to
Jones’s chagrin, that his nephew would serve as literary
executive for American rights to his works.
Graf-Freud, Regina Deborah (Rosa)
Regina Deborah Graf-Freud (Rosa) was born on
March 21, 1860, and died in the Treblinka concentration camp in 1942. Considered his favorite sister,
Freud in 1886 acknowledged that the beautiful Rosa,
like himself, had ‘‘a nicely developed tendency toward
neurasthenia’’ (Freud 1960, p. 210). On October 22,
1874, Freud wrote to Eduard Silberstein: ‘‘Rosa has
entered a school of drawing and design newly established for the perfection of feminine handicrafts. I
have taken charge of the rest of her education and am
sacrificing one of my lectures to that end. The gods
cannot possibly have rejoiced at this sacrifice as much
as I did’’ (Freud 1989a, p. 67). She would return the
63 4
favor in various ways, by taking care of his laundry, for
example, during his stay in Paris, later by caring for his
children during vacations.
Rosa’s fate was particularly unfortunate. After a disappointing love affair, she married Heinrch Graf (b. 1852),
a physician, on May 17, 1896, but he died in 1908 at the
age of fifty-six. Her son, Hermann Adolf, was born on
July 13, 1897 and died in action during World War I, in
early 1917. Finally, her daughter, Cäcilie, born October
18, 1899, and nicknamed Mausi, whom Freud called
‘‘my favorite niece,’’ a dear girl of 23, was unmarried and
pregnant when she committed suicide with an overdose
of the barbiturate veronal on August 18, 1922.
The last document from Rosa is a letter transmitted
by the International Red Cross to Freud’s address in
London. Twenty five words only were authorized:
‘‘Geliebte Martha! Tief bewegt grüssen Dich Alle.
Erbitten Deiner Alexanders Familie Befinden. Vier einsam. Traurig. Leidlich. Gesund. —S. fruendschaftlich.
Ganze Einrichtung bestens engleagert. Graf Rosa’’
(‘‘Dear Martha! Greetings with heartfelt emotion.
Wondering about the state of your Alexander’s family.
Four alone. Sad. Painful. Health. Yours warmly. Best
furnishings in storage. Graf Rosa.’’)
Rosa was deported in Theresienstadt on August 28,
1942, at the same time as her three sisters, with whom
she was living in a increasingly cramped apartment.
According to a witness, during the Nuremberg trial, in
October 1942 in the Treblinka concentration camp,
the commandant of the camp to whom she introduced
herself as Sigmund Freud’s sister, examined her identification and ‘‘said that there was probably some mistake and showed her the railroad signs, telling her that
there would be a train to take her back to Vienna in
two hours. She could leave her belongings, go into the
showers and, after bathing, her documents and her
ticket to Vienna would be ready. Rose naturally went
into the showers and never returned’’ (LeupoldLöwenthal, 1989).
Moritz-Freud Maria (Mitzi)
Maria Moritz-Freud (Mitzi) was born on March 22,
1861, and died in the Maly Trostinec, the extermination camp, in 1942. In 1885 she had to work as a governess, which led Freud, then in Paris, while observing
nannies with young children, to write Martha: ‘‘I
couldn’t help thinking of poor Mitzi and grew very,
very furious and full of revolutionary thoughts’’
(Freud 1960, p. 173).
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In 1887 Mitzi married her Romanian cousin
Moritz Freud(1857–1920). They had four children,
Margarethe, born in 1887; Lilly Marlé-Freud, born in
1888, who became a well-known actress; Martha Gertrude, born in 1892, who illustrated children books
under the name ‘‘Tom’’ and would commit suicide in
1930, a year after her husband the journalist Jakob
Seidmann, killed himself; Theodor (Teddy) and born
in 1904, whose twin was stillborn and who died from
drowning in 1923 in Berlin. Martha’s daughter, Angela
Seidmann, was in the care of Freud and Anna for a
while before emigrating to Haı̈fa.
Mitzi, reunited with her sisters in Vienna after her
husband’s death, shared their fate in the Holocaust.
She was deported to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, on June 29, 1942, then to Maly Trostinec
where she disappeared (Leupold-Löwenthal, 1989).
Freud, Esther Adolfine (Dolfi)
Esther Adolfine (Dolfi) was born on July 23, 1862, and
died in 1943 in the concentration camp at Treblinka.
She was unmarried and cared for her father Jakob
when he fell ill, then of her mother, becoming impetuous Amalie’s constant companion, which her nephew
Martin considered could not have been a welcome
fate. ‘‘She was not clever or in any way remarkable,
and it might be true to say that constant attendance on
Amalie had suppressed her personality into a condition of dependence from which she never recovered’’
(M. Freud, 1958, p. 16).
Dolfi was deported with Mitzi and Paula to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt on August 28, 1942,
where she died from ‘‘internal hemorrhages’’ on February 5, 1943, according to information gathered by
Harry Freud after the war, perhaps due to malnutrition. (Leupold-Löwenthal, 1989).
Winternitz-Freud, Pauline Regine (Pauli)
Pauline Regine Winternitz-Freud (Pauli) was born on
May 3, 1864, and died in the Holocaust in 1942. She
was married to Valentin Winternitz and emigrated to
the United States, where their daughter, Rose Beatrice
(Rosi), was born on March 18, 1896. After her husband’s death in 1900, on Freud’s advice, she returned
to Berlin, where she lived with her husband’s family
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mination camp or Maly Trostinec (Leupold-Löwenthal, 1989).
In 1913, Rosi, just seventeen years old, developed
psychological problems that suggested psychosis. Ten
years later and pregnant, she married Ernst Waldinger,
a young poet, but the couple was not happy and, in
1931, she had a relapse. Rosi successfully emigrated to
the United States and in 1946 entered analysis with
Paul Federn in New York, probably with the financial
assistance of Anna Freud.
Freud, Alexander Gotthold Efraim
Alexander Gotthold Efraim Freud was born on April
15 (or April 19), 1866, in Vienna, and died in 1943 in
Canada. The youngest of the family, his name was chosen by Freud himself at a family meeting.
For a number of years Alexander was closest to his
older brother, sharing with him, until Freud married,
Easter and summer vacations, mainly in Italy after a
first visit there in 1895. He took part in the 1897 trip
during which Freud contemplated Luca Signorelli’s
frescoes, and in the visit to Rome at the end of August
1901. ‘‘It was a high point of my life’’ as wrote Freud to
Wilhelm Fliess. He was also with his brother on the
Acropolis, during the sudden ‘‘disturbance of memory’’ in Athens in September 1904.
Merry and whimsical and a music-lover, Alexander
‘‘was an excellent story-teller who could imitate the various accents of the characters in his stories, as his
nephew would write (M. Freud, 1958, p. 17). He did not
pursue an education but, intelligent and hardworking,
became a specialist in transportation and worked at the
Vienna Chamber of Commerce. On August 20, 1899,
Freud wrote to Fliess: ‘‘Alexander was here for four days;
he will lecture on tariff rates at the Export Academy and
will be given the title and rank of professor extraordinarius after one year—much earlier in fact than I’’
(Freud, 1985c). With his expertise, he was responsible
for organizing Freud’s voyage to America in 1909.
Also in 1909, Alexander married Sophie Sabine
Schreiber in a synagogue, in a double ceremony with
his niece Mathilde. His wife gave birth on December
21, 1909, to Harry, their only child. With an excellent
livelihood, he shared with Freud the support of their
mother and Dolfi. He was, according to his brother,
much more upset than he by Amalie’s death in 1930.
In 1936 he commissioned Wilhelm Victor Krauss to
paint Freud’s portrait.
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F R E U D , S I G M U N D S C H L O M O (1856 –1 939)
In March 1938, shortly after the Alexander emigrated to Switzerland. Sigmund, at the time still in
Vienna wrote Ernest Jones (April 28, 1938) that his
brother caused him considerable worry; he had reacted
badly to the loss of his business and was in poor
health. By shared decision, the brothers left a large
sum (160,000 Austrian Schillings) to their four sisters
that would have been sufficient for a comfortable living in Vienna; they saw no serious danger to their
remaining in Vienna. Freud soon realized his mistake
and at his request Marie Bonaparte attempted to
secure their passage from Austria, but without success.
Alexander gave up his Anglophobia and proGerman sentiments that dated to the First World War
to emigrate to London in September 1938, where he
also joined his son Harry. It was this latest who wrote
to his aunts a letter they never receive and in which he
described Sigmund’s last days.
Alexander and his wife would emigrate to Canada,
where he died in 1943.
See also: Freud, Jacob Kolloman (or Kelemen or Kallamon); Freud-Nathanson, Amalie Malka.
Bibliography
Bernays-Freud, Anna. (November 1940). My brother Sigmund Freud. American Mercury 51 (203), 335–342.
Bernays-Heller, Judith. (1973). Freud’s mother and father. In
Freud as we knew him. (H.M. Ruitenbeck, Ed.). Detroit:
Wayne State University Press.
Freud, Martin. (1958). Sigmund Freud: Man and father. New
York: Vanguard Press.
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The Interpretation of Dreams. SE
4–5.
———. (1960). Letters. New York: Basic Books.
———. (1989). Letters of Sigmund Freud and Eduard Silberstein: 1871–1881. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Krüll, Marianne. (1979). Freud und sein Vater. Die Entstehung der Psychoanalyse und Freuds ungelöste Vaterbindung.
Beck.
———. (1986). Freud and His Father. (Arnold J. Pomerans,
Trans.). New York: W.W. Norton. (Original work published 1979).
Leupold-Löwenthal. (1989). Die Vertreibung der Familie
Freud 1938. Psyche-Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und ihre
Anwendungen, 43 (10), 908–928.
63 6
FREUD, SIGMUND SCHLOMO (1856–1939)
Sigmund Schlomo Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in
Freiberg (now Priborg), Moravia (now the Slovak
Republic), and died on September 23, 1939, in London. He was the son of Amalia Nathanson and of
Jakob Freud, a draper, who had two children (Emanuel
and Philipp) from a previous marriage. Freud was the
first child of a couple in which the husband was forty
years old, twice as old as his young wife. Over the next
ten years, five daughters and two more sons would be
born.
He was circumcised a week after birth. When he
was two years old, a younger brother, Julius, died at
the age of seven months, the first of several traumas of
his early childhood. Others included the arrest for
theft of ‘‘Nanie’’ his nurse; the departure of his father
for Austria after a series of bad business dealings; the
emigration to Great Britain of his older half-brothers
and their children, his first playmates; and, most crucially, his own exile at the age of three. He rejoined his
father in Vienna in the company of his mother after a
lengthy train trip that left a deep impression on him.
He remembered his constant poverty following his
arrival in the Austrian capital in 1859 and during his
childhood, but alluded only once to the family’s shame
after his uncle Josef was condemned to ten years of
forced labor for trafficking in counterfeit currency in
1866. He was a brilliant student, however, and after
completing his ‘‘matura’’ (equivalent of the first year
of college), was able to choose between law and natural
science. He enrolled in medical school and after briefly
studying philosophy (Franz Brentano was one of his
teachers), decided to major in zoology.
In the summer of 1875, after a brief stay in Great
Britain with his half-brothers in Manchester, he was
able to put together a better idea of his place in the
family genealogy. The following year he obtained a
research grant to work at the Experimental Zoology
Station of the University of Vienna in Trieste, where
his work helped demonstrate the existence of testicles
in the male eel. His work was presented to the Academy of Sciences in March 1877 and published in April
(1877b), signaling his entry, at the age of twenty-one,
into the world of science. In the following years his
research and personal interest led him to study the
anatomy of the nervous system; he hoped that through
his research he would be able to achieve what he had
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always dreamed of—financial security. But in spite of
his success, his material life remained precarious.
In October 1876 he entered Professor Ernst
Brücke’s Physiologisches Institut, where he remained
until 1882. He became friends with the two assistants,
Ernst von Fleischl and Josef Breuer, and investigated
the posterior nerve roots of the Petromyzon, or sea
lamprey. Impressed by Ernst Brücke’s personality, he
became an adept of the positivist school of Emil Du
Bois-Reymond, who claimed that biology could be
explained by physico-chemical forces whose effects are
strictly deterministic. In March 1881, Freud was made
doctor of medicine, while continuing his research and
writing on subjects as distant from human clinical
practice as the nerve cells of crayfish.
But his future as a laboratory researcher was called
into question when he met Martha Bernays, who
became his wife four years later. He needed to provide
an income for his future household, and followed the
advice Brücke had given him in June—to abandon
pure research and go into medical practice. This prospect failed to excite Freud, as he wrote many years
later, ‘‘After forty one years of medical activity, my selfknowledge tells me that I have never really been a doctor in the proper sense. I became a doctor through
being compelled to deviate from my original purpose;
and the triumph of my life lies in my having, after a
long and roundabout journey, found my way back to
my earliest path. I have no knowledge of having had
any craving in my early childhood to help suffering
humanity. My innate sadistic disposition was not a
very strong one, so that I had no need to develop this
one of its derivatives. Nor did I ever play the Ôdoctor
game’; my infantile curiosity evidently chose other
paths. In my youth I felt an overpowering need to
understand something of the riddles of the world in
which we live and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution’’ (1927a).
Freud worked in various departments of the Vienna
General Hospital to complete his training. While continuing his research on cerebral anatomy and pathology, he became interested in psychiatry (while working
with Professor Theodor Meynert) and the nascent
field of neurology. This very likely contributed to
Freud’s failure to reap the rewards of his research on
cocaine, which he had begun in 1884. More preoccupied with its euphoric effects and what he incorrectly
believed to be its ability to serve as a substitute for the
opiates, he missed the opportunity to discover its local
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ocular anesthetic properties. For several years he continued to ingest a certain amount of cocaine to overcome his timidity and increase his ability to work,
which he discussed openly in his correspondence.
Appointed privat-docent in July 1885, he requested
a grant to study neurology with Jean Martin Charcot
in Paris. His internship at the Salpêtrière Hospital
from October 13, 1885, to February 23, 1886 derailed
his other projects, by exposing him to disturbances of
mental origin. In terms of etiological research as well
as his career as a specialist in neurology, the clinical
lessons of the Parisian master, then at the height of his
glory, demonstrated to Freud the importance of syndromes that had until then been characterized as ‘‘hysterical.’’ Charcot’s personality fascinated Freud and
this first trip outside the Viennese family circle was to
have a decisive effect on his future.
After returning to Vienna he set up a private
practice on April 25, 1886, after a short stay in Berlin
working with Professor Joseph Baginsky, where he
familiarized himself with pediatrics. This enabled him,
over a ten-year period, to maintain a steady practice in
the department of neurology that the pediatrician
Max Kassowitz (1842–1923) had opened at the Vienna
Institute for Child Diseases. Once established he was
finally able to get married, which he did on September
13, 1886. But his attempt to become Charcot’s spokesman among Viennese neurologists and psychiatrists
met with open rejection, especially from Theodor
Meynert. Demanding, vulnerable, and passionate, for
years he interpreted criticism or ignorance of his contributions as a form of systematic hostility that he
often attributed to anti-Semitism, which was widespread in Vienna, especially in academic and medical
circles.
His solitude was broken by a meeting that would
later develop into a close friendship that lasted for
nearly fifteen years. Wilhelm Fliess, an otorhinolaryngologist (ear-nose-and-throat specialist) in Berlin, gradually became a confidant who could share some of
Freud’s doubts and research activities, and a witness to
the clinical experiments and theoretical hypotheses
that littered the long road leading to the birth of psychoanalysis. An extensive correspondence and several
meetings, referred to as ‘‘conferences,’’ enabled them
to exchange ideas about their research, which often fell
upon deaf ears when Freud clearly overestimated his
friend’s comprehension. They also exchanged personal
information. For Freud it was the anxiety about
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money and the birth of six children in succession,
something Fliess’s theories on menstruation and the
hope that they brought of a possible method of contraception failed to resolve.
Their friendship gradually took the place of an earlier friendship with an older Viennese doctor, Josef
Breuer. Breuer, who had helped Freud financially and
professionally early in his career, had also related to
him, in 1882, the story of his patient Anna O. and her
treatment by the ‘‘cathartic method’’ that she and
Breuer had invented. Having experimented with hypnosis for a period of time, Freud had determined that
it was ineffective, especially after an 1889 visit to
Nancy to see Hippolyte Bernheim, Charcot’s rival. He
then decided to make use of the ‘‘talking cure’’ Breuer
had mentioned. This involved, in the attempt to overcome the patient’s resistance, bringing back to consciousness an apparently forgotten memory, which
had been repressed, of the first appearance of a symptom. This made hypnosis no longer necessary; gradually, the technique of incessant questioning it had
given way to was in turn abandoned, in favor of the
free association of ideas. Freud had developed the
hypothesis of the unconscious, together with the idea
that disturbances had their origin in the history of the
subject’s infantile sexuality.
These statements were shocking to many, especially
because of Freud’s public intransigence concerning
them, and it was not without considerable reluctance,
ultimately leading to the end of their friendship, that
Josef Breuer agreed to cosign the Studies in Hysteria in
1895. Wilhelm Fliess remained his only confidant and
the only one who listened to his theoretical suggestions
and the results of his day-to-day clinical observations.
Sexual etiology and childhood seduction by a parent
were among the earliest etiological ideas, but the death
of his father in October 1896 led Freud to question
these ideas, and to practice the same methods on himself he had been using on his patients. His self-analysis
continued throughout the summer and fall of 1897
and the discoveries followed: psychic reality, the Oedipus complex, and so on. Under various forms Freud
would continue to question himself, as shown by his
statement to James Jackson Putnam in 1911—‘‘A selfanalysis must be continued indefinitely. I note, in my
own case, that each new attempt has brought surprises’’ (November 5 letter)—and the article dedicated
to Romain Rolland, ‘‘A Disturbance of Memory on the
Acropolis.’’ (1936a)
63 8
Prompted by the frequency with which his patients
spontaneously reported their dreams to him, Freud
began to investigate their unconscious meanings. The
first dream to which he applied his new method of
interpretation through the fragmentation and association of ideas was the ‘‘injection given to Irma,’’ of July
23, 1895. His systematic investigation of this dream
became the origin of The Interpretation of Dreams,
published at the end of 1899, but dated 1900 (1900a).
It is a fundamental work in what Freud had referred to
for the first time in 1896 (in an article published in
French in the Revue neurologique) as ‘‘psychoanalysis.’’
The book was widely praised but sold poorly
(421 copies in six years), although this did not impede
his work. It was a period in which he described himself
as a ‘‘conquistador,’’ thereby summarizing the mixture
of enthusiasm and obstinacy that characterized his
personality. Anxious, suffering from hypochondriacal
illnesses of the stomach and heart, preoccupied with
the calculation of dates predicting his death, undecided about whether to continue or abandon smoking;
there is nothing of the austere scholar depicted by his
biographers. But he was primarily an indefatigable
worker, who stayed up late at night to answer letters (a
correspondence estimated at more than twenty thousand letters) and would fill large sheets of paper with
his broad gothic handwriting.
As his friendship with Fliess waned, he prepared the
Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b) and took
notes for the Dora case, which was not published until
1905. Some of those who attended his courses at the
university went to see him, either to be treated, like
Wilhelm Stekel, or to discuss innovative theories with
him. They formed the ‘‘Wednesday Psychological
Society,’’ which met every week and, in 1908, became
the first Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. The publication of Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious
(1905c) and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905d); followed by a collection of his earliest articles,
Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre aus den
Jahren 1893-1906 (1906b); helped him break out of
what he described as his ‘‘splendid isolation.’’ Readers
intrigued by the originality of his hypotheses came to
visit him in Vienna: Max Eitingon in January 1907,
Ludwig Binswanger and Carl Gustav Jung in February,
Karl Abraham in December 1907, Sándor Ferenczi in
February 1908. They were to form the core group of
his future disciples.
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In response to the growing number of followers and
the high level of interest, the first International Psychoanalytical Congress was held in Salzburg on April
27, 1908. Freud spoke for nearly five hours on the Ratman (1909d), a case which, by systematizing nondirectivity, helped establish the parameters of the psychoanalytic ‘‘framework.’’ Here the patient was
stretched out on a couch with the psychoanalyst seated
behind him, out of sight of the patient, sessions were
held daily and lasted for about an hour, the patient
was free to say whatever he wished. Freud laid down
the groundwork for the theory of ‘‘transference’’ with
the therapist and, in 1910, in response to Curl Gustav
Jung’s affair with his patient Sabina Spielrein, the theory of the ‘‘counter-transference.’’ That same year, the
risks of ‘‘wild’’ psychoanalysis led to the creation, at
Ferenczi’s initiative, of an international psychoanalytic
association to monitor the development of ‘‘die
Sache’’ (the cause) and distinguish the wheat from the
chaff among its practitioners.
though Freud gradually enlarged the concept of sexuality, which the majority of his critics reduced to adult
forms of genital sexuality. The concepts of ‘‘infantile
sexuality’’ and ‘‘polymorphous perversity’’ were even
more unacceptable to those who believed they sullied
what was believed to be an original infantile purity.
As is often the case in such situations, Jung’s departure in 1914 served as a spur to Freud’s creativity, who
wrote ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’ (1914c) and
developed his analysis of the primal scene in his essay
on the Wolfman, which he also completed that year
(1918b [1914]). He also provided the first historical
overview of the origins of psychoanalysis in On the
History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (1914d),
which was intended to sway those who were still undecided between him and Jung.
Although Freud maintained friendly relations with
Sándor Ferenczi—notwithstanding periods of tension
and the short analysis his younger colleague began
with him in 1914—until Ferenczi’s death in 1933, his
relationships with his other students were often
strained. Alfred Adler, who developed a theory based
on aggression, the will to power, and organ inferiority,
and rejected sexual etiology, distanced himself from
Freud to found a new school in 1911. He was followed
by Wilhelm Stekel in 1912. But the greatest disappointment came from Carl Gustav Jung, who in 1909
had been declared ‘‘successor and crown prince’’ by
Freud, who had glimpsed the doors of academic psychiatry opening to him, along with the possibility that
psychoanalysis would no longer be viewed as a ‘‘Jewish
matter.’’ Their personal relationship, as shown in their
correspondence, and the intellectual exchange this
involved, encouraged Freud to study psychosis, using
the Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Schreber
(1911c), and to speculate on anthropological issues, of
which Totem and Taboo (1912-1913a) is the first
expression.
The First World War seemed to sound the death
knell for the young science of psychoanalysis. Freud’s
sons were at the front and he initially supported a German victory. However, he soon revised his position,
which he explained in ‘‘Thoughts for the Times on
War and Death’’ (1915b). Times were difficult and
material scarcity became a growing problem as war
progressed. However, it was also a period of considerable intellectual creativity, and Freud laid out the
groundwork for the broad theoretical foundations of
psychoanalysis, primarily the twelve essays on metapsychology, only five of which (and the newly discovered draft of the twelfth) were published. In spite of
his pessimism there was renewed interest in psychoanalysis among the public and within the medical
establishment when it proved useful in treating war
neuroses. The end of hostilities brought about a minor
institutional triumph for, following the Fifth International Psychoanalytical Congress in Budapest
(September 28–29, 1918), Béla Kun’s revolutionary
government offered a university chair to Sándor Ferenczi. Another Hungarian, the rich brewer Anton von
Freund, whom Freud analyzed, invested his fortune in
‘‘the cause,’’ which led to the creation of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, but he died of cancer in 1920.
However, Jung’s personality was such that he could
not remain for long in the position of the submissive
son, and his religious training and interest in mysticism led to no more than a superficial acceptance of
Freud’s materialism and insistence on sexual etiology.
This rejection of what was considered an outrageous
and obscene ‘‘pansexualism’’ was fairly general, even
Freud was sixty-five at this time, and around him
he saw sickness and death. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g) reflected this, with its theory of the repetition compulsion and the duality between a life
impulse, Eros, and a death impulse, Thanatos, whose
theoretical necessity Freud maintained until his death,
despite the opposition of many psychoanalysts to such
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‘‘speculation.’’ In real life his daughter Sophie (he
called her ‘‘Sunday’s child’’) died during the Spanish
flu epidemic, on January 25, 1920. Three years later, in
April 1923, he experienced the first signs of cancer of
the jaw, which had a profound effect on the remaining
sixteen years of his life; that same year, on June 19, his
favorite grandson, Heinele, died.
He was now sixty-seven years old and, although he
often complained of growing old, this was but one of
the many hypochondriacal conditions he had always
referred to in his letters. His fear of death is most evident in his superstitious fears and morbid calculations,
borrowed from Wilhelm Fliess, but the fateful days
passed without event. Freud also showed considerable
interest in telepathy and clairvoyance, and conducted
experiments in this field, often together with Sándor
Ferenczi.
In spite of his shortness, he was still the ‘‘professor’’
and was authoritarian with his family, his students,
and his patients. He showed himself to be the undisputed leader of the psychoanalytic movement, interest
in which he stimulated through his many publications.
He had overcome pain and disappointment, and
watched as the ‘‘cause’’ to which he had devoted his
life continued to grow. Interest spread to France, and
its identification with a founding father, a Moses—for
Freud the creator of monotheism—seemed increasingly justified. It is in this context that his decision to
become his daughter Anna’s analyst must be understood. This is not as unusual as it may seem, especially
for the time, and Freud speaks of it in his letters. It was
only after the Second World War that Anna Freud’s
accession to the status of guardian of Freudian orthodoxy cast into oblivion a form of training so inconsistent with the strict criteria that had been laid out.
There was a risk the lapse would be viewed as something very nearly incestuous.
With the onset of his cancer, old age and death
became a reality for Freud. It was at this time that he
strengthened the death instinct and deepened the concept of identification discussed in Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c). He also revised the
theoretical model that he had been developing for the
past quarter-century with the ‘‘second topographical’’
structure introduced in The Ego and the Id (1923b).
Some of his contemporaries, like Otto Rank, were
reluctant to accept Freud’s newest theories, which
appeared to disturb the fantastic and somewhat unreal
experience represented by the birth of psychoanalysis
64 0
for those who had lived through it. Freud’s life was
now marked by painful and disfiguring operations
that forced him to interrupt his activities while he
recovered in the Weiner Cottage-Sanatorium or the
Schloss Tegel clinic, which Ernest Simmel ran from
1927 to 1931 in Berlin. The uncomfortable prosthetic
devices he was required to wear caused him to remain
silent for long periods of time.
Change was in the works, however. There were disagreements within the secret committee, formed at the
request of Ernest Jones in 1912 to provide support for
Freud during Jung’s defection, and it ceased to exist
entirely in 1927. The quarrels weren’t so much about
who would inherit Freud’s mantle, as they were about
jealousies and rivalries, all of which helped feed
Freud’s increasingly pessimistic—some would say realistic—vision of the human race. The first generation
of psychoanalysts had evolved and began to develop
their own theories. It often fell to Freud to resolve the
resulting theoretical disputes and arbitrate personal
conflicts.
Freud never claimed to be a great therapist and was
often irritated by the ‘‘furor sanandi’’ shown by some
of his followers, notably Sándor Ferenczi, as being contrary to a strictly psychoanalytic attitude. Although he
had encouraged the use of ‘‘active technique’’ in 19181920, he hesitated to complete the project for a ‘‘psychoanalytic method’’ that his followers demanded of
him and which he had begun to write down in 1908.
During this last period of his life, he devoted himself
almost exclusively to training analyses. Having been a
patient of Freud was widely viewed as a kind of
diploma, and there was an unending stream of candidates, especially from North and South America.
His theoretical interest turned increasingly to what
he felt to be his most important contribution: the
importance of psychoanalysis to culture. It was in
keeping with this that he resumed his anthropological
ideas about the primitive horde and the murder of the
primitive father, which had been introduced in Totem
and Taboo (1912-1913a), extending their scope with
the new theory of impulses, the importance of primal
fantasies, and the concept of primary identification (in
1923b). In The Future of an Illusion (1927c), Freud
analyzed religious sentiment; aside from being an affirmation of his scientific and materialist beliefs, the
book also served as a warning against the religious
leanings that jeopardized psychoanalysis. Civilization
and its Discontents (1930a) resumed the discussion of
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human destiny, torn between its contradictory
impulses and condemned to negotiate the avoidance
of suffering for its survival. Freud’s focus on culture in
his writings became increasingly obvious; he described
a ‘‘process of civilization’’ whose evolution paralleled
the process of mental development in the individual.
The last essay, ‘‘Weltanschauung,’’ in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933a) resumed these
themes, which had also been discussed in his letter to
Albert Einstein, ‘‘Why War?’’ (1933b), but it was in
Moses and Monotheism (1939a) that Freud outlined
the last great fresco of man’s relation to culture, which
continued to preoccupy him.
Freud continued to refine psychoanalytic theory.
The second topographical model and the theory of
impulses, ‘‘our mythology,’’ as he called it in 1933, as
well as upheavals in the psychoanalytic movement, led
to new considerations and refinements. Inhibitions,
Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d) is a response to the
reduction of the Oedipus theory to the ‘‘birth trauma’’
proposed by Otto Rank in 1924, the first manifestation
of a defection that would continue until 1926. ‘‘The
Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex,’’ (1924d) ‘‘Some
Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction
between the Sexes,’’ (1925j) and ‘‘Female Sexuality’’
(1931b) provide an outline of the libido that was supported by the work of the first female psychoanalysts.
The emphasis on a phallic phase responded to the criticism of Ernest Jones on Freudian views about femininity, discussed in chapter 30 of the New Introductory
Lectures (1930a). There, Freud insists on the primordial role played by the threat and fear of castration.
The ego defenses raised to counter the threat led Freud
to introduce elements for a new approach to perversion, which he did in ‘‘Negation’’ (1925h). ‘‘Fetishism,’’
(1927e) and his final manuscript, ‘‘Splitting of the Ego
in the Process of Defense.’’ (1940e [1938]) Freud gave
increasing consideration to the death impulse in his
clinical work and eventually it became not speculative
but a key element of his theory, in spite of the opposition of many of his students.
Some of his older students passed away—Karl
Abraham in 1925 and Ferenczi, who had grown distant
from him, in 1933. The most important person in
Freud’s circle was now Anna, his daughter. While she
was undergoing analysis, Freud arranged her initial
contacts with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, to
which she was elected a member in 1922. The worsening of his cancer and subsequent infirmity led to his
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becoming increasingly dependent on his ‘‘Antigone,’’
who began to represent him at conferences and
accepted the Goethe Prize in his stead, when it was
awarded in 1930 by the city of Frankfurt to acknowledge the literary value of his writing. She took his
place at the funeral of his mother, Amalia FreudNathanson, who died at the age of ninety-five in September 1930. It is easy to understand why Freud
looked askance at Ernest Jones and English psychoanalysts when, in 1925, they welcomed Melanie Klein and
her theories, which contradicted the views of Anna
Freud on child psychoanalysis.
Moreover, the Old World was crumbling, incapable
of stopping the rise of Adolf Hitler. Freud’s books were
burned publicly in May 1933, and Jewish psychoanalysts were forced to flee or condemned to death. Initially, Freud negotiated in the hope of preserving the
‘‘cause,’’ but the Anschluss forced him to face the bleak
reality. With the assistance of Princess Marie Bonaparte, who, after an analysis begun in 1925, had
become an attentive and influential friend, and the
U.S. Ambassador William C. Bullitt, with whom he
had attempted to write a psychological study of President Woodrow Wilson (1966b), he was able to emigrate with his wife and daughter to Great Britain on
June 6, 1938. His other children as well as his brother
Alexander left Austria, but his four sisters remained in
Vienna; they died in the Nazi concentration camps in
1942 and 1943.
The ‘‘peau de chagrin’’ (Balzac’s novel was one of
the last books he read) began to tighten around Freud,
who had settled on the outskirts of London, where he
continued to write and see patients. The onset of the
Second World War on September 1, 1939, and his physical decline led him to ask Max Schur, his doctor, to
keep the promise they had made when they first met:
not to give him a sedative but to shorten his suffering
when he felt the hour was near. He died on September
23, 1939, and three days later his ashes were placed in a
Greek urn that, knowing his fondness for antiques,
Marie Bonaparte had given him.
Freud’s death did not go unnoticed in spite of the
upheavals in Europe and elsewhere. Aside from the
eulogies and numerous critical assessments, it marked
the beginning of a considerable expansion of psychoanalysis that began in the United States, a country
Freud claimed to have little liking for. It also resulted
in an astonishing idolization of Freud in the years following the war. For a time, under the impetus of the
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lengthy biography written by Ernest Jones, Freud
became a subject for hagiography; mention of his name
took the place of original thinking and the ‘‘return to
Freud’’ served as a theoretical pretext, for others as for
Jacques Lacan in France. The home at Maresfield Gardens, where Martha Freud died in 1951, became, under
the watchful eye of Anna Freud, the center of Freudianism and, after her death in 1982, was transformed into a
museum, as was Freud’s apartment at Berggasse 19 in
Vienna. In New York, Kurt Eissler began gathering
documents and eye-witness accounts of Freud for the
Freud Archives. However, because of his demand for
secrecy, this material was for years kept from researchers, arousing their anger, exciting their curiosity, and
giving rise to a number of spiteful rumors.
On a more serious note, after the leading biography
by Fritz Wittels, which had irritated Freud in 1924,
and the monument erected by Ernest Jones from 1953
to 1957, a number of books have been written to
describe Freud’s life and work, by serious scholars:
Max Schur (1972), Ronald W. Clark (1980), Peter Gay
(1988). Some of these presented original, and often
questionable, interpretations of Freud’s work, such as
the biographies by Frank Sulloway (1979) and Marianne Krüll (1979). The gradual appearance of new
documents and the opening of the secret archives
opened the door to future research and new assessments of Freud’s importance for the history and evolution of the civilization of his time and for human
thought.
By the 1960s Freud’s books were often bestsellers.
The body of Freud’s writings increased with the publication of his correspondence to his students and
friends. His letters to Wilhelm Fliess, purchased in
1937 by Marie Bonaparte and miraculously preserved
throughout the Second World War, provided insights
into the birth of psychoanalysis, a theme that was to
serve as inspiration for filmmakers and dramatists
(among others, John Huston’s film, Freud, of 1962).
Unfortunately, some passages were censured, which
led to the growth of research on an unexpurgated history of Freud and psychoanalysis. Paul Roazen helped
promote these efforts with his study on the relationship between Freud and Viktor Tausk (1969), which
emphasized Freud’s responsibility in the suicide of this
brilliant student and triggered a backlash against
‘‘orthodox’’ Freudians by adversaries who, thirty years
later, would be labeled ‘‘revisionists.’’ Ardent supporters and angry critics confronted one another on a
regular basis. Freud and his ideas were called into
question by an increasingly large number of people, in
a way compensating for the glorious early years psychoanalysis. The number of essays and criticisms
multiplied with the discovery of historical documents—some authentic, some not. The anger and bitterness of his critics became increasingly obvious,
betrayed by the excess of the accusations: there was an
alleged attempt on Fliess’s life, reports of lies about his
patients or errors of diagnosis by a Freud who was
hungry for glory, tales of a ménage à trois involving
Minna Bernays, and rumors of an abortion. A band of
‘‘moralists’’ obsessed with the ‘‘truth’’ about Freud and
Freudianism kept up the pressure, especially in the
United States.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
64 2
Works discussed: Autobiographical Study, An; Civilization
and its Discontents; ‘‘Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest’’ ‘‘Contributions to the Psychology of Love’’;
‘‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’’; ‘‘Delusions and
Dreams in Jensen’s ‘‘Gradiva’’; ‘‘Dostoyevsky and Parricide’’; Ego and the Id, The; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; ‘‘Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses’’; Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety; ‘‘Instincts and
their Vicissitudes’’; Interpretation of Dreams, The; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious; ‘‘Klinische Studie über die halbseitiger Cerebrallähmung der Kinder’’ [Clinical study of
infantile cerebral diplegia]; Leonardo da Vinci and a
memory of his childhood; ‘‘Lines of Advance in PsychoAnalytic Therapy’’; ‘‘Metapsychologic Supplement to the
Theory of Dreams’’; Moses and Monotheism; Moses of
Michelangelo, The’’; ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’;
‘‘Negation, The’’; ‘‘Neurasthenia and Anxiety Neurosis’’;
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; ‘‘Note upon
the ÔMystic Writing Pad’, A’’; ‘‘Notes upon a Case of
Obsessional Neurosis’’ (Rat Man); ‘‘On Narcissism: An
Introduction’’; ‘‘On the History of the Psychoanalytic
Movement’’; ‘‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’’;
Phylogenetic Fantasy, A: Overview of the Transference
Neuroses; ‘‘On Transience’’; ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology, A’’; Question of Lay Analysis, The; ‘‘Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis’’;
‘‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’’;
‘‘Repression’’; ‘‘Seventeenth-century Demonological
Neurosis, A’’; ‘‘Sexual Enlightenment Of Children, The’’;
‘‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’’; Studies on Hysteria; ‘‘Theme
of the Three Caskets, The’’; ‘‘Thomas Woodrow Wilson,
Twenty-eighth President of the United States. A Psycho-
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logical Study’’; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality;
‘‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’’; ‘‘Totem
and Taboo’’; ‘‘Uncanny, The’’; ‘‘Unconscious, The’’;
‘‘Why War?’’; ‘‘ÔWild’ Psycho-Analysis.’’
Bibliography
Mijolla, Alain de. (1982). Aux origines de la pratique psychanalytique. In R. Jaccard (Ed.), Histoire de la psychanalyse (v. I, pp. 11–43). Paris: Hachette.
———. (1989). Images of Freud from his correspondence.
International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 5, 87–110.
———. (1993). Freud, biography, his autobiography and
his biographers. Psychoanalytic History, 1 (1), 4–27.
———. (1996). Un adolescent bien tranquille. Sig(is)mund
Freud, 1870–1876. Cahiers du Collège international de
l’Adolescence, 1, 231–267.
Wittels, Fritz. (1924). Sigmund Freud, his personality, his
teaching, his school (E. and C. Paul, Trans.). London: Allen
& Unwin.
FREUD’S SELF-ANALYSIS
Although Didier Anzieu’s doctoral thesis (1975; trans.
1986) treated Freud’s self-analysis, he had already published a briefer, more general text: L’auto-analyse: Son
rôle dans la découverte de la psychanalyse par Freud, sa
fonction en psychanalyse (Self-analysis: its role in the
discovery of psychoanalysis by Freud and its function
in psychoanalysis; 1959). There one finds, in addition
to research on the self-analysis of the young Freud, a
study of self-analysis in general, both in literature (the
surrealists) and in the clinic, before and after
treatment.
Freud’s Self-analysis (1986) dropped the study of
self-analysis in general and featured an epistemological
and historical approach to Freud’s self-analysis, primarily as revealed in The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900a), in relation to the discovery of psychoanalysis.
Anzieu avoided classic biography (such as the one
by Ernest Jones [1953–1957]) in order to apply the
psychoanalytic method to its creator. His work is supported by a thorough chronological inventory of the
documents of the self-analysis (dreams, screen memories, slips, instances of forgetting, and parapraxes)
from 1895 to 1902, the date of the break with Wilhelm
Fliess and the foundation of the Psychoanalytic Society
of Vienna. A chronological list of the inventory itself is
appended at the end of the work.
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The central focus of the book is essentially an investigation into the subjective conditions that led Freud
to create psychoanalysis. This focus is also part of a
major preoccupation of Anzieu’s, the psychoanalysis
of creative genius (1974).
Especially notable in Freud’s Self-Analysis are the
creative subject’s masochism, the mother’s favoritism
for the future genius, Freud’s mentally active attitude
in relation to the primal scene, the creative subject’s
‘‘heroic identifications,’’ and also the castration anxiety that tends to paralyze or destroy creativity. In
this regard Anzieu emphasizes the supportive role
played by Fliess, remarking along the way that there
is no serious self-analysis if it is not spoken to
someone.
At a time when the history of psychoanalysis still
captured only limited interest in France, Didier Anzieu
produced both a reference work for researchers and a
valuable example of the inseparability of psychoanalytic theory from the history of the discovery of its concepts, and thus from its authors.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Anzieu, Didier; Self-analysis.
Source Citation
Anzieu, Didier. (1986). Freud’s self-analysis (Peter Graham,
Trans.). Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
(Original work published 1975)
Bibliography
Anzieu, Didier. (1959). L’auto-analyse: Son rôle dans la
découverte de la psychanalyse par Freud, sa fonction en psychanalyse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
———. (1974). Vers une métapsychologie de la création. In
Didier Anzieu (Ed.), Psychanalyse du génie créateur (pp. 1–
30). Paris: Dunod.
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4: 1–338; 5: 339–625.
Jones, Ernest. (1953–1957). Sigmund Freud: Life and work.
London: Hogarth.
Mellor-Picaut, Sophie. (1977). Le travail de la création dans
‘‘L’autoanalyse de Freud et la découverte de la psychanalyse’’ par Didier Anzieu. Psychanalyse à l’université. 2 (8),
707–724.
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FREUD,
THE
SECRET PASSION
FREUD, THE SECRET PASSION
The first film made about Sigmund Freud, Freud, the
Secret Passion was directed by John Huston and was
based on a very long script proposed by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1958 but reworked by Charles Kaufmann and
Wolfgang Reinhardt (Sartre insisted that his name not
appear in the credits); it featured Montgomery Clift in
the role of Freud and Susannah York in the role of
Cecily Koertner. Released in 1962, it was distributed in
France under the title Freud, désirs inavoués.
The film tells the story of the treatment by hypnosis
of an hysterical patient, Cecily, by the young Freud,
who struggles to bring her into awareness of the sexual
origins of her problems and runs up against hostility
from those close to her. Freud almost invariably looks
furious, ‘‘somber,’’ ‘‘stiff,’’ ‘‘ashen-faced’’—stuck in the
shackles of his neurosis until he achieves a state of
lucid Sartrean consciousness by getting rid of the
protective and hated father figures with whom he had
surrounded himself. Pushed by the hostility of the
Viennese medical community, spurred on by antiSemitism, he becomes ‘‘engaged,’’ according to Sartre’s
ideas, in a revolutionary combat for the liberation of
oppressed hysterics, unjustly called ‘‘fakers.’’ He is constructed in the image of the author-philosopher, who
was known for repeatedly taking a stand in defense of
blacks, the Algerians, Jews, workers, or those who, like
Jean Genet, had been labeled from childhood and condemned to be what others had designated them to be.
It is these violent external conflicts, symbolized by
the three ‘‘fathers’’ who appear—an alcoholic Theodor
Meynert, a senile Jakob Freud, and a lame Josef
Breuer—that for Sartre constitute the main motivation for Freud’s actions, although Sartre poses an
additional, underlying question: What was Freud’s
sexuality? The film glosses over this aspect of the script
and of Sartre’s explanation of Freud’s violence by
means of a sexual contention that remains inexplicable
and unexplained. ‘‘But your Freud, he was neurotic
down to the marrow!’’ Sartre once said jubilantly to
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (Pontalis in Sartre, 1984/1985).
On July 15, 1958, considering Ernest Jones’s hagiography of Freud, Simone de Beauvoir noted in her
journal: ‘‘Jones doesn’t explain very well what Freud’s
particular neurosis was, nor how he got rid of it. Perhaps the fact that Freud’s daughter is still alive embarrasses him, but there are certain questions he doesn’t
ask: Freud’s relationship with his wife, for example. It’s
64 4
easy enough to say that they [sic] were Ôexcellent’; but
Freud’s depressions and migraines are either directly
linked to his domestic life or they are not. Which?
After all, he was an extremely vital man; witness his
passionate love of travel. Monogamous, all right; but
why, exactly? Jones avoids the question. . . . The most
moving moment is the one where he discovers his mistake about hysteria. He had believed that all his
women patients had been Ôseduced’ by their fathers . . .
and he realized that his patients had invented it all.
What a slap in the face! What a shock! . . . It is moving
to watch these concepts that have become so scholastic, mechanical—transference for example—reveal
themselves in such vital experiences’’ (1963/1965, pp.
430–431).
In a 1965 interview, Huston confided to Robert
Benayoun: ‘‘The basic idea of Freud the adventurer,
the explorer of his own unconscious, was mine. I
wanted to concentrate on this episode like in a detective plot.’’ He also explained: ‘‘To me, hypnosis is
something magical, almost sacred’’ (Benayoun, 1965).
And indeed, the hypnotic treatment and catharsis
are what are presented to the public. Huston’s Freud
conforms to the classic movie character who, one
against all, and above all, against himself, must make
triumphant a truth that he reveals through pain.
Despite the sugar-coatings he added to the original
script, Huston had to submit to the explicit and implicit imperatives of American censorship and adapt his
film to the then-dominant ideological demands of the
world of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. He later
deplored the fact that his film had been ‘‘literally mutilated of its essential scenes’’ (Benayoun, 1965).
Many were concerned that Freud’s image might be
ruined by his promiscuity in overly shocking scenes. It
was essentially Anna Freud who opposed the idea of
any film on her father. It is known, for example, that
through the intermediary of Marianne Kris, she convinced Marilyn Monroe (who had consulted her during
a shoot in London) not to play the role of Cecily, which
Huston had in mind for her, according to Donald
Spoto’s Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (1993). She also
opposed the idea of any living member of the family
being represented, which explains the childless marriage
attributed to Freud onscreen. The theme of prostitution, which Sartre emphasized so constantly that it can
be wondered whether this was his answer to his questions about Freud’s sexuality, was also strongly challenged by Hollywood’s censors, advised by some
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F R I E D L Ä N D E R - F R Ä N K L , K A T E (1902 –1 949)
eminent psychoanalysts (Walker, 1993). At the time, as
Pontalis pointed out, studies of the history of psychoanalysis were virtually nonexistent.
Although the film can be criticized on many counts,
its great merit must be acknowledged; it helped to
shatter the conventional portrait of an old, stern,
bespectacled, and white-bearded Freud. Even though
it may seem artificial, excessive in the grimaces and
wounded looks given by Montgomery Clift, the character seen onscreen made it possible, in its day, to imagine a Freud who was closer to the young viewers discovering him for the first time.
See also: Cinema and psychoanalysis; France; Sartre and
psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Beauvoir, Simone de. (1965) Force of circumstance: The autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir (Richard Howard,
Trans.). New York: Putnam. (Original work published
1963)
Benayoun, Robert. (1965). Interview de John Huston. Positif, 70.
Mijolla, Alain de. (1999). Freud and the psychoanalytic
situation on the screen. In Endless night. Cinema and
psychoanalysis: Parallel histories (pp. 188–199). Los Angeles
and London: University of California Press. (Original work
published 1994)
Sartre, Jean Paul. (1985). The Freud scenario (Quinton
Hoare, Trans.). London: Verso. (Original work published
1984)
brother, Emil (later codirector of the brewery with
him), and two sisters on a magnificent property, the
remains of which are still visible next to the brewery.
Here Sigmund Freud spent the summer of 1918, far
from the penury of wartime, receiving visits from Sandór Ferenczi, going for carriage rides along the
Danube, correcting proofs of his articles, and analyzing one of von Freund’s sisters, Kata (the future wife of
Lajos Lévy, a physician, analyst, and director of the
Jewish Hospital).
Von Freund underwent analysis with Freud and
even directed a course of an analysis, which he
reported on to Freud. The two men became friends,
and von Freund went on to play an important role in
the psychoanalytic movement. An eminent figure in
Budapest, and practical and generous in temperament,
he was initially the main organizer of the Fifth Congress of 1918 and was the founder of the first center for
research on child psychology (for which he recruited
Melanie Klein, one of Ferenczi’s patients). He financed
the publishing house Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag in Vienna as well as an analytic outpatient clinic in Budapest (the latter was never actually
created). He died prematurely of cancer, and Freud
composed a moving obituary for this ‘‘providential’’
man.
MICHELLE MOREAU RICAUD
See also: Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Hungary; Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
Bibliography
Spoto, Donald. (1993). Marilyn Monroe: The autobiography.
New York: HarperCollins.
Freud, Sigmund. (1920). Dr. Anton von Freund. SE, 18:
267–268.
Walker, Janet. (1993). Couching resistance: Women, film, and
psychoanalytic psychiatry, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
FRIEDLÄNDER-FRÄNKL, KATE (1902–1949)
FREUND TOSZEGHY, ANTON VON
(1880–1920)
Kate Friedländer, psychoanalyst and physician, was
born in Innsbruck, Austria in 1902, and died February
20, 1949, in London.
Anton von Freund Toszeghy, director of a brewery in
Budapest, Hungary, a doctor of philosophy, and a
patron of the psychoanalytic movement, was born in
1880 in Budapest and died on January 20, 1920, in
Vienna, Austria. The son of a rich, ennobled industrialist who founded the state brewery of Steinbuch
A. G., von Freund spent an idyllic childhood with his
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Kate Friedländer’s birthplace was one of the most
anti-Semitic parts of Austria, and her parents were
middle-class Jews. Her two brothers both died in early
childhood, and she had a gifted younger sister whom
she greatly admired.
She obtained her medical degree at the University
in 1926, but frustrated by the narrow outlook in her
645
FRIENDSHIP
native town, she left for the Weimar Republic and
settled in Berlin. There she became an assistant to Professor Karl Bonhoeffer at the University psychiatric
clinic (The Charité), where many of the young doctors
were interested in psychoanalysis. In 1930 Kate Friedländer obtained her second medical degree. She was
interested in neurology and in 1932 published a paper
titled ‘‘A Clinical Entity to be separated from Multiple
Sclerosis.’’ She wrote other papers, including one on
general paresis and the social integration of those who
had been treated for this condition with malaria therapy. This reflected her keen interest in social affairs
and strong social conscience,an interest reflected in
her involvement in the Juvenile Court in Berlin. Her
interest in delinquency lasted all through her professional life. Two of her early papers, ‘‘The Somatic Origin of Anxiety’’ (1933) and ‘‘The Biological Basis of
Freud’s Theory of Anxiety’’ (1935), proclaimed her
deep interest in this subject.
Friedländer’s achievements in Berlin, and her pleasure
in them, were overshadowed by the success of the Nazis.
Together with her husband and two-year-old daughter,
she emigrated to London in 1933, to become first an
associate and then a full member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. In 1936 she took her third medical
degree in Edinburgh, and in 1943 her D.P.M., in London.
Her husband became increasingly mentally ill and,
although she fought hard to save her marriage, the first
steps toward an eventual divorce were taken in 1935.
Although her interests were wide, Kate Friedländer’s contributions to psychoanalysis developed along
two main lines, one linked closely with Edward Glover
and the other with Anna Freud. In the 1930s she had
already pursued her interest in delinquency and joined
Glover in the Institute for the Study and Treatment of
Delinquency; she published a book, The PsychoAnalytic Approach to Juvenile Delinquency, in 1947.
With the arrival of Anna Freud she was greatly stimulated by her work with children and by the eventual
creation of the War Nurseries. It was she above all who
persuaded Anna Freud to found the child training
course, in which she took an active part and which
later became an integral part of the Hampstead Child
Therapy Course and Clinic—an enterprise that would
have delighted her had she lived to see it.
It was her remarkable vision and energy that led her
to set up Britain’s first Child Guidance Clinic—that of
West Sussex, of which branches were opened in
Horsham, Chichester and Worthing, supported by
64 6
enthusiastic students who had worked in the Hampstead Nurseries. These are the achievements for which
she is best remembered. She played as well a full part
in the life of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and
submitted a number of written statements to the special meetings on the Controversial Discussions. But
when Edward Glover, whom she strongly supported,
resigned from the Society in 1944, she withdrew as
well.
She was a keen and active sportswoman, an adventurous swimmer who defied tide and uncongenial
weather, fond of tennis, skiing, ice-skating, and mountaineering. She died, with a great deal still to offer, on
February 20, 1949, from carcinoma of the lung with
brain secondaries, at the early age of forty-six, with her
second husband, a well-known radiologist, at her
beside.
CLIFFORD YORKE
See also: Controversial Discussions; Great Britain.
Bibliography
Friedländer, Kate. (1940). On the longing to die. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 21, 416–426.
——— (1941). Children’s books and their function in
latency and pre-puberty. Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 26.
———. (1945). Formation of the anti-social character. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1, 189.
———. (1949). Neurosis and home background, a preliminary report. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 3–4, 423.
King, Pearl H. M.; and Steiner, Riccardo. (1991). The FreudKlein Controversies, 1941–1945. London-New York: Tavistock
Publications-Routledge,
New
Library
of
Psychoanalysis.
FRIENDSHIP
From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, friendship is one of
the bonds that arise from sexual impulses when their
attainment of a directly sexual goal is inhibited. However, this is a process of inhibition rather than sublimation. This approach to a sexual satisfaction that is
never consummated forms the basis for especially
strong and enduring ties between people.
Both in adolescence and in adulthood, Freud had
some intense and deep friendships, but he did not
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write on this subject at any great length. However,
friendship, as he defined it, plays a key role between
individuals to the extent that it appears as a metaphor
for those relationships between two people that, unlike
the state of romantic love, lead to a broader form of
unity. In this sense, Freud connects it with these other
ties that are based on the aim-inhibited sexual
impulses: the tender relationship between parent and
child, and conjugal love in which the sexual relationship has gradually fallen into second place. These two
bonds form the basis for the broader unity that is constituted by the family, just as friendship is the foundation for the creation of social ties.
However, these different kinds of bond should not
be confused, because the homosexual libido can
develop into friendship whereas the conjugal bond is
in essence heterosexual and the parent-child relationship involves an elaboration of the parent’s narcissistic
libido. These ties can even conflict: ‘‘a pair of lovers are
sufficient to themselves, and do not even need the
child they have in common to make them happy’’
(1930a [1929], p. 108).
At the theoretical level, Freud refined the concept of
sublimation by distinguishing it from the inhibition of
the aim of sexual satisfaction and, in this respect,
friendship constitutes a good example. Using the
examples of Plato and St. Paul (1921c), Freud emphasized that the libido corresponds to love understood in
a wide sense, including, along with the state of romantic love, self-love, filial and parental love, friendship,
and even the attachment to physical objects and
abstract ideas. The sexual basis of these ties is attested
to by the fact that they retain some of the primary sexual aims: ‘‘Even an affectionate devotee, even a friend
or an admirer, desires the physical proximity and the
sight of the person who is now loved only in the ÔPauline’ sense’’ (pp. 138–139).
However, these aim-inhibited drives are not only
capable of being combined with non-inhibited drives
but can also be transformed back in the opposite
direction to revert to the directly sexual form from
which they have originated. Friendship, admiration,
and even the religious bond therefore remain close to
the sexual bond itself.
There is a particular kind of friendship that merits
further consideration—the form that is shared by
male homosexuals and leads to the formation of social
ties. In relation to Daniel Paul Schreber, Freud wrote
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that homosexual tendencies ‘‘help to constitute the
social instincts, thus contributing an erotic factor to
friendship and comradeship, to esprit de corps and to
the love of mankind in general. How large a contribution is in fact derived from erotic sources (with the
sexual aim inhibited) could scarcely be guessed from
the normal social relations of mankind’’ (1911c
[1910], p. 61). He bases this on the hypothesis that the
shared homosexual impulse is generally aim-inhibited
and constitutes a source of unused libido that is therefore available for these various ties. Moreover, the
degree of homosexual drive in an individual determines their particular capacity for forming such ties,
provided that they continue to inhibit it from direct
satisfaction.
This highly simplistic economic perspective, which
ignores the entire tradition of homosexual friendship
in antiquity and mentions only the form that is not
aim-inhibited, is somewhat baffling. This is a long way
removed from the depth of Freud’s analysis of the resexualization of sublimated homosexual ties that leads
via narcissism to paranoia (1911c [1910]). However,
Freud continues to subscribe to this specific affinity
between the homosexual bond and the constitution of
the group through friendship and esprit de corps: ‘‘It
seems certain that homosexual love is far more compatible with group ties, even when it takes the shape of
uninhibited sexual tendencies’’ (1921c, p. 141).
While the ‘‘social sense,’’ a ‘‘sublimated’’ (or, rather,
inhibited) form of the male homosexual libido, may
take the form of love of humanity, it can also be
extended to a relatively large group. Solidarity is therefore the form of expression given to the recognition of
what is identical to the self.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Alter ego; Double (the); Eros; Homosexuality;
Persecution; ‘‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia
Paranoides).’’
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1911c [1910]). Psycho-analytic notes on
an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides). SE, 12: 1–82.
———. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
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FRIGHT
Further Reading
See also: Castration complex.
Rangell, Leo. (1963). On friendship. Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, 11, 3–54.
Bibliography
Rubin, Lowell B. (1986). On men and friendship. Psychoanalytic Review, 73, 165–181.
Barrois, Claude. (1988). Les névroses traumatiques. Paris:
Dunod.
Freud, Sigmund. (1923d [1922]). A seventeenth-century
demonological neurosis. SE, 19: 67–105.
FRIGHT
Fright, a state of sudden, extreme fear, is provoked
either by a situation experienced as an external danger
or by the feeling of a high probability of danger. Situations capable of causing fright are often associated
with a risk of physical or mental death.
The term fright appeared in the Freudian corpus for
the first time in the ‘‘Preliminary communication’’
(Breuer and Freud, 1893a) to the Studies on Hysteria
(1895d). In this paper Freud evokes the links between
certain forms of hysteria and traumatic neurosis, combined in the term traumatic hysteria. Unlike the physical expression of hysteria, the affect of fright is mental
trauma.
In a clinical context, fright is accompanied by a
state of shock and stupor or, more rarely, by disordered agitation. But ever since Freud, psychoanalytic
clinical practice and theory have always emphasized
the passivity of fright and total lack of preparedness of
the subject in the face of the situation, which are due
as much to the totally unforeseeable nature of the
event as to the potential for concrete danger. It is in
this sense that fright must be differentiated from fear
(a concept implying a definite object) and anxiety (a
central psychoanalytic concept connoting the anxious
expectation of an external or internal danger that
needs to be confronted). As with many concepts, this
distinction between internal and external is primarily
metaphoric. For example, ‘‘sexual fright’’ designates a
cataclysmic eruption that has a disorganizing effect on
the subject’s mental life. Fright is associated with the
splitting of the ego, the castration complex, and the
perception of reality.
In light of the distinctions above, the concept of
fright deserves a place in modern psychoanalysis, for it
allows psychoanalysts to accurately assign theoretical
and clinical categories and to avoid terminological
ambiguity.
CLAUDE BARROIS
64 8
———. (1926d [1925]). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety.
SE, 20: 75–172.
———. (1940c [1922]). Medusa’s head. SE, 18: 273–274.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1893a). On the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena: Preliminary communication. SE, 2: 1–17.
FRINK, HORACE WESTLAKE (1883–1936)
Horace Westlake Frink, American psychoanalyst and
physician, was born in 1883 in Millerton, New York,
and died on April 19, 1936, in Chapel Hill, North
Carolina.
A physician uncle in Hillsdale, NY, raised Frink, an
orphan. He studied with Adolf Meyer while attending
Cornell University Medical College, from which he
received his medical degree in 1905.
Although Abraham Arden Brill, Frink’s first analyst
in 1909, considered himself the most prominent analyst in America, after James Jackson Putnam’s death in
1918 Freud was unhappy with the prospects of the
direction of his movement in the United States.
Between 1921 and 1923, for two periods of analysis,
Frink was in treatment with Freud in Vienna, and
Freud decided Frink was the most brilliant of his
American disciples, and picked Frink to replace Brill as
his deputy in America.
Frink was married and had two children. He was a
Gentile in a movement known for its many Jews,
which could help account for Freud’s enthusiasm for
him. At Freud’s direction he became president of the
New York Psychoanalytic Society.
During Frink’s second analysis with Freud, Frink
underwent a psychotic breakdown which Freud failed
to recognize as such. Frink suffered so much depersonalization that he had to be taken care of for a time by
a male attendant. Freud interpreted Frink’s difficulties
as simply part of the analysis.
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‘ ‘F R O M
Earlier, back in New York, Frink had fallen in love
with a patient of his, an immensely rich, Jewish, married woman named Angelika Bijur. Her husband, also
in analysis, threatened a legal suit against what he
thought was the misconduct of his wife’s analyst. Frink
had guilt feelings about abandoning his first wife who,
however, was willing to divorce for the sake of his
health. Freud saw Frink’s new fiancée in Vienna and
encouraged the new union. Shortly before the wedding
the bride had her doubts about Frink’s stability. Freud,
however, insisted that Frink’s analysis was ‘‘complete’’
and that he was fully able to go through with the marriage. Freud thought that the match would be good for
the analytic movement.
Bijur’s first husband died of cancer, and shortly
after the wedding Frink’s own first spouse passed away.
Frink felt he was unable to carry on, and put himself
under the psychiatric care of Adolf Meyer. Frink’s second wife repudiated Meyer’s recommendation of
patience, and ended the marriage. She was furious at
the way she thought that Freud had misled her, and
irritated that he had blamed her for supposedly having
failed Frink over money.
Frink did attempt a professional comeback after
leaving the hospital. But at an analytic meeting in New
York, Brill read a letter from Freud to another analyst
stating that Frink was unfit to execute the commission
to which Freud had appointed him, because he was
suffering from a mental disorder.
Frink spent the next decade raising his children. He
was able to live on the money they had inherited from
their mother, which Angelika had given as part of the
divorce settlement. Frink re-married in 1935, but was
suffering from heart disease; he died at a hospital in a
state of manic excitement.
Frink’s textbook Morbid Fears and Compulsions
(1918) was the best psychoanalytic book of its kind in
English at the time.
Frink, who had become the center of a great scandal, turned against analysis but did not in the remotest
way blame Freud for what had happened. Freud
thought that Frink’s demise was the last straw in
Freud’s efforts to help the Americans, and it confirmed
Freud in his anti-American prejudices.
PAUL ROAZEN
See also: United States.
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THE
HISTORY
OF AN
INFANTILE NEUROSIS’’ (WOLF MAN)
Bibliography
Frink, Horace. (1918). Morbid fears and compulsions New
York: Dodd Mead.
‘‘FROM THE HISTORY OF AN INFANTILE
NEUROSIS’’ (WOLF MAN)
The twenty-three-year-old Dr. Sergueı̈ Pankejeff, alias
the Wolf Man, first consulted Freud in the beginning
of February, 1910, and became the subject of the longest and, by general consent, greatest of Freud’s case histories. Dr. Pankejeff ’s health had collapsed in his eighteenth year after a gonorrheal infection, and by the
time he met Freud, he was incapacitated and entirely
dependent on an attendant. In Freud’s eyes, he had an
obsessional neurosis; modern opinion favors the diagnosis of borderline pathology.
Dr. Pankejeff felt that he was caught off from the
world by a ‘‘veil,’’ which could be torn away only after
he received an enema. In a letter addressed to Sándor
Ferenczi at the very beginning of the analysis, Freud
wrote about his patient, ‘‘He would like to use me
from behind and shit on my head.’’
In the case history, Freud focuses on the patient’s
early life. The very title of the case history, ‘‘From the
history of an infantile neurosis,’’ indicates a drastic
expository selection from the four and a half years of
the patient’s first analysis with Freud. Freud used the
case to demonstrate the lasting neurotic impact of
conflicted infantile sexuality in order to refute the theories of Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. Despite Freud’s
claim of a complete cure, the Wolf Man continued to
be seriously ill for the remaining half century of his life
and was seen by many therapists (for accounts of Dr.
Pankejeff ’s second analysis with Freud and the subsequent prolonged analysis with Ruth Mack Brunswick,
see Gardiner, 1971).
The case history is noteworthy for having brought
to attention the psychodynamics of the following phenomena: the primal scene (adults engaged in sex), the
early oral organization of the libido, primary feminine
impulses, deferred effects, the rare instance of a trauma
arising from a manifest drama, the complexities of
anal eroticism and the castration complex, and the
multiple vicissitudes of an obsession. In a technical
sense, the case is remarkable as an example of a most
elaborate analysis of a dream, a detailed reconstruction
of an infantile scene, and strategic reliance on forced
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F R O M M , E R I C H (190 0 –1980 )
termination of the analysis. Given the paucity of transference between Dr. Pankejeff and Freud in the clinical
setting, one may suspect that the case material was
immeasurably better understood and more highly
organized in Freud’s mind than in the patient’s.
Freud described a whole range of mental disturbances in Pankejeff ’s young life, ranging from infantile
anorexia and panic attacks to deficient impulse control, phobia, entrenched sadomasochistic tendencies,
and various symptoms of obsession. Because he
emphasized oedipal-derived pathology, Freud attributed major importance to the primal scene and the castration complex. Capital events determining the
patient’s young life were a primal scene observed when
he was one and a half, a threat of castration from his
nursery maid Grusha about a year later, his sister’s
seduction when he was three and a quarter, his traumatic dream when he was four, the outbreak of symptoms of obsession a half year later, and hallucinations
at the age of five.
In a mimetic gesture, Freud devotes part 4 of his
case history to the traumatic dream that Pankejeff had
at age four about wolves (whence the patient’s pseudonym). According to Freud’s minute reconstruction,
which mined each detail of the dream, the primal
scene of coitus a tergo (vaginal penetration from
behind) observed by the patient as an infant finally
returned much later in a dream when he was capable
of a deferred understanding. After writing up the case
in 1914, Freud himself had a deferred understanding
about the authenticity of the early primal scene (Freud
did not include that revision in part 4 but deferred its
inclusion, and hence his readers’ ability to understand
it, until part 5).
Notwithstanding Freud’s reserve about the factuality of the primal scene, his comparative elaboration of
clinical material in the case history remains problematic. According to Freud, the Grusha scene was more
certain than the primal scene (1918, 113 ff.), yet he
mentions the Grusha scene on 12 pages, or 10 percent
of the case (115 pages), whereas he refers to the ‘‘less
certain primal scene’’ on 46 pages, or about 40 percent
of the case. Such a discrepancy over what is salient in
the very showpiece of Freud’s case histories proportionately undercuts its intrinsic value.
Another salient feature of the case history is that the
initial years of treatment produced hardly any change.
Freud submitted his patient to a ‘‘long education’’
65 0
before Pankejeff would share in the work of analysis,
and once he did with any success, he forsook further
cooperation. He thus became ‘‘unassailably entrenched
behind an attitude of obliging apathy.’’ Freud then
took the drastic measure of unilaterally setting an irrevocable, fixed date for terminating treatment. Reacting
to the pressure of a deadline, Pankejeff reportedly lessened his resistance and came forth with a flood of
material that clarified Freud’s comprehension of the
infantile neurosis. In light of the patient’s passive character and superficial compliance, many analysts hold
that only Freud believed that there was a clinical breakthrough, not his patient.
PATRICK MAHONY
See also: Abraham, Nicolas; Disavowal; Infantile neurosis;
Money and psychoanalytic treatment; Pankejeff, Sergueı̈;
Primal fantasy; Primal scene.
Source citation
Freud Sigmund. (1918). From the history of an infantile neurosis. SE, 17, 1–122.
Bibliography
Freud Sigmund. (1918). From the history of an infantile
neurosis. SE, 17, 1–122.
Gardiner, Muriel M. (Ed.). (1971). The wolf-man by the
wolf-man. New York: Basic Books.
Mahony, Patrick J. (1984). Cries of the wolf man. New York:
International Universities Press.
Smith, Joseph, and Humphrey, Morris (Eds.). (1992). Telling
facts: history and narration in psychoanalysis. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Viderman, Serge. (1970). La construction de l’espace analytique. Paris: Denoël.
FROMM, ERICH (1900–1980)
Erich Fromm, a German psychoanalyst and sociologist, was born on March 23, 1900, in Frankfurt,
Germany, and died on March 18, 1980, in Locarno,
Switzerland. He grew up in a Jewish family in Germany. From age eighteen to twenty-two he attended
the University of Heidelberg, where he studied sociology, receiving his doctorate under the supervision of
Alfred Weber. He wrote his thesis on Talmudic law in
three separate Jewish communities. In 1924 he met
Frieda Reichmann, who became his first analyst and
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later his wife. At the time she was running a small
sanatorium in Frankfurt. Fromm had two other analysts before he moved to Berlin, where in 1927 he was
analyzed by the Viennese Hanns Sachs.
From the 1930s, after about ten years of being a traditional Freudian, Fromm began to look critically at
the central moral and philosophical bases of Freud’s
writings. As a Marxist, Fromm was shrewd in spotting
the middle-class, liberal assumptions Freud had taken
for granted. As a psychologist, Fromm’s special theoretical contribution was an understanding of the social
forces that stabilize or undermine the political community. In Escape from Freedom (1941), a landmark in
modern social science, Fromm enunciated the important concept of ‘‘social character’’ in building theoretical bridges between the study of the individual and the
study of society. He was fascinated with the problem
of social change and how sociological issues can be
understood in the light of depth psychology. He also
wanted to examine people in their social milieus.
Fromm had his predecessors within psychoanalysis,
the most notable perhaps being Wilhelm Reich, who
also tried to synthesize Marxist and Freudian principles. Fromm has his detractors: not only strict psychoanalysts but also Marxist hardliners, who have been
determined to dismiss Fromm as a so-called social
democrat.
After Fromm fled from Nazi Germany in 1933, he
moved to the United States, where he was soon in
contact with a whole new school of analysts, anthropologists, and sociologists that became known as the
neo-Freudian movement. This group included analysts
like Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, Abram Kardiner, and Clara Thompson, as well as academics such
as Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Ralph Linton.
Fromm found that he had been quietly dropped as a
direct member of the International Psychoanalytical
Association. Despite this setback, he was made clinical
director of the William Alanson White Institute in
New York City, which focuses on training psychoanalysts, and served from 1946 until 1950.
In 1949 Fromm moved for much of the year to
Mexico for his second wife’s health. There he founded
the Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis, where his
ideas are still being taught in a clinical context as of
2005. He also continued to write in his isolated retreat
near Mexico City. Especially in Germany, where the
International Erich Fromm Society is headquartered,
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but also in Italy and elsewhere, Fromm’s clinical concepts are still being extended.
Millions of people around the world read Fromm’s
works, but it has usually been his social philosophy
that catches the public’s attention. Works like The
Sane Society (1955) represent a serious indictment of
modern capitalist culture. Man for Himself (1947) was
an early popular effort to extract a humanitarian core
from analytic teachings. The Art of Loving (1956) is
perhaps Fromm’s best-selling book. The Anatomy of
Human Destructiveness (1973) showed the comprehensive nature of Fromm’s system of thought. To Have
or to Be? (1976) was a widely read restatement of
his attempt to connect humanistic Marxism with analysis. More technical works like The Forgotten
Language (1951) and Psychoanalysis and Religion
(1950) are of direct clinical relevance, even though
they are no longer studied at most professional training centers.
Fromm was one of the first and boldest to challenge
the ideological underpinnings of Ernest Jones’s quasiofficial three-volume life of Freud. In Sigmund Freud’s
Mission (1959) he gave a path-breaking response to the
orthodox version of Freud’s career and its controversies. For example, he asked some serious questions
about Freud’s relationship with his mother—a subject
that has not received adequate attention in the literature. Fromm also discredited Jones’s account of the
supposed mental deterioration of both Sándor Ferenczi and Otto Rank.
Fromm, one of the most conceptually clear-cut
thinkers in the tradition of dissenting analysts, claimed
to be truer to the intellectually radical implications of
the spirit of Freud’s thought than the organized following generally supposed to be Freud’s heirs. One
cannot correct some central problems where Freud
could be mistaken by piously fixing translations or reediting Freud’s writings. By pointing out some of these
central problems, Fromm ranks as an important critic
of Freud’s. Part of Fromm’s strength came from a deep
identification with Freud as a warrior of the spirit; to
be genuinely like Freud meant also to be independentminded. Fromm proved fearless in expressing his
analytic convictions, even though the orthodoxminded to reacted to him by branding him as a dissenting voice.
PAUL ROAZEN
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F R O M M - R E I C H M A N N , F R I E D A (188 9 –1957 )
See also: Germany; Horney-Danielson, Karen; International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies; Marxism
and psychoanalysis; Mexico; United States;; Politics and
psychoanalysis; Sigmund Freud Institut.
Bibliography
Burston, Daniel. (1991). The legacy of Erich Fromm. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Fromm, Erich. (1941). Escape from freedom. New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston.
———. (1947). Man for himself. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett
Premier Books.
———. (1950). Psychoanalysis and religion. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
———. (1951). The forgotten language: An introduction to
the understanding of dreams, fairy tales, and myths. New
York: Rinehart.
———. (1955). The sane society. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett
Premier Books.
———. (1956). The art of loving. New York: Harper.
———. (1959). Sigmund Freud’s mission: An analysis of his
personality and influence. New York: Harper.
———. (1973). The anatomy of human destructiveness. New
York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
———. (1976). To have or to be? New York: Harper and
Row.
Funk, Rainer. (1982). Erich Fromm: The courage to be human
(Michael Shaw, Trans.). New York: Continuum.
FROMM-REICHMANN, FRIEDA
(1889–1957)
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, psychoanalyst and physician, was born on October 23, 1889, in Karlsruhe, Germany, and died on April 28, 1957, in her cottage on
the grounds of Chestnut Lodge, Rockville, Maryland,
in the United States.
Fromm-Reichmann was the oldest of three daughters. Her father was a Jewish bank personnel manager
and her mother founded a girls’ school, which well prepared Frieda to be among the very first German university-trained women. She graduated in 1913 from the
University of Koenigsberg medical school where her
dissertation mentor was Kurt Goldstein, with whom
she worked during World War I. As a major in the
Prussian Army she ran a hospital for soldiers with
65 2
brain injuries. She then joined the psychotherapy staff
of the Lahmann Sanitorium, Weisser Hirsch, under
J. H. Schultz’s directorship (1920–1924).
Fromm-Reichmann received her psychoanalytic
training at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (1925),
where her training analyst was Hanns Sachs. She
opened her own sanatorium where kosher food was
served (nicknamed the ‘‘Thorapeuticum’’), working
closely with Georg Groddeck, as well as Sándor Ferenczi. She was married to Erich Fromm, who was ten
years younger than she. This marriage lasted for about
four years. Along with Karl Landauer, Heinrich Meng,
Georg Groddeck, Siegfried Füchs, and Franz Stein,
they founded the Frankfurter Institut. With the onset
of World War II she went first to Alsace-Lorraine,
(1933–1934) then Palestine (1934), and in 1935 to the
United States.
At Chestnut Lodge, as its Director of Psychotherapy, she helped its owner and medical director, Dexter
M. Bullard, Sr., make it the premier center for the
psychoanalytically-oriented treatment of schizophrenia, and worked closely with Harry Stack Sullivan. She
was a training analyst of the Washington-Baltimore
Psychoanalytic Institute and president of its Society
(1939–1941), and a popular teacher at the Washington
School of Psychiatry.
Her central thesis was that psychotic patients’ communications are understandable, that they magnify
their sense of their destructive potential and thus isolate themselves, suffering enormous loneliness and
dread. If the therapist understands his or her countertransference and thus is not made anxious by the
psychotic patient, recovery is possible. Essentially all
psychiatrists trained during the 1950s, 1960s and
1970s read her book Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy. Joanne Greenberg, a patient of hers who recovered
from schizophrenia, wrote the bestseller I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, in which Fromm-Reichmann
appears as Dr. Fried.
ANN-LOUISE S. SILVER
See also: Germany; Psychotic transference; Schizophrenia;
Sigmund Freud Institut; United States.
Bibliography
Bullard, Dexter. (1959). Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
Selected papers of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda. (1950). Principles of intensive
psychotherapy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Greenberg, Joanne. (1964). I never promised you a rose garden. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Hornstein, Gail A. (2000). To redeem one person is to redeem
the world: The life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. New York:
The Free Press.
Silver, Ann-Louise. (Ed.). (1989). Psychoanalysis and psychosis; Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
FRUSTRATION
The word frustration, now in common usage, refers to
the state of someone who denies himself, or who is
denied, drive satisfaction.
Beginning with ‘‘Heredity and Aetiology of the
Neuroses’’ (1896a), a paper written in French, Freud
identified sexual frustration as conducive to anxiety
neurosis. In ‘‘My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality
in the Aetiology of Neuroses’’ (1906a), to refer to frustrated excitation, he used the word ‘‘frustrane,’’ a
word probably formed from the German verb ‘‘frustrieren’’ (to frustrate), which was in everyday usage.
The German language has no equivalent to the substantive form ‘‘frustration,’’ which was later used in
English and the romance languages to translate ‘‘Versagung,’’ the word used by Freud in a slightly different
sense from the meaning it then had of renunciation
and sometimes refusal to describe frustration. Freud
was aware of this difficulty and did not neglect to discuss it.
In his article ‘‘Types of Onset of Neurosis’’ (1912c),
Freud used the word ‘‘frustration’’ (Versagung) for the
first time to describe both internal and external factors
that cause neurosis. He wrote, ‘‘Psycho-analysis has
warned us that we must give up the unfruitful contrast
between external and internal factors, between experience and constitution, and has taught us that we shall
invariably find the cause of the onset of neurotic illness
in a particular psychical situation which can be
brought about in a variety of ways’’ (p. 238). In essential particulars he continued to hold this view, going
on to write, for example, about a narcissistic form of
frustration.
The concept of frustration seems to cover the idea
of privation, while sometimes going beyond it. Freud
was aware of a conceptual difficulty here, and he
attributed its resolution to psychoanalysis rather to the
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innate genius of the German language. In The Future
of an Illusion (1927c), he wrote, ‘‘For the sake of a uniform terminology we will describe the fact that an
instinct cannot be satisfied as a Ôfrustration,’ the regulation by which this frustration is established as a Ôprohibition’ and the condition which is produced by the
prohibition as a Ôprivation’ ’’ (p. 10). Later in this work
he specified the drive urges subject to frustration, prohibition, and privation: incestuous, murderous, and
cannibalistic wishes.
In the view of English-language authors, Melanie
Klein in particular, frustration incites the reality principle and modulates psychic functioning. ‘‘Neurotic
children do not tolerate reality well, because they cannot tolerate frustrations. They protect themselves from
reality by denying it. What is fundamental and decisive
for their future adaptability to reality is their greater or
lesser capacity to tolerate those frustrations that arise
out of the Oedipus situation’’ (Klein, 1975, pp.
11–12). Here the feeling of frustration appears to complement the idealizing impulse pointed out by JeanMichel Petot (1982), who also suggested that the English term ‘‘deprivation’’ was closer to the German
Versagung.
The connections made by Freud among frustration,
prohibition, and privation form the basis for Lacan’s
discussion of the connections between castration, privation, and frustration in his seminar on the object
relationship (1994). Frustration there appears as an
imaginary formation caused by the symbolic mother
but related to the real breast; it prevents the subject
from entering the symbolic dialectic of giving and
exchange. Lacan writes, ‘‘Frustration essentially
belongs to the realm of protest. It relates to something
that is desired and not possessed but that is desired
without reference to any possibility of gratification or
acquisition. Frustration itself constitutes the realm of
unbridled and lawless demands. This core of the concept of frustration as such is one of the categories of
lack and an imaginary damnation. It exists at the imaginary level.’’ And later, ‘‘The early experience of frustration is only of importance and interest insofar as it
leads to one or other of the two levels that I have set
out for you—castration or privation. In truth, castration is simply that which accords frustration its true
place, transcending it and establishing it within a law
that gives it another meaning.’’
Frustration for Lacan is nonetheless more than a
mode of object relationship; it extends from an object
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FUNCTIONAL PHENOMENON
relationship to the very organization of speech and the
ego. There is an inherent frustration in the discourse
of the subject, and the feeling of frustration is a basic
characteristic of the ego (Lacan, 1994). These propositions can be connected with Kleinian theories of the
genesis and organization of the psychic apparatus.
It should be mentioned that on two occasions
Lacan made Freud’s use of the term frustration
unnecessarily problematic. He asserted that it was of
marginal importance in Freud’s thought, whereas in
fact it is central to his thought and Lacan himself
deploys it as such (1994 [1956–1957]). Ten years later,
far from correcting this viewpoint, he went so far as to
assert that there was not the slightest trace of the term
frustration to be found in Freud’s works (1966).
Lacan’s persistent slip suggests that the expansion of
the concept of frustration in psychoanalysis is the
result of a misunderstanding or a translation error not
only among German and English and the romance
languages but above all between psychoanalysis and
psychology, which at the time essentially based its
observations, experiments, and theories on the conflict
between frustration and gratification.
LUIZ EDUARDO PRADO DE OLIVEIRA
See also: Abstinence/rule of abstinence; Active technique;
Anxiety; Archaic mother; Child analysis; Deprivation;
Negative Capability; Primary need; Privation; Projection;
Protothoughts; Psychological tests; Realization; Relaxation principle and neo-catharsis; Splitting; Splitting of
the object; Subject’s castration, the; Symbolic realization;
Thought-thinking apparatus; Want of being/lack of
being.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1896a). Heredity and the aetiology of the
neuroses. SE, 3: 141–156.
———. (1906a [1905]). My views on the part played by
sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses. SE, 7: 269–279.
———. (1912c). Types of onset of neurosis. SE, 12: 227–
238.
———. (1927c). The future of an illusion. SE, 21: 1–56.
Klein, Melanie. (1975). The psychological foundations of
child analysis. In The writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 2: The
psycho-analysis of children; Alix Strachey, Trans.). London:
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Lacan, Jacques. (1966). Écrits. Paris: Seuil.
65 4
———. (1977). Écrits: A selection (Alan Sheridan, Trans.).
New York: Norton.
———. (1994). Le seminaire. Book 4: La relation d’objet
(1956–1957). Paris: Seuil.
Petot, Jean-Michel. (1982). Mélanie Klein. (Christine Trollope, Trans.). Madison, CT: International Universities
Press.
Siboni, Jacques. (1996). Les mathèmes de Lacan: Anthologie
des assertions entièrement transmissibles et de leurs relations
dans les écrits de Jacques Lacan. Paris: Lysimaque.
Further Reading
Bacal, Howard. (1988). Reflections on ‘optimum frustration.’ Progress in Self Psychology, 4, 127–131.
Lowenfeld, Henry. (1975). Notes on frustration. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 44, 127–138.
FUNCTIONAL PHENOMENON
In his study on ‘‘hypnagogic’’ states (states between
being awake and falling asleep) (1909/1951), which
earned immediate publication and led him to make
contact with Sigmund Freud in 1909, Herbert Silberer
designated by the name ‘‘autosymbolic phenomenon’’
the visual image he saw when falling asleep that, upon
analysis, could be understood as a representation in
image form of his ideas at that moment. He gave the
name ‘‘functional phenomenon’’ to what, in this process, represented not the object of his thought but how
his mind was functioning—effortlessly, cumbersomely, or vainly. In other words, the term refers to a
symbolization of the thinking process itself, of the current activity of the mind, its affects, and its intentions.
In ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’ (1914c), Sigmund Freud, in his discussion of the role of moral
conscience, offered a commentary that is as clear as it
is full of praise: ‘‘It will certainly be of importance to
us if evidence of the activity of this critically observing
agency—which becomes heightened into conscience
and philosophic introspection—can be found in other
fields as well. I will mention here what Herbert Silberer
has called the Ôfunctional phenomenon,’ one of the few
indisputably valuable additions to the theory of
dreams. Silberer, as we know, has shown that in states
between sleeping and waking we can directly observe
the translation of thoughts into visual images, but that
in these circumstances we frequently have a representation, not of a thought-content, but of the actual state
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gling against sleep. Similarly, he has shown that the conclusions of some dreams or some divisions in their content merely signify the dreamer’s own perception of his
sleeping and waking. Silberer has thus demonstrated the
part played by observation—in the sense of the paranoic’s delusions of being watched—in the formation of
dreams. This part is not a constant one. Probably the
reason why I overlooked it is because it does not play
any great part in my own dreams; in persons who are
gifted philosophically and accustomed to introspection
it may become very evident’’ (pp. 96–97).
In Silberer’s thought, analysis of functional phenomena resulted in an interpretation that increasingly
evolved toward abstraction and generalization—‘‘anagogical interpretation,’’ which Freud criticized.
At the end of a lengthy critical examination of Silberer’s theories in his article ‘‘The Theory of Symbolism’’ (1916/1948), Ernest Jones concluded, ‘‘Silberer,
by first extending the term Ôfunctional symbolism’
from its original sense to cover the concrete representations of concrete processes in general, and by then
confining it to the cases where these are secondary in
nature, receds from the conception of true symbolism
and reaches once more the population conception of
symbolism as the presentation of the abstract in terms
of the concrete’’ (p. 127).
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Anagogical interpretation; Silberer, Herbert.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction.
SE, 14: 67–102.
Jones, Ernest. (1948). The theory of symbolism. Papers on
Psychoanalysis. Boston: Beacon Press. (Original work published 1916.)
Silberer, Herbert. (1911). Symbolik des Erwachens und
Schwellensymbolik überhaupt. Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, 3, 621–660.
———. (1951). Report on a method of eliciting and observing certain symbolic hallucination-phenomena. In David
Rapaport (Ed.), Organization and pathology of thought:
Selected sources (pp. 195–207). New York: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1909)
———. (1971). Hidden symbolism of alchemy and the occult
arts (Smith Ely Jelliffe, Trans.). New York: Dover. (Original
work published 1914.)
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The fundamental rule, as set forth in ‘‘Freud’s PsychoAnalytic Procedure’’ (1904a [1903]), urges that
patients say ‘‘whatever comes into their heads, even if
they think it unimportant or irrelevant or nonsensical
. . . or embarrassing or distressing’’ (p. 251). Implicitly,
the rule urges analysts to adopt a corresponding listening technique (‘‘evenly suspended attention’’), for
which they are prepared by virtue of what Ferenczi
(1928, pp. 88-89) called the second fundamental rule,
namely the requirement that future analysts be analyzed themselves.
The fundamental rule was an end-point in Freud’s
development of his technique. He had begun with the
"cathartic method," using hypnosis to elicit a verbal discharge of affects attached to buried traumas. In an intermediary stage, he used ‘‘free associations’’ as a way of
uncovering the latent meaning of manifest phenomena
such as memories, symptoms, or dreams, but without as
yet forgoing the constraining use of suggestion. His
adoption of the fundamental rule marked the renunciation of suggestion and of all prior assumptions on the
part of the therapist. By initially and always giving the
right to speak to the patient, the rule designated him or
her as the source of all knowledge. By insisting that both
partners in the work of analysis proceed ‘‘without any
purpose in view’’ (1912e, p. 114) the rule claims implicitly to institute a kind of independent authority or
"third party" before which the sequence of psychic material demanded by the rule might be manifested,
perceived, and put into words. This initial positive
rationality for the rule gradually came into question as
the complexity of what was involved became apparent.
By examining significant variations in the way the
rule has been stated, it is possible to get the measure of
its metapsychological implications.
1. The statement of the rule was at first intended as
a purely negative recommendation: the patient must
not, as he would in an ordinary conversation, reject
the incidental thoughts that cross his or her mind. The
idea is to lift the censorship so that the products of
unconscious mental activity could be expressed.
To resolve the paradox resulting from the fact that
this negative prescription assumes a patient who is
already in the process of speaking, the rule was subsequently pared down by Freud to: ‘‘Say whatever goes
through your mind’’ (1913c, p. 135). Thus, the
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patient’s ‘‘choice’’ of a topic was no longer differentiated from ‘‘any intrusive ideas that may occur to
you’’ (p. 134). The result of this was that the patient
had to attribute two functions to the rule simultaneously, making it both a source of freedom and an
obligation to ‘‘tell all.’’
2. Freud’s formulation of the rule created a basic
disjunction between ‘‘whatever goes through the
mind’’ and words used to report it. At first this distinction seems clear enough: The patient’s utterances
presumably result from a voluntary act, whereas
‘‘whatever goes through the mind’’ is involuntary and
passively ‘‘received.’’ Thus understood, the logic of the
rule combines the supposed ‘‘immunity’’ of the act of
speaking with an acceptance of the idea of a ‘‘passivity’’
that implies the suspension of the usual way in which
meaning is assigned. This logic is supposed to lead the
patient to a positive cathexis of ‘‘whatever goes
through the mind’’ and its enigmatic origins. And
‘‘whatever goes through the mind,’’ it should be
recalled, is a heterogeneous category, including as it
does not just ideas, images, or wishes, but also representations, sensations, feelings, pure affects (such as
anxiety), bodily states, and so on.
3. Further reflection confronts us with the fact that
this as-yet unverbalized material comprises ‘‘wordpresentations’’; it is therefore discursive in nature,
which means that the discrepancy between what comes
to mind and the act of reporting it is either invalidated
or limited to the sphere of linguistic activity.
We can see how Jacques Lacan, as a result of this primordial importance of speech and language, was led to
propose the following wording for the rule: ‘‘Say anything at all, without being afraid of saying something stupid.’’ However, the disjunction evident in Freud’s work
remains in full force. An eloquent expression of it is the
metaphor of traveling in a train. The patient is compared
to the passenger seated by the window, who must
describe to his traveling companion the scenery passing
by, without paying special attention to any given aspect
on a priori grounds. For Freud, the most important
point was that the countryside being traversed can never
be reduced to what the passenger can perceive of it and
say about it. The disjunction between psychic activity
and the activity of speaking preserves the heterogeneity
of relationships that word-presentations may have with
the various registers of psychic and physical reality.
According to Freud, ‘‘whatever comes to mind’’ tends,
65 6
through the favored mode of regression toward the visual
image, toward a hallucinatory realization that is similar
to the dream and its primary processes.
The crucial phenomenon remains the transference,
through which ‘‘what comes to mind’’ is aimed at the
analyst to whom, simultaneously, the patient’s speech
is addressed. The postulate of the rule is that discourse
can invest this transferential relationship.
The statement of the rule alludes to certain critical
judgments that the patient must disregard. The judgments that something is unimportant or nonsensical
naturally attest to the ordinary aspiration to say
important and logical things. The judgment against
things that are ‘‘distressing’’ to say summarizes all the
others. Thus, the conflict whose onset is postulated in
the wording of the rule is one that, by attesting to the
consistency of the patient’s inner psychic conflict,
ensures that the attempt to put the rule into effect will
have a dynamic value. The analysand’s task is thus to
confront the unpleasure of telling. At the price of this
unpleasure, overcoming resistance can be productive.
From a metapsychological point of view, we can
consider that by requiring the lifting of repression, the
rule opens up the unconscious, gives the repressed
access to consciousness, under the sign of the pleasure
principle. The resistances that attempt to close this
door are based on ordinary rationality. However,
under the aegis of an accepted rule, they are no longer
anything other than rationalizations; they express the
action of repression, which also derives from the pleasure principle, since its aim is to substitute a sort of
flight by avoidance for the action of a psychic ‘‘reality
principle’’ and the free judgment it makes possible.
We can conceive that ‘‘intrusive ideas’’ are derivatives
of the repressed: They can be perceived and spoken
because they are not too threatening to the censorship.
At a certain threshold of instinctual investment, a certain proximity to the unconscious kernel, signal-anxiety
triggers repression, which manifests itself as resistance.
It is because the conflict between repressing and
repressed is well ‘‘organized’’ that it reveals the topographical contradictions of the pleasure principle (what is
pleasure in one place becomes unpleasure in another),
and that by following the associative chains and the
‘‘compromises’’ whose traces they bear and the context
this process creates, the analyst is enabled to ‘‘discover
the repressed instinctual impulses which are feeding the
resistance,’’ according to Freud in ‘‘Remembering,
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Repeating and Working Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II)’’
(1914g, p. 155). In the same essay Freud defined the
cure as a ‘‘working-through of the resistances’’ (p. 155).
The aim of the rule is not to ‘‘free’’ unconscious material (as in hypnosis), but rather to support the most
complete and most ‘‘free’’ manifestation of conflicting
forces so that their interplay may be modified.
Let us highlight the complexity of the rule’s inherent stakes and their metapsychological correlates:
a) The rule cannot be described as either impartial
or exterior to the forces at work in the analysis. It is
directly involved in the phenomena inherent in the
processes of the cure and its indirect ‘‘goals’’ (symbolformation, sublimation, transference onto speech,
becoming-conscious): Putting it into effect is an end
as much as a means.
b) Accordingly, the rule inevitably plays a role in
the transference. Far from remaining a third locus, it is
invested as an emanation of the analyst’s desire that it
will thus be possible to satisfy or disappoint. Mobilization of the conflict in response to the rule can be
expressed in the form of a transferential acting out
(Agieren) inherent in the logic of the situation. But the
massive nature of this mobilization and the instantaneous nature of making the rule the locus of conflict
do not facilitate the task of interpretation.
c) It is thus clear that the rule necessarily summons
up the transgressions that contest it, the events that
illustrate the impossibility of completely putting it
into effect. It is only realized through that which seems
to negate it: the activation of modes of ‘‘magical’’ or
animistic thinking, which subvert the very existence of
an observing ego, of a reality principle applied to psychic space. Any reference, even implicit, to the rule,
seems to disappear at times, and it is then the sustained analytic setting that ensures through its vicariousness, until such time as a successful interpretation
or a working-through makes it reappear, along with
the meaning of the play of psychic forces that it
represents.
d) The putting into effect of the rule has its optimal
relevance when, as is the case in the neurotic, the topography of the repression attests to a tempered conflict
between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Clinical work has brought to light forms of resistance linked to the unconscious of the ego and the
superego that subvert the dynamics of the analytic
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situation (interminable analysis, or even disorganizing
regression). Here we shall mention only the need for
punishment, linked to unconscious guilt, that can be
appeased only in and through suffering. The dynamic
of the rule is perverted when the unpleasure it involves
satisfies this need in an overly masochistic way. The
work of analysis can then no longer be based on the
logic of the pleasure principle to modify this need.
This is but one of the many examples that could illustrate the limits of the rule’s relevance and the need, in
many cases, to situate the analysis outside its bounds.
The discrepancy between the apparent programmatic rationality of the rule and the complexity of its
metapsychology explains that both its practical value
and the function of its statement have been relativized
and indeed called into question. Many analysts believe
it is superfluous to state it. Others even deem it antianalytic, because it introduces an alienating representation of a goal, that of speaking ‘‘according to’’ the rule,
and they believe it is preferable that the dynamics of
the analysis begin spontaneously, allowing the patient
to discover its inherent rule when they can make
sense of it.
By contrast, one can underscore that the analytic
situation could not be established by acting as if the
superego-linked register of the prescription could be
abolished. In this vein, one can point out that the
statement of the rule, in its brilliant economy, condenses that which can be directly transmitted at the
outset of the cure, and which the analyst states in the
name of the analysis. In this way, it dismisses other,
more implicit or more insidious prescriptions, and
places the patient in the position of assuming responsibility for his or her own analysis.
The statement of the rule thus takes on the meaning
of a repetition of an original, founding statement of
the analytic situation. While the rule was initially
intended as a third locus excluding suggestion from
the analytic process, through its ineluctable transferential evolution, it has proved to be the means and the
place through which the effects of suggestion can be
identified and analyzed in the transference.
JEAN-LUC DONNET
See also: Active technique; Face-to-face situation; Free
association; Modesty; Obsessional neurosis (compulsive
neurosis); Outline of Psychoanalysis, An; Psychoanalytic
treatment; ‘‘Recommendations to Physicians Practising
657
F U S I O N /D E F U S I O N
Psycho-Analysis;’’ ‘‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through;’’ Training analysis; Training of psychoanalysts; Transgression; Truth.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund (1904a [1903]). Freud’s psycho-analytic
procedure. SE, 7, 247–254.
———. (1912e). Recommendations to physicians practising
psycho-analysis. SE, 12, 109–120.
———. (1913c). On beginning the treatment (Further
recommendations on technique of psycho-analysis I). SE,
12, 1–144.
———. (1914g). Remembering, repeating and workingthrough (Further recommendations on the technique of
psycho-analysis II). SE, 12, 145–156.
FUSION/DEFUSION
The concepts of fusion and defusion essentially apply
to the life and death instincts, which are initially closely united but later become partially differentiated,
under the influence of various psychic movements.
Some portion of these instincts remains fused together
in the self, in the form of erotogenic masochism
(Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967, pp. 244–245).
The elaboration of the second theory of the
instincts in ‘‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’’ (1920g)
led Sigmund Freud to postulate the existence of two
types of instincts: the life instinct, which forms everlarger units, and the death instinct, which disintegrates
these units. Fusion of the life and death instincts is primal. Outward projection of the death instinct, when it
is redirected inward toward the self, constitutes secondary masochism, Freud asserted in ‘‘The Economic
Problem of Masochism’’ (1924c). But, according to
Freud, a psychic movement that inhibits libidinal satisfaction, such as the movement that is the basis for the
existence of the superego or the process of sublimation, by its very nature brings about a defusion of the
instincts and thus unleashes destructiveness. This is
what endows the Superego with a brutal and cruel
aspect, Freud explained in ‘‘The Ego and the Id’’
(1923b).
Benno Rosenberg, in his thorough study of the consequences of this theory of fusion of the instincts,
postulated the existence of a form of ‘‘life-saving
65 8
masochism,’’ so named because it restrains primal
destructiveness in its structures. Nevertheless, there is
a remaining ambiguity: When Jean Laplanche in The
Language of Psychoanalysis (1967, trans. 1974) deemed
the term union preferable to fusion, he introduced the
concept of binding (Wilfred R. Bion), which has generally supplanted the concept of fusion in the current
psychoanalytic literature. However, the concept of
binding/unbinding applies to that which interrelates
or separates the ego and the object, and no longer
applies to the two types of instincts.
It has come to the point where the term fusion is
often used instead of binding; there is thus a confusion
between that which pertains to the integration of
opposite qualities, with all the mental work that
entails, and what was originally conceived as a primal
attribute of the psyche. This confusion particularly
affects the concept of ambivalence, which is the maintaining of two distinct qualities that exist in conjunction but not in a state of fusion.
CLÉOPÂTRE ATHANASSIOU-POPESCO
See also: Activity/passivity; Binding/unbinding of the
instincts; Death instinct (Thanatos); Economic point of
view; Eros; Free energy/bound energy; Ego and the Id,
The; Life instinct (Eros); Love-Hate-Knowledge (L/H/K
links); Sexuality.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE,
18, 7–64.
———. (1923). The ego and the id. SE, 19, 12–66.
———. (1924). The economic problem of masochism. SE,
19, 159–70.
Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1974). The
language of psycho-analysis. (Donald Nicholson-Smith,
Trans.). New York: Norton.
Rosenberg, Benno. (1991). Masochisme mortifère et masochisme gardien de la vie. (pp. 30–54). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
FUSION/DEFUSION OF INSTINCTS
Freud used the terms ‘‘fusion’’ and ‘‘defusion’’ (Mischung/Entmischung), in the context of his second theory
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of the instincts, to account for the ‘‘mixing’’ and separation of the life instincts and the death instincts.
Throughout his work, Freud relied upon the notion
of an instinctual dualism, on an opposition between
two fundamental kinds of instinct, to explain the conflict inherent in mental life. In his first theory of the
instincts, he contrasted sexual instincts on the one
hand and self-preservative instincts (or ego-instincts)
on the other. In his second theory, the life instinct, or
Eros, stood opposed to the death instinct, and Freud
emphasized that the antagonistic relationship between
the two reflected their essential nature. The life
instinct, for its part, was a force that strove to unify, and
this included unifying the two fundamental instincts
themselves; their intimate fusion came about through
their simultaneous cathexis of the same object, which
rendered them well-nigh indissoluble. At the same time,
the death instinct, which promoted dissolution, worked
to defuse them through a decathexis of the object, thus
threatening the unity of the psyche itself.
These theses were first set forth in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), where Freud, postulating the
self-destructive character of the death instinct, sought
to show how a portion of its self-destructiveness was
immediately neutralized by the life instinct, which eroticized it. In the first edition of the work, in introducing the notion of instinctual fusion, Freud cited
Alfred Adler (p. 53n), who had indeed, many years earlier, argued that instinctual energy stemmed from
‘‘two originally separate instincts,’’ the one sexual, the
other aggressive, ‘‘which had subsequently intersected’’
(Adler, 1908). Freud would observe later, in ‘‘Analysis
Terminable and Interminable’’ (1937c), that ‘‘The two
fundamental principles of Empedocles—love and
strife—are, both in name and function, the same as
our two primal instincts’’ (p. 246).
With The Ego and the Id (1923b), the fusion and
defusion of instincts became a feature of Freud’s second topography (also known as the structural theory):
defusion was now viewed as a function of the id and of
the severity of the superego, while fusion was the task
of the ego, both constitutionally and in its role as unifier of the three mental agencies. Instinctual defusion
caused regression, and identification and sublimation
themselves tended to bring about defusion. The clinical prototype of instinctual fusion was to be found in
the action of sadism (which facilitated the turning of
the death instinct toward the external world) and of
masochism; its metapsychological prototype was
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primary erotogenic masochism. The physiological
basis of this last, namely sympathetic sexual excitation,
constituted the very foundation of the Freudian theory: ‘‘It may well be that nothing of considerable
importance can occur in the organism without contributing some component to the excitation of the sexual
instinct’’ (1905d, p. 205; 1924c, p. 163).
The fusion and defusion of the instincts (Triebmischung/Triebentmischung) needs to be clearly distinguished from the processes known as binding and
unbinding (Bindung/Entbindung). Freud first used
these last terms in connection with energy flows: the
self-preservative instincts of the ego, he argued, tended
to bind the free energy that flowed continuously from
the sexual instincts; unbinding, therefore, was a discharge of free energy by the ego. In 1920, when Freud
advanced the notion that union was the aim of the life
instincts, he saw such union as dependent for its quality and its strength on this internal capacity of the ego’s
to bind self-preservative impulses to free sexual energy
(Rosenberg, 1991). The best way to keep the distinction clear between the two above-described levels of
instinctual interaction—the binding/unbinding processes internal to the ego and the fusion/defusion of
the life and death instincts—is to confine the original
economic reading to binding/unbinding. Variations in
the quantitative factor may then be said to bring about
a qualitative modification of the instinctual fusion,
notably in ‘‘the advance from the earlier [genital]
phase to the definitive genital one’’ (1923b, p. 42).
Attention to the variations of the binding/unbinding internal to the ego and the fusion/defusion of the
life and death instincts has played a heuristic role in
the understanding of psychosis (in the work of Melanie Klein, Piera Aulagnier, Benno Rosenberg, and
others), of psychosomatic illness (for Pierre Marty),
and of borderline conditions (in the ‘‘objectalizing/
deobjectalizing function’’ described by André Green).
Jacques Lacan has criticized an approach that casts a
positive light on instinctual binding and its agency, the
ego, while condemning the fascinating and immobilizing aspects of the process. Jean Laplanche (1981) has for
his part argued that sexuality should not be reduced to
the unifying function of the life instinct lest it thereby be
divested of its non-bound aspect, with its fundamentally
destructive and even demoniacal features.
JOSETTE FRAPPIER
659
FUTURE
OF AN
ILLUSION, THE
See also: Binding/unbinding of the instincts.
Bibliography
Adler, Alfred. (1908). Der Aggressionstrieb im Leben und in
der Neurose. Fortschrift. Med., 26.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1–
64.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
———. (1924c). The economic problem of masochism. SE,
19: 155–170.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 209–253.
Laplanche, Jean. (1981). Problématiques IV. L’Inconscient et
le Ça. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Rosenberg, Benno. (1991). Masochisme mortifère et masochisme gardien de la vie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION, THE
The publication of a The Future of an Illusion followed The Question of Lay Analysis (1926e) and preceded Civilization and its Discontents(1930a [1929]).
Die Zukunft einer Illusion soon reached a wide audience, and was translated into English in 1928 by W.
D. Robson-Scott as The Future of an Illusion, and
into French in 1932 by Marie Bonaparte as L’Avenir
d’une illusion.
In a letter to the Swiss Calvinist pastor Oskar
Pfister (November 25, 1928), Freud wrote: ‘‘I do
not know if you have detected the secret link
between Lay Analysisand the Illusion. In the former
I wish to protect analysis from the doctors and in
the latter from the priests.’’ Freud keeps his distance
from the two principal custodians of secrets protected by the law. Moreover, he considers priestly
knowledge, or religious dogma, a ‘‘neurotic relic’’
that it is time to replace ‘‘with the results of rational
mental labor.’’
The link between The Future of an Illusion and
Civilization and its Discontents was made by Romain
Rolland. Liluli, the title of a play he wrote, was a play
on the word ‘‘illusion.’’ In The Future of an Illusion
Freud discusses the religious feelings then so essential
66 0
to Rolland’s thinking and which Freud refers to as
‘‘oceanic sensations’’; these he considers both eternal
and infinite. In Civilization and its Discontents Freud
explicitly refers to this concept to differentiate himself from it: ‘‘I cannot discover this Ôoceanic’ feeling
in myself.’’
Freud considered religion to be a phenomenon of
culture or civilization, based, like all culture, on the
‘‘rejection of instincts’’ by means of ‘‘prohibitions.’’
The gods retain ‘‘their threefold task: they must
exorcize the terrors of nature,’’ (especially death),
‘‘they must reconcile man to the cruelty of fate, particularly as is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations
which a civilized life in common has imposed on
them.’’ Religion thus constitutes a ‘‘treasure of ideas
born of the need to make human misery
supportable.’’
Freud used as an example one of the phases of religious evolution, ‘‘which roughly corresponds to the
final form taken by our present-day, white, Christian
civilization.’’ Here he makes a clean break with Jung,
who based many of his ideas on the religions of India
(Hinduism and Buddhism primarily). Logically, he
insists on an essential characteristic of Christian religion, ‘‘the father-son relationship.’’ He asserts that
‘‘God is an exalted father, the nostalgia for the father is
the root of religious need.’’
The entire work is marked by Freud’s desire to placate his friend, Pastor Pfister, who responded the following year with the publication of a pamphlet titled
The Illusion of a Future (1928). Freud distinguished
illusion from error: an illusion, the product of desire,
is not necessarily false. Moreover, he adds a condition
to a claim present in his article on ‘‘Compulsive activities and religious exercise’’ (1907b): ‘‘Religion could
thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.’’ He even considers that ‘‘devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain
neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal
neurosis spares them the task of constructing a
personal one.’’
Freud, who spent his life trying to destroy illusions
and complete what Max Weber called the ‘‘disenchantment of the world,’’ seems to hesitate when it
comes to the future of religious phenomena. He says
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he is in favor of ‘‘retaining the religious doctrinal system as the basis of education and of man’s communal life.’’ Just as Charles Maurras at the time defended
Catholicism as an element of political order in spite
of his naturalist positivism, Freud, in spite of his
atheism, defended Christian education (the teaching
of religion was required in Austrian schools) ‘‘which
is so important for the safeguarding of civilization.’’
He concludes his work with a case study of conversion, without confusing the beliefs of ‘‘inert and unintelligent’’ crowds with the more certain achievements
of science. ‘‘No, our science is not an illusion.’’
ODON VALLET
See also: Belief; Civilization and its Discontents; Ethics;
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; Magical
thinking; Mysticism; Pfister, Oskar Robert; Religion and
psychoanalysis; Rite and ritual; Science and psychoanalysis; Weltanschauung.
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ILLUSION, THE
Source citation
Freud, Sigmund. (1927c). Die Zukunft einer Illusion.
Vienna; GW, XIV, p. 325–380; SE, 21: 5–56.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1907b). Compulsive activities and the
exercise of religion. SE, 9: 117–127.
———. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
———. (1926e). The question of lay analysis. SE, 20: 177–250.
———. (1927c). The future of an illusion. SE, 21: 1–56.
———. (1930a). Civilization and its discontents. SE, 21:
57–145.
Freud, Sigmund and Pfister, Oskar. (1963). Psycho-analysis
and faith; the letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister.
(Heinrich Meng and Ernst L. Freud, Eds., and Eric Mosbacher, Trans.). London: Hogarth Press.
Pfister, Oskar. (1928). The illusion of a future. International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 74, 1993, 557–579.
661
G
GADDINI, EUGENIO (1916–1985)
Eugenio Gaddini, president of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society from 1978 to 1982, was born in Cerignola,
Foggia, Italy, on January 18, 1916, and died in Rome
on September 27, 1985. A brilliant student, he developed a precocious interest in literature and philosophy. In 1942 he received his medical diploma. In 1956
he gave up his position as chief physician in a hospital
in Rome to devote himself to psychoanalysis.
After completing an analysis with Emilio Servadio,
he was admitted in 1953 to the Società Psicoanalitica
Italiana (Italian Psychoanalytic Society), in which he
served as secretary (1957), vice president (1967–1969),
and president (1978–1982). During his tenure as president, he worked hard to expand the society, primarily
by revitalizing the Rivista de psicoanalisi (Review of
psychoanalysis), of which he was editor for several
years. After 1970 he worked as a teacher at the Centro
Psicoanalitico Romano (Rome Psychoanalytic Center)
and the Centro di Firenze (Florence Center), which he
founded, surrounding himself with a circle of students
who were receptive to his original ideas. Gaddini was
highly esteemed within the International Psychoanalytical Association, where he assumed several high-level
positions, and was known for his original contributions
in the fields of metapsychology and clinical therapy.
Combining Freudian psychoanalysis with the techniques of Donald Winnicott, he formulated an innovative theory of early mental states, postulating the
existence of a ‘‘fundamental mental organization,’’
which serves as the basis for the formation of the self.
According to Gaddini, ‘‘nonintegration anxiety’’
occurs during the transition from the ‘‘psychosensory
zone,’’ characterized by a preponderance of physical
sensations, to the ‘‘psycho-oral zone’’ (1987). During
this process, when the basic outlines of mental structure are laid down, the mechanism of imitation plays
an important role (Gaddini, 1969). Gaddini distinguished imitation from introjection and identification,
which he associated with the psycho-oral zone, where
the tension to ‘‘attain the object’’ was a sign of distinctness and separation. Imitation he associated with the
psychosensory zone and ‘‘correlative bodily fantasies.’’
In other words, fantasies of fusion respond to bodily
changes associated with becoming ‘‘the object.’’ During the course of analysis (1981), disturbances of the
psychosensory zone become manifest in transference
through the patientÕs use of mechanisms of imitation
to reestablish fusion, as if by magic, and avoid recognition of the object as an other distinct from the self.
In his writing, Gaddini suggested reconsidering the
function of the father in the oedipal triangle (1989)
and in aggression. Adopting the fusion theory of
instincts, he hypothesized that aggression shifted the
libido from its initial narcissistic position to objects
(1972). His essay ‘‘Transitional objects and the process
of individuation,’’ published in 1970 with his wife
Renata, continued the work of Donald Winnicott.
GaddiniÕs writings have been collected in Scritti, published posthumously in 1989 and translated into English in 1992.
ANNA MARIA ACCERBONI
See also: Italy
Bibliography
Gaddini, Eugenio. (1969). On imitation. International Journal of Psycho-analysis, 50, 475–484.
663
GAIN (PRIMARY
AND SECONDARY)
———. (1972). Agression and the pleasure principle:
Towards a psychoanalytic theory of aggression. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 53 (2). 191–198.
———. (1987). Notes on the mind-body question. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 68 (3), 315–330.
———. (1916–17a [1915–17]). Introductory lectures on
psycho-analysis. Parts I and II.SE, Part I, 15 ; Part II, 16.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19 : 1–66.
———. (1926e). The question of lay analysis. SE, 20:
177–250.
———. (1989). Scritti. Milan, Italy: Raffaello Cortina.
———. (1992). A psychoanalytic theory of infantile experience: Conceptual and clinical reflections (Adam Limentani,
Ed.). London: Tavistock Publications.
GARDINER, MURIEL (1901–1985)
Limentani, Adam. (1986). Eugenio Gaddini (1916–1985).
International Journal of Psycho-analysis, 67, 373–374.
An American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, Muriel
Gardiner was born November 23, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois and died February 6, 1985 in Princeton, New Jersey.
GAIN (PRIMARY AND SECONDARY)
Primary and secondary gains correspond to the direct
or indirect advantages that individuals gain from their
illness. The primary gain is a constitutive element of
the illness that is present in the very motive of the illness. The secondary gain is an addition to the primary
gain and comes into play at a later stage. It consolidates the disorder.
The specific term ‘‘gain’’ in relation to an illness
appeared in 1897 in a letter from Freud to Wilhelm
Fleiss. Secondary gain is described for the first time in
1913 in On Beginning the Treatment: here the symptom has a secondary function (1913c). In 1916 in
Lecture twenty-four of Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis Freud clearly articulated the distinction
between primary and secondary gain (1916–17a,
[1915–17]), and again in 1923 in a footnote to the
study of the case of Dora (1905e [1901]).
Primary gain subdivides into two parallel aspects. In
the internal part, illness remains the most economic
solution in cases of conflict, and this is the ‘‘flight into
illness.’’ The external part is linked to profitable arrangements occasioned in the individualÕs relational life.
The secondary gain ‘‘helps the ego in its effort to incorporate the symptom.’’ (1916–17a [1915–17]) It procures
a satisfaction that is narcissistic or linked to selfpreservation.
DOMINIQUE BLIN
See also: Flight into illness; Narcissism
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905e (1901]). Fragment of an analysis of
a case of hysteria. SE, 7: 1–122.
66 4
The daughter of Edward Morris and Helen Swift,
she was born into a family of wealth and privilege.
During her childhood she became aware of the plight
of the poor and disenfranchised and subsequently
developed a life-long commitment to social and political reform. After graduating from Wellesley College in
1922 she traveled to Europe where she lived until the
outbreak of World War II.
In 1926 she settled in Vienna where she underwent
the first of two periods of analysis with Ruth Mack
Brunswick. During this period she developed an interest in applying psychoanalytic insights to education.
Simultaneously with her psychoanalytic training she
attended the Vienna Medical School, graduating in
1938. In 1934, in the midst of her training and a second period of analysis with Mack Brunswick, a fascist
dictatorship was installed in Austria. Witnessing the
brutality that accompanied these events was a turning
point in GardinerÕs life. She resolved to help endangered individuals escape from fascist Europe, and for
the next six years worked tirelessly in the Austrian
underground. These years are vividly described in her
memoir Code Name ‘‘Mary’’ (1983).
After returning to the United States in 1939 Gardiner
completed her analytic training at the Philadelphia
Association for Psychoanalysis, with which she was
associated for many years. Gardiner was appointed a
training and a supervising analyst in 1955, but she never
accepted any candidates. Rather she found fulfillment
by using her training in psychoanalysis in her work as a
consultant in schools, hospitals, and residential settings.
Here she was able to offer help to children and adolescents, and to their teachers, social workers, and doctors.
GardinerÕs publications include The Deadly Innocents:
Portraits of Children Who Kill (1976), a book which grew
out of her work with children and adolescents; and
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The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man (1971), which she edited. This is a compilation which includes his autobiographical reminiscences, FreudÕs original case report, Ruth
Mack BrunswickÕs 1928 essay, and GardinerÕs paper
recording her contacts with the Wolf Man over three
decades. After the Wolf ManÕs death in 1979 she wrote
The Wolf ManÕs Last Years (1983a) wherein she described
his final years and gently but pointedly took issue with
Karin ObholzerÕs portrayal of the Wolf Man in her 1982
book, The Wolf Man, 60 Years Later.
Muriel GardinerÕs contribution to psychoanalysis
goes beyond her books and papers, her generous support of the Hampstead Clinic, the Freud Archives, and
the Freud Museum, and her long relationship with the
Wolf Man, characterized as it was by her concern for
his dignity and psychological well-being. Of equal significance was the fact that she took psychoanalytic
insights and her counsel into settings—schools, hospitals, and prisons—where they are usually not found.
NELLIE L. THOMPSON
See also: Brunswick, Ruth Mack; Freud Museum; ‘‘From
the History of an Infantile Neurosis’’ (Wolf Man); Pankejeff, Sergei.
Bibliography
Gardiner, Muriel M. (1971). The Wolf-Man by the WolfMan. New York: Basic Books.
———. (1976). The deadly innocents: Portraits of children
who kill. New York: Basic Books.
———. (1983). Code name ‘‘Mary’’: Memoirs of an American woman in the Austrian underground. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press.
———. (1983a). The Wolf ManÕs last years. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, 31, 867–897.
Guttman, Samuel A. (1985). In memoriam Muriel M. Gardiner, M.D. (1901–85). The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child,
40, 1–7.
GARMA, ANGEL (1904–1993)
A Spanish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Angel
Garma was born June 24, 1904, in Bilbao, and died
January 29, 1993, in Buenos Aires.
Garma, a Basque by birth and temperament, went
to Madrid at the age of seventeen to study medicine.
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After completing his studies he left for Germany,
where he was a student of Robert Gaupp and Karl
Bonhoeffer. In 1929 he began a training analysis with
Theodor Reik at the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis.
When he was twenty-seven Garma became a member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association (BPV)
after presenting his now classic paper, ‘‘Die Realität
und das Es in der Schizophrenie’’ (Reality and the Id
in Schizophrenia), which he read in October 1931.
This innovative essay questions the Freudian conception of psychosis. While Freud believed the psychotic
repressed reality to satisfy the id, Garma claimed that
the psychotic represses the id more than the neurotic,
which disturbs his relation to reality.
At the end of 1931 Garma settled in Madrid.
Although he had completed his training with the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association, he soon quit the organization, decrying its growing discrimination. He
remained a ‘‘direct member’’ of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) for several years. In July
1936, before the start of the Spanish Civil War and in
spite of his sympathy for the Republicans, Garma went
to France to avoid the fratricidal struggle taking place
in his homeland. Through the Société Psychanalytique
de Paris he met Celes Ernesto Cárcamo, an Argentinean who had trained in Europe before returning to
Buenos Aires. He invited Garma to accompany him.
Garma preferred to remain in Paris, but spurred on by
the impending world war, he eventually decided to
leave.
Garma arrived in Argentina in June 1938 and
quickly adapted to life in Buenos Aires, a progressive
city where psychoanalysis was already being taught.
CárcamoÕs return in 1939 gave a new impetus to the
nascent psychoanalytic movement, which was soon
reinforced by the arrival of Marie Langer.
In late 1942 the Asociación Psicoanalı́tica Argentina
(APA) was founded. Garma was its first president
(1942–1944), a position he held on three other occasions during his life. He founded the Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he was a teacher for thirty-two
years. During his tenure as APA president, Garma
promoted scientific activity, established annual conferences, and helped organize Latin-American and PanAmerican conferences.
GarmaÕs work was widely recognized during his
lifetime. He was honored publicly on his seventieth
birthday and, in 1983, was named honorary vice
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G A T T E L , F E L I X (1 870 –19 04)
president of the IPA. In 1989 King Juan Carlos I of
Spain decorated him and the APA named the Institute
of Psychoanalysis after him. A year later he was elected
honorary president of the Psychoanalytic Federation
of Latin America (FEPAL).
An important pioneer, Garma developed a body of
scientific work of considerable importance. He made
significant contributions to the study of the psychoanalysis of dreams, psychoses, perversions, psychosomatic medicine, and technique. Within his extensive
body of work his detailed and careful work on gastric
ulcers and headache deserve special mention.
Dream-like phenomena were a constant preoccupation for Garma. The doctoral dissertation he presented
in Argentina, ‘‘Psicioanálisis de los sueños’’ (1940,
[Psychoanalysis of Dreams]) became a classic. Garma
continued to make contributions to the theory of
dreams, focusing his work on the Traumdeutung, even
though he sometimes disagreed with FreudÕs findings.
GarmaÕs research primarily involved the theory of
the traumatic genesis of dreams, the characteristics of
dream-like thought, the origin of dream hallucinations,
and the relation to reality. The dream originates in
unconscious conflicts that configure a traumatic situation, so that, ultimately, all dreams are nightmares. The
satisfaction of desire is merely an attempt to mask the
traumatic situation. The dream work is not limited to
providing mental content with a new form, it is a creative process, a particular type of thought, archaic and
vast. GarmaÕs theory on the origin of dream hallucination and the relation to reality, which contradicts Freud,
is discussed in his essay ‘‘La realidad exterior y los
instintos en la esquizofrenia’’ (External Reality and the
Instincts in Schizophrenia), published in 1931. Here,
the relation of the subject to reality is disturbed whenever he has to abandon the satisfaction of impulsive
demands and submit to internal persecutory objects
that channel the death impulse.
These ideas, along with others, are crystallized in
two important books. Nuevos Aportaciones al psicoanálisis de los sueños (1970, [New Contributions to the
Psychoanalysis of Dreams]) covers thirty years of his
work, although it by no means exhausts his contributions to the field. His Tratato mayor del psicoanálisis de
los sueños (1990, [Comprehensive Treaty on the Psychoanalysis of Dreams]) incorporates the work done
during the last twenty years of his life. All of GarmaÕs
work is a sustained and consistent effort to unmask a
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fundamental structural conflict, the submission of a
masochistic ego to a sadistic superego that serves as an
obstacle to the free exercise of genitality.
Angel Garma had two daughters, Lucinda and Isabel, with Simone Mas, his first wife. Elisabeth Goode
Rasmussen, his second wife, who was with him at the
height of his career, remained a steadfast caretaker
during the years of his illness. An eminent psychoanalyst in her own right, she assumed the difficult role of
being the wife of a great man. Angel and Elisabeth had
two daughters, Carmen and Sylvia.
R. HORACIO ETCHEGOYEN
See also: Argentina; Colombia; Congrès des psychanalystes de langue française des pays romans; Federación
psicoanalı́tica de América latina; Spain.
Bibliography
Garma, Angel. (1931). Die realität und das es in der schizophrenie. Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse.
———. (1970). Nuevas aportaciones al psicoanálisis de los
sueñs. Buenos Aires: Paidós.
———. (1985). The psychoanalysis of dreams. New York:
Jason Aronson. (Original work published 1940)
———. (1990). Tratado mayor del psicoanálisis de los sueños.
Madrid: Contenido.
GATTEL, FELIX (1870–1904)
Felix Gattel, a medical doctor, was born in Berlin on
December 14, 1870, and died in 1904. He is known in
the history of psychoanalysis as Sigmund FreudÕs first
student.
Gattel traveled from San Francisco to Würzburg,
Germany, to complete his studies. Though he specialized in neurology, he spent May to October 1897 in
Vienna, studying with Freud (Masson, Jeffrey M.,
1985). He published a few articles but after 1899 all
trace of Gattel was lost. The exact date of his death is
not known, but Wilhelm Fliess indicates in his writings
that he died in 1906. Subsequent research by Michael
Schröter and Ludger M. Hermanns has led to the conclusion that he died on October 17, 1904.
Gattel followed the same initial scientific education
as Freud, beginning his career in pathological anatomy.
His interest then turned to neurosis and sexuality. He
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learned about Freud while he was doing research, in
particular, through an article written by Freud in collaboration with Oskar Rie on infantile cerebral hemiplegia (1891a). Gattel, aware of FreudÕs growing reputation in the field of neurasthenia and hysteria, contacted
him before settling in Vienna, most likely to take
advantage of FreudÕs clinical experience.
Gattel remains something of a mystery to us, since
there is little available biographical material. He was
one of FreudÕs earliest supporters and, with Emma
Eckstein, can be considered one of his first students—
at least in the traditional academic sense, where a
young medical student might work under the guidance of an older colleague. Eckstein can be considered the first student of analysis, since she was
analyzed by Freud and then began analyzing others in
turn.
GattelÕs importance—although minor—in the history of psychoanalysis shows up in several ways.
Freud, eager to communicate his research results, conducted experiments with him, as he did later with
Heinrich Gomperz; this was classic scientific research
as practiced in academic circles. As an academic Freud
assigned Gattel the job of conducting field research in
neurasthenia (letter to Wilhelm Fliess, January 20,
1898). Gattel was an enthusiastic and enterprising student, but not up to the theoretical level his teacher
would have liked. It was through these early experiments with Gattel that Freud came to understand that
conventional scientific research was not the best
method for communicating his ideas. During this
work, he came to understand the importance of transference between student and teacher. It is easy to
understand the importance of FreudÕs first students by
examining the concept of the correspondent in scientific discovery. Gattel and Fliess, although in different
ways, assumed this role before the creation of the Wednesday Psychological Society. It was during these
meetings that Freud was able to express himself most
fully, for his audience was able to follow his ideas and
spurred him on intellectually. At the same time, given
the inevitable diffusion of transference in a small
group, he was not overly concerned with the intensity
of two-way transference. This activity preceded the
evolution of the small group of the ‘‘savage horde’’
that Freud later became interested in.
Gattel appears in the Freud-Fliess correspondence
as someone inclined to plagiarism. He was the quintessential mediocre student. In the Swoboda affair, which
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signaled the end of FreudÕs friendship with Fliess
(Porge, Erik, 1994; Le Rider, Jacques, 1982), he is mentioned as an example of an unreliable personality.
Frank J. Sulloway (1979) exaggerates his importance,
but Schröter and Hermanns (1992) provide a more
accurate assessment of him as a talented and hard
working young man, capable of recognizing the value
of a scientific discovery but unable, during his short
life, to live up to the promise of his talent.
NICOLAS GOUGOULIS
See also: Germany; ‘‘Neurasthenia and ÔAnxiety NeurosisÕ’’.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund, and Rie, Oskar. (1891a). Klinische Studie
über die halbseitige Cerebrallähmung der Kinder, Heft III
der Beiträge zur Kinderheilkunde. Wien: Kassowitz.
Le Rider, Jacques. (1982). L’Affaire Otto Weininger. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Masson, Jeffrey M. (1985). The complete letters of Sigmund
Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904. London: Belknap.
Porge, Erik. (1994). Vol d’idées? Paris: Denoël.
Schröter, Michael and Hermanns, Ludger. (1992). Felix Gattel, 1870–1904: Freud’s first pupil. International Review of
Psychoanalysis, 19, 91–104, 97–208.
Sulloway, Frank J. (1979). Freud—biologist of the mind. London: Burnett.
GELEERD, ELISABETH (1909–1969)
Psychoanalyst Elisabeth Geleerd was born on March
20, 1909 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and died May
25, 1969 in New York.
Elisabeth GeleerdÕs parents were Moses and Bertha
(Haas) Geleerd. The eldest of three children, she and
her two younger brothers, Yap and Benedictus, grew
up in comfortable circumstances in Rotterdam where
her fatherÕs business was outfitting ships. When she
was nine or ten her mother died of tuberculosis and
she was sent to live with an aunt and uncle. This was
an unhappy experience and she returned to her fatherÕs
house in her early teens. Several years later Yap also
died of tuberculosis. The deaths of her mother and
brother influenced ElisabethÕs decision to study medicine at the University of Leyden. Her father supported
her ambition to become a physician.
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GENDER IDENTITY
After receiving her M.D. in 1936, she moved to
Vienna in order to undertake psychoanalytic training
at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, where her analyst was Anna Freud. In 1938 the deteriorating political
situation led her to move to London, where she completed her analytic training at the Institute for Psychoanalysis, the training arm of the British Psychoanalytic
Society. In 1940 she arrived in the United States and
worked for several years at the Menninger Clinic in
Topeka, Kansas before finally settling in New York in
1946. That same year she married the prominent psychoanalyst, Rudolph M. Loewenstein.
In 1947 Geleerd was appointed a training analyst at
the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and, as a member of the Educational Committee, played a formative
role in the development of the Child and Adolescent
analysis program at the Institute.
Recollections of Geleerd invariably note her intelligence and beauty. Her countenance has been described
as neoclassical and delicate, her temperament as sensitive, searching and romantic. The congruence between
her face and her character, each mirroring the other,
left an indelible impression on her friends and colleagues. She was by all accounts an empathic therapist,
but her approach to patients was based on a thorough
grasp of psychoanalytic theory and technique. In a series of papers on the psychodynamics of childhood
schizophrenia, the developmental vicissitudes of adolescence and the psychological states of fugue and
amnesia, she delineated the defenses the ego utilizes in
its attempt to master early, often overwhelming
trauma originating in the mother-child relationship.
She also sought to suggest new techniques for treating
seriously disturbed children and adolescents.
NELLIE L. THOMPSON
See also: Loewenstein, Rudolph M.
Bibliography
Geleerd, Elisabeth R. (1958). Borderline states in childhood
and adolescence. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 13,
279–295.
———. (1964). Child analysis: Research, treatment and
prophylaxis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 44, 242–258.
Kabcenell, Robert. (1970). Eulogy for Elisabeth Geleerd.
Unpublished. A.A. Brill Library, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.
66 8
Tartakoff, Helen. (1970). Obituary Elisabeth Geleerd Loewenstein. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 51,
71–73.
Thompson, Nellie L. (1997). Elisabeth Geleerd. In Jewish
women in America: An historical encyclopedia, Volume
One. (pp. 501–502) (Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash
Moore, Eds.) New York: Routledge.
GENDER IDENTITY
The term gender identity, meaning a personÕs relative
sense of his or her own masculine or feminine identity,
was first used in 1965 by John Money (Money, 1965).
The term was introduced into the psychoanalytic literature by Robert Stoller in 1968 (Stoller, 1968).
Money used the term to distinguish the subjective
experience of gender from the concept of ‘‘gender
role’’ which he used to describe the socially determined
attributes of gender.
Stoller (1968) developed the idea further to distinguish between the psychological and biological dimensions of sex. He used gender to distinguish ideas and
experiences of masculinity and femininity—both
socially determined psychological constructs—from
sex, the biologically determined traits of maleness and
femaleness.This usage has become the standard in psychoanalytically derived discussions of gender and sexuality to refer to the psychological aspects of sexuality,
what Freud (1925) called ‘‘psychical consequences of
the anatomical distinction between the sexes.’’
Stoller (1968) further distinguishes the general
sense of masculinity and femininity—gender identity—from the earlier awareness of sexual difference,
what he calls core gender identity, a relatively fixed
sense of maleness or femaleness usually consolidated
by the second year of life, prior to the oedipal phase.
Stoller identifies three components in the formation
of core gender identity: 1) Biological and hormonal
influences; 2) Sex assignment at birth; 3) Environmental and psychological influences with effects similar to
imprinting.
In contrast to FreudÕs belief that the primary identification is masculine, Stoller believes that both the boy
and the girl begin with a female core gender identity
obtained from the maternal symbiosis. Core gender
identity is derived non-conflictually through identification and, in essence, learning. Failure to interrupt
the maternal symbiosis pre-oedipally with boys may
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result in permanent core gender identity disorders like
transsexualism. Otherwise, normal development facilitates the boyÕs shift to a male core gender identity and
the subsequent oedipal conflicts associated with
obtaining a masculine gender identity.
GENERAL MEDICAL SOCIETY FOR
PSYCHOTHERAPY (AÄGP). See Allegemeine
The concept of gender identity is important historically because it separates masculine and feminine
psychology from the innate biological determinism
suggested by Freud. Increasing attention to the diversity and multiplicity of the origins and workings of
gender have made even the terms gender identity and
core gender identity less than adequate to describe the
nuances of such a central organizing factor of personality and behavior. It is important to differentiate the
term, gender identity, which describes the individualÕs
sense of gender, from StollerÕs speculative theory
about the origins of core gender identity.
GENERAL THEORY OF SEDUCTION
CHRISTOPHER GELBER
See also: Femininity; Feminism and psychoanalysis; Identity; Imaginary identification/symbolic identification;
Masculinity/femininity; Perversion; Sexual differences;
Stoller, Robert J.; Transsexualism.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1925j). Some psychical consequences of the
anatomical distinction between the sexes, SE, 19: 241–258.
Money, John (Ed.). (1965). Sex research: New developments.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Stoller, Robert. (1968). Sex and gender: On the development
of masculinity and femininity. New York: Science House.
Further Reading
Benjamin, Jessica. (1998). Shadow of the other. Intersubjectivity and gender in psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.
Breen. Dana. (Ed.). (1993). The gender conundrum. London,
New York: Routledge
Chodorow, Nancy. (1978). The reproduction of mothering.
Psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fast, Irene. (1999). Aspects of core gender identity. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 9, 633–662.
Stoller, Robert. (1985). Presentations of gender. New Haven,
London: Yale University Press.
Wagonfeld, S., rep. (1982). Panel: Gender and gender role.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 30,
185–196.
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Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie
Sigmund Freud developed the theory of seduction in
the years 1895–1897, and then he abandoned it. The
theory accounted for the genesis of the psychopathological unconscious on the basis of a complex
mechanism that brought two moments into play: a
scene in which a child is seduced by an adult, and
the ‘‘deferred’’ reactivation of this scene at a later
time.
Jean Laplanche has proposed a ‘‘general theory of
seduction,’’ extending the Freudian seduction theory
to the genesis of the unconscious in general, and
broadening its foundations to include primacy of the
otherÕs enigmatic message and the theory of repression
as a partial failure to translate this message.
It has been said, and is incessantly repeated, that
Freud abandoned his first theory of the neuroses and
announced this to Wilhelm Fliess in his letter dated
September 21, 1897 (SE 1, p. 259). Recrudescences
and relics of this theory are nonetheless legion in
FreudÕs work. What is perhaps the most surprising
fact is that it was effectively tabooed and misrepresented until 1964 (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1964).
Even then, when it began to attract a new interest,
this was directed not to the highly complex mechanism described by Freud but instead to anecdotes of
manifest sexual abuses and to the issue of whether
Freud had fled, or ‘‘repressed,’’ this reality and taken
refuge in the hypothesis of a pure and simple production of fantasies (Masson, 1984).
FreudÕs original seduction theory was strictly confined to the realm of the psychoneuroses. It is even
tempting to think that Freud posited the existence of
the unconscious in neurotics alone, and that he nourished the hope that cure might come to mean the elimination of the unconscious.
The theory sought to explain the development of
the unconscious by the repression, in the child, of
memories of sexual scenes usually experienced while
in the charge of an adult. It brought three interconnected levels into play: a temporal dimension, a
topographical dimension, and a language-related
dimension. The temporal aspect of seduction was
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bound up with the concept of deferred action (or
‘‘afterwardness’’ [Nachträglichkeit]), which was to survive in FreudÕs later thought. The thesis was that nothing was inscribed in the human unconscious save by
way of the interrelationship between at least two events
separated from one another by a period of mutation, a
lapse of time that made it possible for the subject to
react differently to the memory of the first experience
than to the actual experience as lived. Left in suspense,
the initial memory became pathogenic and traumatizing when revived by the occurrence of a second scene
having some association or resonance with the first.
The topographical aspect involved the theory of an
ego in the process of formation, armored against
attack from without but not against attack from
within. Since what attacked it at the second moment
was not an outside event but a memory, this ego was
unprotected and could react only by repression.
Lastly, a linguistic aspect of the theory was suggested by FreudÕs analogy between the barrier separating the two moments of the psychical trauma and a
translation, or a partial failure of translation (letter to
Fliess of December 6, 1896, SE 1, p. 235).
It is thus apparent just how inadequate a response it
is to reduce the seduction theory to the simplistic
assertion that the adultÕs seduction of the child brings
on mental disturbance. FreudÕs first theory was in fact
intimately interwoven with the clinical doctrine of the
time.
At the close of 1897, Freud undertook a systematic
critique of his theory which led him to abandon it, surrendering hysterics to their ‘‘seduction fantasies,’’ and
those fantasies themselves, ultimately, to a phylogenetic determinism.
The critique of a theory—its ‘‘falsification’’—may
have several outcomes: rejection, partial modification,
or a reexamination of its foundations. It is the last of
these that Jean Laplanche has sought with his ‘‘general
theory of seduction.’’ In the first place, he argues, the
unconscious should not be looked upon as invariably
pathological. The unconscious is part of the human
condition, and there is therefore no reason to rebuke a
theory or a practice for not being able to eliminate it.
Secondly, the adult-child relationship ought to be
viewed in a way that transcends psychopathological
features specific to particular cases of perverse sexual
abuse. Generally speaking, there is a basic asymmetry
between the infant and the adult, stemming from the
67 0
fact that adults have already constructed a sexual
unconscious for themselves and that their way of
addressing themselves to children, in gestures or
words, is necessarily shot through by that unconscious.
Thirdly, the general theory of seduction aims to bring
considerations to the fore that played little part in
FreudÕs thinking. These include: the notion of the message; the priority of the adult other in the message
received by the infant; and, lastly, the idea of ‘‘translation’’ as the basis for a model of repression less
mechanistic than that of a pure interplay of forces, as
set forth in classical psychoanalytic thought.
JEAN LAPLANCHE
See also: Anaclisis/anaclictic; Breastfeeding; Deferred
action and trauma; Heterosexuality; Masochism; Maternal reverie, capacity for; Object; Ontogenesis; Oral stage;
Proton-pseudos; Seduction; Seduction Scenes.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1896c). The aetiology of hysteria. SE, 3:
186–221.
———. (1950a [1887–1902]). Extracts from the Fliess
papers. SE, 1: 173–280.
Laplanche, Jean. (1989 [1987]). New foundations for psychoanalysis. (David Macey, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1968 [1964]).
Fantasy and the origins of sexuality. International Journal
of Psycho-Analysis, 49, 1–18.
Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. (1984). The assault on truth.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
GENEVA PSYCHOANALYTICAL SOCIETY. See
Société psychanalytique de Géneve
GENITAL LOVE
Genital love corresponds to the type of object relation
organized during the adult genital phase of libidinal
development. It is characterized by the unification,
under the primacy of the genital, of pregenital sexual
aims and, in particular, by the reunion of the two currents of sexuality—sensuality and affection.
It is difficult to provide a univocal definition of love.
The Greeks differentiated among eros, philia, and agapè,
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distinctions that were picked up by Freud, who distinguished sensual love from affection and from love in
the more general sense of the term. Although he leaves
discussions of love to the poets, Freud refers to the
polysemy of the term ‘‘love,’’ which he judges to be well
founded: sexual and amorous relations between men
and women, love between parents and children, friendship, self-love, the love of truth or humanity. ‘‘We are of
the opinion, then, that language has carried out an
entirely justifiable piece of unification in creating the
word ÔloveÕ with its numerous uses, and that we cannot
do better than take it as the basis of our scientific discussions and expositions as well’’ (1921c).
images of the parents that were internalized during the
oedipal phase have been sufficiently differentiated. In
this sense genital love, that is, adult genital organization, is indeed the successor of the oedipal complex,
and assumes further that it renounces the oedipal
objects formed during childhood (Perron, Roger, Perron-Borelli, Michèle, 1994). Genital, or post-oedipal
love, is the form of love best able to articulate the two
currents—heterosexual and homosexual—of oedipal
love. Positive oedipal erotic investments are reflected
onto the sexual partner in the couple, while homosexual investments will nourish, in a more or less desexualized form, social and professional relations.
The concept of ‘‘genital love’’ has meaning only if it
is associated with the concept of the ‘‘genital phase’’ of
libidinal development. It would thus stand in contrast
to that which characterizes the object relations of the
preceding ‘‘pregenital’’ phases. Genital love should not
be understood here solely as love in the form of sexual
congress, but as the type of love organized after the
oedipal phase and the latency period, at the moment
when the libido is sufficiently evolved to enable the
organization of the adult genital phase.
Michael Balint (1947) emphasized the idealist nature of a concept that would manifest no trace of
ambivalence or pregenital object relation. This type of
ideal object relation would, therefore, contain no oral
characteristics, would have no desire to devour the
object; there would be no desire to dominate or master
the object, no sadistic traits and therefore no vestige of
anality; there would be neither envy nor fear of the
genital organs of the other sex, therefore no trace of
the phallic phase or castration complex, and so on.
Clearly, such love does not exist. The pregenital components cannot all be integrated and every love
assumes the destruction of the narcissistic ‘‘shell.’’ We
are justified, then, in emphasizing the idealist nature
of such a concept, even its normative aura. This does
not mean that a certain maturation of the ego and its
abilities does not take place gradually when the genital
phase of libidinal development is achieved. The state
of being in love (David, Christian, 1996) then becomes
possible: it is the result of the simultaneous activity of
free sexual tendencies and inhibited tendencies and, in
particular, of the union of sensuality and affection.
Thus, genital love is characterized by the unification, under the primacy of the genital, of all the sexual
components that have not been repressed or sublimated, and of those pregenital sexual aims that have
been maintained as preliminary pleasures. This unification is prepared during the infantile genital stage
and is ‘‘completed’’ only after puberty with the development of adult sexuality.
During the period of oedipal decline, a new distribution of impulse cathexes will leave its traces
throughout the sexual life with a new distribution of
inhibited or sublimated erotic investments. In particular, there is a conjunction of the sensual erotic current
and the affectionate current of adolescence following
their relative disjunction during the latency phase.
There is a reunion of ‘‘genital satisfaction and pregenital affection’’ (Balint, Michael, 1947). The union of
these two currents brings about an equilibrium that is
rarely static but can rather be compared to an interlacing, a struggle (Parat, Catherine, 1996).
The model of adult genital organization implies the
choice of a heterosexual object, which leads to the
reproduction, in a couple, of what was for the child
the representation of the couple created by his or her
parents. This assumes that the sexual nature of the
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JEAN-FRANÇOIS RABAIN
See also: Aberastury, Arminda, known as ‘‘La Negra’’;
Adolescence; Genital stage; Love; Organization; Partial
drive; Pregenital; Psychosexual development; Puberty;
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Bibliography
Balint, Michael. (1972). L’amour génital. Amour primaire et
Technique psychanalytique. Paris: Payot. (Original work
published 1947)
David, Christian. (1996). Post-scriptum à l’état amoureux.
Revue française de psychanalyse, 60 (3), 633–642.
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Parat, Catherine. (1996). Á propos de l’amour et de l’amour
de transfert. Revue française de psychanalyse, 60 (3), 643–
662.
Perron, Roger and Perron-Borelli, Michèle. (1994). Le Complexe d’Œdipe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Revue française de psychanalyse (1996).
GENITAL STAGE
A stage or phase of psychosexual development, the
genital stage is characterized by the organization of the
component instincts under the primacy of the genital
zone. It is divided into two periods separated by the
latency period: first, the infantile genital organization,
or phallic phase, dominated by the phallus, that is, by
the male genital organ alone, and, secondly, the genital
organization properly so-called, which is established at
puberty.
Many authors feel that the terms ‘‘genital stage’’ or
‘‘genital organization’’ should be reserved for this second period, and that the ‘‘infantile genital organization’’ or ‘‘phallic phase’’ should properly be classed
with the (oral and anal) pregenital organizations that
precede latency. Freud himself at first described the
genital organization as linked to the discovery of the
sexual object at the time of puberty (1905d). Under
the primacy of the genital zone, a prerequisite to the
union of the sexes, the component instincts of the
young child’s ‘‘polymorphously perverse’’ sexuality
were unified and integrated into sexual activity as
fore-pleasure.
In a paper of 1923, ‘‘The Infantile Genital Organization,’’ intended as a complement to his Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality, Freud moved away from the
standpoint of biological maturation, reduced the significance previously accorded to puberty, and
described an organization that approximated ‘‘(in
about the fifth year) to the definitive form taken by
[sexuality] in the adult’’ (1923e, p. 141).
There are two important points here. Objectchoices, as first made during this phase, are in every
way analogous to post-pubertal choices, and this is
‘‘the closest approximation possible in childhood to
the final form taken by sexual life after puberty’’ (p.
142). The second and even more important point is
that the infantile genital organization, which is simultaneous with the emergence of the Oedipus complex,
is marked by the presence of a particular sexual theory:
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the child at this time conceives of but one kind of genital, namely the male sexual organ. This is the reason
for the denomination ‘‘phallic phase’’: ‘‘At the same
time, the main characteristic of this ’infantile genital
organization’ is its difference from the final genital
organization of the adult. This consists in the fact that,
for both sexes, only one genital, namely the male one,
comes into account. What is present, therefore, is
not a primacy of the genitals, but a primacy of the
phallus.’’ (p. 142)
The idea of the primacy of the male genital organ
thus became the foundation of the general theory of
the castration complex, of which Freud sought thenceforward to frame feminine as well as masculine versions: ‘‘the significance of the castration complex can
only be rightly appreciated if its origin in the phase of
phallic primacy is also taken into account’’ (p.144). In
An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, Freud placed the phallic
phase as a pregenital organization following the oral
and anal organizations, and reserved the term ‘‘genital
organization’’ or ‘‘phase’’ for the pubertal period only.
He reasserted the idea that ‘‘The complete organization is only achieved at puberty, in a fourth, genital
phase’’ (1940a, p. 155).
It is worth recalling here the importance of the
notion of organization. Each phase of development
sets up a functional system that organizes not only the
current state of mental operation but also its future
state. Thus, in 1923, Freud summarized the transformations that the polarity between the sexes undergoes
during infantile sexual development as follows: ‘‘At the
stage of the pregenital sadistic-anal organization, there
is as yet no question of male and female; the antithesis
between active and passive is the dominant one. At the
following stage of infantile genital organization, which
we now know about, maleness exists, but not femaleness. The antithesis here is between having a male
genital and being castrated. It is not until development has reached its completion at puberty that the
sexual polarity coincides with male and female’’
(1923e, p. 145).
Even though the evolution of Freud’s view of psychosexual development led him to assimilate infantile
sexuality more and more to adult sexuality, he did not
alter his initial assertion: he continued to maintain that
it was only with the advent of the sexual organization
of puberty that the component instincts were definitively unified and a hierarchy established; the child
could not emerge from the anarchy of the component
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instincts until, at puberty, the primacy of the genital
zone was assured.
JEAN-FRANÇOIS RABAIN
See also: Adolescent crisis; Genital love; Phobias in children; Stage (or phase).
Bibliography
Brusset, Bernard. (1992). Le Développement libidinal. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1923e). The infantile genital organization (An
interpolation into the theory of sexuality). SE, 19: 141–145.
———. (1940a). An outline of psycho-analysis. SE, 23:
139–207.
Further Reading
Dorsey, Denise. (1996). Castration anxiety or feminine genital anxiety? Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 44(S), 283–302.
Harley, Marjorie. (1961). Some observations on the relationship between genitality and structural development at adolescence. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 9, 434–460.
Roiphe, Herman. (1968). On an early genital phase: With an
addendum on genesis. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child,
23, 348–368.
GERMAN ROMANTICISM
AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Romanticism, according to Thomas Mann, was ‘‘the
most revolutionary and most radical’’ movement of
the ‘‘German spirit.’’ Along with Judaism and the
Enlightenment, it was one of Sigmund FreudÕs main
sources of inspiration. The culture of the age of Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe infused his childhood and
youth, but also the whole of the nineteenth century,
which was steeped in post-romantic elements such as
Darwinism and the resurgence, in Germany, of Naturphilosophie, forgotten at the end of the century (Ellenberger, 1974). FreudÕs knowledge of certain romantic
works of literature is attested by their presence in his
library and by the 130 citations of them that appear in
his writings.
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If Freud was ambivalent with regard to romanticism, this may have to do with his disillusionment,
during his youth, with the pan-Germanism (part of
the post-romantic trend) of student circles in Vienna
when he arrived at the university in 1873 and joined
the Reading Circle of Viennese Students, whose ‘‘Wagnerism’’ soon veered toward nationalism and antiSemitism (MacGrath, 1974).
On the other hand, all of the themes for which
romantic science and medicine had laid the groundwork were to be found in psychoanalysis a century
later: dreams and their ‘‘psychic value,’’ instinct,
repression, the lifting of which is the source of ‘‘the
uncanny’’ (Friedrich von Schelling)—the unheimlich
being a central concept in both romanticism and psychoanalysis, Friedrich SchleiermacherÕs secularized
interpretations, which he even applied to speech, and
of course Witz, that alloy of Jewish thought and
romantic irony theorized by Jean Paul and August Wilhelm von Schegel, on whom Freud relied, along with
Heinrich Heine, whose work he cited numerous times
in his writings. A ‘‘defrocked romantic,’’ Heine was
also FreudÕs model as an atheist Jew, a ‘‘brother in
unbelief ’’ to Spinoza, one of the romanticsÕ sources.
They gave Eros and sexuality an essential place, and,
by elevating the individual ego, took on the conquest
of inner freedom. We should also recall the ‘‘conquistador’’ status of Freud himself and the open, ‘‘interminable’’ form of his work.
FreudÕs teacher Ernst Brücke had trained him in
experimental physiology in a spirit of physico-chemical reductionism, which, in its opposition to the Naturphilosophie of his own teacher, Johannes von Müller,
nevertheless allowed a romantic heritage to filter
through in Freud’s work. It was brought forth by his
self-analysis—in the tradition of the knowledge of self
of the romantic Bildung—with Wilhelm Fliess, an
adept of romantic biology who transmitted to him,
notably, the idea of primal bisexuality. Freud then
practiced hypnosis—the heritage of animal magnetism—to create, through a radical transformation, the
psychoanalytic cure. At the same time, he drew upon
the post-romantics of his own time to support his
work: the theosophist Gustav Fechner, from whom he
borrowed the concepts of topography and the pleasure
principle, Theodor Lipps, for the unconscious, and
Karl Scherner for dreams. At the time of the shift in his
thinking in the 1920s, with the dualism of the
instincts, Freud can be seen as returning to the ‘‘primal
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antithesis of the world’’ of Naturphilosophie, and he
later took part in an essential discussion with Romain
Rolland, ‘‘the last of the great French romantics.’’
In ‘‘A Short Account of Psycho-Analysis’’ (1924f)
Freud alluded to romanticism as an element in the
prehistory of psychoanalysis, while Ludwig Binswanger pointed out FreudÕs faithfulness to the concept of
nature as ‘‘mythical essence,’’ and Thomas Mann
assessed psychoanalysis as a romanticism turned
scientific.
MADELEINE VERMOREL AND HENRI VERMOREL
See also: Goethe and psychoanalysis; Individual; Individuation (analytical psychology); Judaism and psychoanalysis; Sublimation.
Bibliography
Ellenberger, Henri. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious:
The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. New York:
Basic Books.
Freud, Sigmund. (1924f). A short account of psycho-analysis. SE, 19: 189–209.
MacGrath, William J. (1974). Dionysian and populist politics
in Austria. New Haven; London: Yale University Press.
Mann, Thomas. (1936). Freud and the future. International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 37 (1), 106–115.
———. (1941). FreudÕs position in the history of modern
culture. Psychoanalytic Review, 28(1), 92–116.
Vermorel, Henri, and Madeleine Vermorel. (1986). Freud et
la culture allemande. Revue française de psychanalyse, 49,
1034–62.
GERMANY
The first contacts between psychoanalysis and Germany occurred during the discussions and correspondence between Freud and Wilhelm Fliess at the end of
the 1890s and continued through FreudÕs student Felix
Gattel. Between 1907 and 1910 psychiatrists who
formed part of the entourage of Otto Binswanger, professor of psychiatry at Jena, became familiar with the
‘‘cathartic method.’’ They included Wolfgang Warda,
Wilhelm Strohmayer, Arnold Georg Stegmann, Georg
Wanke, Iwan Bloch, Arthur Muthmann, Otto Juliusburger, and Jaroslav Marcinowski.
The first systematic application of psychoanalysis in
Berlin was carried out by Karl Abraham, a student of
67 4
Carl Gustav Jung and Eugen Bleuler. Abraham was in
close contact with Freud since 1908 and was responsible for the first meeting of the Berliner Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (Berlin Psychoanalytic Association)
on August 27, 1908, which involved a group of local
doctors, including Magnus Hirschfeld (a sex
researcher), Iwan Bloch (dermatology, human sexuality), Otto Juliusburger (psychiatry, abstinence), and
Heinrich Koerber (circle of Monists). Later its members included Max Eitingon and Mosche Wulff. In
1910 the International Psychoanalytical Association
was founded on the occasion of the second international congress of psychoanalysis in Nuremberg, with
the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association the leading
regional group. By the end of 1911 the Berlin association had eleven members, including three women,
Tatiana Rosenthal, Karen Horney, and Margarete Stegmann, the first women analysts. In June 1912 two
other nonphysician women were admitted as members
at large.
Since German psychiatrists resisted psychoanalysis,
recognition took place through various cultural movements (sexual liberation, the emancipation of women,
judicial reform, monism). At the time two psychoanalytic congresses were held in Germany: the Weimar
congress on September 21, 1911 and the Munich congress on September 7, 1913. The Berlin Psychoanalytic
Association underwent qualitative consolidation in an
effort to set itself apart from the sexual sciences (after
the exclusion of Magnus Hirschfeld in 1911) and in
reaction to the defection of Carl Jung, who gave up
the presidency of the International Psychoanalytical
Association in 1913 and was supported by the
Munich group.
Aside from its institutionalization, psychoanalysis
received a welcome reception in literature (from
authors Lou Andreas-Salomé, Hermann Hesse, Rainer
Maria Rilke, Alfred Döblin). Indeed, the city of Frankfurt awarded Sigmund Freud the Goethe Prize in 1930.
It was also well received in art (though the mediation
of Otto Gros, who was part of the action group that
included F. Pfemfert, F. Jung, E. Mühsam). Georg Wilhelm PabstÕs film Geheimnisse einer Seele (The mysteries of a soul; 1926) was made in collaboration with
Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs.
Georg Groddeck, the ‘‘wild analyst’’ and the ‘‘father
of psychosomatics,’’ opened a fifteen-bed clinic in
Baden-Baden. During World War I, an opportunity
arose to prove the effectiveness of psychoanalysis in
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treating war neuroses. This had the effect of identifying the majority of analysts with the objectives of the
war (with the exception of Helene Stöcker and Siegfried Bernfeld) and enabled them to maintain international scientific dialogue (for example, through the
publication of the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse). Official recognition of psychoanalysis grew,
as demonstrated by the presence of government representatives from Austria, Germany, and Hungary at the
1918 Budapest congress, whose theme was the use of
psychoanalysis in treating war neuroses. It was here
that Sigmund Freud spoke in favor of the use of mass
psychoanalysis. In 1919 the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag (International Psychoanalytic
Press) was founded in Leipzig (later in March 1936 the
Nazis confiscated the firmÕs inventory).
The executive board of the Berlin Psychoanalytic
Association appointed Max Eitingon, Ernst Simmel,
and Karl Abraham on September 26, 1919, to head the
Poliklinik für psychoanalytische Behandlung nervöser
Krankheiten (Polyclinic for the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Mental Illnesses), which opened on February
16, 1920. Though the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association managed the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and
the polyclinic, Max Eitingon owned the physical assets
and library. He financed the association with an
annual fund of 16,000 Reichsmarks. Annual elections
were held for the various positions (polyclinic, teaching, candidate, cash management, and subventions).
The association grew through an influx of Hungarian
analysts fleeing the revolution and counterrevolution,
as well as the arrival of analysts from other countries,
who were attracted by the freedom and liberality of the
Weimar Republic and the then favorable economic
situation in Germany. From 1923 the training of analysts was systematized according to guidelines established by Max Eitingon, Carl Müller-Braunschweig,
and Sándor Radó and included theoretical courses, a
required analysis, and supervised analyses. In 1925
analytic treatment was recognized by a new Prussian
order on honoraria (PREUGO) and the German doctorÕs agreement (ADGO). Following the death of Karl
Abraham (on December 25, 1925), Ernst Simmel
became director of the association (Sándor Radó was
secretary, and Karen Horney was treasurer). On April
24, 1926, the association, in compliance with the international guidelines introduced by Ernest Jones, president of the International Psychoanalytical Association,
became the Deutsche psychoanalytische Gesellschaft
(DPG; German Psychoanalytic Society).
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Germany was host to international psychoanalytic
congresses in 1922 (Berlin), 1925 (Bad Homburg), and
1932 (Wiesbaden), as well as a couple of national conferences in 1924 (Würzburg) and 1930 (Dresden). Psychoanalytic work groups were formed in Leipzig in
1919 around Karl H. Voitel (from which a second
group formed in September 1922 with Therese Benedek at its head), in Frankfurt in 1926 (with members
Karl Landauer and Heinrich Meng), in Stuttgart in
1930 (with members Gustav Hans Graber and Hermann Gundert), and in Hamburg in 1930 (with members Clara Happel and August Watermann).
In 1929 the Südwestdeutsche psychoanalytische
Arbeitsgemeinschaft (Southwest German Psychoanalytic Work Group, with members Karl Landauer, Heinrich Meng, and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann) was
formed in Frankfurt in close collaboration with the
Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social
Research) (with members Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno). This work group sought to diffuse psychoanalysis by providing training analysis and classes
on theory held at the university for candidates without
any therapeutic training. A few psychoanalytic clinics
were established, though they soon closed for lack of
financing. There were the Therapeutikum (from 1924
to 1928, with room for fifteen patients), founded by
Erich Fromm and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann in Heidelberg to create a bridge between orthodox Judaism
and psychoanalysis, and the Schloss Tegel sanitorium
in Berlin (from April 1927 to August 1931) for the
treatment of serious neuroses, addictions, and character disturbances.
In 1928 Max Eitingon became president of Internationaler psychoanalytischer Verlag. On January 13,
1931, he was elected president of the DPG, and was
assisted by Felix Boehm, Hanns Sachs, and Ernst
Simmel.
On April 7, 1933, a law restoring the ‘‘office of professions’’ was issued by the National Socialist government, followed, on April 9, 1933, by an ‘‘Aryanization’’
order directed at medical organizations. On April 22,
1933, medical health insurers started excluding ‘‘nonAryan’’ doctors, and psychoanalysis was attacked as a
‘‘Jewish’’ science. Yet many eminent non-Jewish representatives of the profession, such as Felix Boehm and
Carl Müller-Braunschweig, believed, as did National
Socialism itself, that psychoanalysis was an effective
therapeutic practice. Many eminent leftist psychoanalysts, including Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, and
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Ernst Simmel, considered psychoanalysis to have a
worldview opposed to National Socialism.
At the annual DPG meeting of May 6, 1933, when
Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig proposed Aryanizing the presidency, most members voted against the
change (eight out of fifteen, with five abstentions). On
May 10, 1933, the works of Sigmund Freud, along with
those of other psychoanalysts, were burned. On
November 18, 1933, Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig
assumed control of the society, and on December 31,
1933, Max Eitingon left Berlin.
At the annual DPG meeting held on December 1,
1935, the society, with the assistance of Ernst Jones,
president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, refused to dissolve and decided to remain
within the association. However, it required its Jewish
members to leave the society. By 1936, 74 analysts had
left Germany. Salomea Kempner, August Watermann,
and Karl Landauer did not survive their incarceration
by the National Socialists.
Some members of the DPG resisted the regime:
Edith Jacobsohn fought with the socialist resistance
group Neu Beginnen (New Beginnings). She was
arrested on October 24, 1935, but managed to escape
and fled to the United States. The DPG then passed a
resolution that required members to abstain from politics. In February 1937 Käthe Dräger became head of
the Berlin committee of the KPD-Opposition (the
opposition group formed to fight the German communist party, or KPD). She wrote and distributed
antifascist writings and tracts, and helped the families
of comrades who had been jailed. In 1937 John Rittmeister was forced to flee Switzerland for ‘‘communist
activity,’’ and in 1941 he joined the resistance group
that had formed around H. Schultze-Boysen (the Rote
Kapelle, or Red Orchestra). He was arrested on September 26, 1942, and executed on May 13, 1943. Fourteen psychoanalysts remained in Germany.
Discussions between Felix Boehm (president of the
DPG), Sigmund and Anna Freud, and other leading
analysts gave Boehm the impression of a certain neutrality toward or even support for his and the DPGÕs
adaptation to the National Socialist regime. But those
involved did not want to further complicate matters,
though they did not agree with his political views or
the ideological conformism of Müller-Braunschweig.
The Ministry of the Interior told Boehm that to obtain
authorization to teach, he, as president of the DPG,
67 6
had to fold the other psychotherapeutic organizations
into the Deutsches Institut für psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie (German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy), which was to
be under National Socialist control and run by Professor Matthias Heinrich Göring.
The new institute was founded in May 1936, and
Max EitingonÕs assets ‘‘inventoried.’’ This was the
beginning of the development of a ‘‘German psychotherapy,’’ an eclectic mix of different psychotherapeutic theories. The DPG was dissolved on November
19, 1938, after an aborted attempt by MüllerBraunschweig to transfer the Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (WPV; Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society) and the publishing house to the German
Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy, within which it would become working group A.
Although Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig were
officially banned from teaching and publishing, they
were both important collaborators of the institute.
They ran the polyclinic, and Boehm coordinated the
working group on homosexuality, while MüllerBraunschweig coordinated the teaching program. The
ban on the use of psychoanalytic terminology did not
affect Harald Schultz-Hencke, however, who in 1933
developed a form of ‘‘neopsychoanalysis,’’ an amalgam
of current psychoanalytic teachings, by abandoning
metapsychology and other essential elements of
analysis.
Of the 300 members of the medical staff of the German Institute (including 17 members of the DPG/
WPV), 41 were members of the Nazi party (the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), and of the
145 members who were not doctors (25 of whom were
members of the DPG/WPV), 22 were party members.
Although most of the DPG members remaining in
Germany had managed to adapt to the Nazi regime,
only Doctor Gerhard Scheunert was a member of the
Nazi party. The German Institute, by then solidly
established, was recognized by the union of German
workers, financed by the Luftwaffe and private
insurers, and, during the war, was ‘‘assigned to the war
effort.’’ Eventually it was raised to the level of a government institute within the ReichÕs research council
(Reichsinstitut im Reichsforschungsrat), with an
annual budget of 880,000 Reichsmarks.
After the war, though participants claimed to have
sought to ‘‘save psychoanalysis’’ by their underground
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presence, they faced considerable skepticism and criticism from colleagues living abroad. On October 16,
1945, the DPG was reestablished with MüllerBraunschweig as its first president, Boehm as representative, and Werner Kemper as the third member of the
office staff. It had 35 ordinary members and 2 members at large, 12 of whom had been trained between
1936 and 1945. On April 29, 1946, it resumed activities
(as the Berliner Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft until
December 3, 1950), but the British military authorities
forced the DPG to strike any mention of being a
‘‘member of the International Psychoanalytical Association.’’ On May 9, 1947, the Institut für Psychotherapie was founded in Berlin, with teachers from a variety
of psychotherapeutic backgrounds, to provide training
in psychotherapy; in 1948 the institute also began
training ‘‘education counselors,’’ or Psychagogen (child
and adolescent therapists).
During the first postwar International Congress of
Psychoanalysis, which took place in Zurich in 1949,
the confrontation between Harald Schultz-HenckeÕs
neopsychoanalysis and the conventional Freudian
position of Müller-Braunschweig reached its culmination. The DPG was provisionally admitted to the International Psychoanalytical Association, subject to the
requirement that its members state their position
openly.
On May 13, 1950, Müller-Braunschweig, unsuccessful in his attempts to obtain recognition from SchultzHencke, secretly founded the Deutsche psychoanalytische Vereinigung (DPV; German Psychoanalytic
Association). The DPV was admitted to the International Psychoanalytical Association at the 1951 Amsterdam congress, but not the DPG. The DPG only
succeeded in regaining membership as the IPA Executive Council Provisional Society at the IPA Congress in
Nice in 2001. In 2004 the DPV was the second largest
group within the International Psychoanalytical Association in terms of number of members. At the suggestion of Werner Schwidder (member of the DPG and
student of Schultz-Hencke), the DPG, in 1962, joined
with other neopsychoanalytic groups to form the Internationale Föderation psychoanalytischer Gesellschaften
(International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies),
comprising twenty individual societies in Europe,
North America, and South America.
In spite of struggles for influence between the DPG
and the DPV, which were just beginning to ease, in 1949
Wilhelm Bitter founded the Deutsche Gesellschaft für
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Psychoanalyse, Psychotherapie, Psychosomatik und
Tiefenpsychologie (German Society for Psychoanalysis,
Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics, and Depth Psychology), a professional organization incorporating the
major trends in depth psychology (neopsychoanalysis,
conventional Freudianism, Jungian analysis, Adlerian
analysis). The member societies took turns supplying
presidents. As of 2004, it had approximately 3,150
members in 45 institutes, which are recognized by the
kassenärztliche Bundesvereinigung (German association of registered physicians) and German medical associations as establishments providing further education
to become child and youth analytical psychotherapists.
Outside Berlin, working groups and psychotherapeutic
establishments were created in Munich (the successor
of the German Institute for Psychological Research and
Psychotherapy and the mobile psychosomatic service of
Johann Cremerius), Stuttgart (the working group in
1946, and in 1948 the Institut für Psychotherapie und
Tiefenpsychologie [Institute for Psychotherapy and
Depth Psychology], representing the various forms of
depth psychology and founded by Wilhelm Bitter, Hermann Gundert, and Felix Schottlaender), Heidelberg
(the department of psychosomatics run by Alexander
Mitscherlich), Bremen (the working group founded by
Hildegard Buder in 1949, and an institute founded by
R. W. Schulte and Franz Rudolf Haarstrick in 1951),
and Göttingen (the Tiefenbrunn regional hospital,
founded by G. Kühnel and W. Schwidder). Later, institutes were created in all the major cities of the Federal
Republic of Germany. The Berlin institute gradually lost
its importance and was overshadowed by the institute
founded in Frankfurt in 1961 under the direction of
Alexander Mitscherlich and associated with the university. This was the Institut und Ausbildungszentrum für
Psychoanalyse und psychosomatische Medizin (Institute and Learning Center for Psychoanalysis and
Psychosomatic Medicine), which was renamed the Sigmund Freud Institute in 1964.
Mitscherlich and his wife, Margarete MitscherlichNielsen, not only renewed relations with the Institute
of Social Research (where Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were central figures) but also initiated a
dialog with the international psychoanalytic community concerning the controversies associated with GermanyÕs National Socialist past. Sparked by criticisms
from the student movement, interest in social policies,
group therapy, and family therapy grew (relevant
authors include Horst-Eberhard Richter, Franz
Heigl, Anneliese Heigl-Evers). The ‘‘Bernfeld Circle’’
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(Johannes Cremerius) began to question the training
and qualifications of analysts, the issue of feminism,
and the various polemics surrounding psychoanalysis
(Christa Rhode-Dachser).
In the German Democratic Republic, ideology
interfered with the resumption of a psychoanalytic tradition, although there was relative tolerance for neopsychoanalysis. In an initial phase running from 1945
to 1949, the analysts Werner Kemper (West Berlin),
Alexander Mette (Weimar), and Franz Baumeyer
(Arnsdorf) were among the dozen psychiatrists
responsible for training and accrediting ‘‘mental health
caretakers and psychotherapists.’’ In Leipzig, the neurologist A. Beerholdt, although he never completed his
analytic coursework, was able to introduce psychoanalysis to several psychiatrists (Wendt, Starke, Behrendt,
Böttcher). The only trained psychoanalyst remaining
in the German Democratic Republic, Alexander Mette,
left psychoanalysis to start a career in politics (he pursued an initial interest in health policies, then a university career, and eventually became a member of the
chamber of deputies of the German Democratic
Republic and a member of the central committee of
the Socialist Unity Party). The contents of psychoanalytic discussions were determined by Harald SchultzHencke and his followers, Werner Schwidder, U. Derbolowsky, and G. Kühnel. Schultz-HenckeÕs appointment as professor at Humboldt University on September 29, 1949, led the DPG to issue a resolution
forbidding members from taking posts in both East
and West Germany, and Schultz-Hencke gave up his
professorship. Following the creation of the German
Democratic Republic on October 7, 1949, psychotherapeutic establishments were created in Jena and
Leipzig.
From 1950 to 1962, while psychoanalysis was
expanding in the United States and an antipsychoanalytic movement was taking place in the Soviet Union
(where FreudÕs work represented a facet of National
Socialist ideology), the trend in the German Democratic Republic turned to Pavlovianism. Associated
with the therapeutic tradition of Otto Binswanger,
Johannes H. Schultz, Ernst Speer, and O. Vogt, in 1951
a department of psychotherapy was opened at the
medical polyclinic. There they developed a medicalmaterialist ‘‘rational psychotherapy’’ intended to
replace neopsychoanalysis.
The period from 1963 to 1976, when H. Kleinsorge
was president of the DPG, was characterized by greater
67 8
openness in discussions of psychotherapies and in
international relations. In the society a number of sections were set up, organized according to method
rather than their theoretical leanings: psychodynamic
therapy, group therapy, autogenic training and hypnosis, infant therapy, music therapy. Between 1976 and
1984 recognition was granted to ‘‘medical specialists in
psychotherapy’’ and ‘‘medical psychologists’’ (August
1978), and individual therapy was reintroduced. Fifteen regional societies of psychotherapy were created
to cover psychotherapeutic needs and the basic training of doctors, and interdisciplinary working groups
were formed to further integrate psychoanalysis with
the medical field. After 1985 efforts were made to institutionalize psychotherapy in the universities by creating autonomous chairs of psychotherapy and medical
psychology, and psychoanalytically oriented research
on the body helped to conceptualize group therapy.
Access to the psychoanalytic literature was still limited,
however: Freud was first published in the German
Democratic Republic as late as 1983.
In September 1947, the Studiengesellschaft für
praktische Psychologie (Research Society for Practical
Psychology) was formed in West Germany for representatives of all the academic professions concerned
with the individual. Ever since 1945, in the university
exams given to psychologists, psychoanalysis appeared
under ‘‘depth psychology and education counseling.’’
After the educational reforms of 1973, it appeared in
the larger field of ‘‘clinical psychology,’’ comprising the
study of testing, prevention, rehabilitation, counseling,
and other areas outside the field of depth psychology.
Gradually, psychoanalysis disappeared from higher
education to be taught in training institutes and the
psychosomatic departments of medical schools. Nonetheless, in experimental psychology, psychoanalysis
remained the most systematic and most studied psychological theory in 1977. At the beginning of the
1980s, the emphasis on the interpretation of psychoanalytic texts brought about through the influence of
Jacques Lacan made its appearance in German scholarship. After 1970 medical psychology and sociology, as
well as psychotherapy and psychosomatics, became
required material for students of medicine and
resulted in the creation of the corresponding chairs
and, in some cases, university departments. In 1979
the DPG created a psychoanalysis section alongside
psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis became a part of
the continuing training of doctors. At the start of the
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1990s, specialist medical training included fields such
as ‘‘psychotherapeutic medicine,’’ ‘‘psychiatry and psychotherapy,’’ ‘‘psychiatry and psychotherapy of children and adolescents.’’
With respect to the relations between psychoanalysis
and insurers, the Einheitskrankenkasse and the Rentenversicherung, in Berlin, had financed the Zentralinstitut
für psychogene Erkrankungen der Versicherungsanstalt
Berlin (Central Insurance Institute of Berlin for Mental
Illness), founded by Werner Kemper and Harald
Schultz-Hencke. By 1955 insurance reforms in Berlin
had gradually done away with many of these organizations, but the Central Insurance Institute remains.
Empirical follow-up work on outpatients by Franz Baumeyer and Annemarie Dührssen made legal recognition
of psychotherapy possible. In 1960 the ‘‘Munich
model’’ was instituted; this system involved the sharing
of medical expenses among the government (for
employees), insurers, and patients, each paying a third.
In 1967 psychological and psychoanalytic therapies
became covered general medical expenses for which
insurers were responsible, following verification of the
illness. In 1968 insurers (and in 1971 mutual insurance
companies as well) started covering psychotherapy
under certain conditions, and they also covered child
therapies. On July 1, 1976, the medical committee and
insurers modified the guidelines for analytic therapies
to recognize neurosis as an illness. Psychosomatic treatment became covered from October 1, 1987. In therapy,
if the symptoms are recognized, reimbursement covers
160 fifty-minute hours of treatment, with 80 to 140
additional hours possible. Psychologists who have
received analytic training can provide psychoanalytic
treatments. With the passing of a law regulating psychotherapists (June 16, 1998), ‘‘psychological psychotherapists’’ and child and youth therapists now
require a license to practice medicine.
Among journals, one of the most important is Psyche, which began by focusing on depth psychology but
later broadened its coverage to include cultural trends.
Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse published contributions to
the theory, practice, and history of psychoanalysis.
Forum der Psychoanalyse and Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Theorie und Praxis are clinical in orientation.
Other journals include Praxis der Psychotherapie und
Psychosomatik and Zeitschrift für psychosomatische
Medizin und Psychoanalyse.
Until the end of the 1960s, the DPG and the DPV
were separated by their divergent theoretical positions
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concerning Harald Schultz-HenckeÕs neopsychoanalysis. Since then, the DPGÕs orientation has shifted to a
more international position focused on the ego and
the self and on the theory of object relations. Moreover, it has generally supported the classical Freudian
position. However, there has been growing interest
within both the DPV and the DPG for the Kleinian
position, and contacts have developed with the ‘‘Middle Group’’ of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.
Though there are a few theoretical differences (Rudolf,
1987), there are more differences in practice. For
example, in training analysis the DPV recommends
four sessions, and the DPG three.
After accounts were settled over Alexander MitscherlichÕs involvement with National Socialism, a reckoning
that took place over a twenty-five-year period following
the war, the first postwar congress of the International
Psychoanalytical Association in Germany was held in
Hamburg in 1985. At the congress there was a growing
interest in the history of psychoanalysis, its development
(Karen Brecht, Volker Friedrich, Ludger Hermanns,
Dierk Juelich, Isidor Kaminer, and Regine Lockot), and
its interpretation (Hermann Beland, Ermann). In 1995
and 1996 conferences between groups of German and
Israeli psychoanalysts took place (H. Beland). In 1996
the first joint DPG-DPV conference was held on ‘‘the
division of the psychoanalytic community in Germany
and its consequences.’’ In 1996 the two societies, the
DPG and DPV, had nearly the same number of members (approximately five hundred each).
REGINE LOCKOT
Bibliography
Haarstrick, Franz Rudolf. (1994). Die Entwicklung des
Gutachterverfahrens in der Psychotherapie. Arbeitskreis
Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychoanalyse, Psychotherapie,
Psychosomatik und Tiefenpsychologie/Vereinigung Analytischer Kinder—und Jugendlichen—Psychoterhapeuten, 4.
Hermanns, Ludger M. (1994). Karl Abraham und die
Anfänge der Berliner psychoanalytischen Vereinigung.
Luzifer-Amor, 13, 30–40.
Höck, Kurt. (1988). Entwicklung der Balint-Gruppenarbeit in
der D.D.R. Klinik und Praxis. Berlin: Springer.
Lockot, Regine. (1985). Erinnern und Durcharbeiten: zur
Geschichte der Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie im Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.
Rudolf, Gerd. (1987). Vergleich der Akzeptanz psychoanalytischer Konzepte von I.P.A.- und D.P.G.-Mitgliedern.
679
GESAMMELTE SCHRIFTEN
GESAMMELTE SCHRIFTEN
The twelve volumes of the Gesammelte Schriften constitute the first publication of FreudÕs complete (or
almost complete) works in his native language. They
were published by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
This edition was undoubtedly planned when Freud
was ill with cancer in 1923, and it was originally limited to ten volumes. Volumes 4, 5, 7, 8, and 10
appeared in 1924, volumes 1, 2, 3, 6, and 9 in the following year. Since Freud remained productive despite
his illness, an eleventh volume containing his writings
from the interim was published in 1928, and in 1934 a
final volume appeared that brought together ‘‘the writings of 1928–33’’ and various additions to Volumes 1–
11. Anna Freud and Adolf Josef Storfer served as editors for Volumes 1–11 and Otto Rank as their co-editor on Volumes 4, 5, 7, 8, and 10. Anna Freud and
Robert Waelder made the selection and provided editorial commentary for Volume 12. As indicated on the
endpapers, all volumes were ‘‘prepared with the collaboration of the author,’’ and in correspondence Freud
several times referred to the Gesammelte Schriften as
the ‘‘complete edition’’ of his works.
This was not a critical edition, however. The somewhat random composition of Volumes 11 and 12 was
the result, to be sure, of their belated conception.
Volumes 1–10, envisioned as a whole, were organized
by theme. Scholarly apparatus and commentary were
minimal. There was no introductory statement of the
principles governing the editorsÕ choices and aims, nor
was any bibliography or index provided. The only editorial decision of any moment concerned The Interpretation of Dreams, the first edition of which magnum
opus, FreudÕs dream-book in its initial form, was
offered as the second volume of the Gesammelte Schriften, while Volume 3 assembled the many and often
voluminous additions that Freud made to the book in
its subsequent editions. It was Freud himself who proposed this original way of presenting his great work.
Prior to the publication of the Gesammelte Schriften, Freud had for the most part published his work in
the form of monographs, articles in journals or annals,
or contributions to anthologies and collections. After
the founding, in 1919, of his own publishing house,
the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, he generally published there. It was thus the ‘‘twelve volumes
in dictionary format’’ (to quote the publishersÕ
68 0
promotional matter) of the Gesammelte Schriften that
gave readers their first general view of the full scope
and import of FreudÕs work.
ILSE GRUBRICH-SIMITIS
See also: Gesammelte Werke; ‘‘Moses of Michelangelo,
The’’; Studies on Hysteria
Bibliography
Grubrich-Simitis, Ilse. (1993). Back to FreudÕs texts. Making
silent documents speak. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
———. (2000). Metamorphosen der Traumdeutung. In
Jean Starobinski, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, and M. Solms,
(Eds.) Hundert Jahre Traumdeutung von Sigmund Freud.
Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.
GESAMMELTE WERKE
The eighteen-volume Gesammelte Werke, along with
an unnumbered supplemental volume (the Nachtragsband) constitutes the second complete edition of
FreudÕs work in German.
In 1939, having emigrated to London, Freud
founded the Imago Publishing Company as a successor to the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag,
shut down by the Nazis. The chief purpose was to preserve the Viennese Gesammelte Schriften, duly modified, as a new Gesammelte Werke. Work on the project
was begun as early as the fall of 1938, with Freud
participating.
At the outset, the editorial committee consisted of
Anna Freud, Edward Bibring, and Ernst Kris.
Volumes 1 through 17 appeared between 1940 and
1952, which is to say after FreudÕs death. Bibring and
Kris migrated to the United States in 1940–41, to be
replaced by Willi Hoffer and Otto Isakower, who
served as co-editors for every volume except 9 and
15, both of which were published in 1944. Marie
BonaparteÕs collaboration was acknowledged in every
volume. Volume 18, planned as a Gesamtregister or
General Index, was prepared by Lilla Veszy-Wagner,
but before the manuscript could be sent to the printer, Imago Publishing Company went bankrupt in
1961. When S. Fischer Verlag of Frankfurt acquired
the rights to FreudÕs works in 1960, they also came
into possession of the remaining stock of the seventeen volumes of the Gesammelte Werke and the
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GESTAPO
manuscript of the Gesamtregister. After a thoroughgoing revision, Volume 18, the very first general
index to FreudÕs work, finally appeared in 1968. In
1987 the Nachtragsband, edited by Angela Richards
with the assistance of Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, brought
together all of FreudÕs psychological and psychoanalytical texts that for one reason or another had not
been included in the first seventeen volumes of the
Gesammelte Werke.
Like the Gesammelte Schriften, the first seventeen
volumes of the Gesammelte Werke cannot be described
as a critical edition of FreudÕs work. Editorial comment is reduced to the bare minimum. In contrast to
the approach of the Schriften, the contents of the
Gesammelte Werke are ordered chronologically.
Volume 2 and 3 reproduce the eighth edition of The
Interpretation of Dreams, including all the added
material.
The Nachtragsband, however, is supplied with a serious editorial apparatus and may be considered a critical edition. It is organized by theme, but its overall
arrangement is chronological.
The main aim of the editors of Volumes 1-17, working from London during and immediately after the
Second World War, was to make FreudÕs work available
in its original language through the book trade. The
editorial shortcomings resulted in part from the difficult conditions under which this second edition of
FreudÕs collected works had to be produced; in light of
the circumstances the undertaking constituted a
remarkable rescue operation. The Nachtragsband eked
out the set of texts in Volume 1-17 by adding writings
that had come to light later, some of them lacking even
in the Standard Edition, as for example the ‘‘Übersicht
der Übertragungsneurosen’’ (Overview of the transference neuroses) of 1915. Some texts, among them the
‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’’ and FreudÕs original notes on the ‘‘Rat Man’’ case, appeared in the
Nachtragsband in freshly corrected transcriptions.
Until such time, then, as a historico-critical edition
is produced, the Gesammelte Werke and the Nachtragsband together constitute the most comprehensive presentation of FreudÕs work available in its original
language.
ILSE GRUBRICH-SIMITIS
See also: Gesammelte Schriften; Imago Publishing Company.
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Bibliography
Grubrich-Simitis, Ilse. (1987). Einleitung. In Sigmund
Freud, GW, Nachtragsband, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.
———. (1993). Back to FreudÕs texts. Making silent
documents speak. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
GESTAPO
It was not long after the Anschluss of March 13, 1938,
that the Nazis began to take an interest in the Jew Sigmund Freud. The number of ‘‘visits’’ to the Berggasse
residence increased in frequency and were often
accompanied by demands for money. One Tuesday
evening, on March 22, Anna Freud was held ‘‘bei
Gestapo’’ for questioning, which sealed her fatherÕs
decision to leave Austria.
It has been suggested that ‘‘humor is a polite way of
expressing despair’’ and it is not surprising that a
number of jokes circulated in Austria at the time. One
of them, attributed to Freud himself, has been frequently repeated ever since Ernest Jones reported it:
‘‘One of the conditions for being granted an exit visa
was that he sign a document that ran as follows, ÔI
Prof. Freud, hereby confirm that after the Anschluss of
Austria to the German Reich I have been treated by the
German authorities and particularly the Gestapo with
all the respect and consideration due to my scientific
reputation, that I could live and work in full freedom,
that I could continue to pursue my activities in every
way I desired, that I found full support from all concerned in this respect, and that I have not the slightest
reason for any complaint.Õ When the Nazi officer
brought it along Freud had of course no compunction
in signing it, but he asked if he might be allowed to
add a sentence, which was: ÔI can heartily recommend
the Gestapo to anyoneÕ’’ (Jones, 1957, p. 226).
This ‘‘story’’ has been repeated many times and
commented on by those who treated it as genuine.
Some commentators have reproached Freud for a
‘‘recommendation’’ they felt to be ambiguous; others
admired his audacity. Eventually, some people ended
up believing that Freud had actually added this sentence to the Nazi document.
It is hard to imagine that Freud, who was aware of
the difficult and costly negotiations by the U. S.
ambassador to France (William C. Bullitt), Marie
Bonaparte, and Ernest Jones to obtain his visa, and
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GIFT
who was responsible for the fate of his daughter and
wife within the climate of the anti-Semitic hatred that
had taken hold in Vienna, would have taken the risk of
making a joke that in a matter of seconds might undo
all their efforts. Moreover, he was depressed by the
powerlessness resulting from his age and poor health,
as he wrote in a letter to his son Ernst on May 12,
1938, ‘‘I am writing to you for no particular reason
because here I am sitting inactive and helpless while
Anna runs here and there coping with all the authorities, attending to all the business details’’ (letter number 297, p. 442). But his ‘‘official’’ biography maintained this fiction, and none of those close to Freud
denied it, especially Anna Freud.
The original text of the statement was found during
a 1989 public auction of documents concerning the
emigration of FreudÕs family. It is a more sober statement, closer to the horrible truth of those years, than
the theatrical version given by Jones, and more consistent with the customary bureaucratic indifference of the
Nazi machine. It was written by Alfred Indra and signed
by Freud, without any additions by him. It reads: ‘‘Erklarung. Ich bestätige gerne, dass bis heute den 4. Juni
1938, keinerlie Behelligung meiner Person oder meiner
Hausgenossen vorgekommen ist. Behörden und Funtionäre der Partei sind mir und meinem Hausgenossen ständig korrekt und rücksickstvoll entgegentretten. Wien, den
4. Juni 1938. Prof. Dr. Sigm. Freud.’’ (Declaration. I
hereby confirm of my own free will that as of today,
June 4, 1938, neither I nor those around me have been
harassed. The authorities and representatives of the
Party have always conducted themselves correctly and
with restraint with me and with those around me.
Vienna, June 4, 1938. Prof. Dr. Sigm. Freud.)
FreudÕs comment was most likely introduced to
mask the anguish of his departure—a form of black
humor, which had close links, throughout FreudÕs life,
with the tradition of Yiddish Witze, which were often
also tinged with despair.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Bettelheim, Bruno; Freud, (Jean Martin); Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag; Mitscherlich,
Alexander.
Bibliography
Jones, Ernest. (1957). Sigmund Freud. Life and work. London: Hogarth.
68 2
Mijolla, Alain de. (1989). A sale in Vienna. Journal de
lÕassociation internationale dÕhistoire de la psychanalyse, 8.
GIFT
Gifts and money are unconsciously associated with
anal eroticism. In ‘‘On Transformations of Instinct as
Exemplified in Anal Erotism’’ (1916–1917e), Sigmund
Freud writes, ‘‘It is probable that the first meaning
which a childÕs interest in faeces develops is that of
ÔgiftÕ rather than ÔgoldÕ or Ômoney.Õ . . . Since his faeces
are his first gift, the child easily transfers his interest
from that substance to the new one which he comes
across as the most valuable gift in life. Those who
question this derivation of gifts should consider their
experience of psycho-analytic treatment, study the
gifts they receive as doctors from their patients, and
watch the storms of transference which a gift from
them can rouse in their patients’’ (pp. 130–131). The
gift is meaningful because of its connection to the
libido and eroticism. FreudÕs investigation led him to
the discovery of the unconscious link with defecation
and its relation to treasure hunting.
Karl Abraham (1916) examined the connection
between excessive giving and anxiety. He investigated
(1919) the transference meaning of the associations—
occasionally excessive—presented by the patient to the
psychoanalyst as a gift. This attitude is an expression
of narcissism and is characterized by its view of analysis as something governed by the pleasure principle.
What happens to the instinctual impulses of anal
eroticism after the genital organization has been established? Freud in ‘‘On Transformations of Instinct as
Exemplified in Anal Eroticism’’ (1916–17e) responds
with the idea of the transformation of instinct. In this
schema, gift equals excrement according to the symbolic language of the dream and daily life.
The first gift is excrement, a part of the infantÕs
body he gives up only upon the motherÕs insistence
and through which he manifests his love for her. Defecation and its relation to the object thus become the
first opportunity for the infant to choose between
bodily pleasure (narcissism) and object love
(sacrifice).
Later in life the interest in excrement is transferred
to an interest in gifts and money. The concepts of
excrement, infant, and penis are poorly distinguished
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and are frequently treated as if they were equivalent;
they can easily be substituted for one another. Freud
perceived the identity of the infant with excrement in
the linguistic expression: ‘‘to give a child.’’ Similarly,
Freud wrote in the ‘‘Wolf Man’’ (1918b), ‘‘By way of
this detour demonstrating a common point of departure in their significance as gifts, money can now
attract to itself the meaning of children, and in this
way take over the expression of feminine (homosexual) satisfaction.’’
Freud views the transference relation of certain
patients as a vague recollection of this problematic,
arising whenever the patient wants to interrupt the
unfinished treatment and place himself in a situation
of disdain that originates in the outside world. The
patient then replaces the urgent desire to have a child
with promises of significant gifts, most often as unrealistic as the object of his past desire. This concept is
developed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g).
Melanie Klein (1932–1975) demonstrated the
importance of the theme of poison gifts as a source of
depression and melancholy toward the object. ‘‘For
the child gifts attenuate his guilt by symbolizing the
free gift of what he wanted to obtain by sadistic
means.’’ In this same article, Klein clarifies the role of
ambivalence and sees it as a step forward compared to
archaic mechanisms. The gift provides access; it is a
preliminary form of sublimation within the compulsions of reparation and restitution associated with
obsessive behavior.
DOMINIQUE J. ARNOUX
See also: Anality; Money in psychoanalytic treatment
Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1966). Examen de l’étape prégénitale la
plus précoce du développement de la libido. Complete
works, vol. 2, 1915–1925. (pp. 231–254) (I. Barande,
Trans.) Paris: Payot. (Original work published 1916)
———. (1979). A particular form of neurotic resistance
against the psycho-analytic method. (pp. 303–311) In
Selected papers of Karl Abraham, M.D. (Douglas Bryan and
Alix Strachey, Trans.) New York: Brunner/Mazel. (Original
work published 1927)
Freud, Sigmund. (1908b). Character and anal erotism. SE, 9:
169–175.
———. (1916–17e). On transformations of instinct as
exemplified in anal erotism. SE, 17: 127–133.
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———. (1918b). From the history of an infantile neurosis.
SE, 17: 1–122.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18:
1–64.
Klein, Melanie. (1975). The psycho-analysis of children. (Alix
Strachey, Trans.) London: Hogarth Press. (Original work
published 1932)
GLOVER, EDWARD (1888–1972)
Edward Glover, British psychoanalyst and physician,
was born on January 13, 1998 in Lesmahagow, Scotland, and died August 16, 1972, in London.
Born in a small Scottish village, he was the third
and youngest son of a country schoolmaster, Matthew
Glover, who, for reasons of health, had previously
given up a very promising scholastic University career.
His mother, Elizabeth Shanks Glover, had been raised
by her uncle, a Minister of the Reformed Presbyterian
Church, and she was privately educated in its very firm
tenets and strict Sunday observances, as well as in
domestic arts. By contrast, EdwardÕs father was Darwinian and agnostic, but Edward was raised in what he
regarded as his motherÕs oppressive religious
convictions.
Glover is said to have inherited his literary gifts
from his mother, but his fatherÕs linguistic expertise
and thorough knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew,
French, and English must have deeply influenced him.
Matthew GloverÕs interest in natural philosophy, his
intellectual rigor, scientific attitude, and capacity to
teach was likewise reflected in EdwardÕs selfsame gifts.
But the boy hated his early years of schooling and
religious instruction, describing himself as ‘‘reluctant,
rebellious, contumacious, and obstinate’’ as a pupil,
though he seems otherwise to have had a happy childhood. But, on entering secondary school–under his
fatherÕs direction–he threw himself into his work with
energy and gusto, matriculating at sixteen, starting
medical training, and qualifying M.B., Ch.B. with distinction at the age of twenty-one.
He was appointed House Physician to the wellknown cardiologist Professor John Cowan at Glasgow
Royal Infirmary, and in the next few years learned to
apply scientific method to clinical practice and undertook research. Four years later he became Senior Resident at the Glasgow ChildrenÕs Hospital, and remarked
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that there ‘‘the facts of psychological life could no
longer be gainsaid.’’ He became Assistant Physician at
the Edward VII Sanatorium at Midhurst, greatly
admiring the pathologist there, J.A.D. Radcliffe, whom
he felt provided him with a disciplined understanding
of natural scientific method. GloverÕs experience led to
significant published contributions to the field of pulmonary medicine.
In following his medical career he had been greatly
influenced by his oldest brother, James. His dissatisfaction with a strictly organic approach to medicine–the
limitations of which he discovered in the course of his
own clinical practice–led him to follow his brother
JamesÕs interest in FreudÕs psychology. James had
moved to Brunswick Square in London to set up a psychiatric practice with Drs. Jessie Murray and Julia
Turner. In 1920 the brothers went to Berlin to undergo
training analyses (Edward preferred to call his an
apprenticeship) with Karl Abraham, studying alongside Ella Freeman Sharpe and Mary Chadwick–also to
make their names as psychoanalysts in London. Glover
had an honorary appointment there, and learned as
much psychiatry as he could from the hospital facilities in Berlin before returning to London, becoming
an associate member of the British Psycho-Analytical
Society in 1921 and a full member the following year.
James, who was close to Ernest Jones, died in 1926,
and Edward took over many of his commitments. He
was appointed Scientific Secretary of the British
Society, Director of Research, Assistant Director,
under Jones, of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis,
and then Secretary of the training committee of the
International Psychoanalytic Society. His influence in
the British Society was second only to Jones, while his
reputation among doctors outside the Society was
unsurpassed. He was a fine public speaker and a very
gifted writer; and although he sometimes lapsed into
polemics, he produced some memorable and witty
sayings in the process.
Glover was sufficiently self-critical to recognize
that, for a time after his qualification, he had allowed
his enthusiasm for psychoanalysis to undermine, at
times, the critical and scientific discipline that had
become so important to him during his strictly medical work. But it was an error that he soon set about
correcting. He became an enemy of what he called
‘‘unchecked speculation,’’ and became, in a series of
telling critiques of analysts and former analysts published over the years (most notably, perhaps, Freud or
68 4
Jung [1950]), what someone in another field once
called ‘‘the necessary antidote to everything.’’ In this
he held firmly to the common ground of basic psychoanalytic concepts. Unhappily, he lived to see that
ground becoming increasingly less common.
Much of his work, however, consists of original
contributions covering a wide range of psychoanalytic
interest. These included: drug addiction; prostitution;
War, Sadism, and Pacifism (1933); The Technique Of
Psycho-Analysis (1955); the classification of mental
disorders; the early development of mind and the
nuclear theory of ego formation; education; and
research methods in psychoanalysis. A selection of
many key papers appeared in 1956. A classic textbook
on psychoanalysis was published in 1939 and substantially enlarged for a second edition in 1949. But,
perhaps above all, his contributions to the study of
psychopathy and crime reflected his single greatest
interest, about which he wrote a large number of
papers, the bulk of them gathered together in his
book The Roots of Crime (1960). From small beginnings in 1922, and in association with Grace
Pailthorpe and others, the foundations were laid on
which Glover later founded the Institute for the
Study and Treatment of Delinquency (ISTD), the
clinical wing of which was later adopted by the
National Health Service as the Portman Clinic, while
the scientific and research division was funded separately. Together with Hermann Mannheim and Emanuel Miller, Glover founded The British Journal of
Delinquency (later The British Journal of Criminology)
in 1950 and, together with the ISTD, launched the
International Library of Criminology. He was a
founding member of the editorial board of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child.
Glover is often remembered in the British Psychoanalytic Society, perhaps unfairly, for the part he
played in the series of Controversial Discussions,
recorded with great thoroughness and scholarship by
Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner in The Freud-Klein
Controversies 1941–45 (1991). GloverÕs critique of
Klein, later published separately, is still perhaps the
most thorough and exhaustive on this topic. His dissent led him to leave the Society in 1944, but he continued to be a member the International Psychoanalytic Association through his honorary membership of
the Swiss and American Societies. GloverÕs first wife,
whom he married in 1918, died eighteen months later
from septicemia. He married for a second time in
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G L O V E R , J A M E S (1882 –1 926)
1924, and their only child, a mentally handicapped
girl, was born in 1926.
CLIFFORD YORKE
See also: British Psycho-Analytical Society; Splitting of
the object; Controversial Discussions; Dipsomania; Great
Britain; Indications and contraindications for psychoanalysis for an adult; Schmideberg-Klein, Melitta; Technique with adults, psychoanalytic.
Bibliography
Glover, Edward. (1933). War, sadism and pacifism. London:
Allen and Unwin.
———. (1950). Freud or Jung. London: Allen and Unwin.
———. (1955). The technique of psycho-analysis. London:
Bailliere, Tindall and Cox.
———. (1956). On the early development of mind. Selected
papers. London: Imago Publishing. Re-issued 1970, New
York: International Universities Press.
———. (1960). The roots of crime. London: Imago Publishing. Re-issued 1970, New York: International Universities
Press.
King, Pearl H.M.; and Steiner, Riccardo. (1991). The FreudKlein controversies 1941–1945. London and New York:
Tavistock Publications-Routledge.
GLOVER, JAMES (1882–1926)
English psychoanalyst and physician James Glover was
born in Lesmahagow, Lanarkshire, Scotland. Six years
older than his well-known brother Edward, James was,
after Ernest Jones, the most notable British (Scottish)
psychoanalyst of his era. As he died prematurely from
diabetes at the age of fourty-four, after only eight years
of training and practice of psychoanalysis, he left few
publications. Had not Ernest Jones devoted eight
pages of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis
(volume 8, 1926) to his obituary, there would be little
record of his life and the name of Glover would exclusively be associated with his younger brother.
James and Edward were the sons of Matthew Glover, country schoolmaster and academic, and Elizabeth Smith Shanks, who came of a farming family.
There was a middle brother who died. James was
regarded as the genius of the family and Edward as
the more pedestrian. James received a fine Scottish
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education, which stimulated and trained his intellect;
throughout his life he maintained his knowledge of
science and philosophy. At the same time, he was a
writer of short stories and a great reader of literature.
James qualified as a physician and surgeon in Glasgow at the early age of twenty-one. As he was already
in poor health, he undertook sea voyages and spent
some years in Brazil where he practiced both medicine
and surgery. After some ten years his health deteriorated further and he returned to Britain where he practiced chest medicine and ear, nose, and throat surgery.
His philosophical interests turned to psychology and
to an interest in Freud. In 1918 he joined the Brunswick
Square Clinic, the first psychotherapy center in the United Kingdom, founded by Julia Turner and Dr. Jessie
Murray. They practiced an eclectic form of psychotherapy, influenced by Pierre Janet and Dejerine. James
underwent a ‘‘pseudo-analysis’’ with Julia Turner and
quickly became co-director of the clinic with her after
the illness and death of Dr. Murray. He was very active
in training psychotherapists at the clinic and was in
charge of the rehabilitation of resident patients. But his
skeptical and enquiring mind and strict scientific and
philosophical outlook soon made him dissatisfied with
eclectic psychotherapy and he decided to become a psychoanalyst. In 1920 he attended the Hague Congress of
Psychoanalysis and went on to Berlin for some months
of analysis with Karl Abraham and returned to him for
more analysis the following year. At this time he insisted
that psychoanalysis should be the only form of psychotherapy at the Brunswick Square Clinic and persuaded both the patrons and the staff to close the clinic
and to transfer its funds and activities to the Psychoanalytic Society. Jones writes that he displayed tact combined with a steel-like resolution in order to get his way.
Amongst the psychoanalysts who were drawn to psychotherapy through the Brunswick Square Clinic were
Sylvia Payne, Mary Chadwick, Ella Sharpe, Nina Searle,
Susan Isaacs, Iseult Grant-Duff, Marjorie Brierley and
the Jungian Constance Long.
Glover became an associate member of the newly
formed Psychoanalytic Society in 1921, full member
1922, and in 1924 was appointed to the council. He
arranged the transfer of the International Library of
Psychoanalysis to the Hogarth Press of Leonard and
Virginia Woolf. Glover was untiringly active in the
Psychoanalytic Society, training, lecturing (particularly on anxiety states), and establishing the clinic of
the society, and was its assistant director.
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Glover was a fine lecturer and a fierce polemicist, a
trait shared with his brother Edward. He was appointed
chair of the medical section of the British Psychological
Society, which was the meeting ground for psychotherapists of different persuasions. One of his few
published papers is his contribution to a symposium
‘‘The conception of sexuality’’ (1925), in which he savagely criticized the contribution of J.A. Hadfield, a leading figure at the Tavistock Clinic. Reading his paper
gives a vivid insight into the quality of GloverÕs mind;
he was described by Ernest Jones as lucid, ironic, as a
master of metaphor, and a searcher for truth.
Glover hesitated to publish and had to be persuaded. He gave a paper ‘‘Notes on an unusual form of
perversion’’, at the 1924 Salzburg Congress and it was
published in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. He gives a clear and rigorous account of the analysis of his patient who was an alcoholic fetishist. Glover
showed that there was a marked oral fixation underlying the genital oedipal level: the attitude to the maternal nipple was as a source of pleasure and a focus for
oral sadism. He wished to take revenge on the nipple
for his weaning and for his motherÕs betrayal of him
through her genital relationship to her husband. The
patientÕs fetishist behavior involved shoes, which
represented both the maternal phallus and a disgust
for smell, which was a fecal displacement. Particularly
interesting is his discussion of the fetish having been
established at a phase when clear self-object differentiation had not been established.
Glover died of severe diabetes: Ernest Jones wrote
that this was ‘‘an inestimable loss’’ to psychoanalysis.
MALCOLM PINES
See also: British Psycho-Analytical Society; Glover,
Edward; Great Britain.
Bibliography
Glover, James. (1924). Notes on an unusual form of perversion. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 8, 10–24.
——— (1925). Contribution to a symposium on the conception of sexuality. British Journal of Psychology, 5, 3.
Jones, Ernest. (1927). James Glover, 1882-1926. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 8, 1–9.
Pines, Malcolm. (1991). The development of the psychodynamic movement. In Berios, G.E.; and Freeman H. (Eds.).
150 years of British Psychiatry 1851 to 1991. London: Gaskell-Royal College of Psychiatrists
68 6
GOETHE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (born August 28, 1748;
died March 22, 1832), poet and dramatist, dominated
the German literary scene of his time. The Aufklärung,
Sturm und Drang, of which he is the principal representative along with Johann Herder and Friedrich von
Schiller, the German classicism he embodied along
with Schiller, and German romanticism have all been
referred to by Heinrich Heine as ‘‘Goethean.’’ He is
one of the principle sources of Freudian thought.
Freud noted GoetheÕs scientific interests (Freud,
1930e). After reading the poem, ‘‘Hymn to Nature’’—
then attributed to Goethe but in reality written by
Georg Christoph Tobler, a Swiss pietist—Freud
decided to enter medical school, and according to
Ludwig Binswanger, throughout his work remained
faithful to natureÕs ‘‘mythical essence.’’ A theoretician
of evolution fifty years before Darwin, Goethe inspired
Freud, as shown by the ‘‘sheepÕs head’’ dream, where
the dreamerÕs associations make reference to GoetheÕs
research on the intermaxillary bone of the sheep.
Goethe introduced the ideas of Spinoza—another
of FreudÕs models—into Germany, and Freud often
quoted GoetheÕs maxim: ‘‘The best of what you know/
You could not tell your students,’’ which reflected the
need for dissimulation imposed by the revelation of
essential truths.
Freud often quoted GoetheÕs Faust; speaking
through the devil, he assumed his role as (metapsychological) sorcerer in the creation of his work. He also
referred to the ‘‘eternal feminine’’ and the ‘‘Mothers,’’
using the poetÕs words to flesh out his conception of
the representation of the mother and woman. He made
use of a number of GoetheÕs lines, such as ‘‘in the
beginning was the Deed,’’ (for example, 1912–13a, p.
161) and ‘‘What thou hast inherited from thy fathers,
acquire it to make it thine’’ (e.g., 1912–13a, p. 158n).
Goethe was a secret advisor to the Duke of SaxeWeimar and had Johann Fichte and representatives of
the first phase of German romanticism appointed to
the University of Jena. Nearly contemporary with the
universalism of the Enlightenment and the French
Revolution, he opposed a number of romantic ideas,
even though the concept of Naturphilosophie was a
logical outcome of his scientific research. In GoetheÕs
work, the word Trieb—which became a core concept
in psychoanalysis—assumes the meaning of instinct,
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GOETHE PRIZE
need, and mental impulse, Bildungstrieb being the
secret force that animates living creatures. The model
of the Urphänomen influenced the model of the primal
in mental life (Vermorel, 1995).
Goethe was one of FreudÕs principal models and he
quotes him a hundred and ten times, according to the
Concordance. He even shows up in FreudÕs dreams as a
familiar character, like his family and friends. Freud
identified with this creative genius, who, like him, was
coddled during childhood by his mother but deeply
wounded by the death of family members. According to
Alain de Mijolla (1981), because he often held his father
in low esteem, Freud created a double of his grandfather
Schlomo in the idealized figure of the sage of Weimar.
In his acknowledgments for receiving the Goethe
prize, Freud recognized that the poet had emphasized
Eros in mental life and appreciated the value of
dreams. He said his inspiration for the term ‘‘psychoanalysis’’ came from the ‘‘chemistry’’ found in the Elective Affinities (the alchemy to which Goethe was introduced as a young man). He went so far as to turn him
into a precursor of psychoanalysis, for having
described in Iphigenia a kind of spiritual cure, and
using conversation to heal a mental symptom experienced by Mrs. Herder (Freud, 1930e).
HENRI VERMOREL
See also: Act/action; Eissler, Kurt Robert; FreudNathanson, Amalia Malka; Goethe Prize; On Dreams;
On Transience; Vienna, University of; Witch of
Metapsychology, the.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1917b). A childhood recollection from
Dichtung und Wahrheit. SE, 17: 145–156.
———. (1930e). Address delivered in the Goethe Haus at
Frankfurt. SE, 21: 208–212.
GOETHE PRIZE
The Goethe prize was awarded by the city of Frankfurt
to Sigmund Freud on August 28, 1930 in Frankfurtam-Main. The prize, instituted in 1927, was awarded
annually on August 28, the anniversary of the birth of
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The sum of ten thousand Deutsche Marks was awarded to individuals
‘‘whose creative activity served to honor the memory
of Goethe.’’ Before Freud the prize had been given to
Stefan George (1927), Albert Schweitzer (1928), and
Leopold Ziegler (1929).
In 1927 Heinrich Meng and Stefan Zweig had
begun a promotional campaign to propose Freud for
the Nobel Prize. Members of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute (1929–1933), especially Heinrich Meng,
also worked to ensure that Freud was awarded the
Goethe prize. Because of his poor health, Freud, than
seventy-four years old, was unable to accept the prize
in person and sent his daughter Anna Freud to Frankfurt for the awards ceremony (1930d).
The award of the Goethe prize by Frankfurt in 1930
was considered by Freud to be the culmination of
his public life. Discussions by the award committee
appeared to idealize psychoanalysis, but in fact it was
criticized. Among the adversaries of psychoanalysis
there was a general refusal to accept psychoanalysis
and a converse movement to idealize Goethe, which,
given the regressive nature of German society of the
time, was soon to become a permanent characteristic.
A few years later, in 1933, FreudÕs writings were burned
by the National Socialists in Frankfurt and in other
German cities.
The reaction of the media to the award simply
repeated the controversy that divided the award committee. The periodical Die Psychoanalytische Bewegung
(1930), contains a review of the event in German.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. (1992). Faust, a tragedy, part
one. (Martin Greenberg, Trans.). New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press. (Original work published 1808)
———. (1998). Faust, part two. (Martin Greenberg, Trans.).
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Original work published 1883)
Hachet, Pascal. (1995). Les psychanalystes et Goethe. Paris:
LÕHarmattan.
Vermorel, Henri. (1995). La pulsion, de Goethe et de Schiller
à Freud. In H. Vermorel et al. (Eds.), Freud, Judéité, Lumières et Romantisme (pp. 133–149.). Lausanne: Delachaux &
Niestlé.
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THOMAS PLÄNKERS
See also: Freud Anna; Germany; Goethe and psychoanalysis; Meng, Heinrich.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1930d). Letter to Dr. Alfons Paquet. SE,
21: 207–207.
Paquet, Alfons. (1930). Zum Goethepreis 1930. Rede im
Südwestdeutschen Rundfunk am 28.8.1930. In Die Psychoanalytische Bewegung. p. 426–430.
687
GOOD-ENOUGH MOTHER
Plänkers, Tomas. (1993). Vom Himmel durch die Welt zur
Hölle. Zur Goethe-Preisverleihung an Sigmund Freud im
Jahre 1930. Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse. 30, p. 167–180.
———. (1996). Die Verleihung des Frankfurter GoethePreises an Sigmund Freud 1930. Die Sitzungsprotokolle
des Goethe-Preiskuratoriums. In Tomas Plänkers, et al.,
Psychoanalyse in Frankfurt a. M. Zerstörte Anfänge, Wiederannäherung und Entwicklungen (p. 254–331). Tübingen:
Diskord.
GOOD-ENOUGH MOTHER
The ‘‘good-enough mother’’ is a mother whose conscious and unconscious physical and emotional attunement to her baby adapts to her baby appropriately at
differing stages of infancy, thus allowing an optimal
environment for the healthy establishment of a separate
being, eventually capable of mature object-relations.
Evolving slowly, and underpinning Donald WinnicottÕs theory of early integration, personalization and
object-relating, this concept includes the ‘‘ordinary
devoted mother’’ (1949), and ‘‘the good-enough environment’’. It first appears clearly in WinnicottÕs ‘‘Mind
and its Relation to the Psyche-Soma’’ (1949).
WinnicottÕs emphasis on the particular need for
maternal sensitivity begins in his paper ‘‘The Observation of Infants in a Set Situation’’ (1941), and is referred
to repeatedly in his work. His statement, ‘‘There is no
such thing as a baby’’ implies that without a mother, an
infant cannot exist. He describes ‘‘primary maternal
preoccupation’’ (1956), the psychophysiological preparedness of a new mother for motherhood, as a special
phase in which a mother is able to identify closely and
intuitively with her infant, in order that she may supply
first body-needs, later emotional needs, and allow the
beginnings of integration and ego-development.
The good-enough mother is described as responding to the infantÕs gesture, allowing the infant the temporary illusion of omnipotence, the realization of hallucination, and protection from the ‘‘unthinkable
anxiety’’ (primitive agonies) that threatens the immature ego in the stage of ‘‘absolute dependence.’’ Failure
in this stage may result, ultimately, in psychosis.
As the infant develops, the good-enough mother,
unconsciously aware of her infantÕs increasing egointegration and capacity to survive, will gradually fail
to be so empathic. She will unconsciously ‘‘dose’’ her
failures to those that can be tolerated, and the infantÕs
68 8
developing ego is strengthened, the difference between
‘‘me’’ and ‘‘not-me’’ clarifies, omnipotence is relinquished, a sense of reality begins to emerge, mother
can be increasingly seen as a separate person, and ‘‘the
capacity for concern’’ can develop. Failure in this stage
may result in the formation of a ‘‘false self.’’
Winnicott describes how the capacity to be alone
can develop out of the experience of the infant of
being alone in the presence of another. Ego-immaturity is balanced by ego-support from mother, and this
ego-support is in time internalized, so that aloneness
is tolerable (1958).
Many writers approach environmental failure (Fairbairn, Kohut, Balint, and others); however, few
describe the optimal situation in health as described by
Winnicott. Winnicott is accused of romanticism, idealism and optimism in his description of the mother
whose adaptation is so exquisite, and of ‘‘blaming the
mother’’ when things go wrong. It is important in
reading his work to realize the lack of moralism he
evinces. Winnicott certainly regrets the failure of those
mothers who cannot reach the state of being ‘‘goodenough,’’ but acknowledges that this state arises out of
their own early relationships, and he emphasizes
repeatedly the strength of innate maternal capacity.
JENNIFER JOHNS
See also: False self; Handling; Holding; Maternal care;
Object; Self (true/false); Transitional object, space; Winnicott, Donald W.
Bibliography
Winnicott, Donald W. (1956). Primary maternal preoccupation. In Collected papers, through paediatrics to psychoanalysis (pp. 300–305). London: Tavistock Publications, 1958.
———. (1958). Mind and its relation to the psyche-soma.
In Collected papers, through paediatrics to psychoanalysis
(pp. 243–54). London: Tavistock Publications. (Reprinted
from British Journal of Medical Psychology, 27, (1954),
201–209.)
———. (1958) The observation of infants in a set situation.
In Collected papers, through paediatrics to psychoanalysis
(pp. 52–69). London: Tavistock Publications. (Reprinted
from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 22 (1941),
229–249.)
——— (1965). The capacity to be alone. In The maturational processes and the facilitating environment (pp. 29–36).
London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. (Reprinted from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39 (1958), 416–420.)
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GRAF-FREUD, REGINA DEBORA (ROSA)
GÖRING INSTITUTE. See Deutsches Institut für
Psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie (Institut Göring)
GÖRING, MATTHIAS HEINRICH
(1879–1945)
Matthias Heinrich Göring, a German physician,
psychiatrist, and Nazi, was born on April 5, 1879, in
Düsseldorf, Germany and died in 1945 in captivity in
Poznan, Poland.
He earned a doctorate in law at Freiburg/Breisgau
in 1900 and a doctorate in medicine at Bonn in 1907.
Specializing in psychiatry and neurology, in 1923 Göring set up practice as a Nervenarzt in Elberfeld and
subsequently underwent a training analysis with
Adlerian Leonhard Seif in Münich. In 1928 he established an educational counseling service in Elberfeld
and in 1929 founded a study group of psychotherapy
in Wuppertal.
Like fellow Adlerians Seif and Fritz Künkel, Göring
placed an emphasis upon ‘‘community feeling,’’ to
which he added German patriotism and Christian
pietism. He was therefore critical of psychoanalysis for
its alleged materialism and pansexualism.
GöringÕs significance in the history of psychoanalysis stems from his career after 1933. His position as
leader of organized psychotherapy in Nazi Germany
stemmed from the fact that he was an elder cousin of
Nazi boss Hermann Göring. In part to protect the
fledgling institution of psychotherapy against Nazi
medical activists and university psychiatrists, Göring
(who joined the Nazi party in 1933) preached against
‘‘Jewish’’ psychoanalysis and supervised the exclusion
of Jewish psychoanalysts from his society and
institute.
In 1934 Göring assumed leadership of the German
General Medical Society for Psychotherapy and from
1936 to 1945 was director of the German Institute for
Psychological Research and Psychotherapy in Berlin.
In 1938 he presided over the destruction of the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Institute and the dissolution of the
German Psychoanalytic Society, although also protecting and employing psychoanalysts August Aichhorn,
Felix Boehm, and Carl Müller-Braunschweig.
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At the German Institute for Psychological Research
and Psychotherapy in Berlin and at branches elsewhere
in Germany and in Vienna, however, non-Jewish psychoanalysts continued to practice, study, and train.
Göring himself allegedly expressed appreciation for
the expertise of the Freudians, who were especially
active within the Berlin outpatient clinic. GöringÕs
wife Erna was in analysis with Werner Kemper and his
son Ernst underwent a training analysis with Carl
Müller-Braunschweig. Outpatient director and psychoanalyst John Rittmeister, however, fell victim to
charges of espionage and was executed by the Nazis in
1943.
The legacy for psychoanalysts in Germany of the
institutionalization of psychotherapy that Göring occasioned during the Third Reich has been one of both professional advancement and internecine ethical debate.
GEOFFREY COCKS
See also: Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie; Berliner Psychoanalytische Poliklinik;
Deutsches Institut für Psychologische Forschung und
Psychotherapie (Institut Göring); France; Germany; Psychopathologie de l’échec (Psychopathology of Failure).
Bibliography
Cocks, Geoffrey. (1985). Psychotherapy in the Third Reich:
The Göring Institute (2nd ed). New York: Oxford University Press.
Lockot, Regine. (1985) Erinnern und Durcharbeiten : zur
Geschichte der Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie im Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.
———. (1994). Die Reinigung der Psychoanalyse : die deutsche
psychoanalytische Gesellschaft im Spiegel von Dokumenten
und Zeitzeugen (1933–1951). Tübingen: Diskord.
GRADIVA. See Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s
‘‘Gradiva’’
GRAF-FREUD, REGINA DEBORA (ROSA). See
Freud, Sigmund (siblings)
689
G R A F , H E R B E R T (1 904 –19 73)
GRAF, HERBERT (1904–1973)
Herbert Graf is broadly known in psychoanalysis by
the name of ‘‘Little Hans.’’ Born on April 10, 1904 in
Vienna, he died on April 5, 1973 in Geneva.
Graf was the Stage Director at the Metropolitan
Opera in New York 1936–1960, and Director of
the Grand Theatre in Geneva (1965–1973). He
also authored several books on opera production
in America.
The son of Max Graf, musicologist and critic, and
Olga Graf (nee Hoenig), apparently a one-time patient
of FreudÕs, Herbert Graf grew up in the avant-garde
intellectual atmosphere of fin de siecle Vienna. His
godfather was Gustav Mahler. He describes, in a four
part interview with Francis Rizzo later in life, how he
‘‘invented’’ his study program in order to become an
opera director, for which there was at that time no prescribed curriculum.
In 1922 Freud published a postcript to ‘‘Analysis of
a Phobia in a Five-year old Boy’’ in which he describes
a visit from ‘‘Little Hans’’ when he was a young man.
Graf himself refers to this visit in the Rizzo interviews
and reports that he had no recollection of the treatment until he came across FreudÕs paper in his fatherÕs
study. Several place names that Freud had not altered
led him to believe that the article referred to him. He
sought Freud out in Berggasse 19 and the meeting is
described in FreudÕs publication.
GrafÕs publications were not in the field of psychoanalysis. The interviews with Rizzo are interesting for
the light they shed on the attitudes towards FreudÕs
theories amongst intellectuals in Vienna in the early
part of the twentieth century. GrafÕs later biography
had no relevance to psychoanalysis. As ‘‘Little Hans’’
he was of fundamental importance. His treatment was
the very first example of a child analysis, although an
unusual one, as it was carried out by his father under
FreudÕs ‘‘supervision.’’
VERONIKA MÄCHTLINGER
See also: ‘‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy’’
(Little Hans); Graf, Max.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a fiveyear-old boy. SE, 10: 1–149.
69 0
———. (1922c). Postscript. SE. 10: 148.
Rizzo, Francis. (1972). Memoirs of an invisible man; Herbert
Graf recalls a half-century in the theater: a dialogue with
Francis Rizzo, interview, with 12 illustrations and 2
sketches. Opera News 36, part I, 5 Feb. 1972, p. 24–28 ; part
II : 12 Feb. 1972, p. 26–29 ; part III : 19 Feb. 1972, p. 26–29 ;
part IV : 26 Feb. 1972, p. 26–29.
GRAF, MAX (1873–1958)
Max Graf, a composer and music critic, the father of
‘‘Little Hans,’’ was born October 1, 1873, in Vienna,
where he died on June 24, 1958.
The son of Joseph Graf, a Jewish writer and editor,
he was educated in Vienna and Prague. After 1891 he
studied at the law school of the University of Vienna
but devoted most of his time to music and it was his
intention to become a composer, according to Louis
Rose (1986). He finished his legal studies in 1896 but
devoted much of his time to music composition and
criticism, and regularly took part in meetings of the
literary group Jung-Wien. From 1902 to 1938 he taught
the history of music and musical aesthetics at the
Vienna Academy of Music, where he was appointed
professor in 1909.
Graf met Sigmund Freud in 1900 and his wife, Olga
Graf (born Olga Hoenig), from whom he separated a
few years later, was probably a patient of FreudÕs.
Within the psychoanalytic movement he is known for
being the father of ‘‘Little Hans,’’ Herbert Graf, who
was born in 1903. It was Max who supplied Freud with
the material for his paper ‘‘The Analysis of a Phobia in
a Five-Year Old Boy’’ (1909b).
At the end of 1904, he took part in sessions of the
Wednesday Psychoanalytic Society and, in December
1907, wrote an essay entitled ‘‘Methodik der Dichterpsychologie’’ (Methodology of the Psychology of the
Poet). In early 1906 Freud wrote a short text on a
somewhat unexpected topic, ‘‘Psycopathische Personen auf der Bühne’’ (Psychopathic Characters on the
Stage). The text was never published in German, but
Graf, to whom Freud had given the manuscript, kept it
and had an English translation published (1942a
[1905–1906]).
In 1909 Graf settled in Paris as a correspondent for
the Frankfurter Zeitung and translated Romain Rolland into German. ‘‘In 1910–1911 he gave up all work
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with the Society. His book on the psychology of creativity appeared in 1910 and his pamphlet on Wagner
in 1911. In February 1909 Freud had asked him to prepare an essay on ÔMozart and his Relation to Don
Juan,Õ but Graf did not follow up on the idea. He officially withdrew in 1913’’ (Rose, 1986). On the list of
members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society for
October 1913, his name is crossed off.
in The Analysis of the Self, corresponds to or replaces
the ‘‘purified pleasure-ego’’ posited by Sigmund
Freud: The subject, center of the world, expels what is
unpleasurable and preserves what is pleasurable. In
theory, the instinctual grandiose self is integrated into
the self to form the nucleus of the ambitions (strivings), but it cannot constitute itself or be the object of
fixations, repression, or splitting.
Graf emigrated to the United States in 1938 and
taught until 1947 at the New School for Social
Research in New York, where, in 1940, he created the
first seminars in music criticism. He was a guest professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and at Temple University in Philadelphia. In
1947 he returned to Austria and taught music criticism
at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and elsewhere. In 1953
his autobiography, Jede Stunde war erfüllt: Ein halbes
Jahrhundert Musik- und Theaterleben (Every Minute
Filled: A Half-Century in Music and Theater), was
published in Vienna, where he died in 1958.
The grandiose self, also called the narcissistic self,
first appeared in KohutÕs work in 1964. A description
of an aspect of the narcissistic personality, it acquired a
metaspychological status in KohutÕs 1971 book.
ELKE MÜHLLEITNER
See also: ‘‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy’’
(Little Hans); Applied psychoanalysis and the interaction
of psychoanalysis; Graf, Herbert; Minutes of the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society.
Bibliography
Graf, M. (1911). Richard Wagner im ‘‘Fliegenden Holländer,’’
Ein Beitrag zur Psychologie des künstlerischen Schaffens.
Leipzig-Vienna: F. Deuticke.
———. (1942). Reminiscences of Professor Sigmund Freud.
Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 11, p. 465–476.
———. (1947). From Beethoven to Shostakovich: The Psychology of the Composing Process. New York: Philosophical
Library.
Mühlleitner, Elke. (1992). Biographisches Lexikon der Psychoanalyse (Die Mitglieder der Psychologischen MittwochGesellschaft und der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung
1902–1938). Tübingen: Diskord.
Rose, Louis. (1986). The psychoanalytic movement in Vienna:
Towards a science of culture. Dissertation, Princeton
University.
GRANDIOSE SELF
The grandiose self, described and developed as a normal narcissistic configuration by Heinz Kohut in 1971
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From a developmental point of view, the infant
attempts to restore narcissistic perfection by establishing narcissistic configurations, among them the grandiose self, a structure invested with energy that is rooted
in exhibitionist part-instincts. In narcissistic pathology, the activity of the grandiose self explains the
intensity of the demand for attention; if it is repressed,
no source is available to nourish the reality-ego, which
is characterized by a lack of self-esteem, feelings of
inferiority, and a tendency toward depression. In
KohutÕs The Restoration of the Self (1977), the grandiose self is the pole of the self that draws its strength
from the self objectsÕ responses to mirroring needs.
The notion is related to mirror transference.
Initially instinctual, the grandiose self was desexualized with KohutÕs generalized self psychology
advanced in 1977.
AGNÈS OPPENHEIMER
See also: Self psychology.
Bibliography
Kohut, Heinz. (1971). The analysis of the self. New York:
International Universities Press, 1971.
———. (1977). The restoration of the self. New York: International Universities Press
GRANOFF, WLADIMIR ALEXANDRE
(1924–2000)
Wladimir Alexandre Granoff, a French psychiatrist
and psychoanalyst, was born September 7, 1924, in
Strasbourg, and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine on February
2, 2000.
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His family, part of the Russian intelligentsia, had
moved to Alsace after emigrating from Russia. Young
Granoff attended secondary school in Strasbourg.
During the war, as a refugee in Nı̂mes, he discovered
FreudÕs work in the local library. He began studying
medicine and psychiatry in Lyon and continued his
education in Paris.
With the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (Paris
Psychoanalytic Society) he began a training analysis
with Marc Schlumberger; Maurice Bouvet and then
Jacques Lacan directed his group control analysis, and
Francis Pasche his individual control analysis. In 1953
he began organizing the student rebellion at the Institut de Psychanalyse with Serge Leclaire and François
Perrier, whom he followed during the June 1953 split.
The three men were later referred to as the ‘‘Troika.’’
After their secession they participated actively in the
Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP) (French
Society for Psychoanalysis), founded in 1953, leading
seminars on clinical psychoanalysis together and
working to ensure the organizationÕs admission into
the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA).
During a colloquium on female sexuality organized by
the SFP in September 1960 in Amsterdam, Granoff
and François Perrier presented a report on ‘‘Le problème de la perversion chez la femme et les idéaux
féminins,’’ which reopened the question of female
sexuality (La Psychanalyse, 1964).
He played an important role in negotiations with
the IPA (Pierre Turquet, Max Gitelson) because of his
multilingualism (he spoke Russian, German, English,
and French). In 1963, together with his friend Victor
Smirnoff, he prepared a ‘‘Histoire de la psychanalyse
en France,’’ in order to convey to the Anglo-American
psychoanalytic community the originality and specificity of psychoanalysis in France. The article was
mimeographed and translated into English, but
remains unpublished at this time. Despite these
efforts, Granoff sensed that their request would be
rejected and that Lacan would never be admitted to
the IPA. He also felt he himself had been betrayed by
Lacan. So, in 1964, he helped found the Association
Psychanalytique de France (French Psychoanalytic
Association) and abandoned any further involvement
in institutional politics, refusing even to attend IPA
congresses.
After years of absence from public life, he presented
a paper in 1973–1974, ‘‘Filiations, lÕavenir du complexe dÕOEdipe,’’ a psychoanalytic interpretation of the
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history of psychoanalysis, characterized by a return to
FreudÕs writings. In 1974–1975 he gave another talk on
‘‘La pensée et le féminin.’’ These presentations were
contemporaneous with those given by François Perrier
and it was at this time that the two men renewed their
former friendship.
He was one of the first to introduce Sándor Ferenczi
in France and held a conference in 1958 entitled ‘‘Ferenczi: faux problème ou vrai malentendu’’ (published
in La Psychanalyse, 1961). In 1983 he published,
together with philosopher Jean-Michel Rey, LÕOcculte,
objet de la pensée freudienne, in which he investigated
FreudÕs interest in telepathy.
His withdrawal from organizational work did not
mean retirement from active life, and Granoff always
maintained relations with French Lacanians and foreign colleagues. Because of his broad exposure to European culture and his Slavic background, he was perhaps the most cosmopolitan, the most international
French psychoanalyst of his generation. His work—in
large part appearing in individual articles—focused on
Freudian practice as well as the problems of translating
and transmitting psychoanalysis.
JACQUES SÉDAT
See also: Association psychanalytique de France; Femininity; France; Psychoanalytic filiations; Société française
de psychanalyse; Telepathy.
Bibliography
Granoff, Wladimir. (1975). Filiations. L’avenir du complexe
d’Œdipe. Paris: Minuit.
———. (1976). La pensée et le féminin. Paris: Minuit.
Granoff, Wladimir, and Perrier, François. (1964). Le problème de la perversion chez la femme et les idéaux féminins. Psychanalyse, 7, 141–199.
———. (1979). Le désir et le féminin. Paris: Aubier.
Granoff, Wladimir, and Rey, Jean-Michel. (1983). L’Occulte,
objet de la pensée freudienne. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France.
GRAPH OF DESIRE
The Graph of Desire is a schema, or model, that
Jacques Lacan began developing in his seminar on The
Formations of the Unconscious (1957–58). It achieved
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GRAPH
its definitive form in his essay ‘‘Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’’ (1960/2004). Its four successive stages represent the constitution of the human subject and his
desire. Nevertheless, Lacan never intended it to
describe the genetic stages of a biological development.
Rather, it represents the ‘‘logical moments’’ of the
birth of a speaking subject.
Lacan starts with what he calls the ‘‘quilting point’’
(where an upholsterer attaches a button to a sofa or
mattress to prevent the batting from moving around)
a kind of looping by which the signifying chain of the
parental OtherÕs ‘‘discourse’’—not to be understood
here as merely verbal, of course—intersects with the
babyÕs expressions of need (See Figure 1).
OF
DESIRE
discourse, from s(A) to A, and then returns, from A to
s(A), along the path of the babyÕs biological impulses.
In this circularity, everything comes back to the signifying structure of the OtherÕs discourse. The demand
of the newborn must conform the OtherÕs ‘‘code’’ in
order to be understood.
In spite of this apparently closed circularity, Lacan
also situates the constitution of the ego ideal at this
level. By grasping upon an insignia of the OtherÕs parental power, s(A), the child anticipates its own future
access to any power whatsoever. From then on, the ego
ideal, I(A), is inscribed at the endpoint of trajectory
delta, as an anticipated function that the child can
attain in relation to the parent.
The process where the ego is constituted makes up
the second stage of the graph. A right-to-left vector
goes from the specular image, i(a), to the constitution
of the ego, m (Figure 2). This vector is essentially imaginary, which means that it belongs to the register of
spatial-corporeal representation, and it is grafted as a
short circuit onto the delta trajectory, which represents
the pressure of need.
This pressure of need is represented by a retrograde
trajectory beginning at delta (d). In the course of its
reverse looping, this line intersects at two successive
points the vector S fi S0 , which represents the chain of
the OtherÕs discourse. Because they travel in opposite
directions, the two trajectories carry out this double
intersection in a retroactive manner that calls to mind
FreudÕs concept of ‘‘deferred action.’’ For Lacan, the
point of intersection on the right, A, represents the
‘‘treasure trove of signifiers’’ (p. 292), which is LacanÕs
definition of the Other as the ‘‘locus’’ of the signifying
battery on which the subject depends. On the left, the
other point, s(A), represents the moment at which a
meaning is produced in the heart of the Other, which
henceforth makes it a sign for the infant.
From then on, a second circuit can be taken by
returning along the signifying chain, S fi S0 . This
return circuit, by which the constitution of the ego is
implicated in the discourse of the Other, might constitute in itself an impasse, from which no subject could
extricate himself. And this is where Lacan made one of
his specific contributions to psychoanalysis by emphasizing the intrinsic doubling of the OtherÕs discourse.
This first stage of the graph forms a ‘‘circuit’’ of
vectors that first follows the chain of the OtherÕs
We have seen that effects of meaning are manifested
in the Other, s(A), where they are interposed between
FIGURE 1
FIGURE 2
s(A)
S
S'
A
Signifier
Voice
m
S
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I (A)
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S
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GRAPH
OF
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FIGURE 3
s(A)
A
Signifier
Voice
m
i (a)
I (A)
S
the needs of the baby and certain signals and statements coming from the mother. The baby comes to feel
capable of provoking these maternal manifestations,
and at the same time develops a paranoid tendency to
interpret their intentionality when they appear.
Lacan developed an account of this essential phenomenon on the basis of certain linguistic facts that
led him to distinguish, beyond the subject of the statement evident in the parental discourse, a more or less
obscured subject of the enunciation. This implied that
quite another dimension of unconsciousness was possible (Figure 3).
The intentionality that is assumed to exist in the
manifestations of the Other causes the child to ask—
What does he want from me? This question forms the
basis of the first experience of anxiety (Hilflosigkeit).
Given the fundamental mirroring nature of the imaginary relation that gives the ego substance, this paranoid question—What does he want from me?—returns
in the form of a question addressed to the nascent subject—What do you want? (or ‘‘Chè vuoi?’’ as Lacan puts
it). This form of address, characteristic of the superego
leads to the upper stage of the graph, which it takes the
form of a question mark rooted in A, the place of the
Other. But the Other at this stage is still not in any way
the ‘‘barred’’ by the symbolization of its possible
absence and not yet marked by the incompleteness of
its sexual identity. At this point the Other is still the
all-embracing expression of the two parents merged
into a single non-castrated parent figure. It is the perception of the motherÕs lack of a penis that now plays
the crucial role of representing the incompleteness of
the maternal Other.
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For the nascent subject, this is a transformational
moment that leads to a recognition that the Other is
desiring/lacking. From that moment on, the Other will
be ‘‘barred,’’ S(A/), and submitted to the symbolic system of exchange that is instituted in the aftermath of
the of the superegoÕs question (Chè vuoi?). It is from
this point that we can conceive of the emergence of a
subject in its own right. Lacan designates it with a
barred S because of its fundamental dependence on a
relation of at least two signifiers, one of which is necessarily the signifier of the lack in the Other—without
which, Lacan said, no signifier would ever be able to
represent a ‘‘person.’’
This is what can be formalized in a fourth imaginary stage wherein the subject that is detached at the
point of symbolization by the Other finds a way to
represent itself as having a relation with the object of
desire through an unconscious fantasy, as shown in
the formula S/ } a. The operation by which the Other
is recognized as lacking is inscribed in a symbolic system of exchange that nevertheless includes a real
‘‘remainder’’ made up of objects that are detachable
from the mother. These are the Freudian partial
objects, which Lacan designates with a small a, that
become part of the fantasy. Any persistent difficulty in
symbolically marking the motherÕs lack interferes with
the constitution of the fantasy and leads to a failure in
the process of subjectivation (Figure 4).
At the upper level of the graph, along the imaginary
vector (d fi /S } a), desire and fantasy maintain a relation similar to the one that at the lower level governed
the constitution of the ego in relation to the image of
the small other, i(a). However, Lacan noted that these
two imaginary stages are not in any way analogous to
each other, since unconscious desire tends to present
itself regularly to the ego as precisely what the ego does
not want. The subject of the unconscious fantasy, in
contrast to the ego, represents for Lacan ‘‘the ÔstuffÕ of
the I that is primally repressed’’ (p. 302). In treatment,
this subject would be the analystÕs true interlocutor.
The two levels of the graph are modeled on a split
that is structural in the human being (in LacanÕs terms
parlêtre, or ‘‘speaking-being’’). The first level, that of
the statement and of specular relations of the ego, is
prior to castration. It manifests a phallic-narcissistic
logic where the nascent ego remains trapped in the circle of the OtherÕs all-importance. The upper level, on
the other hand, has as its keystone the signifier of the
lack in the Other, S(S/), the guarantor of a discourse
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FIGURE 4
S
s(A)
D
Jouissance
(S
brain led to mental disorders; psychiatry accepted this
position (Henry Maudsley). Psychiatric treatments
showed the influence of the French schools—Pierre
Janet, Jules Déjerine, Hippolyte Bernheim. In 1913 the
Brunswick Square Clinic, the first to offer psychotherapy, based its treatments on the theories of Janet.
Castration
d
a)
s(A)
A
Signifier
Voice
m
i (a)
I (A)
S
submitted to what Freud called the ‘‘reality of
castration.’’
BERNARD PENOT
See also: Jouissance (Lacan).
Bibliography
Lacan, Jacques. (2004). The subversion of the subject and
the dialectic of desire in the freudian unconcsious. In
Écrits: A selection. (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W.
Norton. (Original work published 1960)
GRATITUDE. See Envy; Envy and Gratitude
GREAT BRITAIN
At the end of the nineteenth century, British psychiatry
was more neurological than psychological. Neurology
(John Hughlings Jackson) taught that disorders of
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Interest in and research on depth psychology centered in the Society for Psychical Research. Many leading scholars and intellectuals supported attempts to
identify whether there was psychic survival after death,
an agnostic effort to fill the fearful gap left by the loss
of religious belief through the rise of scientific materialism and positivism. The first contacts with FreudÕs
writings were through articles by Frederick W.H.
Myers on hysteria in 1893. Myers proposed his own
theory of a ‘‘subliminal’’ subconscious derived from
his observations of cases of multiple personality and
hysteria. The ground for receiving psychoanalytic
ideas was prepared by Havelock Ellis through his encyclopedic writings of the psychology of sex (Hinshelwood, 1991).
As Victorian ideas gave way to those of the Edwardian era, there was an upsurge of liberal agnostic writings that can be seen in novels, essays, and philosophical writings of the time, in particular from the
Cambridge group of intellectuals who formed the
nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group (Pines, 1991a). Leonard Woolf, the future husband of Virginia Woolf, was
a very early reviewer of FreudÕs writings and a short
story by Lytton Strachey was titled ‘‘According to
Freud.’’ From the members of the Bloomsbury Group
came the analysts James and Alix Strachey (the future
translators of Freud); the younger brother of Virginia
Woolf, Adrian Stephen: and his wife Karen. In contrast
to the Viennese analysts the great majority of the
early British analysts were middle-class Christian
professionals.
Within psychiatry, Ernest Jones takes pride of place
in introducing psychoanalysis to Britain. Jones turned
from neurology to psychiatry and his encounter with
FreudÕs writings led to meeting first with Carl Gustav
Jung in 1907 and with Sigmund Freud in 1908. Jones
devoted his life to developing and protecting psychoanalysis in Britain. Initially regarded by Freud with some
suspicion, the Welshman Jones gradually found acceptance. He founded the London Psycho-Analytic Society
in 1913, attracting a mixed group of interested physicians, but dissolved it in 1919 because several members,
especially David Eder, declared their adherence to Jung.
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For some years, having failed to obtain recognition in
London, Jones had worked in Toronto and was one of
the founders of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Though Jones must be regarded as an outstanding
figure in the development of the psychoanalytic movement, he was not alone. David Eder gave the first paper
on psychoanalysis to a medical audience in 1911 at a
Congress of the British Medical Association; the audience left in disgust before he had finished speaking.
Henry Butter Stoddart, a distinguished psychiatrist who
became a convert to psychoanalysis, was better received.
He gave a series of lectures titled ‘‘The New Psychiatry’’
in Edinburgh in 1915. There he found converts as well as
opponents, the most significant of the former being
George Robertson, Professor of Psychiatry at Edinburgh, who thereafter declared himself a Freudian. Stoddart, a stout, good-humored man, played a quiet yet
important role in establishing psychoanalysis within
psychiatry, through his well respected textbook ‘‘Mind
and its Disorders.’’
In these early days psychoanalytic ideas were supported and propagated by important psychiatrists and
psychologists who nevertheless maintained a critical
attitude and did not become members of JonesÕs
reformed British Psycho-Analytical Society (1919).
Eder was accepted as, after some analysis with Sándor
Ferenczi, he left Jung. Bernard Hart was significant both
because of the respected position he held and as author
of a textbook, ‘‘The Psychology of Insanity’’ (1912),
which ran through many editions and was the principal
textbook in support of psychoanalysis. The influential
psychologist William McDougall, the research psychologist Sir Cyril Burt, the well-known clinician William
Browne, all made FreudÕs ideas accessible to their professions. Perhaps the most brilliant figure was William
Halse Rivers, psychiatrist, research psychologist, and
anthropologist, who died prematurely in 1922. Rivers,
along with other dynamically-minded psychiatrists,
treated psychiatric casualties during World War One
with a psychotherapy that was strongly influenced by
psychoanalysis. RiversÕs work and personality became
well known through the autobiography of the poet Siegfried Sassoon who had been RiversÕ patient during the
war. The novelist Pat Barker used Rivers as a central
character in her three novels about psychiatry and the
First World War: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and
The Ghost Road (London, Viking).
Psychoanalysis made great strides through the treatment of psychiatric cases during World War One, and
69 6
there were many chronic cases of these war casualties
who had to be treated after the war. The Ministry of
Pensions set up clinics to deal with these patients and
their senior psychiatrist was the analyst David Forsyth.
Attacks upon psychoanalysis came from many psychiatrists, notably a disciple of Hughlings Jackson,
Charles Mercier. He attacked psychoanalysis as a German importation that would corrupt the minds both
of doctors and of children. In his attacks he was supported by many other psychiatrists, amongst whom
was the first Professor of Psychiatry in England, ShawBolton. In a critical article, ‘‘The Myth of the Unconscious Mind’’ (1926), Shaw-Bolton stated that it had
been a repugnant task to write but that psychoanalysis
was an insidious poison being inserted into the minds
of the young.
Jones reformed his Society more carefully and
retained a strong control over its development for over
two decades. Its outstanding supporters included the
brothers James and Edward Glover. James, who died
early, had been to Karl Abraham in Berlin for analysis
and on his return dissolved the Brunswick Square
Clinic which had been an important training institution for psychotherapy that was not psychoanalytic
(Boll, 1962). Amongst its students who later became
analysts were Mary Chadwick, Ella Freeman Sharpe,
Nina Searl (a pioneer in child analysis), Iseult GrantDuff and Marjorie Brierley, the last of whom was to
become a very influential psychoanalytic theoretician.
In the 1920s psychoanalysis increased both in popularity and notoriety. The British Medical Association
set up a committee to investigate and report on the
subject of psychoanalysis following public disquiet
over breakdowns and suicides said to be the result of
psychoanalysis. This committee sat for three years and
took evidence from both supporters and opponents of
psychoanalysis. Ernest Jones represented psychoanalysis, and his impressive performance carried the day for
the cause. The result was that the British Medical Association acknowledged psychoanalysis as an authentic
form of treatment and determined that the term psychoanalysis should not be used for any other technique
or theory than that of Freud. However, the committee
did not record its support of psychoanalysis, solely its
recognition.
In the 1920s and early 1930s the Psychoanalytic
Society remained quite small and London remained
the only training center. Some British analysts went
to Vienna for analysis (the Stracheys, Money-Kyrle,
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Riviere), some to Berlin (James and Edward Glover,
Ella Sharpe), some to Budapest (David Eder). Interest
grew in child analysis and Nina Searle began to write
on this topic before Melanie KleinÕs arrival in 1926 at
JonesÕs invitation. Klein was introduced through Alix
Strachey who had gone to Berlin for further analysis
with Abraham, being dissatisfied with her experience
in Vienna with Freud. The correspondence between
James and Alix Strachey gives a vivid picture of the
two cities, Berlin and London, and their psychoanalytic communities.
Edward Glover was JonesÕs close collaborator and
for many years the presumptive next president of the
Society. He produced the first enquiry into the theories
and practices of psychoanalysis by issuing a questionnaire to members of the British Society which later he
elaborated into his authoritative textbook on the technique of psychoanalysis. Though Glover had supported Melanie Klein for some years, later he strongly
opposed her, and for this reason found himself against
strong opposition when preparing to succeed Jones as
president.
It should be recognized that a distinct ‘‘English’’
school of psychoanalysis had begun to emerge. The
distance from Vienna led to independent thinking:
consideration was being given to the psychic consequences of bereavement and mourning following from
the great number of casualties and bereaved families
left by the war. This led to a consideration of object
relations in addition to libidinal forces. John Carl Flugel, who held an academic position at London University, wrote the influential ‘‘Psychoanalysis of the
Family,’’ and John Bowlby researched the psychological and socially deprived backgrounds of juvenile
delinquents. Donald Winnicott applied his extensive
experience as a pediatrician to child analysis.
British psychoanalysis was dramatically changed by
the flight of Sigmund and Anna Freud and their supporters to London in 1938. It is not pleasant to find it
on record that Melanie Klein thought it unfortunate
that the Freuds had come to London as it would prejudice her intellectual hold on the Psycho-Analytic
Society. Indeed, conflict soon broke out between the
Viennese and the supporters of Melanie Klein which in
wartime led to the famous ‘‘Controversial Discussions’’ that set the scene for the tripartite division of
training in the British Psycho-Analytical Society after
the war, the three groups of Kleinians, Freudians and
the Middle, later Independent Group. This group consisted of those who did not wish to be identified with
either of the warring camps. Influential teachers during this period included: for the Klein Group, Susan
Isaacs, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, Roger MoneyKyrle; for the ‘‘Middle Group’’; Ella Freeman Sharpe,
James Strachey, Sylvia Payne, Donald Winnicot, William Gillespie, Marjorie Brierley, and later Michael
Balint; for the Anna Freud Group were Kate Friedlander, Ilse Hellman, and Willie Hoffer. Anna Freud
virtually retired from the British Psycho-Analytical
Society to build her own training center in child analysis at the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic, though on
the international scene she retained her pre-eminence
in psychoanalytic theory.
Melanie Klein made a powerful impact in Britain
through her writings on early psychic development.
She was supported by Susan Isaacs, Joan Riviere, Ernest
Jones and others, although many analysts considered
her ideas to be unsystematic and overly speculative.
Among them, her clearest critic was Marjorie Brierley.
Ronald Fairbairn, working in isolation in Edinburgh,
was considerably influenced by Klein, and in turn
Melanie Klein recognized that she also learned from
him; impressed by his work on the schizoid personality
she added ‘‘schizoid’’ to her ‘‘paranoid’’ early infantile
stage, hence ‘‘paranoid-schizoid.’’ Fairbairn was the
strongest revisionist of psychoanalytic theories, establishing a full object relationship theory.
Jones continued to be the dominant figure in British psychoanalysis, as a result both of his writing and
his personality. Influenced by Melanie KleinÕs exploration of early psychic development, he wrote on female
sexuality in a way that Freud perceived as a challenge
both to himself and to his daughter Anna. Jones tried
to achieve a balance between the innovative British
work and the more conservative Viennese mode, instituting a series of exchange lectures in an attempt to
build bridges.
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British psychoanalysis has been regarded as leading
the way in child analysis. This is due to several factors.
The Hampstead Child Psychotherapy Clinic provided
thorough training in child and adolescent analysis, as
systematically organized by Anna Freud and her close
collaborators. Research initiated by Joseph Sandler on
the Hampstead Index (representing the ClinicÕs collection and collation of clinical experience) has lead to
several important publications. Anna FreudÕs concept
of ‘‘developmental lines’’ has been a significant clarification in the study of child development. Melanie
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KleinÕs theories have had a major impact and many
child analysts have adopted her theories. The training
in infant observation and child analysis at the Tavistock Clinic is largely Klein-oriented. Some of her
ideas have eventually been partly accepted by those
who previously opposed them, including Anna FreudÕs
followers. Klein retained a stronghold on the writings
of her followers, which eventually led Paula Heimann
to leave her group. In contrast to Anna Freud, Klein
did not develop a systematic training in child analysis,
though her influence on the Tavistock training is
noticeable. Donald WinnicottÕs writings represent a
distinct and different viewpoint. His vast experience as
a pediatrician and his acute observational powers led
him to the concepts of transitional space and transitional object, tracing the infantÕs move away from total
dependence on the maternal environment. His original concepts such as holding, the use of an object, and
the objectÕs survival of the infantÕs destructiveness,
have been influential internationally. Originally a supporter of Melanie Klein, he became a strong critic of
what he saw becoming a proselytizing movement
within the British Society. Khan, an analysand of Winnicott, was a blazing comet who burnt himself out. His
sparkling, erudite papers, which also bridged British
and French psychoanalysis, were notable contributions
though his polemical debating style demonstrated an
equally noticeable self-inflation. In his later years he
became isolated, somewhat paranoid and was asked to
resign from the Society because many members were
outraged by the anti-Semitic tone of his last book,
written during his final illness.
The balance between the size and influence of the
three groups varies: the ‘‘Group of Independent Analysts’’ is the largest in number, followed by the Klein
group and then the ‘‘Contemporary Freudian’’ as the
former ‘‘B’’ (Anna Freud) group was called. There is a
‘‘gentlemanÕs agreement’’ that each group should be
represented on committees and take turns in the significant roles of President, Scientific Secretary and
Chairs of important committees. Total membership as
of 2005 was 443 Members and Associate Members,
many of whom live abroad. On qualification the student is elected to associate membership. Candidates
for full membership are obliged to take part in a membership course with seminars and advanced
supervision.
The Institute is responsible for the International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, founded by Jones in 1920;
69 8
the New Library of Psycho-Analysis, which is the successor to the original library which Jones founded in
1921 and which was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press; and also for the Standard Edition of FreudÕs work, which was undergoing a
new revision as of 2004. Riccardo Steiner has demonstrated the political aim that Jones and his translators
held in ‘‘standardizing’’Õ the language of psychoanalysis in the English version. In recent years there has
been more activity devoted to making psychoanalysis
better known to the general public through systematic
courses of lectures and daylong and weekend meetings,
which are more directed to interested professionals.
It is obligatory of psychotherapy training institutions to submit to regulation and registration which
has brought psychoanalysts into closer collaboration
but also into conflict with other psychotherapeutic
training institutions. The United Kingdom Council
for Psychotherapy was formed to represent and regulate psychotherapy trainings. The British Psycho-Analytical Society, together with the Society of Analytical
Psychology (Jungians), the Tavistock Clinic and some
other broadly psychoanalytic organizations have broken away from UKCP to form the British Confederation of Psychotherapists, so as to affirm their group
identities as ‘‘psychoanalytic.’’
University College of the University of London has
a privately funded Chair of Psychoanalysis which must
be occupied by a psychoanalyst. Students can gain
PhDs for research in the field of psychoanalysis and
these students do not have to be members of the Psycho-Analytic Society. The Tavistock four-year training
in psychoanalytic psychotherapy can lead to a PhD as
well. For several years it has been possible to achieve
psychoanalytic training in Scotland through a joint
venture of the Scottish Institute of Human Relations
and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis in London. Training is also possible in Northern Ireland and may
become possible in other regions of the British Isles.
The British Psycho-Analytical Society has coped
with great dissention without splitting into conflicting
units and is likely to remain one body. Psychoanalysis
is still regarded as a prestigious qualification and
attracts good candidates, although the number of
medically-qualified applicants has diminished. The
Institute has always accepted women and non-medically-qualified applicants and has recently declared
itself to operate a non-discriminatory admissions policy regarding sexual orientation and ethnicity.
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A full account of this movement, principally associated with Ronald D. Laing and David Cooper, has
been provided by Digby Tantum (1991). Laing wrote
his most famous and influential book, The Divided
Self, when he was a senior registrar at the Tavistock
Clinic and in training analysis with Dr. Charles
Rycroft. Although he was accepted as an associate
member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, he
rapidly distanced himself from it and he and Cooper
founded their own Philadelphia Association. Together
they ran a community named Kingsley Hall on ‘‘antipsychiatric’’ lines. The basic tenets of anti-psychiatry
are as follows: Schizophrenia is not an illness, but a
label arbitrarily fixed by society and confirmed by psychiatrists; the symptoms of madness are understandable as communications; what psychiatrists call schizophrenia is either a reaction to a disturbed family or a
healing voyage which would be of benefit if it could be
completed without interference; and, lastly, psychiatrists and psychiatric hospitals degrade people and
cause mad behavior.
Laing and Arnold Esterson carried out research on
families in 1958 and 1967, partly at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and at Villa 21, Shenley Hospital, which was directed by Cooper and which treated
young schizophrenics. From their researches they concluded that schizophrenia was a reaction to familial or
social pathology and that symptoms were cause by disturbed family communications. Their findings were
published as ‘‘The Politics of Experience’’ (1967) and
by Cooper as Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry (1967). As
Tantum described it, ‘‘Many readers agreed with Laing
that a plausible account of symptoms in terms of disturbed family communication was tantamount to
proving that disturbed family communications caused
symptoms. ÔThe Politics of ExperienceÕ was written at
the height of the 1960Õs rebellion by young people
against their parents generation. It was the apogee of
flower power and a year before the Paris Evenements.
Drug induced mysticism was fashionable and was presented as a voyage of self-discovery. It was tempting to
pretend that schizophrenia was not only intelligible
but intelligent’’ (1991).
LaingÕs legacy survives in the Philadelphia Association and in the Arbours Association, which is led by his
former associate Joseph Berke. Both these organizations
have training programs and the Arbours Association
provides shelter and treatment for psychotic patients in
residential homes, thus avoiding hospitalization. The
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other legacy of the anti-psychiatry movement is found
in the refinement of psychiatric diagnosis and in a more
psychodynamic approach to both the schizoid character
and to schizophrenia. The movement has also increased
the momentum away from psychiatric treatment and
toward self-help circles for persons who have suffered
psychotic breakdowns and who try to avoid further psychiatric involvement. Laing had relatively little direct
influence within the British Psycho-Analytical Society
and his theories and practices were marginalized by lack
of attention.
The Tavistock Clinic has a reputation for psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Founded after World War I by
Hugh Crichton-Miller, it began as an eclectic center
for psychotherapy where Freudians, Jungians, and
Adlerians, among others, provided psychotherapeutic
services. During the Second World War the director of
the Tavistock Clinic, John Rawlings Rees, who was not
himself a psychoanalyst, was appointed director of
British Army Psychiatry. Through his influence, several future leaders of psychoanalysis, including Wilfred
Bion, John Rickman, and Thomas F. Main, were given
posts of high responsibility. When they returned to
civilian life at the end of the war they succeeded in
making the Tavistock Clinic a psychoanalytic clinic, no
longer eclectic. John D. Sutherland, who succeeded
Rees as director, held an early enthusiasm for group
psychotherapy under the leadership of Bion (and later
of Henry Ezriel). This movement eventually faded
and was replaced by individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Over the years the Kleinian Movement
became predominant and those who did not follow
this school were to some extent marginalized. The
most conspicuous example is that of John Bowlby,
whose research into the links between ethology and
psychodynamic theory was regarded as extraneous.
Bowlby had created the Department of Family and
Children and introduced a systems approach to the
pathology of the family and because of his ‘‘contamination’’ by such ideas he was also marginalized in the
British Psycho-Analytical Society, of which he had
been a prominent member since the 1930s. Before his
death, however, the importance of his contribution
was recognized internationally and thereby he
regained recognition within Britain.
Michael Balint did a great deal to make the name
of the Tavistock Clinic known internationally through
his work with family doctors. Together with his
wife Enid, he carried out extensive research into
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GREECE
psychodynamic aspects of general practice, and ‘‘Balint
Groups’’ spread worldwide. Balint had succeeded Ferenczi as the Director of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic
Institute but came to Britain in the 1930s as a refugee.
He quickly established a strong position for himself as
a representative of the Hungarian school of psychoanalysis and was recognized as one of the leaders of the
‘‘Independent’’ group, in time becoming President of
the Society. He also stimulated research into brief psychotherapy, which was carried out by a group of psychoanalysts drawn from the Tavistock Clinic and the
Cassel Hospital.
The Cassel Hospital, too, was founded following
World War I, to provide inpatient psychotherapy, and
between the wars it became more psychodynamic in
its approach. Following World War II, Thomas Main
became its director, and the hospital became a center
for psychoanalytic inpatient psychotherapy. Many
psychoanalysts in training were employed there. The
hospital gained a worldwide reputation for its innovations in psychodynamic nursing and for its contributions to the therapeutic community movement. The
Cassel can be contrasted to the Henderson Hospital
which under Maxwell Jones took an approach to inpatient psychotherapy that was socio-psychological
rather than psychoanalytic.
MALCOLM PINES
Bibliography
Cooper, David. (1967). Psychiatry and anti-psychiatry. London: Tavistock
Hinshelwood, Robert D. (1991). Psychodynamic psychiatry
before World War I. In Berrios and Freeman, (Eds.), 150
years of British psychiatry. London: Gaskell.
Miller, P.; Rose, N.; and Pines, Malcolm.(1994). On therapeutic authority: psychoanalytic expertise under advanced
liberalism. History of the Human Science, 7 (3), 9–64.
Pines, Malcolm. (1991a). The development of the psychodynamic movement. In Berrios and Freeman, (Eds.), 150
years of British psychiatry. London: Gaskell.
———. (1991b). A history of psychodynamic psychiatry in
Britain. In J. Holmes (Ed.): Textbook of psychotherapy in
psychiatric practice. Livingstone, England: Churchill.
Tantum, Digby. (1991). The anti-psychiatry movement. In
Berrios and Freeman, (Eds.), 150 years of British psychiatry.
London: Gaskell.
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Reference to the history of psychoanalysis in Greece
lends itself to reflection along two different lines.
First, there is the history of events—that is, the diachronic line of events that, between 1915 and the
1980s and 1990s, sustained the slow (and somewhat
difficult, owing to discontinuities) establishment of a
framework for the psychoanalytic movement in
Greece, with all of the consequences, both positive and
negative, that such a framework entailed for psychoanalytic circles. This chronology shows that, around
1920, a circle of intellectuals and teachers were actively
studying the works of Sigmund Freud and publishing
on practices in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
However, the official medical community and the
broader public remained indifferent or even hostile to
these currents of thought.
The active presence of Princess Marie Bonaparte in
Athens beginning in 1946 seemed to offer a way of
changing things. The interest of academics and doctors was mobilized on the occasion of a visit by Anna
Freud, who was invited to Athens in 1949, but this
lasted only for the short duration of her stay. Only
two psychiatrists, Démétrios Kouretas and Georges
Zavitzianos; a poet, Andreas Embirikos; and a physician, Nicolas Dracoulides, were interested in pursuing
more in-depth psychoanalytic training. These four
men formed a working group, and, supported by
Marie Bonaparte, were accepted as members of the
Société psychanalytique de Paris (Psychoanalytic
Society of Paris) in 1950. However, the group was to
be short-lived: It disbanded a year later, the four analysts having chosen to settle in three different
countries.
After the end of World War II and the civil war that
ravaged Greece, the creation of a few institutional, psychodynamically oriented mental health centers made
it feasible to organize lecture series, seminars, and
group discussions in Athens; these developments
seemed to portend a possible new beginning for analytic work. Colleagues from abroad—Serge Lebovici was
the first—were prepared to offer assistance, beginning
in 1957. Three Greek analysts working in different
areas—Kouretas at the University of Athens, Pangiotis
Sakellaropoulos at the Center of Thétokos, and Anna
Potamianou at the Center for Mental Health and
Research—provided the impetus, as hopes for a new
beginning took shape. And once again, the central
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figures comprised two psychiatrists and one person
from outside of that field.
Numerous attempts to ensure sustained and systematic collaboration did not yield results. It was not
until 1982, after countless efforts and failures, and
with the help of a group of analysts who had trained
overseas (Athena Alexandris, Pierre Hartocollis, Stavroula Beratis), that a ‘‘Greek psychoanalytic group’’
gained formal recognition as a study group of the
International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). This
group, which includes four teaching analysts, ten
members, eight corresponding members, and twentysix candidates, was designated by election as an IPA
member society in 2001.
Between 1989 and 1995, two groups inspired by the
work of Jacques Lacan, the Freudian Praxis, and the
Athenian Circle of the European School of Psychoanalysis, as well as another group whose members wished
to remain independent of any school, were formed.
Still two other groups follow the teachings of Alfred
Adler. Thus, the diachronic axis in Greece reveals considerable oscillation between forward movement and
movements of regression-repetition, attesting to an
unconscious, but definite, fidelity to Freudian thought
in connection with the psychic trajectory of individuals and groups.
A second line of reflection brings out even more
clearly the similarities between the course of development of psychoanalysis in Greece and the very
essence of the Freudian Logos. Marked by a convergence between the Jewish soul and the Hellenistic
spirit, FreudÕs thought engraved a path of complementary opposites and constraints that mirrors the
history of psychoanalysis in Greece. That history, it
seems, is the fruit of conflicts whose unexpected violence often astonished spectators; it is also the result
of harsh schisms and mutilating projections, the
revelatory details of which can be found in the writings of those involved in its difficult and laborious
gestation.
Opposition and indifference arose within the group;
analysts departed to seek training abroad. There were
abortive attempts, productive convergences, jolts, and
contacts. It is certain that the development of psychoanalysis was not exempt from tumultuous adventures in any
country. However, it is equally certain that in this land
that engendered what for Freud doubled as the alien element of the unconscious—that is, the discourse and
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myths of the ancient Greeks—the constraint of rejection
and exclusion of analytic thought exerted its influence
for too long. There are a variety of reasons for this, and
they have been studied and discussed by such authors as
Gerosimos Stephanotos, Athanase and Hélène Tzavaras
and Anna Potamianou. Currently, this constraint has
been eased somewhat. For Freud, the journey leading to
Athens was not easy; the price he paid in terms of his
autoanalysis was considerable. For Greek analysts today,
there is certainly a price to be paid so that analysis may
‘‘be’’ in their country.
With regard to publications in Greek: Kouretas and
Zavitzianos published numerous works, mainly concerning clinical practice and applied psychoanalysis.
More recently, Greek psychoanalysts have mostly
tended to publish in the language in which they
received their training (English, French, or German),
but numerous articles and several books, including
four collaboratively written volumes, have also been
written in Greek.
ANNA POTAMIANOU
Bibliography
Potamianou, Anna. (1988). Episkepsis: Pensées autour de la
visite dÕAnna Freud à Athènes. Revue internationale dÕhistoire de la psychanalyse, 1, 247–254.
Stephanatos, Gerosimos. (1992). Un pari sous lÕAcropole.
Bulletin dÕinformation du Quatrieme Groupe. 12, 56–63.
Tzavaras, Athanase. (1993). Psychanalyse ‘‘et’’ Grèce—dix
ans après. IO—Revue Internationale de Psychanalyse, 4,
157–162.
Tzavaras, Hélène. (1993). Oedipe ou Ulysse? Identité et filiation de la psychanalyse en Grèce. IO—Revue Internationale
de Psychanalyse, 4, 87–93.
Tzavaras, Hélène, and Tzavaras, Athanase. (1995). Au pays
dÕOedipe. Panoramiques, 22, 156–158.
GREENACRE, PHYLLIS (1894–1989)
Phyllis Greenacre, American psychoanalyst and physician, was born May 3, 1894 in Chicago, Illinois, and
died October 24, 1989 in Ossining, New York.
Greenacre was the fourth of seven children of Isaiah
Thomas, a prominent lawyer, and Emma Russell. After
graduating from Rush Medical College in Chicago, in
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G R E E N S O N , R A L P H (1911 –1979)
1916, she became an intern and resident at the Phipps
Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore
(Harley and Weil, 1990).
At the Phipps Clinic, where Greenacre remained for
twelve years, she came into contact with the great
Swiss-American psychiatrist, Adolf Meyer. Her exposure to Meyer reinforced her conviction of the inextricable link between biology and psychology. In 1932
she began psychoanalytic training at the New York
Psychoanalytic Institute, graduating in 1937. In 1942
she was appointed a training analyst and henceforth
served in a number of important institutional positions at the Institute.
During this period there was a growing influx of
émigré analysts to the United States and particularly to
New York. Greenacre was influenced by two of these
émigrés, Heinz Hartmann and Ernst Kris. Her friendship with Kris was particularly significant because he
encouraged her to value her unique analytic vision.
GreenacreÕs written contribution falls into three
categories: clinical papers on development; psychoanalytic training and therapy; and studies of creativity.
Her first paper, ‘‘The Predisposition to Anxiety’’
(1941), was criticized for its exploration of preverbal
stages of development, and her argument that the
roots of anxiety might predate the existence of the ego.
This paper and its companion, ‘‘The Biological Economy of Birth’’ (1945), are also noteworthy because
they announce her interest in memory and its vicissitudes. GreenacreÕs clinical work took as its point of
departure her conviction of the importance of reconstruction in analytic work. She paid close attention to
screen memories, believing them the path by which
early preverbal experiences could be traced.
In the early 1950s Greenacre began writing on
fetishism, and observed that fetishists had an especially
mutable body image. The fact that descriptions of
bodily changes were central to the writings of Lewis
Carroll and Jonathan Swift led to the biographical
study Swift and Carroll (1955). She wrote a number of
papers on creativity, and proposed a theory of aggression, in The Childhood of the Artist (1957), as a manifestation of a positive developmental force; aggression
as a positive response by the infant to the circumstances of its earliest experiences, both frustrating and
gratifying.
GreenacreÕs contributions to psychoanalysis include
original insights about the bodily and psychic
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experiences of the preverbal child, fetishism, and the
creative individual. Of equal note is the fact that she
presented this material in papers and books that are
characterized by beautiful, evocative prose, in the service of imaginative and bold theoretical ideas and the
sensitive interpretation of clinical material.
NELLIE L. THOMPSON
See also: Allergy; As if personality, Identity; Imposter;
Trauma of Birth, The.
Bibliography
Greenacre, Phyllis. (1941). The Predisposition to Anxiety.
In Trauma, growth and personality (pp. 27–82). New York:
W. W. Norton, 1952.
———. (1945). The Biological Economy of Birth. In
Trauma, growth and personality (pp. 3–26). W. W. Norton,
1952.
———. (1955). Swift and Carroll, a psychoanalytic study of
two lives. New York: International Universities Press.
———. (1957). The Childhood of the Artist: Libidinal
Phase Development and Giftedness. In Emotional growth,
psychoanalytic studies of the gifted and a great variety of
other individuals (2 vols., p. 479–504). New York: International Universities Press.
Harley, Marjorie, and Weil, Annemarie. (1990). Phyllis
Greenacre, M.D. (1894–1989). International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 71, 523–525.
GREENSON, RALPH (1911–1979)
Ralph Greenson, American psychoanalyst and physician, was born on September 20, 1911 in Brooklyn,
New York, and died on November 24, 1979 in Los
Angeles, California.
He was the eldest child (by ten minutes, as he was a
twin) born to his physician father and pharmacist
mother in Brooklyn. He completed his premedical studies at Columbia University and his medical training
at the University of Bern (1930–1934) in Switzerland.
In Switzerland he met Hildi Troesch; they married and
had two children, Daniel and Joan.
In 1935 he began an analysis with Wilhelm Stekel
and undertook analytic training in the Active Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna. Dissatisfied with the
therapeutic effect of this work, he began ‘‘classical’’
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training in Los Angeles in 1938 and had a personal
analysis with Otto Fenichel. He held various positions
in organized psychoanalysis, but mostly enjoyed teaching candidates, residents and medical students. He
gave many public lectures which were very popular
and well received. These were published in book form,
as Loving, Hating, and Living Well (1993).
He published 65 articles in the psychoanalytic literature, almost all of which were clinically based.
Thirty-two of these appear in his book Explorations in
Psychoanalysis (1978). The Technique and Practice of
Psychoanalysis (1967) is still considered a classic book
on analytic technique. In addition to his books on
technique, his major contribution to psychoanalysis
involved his emphasis on aspects of analytic work: the
working alliance—the ‘‘real’’ relationship with
patientÕs empathy and counter-transference, apart
from transference interpretations.
DANIEL GREENSON
See also: Abstinence/rule of abstinence; Boredom; Empathy; Identity; Silence; Technique with adults, psychoanalytic; Therapeutic alliance; Transference relationship.
Bibliography
Greenson, Ralph. (1965). The working alliance and
the transference neurosis. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 34
p. 155–181.
———. (1967). The technique and practice of psychoanalysis
(Vol. 1). New York: International Universities Press.
———. (1970). The exceptional position of the dream in
psychoanalytic practice. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 39,
519–549.
——— (1978). The ‘‘real’’ relationship between the patient
and the psychoanalyst. In Explorations in Psychoanalysis (p.
425–440). New York: International Universities Press.
(Original work published 1971)
——— (1978). Explorations in psychoanalysis. New York,
International Universities Press.
GRESSOT, MICHEL (1918–1975)
Michel Gressot, a Swiss physician, psychoanalyst and
teacher with the Société Suisse de Psychanalyse (Swiss
Society for Psychoanalysis) was born in Porrentruy
in 1918 and died in Geneva in 1975. He attended the
Collège de Saint-Maurice (Valais), where he acquired
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an extensive background in humanism and philosophy
that was to have a profound affect on his psychoanalytic work. After studying medicine in Fribourg, Basle,
and Lausanne, he specialized in psychiatry in Lausanne, in Malévoz (Valais), and in Geneva, where he
settled in 1950 as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. In
1969 he was appointed Privat Dozent at the School of
Medicine of the University of Geneva.
Gressot was introduced to FreudÕs work through his
teachers at Saint-Maurice. Subsequently, during his
psychiatric training, he began a personal analysis with
Charles Odier in Lausanne. Once settled in Geneva he
devoted himself almost exclusively to psychoanalysis.
Raymond de Saussure, upon his return from the United States in 1952, relied on GressotÕs assistance in providing a new impetus to the development of psychoanalysis and training (after 1956 he worked with
Marcelle Spira). These psychoanalytic educators
played an important role in the later growth of psychoanalysis in French-speaking Switzerland, especially in
Geneva. Gressot regularly gave seminars and conferences, and was an enthusiastic participant in the Congrès des psychanalystes de langue romane (Congress of
romance language psychoanalysts). His career was
interrupted suddenly in 1975, when he died in Geneva
at the age of fifty-seven.
GressotÕs most important contributions were collected by Michel de MÕUzan in a posthumous volume
entitled Le Royaume intermédiaire (1979), with a preface by Michel Roch. It contains his essay, ‘‘Le Mythe
dogmatique et le Système moral des manichéens,’’
which emphasizes the psychoanalytic advantage in
studying Manichaeism. The book also contains two
important reports on congresses held in Paris. The first,
from 1955, ‘‘Psychanalyse et Connaissance: Contribution à une épistémologie psychanalytique,’’ sketches a
psychoanalytic theory of knowledge. The second, from
1963, ‘‘Psychanalyse et Psychothérapie, leur commensalisme: LÕesprit de la psychanalyse est-il compatible avec
la psychothérapie?’’ studies the interaction of the fields
of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy from a dialectic
point of view that was typical of GressotÕs style.
Gressot trained a number of psychoanalysts during
his career. The depth of his thought, his attention to
detail as a writer, and his openness to different ideas all
had a strong influence on the growth of psychoanalysis
inside and outside Switzerland.
JEAN-MICHEL QUINODOZ
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GRID
See also: Congrès des psychanalystes de langue française
des pays romans; Switzerland (French-speaking)
Bibliography
Gressot, Michel. (1979). Le royaume intermédiaire. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Roch, Marcel. (1979). Préface: En hommage à Michel Gressot. In Michel Gressot, Le royaume intermédiaire. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
‘‘Dodgsonian,’’ in reference to Charles Dodgson (Lewis
Carroll), the author of AliceÕs Adventures in Wonderland.
The grid was not as ill-fated as BionÕs other notation systems and has even become emblematic of his research.
Arranged along the vertical axis of the grid are the
following: A) beta-elements; B) alpha-elements; C)
dream thoughts, dreams, and myths; D) preconception; E) conception; F) concept; G) a scientific deductive system; H) algebraic calculus.
——— (1980). Á propos de l’histoire de la psychanalyse en
Suisse romande. Bulletin de la Société suisse de psychanalyse, 10, 17–30.
The horizontal axis essentially presents the functions the mind uses to have access to the real: 1) definitory hypotheses; 2) denial; 3) notation; 4) attention; 5)
inquiry; 6) action.
GRID
If, in the horizontal axis, Bion draws from FreudÕs
1911 article, ‘‘Formulations on the Two Principles of
Mental Functioning,’’ the vertical axis instead reflects
the influence of Immanuel KantÕs epistemology.
The grid is an instrument for classifying psychoanalytic
material, coming from either the patient or the analyst,
proposed by Wilfred R. Bion in his Elements of PsychoAnalysis (1963). Classification is made along two axes,
with the vertical axis representing the genetic evolution
of thoughts or ideas, and the horizontal axis representing the uses or functions attributed to thoughts or
ideas. By combining the vertical categories with the horizontal uses or functions, a grid is obtained that makes
it possible to classify the ‘‘elements of psycho-analysis’’—the term Bion applies to the thoughts and emotions of the patient-analyst dyad.
Bion does not advocate using the grid as a working
method during sessions. Rather, it is conceived as a
tool that the analyst can use outside of the sessions to
clarify their ideas or reexamine material.
By means of the grid and other abstract systems of
notation, Bion sought to bring a greater degree of specificity to psychoanalytic theory. For example, in the theory of the Oedipus complex that helped Sigmund Freud
to found psychoanalysis, there are elements that are constants, fixed through their association with other elements. Thus, in the classic oedipal scheme, it would be
impossible to detach any of the following from the
whole: sexual agitation, sexual curiosity, or castration.
BionÕs use of new methods of notation began with his
book entitled Learning from Experience (1962) and
reached its height with Transformations: Change from
Learning to Growth (1965), where the reader finds a profusion of mathematical signs, Greek words, arrows, dots,
and lines, the assimilation of which (when it is possible)
adds little to analytic understanding. Bion himself
admitted his failure, referring to his mathematics as
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As a whole, the grid recalls KantÕs categories (much
more than it does Dimitri Mendeleev, contrary to what
some have suggested). Like in KantÕs faculty of thought,
there are three levels in the grid: sensibility, understanding, and reason. Sensibility, in KantÕs work, is predominantly passive and serves to receive impressions from the
outside (the equivalent of BionÕs lines A, B, and C).
Understanding is active; it takes sensibilityÕs components
and forms them into judgments and real knowledge (the
equivalent of BionÕs lines D, E, and F). Reason is the final
stage in the operations of knowledge, which are begun by
the senses and continue through the understanding.
For all its interest, BionÕs grid did not achieve the
degree of abstraction he believed was desirable in the
development of any scientific theory. The grid did not
produce the desired combinatory effects, in the same
way that psychoanalytic theory is not at the level of a
predictive scientific system. Perhaps the ascent into
abstraction is not possible for psychoanalysis, just as it
is not possible for the other human sciences. Walking
in the footsteps of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ernst Mach,
and Bertrand Russell, Bion did not take into account
the methodological obstacles raised when one attempts
to assimilate the natural and human sciences—obstacles evoked by Wilhelm Dilthey in his Introduction to
the Human Sciences: An Attempt to Lay a Foundation
for the Study of Society and History and by Georges
Politzer in his Critique of the Foundations of Psychology:
The Psychology of Psychoanalysis, among others.
PEDRO LUZES
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BION’S GRID
Definitory
hypothesis
1
2
A
Beta-elements
A1
A2
B
Alpha-elements
B1
B2
B3
B4
B5
B6
…Bn.
C
Dream thoughts,
dreams, and myths
C1
C2
C3
C4
C5
C6
…Cn.
D
Preconception
D1
D2
D3
D4
D5
D6
…Dn.
E
Conception
E1
E2
E3
E4
E5
E6
…En.
F
Concept
F1
F2
F3
F4
F5
F6
…Fn.
G
Scientific
deductive system
Notation
3
Attention
4
Inquiry
5
Action
6
…n.
A6
A1
H
Algebraic calculus
SOURCE: In
W.R. Bion, Elements of Psychoanalysis, London: Heinemann.
See also: Concept; Container-contained; Learning from
Experience; Maternal reverie, capacity for; Preconception.
Trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. (Original
work published 1928)
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht. (1963). Elements of psycho-analysis.
London: Heinemann.
———. (1965). Transformations: Change from learning to
growth. London: Heinemann.
Politzer, Georges. (1994). Critique of the foundations of psychology: the psychology of psychoanalysis (Maurice Apprey,
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GRODDECK, GEORG WALTHER
(1866–1934)
A German physician and the director of a clinic in
Baden-Baden, in the Black Forest region, Georg Walther
Groddeck was born on October 13, 1866, in Bad Kösen
705
G R O D D E C K , G E O R G W A L T H E R (1 866 –19 34)
an der Saale, Germany, and died on June 11, 1934, in
Knonau bei Zürich, Switzerland. Groddeck detailed his
upbringing in his autobiographical writings. A saying
of his motherÕs, ‘‘Big ears mean great accomplishments,’’ became his life motto. The youngest of five children in a family of aristocrats, he was educated at the
school in Schulpforta where Gotthold Lessing, Otto
Rank, and Friedrich Nietzsche also studied. He was a
great admirer of Nietzsche and Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, among others. He studied medicine with Ernst
Schweninger, Otto von BismarckÕs personal physician,
in keeping with a Romantic tradition of medicine based
on experience, in contrast to the scientific mindset of
his era. As a result of his exceptionally powerful personality, Groddeck became a renowned doctor whom
patients throughout Europe came to consult about
somatic and psychosomatic illnesses. He initially used
hydrotherapy, dietetics, massage therapy, and psychotherapy based on authority and the power of suggestion; he later refined this approach into a form of
psychoanalytic-psychosomatic therapy.
In 1910, during a life crisis, he discovered the writings of Sigmund Freud, and he completed his self-analysis in the course of the 115 lectures on psychoanalysis
that he delivered to patients in his clinic between 1916
and 1919. These lectures later became famous.
He began corresponding with Freud in 1917 and met
him personally in 1920, at the international psychoanalytic congress in the Hague. Groddeck drew a mixed
reception with his presentation at the congress, which
he supposedly introduced by saying, ‘‘I am a wild psychoanalyst,’’ and in which, associating freely, he spoke of
his childhood enuresis. In 1920 he became a member of
the Deutsche psychoanalytische Gesellschaft (German
Psychoanalytic Society). But he did not fully integrate
himself into the psychoanalytic movement, and he followed his own path whenever personal ties were important and institutional constraints bothersome. He took
a skeptical view of the new ego psychology.
Throughout his life he remained involved in sociopolitical activist groups. He refused to accept the National
SocialistsÕ reining in of German psychoanalysts after
1933 and ran up against insurmountable problems with
them. Finally, he had to take refuge in Switzerland.
In 1917 he put forward his psychoanalytic-psychosomatic agenda in Psychische Bedingtheit und psychoanalytische Behandlung organischer Leiden (Psychic
70 6
determination and psychoanalytic treatment of
organic disorders). Using examples from his clinical
work and vignettes from his self-analysis, he described
the relationship between somatic disorders and
unconscious psychic processes. In 1921 he published
Der Seelensucher: ein psychoanalytischer roman (The
soul-seeker: a psychoanalytic novel), a humorous
account of the adventures of a psychoanalytic Don
Quixote. Groddeck considered this his best work, as
did Freud; others complained that it was sexually indecent and unscientific. With the publication of the The
Book of the It (1923/1928), Groddeck became famous.
This was yet another extremely personal book: clinically oriented, spontaneous, unconventional. This
work was followed by many lectures, articles in the
journals Satanarium and Die Arche, and, in 1933, Der
Mensch als Symbol: unmassgebliche Meinungen über
Sprache und Kunst (Man as symbol: considerations,
without pretension, on language and skills). GroddeckÕs correspondences with Freud and with Sándor
Ferenczi are well known. Most of his works are available in translation in many languages.
Groddeck was important above all in psychoanalytic
psychosomatics. He was the first to argue for the value of
psychoanalysis in theorizing about the mind and for the
treatment of not just conversion but all somatic disorders, which he supported with a large amount of clinical
data. His work is still controversial because his method
was neither rational nor scientifically rigorous. Instead,
he followed the primary processes in both his therapeutic
work and his writings. Using this way of thinking, which
Hanns Sachs described as a ‘‘self-portrait of the unconscious,’’ he presented psychoanalysis as an activity, not a
theory. Drawing on Nietzsche and the critical philosophy
of consciousness, he stressed the concept of the id, a concept that Freud took up, but in a modified form. (He
advocated saying, ‘‘The id thinks in me,’’ and not ‘‘I
think.’’) He recognized the significance of regression, preoedipal desires, and maternal transference, and thus had
an enormous influence on Ferenczi, with whom he
became friends. He was also in contact with Ernst Simmel, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Michael Balint. The
educated public and several writers (Lawrence Durrell
and Ingeborg Bachmann, among others) took a great lay
interest in his work, and the French psychoanalysts
Roger Lewinter, Pierre Fédida, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis,
Octave Mannoni, and François Roustang were receptive
to his ideas for their scientific content.
HERBERT WILL
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G R O S S , O T T O H A N S A D O L F (1877 –1 920)
See also: Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie; Book of the It, The; Germany; Id; Psychic
causality; Psychosomatic.
Bibliography
Bos, Jaap. (1992). On the origin of the id (das Es). International Review of Psychoanalysis, 19, 433–443.
Chemouni, Jacquy. (1984). Georg Groddeck, psychanalyste de
lÕimaginaire: psychanalyse freudienne et psychanalyse groddeckienne. Paris: Payot.
Groddeck, Georg. (1917). Psychische Bedingheit und psychoanalytische Behandlung organischer Leiden. Leipzig:
S. Hirzel.
———. (1928). The book of the it. Washington, DC: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co. (Original work
published 1923.)
———. (1933). Der Mensch als Symbol: unmassgebliche
Meinungen über Sprache und Kunst. Leipzig: Internationaler psychoanalytischer Verlag.
———. (1951). The world of man (V. M. E. Collins, Trans.).
New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co.
———. (1977). The meaning of illness: selected psychoanalytic
writings (Gertrud Mander, Trans.). London: Hogarth Press.
Grossman, Carl M., and Grossman, Sylva. (1965). The wild
analyst: the life and work of Georg Groddeck. New York:
Braziller.
Grotjahn, Martin. (1966). Georg Groddeck: the untamed
analyst. In Franz Alexander, Samuel Eisenstein, and Martin
Grotjahn (Eds.), Psychoanalytic pioneers. New York: Basic
Books, 1966.
Will, Herbert. (1987). Georg Groddeck: die Geburt der Psychosomatik. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (dtv).
———. (1994). Ferenczi und Groddeck: eine Freundschaft.
Psyche, 720–737.
GROSS, OTTO HANS ADOLF (1877–1920)
Otto Gross, a neurologist and psychoanalyst, was born
March 17, 1877, in Feldbach (Styria), Austria, and
died February 13, 1920, in Berlin. His father, Hans
Gross, was a celebrated professor of criminal law and
his mother Adèle came from a middle-class family.
Young Otto Gross grew up in a well-to-do family
environment and was a precocious child.
On the advice of his father, he began studying medicine and completed his degree at the University of Graz
in 1899 at the age of twenty-two. He was hired as a
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doctor on a cruise ship, which introduced him to South
America—and drugs. He was also involved with several
women during this time, something that earned him a
rebuke from his father on his return, the beginning of a
conflict that would last until 1907 and their final break.
In 1903 he married Frieda Schloffer, ‘‘one of the only
Germans I have ever liked,’’ wrote Freud. But his sexual
life remained agitated, the reflection of the ‘‘sexual
immorality’’ he would turn into a theoretical credo.
In 1901–1902 he specialized in neurology and was
especially interested in the hypotheses of Carl Wernicke
on associative circuits and their separation (in a February 1908 letter to Carl Gustav Jung, Freud humorously
referred to this as ‘‘sejunction’’). In 1902, he began a
detoxification cure at the Burghölzli Clinic, where Jung
was working, and discovered psychoanalysis.
In spite of his appointment as Privat Dozent at the
University of Graz, he left the city—where his father
had also received an appointment—to settle, in September 1906, in Munich. Here, as an assistant to Emil
Kraepelin, he spent time among the artistic and literary circles in the Schwabing quarter. The following
year he went to Amsterdam for the first International
Congress on Psychiatry, Psychology, and Aid to the
Mentally Ill and, with Jung, defended FreudÕs theory of
hysteria. His intellect and creativeness caught FreudÕs
(who felt that ‘‘unfortunately he was not quite sane’’)
and Ernest JonesÕs attention, and he was present at the
Salzburg Congress of April 27, 1908.
Gross was again hospitalized at the Burghölzli,
where Jung began treating him. Jung kept Freud
informed of his progress, for both men felt that
because of GrossÕs intelligence this was a unique
opportunity to develop further theoretical insights.
Jung diagnosed an ‘‘obsessive neurosis’’ in 1908, which
was confirmed by Freud. GrossÕs condition seemed to
get better. He gave up drugs—opium and cocaine—
but things soon got worse, and in June 1908 Jung diagnosed him as suffering from ‘‘precocious dementia’’
after Gross escaped from the clinic and displayed
increasing symptoms of pathological behavior. Nonetheless, he continued to work and publish articles in
which he explained his theories on the social origin of
nervous disturbances. He became involved with anarchist circles, but spent increasing amounts of time in
psychiatric clinics, which were paid for by his father.
In 1909, his book Über psychopathische Minderwertigkeiten (On Psychopathic Inferiority) was published.
707
G R O S S , O T T O H A N S A D O L F (1877 –1920)
On June 3, Freud referred to GrossÕs book, in which he
establishes a connection between genius and degeneracy, as a ‘‘bold synthesis overflowing with ideas.’’ The
‘‘degenerate,’’ although appearing unsuited to current
social life, can also represent the future of the culture.
In 1913 Gross published, in the Expressionist review
Aktion, an essay entitled ‘‘Zur Überwindug der kulturellen Krise’’ (How to Overcome the Cultural Crisis), in which he affirmed that ‘‘the psychology of the
unconscious is the philosophy of revolution.’’ He
referred to Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud,
and one can only wonder what influence this early
work may have had on the Marxist psychoanalysts of
the following decades.
A few months after its publication, at his fatherÕs
request, Otto Gross was expelled from Germany, held
in Austria at the Tulln Asylum, and placed under his
fatherÕs care. The international press began to print articles about his arbitrary internment and, on January 25,
1914, he was transferred to the Troppau Asylum in Silesia, where he remained until July 8. He then followed a
treatment with Wilhelm Stekel, who refused to diagnose him as a schizophrenic and spoke only of a serious
neurosis accompanied by drug addiction. In the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie, Gross
published an article on the symbolics of destruction.
His fatherÕs death in 1915 left Gross distraught. At the
start of the First World War, he worked as a volunteer in
several military hospitals but was himself hospitalized
again in Romania for drug addiction at the end of 1916,
before being transferred to Munich to stay with his
mother, then to Vienna. His writings appeared in various political reviews and made use of psychoanalysis to
criticize education, society, and the patriarchy, which
communism would supposedly abolish in favor of a
matriarchy (‘‘The Fundamentally Communist Conception of the Symbolics of Paradise,’’ July 1919). He is
mentioned in a letter from Sándor Ferenczi to Freud on
February 7, 1918: He ‘‘made his circle of disciples there,
who, among other things, had the duty without exception to enter into sexual relations with Dr. GrossÕs lover,
named ÔMieze.Õ They supposedly classified the young
colleague, who found that repugnant, as Ômorally unreliableÕ for that reason. Incidentally, the young colleague
had some time ago received news of Dr. GrossÕs death,
which has, however, not been substantiated. He will still
pop up here and there as a ÔGolemÕ.’’
In 1920 he published his last book, Drei aufsätze
über den inneren Konflict (Three papers on the inner
70 8
conflict), this conflict being situated between the
‘‘self ’’ and the ‘‘foreign,’’ which established a conflict
between Freudian sexual drives and the Adlerian
ego drive.
He was found unconscious on a Berlin sidewalk on
February 11, 1920, and died in the Pankow sanatorium
two days later from pneumonia. He was buried ‘‘by
mistake’’ in the Jewish cemetery of Berlin.
Known to Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Max Weber,
Blaise Cendrars (who protested against his internments), and the Dadaists, this ‘‘Golem’’ continued to
be referred to in connection with D. H. Lawrence
(whose wife Frieda, born Frieda von Richthofen, had
been his mistress in 1912) and the Bloomsbury
group. Guillaume Apollinaire had written ‘‘La disparition du Dr Gross’’ in the Mercure de France on
January 16, 1914, to protest his internment, and Sándor Ferenczi wrote to Freud, on March 22, 1910,
‘‘There is no doubt that, among those who have followed you up to now, he is the most significant. Too
bad he had to go to pot.’’ Ernest Jones wrote in his
memoirs that ‘‘[h]e was the nearest approach to a
romantic ideal of a genius I have ever met. . . . He
was my first instructor in the technique of psychoanalsysis’’ (Jones, 1959, p. 173). Paradoxically, the
Marxist Freudians seem to have forgotten Gross,
their earliest precursor.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Germany; Politics and psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Dehmlow, Raimund. and Heuer, Gottfried. (1999). Otto
Gross: Werkverzeichnis und Sekundärschrifttum. Hannover:
Laurentius.
Freud, Sigmund and Jung, Carl Gustav. (1975). The Freud/
Jung Letters: The correspondence between Sigmund Freud
and C. G. Jung (William McGuire, Ed.; Ralph Manheim
and R.F.C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gross, Otto. (2000). Collected works. (Lois Madison, Ed. and
Trans.). Hamilton, NY: Mindpiece.
Hurwitz, Emmanuel. (1979). Otto Gross: Paradies-Sucher
zwischen Freud und Jung. Zürich.
Lawrence, David Herbert, and Richthofen, Frieda von.
(1961). The memoirs and correspondence. London: E.W.
Tedlock Jr.
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GROUP ANALYSIS
GROUP ANALYSIS
Broadly defined, group analysis is a psychoanalytic
approach to the experience of the unconscious in the
group situation and a method for investigating the
psychic structures and processes that manifest themselves in that context. It uses concepts and techniques
from individual psychoanalysis, as well as original psychoanalytic observations from the study of groups. In
a more restricted sense, group analysis is a technique
of group psychotherapy.
Trigant Burrow proposed the notion of ‘‘group analysis’’ in 1927, but it was only at the beginning of the
1940s that Siegmund Foulkes, John Rickman, and
Henry Ezriel founded the ‘‘Group Analysis’’ tendency
in London. Their work was informed by the structural
perspective of Gestalt theory. At around the same
time, Wilfred R. Bion was developing original ideas
about group structures and processes based on basic
concepts of psychoanalysis and Sigmund FreudÕs speculations on group psychology. FoulkesÕs initial objective was to propose an alternative to the limitations of
individual therapy, while BionÕs aim was to explore the
ways in which group processes could be specifically
mobilized in the treatment of certain traumatic, borderline, and psychotic pathologies.
In the theoretical current inspired by Foulkes, the
group is a totality; the individual and the group form a
figure-ground whole. Within the group, the individual
is like the nodal point in a neural network. Foulkes
believed that all illness is produced within a complex
network of interpersonal relations. In Therapeutic
Group Analysis (1964), he writes: ‘‘Group psychotherapy is an attempt to treat the entire network of problems, either at the point of origin in the primitive
group of origin, or by placing the disturbed individual
into the conditions of transference within an alien
group.’’ The group possesses specific therapeutic properties, which are expressed in the five basic tenets of
Foulkesian group analysis: the capacity to listen to,
understand, and interpret the group as a totality in the
‘‘here and now’’; taking into account only the transference ‘‘of the group’’ on the analyst and not lateral
transferences; the notion of ‘‘unconscious fantasmatic
resonance’’ among the members of the group; ‘‘shared
tension’’ and the common denominator of the unconscious fantasies of the group; and the notion of the
group as a ‘‘psychic matrix’’ and frame of reference for
all interactions.
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In his 1961 book Experiences in Groups, Bion distinguishes and articulates two modes of psychic functioning in groups: the ‘‘work (or W) group,’’ dominated by
the processes and requirements of secondary logic;
and the ‘‘basic-assumption group’’ defined by the concept of group mentality (p. 105ff). ‘‘Group culture’’ is
the structure acquired by the group at a given time, its
self-assigned tasks, and the organization adopted to
perform them. Bion defines ‘‘group mentality’’ as the
mental activity that takes shape within a group based
on the opinions, will, and the unconscious, unanimous, and anonymous desires of its members. It
ensures that group life will correspond to the basic
assumptions that determine its course. Basic assumptions are made up of intense emotional states, primitive in their origin, that play a determining role in a
groupÕs formation, the performance of its task, and the
satisfaction of the needs and desires of its members.
An expression of unconscious fantasies, these assumptions submit to the primary process and remain
unconscious. Basic assumptions are also defensive
group reactions used as magical techniques, especially
for combating the psychotic anxieties reactivated by
the regression the group situation imposes. Three
basic assumptions govern the course of psychic phenomena specific to the group and satisfy the desires of
its members. The basic assumption of dependency
(baD) is grounded in the conviction that the group has
come together to receive security and the satisfaction
of all the needs and desires of its members from someone (therapist, leader, master) or something (idea,
ideal) upon whom (or which) it is absolutely dependent. The corresponding group culture is organized
around the search for a more-or-less deified leader and
manifests itself in passivity and loss of critical judgment. The basic assumption of fight-flight (baF) rests
on the collective fantasy that there exists an internal or
external bad object embodied in an enemy: a group
member, illness, an adverse or erroneous idea that the
group must either attack or flee. The group finds its
leader among paranoid personalities likely to feed this
idea. The basic assumption of pairing (baP) is sustained by the collective fantasy that some being or
event will resolve all the groupÕs problems: Messianic
hope is placed in a couple whose child will save the
group from hatred, destruction, or despair. Group culture is organized around the idea that the future will
bring long-awaited solutions, but for the future to
come, their messianic hope must never be realized. In
his book Group, the Italian writer Claudio Neri
709
GROUP PHENOMENON
extended and further elaborated BionÕs ideas into
field theory.
The French current of thought in group analysis
has focused its research on the unconscious function
the group fulfills for its members. Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (1963) emphasized the importance of instinctual
cathexis and representations whose object is the
group. According to Didier Anzieu in Le Groupe et lÕInconscient, the group, like the dream, is essentially a
means and a locus for the imaginary fulfillment of the
unconscious desires of its members. Although the
groupÕs structures and psychic processes obey general
mechanisms that are characteristic of all products of
the unconscious, some of them are specific to the
group situation, as witness the group illusion. The
model of a group mental apparatus proposed by René
Kaës (1976) describes a mechanism for linking and
transforming the psychic structures committed to the
group by its members. This mechanism produces
the groupÕs psychic reality and processes it within the
group. In his 1993 book Le Groupe et le Sujet du groupe
(The group and the group subject), Kaës emphasizes
the role of repression, denial, or rejection, and the
unconscious alliances underlying the formation of the
psychic reality of the group and its members.
RENÉ KAËS
See also: Anzieu, Didier; Balint group; Bion, Wilfred
Ruprecht; Collective psychology; Family; Family therapy;
Foulkes (Fuchs), Sigmund Heinrich; Group phenomenon; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego;
Group psychotherapy; Identification; Primitive horde;
Second World War: The effect on the development on
psychoanalysis;
Sociology
and
psychoanalysis/
sociopsychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Anzieu, Didier. (1975). The group and the unconscious. (Benjamin Kilborne, Trans.). London and Boston: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1984.
Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht. Experiences in groups. London:
Tavistock Publications, 1961.
Foulkes, Siegmund Heinrich. Therapeutic group analysis.
New York: International Universities Press, 1964.
Kaës, René. Le groupe et le sujet du groupe. Paris: Dunod,
1993.
Neri, Claudio. (1997) Group. (Christine Trollope, Trans.).
Rome, London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley.
71 0
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1963) Le petit groupe comme
objet. In Après Freud. Parı́s: Gallimard, 1968.
GROUP PHENOMENON
Wilfred R. BionÕs work on group dynamics, developed
in particular in his 1961 book Experiences in Groups,
established a fundamental difference between individual and group mentalities; individual and group psychoanalysis must be treated differently, even though
‘‘the two methods provide the practitioner with a rudimentary binocular vision’’ and are ‘‘dealing with different facets of the same phenomena’’ (p. 8). In a
group, individuals undergo a regression to defend
themselves against the conflicts provoked or revealed
by their participation in the group. This regression is
expressed through formation of a ‘‘group mentality’’—a unanimous expression of the groupÕs will, a
defensive system of avoidance and denial, and a common repository for anonymous contributions that the
individual members split off or disavow (such as their
hostility toward the therapist). The individual contributes to the group mentality but is nevertheless situated in opposition to it, since it threatens the satisfactions of the individualÕs needs as a group animal. The
group responds to this threat by means of a compromise formation, the ‘‘group culture.’’
Bion emphasizes the importance of the work (W)
group: the mental functioning (and not the individual
participants) necessary to perform the joint task that
the group has implicitly taken on. The work group
must take reality into account (‘‘reality testing’’); its
characteristics ‘‘are similar to those attributed by
Freud [in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920g] to the
ego’’ (p. 143). The work groupÕs methods are ‘‘rational,
and therefore, in however embryonic a form, scientific’’ (p. 143), and they depend upon cooperation
among the groupÕs members, training, and the type of
mental development defined by the aptitude for learning through experience. The members must undergo
development rather than rely on magical efficacy.
The work group has come together to undertake a
creative task, such as, to resolve the psychological problems of its members. However, the work groupÕs
rational intentions are, as a rule, impeded by obscure
and chaotic emotional forces, which produce anomalies in the groupÕs mental activity. These emotional
forces are given coherence by the supposition that the
group is acting as if its goal were motivated by a basic
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GROUP PHENOMENON
assumption. In contrast with the requirements of the
work group, participation in an activity that depends
on a basic assumption does not call for any training,
experience, or individual mental development; it is
instantaneous, inevitable, and instinctive, and it actually manifests an aggressive refusal to work or
develop. The basic-assumption group does not make
rational use of verbal communication; it does not
develop language as a method of thought and instead
uses words as a mode of action. The inability to
form and use symbols, observed by Melanie Klein
(1930) in an autistic child, extends to all individuals
functioning as members of a basic-assumption
group. The members seemingly wish to replace any
process of elaboration with the ability to know magically, by instinct, without any development or learning, how to live and act in the group. Activity that
depends on a basic assumption does not require any
ability to cooperate on the part of the individual, but
it supposes that the individual—unless he or she is
schizophrenic—posseses a ‘‘valency,’’ defined as ‘‘the
individualÕs readiness to enter into combination with
another in making and acting on the basic assumption’’ (p. 116). The hostile reaction against any process of development in the basic-assumption mentality indicates that time has no place in it, and
interpretations of disturbed temporal relations elicit
feelings of persecution. In fact, the basic-assumption
group only exists outside of time; it neither disperses
nor comes together. Inevitably, the basic-assumption
group develops an intolerable frustration that can
only be addressed by an awareness of the passage of
time, and to counter this frustration, the group
immediately and automatically puts into play behaviors and beliefs that define itself. Because he considered this theoretical model of basic assumption to be
inadequate, Bion elaborated it by describing its
modes of dependency, fight-flight, and pairing.
constitutes a work group of two people centered
around the basic assumption of pairing, which endows
the transference with its characteristic features and
only accounts for the link between individuals in
terms of the libido, the latter designating only the specific quality of the valency characteristic of the pairing
group.
Sigmund Freud considered the Catholic Church
and the army to be groups faced with the basic
assumptions of, respectively, dependency (baD) and
fight-flight (baF)—in effect, ‘‘specialized work
groups.’’ One of the goals of these groups is to prevent
the basic assumption from being translated into
action, which would require work-group methods to
remain in contact with reality. The third type of specialized work group, involved in the basic assumption
of pairing (baP), Bion associated with the aristocracy
and its preoccupation with reproduction and good
genes. However, the psychoanalytic method itself
Bibliography
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A basic assumption can only be manifested in alternation with the two others. When one is active, it relegates the others to prototypes and confines them to
the sphere of what Bion calls the ‘‘proto-mental.’’ In
this sphere, the physical, the psychological, and the
mental are not differentiated and the emotional components are blurred together because they have not yet
come into being on the psychological plane. The
group expresses (proto-) emotions from this sphere by
putting into play a basic assumption, and the psychological expression of these emotions reinforces,
invades, or dominates the groupÕs mental life. The
proto-mental phase in the individual is only a part of
the proto-mental system. Proto-mental phenomena
cannot be understood solely as functions of the individual, but must be studied within the group. Somatic
illnesses can be manifested in the individual, but their
full context is in the relationship between the individual and the active basic-assumption group and in the
proto-mental phases of the two other basic assumptions. The basic-assumption group that sweeps aside
the essential part of individual mentality still operant
in the work group thus expresses, on a level that
is more neurophysiological than psychological, the
primitive parts that live a group life within each
individual.
BERNARD DEFONTAINE
See also: Family therapy; Group analysis.
Bion, Wilfred R. (1961). Experiences in groups. London:
Tavistock.
———. (1970). Attention and interpretation. London:
Tavistock.
Grinberg, León; Sor, Darı́o; and Tabak de Bianchedi, Elizabeth. (1993). New introduction to the work of Bion (rev.
ed.). Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Meltzer, Donald. (1986). The proto-mental apparatus and
soma-psychotic phenomena. In Studies in extended metapsychology. London: Clunie Press.
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OF THE
EGO
Pines, Malcolm. (Ed.). (1985). Bion and group psychotherapy.
London: Routledge.
GROUP PSYCHOLOGY AND THE ANALYSIS
OF THE EGO
Sigmund FreudÕs second essay, after Totem and Taboo
(1912–13a), on collective psychology, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego is perhaps his fundamental work on that topic. He began contemplating
the project in 1919: ‘‘I had not only completed the
draft of ÔBeyond the Pleasure PrincipleÕ . . . but I also
took up the little thing about the ÔuncannyÕ again, and,
with a simple-minded idea [Einfall], I attempted a P"
foundation for group psychology,’’ he wrote to Sándor
Ferenczi on 12 May 1919 (Freud and Ferenczi, Letter
813, p. 354). His progress was slow; a first version was
finished in September 1920, and the final version was
finished in March 1921. It was published that summer.
The close relationship between the discovery of
dynamics operating in large dimensions—the theory
of the life and death instincts, advanced in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920g)—and the possibility of reconceptualizing group psychology is noteworthy.
In contrast to Totem and Taboo, where Freud was
applying psychoanalytic ideas to the psychology of
groups and simultaneously acknowledging the differences between psychoanalysis and anthropology, here
the brief and magisterial introductory chapter makes
the claim that group psychology is part of psychoanalysis. Next he tackles a fundamental problem not elaborated in Totem and Taboo: What is the mental
dynamic that holds together the individuals in a
group, creates the groupÕs forms, ensures its continuity
and stability, or causes its disappearance? In other
words, what is the morphodynamics of groups?
Repeating a significant move in psychoanalysis, his
abandonment of hypnosis, Freud proposed that the
libido accounts for group morphodynamics. He
accomplished this epistemological operation in three
chapters, borrowing from Gustave Le Bon and William
McDougall to describe the prevalence of the primary
processes in ephemeral groups.
Freud refined his proposal by showing how two
groups, the church and the army, can come apart—in
their different ways—through the loss of libidinal
bonds to the leader or among members, and how, in
keeping with psychoanalytic dynamics, only the power
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of love is capable of overcoming the narcissism and
hatred that distance us from one another.
It remained to identify the psychic formations that
ensure group cohesion. This is the topic is addressed
in the next three chapters, where, for the first time,
Freud studied in detail the various known identificatory processes and distinguished the egoÕs identifications from those of the ego ideal. Hence his statement:
‘‘A primary group . . . is a number of individuals who
have put one and the same object in the place of their
ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves
with one another in their ego’’ (p. 116). This statement
holds true for passionate love and the hypnotic state,
which he had used to shed light on the identificatory
processes. Freud then verified its validity in the case of
the primitive horde, as a structure, as discussed in
Totem and Taboo. In the course of his discussion, the
generic quality of alienation and submission inherent
in group membership is brought to light. A final chapter sharpens the distinction between ego and ego ideal,
a distinction that provides an opening for psychoanalytic investigation of the narcissistic psychoses.
In important supplements to this work Freud distinguished three paradigmatic forms and dynamics of
groups, based on the degree of the weakening of the
ego ideal and the ego that they impose: the horde, the
matriarchy, and the totemic clan. He specified that
the level of elaboration allowed to groups excluded
the thinking of sexual difference. He proposed that the
earliest individual psychology in which the ego ideal
does not appear in weakened form is that of the poet
telling the totemic clan the lie that explains their origins: ‘‘the myth, then, is the step by which the individual emerges from group psychology’’ (Postscript, p.
136). He also examined the relationship between direct
sexual instincts and sexual instincts whose aim is
inhibited, with only the latter being mobilized and tolerated by social bonds.
The notion of the intrinsic relationship between
individual and group psychology—which Freud sustained throughout his work—appears the most clearly
in this essay. FreudÕs bringing to light of the libidinal
morphodynamics of groups made possible some fundamental work on identifications, the ego ideal, and the
ego and narcissism that would be continued in The Ego
and the Id (1923b). However, the mode of articulation
of object relations and identifications remained enigmatic, in part. The relevance of the three forms and
paradigmatic dynamics proposed is unquestionable.
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We can assume that these are deployed in every real
human group, and that they are constantly in conflict.
It should be noted that the horde of Totem and Taboo
and that of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
do not have the same status: The first is mythic and
structural, while the second is actual and is endowed
with active libidinal dynamics. The essayÕs lack of resonance among psychoanalysts, with regard to FreudÕs
ideas about group psychology, can be explained by the
fact that the majority of psychoanalysts after Freud,
when working on groups, have hypothesized oedipal
moments in them. Dealing with ‘‘the analysis of the
ego,’’ which has been referred to frequently, is another
matter altogether.
At the beginning of the essay Freud made clear that
he was working only on the libidinal dynamics
involved in group cohesion. Three parameters were
excluded: the influence of external reality on groups,
the influence of ‘‘great men’’ on their level of development, and finally, an economic assessment of bonds
and the role of hatred. This work was to be carried out
in part in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a
[1929]) and then in Moses and Monotheism (1939a
[1934–1938]).
MICHÈLE PORTE
See also: Collective psychology.
Source Citation
Freud, Sigmund. (1921c) Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse. Leipzig-Vienna-Zürich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag; GW, XIII: 71–161; Group psychology and
analysis of the ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1912–13a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13:
1–161.
——— (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
——— (1930a [1929]). Civilization and its discontents. SE,
21: 57–145.
——— (1939a [1934–38]). Moses and monotheism: three
essays. SE, 23: 1–137.
Freud, Sigmund, and Ferenczi, Sándor. (1992–2000). The correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Vol. 2, 1914–
1919. (Ernst Falzeder and Eva Brabant, Eds.; Peter Hoffer,
Trans.). Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966.
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Kaës, René, and Anzieu, Didier. (1976). Chronique dÕun
groupe, le groupe du ÔParadis perduÕ: observation et commentaries. Paris: Dunod.
Mitscherlich, Alexander. (1963). Society without the father: A
contribution to social psychology. (Eric Mosbacher, Trans.
New York: Schocken Books, 1970.
Moscovici, Serge. (1981). The age of the crowd: A historical
treatise on mass psychology. (J.C. Whitehouse, Trans. Cambridge (Cambridgeshire) and New York: Cambridge University Press.
GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPIES
The notion of group psychotherapies encompasses a
considerable number of techniques and different theoretical points of view. Strictly speaking, group psychotherapy is a method for treating psychopathology
and its concomitant suffering by means of the specific
action of the groupÕs processes on the individuals who
comprise it. There is also a model of group psychotherapy that seeks to treat the group as a specific
whole. To accomplish its therapeutic aims and bring
about the corresponding changes in personality, group
psychotherapy mobilizes in the participants the psychological exploration and work that ensues necessarily as a result of the development of intersubjective
and transsubjective links. Various appropriate
mechanisms are directed toward this end.
This method of psychotherapy is probably the oldest form of mental and psychosomatic care. Treatment
regimens practiced in the Asclepion at Pergamon (Bergama) included group sessions of dream interpretation, as the ancient writings of Aelius Aristides reveal.
However, the term ‘‘group psychotherapy’’ is recent: It
was introduced by Jacob Moreno around 1930. Various attempts had been made prior to that, from Franz
von MesmerÕs tub to the explorations of J. H. Pratt
(1905) or Trigant Burrow (1914). On the eve and at
the beginning of the Second World War, Kurt Lewin
and his collaborators developed the basics of group
dynamics, based on Gestalt theory, observations of
experimental groups, and group training programs.
Siegmund Foulkes and Wilfred R. Bion established the
groundwork for group analysis and psychoanalytic
group psychotherapy. During the 1950s and 1960s
this trend saw a remarkable upsurge in the United
States, Latin America (Enrique Pichon-Rivière, José
Bleger), and in Europe, notably in Great Britain,
France, and Italy.
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GROUPS/ENSEMBLE
There is considerable variation among the theories,
practical techniques, and goals of group psychotherapies,
but a certain number of characteristics are common to
all its forms. The group is composed of a relatively small
number of participants (from three to about a dozen)
who come together for a limited time. The restricted size
of the group enables each of its participants to perceive
and enter into relationship with each of the others; the
time limitation, whether or not it is predetermined
(long-term groups, short-term therapies, groups that
gradually become more open), makes it possible to work
with the resistance effects provoked by the groupÕs
institutionalization.
Several combinable classification criteria can be
used to distinguish different types of groups: monotherapy or cotherapy groups; groups centered on the
group or on the individual; on speech or on nonverbal
modes of expression (ergotherapies, art therapies,
writing, music); on psychodramatic role-playing or on
the body (bioenergy, primal scream, relaxation); on
family relations (psychoanalytic and systemic family
therapies); on instituted groups (therapy groups
within institutions, therapeutic communities).
Regardless of the form of communication used to put
the therapeutic processes into play (words, screams,
improvised or scripted role-playing, sculpting, painting, music, puppets), each theory has its own way of
assessing the therapyÕs processes and effects.
According to the psychoanalytic conception, the
group constitutes a staging ground for the externalization, figuration, and contention of pathogenic representations that are unacceptable in the intrapsychic
space; it is a mechanism for linking and dynamic
transformation of the formations and processes that
cannot be internally bound without this detour
through the work of intersubjectivity. Groups result
in specific modes of transference and resistance. Interpreting these produces a reorganization of the psyche
in its encounter with the object-based reality of
others, with the prohibitions and founding statements
of psychic life and of intersubjectivity. For its members, the group constitutes a powerful identificatory
anaclisis; it generates creativity and the capacity for
symbolization between intrapsychic and bodily reality
and intersubjective and social reality. However,
numerous clinical, methodological, and theoretical
problems have yet to be worked out. Group psychotherapies are not a panacea. They require a personal demand and personal training; their effectiveness
71 4
depends on the specific indications, limits, and principles involved.
RENÉ KAËS
See also: Group phenomenon; Group analysis; Intersubjective/intrasubjective.
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht. (1965). Transformations: Change
from learning to growth. London: Tavistock Publications.
Bleandonu, Gérard. (1991). Les groupes thérapeutiques familiaux et institutionnels. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
Foulkes, Siegmund Heinrich. (1964). Therapeutic group analysis. New York: International Universities Press.
Moreno, Jacob L. (1966). The international handbook of
group psychotherapy. New York: Philosophical Library.
Schneider, Pierre-Bernard. (1965–1972). Pratique de la psychothérapie de groupe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
Further Reading
Brown, Dennis, and Zinkin, Louis. (Eds.) (1994). The psyche and the social world: Developments in group-analytic
theory. London/New York: Routledge.
GROUPS/ENSEMBLE. See Topology
GUEX, GERMAINE (1904–1984)
Germaine Guex, a Swiss psychoanalyst and psychologist
who was a teaching member of the Société suisse de psychanalyse (Swiss Psychoanalytic Society), was born in
France in 1904 and died in Lausanne, Switzerland, in
1984. She studied psychology in Geneva and, after
receiving her diploma from the Institut Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, became Jean PiagetÕs assistant in the psychology laboratory. However, she was attracted to clinical
work above all. In 1930 Guex was recruited by Dr. A.
Répond, a psychoanalyst and director of the psychiatric
clinic of the Swiss canton of Valais in Malévoz, to oversee
a psychoanalytically inspired medical and psychological
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G U I L B E R T , Y V E T T E (1867 –1 944)
unit, the first of its kind. This consultancy was geared
toward children, parents, and teachers, and its work was
both therapeutic and preventive.
Freud a friendship based on mutual admiration. Born
Emma Laure in Paris on January 20, 1867, she died in
Aix-en-Provence on February 3, 1944.
During her years in Malévoz, Guex became
acquainted with Sigmund FreudÕs work, especially
through her connection with Dr. Répond, who was
both a psychiatrist and, as a psychoanalyst, a member
of the Société suisse de psychanalyse. In the 1940s she
moved to Lausanne, where she practiced psychoanalysis and was active in developing psychoanalytic training in French-speaking Switzerland. She was the companion of the psychoanalyst Charles Odier.
From a provincial family, her parents settled in
Paris shortly before her birth. Her mother Albine
owned a boutique, while her father, Hippolyte, a bon
vivant who liked spending money in cabarets and
enjoyed the company of women, sometimes brought
her with him to the café-concerts, where she showed
precocious singing talent. Seamstress, shop girl, and
model, at age sixteen Guilbert came to the notice of
Charles Zidler, later to become director of the Moulin
Rouge, who introduced her to the world of show
business.
In 1950 Guex published La névrose dÕabandon (Abandonment neurosis), revised in 1973 and appearing in a
second edition under the title Le syndrome dÕabandon
(The abandonment syndrome). In this book she focused
on the intense emotional needs and lack of security of
some patients, an aspect of pregenital development that
can impede working through the Oedipus complex—a
new approach at that time. She believed that psychoanalytic treatment could enable such patients to have a new
type of emotional experience of the transference, more
conscious than unconscious, based on listening, mutual
trust, and stability in the analytic relationship. Only
then, she believed, could oedipal issues be analyzed.
Because of the importance of its topic, La névrose
dÕabandon established GuexÕs reputation and has been
translated into several languages.
JEAN-MICHEL QUINODOZ
See also: Abandonment; Switzerland (French-speaking).
Bibliography
Guex, Germaine. (1950). La névrose dÕabandon. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France. (2nd ed.: Le syndrome dÕabandon,
1973.)
Quinodoz, Jean-Michel. (1993). The taming of solitude:
separation anxiety in psychoanalysis (Philip Slotkin,
Trans.). London: Routledge.
Roch, Marcel. (1980). Á propos de lÕhistoire de la psychanalyse en Suisse romande. Bulletin de la Société suisse de psychanalyse, 10, 17–30.
GUILBERT, YVETTE (1867–1944)
A French actress, singer and storyteller, whose repertoire ranged from medieval ballads to suggestive
popular songs, Yvette Guilbert shared with Sigmund
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After performing for a time in Parisian theaters,
Guilbert sang at the Eldorado in 1890, then at the
Moulin Rouge, the Divan Japonais, and other
venues. As a storyteller and singer with an inimitable voice, Guilbert crafted in song the Paris of
Toulouse-Lautrec—who made several famous
sketches of her.
On June 22, 1897, Guilbert married Max Schiller, a
Viennese biologist whom she met during one of her
tours in New York. After the First World War, she
appeared in a number of films and developed a new
repertoire based on her research into the history of old
French songs and medieval ballads, which she collected and published. She also wrote three volumes of
memoirs: La Chanson de ma vie (1927), La Passante
émerveillée (1929), and Mes lettres dÕamour (1933).
On the advice of Madame Charcot, wife of the
famous neurologist, Freud heard Guilbert perform for
the first time in Paris in August 1889, while attending
the First International Congress of Experimental and
Therapeutic Hypnotism. Thereafter he never missed
her concerts when she performed in Vienna. Eventually Guilbert and Freud enjoyed a friendly correspondence. In 1931, in reply to one of her letters,
Freud wrote that her interpretive artistry surely arose
from ‘‘repressed desires and traits that havenÕt had a
chance to develop.’’ Guilbert was furious and rejected
the explanation of ‘‘her very dear friend.’’ A few years
later, however, in the daily newspaper Ce Soir (January
14, 1938), Guilbert wrote an article, ‘‘The ActorÕs
Complex,’’ in which she employed the Freudian theories she had previously rejected.
Her husbandÕs niece, Eva Rosenfeld, became a wellknown psychoanalyst as well as a friend and colleague of
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OF
Anna Freud, with whom she worked at the Hietzing
Schule, which she co-directed. At a musicale presented
by Marie Bonaparte in Paris in 1938, during the XV
International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Guilbert performed FreudÕs favorite song, ‘‘Dis-moi que je suis belle.’’
JEAN-PIERRE BOURGERON
See also: Burlingham-Tiffany, Dorothy; France; Hietzing
Schule/Burlingham Rosenfeld School.
Bibliography
Brécourt-Villars, Claudine. (1988). Yvette Guilbert lÕirrespectueuse. Paris: Plon.
Freud, Sigmund. (1960a [1873–1939]). Letters of Sigmund
Freud, 1873–1939. (Ernst L. Freud, Ed.; Tania and James
Stern, Trans.). London: Hogarth Press.
Guilbert, Yvette. (1902). La vedette. Paris: H. Simonis
Empis.
———. (1926). Autre temps, autres chants. Paris: Robert
Laffont.
———. (1992). 47 enregistrements originaux de 1897 à 1934.
Paris: E.P.M.
Knapp, Bettina, and Chipman, Myra. (1964). That was
Yvette: The biography of the great diseuse New York: Holt,
Rinehart & Winston, 1964).
GUILT, FEELING OF
Guilt represents a sensation of intrapsychic tension,
sometimes linked to apprehension of a catastrophic
threat to oneself. It may also be manifest as humility,
suffering, the need for punishment, remorse, and feelings of inadequacy.
According to Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand
Pontalis (1968), the term describes an emotional state
that arises in consequence of some action that the subject considers reprehensible; it may also refer to a
vague feeling of personal unworthiness, unconnected
to any particular act.
The ‘‘sense of guilt’’ appeared for the first time in
FreudÕs work in his article, ‘‘Obsessive Actions and
Religious Practices’’ (1907b); however, he had previously suggested its outlines in the second section of
his ‘‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence.’’ (1894a) Freud
distinguished two sources of the sense of guilt: fear
of authority and fear of the superego. The former
71 6
compels renunciation of some instinctive pressure or
action, while in the latter, internalization of parental
authority initiates development of the superego. One
of the functions of this agency (the superego), which is
responsible for the evaluation and judgment of the
actions of the ego, is known as moral conscience
(1923b). Aggression stemming from this moral conscience prolongs and intensifies the aggression experienced from authority. Under the influence of the sense
of guilt, the ego submits to the superegoÕs demands,
out of fear of losing its affection and protection.
According to Freud, there is a link between the sense of
guilt and the Oedipus complex.
Anxiety occasioned by loss (or potential loss) of the
loved object is not the only manifestation of the sense
of guilt. There is also the potential for psychic pain
and suffering; excessive humility; repeated failures and
regrets; constant asking for penitence, expiations, and
renunciation; suicidal ideas; and the tendency toward
self-punishment.
Melanie Klein (1948), like Freud, also saw a direct
relationship between the sense of guilt and fundamental
ambivalence arising from the life and death instincts.
She stressed that this feeling not only appears in the
oedipal conflict, but also in the very earliest relationships with the nourishing mother. In her description,
damaged intrapsychic objects become persecutors.
In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a), Freud
described how the sense of guilt, together with the
methods and mechanisms used to struggle against it,
influence the individualÕs relationships, not only with
their immediate family, but also other relationships
within the larger social group, and even with civilization
as a whole. One of the principal aims of psychoanalysis
is therefore to understand how patients manage their
guilt, for example, to understand the extent to which
they can accept ambivalence and responsibility in the
face of instinctual strivings and the feelings that generate guilt. The discovery that patients harbor feelings of
both love and hate for their parents underscores the
importance of guilt as a nodal area of personality development. In the first years of life, the specific ways that
children respond to guilt may predispose them to neurosis and mental instability, but may also prove to be a
source of success and fulfillment.
Klein (1945/1975), in opposition to Freud,
attempted to show, through observation of children in
analysis, that the superego emerges much earlier than
Freud suggested. According to her views, the Oedipus
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complex also appears much earlier, during the first six
months of life. The essential nature of the sense of
guilt resides in the young childÕs impression that its
own experience of aggressive instincts have caused
hurt to the love object. The desire to undo or to repair
this damage derives from the sense of guilt.
To the extent that guilt may be said to reflect, or
result from, discordance between the ego and superego, emergence of the latter implies the ineluctable
appearance of the sense of guilt.
LEÓN GRINBERG
See also: Criminology and psychoanalysis; Death instinct
(Thanatos); ‘‘Dostoyevski and Parricide’’; Guilt, unconscious sense of; Law and psychoanalysis; Melancholy;
Moral masochism; Need for punishment; Self-punishment;
Superego.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1894a). The neuro-psychoses of defence.
SE, 3: 41–61.
———. (1907b). Obsessive actions and religious practices.
SE, 9: 115–127.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
———. (1930a). Civilization and its discontents. SE, 21:
57–145.
Klein, Melanie. (1948). A contribution to the theory of anxiety and guilt. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 29,
113–123.
———. (1975). The Oedipus complex in the light of early
anxieties. The writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 3, 1946–
1963). London: Hogarth. (Reprinted from International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 26 (1945), 11–33.)
Laplanche, Jean; and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1973). The
language of psycho-analysis. New York: Norton, 1973.
Further Reading
Pulver, Stanley. (1999). Shame and guilt: a synthesis. Psychoanalytical Inquiry, 19, 388–406.
Sandler, Joseph, and Sandler, Anne-Marie. (1987). Past
unconscious, present unconscious, and the vicissitudes of
guilt. International Journal Psychoanalysis, 68, 331–342.
GUILT, UNCONSCIOUS SENSE OF
The unconscious sense of guilt is an ego state resulting
from conflict between the aims of the superego and
those of the ego.
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As a psychoanalytical term, according to Jean
Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (1973), the
‘‘unconscious sense of guilt’’ developed a more specific
meaning over time than when it was first used simply
to designate a feeling in the unconscious aroused by an
act considered reprehensible. Its current definition
implies an unconscious relationship between the ego
and superego expressed in subjective phenomena from
which, in extreme instances, any conscious perception
of guilt is entirely absent.
The term itself appeared for the first time in Sigmund FreudÕs article ‘‘Obsessive Actions and Religious
Practices’’ (1907b). ‘‘We may say that the sufferer from
compulsions and prohibitions behaves as if he were
dominated by a sense of guilt, of which, however, he
knows nothing, so that we must call it an unconscious
sense of guilt, in spite of the apparent contradiction in
terms’’ (p. 123). However, the basic idea had been
adumbrated much earlier, in the second part of
FreudÕs ‘‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’’ (1894a).
In accepting the hypothesis that the sense of guilt
arises simultaneously with the gradual development of
the superego, it is important to stress that they both
imply a social dimension, and that the superego also
owes its existence to external factors and represents the
demands of society to the ego. In addition, the superego not only frustrates certain tendencies of the ego,
but also can divert aggression at it. When it does so, it
manifests as a repetitive sense of culpability and expiation. In addition, as Freud wrote in The Ego and the Id
(1923b), ‘‘One may go further and venture the hypothesis that a great part of the sense of guilt must normally remain unconscious, because the origin of conscience is intimately connected with the Oedipus
complex, which belongs to the unconscious’’ (p. 52).
The sense of guilt appears to dominate instinctual
life not only by acting to deny gratification, but also by
leading to an increase in libido and thus the provocation of masochistic pleasure. Psychoanalysts see moral
masochism as an expression of an unconscious sense
of guilt.
Unconscious guilt is one of the most powerful factors in the gratification of passive libidinal wishes.
Narcissistic patients should be helped to acknowledge
the unconscious self-criticism and guilt that underlie
their hostile demands for love. They must come to see
how they project their thoughts and attitudes in order
to regain self-esteem. What is in fact a deficiency of
the superego is largely manifested as self-destructive
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OF
refusal to acknowledge guilt, thereby provoking an
obvious disorder of ego functioning.
Trying to help such patients become aware of their
unconscious guilt reveals characteristic patterns. One
often encounters solid resistance to acknowledging
guilt or even accepting its existence, and frequently
such patients use projection as a defense. An intense
battle is waged with the aim of warding off unconscious guilt, of keeping it silent and hidden. Analysis of
dreams may be useful achieving a degree of acceptance.
Inasmuch as unconscious guilt acts as a form of
‘‘signal anxiety,’’ we might expect it to produce
defenses against a subjectÕs wishes. This indeed turns
out to be the case, and the inhibitions one observes are
its clinical manifestations, seen by some as representing a ‘‘signal function’’ that announces the presence of
guilt. But the most important characteristic of the
unconscious sense of guilt is that it deploys defenses
against passive libidinal wishes, in contrast to guilt
caused by active and aggressive libidinal aims.
The origin and nature of unconscious guilt, and the
way in which it affects psychological development are
both unresolved issues. Some psychoanalytical tendencies are distinguished by the treatment techniques they
employ to deal with the sense of guilt. Some analysts
focus interpretatively on the necessity to ‘‘liberate’’ the
patient from guilt, which they consider pathological
and to which the patient is seen as submitting out of
masochism. Other analysts, in sharp contrast, believe
that the denial of guilt is central to all neurotic conflict,
and that guilt itself is due to aggressive fantasies
against objects. This controversy arises from a conflation of two distinct ideas.
Grinberg (1965), from a Kleinian perspective, has
suggested distinguishing ‘‘persecutory guilt’’ from
‘‘depressive guilt.’’ This distinction permits a better
understanding of the dynamic of the sense of guilt and
thus fosters a broader understanding of the content
and quality of object relations, as well as reactions to
different stimuli and the normal or pathological process of mourning.
71 8
Persecutory guilt appears very early in life, and is
associated with a weak and immature ego. It develops
in parallel with the anxieties of the paranoid-schizoid
position, or in the wake of some frustration or of a
failure of depressive guilt. Despite its early appearance, persecutory guilt has an important influence
upon subsequent psychological growth and plays an
important role in the development both of inhibitions and masochistic attitudes and behaviors. Despair, resentment, fear, pain and self-reproach are the
symptoms of persecutory guilt, as are a compulsion
to repeat and a tendency to ‘‘act out.’’ Extreme cases
occur with schizophrenia, melancholia and pathological mourning.
To the extent that persecutory guilt diminishes,
pain and suffering caused by object loss will
increase, along with a more or less depressive manifestations. Concern for self and object, responsibility
and, in the final analysis, the capacity for reparation
will also increase. These feelings represent a form of
depressive guilt which predominates in the normal
process of mourning and in activities requiring
sublimation.
LÉON GRINBERG
See also: Guilt, feeling of.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1894a). The neuro-psychoses of defence.
SE, 3: 41–61.
———. (1907b). Obsessive actions and religious practices.
SE, 9: 115–127.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
Grinberg, León. (1965). Deux sortes de culpabilité: leurs
relations avec les aspects du deuil normal et pathologique.
Revue française psychanalyse, 29, 2–3.
Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis Jean-Bertrand. (1973). The
language of psycho-analysis (Donald Nicholson-Smith,
Trans.). W. W. Norton: New York. (Original work published 1971)
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HALBERSTADT-FREUD, SOPHIE
(1893–1920)
The fifth child of Sigmund and Martha Freud, Sophie
Halberstadt-Freud was born on April 12, 1893, in
Vienna, and died on January 25, 1920, in Hamburg.
Freud’s ‘‘Sunday’s child’’ was named after Sophie
Schwalb, the niece of Samuel Hammerschlag, Freud’s
Hebrew teacher. Admired by her father, and her
mother’s favorite, Sophie only succeeded in getting
out of the house by the sudden announcement of her
engagement in 1912. On July 20, Freud wrote to his
sister Mitzi, ‘‘His name is Max Halberstadt, he’s thirty
years old, is a distant relative of our family from
Hamburg. He’s very serious, inspires confidence, and
both of them seem to be in love with one another. The
terms are appropriate and bourgeois. No wealth, no
distinction. Something we would not be pleased with
in the case of Max Halberstadt.’’ Engaged on July 28,
they were married on January 14, 1913, in Hamburg.
Hoffer. After marrying Irene Chambers in 1945, he
himself became a psychoanalyst and, under the name
Ernst W. Freud, practiced in Germany, returned to
Great Britain, and finally returned to Germany.
On December 8, 1918, Heinz Rudolf, called
‘‘Heinele,’’ was born in Schwerin.
Sophie Halberstadt-Freud died on January 25,
1920, from complications resulting from the Spanish
flu that ravaged Europe. Freud wrote to Pastor Pfister
on January 27:
This afternoon we received the news that our
sweet Sophie in Hamburg had been snatched away
by influenzal pneumonia, snatched away in the
midst of glowing health, from a full and active life
as a competent mother and loving wife, all in four
or five days, as though she had never existed.
Although we had been worried about her for a couple of days, we had nevertheless been hopeful; it is
so difficult to judge from a distance. And this distance must remain distance; we were not able to travel at once, as we had intended, after the first alarming news; there was no train, not even for an
emergency. The undisguised brutality of our time is
weighing heavily upon us. Tomorrow she is to be
cremated, our poor Sunday child! . . . Sophie leaves
two sons, one of six, the other thirteen months, and
an inconsolable husband who will have to pay
dearly for the happiness of these seven years. The
happiness existed exclusively within them; outwardly there was war, conscription, wounds, the
depletion of their resources, but they had remained
courageous and gay. I work as much as I can, and
am thankful for the diversion. The loss of a child
seems to be a serious, narcissistic injury; what is
known as mourning will probably follow only later.
On March 11, 1914, Ernst Wolfgang was born. The
child’s spool game fascinated Freud and provided the
example of repetition in ‘‘Fort-da’’ (1920g, chap. 2).
On September 22, 1914, Freud wrote to Karl Abraham,
‘‘My grandson is a charming little fellow, who manages
to laugh so engagingly whenever one pays attention to
him; he is a decent, civilized being, which is doubly
valuable in these times of unleashed bestiality. A strict
upbringing by an intelligent mother enlightened by
Hug-Hellmuth has done him a great deal of good.’’
Later, ‘‘little Ernst’’ would be analyzed by his aunt
Anna Freud (Roazen, 1933), who hesitated to adopt
him but made him her legal heir. Emigrating to Great
Britain in 1938 after having traveled to Palestine,
Moscow, and South Africa, he was analyzed by Willy
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H A L L , G R A N V I L L E S T A N L E Y (1844 –1 924)
He wrote of this ‘‘irreparable narcissistic wound’’ in a
letter to Sándor Ferenczi on February 4. On April 11,
1929, he consoled Ludwig Binswanger, who was suffering from a similar loss: ‘‘We know that the acute sorrow we feel after such a loss will run its course, but
also that we will remain inconsolable, and will never
find a substitute. No matter what may come to take its
place, even should it fill that place completely, it
remains something else. And that is how it should be.
It is the only way of perpetuating a love that we do not
want to abandon.’’
Early on, commentators claimed that this grief
inspired the introduction of the death impulse in
Freudian theory. In fact, the war of 1914–1918 and the
thoughts it inspired in Freud were sufficient for this
change in his thinking (see the discussion in ‘‘Why
War,’’ 1933b), but the story continues to be repeated.
By December 18, 1923, Freud had indicated to Fritz
Wittels, who repeated this ‘‘interpretation’’ in his biography, that the book had been written in 1919, while
his daughter was still ‘‘healthy and flourishing’’ (this
claim has been discussed and contradicted for some
time by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, 1993). In September he
gave the manuscript to several friends in Berlin to
read, including Karl Abraham. Concluding, he added,
‘‘Likelihood is not always truth.’’
Similarly, it has for a long time been believed,
wrongly, that the child with the spool was Sophie’s
other son, Heinz Rudolf (Heinele), who had a tragic
destiny. In 1922, taken in by his aunt Mathilde, he was,
according to Freud (letter to Anna von Vest, November 14, 1922), ‘‘physically very fragile, truly a child of
the war, but especially intelligent and endearing.’’ He
died on June 19, 1923, from miliary tuberculosis.
On October 15, 1926, Freud wrote to Ludwig
Binswanger, ‘‘For me, that child took the place of all
my children and other grandchildren, and since then,
since Heinele’s death, I have no longer cared for my
grandchildren, but find no enjoyment in life either.
This is also the secret of my indifference—it has been
called courage—towards the threat to my own life.’’
On March 11, 1928, he returned to the subject in a letter to Ernest Jones: ‘‘Sophie was a dear daughter, to be
sure, but not a child. It was only three years later, in
June 1923, when little Heinele died, that I became tired
of life permanently. Quite remarkably, there is a correspondence between him and your little one. He too
was of superior intelligence and unspeakable spiritual
72 0
grace, and he spoke repeatedly about dying soon. How
do these children know?’’
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Beyond the Pleasure Principle; BurlinghamTiffany, Dorothy; Fort-da; Hollitscher-Freud, Mathilde;
Hietzing Schule/Burlingham-Rosenfeld.
Bibliography
Grubrich-Simitis, Ilse. (1993). Back to Freud’s texts: Making
silent documents speak. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Roazen, Paul. (1993). Meeting Freud’s family. Amherst, MA:
University of Massachusetts Press.
Wittels, Fritz. (1923). Sigmund Freud, his personality, his
teaching, his school. (E. and C. Paul, Trans.). London: Allen
& Unwin.
HALL, GRANVILLE STANLEY (1844–1924)
Psychologist, educator, and philosopher Granville
Stanley Hall was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts, on
February 1, 1844, and died on April 24, 1924 in Worcester, Massachusetts.
The son of Congregationalist farmers, he spent his
adolescence in rebellion against the strict authority of
his father, a model of moral and religious values. He
attended Williams College and Union Theological
Seminary before abandoning religion for the emergent
discipline of psychology. During two trips to Europe,
Hall familiarized himself with currents in philosophy,
became conversant with the scientific trends in physiology and psychology, and studied with biologist and
philosopher Ernst Haeckel. In 1878 at Harvard University he was awarded the first American doctorate in
psychology by William James himself. In Leipzig during 1879–80, he also worked with Wilhelm Wundt,
who was just then establishing the first laboratory of
experimental psychology. There he participated in
word association tests based on Francis Galton’s psychometric experiments, which Carl Jung would later
modify to confirm Freud’s theory of neuroses in a
laboratory setting.
After returning to the United States, in 1880 Hall
began his career as an educator and psychologist,
devoting himself to a systematic study of child and
adolescent development. He edited several journals,
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the most important of which was the American Journal
of Psychology, which eventually became a forum both
to disseminate his own ideas and to publish articles on
psychoanalysis. He taught at Johns Hopkins from
1883, and his interest in the human sciences and in
education led to his appointment as president of Clark
University in 1888, where he was also professor of philosophy and psychology and launched more reviews,
including the Journal of Applied Psychology. In 1892 he
also served as president of the newly founded American Psychological Association.
In 1909, Hall invited Freud to deliver the series of
lectures that launched the psychoanalytic movement
in the United States. The correspondence between the
two men, from 1908 to 1923, includes some thirty-one
letters. For Hall, Freudian theory was a boon to the
hereditarian approach to studying children and adolescents. Like Freud, with whose works he had been
familiar since 1894, Hall was inspired by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and he shared a lively interest in understanding sexuality. He was electrified by
Freud’s lectures in Worcester, and believed that they
reduced to ashes much of the flimsy theoretical structure upon which philosophically-based laboratory
psychology of the time relied.
However, in a letter to Freud four years later
(September 26, 1913) Hall indicated areas of skepticism and disagreement with psychoanalytic theory.
Rather prophetically, he suggested that one day ‘‘specific [hereditary] influences’’ would be discovered to
operate on individuals. He was also critical of extravagant use of sexual symbolism. Subsequently, he made
it clear that he regarded as significant the contributions of Alfred Adler, who had rejected castration anxiety as central to the fears and anxieties of childhood.
Learning of Hall’s friendly relationship with Adler,
Freud wrote that he was sharply stung by what he
viewed as a serious defection. However, Hall continued
to support psychoanalysts in the American Psychopathological Association, and from 1917 to 1920 he
served as president of the American Psychoanalytic
Association. Several years later, responding to Freud’s
admonition that Adler’s ideas were incompatible with
psychoanalysis, Hall defended his eclecticism, suggesting that Freud should be more generous toward rebellious children of psychoanalysis like Adler and Jung.
Hall’s autobiography, published in 1923, indicates that he tried self-analysis and underwent some
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psychoanalysis; he was apparently disappointed with
the results but did not disclose them. In general,
while exasperated by religious and moral restrictions
upon happiness and artistic creation, Hall hoped to
protect the essential virtues of the ideology that he
fought—the cult of work and the intricacies of moral
conscience. The influence of psychoanalysis is perceptible in his 1904 two-volume work on adolescence
and in his life of Jesus Christ, published in 1917.
Hall died from pneumonia at eighty years of age.
He is generally considered, with William James, to be
one of the founders of psychology as a scientific discipline in the United States.
FLORIAN HOUSSIER
See also: Clark University; Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis;
North America; Ontogenesis; Psychology and
psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Esman, Aaron H. (1993). G. Stanley Hall and the invention
of the adolescence. Adolescent Psychiatry, 19, 6–20.
Hale, Nathan G. Jr. (1971). Freud and the Americans: The
beginnings of psychoanalysis in the United States. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Hall, G. Stanley. (1923). Life and confessions of a psychologist.
New York: Appleton.
———. (1904). Adolescence: Its psychology and its relations
to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion
and education. New York: Appleton.
———. (1917). Jesus, the Christ, in the light of psychology.
Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
Houssier, Florian. (2003). G. S. Hall (1844–1924): un pionnier dans la découverte de l’adolescence. Ses liens avec les
premiers pschanalystes de l’adolescent. Psychiatrie de
l’enfant, 46, 655–668.
Rosenzweig, Saul. (1992). Freud, Jung, and Hall the kingmaker: The historic expedition to America (1909). St. Louis:
Rana House.
HALLUCINATORY, THE
The basis for the transformational dynamics of representation-perception-hallucination, the hallucinatory
register is a constant process of mental life, representing the instinctual impulse insofar as it is ‘‘pressure’’
(Drang) and movement (Treiberegung).
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HALLUCINOSIS
In noun form and detached from any psychiatric
connotations, the term hallucinatory was introduced
as a metapsychological notion in 1990 by César Botella
and Sára Botella, in an attempt to broaden an analytic
theory that was overly focused on the notion of representation, and that therefore could not explain certain
analytic structures or why certain analytic treatments
were doomed to failure.
Freud used the expression ‘‘hallucinatory satisfaction of need’’ throughout his writings, and he considered the hallucinatory a basic assumption governing
mental life. However, he never really developed
the idea.
The same was true of the post-Freudians. In ‘‘Le
développement du sens de réalité et ses stades’’ (Stages
in the development of the sense of reality; 1913),
Sándor Ferenczi described a ‘‘hallucinatory stage’’ but
did not explore it in depth. Wilfred Bion took an interest in the topic, but his notion of hallucinosis
remained close to that of pathological hallucination.
Jacques Lacan, in Das Ding (1959), hinted at a ‘‘fundamental hallucination,’’ but he did not develop this
idea either.
André Green, in The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse (1973/1999) was indisputably the
first to posit a hallucinatory formation, as a ‘‘negative
hallucination’’ (the representation of the absence of a
representation; this is a reverse configuration, whose
opposite is hallucinatory realization). According to
Green, hallucination was fundamental to the structure
of the psyche. In ‘‘L’hystérie, unité et diversité’’
(Hysteria, unity and diversity; 1985), Augustin
Jeanneau conceptualized a ‘‘hallucinatory position’’
with the value of a mental function.
The hallucinatory represents the instinctual
impulse in the same way that affect represents qualitatively the quantity of the instinct, and the idea
represents the instinct’s contents. It involves a process
that is inseparable from the regressive pathway that
opens up in dreams but that must be inhibited during the working hours in favor of ideation and
perception.
This notion is indispensable to psychoanalytic practice. At certain times during the session, under the
influence of a formal regression of thought, ‘‘accidents
of thought’’ or a quasi-hallucinatory ‘‘work of representability’’ can unexpectedly occur in the analyst
without his or her conscious awareness; this may be
72 2
the only way to gain access to the meaning of the
patient’s unrepresentable material.
CÉSAR BOTELLA AND SÁRA BOTELLA
See also: Absence; Action-(re)presentation; Amentia;
Experience of satisfaction; Fantasy; Idea/representation;
‘‘Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of
Dreams’’; Negative hallucination; Negative, work of;
Pleasure/unpleasure principle; Primary need; Reality
principle; Reality testing; Representability; Subject’s
desire; Wish-fulfillment; Wish, hallucinatory satisfaction
of a; Word-presentation.
Bibliography
Botella, César, and Botella, Sára. (1990). La problématique
de la régression formelle de la pensée et de l’hallucinatoire.
In La psychanalyse: Questions pour demain, colloque de la
S.P.P. Unesco, Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
———. (1992). Névrose traumatique et cohérence psychique. Revue française de psychosomatique, 2.
———. (2001). La figurabilité psychique. Lausanne and
Paris: Delachaux & Niestlé.
Green, André. (1999). The fabric of affect in the psychoanalytic discourse (Alan Sheridan, Trans.). London: Routledge.
(Original work published 1973)
Jeanneau, Augustin. (1985). L’hystérie, unité et diversité.
Revue française de psychanalyse, 49 (1), 258–283.
HALLUCINOSIS
‘‘Hallucinosis’’ is a term coined by Wilfred Bion in
‘‘Transformations’’ (1965) to denote the mental state of
the psychotic part of the personality. Psychotic panic is
the experience, the O, which impels the personality to
hallucinosis. Psychotic panic arises from a primitive
disaster between infant and mother in which the
infant’s emotional contents fail to find a container,
that is to say, a mother with reverie. Undue envy and
greed in the infant are significant factors in this disaster. In an effort to escape overwhelming anxiety, the
infant evacuates ego functions capable of the experience of psychotic panic, along with other related contents, including space, time and meaning. Such events
are in stark contrast to the normal situation where
alpha-function creates a container for violent
emotions.
In transformations in hallucinosis there is a failure
of realistic projective identification; instead there is an
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HAMLET
explosive projection in an unrestricted mental space.
In a metaphor that has become well-known, Bion
compares the emotional experience of psychotic space
to surgical shock, in which the dilation of capillaries so
increases the space in which blood circulates that the
patient is at risk of bleeding to death in his own
tissues.
In the mental space of hallucinosis, words and
images float without limits, either as debris, or, in an
attempt at synthesis, as conglomerates which are
bizarre objects. Such beta-elements and bizarre objects
indicate a place where the object should be, but, as the
container is destroyed, is not. This place feels very
threatening. In transformations in hallucinosis, sense
organs, instead of being used for perception, become
channels for the evacuation of unwanted mental products; the musculature is also used in this way in the
form of acting out. Words, too, become vehicles of evacuation rather than conveyers of meaning. Manifest
hallucinations may be visual, auditory, tactile, and
olfactory. If the sensorial component has been violently fragmented or pulverized during its expulsion,
the hallucinations of the psychotic patient will be evanescent or even what Bion calls ‘‘invisible.’’
Transformations in hallucinosis should be contrasted with transformations in thought. This contrast
is of clinical importance. In the area of thought, frustration and the absence of the object facilitate the
construction of symbols. In hallucinosis there are no
symbols, only representations of concrete things for
the psychotic part of the personality. A sentence
uttered by a psychotic patient, though it may have the
same words as a sentence uttered by a neurotic patient,
has a different significance. As Leon Grinberg and
others remark in their overall exposition, ‘‘. . . words
like yesterday, later, or some years ago may not be
representations but residues of destructive dispersing
attacks on time.’’ (1993, p. 94).
The psychotic patient believes that his method of
transformation in hallucinosis is superior to transformations in thought in that his universe provides him
with freedom from reality—its restrictions, its
pains—especially of frustration and absence of the
object, and its threats of panic and annihilation. In
analysis, hallucinosis is viewed as especially superior
to the transformations in thought offered by the
analyst.
EDNA O’SHAUGHNESSY
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AND
OEDIPUS
See also: Bizarre object; Hallucinatory, the; Psychotic
panic; Psychotic part of the personality; Transformations.
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred. (1965). Transformations: Change from learning to growth. London, Heinemann.
Grinberg, Leon; Sor, Dario; and Tabak de Bianchedi,
Elizabeth. (1993). New introduction to the work of Bion.
Northvale, NJ; London: Jason Aronson.
HAMLET AND OEDIPUS
An original work of applied psychoanalysis, Hamlet
and Oedipus was initially published in 1910 as an article in the American Journal of Psychology with the title
‘‘The Oedipus Complex as an Explanation of the
ÔMystery of Hamlet.’’’ It was translated into German in
1911 in a brochure in the series Schriften zur angewandten Seelekunde as ‘‘Das Problem des Hamlet und
der Oedipus Komplex.’’
In 1923 it appeared as the first chapter of Essays in
Applied Psychoanalysis (Hogarth Press, London, 1964)
as ‘‘A Psychoanalytic Study of Hamlet.’’ In its current
form the work appeared in 1949 as Hamlet and
Oedipus, together with an essay on the interpretation
of Hamlet, an article on ‘‘The Death of Hamlet’s
Father’’ signed by Jones, and an article by Ella Freeman
Sharpe, ‘‘The Impatience of Hamlet,’’ which had previously appeared in 1929 in the International Journal
of Psycho-Analysis.
There are eight chapters in the book, which is an
attempt to spread Sigmund Freud’s ideas and improve
the recognition of psychoanalysis as a science. With
respect to Freud, aside from the theme of parricide,
the author also discussed matricide, and the homosexual and homicidal nature of the son’s aggression
toward the father. Sharpe’s essay continues Jones’s
work through reference to libidinal development,
regression, and pregenital attachment, and shows how
the difficult confrontation with the oedipal conflict
results in procrastination and its transformation into
blind action and violence.
FRANÇOIS SACCO
See also: Applied psychoanalysis and the interaction of
psychoanalysis; Jones, Ernest; Eissler, Kurt Robert; Literary and artistic creation; Parricide; Phantom; Ornicar?;
Shakespeare and psychoanalysis.
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HAMPSTEAD CLINIC
Source Citation
Jones, Ernest. (1949). Hamlet and Oedipus. London:
Hogarth Press.
HAMPSTEAD CLINIC
Founded in London in 1951 by Anna Freud together
with Helen Ross and Dorothy Burlingham, the
Hampstead Clinic set out to provide therapy and assistance to families, to treat disturbed and handicapped
children irrespective of their problems, social background or past history, and at the same time to offer
aspiring analysts the most balanced and rich training
possible. Anna Freud saw the Clinic as an opportunity
to apply the particular psychoanalytic knowledge she
had acquired in the area of child guidance.
Located at 31 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead,
London, the clinic began full operation only in 1952. It
had many philanthropical supporters, notably the
Field Foundation of Illinois, the Foundation for
Research in Psychiatry, and the Yale Study Center. The
establishment comprised six consulting rooms, a playroom, offices, a library, and a classroom for use in the
training of therapists.
In addition to the treatment of children, simultaneous mother-and-child therapy was practiced under
the supervision of Dorothy Burlingham. Burlingham
also promoted the creation of an index that would
record data gathered during child analysis, enter it on
cards, and organize it thematically in close correlation
with the analytic context and with what children
revealed therein. Unconscious contents, anxieties,
defenses, character traits, object-relationships, and
manifestations of the transference were some of the
themes serving as index headings. This classification
system had its origins in the methods developed by
Burlingham and Anna Freud when they directed the
Jackson Nursery in Vienna and later the Hampstead
War Nurseries in London.
For her part, Anna Freud perfected a diagnostic
tool that later came to be known as the ‘‘diagnostic
profile.’’ This approach used a psychological questionnaire intended to generate diagnoses on the basis of
information garnered from interviews with children
and their families. The goal was to increase the reliability of child analysis while making it easier for analysts
to take effective therapeutic action much earlier than
had hitherto been possible.
72 4
The Hampstead Clinic soon achieved a fame that
allowed its founders to undertake several pathbreaking
experiments. In 1954, Burlingham started the analysis
of a blind child, and this marked the beginning of a
long collaboration between the clinic and the Royal
National Institute of the Blind. She soon opened a nursery school for blind children in a house conceived by
Ernst Freud and built in the garden of the main building. Later on, a Well Baby Clinic was set up in order to
help mothers respond to the physical and emotional
needs of their babies, and the observation of normal
children became possible thanks to the institution of a
kindergarten.
DELPHINE SCHILTON
See also: Burlingham-Tiffany, Dorothy; Childhood;
Freud, Anna; Great Britain; Hietzing Schule/BurlinghamRosenfeld; Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, The.
HANDLING
Handling is the way a mother manages the moment to
moment physical care of her infant such that the baby
gets to know his own body. It necessarily involves the
mother and infant going on in a psychosomatic partnership; as if they formed one unit (Winnicott, 1962).
Donald Woods Winnicott presented his ideas of
infant care and its relation to psychological development to the lay public in a series of radio broadcasts
and child care journals (Winnicott, 1947). He gave
detailed descriptions of what happens between the
mutually adapted mother and infant, for example with
breastfeeding or when a mother picks up her baby. In
this paper Winnicott made his famous statement,
‘‘there is no such thing as a baby. . . . A baby cannot
exist alone, but is essentially part of a relationship’’
(p. 88). The description of the mother’s handling of
her baby grew out of Winnicott’s detailed observations
of mother-infant interactions in his work as a pediatrician and later his psychoanalytic work with both child
and adult patients. Mutually attuned and sensitive
physical care of the baby gives the baby a sense of his
own body: ‘‘an indwelling of the psyche in the soma’’
(1970). The mother approaches her baby and picks
him up as if there is a person within the body she
approaches. This concept is adapted to the quality of
care enacted in psychoanalytic treatment. The mother
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H A P P E L , C L A R A (1889 –1 945)
adapts herself to what the baby can understand, and to
what the baby needs. Thus, Winnicott insisted that the
mothering of one’s own baby is a personal job, that no
one else could do as well. The mother’s handling of her
own baby is so sensitive as to be unique.
The baby has no experience of being a baby, so it is
dependent upon the mother’s capacity to adapt to his
needs in order to develop the experience of mutuality.
The ‘‘good-enough mother’’ manages the baby’s body
and its needs in such a way that he comes to know his
body—that there is an inside and an outside, a body
schema integrated with his personal psychic reality,
that is: ‘‘personalization.’’
PAUL CAMPBELL
See also: Breastfeeding; Good-enough mother; Holding;
Integration; Maternal; Maternal care; Neutrality/benevolent neutrality; Object.
Bibliography
Winnicott, Donald. (1964) Further thoughts on babies as
persons. In his The child, the family, and the outside world
(pp. 85–92). Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books.
(Original work published 1947)
———. (1965) Ego integration in child development. In his
The maturational processes and the facilitating environment
(pp. 56–63). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1962)
———. (1970) The mother-infant experience of mutuality. In E. Anthony and T. Bender (Eds.), Parenthood:
Its Psychology and Psychopathology. Boston: Little, Brown
& Co.
———. (1989) On the basis for self in body. In C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd, and M. Davis (Eds.), Psychoanalytic
explorations. London: Karnac. (Original work published
1971)
HAPPEL, CLARA (1889–1945)
Clara Happel, a German psychoanalyst, was born on
October 1, 1889, in Berlin. She committed suicide on
September 16, 1945, in Detroit.
While studying medicine, Happel showed an early
interest in psychoanalysis, and after settling in
Frankfurt in 1921, she began analysis with Hanns
Sachs. The same year Max Eitingon facilitated her
admission to the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society. She
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attended the Eighth International Congress in
Salzburg in 1924, where Olga Székely-Kovacs drew her
caricature. In 1925 in Berlin, Happel lectured on male
homosexuality.
When the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society became the
Deutsche psychoanalytische Gesellschaft (German
Psychoanalytic Society) in 1926, Happel, with Karl
Landauer, was appointed to head the Frankfurt
branch. With Landauer, she participated in the foundation of the Southwest German Psychoanalytic
Working Group, which operated from 1929 to 1933
and from which would emerge the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1931 Happel moved to Hamburg,
where with August Waterman she established a
study group.
After Hitler came to power, Happel, a Jew, firmly
advocated that Jewish members of the Deutsche
psychoanalytische Gesellschaft resign in protest. Her
motion was rejected at a meeting on November 18,
1933. This episode earned her the enmity of Ernest
Jones, who perceived it as at odds with his efforts to
mediate the situation and save psychoanalysis in
Germany. As late as 1936 he was reluctant to allow
her to join after her resignation in protest two
years earlier. Anna Freud, however, opposed this
restriction.
In January 1936, divorced from her husband
(probably because he was not a Jew), Happel left
Germany with her two children, emigrating first to
Palestine and then to the United States, where she was
welcomed by Sándor Radó. Within a year she was
certified as training analyst. She joined the Chicago
Psychoanalytic Society in 1938 but settled in Detroit,
one of the developing outposts. In 1940, with Editha
and Richard Sterba and Leo H. Bartemeier, Happel
helped establish the Detroit Psychoanalytic Society
and its training program, in which she taught, supervised, and lectured.
Happel remained close to fellow émigré analysts,
welcoming them as she had been embraced when she
arrived in the United States. At the beginning of World
War II, she was affected by legal sanctions targeting
‘‘aliens’’ in the United States when a psychotic patient
denounced her. She was arrested on the day after the
attack on Pearl Harbor and detained for six weeks. Her
correspondence with her children, who were then
attending school in New York, reveals a life that was
lonely, difficult, and sad.
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Happel opened a practice in New York, which
enabled her to spend more time with her married
son. Yet despite this success, she became depressed,
and her condition worsened at the end of World War
II with revelations about the Nazi death camps and
the use of atomic weapons on Japan. In addition,
she found it difficult to adjust to life in a country
where she was denied citizenship and not recognized
as a medical doctor. She recalled Stefan Zweig’s
suicide several years earlier and ended her own life
in September 1945.
By the time he was thirty, Freud was a brilliant
researcher in the field of natural science, well-versed in
neuro-anatomy and neuro-physiology, in addition to
having done some work in chemistry. At the laboratory of Brücke (1876–1882) he acquired an expertise
in chemistry and physics, including thermodynamics
(Helmholtz). As to epistemology, Freud, besides his
familiarity with the German positivist school and the
debates it carried on with Vienna (Brentano, Manch,
Bolzmann), attended, for two years, Brentano’s seminar on Aristotle.
Happel’s published work includes a paper on substitute formation in masturbation and observations on
a case of pederasty. Yet she is better remembered for
her training and teaching activities in Germany and
United States.
In his writing, Freud refers little to the hard
sciences as such. He uses the German system of classification: sciences of nature and of mind, situating
psychoanalysis among the former, while insisting that
it is relevant to ‘‘almost all the sciences of the mind’’
(1924f). There was one exception: ‘‘Strictly speaking,
there are only two sciences: psychology, pure and
applied, and natural science’’ (1933a, p. 179). Freud
was frankly ironic about official sciences, assuming,
moreover, the following position: ‘‘Scientific thinking
does not differ in its nature from the normal activity
of thought, which all of us, believers and unbelievers,
employ in looking after our affairs in ordinary life’’
(1933a, p. 170).
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Sterba, Richard F.; Sterba-Radanowicz-Hartmann,
Editha.
Bibliography
Eickhoff, Friedrich-Wilhelm. (1995). The formation of the
German Psychoanalytical Association (DPV): Regaining
the psychoanalytical orientation lost in the Third Reich.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 76, 945–956.
Friedrich, Volker. (1988). Letters of an emigrant: The psychoanalyst Clara Happel to her son Peter, 1936–1945.
Revue internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse, 1,
323–348.
Happel, Clara. (1923). Onanieersatzbildungen. Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 9, 206–209.
———. (1927). Der Mann in der Kloake. Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Pädagogik, 2, 86–89.
———. (1926). Communication: Notes on an analysis of a
case of paederasty. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,
7, 229–236.
Steiner, Riccardo. (1989). It is a new kind of Diaspora. International Review of Psychoanalysis, 16, 35–72.
HARD SCIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
‘‘Hard sciences’’ are those disposing of a theory of
measurement. The development of qualitative mathematics, since the middle of the 19th century, and its
diverse applications have made this description
questionable.
72 6
The relationship between chemistry and psychoanalysis was formed early on—the former lent some
of its prestige to the latter, signifying that the scientific method was common to both of them Freud, and
Freud hoped that chemistry would isolate the toxins
linked to sexuality and neuroses. The contribution of
thermodynamics to his dynamic and economic point
of view was evident also; his use of the terms ‘‘free
energy’’ and ‘‘bound energy’’ makes this clear. Considerations of stability, carried over from Fechner,
equally played a part. At a time when psychoanalysis
was still unsure of its foundation, Freud defended the
theory of the drives by noting that physics also was
unsure of its foundations. Accordingly, he placed the
discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin, and his own,
on the same plane, for having dealt blows to human
narcissism and religious convictions. Finally, a nostalgia for energetics surfaced when he evoked the ‘‘quantitative factor,’’ decisive for symptomatology, yet
unattainable.
‘‘Analysts . . . cannot repudiate their descent from
exact science and their community with its representatives. . . . Instead of waiting for the moment when they
will be able to escape from the constraint of the
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familiar laws of physics and chemistry, they hope for
the emergence of more extensive and deeper-reaching
natural laws, to which they are ready to submit’’
(1941d [1921], p. 178–79). Qualitative dynamics,
which reinterprets thermodynamics, may prove to be a
part of this hoped-for emergence.
MICHÈLE PORTE
See also: Science and psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1924f). A short account of psychoanalysis. SE, 19: 189–209.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on
psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
———. (1941d [1921]. Psycho-analysis and telepathy. SE,
18: 173–193.
Lacan, Jacques. (2002). Écrits: A selection (Bruce Fink,
Trans.). New York: W.W. Norton.
Further Reading
Bucci, Wilma. (1997). Psychoanalysis and cognitive science.
A multiple code theory. New York: Guilford Press.
Holt, Robert. (1997). Psychoanalysis and the philosophy of
science. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
Shevrin, Howard. (1995). Psychoanalysis: one science, two
sciences, or no science?. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 43, 963–985.
Strenger, Carlo. (1991). Between hermenutics and science. An
essay on the epistemology of psychoanalysis. Madison, CT:
International Universities Press.
HARTMANN, HEINZ (1894–1970)
Physician and psychoanalyst Heinz Hartmann was
born in Vienna on November 4, 1894, and died in
Stony Point, NY, on May 17, 1970.
Hartmann’s family had been distinguished for several generations. One grandfather, Moritz Hartmann,
was a well-known poet, essayist, professor, and member of parliament; the other grandfather, Rudolf
Chrobak, was an eminent physician and professor.
Hartmann’s father, Ludo Hartmann, was a professor of
history and founder of public libraries and adult education; his mother, Grete Chrobak, was a successful
sculptor and pianist.
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Tutors educated Hartmann until age thirteen; he
continued in public schools and at the University of
Vienna, where he attended lectures in many fields,
earned his medical degree, and became a psychiatrist
and faculty member in Wagner-Jauregg’s clinic. He
published two papers on quinine metabolism during
medical school, and then published several papers on
psychiatry with Paul Schilder. Becoming interested in
Freud, he published, with S. Betlheim, what became a
minor classic paper in experimental psychoanalysis,
‘‘On Parapraxes in Korsakov Psychosis,’’ demonstrating by experiment the validity of some of Freud’s concepts of symbolization.
When Karl Abraham, with whom Hartmann had
arranged to have a training analysis in Berlin, unexpectedly died, Hartmann had his first analysis with
Sándor Rado; and while in Berlin wrote Die Grundlagen der Psychoanalyse (The foundations of psychoanalysis; 1927). Before 1937, he published about two
dozen papers, including twin studies and studies of
psychoses, neuroses, values, and cocaine; and he contributed to a major handbook on medical psychology.
When Adolf Meyer offered Hartmann a full professorship at Johns Hopkins, Freud offered to analyze
Hartmann free of charge if he would stay in Vienna.
Hartmann was analyzed by Freud, and became a key
member of his generation of Freud’s followers at the
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (a group including
Helene and Felix Deutsche, Edward Bibring, Ernst
Kris, Robert Waelder, Willy Hoffers, Hans Lampl, and
Anna Freud), and co-editor of The International of
Journal of Psychoanalysis. He married Dora Karplus, a
pediatrician who later became a child and adult psychoanalyst. They had two sons, Ernest Hartmann and
Lawrence Hartmann; one became a psychoanalyst and
sleep and dream researcher, the other a child and adult
psychiatrist, educator, and President of the American
Psychiatric Association.
In 1937, Hartmann read to the Vienna Society a
paper on ego psychology that developed into a book,
Ich-Psychologie und Anpassungsproblem (1939) (later
published in English as Ego Psychology and the Problem
of Adaptation; 1958). Along with Anna Freud’s The
Ego and Mechanisms of Defense, that work was a decisive landmark in extending psychoanalysis into the
ego-psychological areas that would be central for the
next several decades. In 1938, after the annexation of
Austria by Nazi Germany, the Hartmanns moved to
Paris, then to Switzerland, and in 1941 to New York.
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There Hartmann became a leader of the New York
Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, which was energized by many illustrious immigrants. He served for
many years as a training analyst and as the first director of the Institute clinic. His old close friendship with
Ernst Kris developed into many years of extraordinary
collaboration, and they soon invited Rudolph Loewenstein to join them. Meeting once a year for many
years, the three jointly wrote a series of major papers.
With Kris and, in London, Anna Freud, Hartmann
founded an annual, The Psychoanalytic Study of the
Child, in 1945; he helped to establish and maintain it
as one of the key publications in psychoanalysis for
several decades. President of the International Psychoanalytic association in the 1950s, he was then elected
their Honorary President for Life, and served as something of a dean of world psychoanalysis in the midtwentieth century.
Hartmann was considered a major clinical analyst,
teacher, theoretician, and metapsychologist, building
on and extending Freud’s ideas and findings. He was
frequently an integrator. A pillar of that era’s psychoanalytic establishment but not a cloistered thinker, he
welcomed biopsychosocial thinking, contributions
from general biology, neurobiology, and medicine;
and also psychology, developmental theory, history,
philosophy, anthropology, sociology, ethology,
mythology, and art. He saw psychoanalysis as central
to a general psychology.
Hartmann is best known for his work on ego psychology and adaptation, elaboration of conflict and
drive theory, neutralization of aggression, and the conflict-free ego sphere, which serve as structures for
much clinical and research work. Familiar analytic
concepts such as structural and developmental theory,
drive, and conflict were, by Hartmann’s time, securely
enough established to allow powerful additions, such
as contributions from biology and interactions with
average expectable (and other) environments, and
such as ego functions and adaptation. His success in
including mind-brain interactions, as well as centrally
defining structures of mind-mind and mind-environment interactions, established some lasting solid
ground, and also helped prepare the field for some
subsequent analytic schools, notably object relations
theory, self psychology, and continuing psychoanalytic
attempts at biopsychosocial integration.
LAWRENCE HARTMANN
72 8
Work discussed: Ego Psychology and the Problem of
Adaptation.
Notions developed: Ego autonomy; Ego, damage inflicted
on the; Ego functions; Self.
See also: Adaptation; Alteration of the ego; Defense
mechanisms; Desexualization; Ego; Ego (ego psychology); Ego libido/object libido; Ego psychology; France;
Identification; Kris, Ernst; Lehrinstitut der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung; Loewenstein, Rudolf M.;
Neutrality/benevolent neutrality; New York Psychoanalytic Institute; Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, The; Self
psychology; Self-representation; Société psychanalytique
de Paris and Institut de psychanalyse de Paris; Stage (or
phase); Structural theories; United States; Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung.
Bibliography
Hartmann, Heinz. (1927). Die Grundlagen der Psychoanalyse. Leipzig: G. Thieme.
———. (1939). Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation. New York, International Universities Press, 1958,
122 p.
———. (1944). The psychiatric work of Paul Schilder. Psychoanalytic Review, 31, (1), p. 296.
———. (1950). Comments on the psychoanalytic theory of
the ego. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 7, 9–30.
———. (1956), The ego concept in Freud’s work. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 37, 433.
(1964). Essays on ego psychology. New York, International
Universities Press. (Original work published 1939)
Hartmann, Heinz; Kris, Ernst; and Loewenstein, Rudolf M.
(1946). Comments on the formation of psychic structure.Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 2, p. 11–38.
———. (1964). Papers on psychoanalytic psychology, New
York: International Universities Press.
Hartmann, Lawrence. (1994). Heinz Hartmann: A memorial
tribute and filial memoir. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child,
49, 3–11.
HATRED
In day-to-day use, hatred is a violent feeling that
impels the subject to wish another person ill and to
take pleasure in bad things that happen to that person.
In ‘‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’’ (1915c),
Sigmund Freud wrote that the primal structure of
hatred reflects the relationship to the external world
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that is the source of stimuli: ‘‘At the very beginning, it
seems, the external world, objects, and what is hated
are identical’’ (p. 136). The determining factor is thus
the relationship to unpleasure. Freud thus asserted
that ‘‘Hate, as a relation to objects, is older than love’’
(p. 139), for this feeling originates in the ego’s selfpreservation instincts rather than in the sexual
instincts (although later on hatred can bind with the
latter to become ‘‘sadism’’). It can be inferred from
this that ‘‘hatred is a kind of self-preservation, to the
extent of destroying the other, while loving is a way . . .
of making the other exist,’’ as Paul-Laurent Assoun
expressed it in Portrait métapsychologique de la haine:
Du symptôme au lien social (Metapsychological portrait
of hatred: from symptom to the social bond; 1995).
This emotion that aims to destroy thus seems to be
radically opposite to love. But as Roger Dorey underscored in ‘‘L’amour au travers de la haine’’ (Love
through hatred; 1986), there are deep affinities between
the two: Not only does hatred precede love, but no doubt
there is love only because there is hatred, at the very
origin of the person’’ Indeed, in both ‘‘Instincts and
Their Vicissitudes’’ and ‘‘Negation’’ (1925h) Freud
showed that hatred is not exclusively destructive
toward the object: Acting as the first differentiating
boundary between inside and outside, it ensures the
permanence of that boundary and is its constituting
principle. Speaking of the purified pleasure-ego, which
places the characteristic of pleasure above all others,
Freud wrote in ‘‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’’ that
love ‘‘is originally narcissistic, then passes over on to
objects, which have been incorporated into the
extended ego, and expresses the motor efforts of the
ego towards these objects as sources of pleasure’’
(p. 138).
But prior to the establishment of genital organization, in which love has ‘‘become the opposite of hate’’
(p. 139), the two earliest stages make no distinction
between them. The oral stage involves incorporating
and devouring the object; in the anal-sadistic stage,
‘‘the striving toward the object appears in the form of
an urge for mastery, in which injury or annihilation of
the object is a matter of indifference’’ (p. 139). It must
be recalled that hatred always expresses the ego’s selfpreservation instincts and that both the will to power
and the urge for mastery originate in hatred; before
the genital stage, self-preservation of the ego is precisely what is endangered by the encounter with the
object. The love/hate distinction that forms in the
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genital stage allows them to be linked together, bringing whole persons into being.
If hatred is experienced as the unpleasure derived
from the encounter with the ‘‘other’’ that threatens the
ego’s integrity, the manner of being of this ‘‘other’’
must be reintroduced. With notions involving the
determining role, for the baby, of the object, with its
expected function as ‘‘container’’ of excitations, ‘‘toilet
breast,’’ or alpha function, Donald Winnicott, Donald
Meltzer, and Wilfred Bion, among others, have shed
new light on the treatment of hatred.
NICOLE JEAMMET
See also: Aggressiveness/aggression; Aimée, case of;
Ambivalence; Breast, good/bad object; Dead mother
complex; Drive/instinct; Ego and the Id, The; Emotion;
Erotomania; Frustration; ‘‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’’; Love-Hate-Knowledge (L/H/K links); Melancholia; Need for punishment; Negative therapeutic reaction;
Negative transference; Object; Object, choice of/change
of; Obsessional neurosis; Paranoia; Paranoid position;
Persecution; Primary object; Projection; Racism, antiSemitism, and psychoanalysis; Reversal into the opposite;
Rivalry; Self-hatred; Self-mutilation in children; Shame;
Splitting of the object; Superego; Transference hatred;
Turning around; ‘‘Why War?’’.
Bibliography
Assoun, Paul-Laurent. (1995). Portrait métapsychologique de
la haine: Du symptôme au lien social. Paris: Anthropos.
Dorey, Roger. (1986). L’amour au travers de la haine. Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse, 33, 75–94.
Freud, Sigmund. (1915c). Instincts and their vicissitudes.
SE, 14: 109–140.
———. (1925h). Negation. SE, 19: 233–239.
Jeammet, Nicole. (1989). La Haine nécessaire. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
HEIMANN, PAULA (1899–1982)
Paula Heimann, British physician, psychiatrist, and
psychoanalyst, was born Paula Glatzko on February 3,
1899, in Danzig, Germany, and died October 22, 1982,
in London.
Heimann grew up in Danzig. She attended the High
School for Girls and studied Medicine in Koenigsberg,
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H E L D , R E N É (1897 –1 992)
Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, and Breslau. She passed
the ‘‘Staatsexamen’’ in 1925.
After attaining her MD, Heimann studied at the
Psychiatric University Clinic in Heidelberg, and the
Charité in Berlin. She received psychoanalytic training
at the Berlin Psycho-Analytic Institute (1928–1932).
Her training analyst was Theodor Reik. Other teachers
included Otto Fenichel, Hanns Sachs, Franz Alexander, Karen Horney and Sándor Rado. She emigrated to
London in 1933, and that year became an associate
member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.
Heimann became a full member in 1939, a control
supervisor in 1940, and a training analyst in 1944. In
1938, she received her British medical qualification
from Edinburgh. She became a Fellow of the Royal
College of Psychiatrists in 1971. In 1924, Heimann
married Franz-Anton Heimann; they had one daughter and divorced in 1933.
In London Heimann became a close collaborator
of Melanie Klein and in 1935 went into further analysis with her. The termination date is not known.
In 1955 she left the Kleinian Group of Analysts of
the British Psycho-Analytical Society. after years of
increasing alienation on both sides, and she became
an active member of the Independent Group of Psycho-Analysts. In 1949 she was elected a member of
the Training Committee of the British PsychoAnalytical Society, becoming its training secretary
in 1954.
She was an esteemed teacher and a sought-after
training analyst and supervisor, at first for students of
the Kleinian Group and later for those of the Independent Group. After the war she helped to train German
analysts and went regularly on weekends to the
Psychosomatic Clinic in Heidelberg and later to the
Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt am Main. Psychoanalytic institutes in France, Germany, Italy, North
and South America invited her to give papers and hold
seminars.
Paula Heimann wrote thirty papers. Her earlier
contributions are of a Kleinian theoretical orientation,
and two of them are contributions to the Controversial
Discussions (1942–1944) of the British PsychoAnalytical Society. Her later papers mainly discuss various clinical problems and questions of technique, in
particular those of transference, counter-transference,
the psychoanalytic setting and different aspects of formulating and making interpretations.
73 0
She read her paper on ‘‘Counter-Transference’’
(1950) at the 16th International Congress of PsychoAnalysis in 1949, in which she conceived of the phenomenon as an important tool for the understanding
of patients’ communications. The paper was influential for many other authors during the 1950s and
1960s. She never wrote a comprehensive critique of
Kleinian theory and technique but it is often implicit
in her later papers (1955–1982). She discussed the
concept of sublimation and the concept of the death
instinct in their clinical relevance in early papers
(1942, 1952) from a Kleinian viewpoint, but presented
a revision of them in later papers (1959, 1964). Her
published contributions to discussions of papers read
at International Congress of Psycho-Analysis (1962,
1964, 1966, 1970) are clear critical evaluations of the
main papers presented.
MARGRET TONNESMANN
See also: Change; Controversial Discussions; Countertransference; Dependence; Empathy; Great Britain; Paranoid position.
Bibliography
Heimann, Paula. (1950). On counter-transference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 31, 81–84.
———. (1952). Certain functions of introjection and projection in early infancy. In Klein, Heimann, Isaacs, and
Riviere (Eds.) Developments in Psycho-Analysis (p. 122–
168). London, Hogarth.
———. (1962). Contribution to the discussion of ‘‘The
curative factors in psycho-analysis’’. International Journal
of Psycho-Analysis,43, p. 228–231.
———. (1989). About children and children-no-longer. Collected papers of Paula Heimann 1942–1980. M. Tonnesmann,
London/New York: Tavistock Publications/Routledge.
King, Pearl H.M., and Steiner, Riccardo. (1991). The FreudKlein controversies 1941–1945. London/New York:
Tavistock Publications/Routledge.
HELD, RENÉ (1897–1992)
René Held, a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst,
was born October 7, 1897, in Paris, where he died on
February 18, 1992. He was the second son of a family
that had emigrated from Russia after a short stay in
Germany. His father was unable to obtain an equivalency diploma for his medical degree and held a series
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of relatively minor positions with pharmaceutical
companies. Consequently, Held was forced to go to
considerable efforts to become fully integrated in
French society.
A man with curious mind, cultivated and sharp
witted, Held was not immediately attracted to psychoanalysis. He was initially interested in psychiatry,
which he had discovered during his medical studies at
the Salpêtrière and then at Val-de-Grace during the
First World War. It was here that he met André Breton
and Louis Aragon. His was an inquisitive mind, and it
was difficult for Held to settle into a sedentary and
unchanging activity. The uncertainties of life led him
to dabble in Russian revolutionary activities while he
was an assistant surgeon in Kiev in 1917 (which earned
him the Croix de Guerre in 1918). Through his friendship with the painters of the Paris School and his
familiarity with the surrealist movement, he developed
an in-depth understanding of art.
It is said that the young twenty-nine-year-old psychiatrist was offered an opportunity to participate in
the foundation of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris
(Paris Psychoanalytic Society) in November 1926 and
that he refused—something he regretted all his life.
The story is not entirely credible, however, as Held
would have been more attracted to the newly formed
Évolution Psychiatrique, because he was a contributor
to the first issue of that organization’s review.
During the 1930s, he was much more interested
in developing a clientele as an independent psychiatrist than in adopting Freudian theories that were
not yet fully accepted. He got married on March 26,
1926, had a son, Jean Francis, in 1930, and had
divorced by 1933. His mother, who followed Jewish
family tradition closely, almost never left his side
from then on.
Miraculously, he managed to survive the Occupation unscathed. A disciplined Frenchman who believed
in his country, Held registered as a Jew with the police
in his area and returned home with a yellow star,
which he decided, two days later, never to wear again.
After narrowly escaping a roundup of French Jews, he
left the city for the unoccupied countryside but
returned to Paris, where, in spite of the seals that had
been placed on the door of his apartment on avenue
Raymond-Poincaré, he managed to live there, treating
American pilots who had been hidden by the
Resistance.
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It wasn’t until the Liberation that Held’s name
began to appear on the rolls of psychoanalytic meetings. He underwent a teaching analysis with John
Leuba, and was then supervised by Sacha Nacht. At a
meeting of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris held in
October 1947, presided over by his analyst, he gave a
talk on ‘‘a phobia about knives.’’ It was here that he
met Pierre Mâle, a man who was to remain a colleague
and friend until his death. That same year he was
made a member of the society. The following year,
Professor Gilbert-Dreyfus created for him, at the La
Pitié hospital, the first department of psychosomatic
medicine.
He was not fond of Jacques Lacan and remained
faithful to his friends during the 1953 split. He was
made a full member of the Société Psychanalytique de
Paris on February 16, 1954, when Pierre Mâle was president, and was given responsibility for teaching activities in the new Paris Psychoanalytic Institute. He
taught psychosomatic medicine in 1954, and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, with Mâle, in 1957. In 1963,
during the 24th Congrès des psychanalystes de langue
française des pays romans (Congress of Frenchspeaking psychoanalysts from Romance-languagespeaking countries), he presented a ‘‘Rapport clinique
sur les psychothérapies d’inspiration psychanalytique
freudienne,’’ which became a book, Psychothérapie et
Psychanalyse (1968). He was also president of Évolution Psychiatrique and the Société de Médecine Psychosomatique (Society of Psychosomatic Medicine).
Held was a brilliant improviser, simultaneously
droll and wise, sometimes carried away by his garrulousness. All of his verbal eloquence has vanished but,
as Gérard Mendel, one of his analysands, wrote, ‘‘We
have his books, four books, in which, regardless of the
subject, the man could be seen on the page, thumbing
his nose at dogma and obfuscation.’’ His books include
De la psychanalyse à la médicine psychosomatique
(1968) and his memoir of surrealism published in
1973 as L’Oeil du psychanalyste (Payot). His last completed book—Held began dozens of unfinished projects for novels, scripts, and other writings—brings his
critical faculties to bear on the then-current fashion
for all things Freudian: Problèmes de la cure psychanalytique d’aujourd’hui. Us et abus de la psychanalyse
(1976).
Although there was much that was colorful about
Held’s character, we must not overlook the originality
of his ideas and his numerous contributions to the
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psychoanalytic conferences organized by the SPP until
the 1970s. As Roland Jaccard remarked, ‘‘rationalist,
atheist, and materialist, René Held was an oldfashioned psychoanalyst: sensitive and warm, he
placed the interests of his patients above those of
theory.’’
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Face-to-face situation; France; Psychotherapy;
Société psychanalytique de Paris and Institut de psychanalyse de Paris.
Bibliography
Held, René. (1968). De la psychanalyse à la médecine psychosomatique. Paris: Payot.
———. (1968). Psychothérapie et psychanalyse. Paris: Payot.
———. (1973). L’Œil du psychanalyste. Paris: Payot.
Jaccard, Roland. (1992). La disparition de René Held: la psychanalyse et l’humour. Le Monde, Tuesday, February
25, 1992.
Mendel, Gérard. (1992). René Held toujours vivant. Raison
présente, 102, 120.
HELLER, HUGO (1870–1923)
Hugo Heller, the second Viennese publisher of Freud’s
works, was born in Hungary in 1870 and died in
Vienna on November 29, 1923.
When he finished his secondary education, he
trained as a bookseller and contributed to founding
the ‘‘first populist bookshop in Vienna.’’ In 1905, he
founded his own bookshop (Hugo Heller & Co.)
comprising a publishing house, an art gallery, and a
reception hall. Many exhibitions and conferences were
organized in this richly endowed bookshop by contemporary poets and artists such as Arnold Schönberg,
Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Jakob
Wassermann, and Thomas and Heinrich Mann. In
response to the cultural orientation of this bookshop,
its clients came from the intellectual elite of Vienna.
Freud was one of the regular customers and in 1907
he gave a conference, ‘‘Der Dichter und das Phantasieren’’ (Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, 1908e), to
Heller’s literary-minded public. Relations between
Hugo Heller and Freud were not based solely on Freud’s
interest in literature; they were also consolidated by
73 2
Heller’s interest in psychoanalysis. He was of the small
circle of the founding members of the Wednesday
Society, where he delivered his first paper: ‘‘Zur
Geschichte des Teufels’’ (On the History of the Devil).
Even before Lou Andréas Salomé was invited to attend
the Wednesday Society, Heller had already given them
an account of the work of this author who was already
enshrined in the mists of legend. His daughter, Maggie
Heller, was one of the pioneers of psychoanalytic teaching. In 1906 she organized a survey of writers and scientists, asking them to list ‘‘ten good books.’’ Arthur
Schnitzler, Ernst Mach, and Peter Altenberg, along with
Freud and others, responded to the survey, which Heller
published under the title Vom Lesen und von guten
Büchern (Reading and good books).
During World War I, Heller took over the scientific
section of the Deuticke publishing house and became
the ‘‘real publisher of the house of Freud.’’ For Heller
this change in Deuticke also reflected the new interest
of psychoanalysis in terms of its applications for the
mind sciences and the broadening of its readership
toward a more general public. In the literary, but also
the social democratic context of this publishing house
the following works of Freud were published:
Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘‘Gradiva’’ (1907a),
Totem and Taboo (1912–13a), the ‘‘Collection of short
writings on the theory of the neurosis’’ (4 volumes,
1907–09) and Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
(1916–17a). Its catalog of authors also included analysts like Otto Rank and Alfred von Winterstein.
Hugo Heller also took the risk of publishing two
psychoanalytic reviews, the Internationale Zeitschrift
für (ärtzliche) Psychoanalyse and Imago, after several
other publishers had backed down. Theodor Reik,
who was working in Heller’s bookshop at the time,
took charge of the two reviews. During the war the
publishing house suffered from production conditions
that went from bad to worse, with the result that it
became problematic to produce the two reviews.
Finally, Heller publications could no longer ensure a
regular production of books. As a result, Freud’s work
Zur Vorbereitung einer Matapsychologie (Toward the
Preparation of a Metapsychology), which he had
entrusted to Heller, never went to print and is considered to have been lost.
After the creation of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag in 1919, Heller handled only the distribution of periodicals and books. After World War I,
although still a member of the Viennese Psychoanalytic
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H E L L M A N N O A C H , I L S E (1908 –1 998)
Association, he no longer attended their meetings.
When he died on November 29, 1923, an obituary in
the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse
observed that Viennese Psychoanalytic Society had lost
one of its oldest members.
LYDIA MARINELLI
See also: Deuticke, Franz; Imago. Zeitschrift für die
Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften; Internationale Zeitschrift für (ärtzliche) Psychoanalyse.
Bibliography
Hall, Murray G. (1985). Österreichische Verlagsgeschichte
1918–1938. Vienna-Köln-Graz.
Mühlleitner, Elke. (1992). Biographisches Lexikon der Psychoanalyse (Die Mitgleider der Psychologischen MittwochGesellschaft und der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung
1902–1938). Tübingen: Diskord.
Nunberg, Herman, and Federn, Ernst. (1962–78). Minutes
of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. New York: International Universities Press.
Worbs, Michael. (1983). Nervenkunst. Literatur und Psychoanalyse im Wien der Jahrhundertwende. Frankfurtam-Main.
HELLMAN NOACH, ILSE (1908–1998)
Dr. Ilse Hellman Noach, distinguished psychoanalyst
and expert on child development, was born in Vienna
on September 28, 1908, and died in London on
December 3, 1998. Her parents, Paul and Irene
Hellman, were deeply engaged in the cultural climate
of the day, encouraging the arts and promoting the
talents of musicians who achieved distinction.
Fascinated by children, Hellman, on leaving school,
completed a two-year course specializing in juvenile
delinquency. She joined a home near Paris for the children of parents unable to care for them, and her fluent
French allowed her to attend evening classes in psychology at the Sorbonne. The home was run on family
lines, and the same staff member looked after each
small group of children. On returning to Vienna, she
attended the University and studied under Charlotte
Buhler, Professor of Child Development, who was
making detailed studies of children from birth
onwards. Buhler was invited to London as visiting Professor at University College, retaining her post in
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Vienna, and in 1937 she invited Hellman, who by then
had been awarded her Ph.D., to join her in the study of
retarded children. When Buhler was in Vienna,
Hellman took charge. It was then, too, that she met the
distinguished analyst and child expert, Susan Isaacs,
who became a close friend.
At the outbreak of war Buhler left for the United
States, and the Home Office employed Ilse Hellman
and other psychologists to work with children evacuated from London to escape the threat of air raids.
Taken from their mothers to remote areas, many suffered disturbed sleep, eating disorders and bedwetting, and the psychologists set up special homes to
cope with these problems. In 1942, Freud’s daughter
Anna invited Hellman to join her war nurseries, set
up to provide for children whose families were disrupted by wartime bombing, and she remained there
until the nurseries closed at the end of the war. The
staff was residential and, to facilitate attachment to a
substitute parent, each member cared for the same
small group of children (as in the French home). The
three homes together cared for 150 children, and
the staff slept wherever they could. The children’s
development was rigorously observed and meticulously recorded, and Ilse Hellman found the experience invaluable for the understanding of the effects of
separation, the restriction of the damage it occasioned, and child observational research. She continued to meet with, and evaluate, her own ‘‘war babies’’
for over fifty years.
While at the nurseries, she trained in psychoanalysis, and rapidly rose to prominence in the British
Psycho-Analytical Society. Her attractive and friendly
personality put her on the best of terms with Melanie
Klein, Donald Winnicott and other well-known analysts: theoretical differences never interfered with
friendship. She joined the Staff at Anna Freud and
Dorothy Burlingham’s Hampstead Child Therapy
Course and Clinic, which had quickly earned a worldwide reputation. The clinic originated major studies
on child development, normative and pathological, to
many of which Ilse contributed. For some years she
was in charge of the department for adolescents, publishing valuable papers about the difficulties encountered with this age group. She wrote on many other
subjects. She was a fine teacher. Her deeply empathic
understanding of the problems encountered by students in their clinical work made her a valued mentor
in work with both adults and children. Her clinical
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HELPLESSNESS
skills with children of all ages secured her international
reputation.
It was not until after the war that she learned that
her mother and brother had died in Nazi concentration camps. It was then she met and married the art
historian, Arnold Noach, who had survived the Nazi
occupation of Holland. He later became Professor of
the History of Art at the University of Leeds. His was a
fun-loving and warm personality. He died suddenly in
1976. Hellman Noach continued her work for many
years, although in the last few years she worked much
less intensively. Impressed by the fact that many young
people showed great trust, and a readiness to confide
in her, she amusingly called herself an ‘‘analytic grandmother.’’ But, at the age of 84, increasing ill health
forced her to abandon the practice of, though not the
interest in, the profession she had served so well.
She endured a cruelly incapacitating illness with
great fortitude, always finding a warm and welcoming
word for her visitors. Generations of analysts have
cause to be grateful for her guidance, instruction, and,
above all, her wisdom. She was survived by her one
daughter, Maggie, and grandchild, Sophie.
CLIFFORD YORKE
See also: Great Britain.
Bibliography
the basis for the relationship to the real object, lost and
rediscovered thanks to ‘‘indications of reality,’’ and
invested with the meaning ‘‘mutual understanding.’’
Helplessness and the theory of anxiety are closely
linked. The helpless baby, powerless to fulfill its needs
and without any adequate means of discharging internal excitation, experiences ‘‘automatic anxiety.’’
Anticipation of helplessness triggers ‘‘signal anxiety,’’
the ego’s appeal to the ego (1926d [1925]).
In a state of helplessness owing to its prematurity,
the preverbal human infant cries, experiences and
recognizes its powerlessness, and urgently alerts the
succoring object. The ability to apprehend its helplessness depends on the protective shield against stimuli,
whose action is thus the basis of relationships, the precondition of effective communication.
For Melanie Klein (1952/1975), the distress associated with the death instinct, a source of tremendous
persecution, precipitates projection. This is the foundation of what she calls the schizoid-paranoid
position.
When a human being is reduced to a state of helplessness, subjected to a primal kind of passivity by the
impositions of others, he or she may seek to regain
mastery through repetition of the experience. For
Kreisler et al. (1966), too much distress of this kind
may cause psychosomatic disorders; for Tustin (1972),
the result may be recourse to autistic defenses.
ANNE AUBERT-GODARD
Hellman, Ilse. (1990). From war babies to grandmothers:
Forty-eight years in psychoanalysis. London: Karnac.
HELPLESSNESS
The state of helplessness is linked to the infant’s initial
powerlessness in the face of its needs. This causes distress, as the protective shield is overwhelmed; only the
intervention of another person can relieve this
suffering.
The neurophysiological model of Sigmund Freud’s
‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’’ (1950c [1895])
posits the baby’s original helplessness as the prototype
of all traumatic situations. Helplessness and satisfaction structure the two modes of mental functioning.
In the primary mode, the desired object and desired
satisfaction are hallucinated immediately through
recathexis of the memory traces left by the real experience. In the secondary mode, a lasting discharge forms
73 4
See also: Alpha function; Anxiety; Dependence; Illusion;
Narcissitic injury; Prematurity; Transference depression;
Thing, the; Trauma.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1925). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety.
SE, 20: 87–172.
———. (1950c [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology.
SE, 1: 281–387.
Klein, Melanie. (1975). Some theoretical conclusions regarding the emotional life of infants. In The writings of Melanie
Klein (Vol. 3, pp. 61–93). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1952)
Kreisler, Léon, Fain, Michel, and Soulé, Michel. Études sur
la clinique psychosomatique du premier âge. Coliques,
insomnie, mérycisme, anorexie, vomissements. Psychiatrie
de l’enfant, IX (1), 89–222.
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‘ ‘H E R E D I T Y
Tustin, Frances. (1972). Autism and childhood psychosis.
London: Hogarth.
‘‘HEREDITY AND THE AETIOLOGY
OF THE NEUROSES’’
Sigmund Freud first published this article in French in
the Revue neurologique in Paris. It is important for two
independent reasons. The first reason is historical, in
that it contains the first occurrence of the word
‘‘psychoanalysis.’’ The second reason is more theoretical, in that the article makes a clear distinction between
Freud’s theories and those deriving from Jean Martin
Charcot’s teaching on the role of heredity in the etiology of the neuroses. The article goes on to provide a
complete exposition of Freud’s thoughts on the sexual
etiologyof neuroses, and his theory of seduction.
The opening sentence reads: ‘‘I am addressing in
particular the disciples of J.-M. Charcot, in order to
put forward some objections to the aetiological theory
of the neuroses which was handed on to us by our
teacher’’ (1896a, 143). Heredity is only a ‘‘condition,’’
to borrow the term used in the distinction already
made the year before (1895f), but it is the ‘‘specific
causes’’ that must be sought.
Referring back to the nosographical distinctions he
made between hysteria, obsessional neurosis, neurasthenia, and anxiety neurosis, he affirms that these
‘‘functional pathological modifications have as their
common source the subject’s sexual life, whether they lie in
a disorder of his contemporary sexual life or in important
events in his past life’’ (p. 149). He adds: ÔI am quite sure
that this theory will call up a storm of contradictions
from contemporary physicians’’ (pp. 149–50).
The etiology of neurasthenia lies in immoderate
onanism and spontaneous pollutions, and that of
anxiety neuroses in forced abstinence, or genital irritation that does not result in orgasm. With regard to the
other states: ‘‘I owe my results to a new method of psycho-analysis, Josef Breuer’s exploratory procedure; it is
a little intricate, but it is irreplaceable, so fertile has it
shown itself to be in throwing light upon the obscure
paths of unconscious ideation’’ (p. 151). The origin of
the disorders is a memory that is related to the sexual
life: ‘‘The event of which the subject has retained an
unconscious memory is a precocious experience of sexual relations with actual excitement of the genitals,
resulting from sexual abuse committed by another
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AETIOLOGY
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NEUROSES’’
person; and the period of life at which this fatal event
takes place is earliest youth—the years up to the age of
eight to ten, before the child has reached sexual maturity’’ (p. 152). The memory of this act passively suffered
in dread: ‘‘The memory will operate as though it were a
contemporary event. What happens is, as it were, a posthumous action by a sexual trauma’’ (p. 154).
The precocious event can also be found in ‘‘obsessional neurosis,’’ but with a ‘‘capital’’ difference: ‘‘it is a
question . . . of an event which has given pleasure, of an
act of aggression inspired by desire (in the case of a
boy) or of a participation in sexual relations accompanied by enjoyment (in the case of a little girl). The
obsessional ideas . . . are nothing other than reproaches
addressed by the subject to himself on account of this
anticipated seuxal enjoyment’’ (p. 155).
Sent to the Neurologisches Zentralblatt on the same
day, February 5, 1896, the article Further Remarks on
the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence reviews the last two
etiologies and develops the notion of repression, which
is missing from the French text. Freud also adds the
analysis of a ‘‘case of chronic paranoia’’ that shows that
this affection also comes "from the repression of distressing memories and that its symptoms are determined in their form by the content of what has been
repressed" (1896b, pp. 174–75).
Of course Freud had sent these considerations to
Wilhelm Fleiss a few months earlier, but they find
their first public expression here. He made the following comment to Fleiss on April 26, 1896: "A lecture on
the etiology of hysteria at the psychiatric society was
given an icy reception by the asses and a strange evaluation by Krafft-Ebbing: ÔIt sounds like a scientific
fairy tale.’ And this, after one has demonstrated to
them the solution of a more-than-thousand-year-old
problem, a caput Nili. They can go to hell, euphemistically expressed’’(1985c [1887-1904]).
The seduction theory has often been called into
question in the course of the history of psychoanalysis,
from Freud’s abandonment of his ‘‘neurotica’’ in September 1897. Taken up again by Sándor Ferenczi in
1932, then by his disciples, the theory has also seen
polemical use, by Jeffrey Masson in 1984.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Choice of neurosis; Constitution; France; Memories; Obsession; Reminiscence.
735
HEREDITY
OF
ACQUIRED CHARACTERS
Source Citation
Freud, Sigmund. (1896a). L’hérédité et l’étiologie des névroses. Revue neurologique, 4: 161–169; GW, 1: 407–422;
Heredity and the aetiology of the neuroses. SE, 3: 141–156.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1895f). A reply to criticisms of my paper
on anxiety neurosis. SE, 3: 118–139.
———. (1896b). Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses
of defence. SE, 3: 157–185.
———. (1896c). The aetiology of hysteria. SE, 3: 186–221.
———. (1985c [1887-1904]). The complete letters of
Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904 (Jeffrey
M. Masson, Ed. and Trans.). Cambridge, MA : Belknap/
Harvard University Press.
Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. (1984). The assault on truth.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
HEREDITY OF ACQUIRED CHARACTERS
The expression ‘‘heredity of acquired characters’’ generally refers to the transmission to descendants of
modifications taking place in the course of the individual life of a forebear, such transmission being possible
by virtue of these modifications being integrated into
the forebear’s genotype. Such modifications may be
morphological, functional, or even behavioral
(acquired through learning). This idea, which was central to the evolutionism of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, was
later very largely rejected. Freud nevertheless accorded
it a non-negligible role in some of his theoretical views.
We have to bear in mind that psychiatry and psychology at the end of the nineteenth century were very
strongly marked by the idea that individual characteristics were essentially determined by hereditary data
(in the genetic sense), whether in reference to normal
or pathological development, including mental
pathologies. It must also be said that in this domain
the theory of degeneration was well established.
It is not surprising that Freud initially stood by the
theory. In 1888 he wrote, in agreement with Jean
Martin Charcot, that ‘‘the aetiology of the status hystericus is to be entirely looked for in the heredity’’
(1888b). However, he made a clear distinction over the
following years between the inherited ‘‘constitutional’’
causes that provide the individual’s base psychic
terrain, and the ‘‘occasional causes,’’ principally the
73 6
vicissitudes of sexual life, which alone could explain
the appearance and form of the mental pathology.
Publishing his translation of Charcot’s Leçons du
mardi (Tuesday lectures), he went so far as to contradict him by writing that ‘‘the most frequent cause of
agoraphobia, as well as the other phobias, does not
reside in heredity but in the anomalies of sexual life’’
(1892–94a).
In Studies on Hysteria (1895d) he actively criticized
recourse to the notion of degeneration as an explanation of hysterical phenomena, and restated the complementary nature of constitutional and accidental
causes. He never departed from this position, which he
stated clearly in the manuscripts he addressed to
Wilhelm Fleiss (Ms B, 1950a), then repeated in his
article in French on Heredity and the Aetiology of the
Neuroses (1896a), and each time over the following
years that he discussed the problem of the ‘‘choice of
neurosis’’—the determination of a subject’s evolution
toward hysteria or phobia.
The problem took on a greater dimension when
Freud undertook to answer the question that cannot
fail to rise in such a perspective: where do the ‘‘constitutional causes’’ themselves come from? He answered
with a thesis inspired by Charles Darwin, and even
more so by Ernst Haeckel, that found its most complete formulation in Totem and Taboo (1912–13a):
major events in the prehistory of humanity mark all its
later development and fashion the individual development of each child. This recourse to ‘‘phylogenesis’’
was coupled with two postulates: the first borrowed
from Lamarck (transmission of acquired characters),
the second from Haeckel (ontogenesis recapitulates
phylogenesis). He focused on the hereditary transmission of general developmental factors and psychic
function, remaining more discreet on the subject of
differential factors.
These Freudian theses have been vigorously criticized, particularly their Lamarckian aspect which
seems to have been eliminated by the victory of neoDarwinism and modern genetics. Contemporary work
in molecular genetics and population genetics seems to
suggest new ways of formulating the question of psychic heredity (Chiland C., Roubertoux P., 1975–1976).
ROGER PERRON
See also: Constitution; Cultural transmission; Identification fantasies; Instinct; Intergenerational; Phylogenesis;
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H E R M A N N , I M R E (1889 –1 984)
Phylogenetic Fantasy, A: Overview of the Transference Neuroses; Prehistory; Thalassa. A Theory of Genitality.
Bibliography
Chiland, Colette, and Roubertoux, Pierre. (1975–1976).
Freud et l’hérédité. Bulletin de psychologie, 4–7.
Freud, Sigmund. (1888b). Hysteria. SE, 1: 39–60.
———. (1892–94a). Preface and footnotes to the translation of Charcot’s ‘‘Tuesday Lectures.’’ SE, 1: 129–144.
———. (1896a). Heredity and the aetiology of the neuroses.
SE, 3: 141–156.
———. (1912–13a). Totem and Taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
———. (1950a [1887–1902]). Extracts from the Fliess
papers. SE, 1: 173–280.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies on hysteria, SE, 2: 48–106.
HERMANN, IMRE (1889–1984)
Imre Hermann, Hungarian neurologist and psychoanalyst was born on November 13, 1889 in Budapest
and died there on February 22, 1984.
He spent most of his long life in Budapest where he
was born. He received his medical degree in 1913.
While still a university student, he became interested
in experimental psychology. During the 1918–19 revolutions he was assistant professor to Géza Révész at the
faculty of psychology. There he met Alice Czinner, also
Révész’s student, who became an analyst herself and
his life companion of fifty-three years (1922–1975).
He set up analytical practice in 1919. Discounting
the few months of the siege of Budapest during the
German occupation, he continued his psychoanalytical practice without interruption up to the last months
of his life. While a university student, he also attended
Sándor Ferenczi’s lectures, and it was Ferenczi who
invited Hermann to join the society. Hermann was a
member of the Hungarian and International Psychoanalytical Societies from 1921; Secretary of the
Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society from 1925, vicepresident between 1936–44, and president between
1945–49. An honorary professor, he lectured at the
medical university and the faculty of arts in Budapest
between 1946–49.
His first important works were in the field of the
psychology of thinking: Psychoanalyse und Logik
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(1924), Das Ich und das Denken (1929). In the first he
explored the unconscious background of certain logical steps, such as doubling and reversal, based on
observations of patients. In the second, he established
a relationship between individual differences in
thought processes with sense-organ orientation. In a
series of experiments in 1921, he demonstrated, that,
given a choice of identical elements, a child will select
an external element, while an adult will select a center
element, but that in a regressive state external selection
returns. Unconscious operations also tend toward
external selection. His book, Pszichoanalizis, mint
módszer (Psychoanalysis as a Method, 1933; published
in German in 1934; 1963) is a summary of the results
of his teaching of psychoanalysis.
In the 1920s his interest turned toward the behavior
of primates. He noted a peculiar instinctive behavior
of the offspring of anthropoid apes: they spend the
first months of their lives clinging onto the fur of their
mothers. He set forth his theory of the clinging instinct
in detail in Az ember ôsi ösztönei (The Primeval
Instincts of Man; 1943, 1984). Hermann’s interest
also extended to a number of other areas. His monographs about Fechner (1925) and János Bólyai (1945)
and several other writings show interest in the psychology of creativity. He also published the book, Az
antiszemitizmus lélektana (The Psychology of AntiSemitism; 1945). Based on clinical observations of
obsessional neurosis he identified the dissociated
superego. He noted the relationship between affectivity and space perception. Toward the end of his life he
found a relationship to exist between musicality and
perversions.
Hermann’s theory of the clinging instinct prepared
the way for the work of John Bowlby and René Spitz,
and supported Mihály Bálint’s theory of primary
object relationship. His studies in the psychology of
thinking make him one of the forerunners of ego psychology. In addition, he deserves credit for maintaining the continuity of psychoanalysis in Hungary and
for reintroducing psychoanalytic training during the
period of liberalization of communist dictatorship.
HUNGARIAN GROUP
See Also: Alcoholism; Christians and Jews: A Psychoanalytical Study; Clinging instinct; Hungarian School; Hungary;
Racism, anti-Semitism and psychoanalysis; Shame.
737
HERMENEUTICS
Bibliography
Binet, Agnes. (1984). Útbaigazı́tás. In Hermann (Ed.): Az
ember õ si ösztönei (pp. 15–33). Budapest: Magvetõ.
Hermann, Imre. (1933). A pszichoanalı́zis, mint módszer.
Budapest: Novák R. és Tsa.
———. (1943). Az ember õ si össztönei Pantheon. Budapest:
Magvetõ, 1984.
Nemes, Lı́via. (1984). Hermann Imre munkássága. In
Hermann Imre ‘‘Az ember õ si ösztönei’’ (p. 586–612).
Budapest: Magvetõ.
Vikár, György. (1985). Obituary. Imre Hermann, 1889–1984.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 66, 111.
HERMENEUTICS
The term hermeneutics is used broadly to describe the
process of justifying interpretation through exposing
the criteria used to produce it. The form is also
used, by extension, to designate a twentiethcentury philosophy for which interpretation is either a
condition for accessing meaning through thought,
and therefore a condition of every science of mind as
such, thus implicating the normativity of logic, or the
praxis of thought itself, no product of thought being
capable of escaping infinite reinterpretation since it
would then no longer be living thought but dead
thought.
In a limited sense, Logic, as understood by Aristotle’s Organon, has been and remains the framework of
hermeneutics. ‘‘Hermeneia,’’ Paul Ricoeur writes, ‘‘in
the fullest sense, is the meaning of the sentence’’—and
goes on to criticize an ‘‘overly Ôlengthy’ concept’’ of
interpretation. But this is also the case when ‘‘hermeneutics’’ is understood as biblical exegesis (an ‘‘overly
restricted’’ sense). Here it is theology, understood as
an exclusive theory and therefore as a preestablished
doctrine, that conditions truth and falsehood, and
thus access to the determination of meaning. It should
not be surprising therefore to find within the result of
the interpretation what we were trying to find from
the start.
Understood as philosophy, hermeneutics rejects the
fact that logical concepts, in the Hegelian sense, can
present and determine meaning, or that the ‘‘logic of
the concept’’ can be its concretization; nor can the
concept serve as a criterion of signification. However,
hermeneutic finality can remain with the concept in
73 8
the sense of discourse, or, on the contrary, an interpretation that falls short of the separation of words and
things, an interpretation of the constitution of a possible world by each and for all, or even a fundamental
process of ‘‘leveling’’ the language of the unconscious.
Freud considered that analytic interpretation, at the
clinical situation, transmutes the patient’s dreams into
the true creative and critical power of subjectivity. For
this reason interpretation is not and could not be an
‘‘extension’’ of the dream, as Ludwig Wittgenstein
claimed, believing to have found in this a critique of
the unscientific nature of Freudian ‘‘hermeneutics.’’
Since, according to Wittgenstein, to interpret a dream
is to prolong it, Freud’s method of dream interpretation remains within the dream from the point of view
of its scientific value. Thus one can also say that hermeneutics risks arbitrariness or relevancy that is only
superficial to the extent that it can drift into an
imaginary free association of ideas in connection of
symbiotic or ‘‘esoteric’’ object, whereas this free association must itself be the object of a rigorous interpretation with reorganized and shared criteria; so
hermeneutics also runs the risks of falling into a ‘‘delirium of interpretation,’’ a psychotic hermeneutics used
by the schizophrenic, who cultivates a discourse of
paradoxes in order to protect himself from ambivalence and conflict (Paul-Claude Racamier).
DOMINIQUE AUFFRET
See also: Amplification (analytical psychology); Deferred
action; Interpretation; Philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
Ricoeur, Paul. (1965). History and truth. (Charles A. Kelbley,
Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1955)
———. (1970). Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation. (Denis Savage, Trans.). New Haven: Yale University
Press. (Original work published 1965)
———. (1974). The conflict of interpretations (Don Ihde,
Ed.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1969)
HEROIC IDENTIFICATION
Didier Anzieu proposed the notion of heroic identification in connection with his concept of the group
illusion (1971). Anzieu extensively studied group
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dynamics and made significant contributions to that
field with his ideas of the skin-ego (1984, 1989) and
psychic envelopes.
By ‘‘group illusion,’’ he wrote, ‘‘I mean a particular
mental state that is seen in natural groups as well as
in therapeutic or formative groups, and that is spontaneously verbalized by group members in the following form: ÔWe are doing well together; we’re a
good group; our leader or our supervisor is a good
leader, a good supervisor’’ (1971). According to
Anzieu, three conditions are necessary to establish
the group illusion: the designation of one group
member as a victim or scapegoat (‘‘One of us is
bad’’), the formulation of an egalitarian theory (‘‘We
are all alike’’), and finally, the refusal to take gender
differences into account (‘‘We are all born outside of
sexual relations’’). With regard to this last condition,
he further explained, ‘‘The group illusion expresses
an unconscious statement according to which group
members are not born in the same way as individuals, but are instead a product of parthenogenesis,
living within the body of a fertile and all-powerful
mother’’ (1971).
With this set of conceptual tools, Anzieu reminded
us that the group derives from a founding father, and
as Freud showed in ‘‘Group psychology and the analysis of the ego’’ (1921c), the great majority of group
members are, or believe themselves to be, equally
loved by the founding hero. ‘‘For the founder, the
group serves as a fantasized resonator that gives body
to his ideas, and as a mediator for making these ideas
known to a broad public. For the group members,
the founder satisfies their heroic desires and proves
that they can obtain the love of the superego’’
(Anzieu, 1984).
Such, then, are group members’ identifications with
the heroism of the group’s founder and leader. As was
often his practice, Anzieu drew examples from
mythology to support this concept, which enriches
and complements the classical Freudian views on
identification.
BERNARD GOLSE
See also: Ego ideal/ideal ego; Group analysis; Identification.
Bibliography
Anzieu, Didier. (1971). L’illusion groupale. Nouvelle revue de
psychanalyse, 4, 73–93.
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———. (1984). Les groupes et leurs romans des origines. In
Didier Anzieu, Bertrand Cramer, Georges David, et al., Le
nouveau roman familial, ou ‘‘On te le dira quand tu seras
plus grand’’ (pp. 99–109). Paris: E.S.F.
———. (1989). The skin ego (Chris Turner, Trans.). New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Original work published
1985)
Freud, Sigmund. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
HEROIC SELF
The heroic self, as understood by Riccardo Steiner
(1999), refers to the creative person’s specific need to
associate with, to compete with, and to surpass, the
heroes of their own or of some other cultural tradition.
Although the heroic self is principally a component
specific to the creative personality, it is present, in
varying degrees, in every single person.
Steiner’s notion of the ‘‘heroic self ’’ is derived,
through the work of Daniel Lagache, Hermann
Numberg, Alain de Mijolla, André Green, Jacques
Lacan, and other French authors, from the phenomenological differentiation of the various aspects of the
ego as originally described by Freud in his paper
entitled ‘‘On Narcissism: an Introduction’’ (1914c). In
this work, Freud spoke of the existence of an ‘‘ideal
ego’’ and of an ‘‘ego ideal,’’ and later he also mentioned
the existence of a ‘‘superego.’’ The heroic self is one of
the ways in which the ideal ego manifests itself. Forming part of the constitutional endowment of the creative personality, it has, of course, constitutional
aspects. Yet, understood from a Kleinian point of view,
the heroic self can either be fostered or inhibited, from
the beginning of life, by the reverie, or by the lack of
reverie, shown by the mother and the parental couple.
Later on in life, it can also be fostered, or inhibited, by
relatives, by teachers, by cultural or other institutions,
depending on the attitude these have towards the
potential heroic self of the creative personality.
The heroic self manifests itself through what Steiner
calls heroic projective and introjective identifications.
The way in which it manifests itself depends on the
individual’s previous vicissitudes. If, for instance, the
heroic self has been properly fostered by the creative
person’s family, or by their educational environment
(by a teacher, school, etc.), at a certain moment the
creator will start to feel the specific need to identify
parts of the self with the heroes of their own or of
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HEROIC SELF
some other cultural tradition. They will do this via
heroic projective identifications, as they will also be
able to introject those same heroes via introjective
identification. Particularly interesting, developmentally speaking, is the period Freud called ‘‘the family
romance,’’ and during adolescence, when it is often
possible to observe the first manifestations of the
heroic self, although Steiner insists that the unconscious roots of the heroic self have to be traced back
to the earliest object relationships and to the way
they have been dealt with during the depressive
position phase.
Conceived in this way, the heroic self constitutes an
important aspect of the creative process. Due to the
creator’s constant interaction with its chosen tradition
or peers, the creative process can never therefore be
conceived to be developing in a socio-cultural
vacuum, nor can it ever be understood as being a
purely subjective process. In other words, there can
never be a relationship between the creator and their
unconscious which excludes all relationship with the
tradition or the peers of the creator’s heroic self.
For various psychopathological reasons, and as a
result of events experienced during the course of infantile and adolescent development, the heroic self and its
heroic introjective and projective identifications can
be deeply disturbed and, in some cases, can almost
cease to exist. All this can result in a megalomanic distortion of the heroic self, which comes to feel narcissistically and destructively superior to any form of
dependence on peers or cultural traditions. In such
cases, creators isolate themselves and refuse to learn
from peer or cultural traditions. The disturbances can
also manifest themselves as a profoundly paralyzing
and melancholic ‘‘apathic’’ which again leads to
impossibility of the individual being able to relate constructively to peers or cultural traditions, or to be able
to learn from them.
In order for the creative personality to be able to
use their own heroic self and their heroic projective
and introductive identifications, it is vitally important
that help is given to the damaged creative personality,
via psychoanalytic treatment, to repair not only their
own internal and external objects, but their heroic self
as well. This leads to it being possible for the creative
personality to learn from their heroic peers, or from
the heroes of the chosen tradition. And, in the case of
genuinely creative personality, it leads to a capacity to
tolerate the specific anxiety related to the need not
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only to bypass their biological parents and their creativity, but also to bypass and to compete constructively
with the great heroes of their cultural tradition, and,
sometimes, with great heroic peers. Particularly
important is the possibility for the creator’s heroic self
to be able to identify with the creative intercourse of
their parents, at least in fantasy. This does necessarily
mean that the creator has to generate children! Very
often, their ‘‘children’’ are their creative results. All this
is possible, according to Steiner, if the creator and
their heroic self have achieved a good enough, even if
not absolute, capacity to function according to what
Klein and her followers have called the depressive position (Segal, 1991).
The notion of the‘‘heroic self ’’ and its heroic projective and introjective identifications may help one to
acquire a better understanding of certain general
aspects of the creative process, particularly those concerning the creator’s relationship with the cultural tradition or traditions to which they belong, or of which
they make use in their own work. It can therefore lead
to a better psychoanalytic understanding of cultural
movements such as classicism, romanticism, futurism,
and the like, because these all involve a particular
unconscious and emotional relationship between creativity, individuality, originality, and the role played in
it by tradition. It can also shed light on the way it is
possible, from a psychoanalytic point of view, to evaluate a creative work in general. Even the reader, the literary or art critic, and so on, all have to mobilize their
heroic selves and their heroic projective and introjective identifications in order to understand and evaluate a creative work.
If one looks at its psychopathological manifestations, the notions of a megalomanic psychopathic
heroic self (and this is something Daniel Lagache has
pointed out at an individual level) can help to clarify
some aspects of what could be called a ‘‘folie à plus,’’
which is to say a stimulation of the megalomanic and
psychopathic aspects of the heroic self at a mass level.
In order to do this, the mass needs a megalomanic and
psychopathic leader. All this could help towards a better understanding of the unconscious roots of the
power which appeals to groups and to the masses,
based on their reference to the ‘‘heroes,’’ past or present, of a particular cultural or historical tradition, not
least certain past and present-day religious figures and
movements. These heroes, religious figures and movements have been used, and continue to be used, in a
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distorted and destructive way by both old and more
recent totalitarian and fundamentalist regimes.
RICCARDO STEINER
See also: Creativity; Ego ideal; Ego ideal/ideal ego; Grandiose self; Heroic identification; Myth of the hero; Self;
Trauma of Birth, The.
Bibliography
Lagache, Daniel. (1982). La psychanalyse et la structure de la
personnalité. In his Oeuvres (pp. 163–78). Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France. (Original work published 1962)
Segal, Hanna. (1991). Dreams, phantasy and art. London:
Routledge-The Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Steiner, Riccardo. (1999). Some notes on the Heroic Self and
the meaning and importance of its reparation for the creative process and the creative personality. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. 80, 685–718.
HESNARD, ANGÉLO LOUIS MARIE
(1886–1969)
A psychoanalyst, doctor with the French Navy, and
professor at the École Principale du Service de Santé
de la Marine, Angélo Louis Marie Hesnard was born in
Pontivy in the Morbihan, on May 22, 1886, and died
in Rochefort-sur-Mer on April 17, 1969. He was coauthor of the first French work on psychoanalysis and
one of the founding members of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). He was the son of Angélo
Théodose Hesnard and Lélia Célénis Rosalie Blancon,
from a family of judges. His brother Oswald, who had
a degree in German, helped him understand Freud’s
writings.
After completing his studies in Pontivy, he entered
the École de Santé de la Marine et des Colonies in
Bordeaux on October 20, 1905. A student of Albert
Pitres, then of Emmanuel Régis, he wrote his dissertation in 1909 on ‘‘Les troubles de la personnalité dans
les états d’asthénie psychique,’’ in which there is a
reference to Freud. He continued his military career in
Toulon, then, from 1910 to 1912, on the armored cruiser Amiral Charner in the Middle East.
Upon his return in 1912 he was appointed assistant
at the Clinique des Maladies Mentales at the University
of Bordeaux, where he rejoined Emmanuel Régis, who
encouraged Hesnard to study Freud. On January 2,
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Freud wrote to Karl Abraham, ‘‘Today I received a letter from a student of Régis, in Bordeaux, written on
his behalf, apologizing in the name of French psychiatry for its present neglect of Ya.’’ According to a letter
to Ernest Jones on January 14, the reference is to the
‘‘apologies from the French nation’’ that Freud
received. This was followed in 1913 by the publication
of ‘‘La doctrine de Freud et de son école’’ by
Emmanuel Régis and Angélo Hesnard in L’Encéphale.
La Psychanalyse des névroses et des psychoses
appeared in 1914. It was a lengthy précis—and as
faithful as it was possible to be at the time—of Freud’s
principal theories, as Sándor Ferenczi noted in the
review of the book he wrote in 1915. This was followed
by an examination of the criticisms the theories had
received from various authors, and finally by several
commentaries, of which Hesnard claimed, after Régis’
death, that he—Régis—was the principal author.
They recognized that ‘‘Freud’s system seems to constitute, regardless of what one may say, one of the most
important scientific movements of the current psychological period.’’ Nonetheless, their remarks essentially
referred to what appeared to them to be no more than
‘‘ingenious assumptions’’ that were both original and
well understood, since—and this is an argument that
would be repeated for decades to come—‘‘Freud’s
method of conception is based on that of Janet, whom
he has constantly been inspired by. Transforming the
term Ôpsychological analysis,’ employed by Janet, into
psychoanalysis has changed nothing in the method
used by both students of Charcot.’’ The causal importance given to sexuality or symbolism was also criticized. While Freud, in his ‘‘On the History of the
Psychoanalytic Movement’’ (1914d), concluded that
‘‘Régis and Hesnard (Bordeaux) have recently [1914]
attempted to disperse the prejudices of their countrymen against the new ideas by an exhaustive presentation, which, however, is not always understanding and
takes special exception to symbolism,’’ he reproached
Hesnard for years for this type of finding. In France
the work remained the only extensive essay on psychoanalysis for nearly twenty years and was reprinted in
1922 and 1929.
Hesnard spent the war years in Rochefort and on
September 16, 1915, married Henriette Aline Vimont.
He was supposed to return to Bizerte, Tunisia, in 1917.
When he returned to Paris in 1919, he was named professor at the École Principale du Service de Santé de
la Marine and assistant in neuropsychiatry at the
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H E S N A R D , A N G É L O L O U I S M A R I E (1886 – 1969)
Bordeaux school of medicine. His interest in psychoanalysis did not wane, nor did his reticence, and he
was appointed rapporteur to the Congrès des aliénistes
et neurologistes de langue française de Besançon
(Congress of francophone psychiatrists and neurologists of Besançon) in August 1923. The subject was ‘‘La
Psychanalyse: Valeur étiologique, méthodologique,
thérapeutique et psychiatrique de la doctrine.’’ In his
conclusion Hesnard wrote, ‘‘It is in this way that
psychoanalysis, freed of its terminological errors, its
theoretical exaggerations, and its symbolic fictions of
semiological research, joins psychiatry, from which it
depends, and clinical psychology. . . . It is in this way
that this still unwieldy, but highly perfectible, body of
doctrine and method, has an incontestable right to our
sympathy as scientists and French nationals.’’
While on a trip to Toulon he established contacts
with young psychiatrists, who, back in Paris, began to
practice psychoanalysis. René Laforgue was the first. It
was with Laforgue that Hesnard founded, in 1925, the
group and the review of the same name, L’Évolution
psychiatrique, before his departure in June to the Far
East. He returned in November 1925, and in August
1926 was present at the Congrès des Aliénistes in
Geneva and participated in the first Conférence des
Psychanalystes de Langue Française (Conference
of francophone psychoanalysts) that was created at
that time.
Although he refused to undergo a teaching analysis
(a position he maintained until the end of his life), in
November 1926 he became one of the founders of the
Société Psychanalytique de Paris, of which he was vice
president in 1928 and president in 1930, and in 1927
helped found the Revue française de psychanalyse,
where he was responsible for the ‘‘medical section.’’ He
was also a member of the Commission Linguistique
pour l’Unification du Vocabulaire Psychanalytique
Française (Linguistic commission for the unification
of French psychoanalytic vocabulary), where he fought
for the harmonization of French psychoanalytic
terminology.
Although supported by Laforgue, he was often criticized by Freud. In 1922, in a preface to the second edition of his first important work, he wrote, ‘‘Freud’s
doctrine, the product not of the French character of
Charcot, as has been claimed, but rather of Germanic
philosophy, has had no more useful adversary in the
search for truth than Restraint, the muse of Latinity.’’
Over the years, Hesnard’s position would soften and,
74 2
in 1926, he dedicated his book, La Vie et la Mort des
instincts, to Freud: ‘‘To Professor S. Freud, I offer,
along with the disavowal of my unfair criticisms, the
homage of my pure admiration.’’ When the book was
reprinted for the third time in 1929, he noted that he
had spent ‘‘ten years in understanding psychoanalysis
theoretically and five years in acquiring sufficient practical knowledge,’’ and he softened his initial criticisms.
Nonetheless, Hesnard remained part of a small
group of psychiatrists who opposed the more cultural
approach to psychoanalysis represented by Marie
Bonaparte. They especially rejected the authority of
the International Psychoanalytic Association, and even
of Freud himself—a division that would nearly lead to
a split among their ranks in the late nineteen thirties.
On January 23, 1932, Hesnard wrote to Bernard
Grasset, whom he was trying, in vain, to treat, ‘‘I beg
you, forget all that flashiness, the grandiloquence, all
those ÔOedipuses.’ You, as a subtle and marvelously
intuitive Gaul, should not let yourself be misled
further by those Judeo-Germanic specters of enchantment’’ (Bothorel, J., 1989).
He was secretary of the Conseil Supérieur de la
Marine in Paris in 1938 and was named head of the
Service de Santé de la Marine in Algeria and director
of the Service de Santé de la Quatrième Région Maritime in 1940, inspector general of the Service de Santé
de la Marine in Africa in 1943, and spent the Second
World War in Bizerte. In 1942–1943 he wrote an article entitled, ‘‘Sur l’israélisme de Freud,’’ published in
1946, which claimed to be a refutation of the apparent
or claimed Jewish influence in Freud’s writings. Nonetheless, Élisabeth Roudinesco maintained that the article was anti-Semitic in spite of Hesnard’s apparent
pro-Jewish sentiments (1982). Calumnied and disgraced after the Liberation, from September 1944 to
June 1945, he lived with his wife and daughter in
Casablanca, where he joined the Socialist Party and
gave several talks before returning to Toulon.
Hesnard participated indirectly in the renewal of
the SPP and was also one of the members of the honor
committee of the group and the review Psyché,
founded by Maryse Choisy in 1946, which brought
together, aside from René Laforgue, religious and academic scholars and Jungian psychologists who had not
been admitted to the SPP. He participated in writing
the Dictionnaire de psychanalyse et de psychotechnique,
which was being prepared in 1949, under the direction
of Maryse Choisy and later Daniel Lagache.
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At this time Hesnard moved into the ‘‘PortHesnard’’ villa in the Mourillon quarter of Toulon,
where he practiced psychoanalytic therapy. He was criticized for his lack of rigor in his work, a reproach that
was used against him during the negotiations intended
to reintegrate the Société Française de Psychanalyse
(SFP) into the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) because he had sided with Jacques Lacan
during the June 1953 split. In June 1957 he was dismissed from the SPP for ‘‘non-payment of dues and
failure to participate in society activities.’’
Although he was elected president of the SFP in
1959, one of the ‘‘recommendations’’ of the IPA committee, made during the Edinburgh congress of 1961,
stipulated ‘‘that the current practice of keeping Doctors Hesnard and Laforgue out of the training program be maintained. With respect to Doctor Hesnard’s
students, these can participate in regular analytic
training or they will not be admitted as students of the
society.’’ Hesnard again sided with Lacan in 1964 during the foundation of the École freudienne de Paris
(Freudian school of Paris) and, in 1968, became a
member of its ‘‘accreditation committee.’’
In 1964, for family reasons, he left Toulon to settle
in Nantes, near where he was born, and where he died
on April 17, 1969.
There have been references to the ‘‘tall, somewhat
Olympian silhouette, the luminous eyes and expressiveness’’ (Picard, 1972) of this complex character,
sometimes sarcastically referred to as ‘‘the admiral,’’
whose extensive body of work has had little impact on
theory. Following a number of articles written before
the war that fall halfway between proselytism and criticism, the bulk of his output was didactic or historical
in nature. These include: Freud dans la société d’aprèsguerre (1946), L’Univers morbide de la faute (1949),
Morale sans péché (1954), Psychanalyse du lien interhumain (1957), L’OEuvre de Freud et son importance pour
le monde moderne (1960), Les Phobies et la Névrose
phobique (1961), Psychologie du crime (1963).
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
Work discussed: Psychanalyse des névroses et des
psychoses, La.
See also: Aimée, case of; Congrès des psychanalystes de
langue française des pays romans; Disque vert, Le ; Ethics;
Évolution psychiatrique (l’ -) (Developments in Psychiatry); France; Object; Psyché, revue internationale de
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psychanalyse et des sciences de l’homme (Psyche, an international review of psychoanalysis and human sciences);
Régis, Emmanuel Jean-Baptiste Joseph; Revue française
de psychanalyse; Société française de psychanalyse; Société psychanalytique de Paris and Institut de psychanalyse
de Paris.
Bibliography
Bothorel, Jean. (1989). Bernard Grasset: vie et passion d’un
éditeur. Paris : Grasset.
Hesnard, Angélo. (1960). L’Œuvre de Freud et son importance pour le monde moderne. Preface by M. MerleauPonty, Paris: Payot.
Hesnard-Félix, Édith. (1984). Le Dr Hesnard et la naissance
de la psychanalyse en France. Ph.D. thesis in philosophy,
Paris-I.
Picard, Pierre Alexandre. (1972). Hesnard et le début de la
psychanalyse en France. Psychologie médicale, IV, 1,
p. 73–85.
Régis, Emmanuel and Hesnard, Angélo. (1913). La doctrine
de Freud et de son école (1re partie). L’Encéphale, VIII, 10
April 1913, p. 356–378.
———. (1914) La psychoanalyse des névroses et des psychoses. Ses applications médicales et extra-médicales. Paris:
Félix Alcan.
Roudinesco, Élisabeth. (1982). La bataille de cent ans. Histoire de la psychanalyse en France (Vol. 1). Paris: Ramsay.
HETEROSEXUALITY
The terms to designate sexual orientation arose only in
the later nineteenth century. ‘‘Homosexuality’’ owes to
work by the Austro-Hungarian journalist and literary
figure Károly Mária Kertbeny, who wished to reform
prevailing sodomy laws in Prussia; in 1868 he coined
the term to avoid the pejorative ‘‘pederast.’’ First used
in a letter, it gained some currency and in 1880 its binary opposite—‘‘heterosexuality’’—appeared in a book
by Kertbeny’s friend and colleague, zoologist Karl
Jager. Richard von Kafft-Ebing picked up both terms,
though not systematically, for use in his Psychopathia
Sexualis, first published in 1886. Not long afterward,
in 1894, the French intellectual Marc-André
Raffalovitch used the term ‘‘heterosexual’’ in an article
published in the Archives of Criminal Anthropology.
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d),
Freud’s developmental stage theory gave special force
to the implicitly privileged status of heterosexuality in
743
H E U Y E R , G E O R G E S (188 4 –1977 )
a normative context. He outlined a biological and psychological program for each individual, to be elaborated by instinctual objects and aims in a trajectory
that moves from a polymorphously perverse disposition in infancy to heterosexual object choice in
adolescence.
Heterosexuality in recent years has attracted
attention as an aspect of gender and sexuality, a new
discipline of study in Anglo-American scholarship,
combining traditions of feminist scholarship, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural studies.
BERTRAND VICHYN
See also: Bisexuality; Ego; Homosexuality; Object,
change of/choice of; Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
Katz, Ned. (1995). The invention of heterosexuality. New
York: Dutton.
Further Reading
Chodorow, Nancy J. (1992). Heterosexuality as compromise
formation: A theory of sexual development. Psychoanalysis
and Contemporary Thought. 15, 267–304.
HEUYER, GEORGES (1884–1977)
A professor of child psychiatry at the Paris Medical
School and member of the Académie Nationale de
Médecine, Georges Heuyer was born in Pacy-sur-Eure
on January 30, 1884, and died in Paris on October
23, 1977.
Having lost his father when he was only eighteen
months old, he was placed in a boarding school in
Pacy, then in Évreux, where his supervisor was the
director of the psychiatric asylum—the origin of his
interest in psychoanalysis. In spite of his poverty he
studied medicine in Paris, where he became friendly
with Georges Duhamel, Henri Queuille, Paul
Chevalier, and Henri Mondor. After continuing his
studies in pediatrics, neurology, and psychiatry, he
became an intern, resident, and in 1923, a doctor in
the Paris hospital system. In 1925 he was made director of the clinic of child neuropsychiatry, which, in
74 4
1949, created the first chair of child psychiatry in
France.
The founder of child psychiatry in France and an
international spokesman for the field, at the time of
his death, Heuyer left behind a considerable body of
work, comprising at least ten books and more than
eight hundred articles and publications.
He was not a psychoanalyst and the great majority
of his work was devoted to child neuropsychiatry, maladjusted children, and criminology. It was Heuyer
who first introduced the use of trained psychoanalysts
in public hospitals (Eugénie Sokolnicka at SainteAnne’s hospital in 1921). With Emmanuel Régis,
Angélo Hesnard, and Édouard Pichon, he was one of
the promoters of psychoanalysis in France, writing the
first article on the subject for a medical treatise, Traité
de pathologie médicale, which was edited by Émile
Sergent in 1924.
In 1925 he created a ‘‘laboratory’’ of psychoanalysis in his clinic, run by Sophie Morgenstern, with
whom he published several articles. However, Heuyer
wrote little on psychoanalysis with the exception of
some studies in collaboration with other people. He
was also far from being an uncritical supporter of the
field and was always ambivalent and, somewhat later
in life, often unfair in his estimate of the profession.
However, he did introduce and encourage the use of
psychoanalytic inquiry and treatment in child psychiatry and recommended that its practitioners have
themselves analyzed or become analysts themselves.
This was the case for the majority of his assistants,
especially Serge Lebovici (assistant from 1946 to
1957), and of his residents, who subsequently helped
psychoanalysis (‘‘which has provided us with so
many new and essential concepts’’ he wrote in 1964)
assume the key position it currently holds in French
child psychiatry.
JEAN-LOUIS LANG
See also: Analytic psychodrama; Infantile psychosis;
Infantile schizophrenia; Psyché, revue internationale de
psychanalyse et des sciences de l’homme (Psyche, an international review of psychoanalysis and human sciences).
Bibliography
Heuyer, Georges. (1924). La psychanalyse. In É. Sergent
(Ed.), Traité de pathologie médicale (Vol. 1, Psychiatrie,
p. 35–79). Paris: Maloine.
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H I E T Z I N G S C H U L E /B U R L I N G H A M -R O S E N F E L D S C H O O L
———. (1936). Préface. In Sophie Morgenstern, Psychanalyse infantile. Paris: Denoël.
Heuyer, Georges; and Morgenstern, Sophie. (1927). Un cas
de mutisme chez l’enfant. Guérison par la psychanalyse.
Journal de la Société de psychiatrie, 19, 6.
Lang, Jean-Louis. (1995). Georges Heuyer, l’art médical et la
psychanalyse. Revue de neuropsychiatrie infantile, 43 (6),
269–273.
———. (1997). Georges Heuyer, fondateur de la pédopsychiatrie: un humaniste du XXe siècle. Paris: Expansion
scientifique française.
HIETZING SCHULE/BURLINGHAMROSENFELD SCHOOL
Founded in 1927 by Dorothy Burlingham and Eva
Rosenfeld under the aegis of Anna Freud, the Hietzing
Schule (Hietzing School) was an effort to create a pedagogic experience inspired by psychoanalytic principles with children who were at the same time engaged
in analysis.
Small and private (it was sometimes known as the
‘‘Matchbox School’’), the school was housed in a log
cabin built in Eva Rosenfeld’s back yard, in the XIIIe
district of Vienna. Peter Blos, who had been engaged
as tutor to Burlingham’s four children, was its first
administrator. He enlisted his friend Erik Homburger
Erikson as one of the teachers.
Rather few students attended the school, about
twenty in all. They came from households in which
their parents were apt to understand psychoanalysis or
to themselves be in analysis. The children of
Burlingham and Rosenfeld, Peter Heller (who would
eventually write about his experiences), August
Aichhorn’s son Walter, and Ernstl Halberstadr-Freud,
participated in the project, which created something
like a ‘‘psychoanalytic family.’’
Freud’s own 1918 pronouncements on the role that
psychoanalysis might play in preventing psychological
conflicts (1919a) undoubtedly influenced the way that
the school was conceived. Siegfried Bernfeld, close to
Anna Freud, a committed socialist who had himself
founded the Kinderheim Baumgarten, gave a lecture on
education on February 25, 1929, the contents of which
were published in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Psychoanalysis, according to the article, ‘‘would provide decisive
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arguments in favor of endeavors in modern education
to promote the independent creative activity of the
child and the retrenchment of authority and punishment’’ (Heller 1992, p. 80). Similarly, teaching at the
Hietzing School was to be free of the constraints of a
rigid or official curriculum in favor of a project-based
approach. To allow free rein to curiosity and fantasy
(though not to acting out) would provide a place for
studying topics such as ‘‘Eskimos,’’ for example,
around which would be organized ethnographic investigations, creation of drawings and objects, and games.
Important debates took place between the school’s
progressives and latitudinarians (Peter Blos and Erik
Erikson) and others who thought it was necessary to
impose some unpleasant tasks on children, including
Anna Freud, Eva Rosenfeld, and August Aichhorn,
who managed the school from 1931 to 1932.
Anna Freud, with her teaching experience in a primary school in Vienna and analysis with her father
(who was also analyst to both Dorothy Burlingham
and Eva Rosenfeld), was one of the first to plan teaching programs based on psychoanalytic principles. She
had almost all the children and some teachers in analysis, including Erik Erikson. Although she appreciated
progressive advances in education, she was fairly
conservative.
The school closed in 1932, in part due to Eva
Rosenfeld’s departure for Berlin. Some students found
it difficult to adapt to public education; this factor
subsequently influenced Anna Freud and Dorothy
Burlingham when they founded, in London during the
Second World War, the Hampstead War Nurseries and
Child Therapy Clinic.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Aichhorn, August; Blos, Peter; BurlinghamTiffany, Dorothy; Erikson, Erik Homburger; Freud,
Anna; Rosenfeld, Eva Marie.
Bibliography
Asspignanesi, Lisa and Forrester, John. (1992). Freud’s
women. New York: Basic Books.
Freud, Sigmund. (1919a [1918]) Lines of advance in psycho-analytic therapy. SE, 12: 159–168.
Heller, Peter. (1992). Anna Freud’s letters to Eva Rosenfeld.
Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
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H I L F E R D I N G -H Ö N I G S B E R G , M A R G A R E T H E (187 1 –1942 )
HILFERDING-HÖNIGSBERG, MARGARETHE
(1871–1942)
Margarethe Hilferding-Hönigsberg, an Austrian physician and psychoanalyst, was born on June 20, 1871, in
Vienna, and died while being deported to Maly Trostinec in September 1942.
She was from a family of Jewish doctors, who were
deeply involved in the social-democratic movement.
She was trained to be a teacher in public and private
schools, received her baccalaureate degree, and, in
1898, enrolled in the philosophy department of the
University of Vienna. She switched from philosophy to
medicine and obtained her doctorate in 1903—one of
the first female doctors in Vienna. In 1904 she married
Rudolf Hilferding, a socialist economist, future minister of finance of the Weimar Republic. In 1907–1908,
the family was living in Berlin but Hilferding-Hönigsberg returned to Vienna with her two sons following
her divorce. In 1910 she began practicing medicine in
a workers’ quarter of Vienna, where she was also politically active with the social democrats from 1927 to
1934, working as a district councilor.
In April 1910 Paul Federn proposed Margarethe
Hilferding as a candidate for the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, which led to an in-depth discussion on
accepting women into the organization. On April 27,
1910, she became the first woman in the society and,
until her resignation, a year-and-a-half later, regularly
attended meetings. During the winter 1910–1911 season, she was an auditor at Sigmund Freud’s talks at the
school of medicine. In January 1911 she gave her first
presentation to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society; it
was titled ‘‘The Basis of Maternal Love.’’
In 1911, at the time of the split between Alfred
Adler and Sigmund Freud, she sided with Adler and
cosigned his letter of withdrawal. After the First World
War she was very active in the Verein für Individualpsychologie (Association for Individual Psychology).
She worked as a chief physician in offices providing
educational counseling in individual psychology and
at the Mariahilfer Ambulatorium day hospital. Her
seminars, talks, and publications concerned educational issues and the problems of women. In the collection edited by Sofie Lazarsfeld in 1926, ‘‘Volkstümliche
Schriftenreihe’’ (Popular Collection), she published
La Régulation des naissances with a postscript by
Alfred Adler.
74 6
When the National Socialists came to power,
Margarethe Hilferding-Hönigsberg was unable to
get out in time. She lost her apartment and was
placed in a Jewish old-age asylum in Vienna. On June
28, 1942, she was deported to Theresienstadt. She
died while being transported to Maly Trostinec in
September 1942.
ELKE MÜHLLEITNER
See also: Austria; Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung.
Bibliography
Hilferding-Hönigsberg, Margarethe. (1919). Der Schleichhandel. Kampf, 12, p. 300–304.
———. (1920). Was kostet die auskömmliche Ernährung ?
Kampf. 13, p. 101–105.
———. (1926). Geburtenregelung. Erörterungen zum 144,
Nachw. A. Adler. Vienna-Leipzig: Moritz Perles.
Mühlleitner, Elke. (1992). Biographisches Lexikon der Psychoanalyse (Die Mitglieder der Psychologischen MittwochGesellschaft und der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung
1902–1938). Tübingen: Diskord.
HIRSCHFELD, ELFRIEDE (1873–?)
Born in 1873 and raised in Frankfurt-am-Main,
Elfriede Hirschfeld was a patient of Sigmund Freud.
She was treated between 1908 and 1914, and appears
anonymously in several articles and in his correspondence. The work of Ernst Falzeder (1994) has enabled
us to identify the person behind these references.
Freud was reticent about treating Hirschfeld after
she had already undergone ten years of psychiatric
treatment. She continued to receive treatment from
several other psychoanalysts and psychiatrists but the
results were inconclusive. She appears for the last time
in the correspondence between Freud and Ludwig
Binswanger on May 10, 1923, while she was being treated in Binswanger’s clinic.
Hirschfeld appears as ‘‘Frau A.’’ in the Freud-Abraham
correspondence, ‘‘Frau H.’’ in the Freud-Pfister correspondence, ‘‘Frau C.’’ in the Freud-Binswanger correspondence, and finally as the ‘‘thirty-seven year old
patient’’ in the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence. She
was the subject of six articles and the origin of three
articles from 1913: ‘‘An Evidential Dream’’ (1913a),
‘‘Two Lies Told by Children’’ (1913g), and ‘‘The
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H I R S C H F E L D , E L F R I E D E (1873 –?)
Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis’’ (1913i). She is
also directly implicated in the following articles:
‘‘Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy’’ (1941d [1921]),
‘‘Some Additional Notes on Dream-Interpretation as a
Whole’’ (1925i), and finally in the chapter ‘‘Dreams
and the Occult’’ in New Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis (1933a [1932]). The list is long enough
to establish the importance of Falzeder’s discovery, but
we can also confirm that her case serves as the background for the technical articles ‘‘Remembering,
Repeating and Working-Through’’ (1914g) and
‘‘Observations on Transference Love’’ (1915a [1914]).
Hirschfeld’s case was described in the three articles
from 1913 and, in greater detail, in the article on
obsessional neurosis. In it Freud introduced the eroticanal phase, following the phases of autoeroticism and
narcissism, which was not present in the first edition
of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).
He also introduces the idea of ‘‘symptom mobility,’’
which he does not describe in detail.
After six years of analysis, three articles, references
in his correspondence, and in spite of the fact that
Freud claimed to have ‘‘reached the hard kernel of the
illness,’’ the patient had not made much progress. She
was passed from doctor to doctor, seeing Carl Gustav
Jung, Oskar Pfister, and finally Ludwig Binswanger,
who treated her in his clinic. Freud made a comment
to Binswanger that was to have considerable technical
significance: ‘‘Analytic treatment should be accompanied by institutionalized control’’ (letter of April 27,
1922). This comment, along with others on then ‘‘current’’ methods of treatment that preceded analysis,
appears in Freud’s correspondence with Karl Abraham. It demonstrates Freud’s pragmatism when faced
with clinical difficulties.
Based on the evidence, Hirschfeld pushed Freud
toward his final position on transference and countertransference. We can now accept that Freud formulated his first ideas about countertransference with
reference to Hirschfeld. Everyone understood the
notion of healing through love, as formulated by Carl
Jung and Max Eitingon (and which is also found in the
Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society [Nunberg,
Hermann; and Federn, Ernst, 1962]), in their own
way. It is important to remember that it was during
this time that Jung was deeply involved with Sabina
Spielrein and Sándor Ferenczi with Elma Palos
(Haynal, André, and Falzeder, Ernst, 1991). Freud was
dealing with a patient who would not now be termed
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neurotic, as he wrote, nor schizophrenic, as Eugen
Bleuler claimed, but very likely borderline or suffering
from ‘‘pseudoneurotic schizophrenia.’’ In these pathologies the symptoms do not mark the return of the
repressed but serve as a defense against psychotic
collapse.
Of the hundreds of patients that Freud treated in
his practice, few were the subject of a monograph
(Dora, for example) or an article (the young homosexual of 1919). Some are mentioned in an article and
others appear only as signs or abbreviations in the correspondence. It is clear that psychoanalysis is not a
purely empirical science and that its theory is firmly
based on clinical practice (Lipton, Samuel D., 1977).
Additionally, contemporary witnesses and belated analyses of Freud’s treatments have contributed greatly to
our understanding of Freudian practice, as well as how
its theorization developed over time (Cremerius,
Johannes, 1980).
The case of Elfriede Hirschfeld can be read as a
female pendant to the Wolfman, to the extent that
their treatments took place almost simultaneously. It is
worthwhile rereading the introduction of pregenitality
based on this case and the use of the primal scene in
Freud’s theorization of the Wolfman’s symptoms. It is
certain that Freud made progress as a researcher who
experimented within this atmosphere of psychiatric
nihilism that consisted in providing a diagnosis, then
waiting for the illness to run its course. It is likely that
his patients recognized this and, depending on their
capabilities, benefited from it.
NICOLAS GOUGOULIS
See also: Case histories.
Bibliography
Cremerius, Johannes. (1980). Freud bei der Arbeit über die
Schulter geschaut. Beiheft zum Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse.
123–158.
Falzeder, Ernst. (1994). My grand-patient, my chief tormentor: A hitherto unnoticed case of Freud’s and the consequences. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 63, 297–331.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE: 7, 123–243.
———. (1913a). An evidential dream. SE: 12, 267–277.
———. (1913g). Two lies told by children. SE: 12, 303–309.
747
HISTORICAL REALITY
———. (1913i). The disposition to obsessional neurosis: a
contribution to the problem of choice of neurosis. SE: 12,
311–326.
———. (1914g). Remembering, repeating and workingthrough (Further recommendations on the technique of
psycho-analysis II). SE: 12, 145–156.
———. (1915a [1914]). Observations on transference love
(Further recommendations on the technique of psychoanalysis III). SE: 12, 157–171.
———. (1925i). Some additional notes on dream-interpretation as a whole. SE: 19, 123–138.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on
psycho-analysis. SE: 22, 1–182.
———. (1941d [1921]). Psycho-analysis and telepathy. SE:
18, 173–193.
Hanyal, André, and Falzeder, Ernst. (1991). Healing through
love? a unique dialogue in the history of psychoanalysis.
Free Associations, 21 (2), 1–20.
Lipton, Samuel D. (1977). The advantages of Freud’s technique as shown in the analysis of the ratman. International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 58, 255–274.
Nunberg, Hermann, and Federn, Ernst. (1962-1975). Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. New York: International Universities Press.
HISTORICAL REALITY
‘‘Historical reality’’ refers to the real facts and events of
the past as they occurred historically, whether they
were external or internal to the subject confronted by
them. In general, historical reality stands opposed to
wishful fantasies and to everything within the mind
that may be said to answer to the pleasure/unpleasure
principle and its principal mechanism: hallucinatory
wish-fulfillment.
To better understand the relevance of historical reality to psychoanalysis, it is important to realize that the
conflict between the two fundamental principles of the
mental apparatus—the pleasure/unpleasure principle
and the reality principle—also has an impact on the
past and on the subject’s ideas about the past.
On the one hand, history as retained in memory is
capable of being reinterpreted and transformed on
behalf of the pleasure/unpleasure principle by means
of the individual’s fantasies, wishes, and defenses. A
fantasy that has been cathected and activated by hallucinatory wish-fulfillment behaves as an actual reality,
74 8
interfering with the ego’s ability to differentiate real
events from imagined and hallucinated ones. This
view supports the belief in memory’s poor reliability
when it comes to historical reality, since any memory
is likely to have been reorganized on behalf of the pleasure/unpleasure principle.
On the other hand, Freud—and many other psychoanalysts as well—was never able completely to
overlook the impact of certain traumatic historical
events in the etiology of mental suffering and symptomology. While history can be transformed for the sake
of the libidinal economy of the subject, the repression
of the historical reality would be incomplete, since it
would leave traces as psychic events unfolded. The reality principle must also be capable of being applied to
the past and of opposing the pleasure principle. In a
way fantasies themselves might be said to indicate the
existence of a kernel of historical reality.
Fantasy and historical reality are not strict opposites. Fantasies, as Freud wrote early in his career, are
of ‘‘mixed blood’’—intermediary formulations that
fall somewhere between lived reality and the way in
which the subject has given it meaning within his libidinal organization of the moment.
Thus in addition to representative forms of the
‘‘memory’’ of events and facts in the past, forms that
are likely to be subjected to different kinds of
‘‘deferred’’ reinterpretations and wishes, there are ways
of directly recording lived experience that bear witness
to the impact of historical reality. The work of reconstructing historical reality is, therefore, potentially
possible, and indeed one of the essential goals of psychoanalytic work (Freud, 1937d) is to extend the influence of the reality principle to the past and its
representation.
Historical reality and mental reality are not, therefore, strictly at odds. The reality of experience marks
history with an imprint that has significance within
the current psychic organization, in particular during
childhood, on the basis of infantile sexual theories and
the narcissism of infantile animism. Debate continues
to erupt, however, within psychoanalysis, over the disjunction between historical reality and mental reality,
and this suggests the fragility of the synthesis mentioned above. It would seem that the question of the
distribution of what is part of actual history—and
therefore, ‘‘outside’’ the subject—and what is part of
desire still needs to be re-examined, as if the boundary
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between inside and outside was fluid and admitted a
degree of undecidability essential to mental functioning and internal conflict.
RENÉ ROUSSILLON
See also: Construction de l’espace analytique, La; Event;
Fantasy; History and psychoanalysis; Internal reality/
external reality; Screen memory; Seduction scenes.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1899a). Screen memories. SE, 3: 299–322.
———. (1937d). Constructions in analysis. SE, 23: 255–269.
———. (1939a). Moses and monotheism: Three essays. SE,
23: 1–137.
Roussillon, René. (1995) La métapsychologie des processus
et la transitionnalité. Revue française de psychanalyse, 59.
Viderman, Serge. (1970) La Construction de l’espace analytique. Paris: Denoël.
HISTORICAL TRUTH
Historical truth, as Sigmund Freud conceived it, can
be defined as a lost piece of the subject’s lived experience that is accessible only through the work of construction. The term historical here refers to origins,
which explains why historical truth can be presented
as a kernel of truth in formations as diverse as legends,
religions, or delusions.
The problem of historical truth can be theorized in
a number of ways in the field of history. The fundamental split between the approach of the historian and
that of the psychoanalyst has to do with their respective ways of conceiving temporality. For the psychoanalyst, time is blended: Present and past live together
in repetition and in the reliving that is a part of the
transference. For the historian, by contrast, the past is
separate from the present, and even if there are causal
links between the two, their order of succession
remains immutable, since what endows an event with
its historicity is precisely the fact that it occurred at
one time that will never be repeated. Thus, seen from a
psychoanalytic perspective, historical truth is not the
material truth of an event, even if Freud may have
believed this early on his works, but rather the truth of
a history as it appears through an event. It is the truth
of a sequence and not of a point; it requires the reconstruction of phases leading up to the constitution of an
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element that can claim the status of truth. Accordingly,
historical truth is to be distinguished from material
truth—literal truth that is presumed to have a direct
referent in reality.
Although Freud spoke a great deal about truth
throughout his work, it was toward the end of his
work that he essentially developed the notion of
historical truth, mainly in connection with ‘‘Constructions in Analysis’’ (1937d) and ‘‘Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays’’ (1939a [1934–38]).
The idea of historical truth is very important in psychoanalysis, because it makes it possible to take off
from a realistic conception of the analytic process, as it
was present in Freud’s early theory centered around
trauma, and move toward a more refined, perspectivebased conception where the main focus is on the
notion of construction and the process of an indirect
confirmation of the construction by the analysand,
who can thus give it a truth value, even in the absence
of a recovered memory. However, the notion of truth
remains dependent upon a feeling of certainty. It is not
formal, in the sense that it could be considered to be
the same thing as exactness.
Two factors must be taken into account here. The
first relates to what Freud called intellectual feeling
and concerns the degree of conviction brought by an
isolated and repressed piece of truth that returns.
This ‘‘kernel of truth,’’ a veritable fossil, is the basis
for the irresistible claim to truth contained in religious faith as well as in delusional beliefs. This is a
‘‘historical’’ truth, that is, the truth of both the fossil
kernel and the sense the subject may have of the process of distortion that is attached to it. In Moses and
Monotheism: Three Essays, Freud wrote: ‘‘An idea
such as this has a compulsive character: it must be
believed. To the extent to which it is distorted, it
may be described as a delusion; in so far as it brings a
return of the past, it must be called the truth’’
(p. 130). ‘‘Historical truth’’ is thus revealed to be distinct from historical exactitude when the latter does
not involve this passage by way of the repressed, and
the truth is not implicit in historical narration, for
this is, on the contrary, the site of compromise and
dissimulation, which this time are conscious. However, as Freud wrote in Moses and Monotheism: ‘‘In
its implications the distortion of a text resembles a
murder: the difficulty is not in perpetrating the deed,
but in getting rid of its traces’’ (p. 43); the only
possibility is thus to follow these guiding fossils
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(Leitfossil) that open a pathway toward truth through
these distortions.
In ‘‘Constructions in Analysis,’’ the dialectic concerning truth is even more subtle, since an erroneous construction can lead the patient to remember a fragment
of his or her historical truth. In this case, said Freud, citing Shakespeare’s Polonius, it is as if ‘‘our bait of falsehood had taken a carp of truth’’ (p. 262). The work of
interpretation thus entails freeing the fossil from the
aggregate of current material encasing it and bringing it
back to the point in the past to which it belongs.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Amnesia; Anticipatory ideas; Construction de
l’espace analytique, La; ‘‘Constructions in Analysis’’;
Myth of origins; Paranoia; Truth.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1937d). Constructions in analysis. SE, 23:
255–269.
———. (1939a [1934–1938]). Moses and monotheism:
three essays. SE, 23: 1–137.
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1985). Vérité ou fantasme de
vérité. Métapsychologie et Philosophie. Paris: Les Belles
Lettres.
Viderman, Serge. (1970). La Construction de l’espace analytique. Paris: Denoël.
Further Reading
Mijolla, Alain de. (1996). Psychoanalysts and their history.
International Psychoanalysis: The Newsletter of the IPA,
5 (1), 25–28.
Spence, Donald. (1982). Narrative truth and historical truth.
Meaning and interpretation in psychoanalysis, New York:
W. W. Norton.
HISTORY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Freud wrote little about history, in the sense that professional historians understand that term, or about its
relationship to psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, three
remarks are in order.
From the outset, Freud posited psychoanalytic
investigation as being linked to the reconstitution of
the patient’s personal history. The aim was to restore
this history to patients, with the goal of helping individuals emerge as the subject and agent of their own history through the lifting of the repressions that weighed
75 0
it down, and breaking the pattern of repetitions that
resulted from it. Initially Freud conceived of this process as a restitution of buried traces in their entirety;
he thus readily compared it with the task of the archaeologist who brings to light the strata of a buried past
layer by layer. Although he always maintained his fundamental hypothesis—that the psyche forgets nothing—he came to believe that these ‘‘traces’’ undergo
constant change as they are reshaped through deferred
action and that they can therefore only be known
through analysis in this reworked form, as he
explained in ‘‘Constructions in Analysis’’ (1937).
If Freud showed little interest in History as it is
written by historians, by contrast he took a great interest in the prehistory and anthropology of so-called
primitive peoples, above all at the time when he was
seeking to substantiate his views on phylogenesis as
the basis for individual psychogenesis. This was the
period when he wrote Totem and Taboo (1912–13a)
and A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses (1987 [1915]).
Finally, on several occasions Freud undertook a psychoanalytic interpretation of significant personalities
from both the past, such as Leonardo da Vinci
(‘‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,’’ 1910), and the present, such as President
Woodrow Wilson (Thomas Woodrow Wilson, TwentyEighth President of the United States: A Psychological
Study, with W. C. Bullitt, 1966). Returning to the story
of Moses in Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays
(1939a), he sought to show that the theory that Moses
was an Egyptian would account for his mythical role
of founder of a monotheistic religion.
It was this type of work, known as psychobiographical studies, that was most influential on certain of
his successors. Notably, in this regard, reinterpretations of Nazism in terms of Adolf Hitler’s personality
and psychopathology can be cited; see, for example,
Saul Friedländer’s History and Psychoanalysis: An
Inquiry into the Possibilities and Limits of Psychohistory
(1975/1978). These studies have often drawn criticism
(for example, from Alain Besançon, after a 1974 work
in which he tried this approach) for the reductionist
tendency of some authors to overlook factors (cultural, economic, social, etc.) operating outside of individual psychic functioning.
The historian and the psychoanalyst would seem to
have common interests: both work on memory,
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H I T S C H M A N N , E D U A R D (1871 –1 957)
forgetting, and the restitution of traces; for both, the
temporal dimension is essential. Both admit that they
construct their object of study through the combined
use of techniques for gathering factual data and the
work of interpretation that endows these data with
meaning by fitting them together; moreover, both use
narratives as their starting point, and they accept that
these narratives come to them constructed through
meaning and must be deconstructed and reconstructed within the framework of their discipline.
See also: Andersson, Ola; Anzieu, Didier; ‘‘An Autobiographical Study’’; Bernfeld, Siegfried; Certeau, Michel de; Construction de l’espace analytique, La; Freud’s Self-Analysis;
Ellenberger, Henri Frédéric; Historical truth; International
Association for the History of Psychoanalysis; Leonardo da
Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood; Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays; On the History of the Psychoanalytic
Movement; Prehistory; Psychoanalytic filiations; Psychoanalytic research; Psychobiography; Psychohistory.
One difference between them is the fact that while
the historian focuses on the effects of time in the collective memory, the psychoanalyst focuses on these
effects in the case of an individual person considered
as such. This difference might seem to be a minor one,
were it not for the substantial difficulties in assessing
how these two levels of analysis are connected: How
do collective history and individual history fit
together? To what extent does History depend on the
contingencies of individual fates, and to what extent
are these fates shaped by History? The main difficulties, however, are epistemological in nature.
Besançon, Alain. (1974). L’histoire psychanalytique: Une
anthologie. Paris: Mouton.
These difficulties have to do with methods: While
the historian is at leisure to verify and tally sources
using every means at his or her disposal, the analyst is,
as a matter of principle—within the framework of
‘‘classical’’ treatment—limited to only what the patient
says in the analytic setting. It is impossible to establish
whether a given event in the past actually took place as
the patient says it did. It has been argued, justifiably,
that this is a moot question, that the only event that is
certain is that something has been said this way in the
here and now, and that therein lies all the ‘‘material’’ of
the analysis (see Viderman, 1970, 1977).
Viderman, Serge. (1970). La construction de l’espace analytique. Paris: Denoël.
The divergence between history and psychoanalysis
exists also, and perhaps above all, at the theoretical
level. Time does not have the same status in the two
disciplines. The psychoanalyst, who can only know
past events through their narration in the present, is
led to accept two temporalities: a one-directional,
linear time in which the narrated events, with their
possibility causality, are ordered; and another, twodirectional time, in which an event has modified,
sometimes profoundly, an earlier event that is thus
reshaped. This means accepting a principle of ‘‘anterograde’’ causality that has no analogue in the study of
history or, perhaps, in any other discipline.
ROGER PERRON
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Bibliography
Friedländer, Saul. (1978). History and psychoanalysis: An
inquiry into the possibilities and limits of psychohistory.
(Susan Suleiman, Trans.). New York: Holmes & Meier.
(Original work published 1975)
Le Beuf, Diane, Perron, Roger, and Pragier, Georges (eds.).
(1998). Construire l’histoire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
Mijolla, Alain de. (1996). Psychoanalysts and their history.
International Psychoanalysis: The Newsletter of the IPA,
5 (1), 25–28.
———. (1977). Le céleste et le sublunaire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
HITSCHMANN, EDUARD (1871–1957)
Austrian physician and psychoanalyst Eduard
Hitschmann was born in Vienna on July 28, 1871, and
died in the United States on July 31, 1957. He was one
of Freud’s early disciples and remained loyal to him
throughout a long career.
Raised in Vienna, Hitschmann was the son of a
banker and the grandson of a physician. He attended the
University of Vienna Medical School, received his degree
in 1895, and initially practiced internal medicine. In
1905 Paul Federn brought him into the Wednesday Psychological Society. By then a well-known physician, he
served for a time as the Freud family doctor.
In April 1909, Hitschmann read before the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society a paper entitled ‘‘A General Presentation of Freud’s Theories’’ (Nunberg and Federn,
1962) in which he proposed to write a brief exegesis of
psychoanalytic ideas. Freud cautioned Hitschmann
not to present psychoanalysis as a closed system and
insisted on openly acknowledging that there are
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domains in which psychoanalysis could lay no clear
claim to knowledge. ‘‘Furthermore, this work would
require that the writer refrain from expressing any of
his own ideas’’ (Nunberg and Federn, 1962, p. 210).
Hitschmann went on to write the first concise presentation of psychoanalysis, Freuds Neuosenlehre: Nach
ihrem gegenwärtigen Stande zusammenfassend dargestellt (1911), which was translated into English as
Freud’s Theories of Neurosis.
He also wrote numerous biographical studies,
including those of Franz Schubert, William James, and
Emanuel Swedenborg; these studies were published in
Great Men: Psychoanalytic Studies (1956).
Hitschmann’s many psychoanalytic publications
did not always receive a friendly appraisal by Freud,
who maintained a certain intellectual distance in spite
of their friendship. He viewed Hitschmann as ‘‘quite
orthodox’’ (Freud 1974, p. 400), as he remarked to
Jung. However, Freud entrusted Hitchsmann to direct
the psychoanalytic outpatient clinic, or ‘‘Ambulatorium,’’ when it was established in Vienna in 1922.
Hitschmann fled the Nazis in 1938 and sought refuge
in London; in 1944 he emigrated to Boston where he
worked as a training analyst until his death.
HAROLD LEUPOLD-LÖWENTHAL
See also: Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse;
Lehrinstitut der Wiener Psychoanalystischen Vereinigung; Psychoanalystiche Bewegung; Wiener psychoanalystiche Vereinigung.
Bibliography
Becker, Philip L. (1966). Edward Hitschmann, 1871–1957,
Psychoanalysis of great men. In Franz Alexander, Samuel
Eisenstein and Martin Grotjahn (Eds.), Psychoanalytic Pioneers. New York: Basic Books Inc.
Freud, Sigmund. (1974a). The Freud/Jung letters: The correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C.G.Jung. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hitschmann, Eduard. (1911). Freud’s theories of the neuroses,
by Dr. Eduard Hitschmann. Authorized translation by
Dr. C.R. Payne, with an introduction by Ernest Jones. New
York, Moffat, Yard and company, 1917. 257 p.
———. (1956). Great men: psychoanalytic studies. New
York: International Universities Press.
Nunberg, Hermann; and Federn, Ernst. (1962). The Minutes
of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Vol. I, 1906–1908. New
York: International. Universities Press.
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HOFFER, WILLI (WILHELM) (1897–1967)
Willie Hoffer, British physician and psychoanalyst, was
born in Luditz, Austria in 1897, and died on October
25, 1967, in London.
Educated in Pilsen and Vienna, he became keenly
interest in biology and psychology, and took a Ph.D.,
the thesis for which concerned play as a means of education. He was analyzed by Herman Nunberg from
1921 to 1922. Although he first joined the Viennese
Psychoanalytical Society in 1923 as a non-medical
member, he studied and qualified in medicine in 1929.
In Vienna, Hoffer worked closely with Anna Freud,
and when the Freud family and others left for London
in 1938, he too came to London and remained a
staunch supporter and in many ways a protector of
Freud’s youngest daughter. Anna Freud repeatedly
consulted him on many important matters and
strongly relied on his judgement. He was a consultant
at the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic,
which was founded by Anna Freud and Dorothy
Burlingham.
Hoffer obtained a British medical qualification in
1943 and taught at the Maudsley Hospital, as Consultant Psychotherapist, from 1954 to 1962. In 1949 he
was elected Editor-in-Chief of The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. In 1957 he resigned this post to
become President of the British Psycho-Analytical
Society for the following three years; he had already, in
1957, been elected an Honorary Vice-President for life
of the International Psychoanalytical Association. His
many other honors included appointments as
Abraham Flexner Lecturer in Nashville, Tennessee in
1953 and Sigmund Freud Lecturer in New York in
1966. Of his tours abroad, his help in re-establishing
psychoanalysis in post-war Germany through repeated
visits to teach in Frankfurt were particularly
appreciated.
Hoffer wrote a great deal. His best-known work is
perhaps his paper on ‘‘Mouth, Hand and EgoIntegration’’ (1950), followed the next year by a paper
on oral aggressiveness and ego development. He was
also fascinated by young children and what could be
learned by studying them. Anna Freud, in a memorial
address in 1968, emphasized his ‘‘unique role in laying
the foundations for a sound and well-planned
approach to the study of children of all ages’’ and
reminded her audience that he had set up, in Vienna, a
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psychoanalytic training course for teachers, graduates
of which were spread all over the western world.
a reputation for quality that brought the imprint
renown.
His interest in children was reflected in his writings
on play, fairy tales, and education, but his interests
were wide and his papers included work on the psychoanalytic investigation of brain damage, schizophrenia, group formation, metapsychology and analytic
technique. Hoffer based much of his work on clinical
observation and he was at all times a careful writer
whose works were frequently revised before
publication.
In 1924 the Press moved to more substantial premises in Tavistock Square in London. Between 1921,
when Virginia Woolf ’s Monday or Tuesday was
launched, and 1938, thirty-three titles are listed in the
Annals of English Literature 1475–1950, all of high
quality, though the first pamphlet was published in
1917. The press became a self-supporting business
with a high reputation, particularly in the area of literature. It became an allied company of Chatto and
Windus in 1946. By that time, if pamphlets and little
series of essays are included, 527 titles had appeared.
Apart from writers either famous or later to become
so, such as T.S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Katherine
Mansfield, C. Day Lewis and Virginia Woolf herself,
issues such as disarmament, the League of Nations,
educational reform and racial prejudice were tackled.
Hogarth was recognized as a foremost publisher of
challenging new ideas and major writing. The Press
retained this reputation after the alliance with Chatto
and Windus.
His warmth and personal qualities made him very
popular in the British Society, and his work was appreciated by many outside his own group. His wife Hedwig was a non-medical psychoanalyst with whom he
lived happily and to whom he was close in every way;
her death in 1961 was a very heavy blow to him, and
although he faced it bravely, it left its mark.
CLIFFORD YORKE
See also: Controversial Discussions; Gesammelte Werke;
Great Britain; International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
The; Lehrinstitut der Weiner Psychoanalytishen Vereinigung; Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung.
Bibliography
Hoffer, Willi. (1947). Diaries of adolescent schizophrenics
(hebephrenics). Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 2,
293–312.
———. (1950). Mouth, hand and ego integration. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 3–4, 49–56.
———. (1955). Psychoanalysis: Practical and research
aspects. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins.
———. (1956). Transference and transference neurosis.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 37, 377–379.
———. (1968). Notes on the theory of defense. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 23, 178–188.
HOGARTH PRESS
The Hogarth Press was born in the dining room of the
home of Leonard and Virginia Woolf (Hogarth
House) in Richmond, Surrey. It was devised largely as
a hobby for its owners, with whose literary views it was
closely identified; but their standing as writers and
critics of substance meant that the small press, concerned more with standards than with profit, attracted
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Seven psycho-analytic works, including Freud’s
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920a), Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c) and the first
volume of his Collected Papers, were translated from
the German under the editorship of Ernest Jones,
assisted by James Strachey and published in Britain
between 1921 and 1924. But in that year, negotiations
were completed with the Hogarth Press, who added
the seven numbers of what was entitled The International Psycho-Analytical Library to its list. A partnership was struck with the Institute of Psycho-Analysis
in London, who became co-publishers, Leonard Woolf
retaining a right of veto, though there is no record that
this was ever exercised.
The Library accepted for publication only works of
the highest standard, most of which were kept in print
for long periods. Karl Abraham, Sandor Ferenczi,
Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann were among its
many distinguished authors. The enterprise was so
successful that Leonard Woolf agreed to publish a
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud in a new translation under the general
editorship of James Strachey, with the collaboration of
Anna Freud and the assistance of Alix Strachey and
Alan Tyson. The first of twenty-four volumes appeared
in 1953 and the last in 1966. The whole is a triumph
of scholarship, with extensive notes and editorial
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HOLDING
introductions: no comparable collection of Freud
exists anywhere in the world. Woolf is said to have
described the decision to publish the work, with
understatement, as ‘‘rather fortuitous.’’
Unhappily, for reasons that have never been fully
disclosed, the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, against the
wishes of the then editor of the International Library,
Clifford Yorke, decided to discontinue the Library, and
the last of the series, number 118, Freud’s Self-Analysis
by Didier Anzieu, was published in 1986. However, the
link with Hogarth as co-publishers of the Standard
Edition, which has maintained its international success, continues. A new edition is now planned, with a
scholarly update of Strachey’s editorial apparatus, with
additional papers by Freud that were either unknown
or unavailable at the time of the first edition, with new
refinements. In this venture, the American publisher
Norton will join the Hogarth Press and the Institute of
PsychoAnalysis. It will be two or three years before the
new edition is ready for publication.
The Hogarth Press has maintained its identity,
together with Chatto and Windus, even though it is
now part of the Random House publishing group.
CLIFFORD YORKE
See also: British Psycho-Analytical Society; Glover, James;
Great Britain; Jones, Ernest; Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
HOLDING
Holding is the process by which the mother’s capacity
to identify with her infant enables her to provide sensitive physical support, especially when the child is
physiologically vulnerable. This provision of ego
support is a ‘‘form of loving’’ that provides the basis
for the establishment of integrated psychological
development.
Donald Winnicott presented his ideas on holding
and infant development to the public, and to those
directly responsible for infant care (1947), and formulated these in psychoanalytic terms at the 22nd International Psychoanalytic Congress at Edinburgh in his
seminal paper ‘‘The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship’’ (1960).
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Sensitive physical handling by the mother allows
the baby to tolerate frustrations such as hunger and
discomfort and experience the gradual diminishment
of his sense of omnipotence without going to pieces.
Holding, at the beginning, is a series of physical acts
which include responding to the baby’s skin, feeding,
and a group of sensory sensitivities built into the
whole routine of day to day care. This is continued as
necessary ego support throughout childhood and
adolescence.
When practicing as a pediatrician during and after
World War II, Winnicott addressed many groups,
including parents and nursery care workers, about the
essential qualities of infant care. In describing the minute details of ordinary breast-feeding, he was able to
demonstrate how the ‘‘good-enough mother’’ provides
sensitive physical and psychological holding of her
baby. She identifies with her infant to know how the
child feels and to provide just what it needs. In the
holding phase, this fosters the baby’s apparent belief
that what it wanted, it created. It has then a hopeful
sense of itself in the present and over time. Successful
holding provides the baby with the feeling of reliability
in the world, both internal and external. The average
mother provides this reliability almost without thinking; and by small increments of frustration allows her
baby to become ‘‘disillusioned’’ and aware that there is
a ‘‘me’’ and ‘‘not-me’’ and a world that in fact it cannot
control. Successful holding is the mothers handling of
her infant through a ‘‘mutuality of cross identifications’’ and leads to an integration of the self.
Winnicott is clear that these processes in infancy are
not the same as the pathological mental mechanisms
of the disturbed or borderline adult patient, but those
infants who have been significantly ‘‘let down’’ (1970)
experience unthinkable anxieties and the later possibility of schizoid states. Winnicott also described holding within the analytic relationship and more broadly
in casework with adult patients (1960). When the analyst’s mind wanders, it can be experienced by the
patient as a failure to ‘‘hold’’ the mind.
Although mention is made of the father’s role in
later phases (1960), Winnicott focuses his attention
more on the immediacy of the mother-baby interaction and less on the conditions within the adult couple
and family needed to foster a successful holding phase.
PAUL CAMPBELL
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H O L L I T S C H E R - F R E U D , M A T H I L D E (1887 –1 978)
See also: Breastfeeding; Breakdown; Dead mother
complex; Framework of the psychoanalytic treatment;
Good-enough mother; Handling; Integration; Maternal;
Maternal care; Object; Protective shield, breaking through
the; Psychosomatic limit/boundary; Self-mutilation in
children; Splitting of the object.
Bibliography
Anthony, E., and Benedek, T. (Eds.). (1970). Parenthood: Its
psychology and psychopathology. Boston: Little, Brown.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1964). Further thoughts on babies as
persons. In his The child, the family and the outside world
(p. 85–92). Harmondsworth, Penguin Books. (Original
work published 1947)
———. (1960). The theory of parent-infant relationship.
The maturational processes and the facilitating environment.
London, Hogarth, 1965, p. 17–55.
———. (1970). The mother-infant experience of mutuality.
In E. Anthony, T. Benedek (Eds.), Parenthood: Its psychology and psychopathology. Boston: Little, Brown.
HOLLITSCHER-FREUD, MATHILDE
(1887–1978)
The eldest daughter of Sigmund Freud, Mathilde was
born on October 16, 1887, in Vienna, and died in
London on February 20, 1978.
Mathilde, named after Josef Breuer’s wife, appeared
in Freud’s dreams as his only reference to oedipal and
fatherly feelings (1900a). A sickly child, Mathilde suffered from several serious illnesses, including bouts
with diphtheria, and references to her health problems
as an adolescent and even after her marriage appear
often in her father’s correspondence.
When she was twenty and doubted her physical
appearance, Freud wrote:
You know that I have always intended to keep you
at home until you are at least twenty-four, until you
are strong enough for the duties of marriage and possibly of bearing children, and until the weakness,
which those three serious illnesses in your early life
left behind, has been repaired. In social and material
circumstances like ours, girls quite rightly do not
marry during their early youth; otherwise their married life would be over too soon. . . . I think you probably associate the present minor complaint with an
old worry about which I should very much like to
talk to you for once. I have guessed for a long time
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that in spite of all your common sense you fret
because you think you are not good-looking enough
and therefore might not attract a man. I have
watched this with a smile, first of all because you
seem quite attractive enough to me, and secondly
because I know that in reality it is no longer physical
beauty which decides the fate of a girl, but the
impression of her whole personality. Your mirror will
inform you that there is nothing common or repellent in your features. . . . The more intelligent among
young men are sure to know what to look for in a
wife—gentleness, cheerfulness, and the talent to
make their life easier and more beautiful (March 26,
1908) (Freud 1960, pp. 271–272).
Despite Freud’s vague plan that she marry Sándor
Ferenczi, seven months later he announced her engagement to ‘‘a young Viennese businessman named Robert
Hollitscher’’ (1875–1959) whom she married at the
synagogue the same day (February 7, 1909) as her
uncle, Freud’s brother Alexander, married.
In September 1912 Freud interrupted his vacation
to go to Mathilde’s bedside. A botched appendectomy
from six years earlier, which had then carried a risk of
peritonitis, had caused her to suffer a miscarriage.
Mathilde remained childless but, after the death of
her sister Sophie in 1920, she took charge of young Heinele (Heinz Rudolf Halberstadt). ‘‘My eldest,
Math[ilde], and her husband,’’ Freud told some friends,
‘‘have virtually adopted him and have fallen in love with
him so thoroughly that one could not have predicted it.’’
(Gay 1988, p. 421) But Heinele died on June 19, 1923.
In Vienna, Mathilde became friends with Ruth
Mack Brunswick, who named her eldest daughter after
her. After her husband’s business suffered during the
Great Depression, Freud helped financially while
Mathilde opened a fashionable women’s clothing
store.
Mathilde and her husband managed to emigrate to
London on May 26, 1938, and so welcomed Freud at
his arrival shortly thereafter. Mathilde Hollitscher
opened another clothing story on Baker Street. She
retired in 1960 and died on February 20, 1978 at age
ninety-two.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Berggasse 19, Wien IX; Freud-Bernays, Martha;
Irma’s injection, dream of; Mathilde, case of.
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Bibliography
Appignanesi, Lisa; and Forrester, John. (1992). Freud’s
women. New York: Basic Books.
Freud, Sigmund. (1960a [1873–1939]). Letters. New York:
Basic Books.
Gay, Peter. (1988). Freud: A life for our time. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Gödde, Günther. (2003). Mathilde Freud. Die älteste Tocher
Sigmund Freud in Briefen und Selbstzeugnissen Gieben.
Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag.
Jones, Ernest. (1957). Life and work of Sigmund Freud.
(Vol. 3). New York: Basic Books.
HOLLÓS, ISTVÁN (1872–1957)
István Hollós, the Hungarian physician, psychiatrist,
and psychoanalyst, was born in Budapest in 1872 and
died there in 1957.
The son of a modest artisan (a Jewish tailor, called
Heszler before he Magyarized his name), he studied
medicine at the Royal School in Budapest. He met
Sándor Ferenczi at the beginning of the century and
participated in the foundation of the Psychoanalytic
Association of Budapest (1913), of which he was vicepresident. He worked as an analyst, then did a short
analysis with Freud in 1918, followed by control analysis in Vienna with Paul Federn, an analyst specializing
in psychotic patients. He was president of the
Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society from 1933 to 1939.
He was appointed director of the famous Lipotmezö clinic near Budapest, also known as the ‘‘Yellow
House.’’ He was close to Ferenczi’s circle and opened
the doors of his asylum to writers (Kosztolànyi and
Karinthy) who were interested in psychotic patients
and their linguistic productions. During the period of
the Hungarian Commune he taught in the university
as a psychiatric ‘‘exhibitor.’’ He translated Freud into
Hungarian, first The Interpretation of Dreams, finished
in about 1917, revised by Ferenczi and published by
Somlóin about 1934–1935; followed by The Ego and
the Id with Géza Dukes, published by Pantheon in
1937. In 1925, under the anti-Semitic regime of Miklós
Horthy he had to resign his position as director of the
asylum. He wrote a moving testimony to the work he
did there and addressed it to Freud, who was
prompted to wonder about his own ‘‘intolerance’’
with regard to psychotic patients. He continued to
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translate Freud and practice as an analyst while maintaining close relations with Ferenczi.
In 1944 thanks to the last minute intervention of
the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, he and his
wife, along with a few other Jews, escaped a tragic
death. He wrote an account of the trauma: Letter from
a Survivor (Psyche, 24 (3), 1974). Following the death
of his wife and a manic episode for which he received
treatment, he returned to the Yellow House, where he
ended his days.
Hollós was one of the pioneers of a new approach
to mental patients who were, as he put it in 1927, ‘‘on
strike from life.’’ His sensitivity, empathy, humanistic
principles, and analytic practice helped him to transform asylum conditions, thus making him a forerunner of the movement to apply psychoanalysis in
psychiatric institutions.
MICHELLE MOREAU RICAUD
See also: Ferenczi, Sándor; Hungary.
Bibliography
Ferenczi, Sándor; and Hollós, István. (1922). Zur Psychoanalyse der paralytischen Geistesstörung. Wien : Internationaler
Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
Hollós, István. (1914). Egy versmondo betegröl. Nyugat, 8,
p. 333–340.
———. (1919). Die Phasen des Selbstbewusstseinsaktes.
Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 5, p. 93–101.
———. (1927). Mes adieux à la Maison jaune. Le CoqHéron, 100, 1986.
———. (1933). Psychopathologie alltäglicher telepathischer
Erscheinungen. Imago, 19, 529–546.
HOMOSEXUALITY
The term homosexuality designates a sexual orientation
in which a person of the same sex is the object.
The term was apparently coined in 1869, from the
Greek homos (‘‘same’’), by K. M. Benkert, a writer who
published his works under the pseudonym Kertbeny
Karoli. He was a defender of sexual rights, and he used
the term ‘‘homosexual’’ during discussions on whether
to change paragraph 143 of the Prussian Constitution
of April 14, 1851, which punished acts of ‘‘unnatural
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HOMOSEXUALITY
indecency’’ committed between men, or between a
man and an animal.
It is highly surprising that Freud took no interest in
this manifestation of sexual life during the first years
of psychoanalysis, despite the abundant literature on
the topic by such writers as Jean-Martin Charcot,
Valentin Magnan, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Albert
Moll, Magnus Hirschfeld, and others. Though Freud
views neurosis as the ‘‘negative of perversion’’ (without
mentioning homosexuality), this is because he supposes that psychic processes do not undergo repression
in the ‘‘pervert.’’ Moreover, the theory of bisexuality
(Freud-Fliess) introduces the question, albeit under
the veil of biology. However, Freud did undertake to
analyze a homosexual patient at the end of the nineteenth century, but the patient concerned apparently
committed suicide at Trafoi.
The arrival of Isidore Sadger in Freud’s circle in
1906 was to be decisive. As dialogue between him and
Freud led to the laying down of an ‘‘etiological formula’’: masculine homosexuality results from a boy’s
childhood repression of the existence of a ‘‘strong’’
mother and a weak or absent father (Freud, 1910c). In
the debate with Sadger, who adhered to the seduction
theory, Freud proposed etiological variants in which
the boy’s arousal is transposed from the mother onto
men (1905d [1910]), or else there is identification with
the mother, hatred towards boys is converted into
love, there is a ‘‘narcissistic’’ fixation on the penis, or
we see identification with the mother leading to
repression of love for the mother (Nunberg, Federn,
1962–75). The theory of narcissism that developed in
tandem with that of homosexuality opened up a path
that Freud left relatively unexplored: the transmission
of narcissism. Thus, Freud’s descriptions in ‘‘On
Narcissism: An Introduction’’ (1914c)—‘‘A person
may love . . . according to the narcissistic type . . . (a)
what he himself is (i.e., himself), (b) what he himself
was’’ (p. 90)—could be supplemented by formulae
such as ‘‘a person loves that which the other wants him
to be’’ and, eventually, ‘‘a person loves in himself that
which the other would have liked to have or to be’’
(p. 90).
The other area barely outlined by Freud in the
discussions of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society is
that of the passage from autoeroticism to narcissism:
‘‘In general, man has two original sexual objects and
his later life depends on the one upon which he
remains fixated. These two sexual objects are, for each
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individual, the woman (the mother, the children’s
nurse, etc.) and his own person. It is a question of getting rid of both of them and not lingering over them.
One’s own person is the one which, most often, is
replaced by the father; the latter soon enters the hostile
position. Homosexuality bifurcates at this point. The
homosexual is unable to detach himself from himself
so soon’’ (1914c). This heavily significant appearance
of the father-figure was not followed up in the etiology
of masculine homosexuality but it was later to be
found in the analysis of male paranoia (the Schreber
case, reported in ‘‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia [Dementia
Paranoides]’’: 1911c [1910]), in which a pathological
defense against homosexuality develops, though the
role of the father is never specified. Is he an agent of
culture because he brandishes castration in the name
of the law that forbids masturbation and the mother?
Might he not also fill a role as seducer?
In 1910, homosexuality was defined by the characteristics of the object or the subject, but in 1915, in
place of this distinction, Freud returned to the conception he had earlier developed with Fliess: the object is
merely the reflection of the bisexual nature of the subject (‘‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,’’ 1905d
[1915]).
Homosexuality in women would remain less well
explored (‘‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,’’ 1920a), because the transposition
of the etiological formula for men—specifically, excessive love for the father—often works less well.
As Sándor Ferenczi remarked in 1914, drawing a
distinction between ‘‘subject homoerotism’’ and
‘‘object homoerotism’’ (Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality, note added in 1920, p. 147), psychoanalysis
relied right from the start on a model of the ‘‘feminine
man’’ and thus neglected the masculinity present in
other homosexual men, just as it ignored the femininity of certain lesbians.
Since the 1970s, as homosexuality became more
openly discussed, several authors (Chasseguet-Smirgel, J., et al., 1964; Isay, R. A., 1986) have communicated clinical observations that suggest other etiologies. But the psychoanalytic perspective has again
become clouded by the way the question of ‘‘gender’’
has been biologized (Robert Stoller). Gays themselves
have embraced theories of innate or physiological
homosexuality in order to defend themselves against
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the inquisitorial persecution long meted out to them
by justice, medicine, and even psychoanalysis.
Nonetheless, a first step towards the lessening of
homophobia, on a basis other than that of moral principles, was taken by Freud, who put forward the idea
that a manifest sexual tendency (heterosexuality, for
instance) could conceal another, opposite tendency
that remains latent (such as homosexuality). However,
although Freud went along with increasingly progressive attitudes in society, he remained just as reserved as
did society—witness this rather ambiguous and
nuanced letter that he wrote in 1935 to the mother of a
homosexual, whose sexuality he did not view as an illness but as a case of arrested development (while only
heterosexuality is treated as normal): ‘‘Homosexuality
is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be
ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of
the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of
sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them.
(Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.) It is a
great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a
crime—and a cruelty, too. . . . By asking me if I can
help, you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place.
The answer is, in a general way we cannot promise to
achieve it. In a certain number of cases we succeed in
developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies, which are present in every homosexual; in the
majority of cases it is no more possible’’ (Letters of
Sigmund Freud, 1856–1939, p. 423). However, such
permissiveness was contradicted by the fact that from
1920 onwards many psychoanalytic societies refused
to admit openly homosexual candidates.
The response to the theoretical and practical debate
around homosexuality was nevertheless present, in
embryonic form, in Freud’s conceptualization of the
sexual instinct in 1905. Indeed, at the beginning of the
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality following
Charcot and Magnan, he used the highly inappropriate
word ‘‘inversion’’ to prove demonstrate that the
instinct has no predefined object.
BERTRAND VICHYN
See also: Activity/passivity; Alcoholism; Anality; Dark
continent; Eroticism, anal; Female sexuality; Fetishism;
75 8
Heterosexuality; Identification; ‘‘Leonardo da Vinci and
a Memory of His Childhood’’; Libido; Narcissism, secondary; Neurosis; Paranoia; Paranoid position; Persecution; Perversion; Phallic mother; Projection; Psychology
of Women, The: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, Psychopathologie de l’échec (Psychopathology of Failure); Sadger, Isidor Isaak; Suicide; Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality.
Bibliography
Bieber, Irving, et al. (1962). Homosexuality, a psychoanalytical study. New York: Basic Books.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Jacqueline, et al. (1964). Female sexuality: New psychoanalytic views. London: Virago.
Freud, Sigmund. (1960). Letters of Sigmund Freud, 1856–
1939. (Ernst L. Freud, Ed.; Tania and James Stern, Trans.).
New York: Basic Books.
Isay, Richard A. (1986). The development of sexual identity
in homosexual men. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 41.
Lewes, Kenneth. (1988). The psychoanalytic theory of male
homosexuality. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Socarides, Charles W. (1978). Homosexuality. New York:
Jason Aronson.
Further Reading
Friedman, Robert. (1988). Male homosexuality. A contemporary psychoanalytic perspective. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press
Roughton, Ralph. (2002). Rethinking homosexuality: What
it teaches us about psychoanalysis. Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, 50, 733–764.
HORNEY-DANIELSON, KAREN (1885–1952)
Karen Horney, physician and psychoanalyst, was born
Karen Danielson in a suburb of Hamburg, on September 15, 1885, and died December 4, 1952, in New York.
Her father was a sea captain of Norwegian origin,
her mother of Dutch-German extraction. She studied
medicine at the Universities of Freiburg, Göttingen,
and Berlin, and married Oskar Horney in 1909. She
entered analysis with Karl Abraham in 1910, and
became a founding member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute in 1920.
Having separated from her husband in 1926,
Horney emigrated to the United States in 1932, when
Franz Alexander invited her to become associate
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director of the newly formed Chicago Psychoanalytic
Society and Institute. She moved to New York in 1934
and became a member of the New York Psychoanalytic
Institute. In 1941, she organized the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, of which she was dean until
her death in 1952. She was founding editor of The
American Journal of Psychoanalysis.
Horney’s thought went through three phases: in the
1920s and early 1930s, she wrote a series of essays in
which she tried to modify orthodox ideas about feminine psychology while staying within the framework of
Freudian theory. In 1930s, she tried to redefine psychoanalysis by replacing Freud’s biological orientation
with an emphasis on culture and interpersonal relationships. In the 1940s, she developed her mature
theory in which individuals cope with the anxiety produced by feeling unsafe, unloved, and unvalued by disowning their spontaneous feelings and developing
elaborate strategies of defense.
Disagreeing with Freud about penis envy, female
masochism, and feminine development, Horney’s
early essays were largely ignored until they were published in Feminine Psychology in 1967. Since then,
there has been a growing recognition that Karen
Horney was the first great psychoanalytic feminist.
As the author of The Neurotic Personality of Our
Time (1937) and New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939),
Horney is often thought of as a neo-Freudian member
of ‘‘the cultural school,’’ a group that also included
Erich Fromm, Harry Stack Sullivan, Clara Thompson,
and Abram Kardiner. These two books proposed a
model for the structure of neurosis in which adverse
conditions in the environment as a whole, and especially in the family, create a ‘‘basic anxiety’’ against
which the child defends itself by developing strategies
of defense that are self-alienating, self-defeating, and
in conflict with each other. In a striking departure
from Freud, Horney advocated focusing on the current
constellation of defenses and inner conflicts rather
than with infantile origins.
In her next book, Self-Analysis (1942), Horney presented her fullest account of how the psychoanalytic
process works in terms of her structural paradigm.
The object of therapy for Horney is to help people
relinquish their defenses, which alienate them from
their real selves, so that they can get in touch with their
true likes and dislikes, hopes, fears, and desires.
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In her mature theory, developed in her last two
books, Horney argued that people defend themselves
against their anxieties by developing both interpersonal and intrapsychic strategies of defense. She described the interpersonal strategies most fully in Our
Inner Conflicts (1945). They involve moving toward,
against, or away from other people and adopting a
compliant, aggressive, or detached solution. Since people tend to employ more than one of these strategies,
they are beset by inner conflicts. In order to avoid
being torn apart or paralyzed, they adopt a strategy
consistent with their culture, temperament, and circumstances; but the repressed tendencies persist, generating inconsistencies and rising to the surface if the
predominant solution fails.
Karen Horney emphasized intrapsychic strategies in
Neurosis and Human Growth (1950). To compensate
for feelings of weakness, inadequacy, and low selfesteem, people develop an idealized image of themselves that they seek to actualize by embarking on a
search for glory. The idealized image generates a pride
system, which consists of neurotic pride, neurotic
claims, and tyrannical shoulds, all of which instensify
the self-hate against which they are intended to be a
defense. The idealized image is inwardly divided, since
it reflects not only the predominant interpersonal
strategy but also the conflict between it and the subordinate tendencies.
Horney’s mature theory helped to inspire the interpersonal school of psychoanalysis, provided a model
for therapies that focus on the current situation, and
influenced some of the descriptions of personality disorders in the DSM-III and -IV. It has made an important contribution to the study of literature, biography,
gender, and culture. Because of her emphasis on selfrealization as the goal of life and the source of healthy
values, Karen Horney was recognized by Abraham
Maslow as one of the founders of humanistic psychology. Her theory has most in common, perhaps, with
the work of Erich Fromm, Ernest Schachtel, Carl
Rogers, and Abraham Maslow. Many of Horney’s ideas
have made their way, often unacknowledged, into the
array of concepts and techniques that are currently
employed in clinical practice.
BERNARD PARIS
Work discussed: Neurosis and Human Growth
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HOSPITALISM
See also: Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie; American Academy of Psychoanalysis; Dark
continent; Feminine sexuality; Femininity; Feminism
and psychoanalysis; Germany; Memory; Second World
War: The effect on the development of psychoanalysis;
Splits in psychoanalysis; United States.
Bibliography
Horney, Karen. (1922). Feminine psychology. New York,
W.W. Norton.
———. (1937). The neurotic personality of our time. New
York: W. W. Norton.
———. (1939). New ways in psychoanalysis. New York,
W.W. Norton.
———. (1942). Self-analysis. New York: W.W. Norton.
———. (1950). Neurosis and human growth: The Struggle
toward self-realization. New York, W.W. Norton.
Paris, Bernard. (1994). Karen Horney : A psychoanalyst’s
search for self-understanding. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Quinn, Susan. (1987). A mind of her own: The life of Karen
Horney. New York: Summit Books.
Westkott, Marcia. (1986). The feminist legacy of Karen
Horney. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
HOSPITALISM
René Spitz introduced the term hospitalism in his work
defining disorders in infants who were institutionalized for long periods and deprived of substitute
maternal care. The notion was later expanded to refer
more generally to severe and lasting maternal
deprivation.
Linked to Sigmund Freud’s concept of maternal
care according to, hospitalism refers to the most radical effects of deficiencies in this area. Spitz’s defining
study of the phenomenon concerned abandoned children who had been separated from their mothers at
around three months and had lived for five to six
months in a nursery that was said to be beyond
reproach in terms of nursing care but that was isolated
and devoid of human bonding relations for the babies.
The pathology analyzed showed the following: overall
developmental deterioration; stagnation in heightweight growth; a shift in development ratios; relational
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or affective expression reduced to silence; motor and
behavioral deviancies; and increased morbidity/mortality rates. Many of these forms of damage were
deemed to be irreversible. Spitz categorized hospitalism as ‘‘total affective deficiency’’ and distinguished it
from anaclitic depression, categorized as ‘‘partial deficiency,’’ which followed at least six months of satisfactory relations with the mother and which could
improve once the child was reunited with the mother.
Spitz described these two pathological forms in a
pair of publications (hospitalism in 1945, anaclitic
depression in 1946) jointly subtitled ‘‘An Inquiry into
the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood.’’ His work emphasizes the vital importance of
object relations and the serious consequences of its
failure. Additionally, it underscores the relevance of
direct infant observation. The baby in reality and the
reconstructed baby, placed in a relation of reciprocal
reassessment, make possible a wealth of discoveries
that validate the research method promoted by Spitz.
His concept thus brings us back to the very origins
of infant psychiatry, and the first World Congress
on Infant Psychiatry, in 1980, was dedicated to
his memory.
As a model of deprivation in institutional settings,
hospitalism holds a historical place in the design of
children’s shelters and child-care facilities. The notion
received international exposure through a World
Health Organization monograph (No. 2, 1951)
entitled ‘‘Maternal Care and Mental Health’’; it was
coordinated by John Bowlby, already an established
presence in this field ten years prior to his shift in
focus to attachment theory.
Spitz’s concept of hospitalism drew a number of critical analyses, some on specific points (the inaccuracy
of the term itself, lack of precision in pediatric terms,
the omission of frequent repeated separation, failure
to consider the father’s role, etc.), others more general
in their scope. These criticisms resulted in some major
reassessments in a new World Health Organization
monograph published in 1962, whose principal
authors included Serge Lebovici and Mary D.
Ainsworth.
Study of the short- and long-term consequences of
a young infant being separated from its mother
remained one of the foremost focuses of childhood
psychiatry (Michel Soulé), constantly revised in the light
of new discoveries and approaches: the competencies of
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infants, relational pathologies, advances in knowledge
about the infant’s mental functioning, psychosomatic
repercussions as the top-ranking psychopathological
expressions of frustration in early infancy (Léon Kreisler). With a few major exceptions, forms of hospitalism at the turn of the millennium are less connected to
stays in institutions and more often concern the complexity of social and intrafamilial deprivation that children face in contemporary society.
LÉON KREISLER
See also: Abandonment; Anaclisis/anaclitic; Deprivation;
Spitz, René Arpad.
Bibliography
Ainsworth, Mary D. Salter. (1962). The effects of maternal
deprivation: a review of findings and controversy in the
context of research strategy. In Mary D. Ainsworth and R.
G. Andry Deprivation of maternal care. Geneva: World
Health Organization.
Lebovici, Serge. (1962). Sur la notion de carence maternelle.
In La carence de soins maternels, réévaluation de ses effets.
Geneva: Organisation Mondiale de la Santé.
Soulé, Michel; Lauzanne, Kathlen; and Leblanc, Nelly.
(1995). La carence de soins maternels. In Serge Lebovici,
René Diatkine, and Michel Soulé (Eds.) Nouveau traité de
psychiatrie de l’enfant et de l’adolescent (Vol. 4, pp. 2529–
2545). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Spitz, René A. (1945). Hospitalism: An inquiry into the genesis of psychiatric conditions in early childhood. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1, 53–74.
Spitz, René A. (1946). Anaclitic depression. Psychoanalytic
Study of the Child, 2, 313–342.
Further Reading
Spitz, Rene A. (1946). Hospitalism: a follow-up report. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 2, 113–118.
HUG-HELLMUTH-HUG VON HUGENSTEIN,
HERMINE VON (1871–1924)
The Austrian psychoanalyst Hermine Hug von
Hugenstein (usually known as Hermine von
Hellmuth) was born in Vienna on August 31, 1871,
where she was murdered on September 8 or 9, 1924.
She is often regarded as the first child psychoanalyst.
Hug-Hellmuth was the second daughter of Hugo
Hug von Hugenstein, who served in the Austrian war
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VON
(1871 –1 924)
ministry both as a military officer (rising to the rank of
lieutenant colonel) and as a civilian. The family was
Catholic. After the death of her mother, who had
served as her tutor, Hermine entered public school
and eventually trained to become a teacher. She taught
in public and private schools before entering the University of Vienna in 1897, where she studied the physical sciences. In 1909, she obtained a doctorate in
physics.
While a patient of the Viennese analyst Isidor
Sadger, Hug-Hellmuth became interested in psychoanalysis. In 1910, she resigned her teaching post and
the next year published her first paper on psychoanalysis in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, even before
she began to take part in the meetings of the Vienna
Psychoanalytical Society. The title of that paper, ‘‘The
Analysis of a Dream of a 5-Year Old Boy’’ already indicated her principal interest. In 1913 she published
‘‘The Nature of the Child’s Soul (Or Psyche).’’ The title
of that paper subsequently served as the name of a section on child psychoanalysis that she wrote for Imago;
she also became a regular contributor to the Internationale Zeitschrift für (ärztliche) Psychoanalyse. HugHellmuth first participated in meetings of the Vienna
Society in 1913, and became a member of the society
that fall.
Active and well-known beyond Vienna, HugHellmuth became the first child analyst and contributed to the evolution of child psychoanalysis. At the
International Congress in The Hague in 1920, she
reported on her early efforts in her paper ‘‘On the
Technique of the Analysis of Children.’’ A year later she
became director of the Educational Counseling Center
associated with the ‘‘Ambulatorium’’ of the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society. Her work, critiqued by both
pedagogues and psychologists, was based on observation and analysis of children’s behavior and on the
possibility of applying psychoanalytic theory to education and the psychology of children. Her broad application of psychodynamic hypotheses to child behavior
contributed to the rejection of psychoanalysis by the
field of educational psychology.
Hug-Hellmuth’s A Young Girl ’s Diary was first published anonymously in 1919 by the Internationaler
Psychoanalytischer Verlag, the official psychoanalytic
publishing house. The book created a sensation, and
was discussed in the daily newspapers as well as in
medical and psychological reviews, but its authenticity
was questioned. Hug-Hellmuth, who was named as
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HUMOR
the book’s ‘‘editor’’ in 1922, would not admit to being
its real author. In 1927 Freud, who had written an
introduction to the book, asked that it be withdrawn
from bookstores.
On the night of September 8–9, 1924, shortly after
the completion of her book New Ways to the Understanding of Youth, Hug-Hellmuth was murdered by her
eighteen-year-old nephew, Rolf. The illegitimate child
of her half-sister Antoine, he had been raised by HugHellmuth since the death of his mother. According to
Rolf, his aunt’s writings contained many observations
of him and he testified at his trial that she had
attempted to psychoanalyze him. After his trial he was
sentenced to twelve years in prison. After being
released from prison, he attempted to get restitution
from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association, as a victim of psychoanalysis.
ELKE MÜHLLEITNER
Work discussed: Young Girl’s Diary, A.
See also: Child analysis; Children’s play.
Bibliography
Drell, Martin J. (1982). Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, A pioneer
in child analysis. Bulletin of the Meninger Clinic, 46 (2),
138–150.
Hug-Hellmuth, Hermine von. (1919). A study of the mental
life of the child. New York and Washington; Nervous and
Mental Disease Monograph series.
———. (1971). A young girl’s diary. Boston: Milford House.
(Original work published 1924)
MacLean, George; and Rappen, Ulrich. (1991). Hermine von
Hug-Hellmuth. New York: Routledge.
Roazen, Paul. (1976). Freud and his followers. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
HUMOR
Humor is the name given to the psychic process that
operates in the field of the preconscious, based on the
dynamic interrelation between the agencies of the
mind, and akin to a defense mechanism, consisting of
an unexpected re-evaluation of the demands of reality
that reverses their painful emotional tone and thereby
offers to the triumphant ego that yield of pleasure
76 2
which enables it to demonstrate its invulnerable
narcissism.
Freud’s first insight into the mechanism of this phenomenon, which was entrenched in the family and
community life in which he was deeply involved, came
in the last pages of Jokes and their Relation to the
Unconscious (1905c). It was, in fact, on the death of his
father that he started to collect Jewish jokes (Witze)
and, at the insistence of Wilhelm Fliess, developed a
theory to explain them, bringing out how their very
condition of possibility lay in the activity of this process within the humorist. Although he pointed out
(1908c) the kinship between this process and children’s games, he did not elucidate it in metapsychological terms until the brief article of 1927 (1927d).
Unlike comedy and wit, or even irony, all of which
aim at the satisfaction of erotic or aggressive drives
and necessitate, for this purpose, the effective presence
of a real third party, humor involves a strictly intrapsychic process of indirection whose purpose is economic, viz., sparing the subject from the painful
feelings (pity, irritation, anger, suffering, disgust, tenderness, horror, etc.) that the situation ought to occasion. The energy of these feelings is thus diverted and
transformed into the moderate but triumphant pleasure (so different from the explosion of hilarity) that is
expressed in the smile of humor. As a result, the
humorist reaffirms his narcissistic invulnerability,
assuring himself that nothing traumatic can affect
him, and that he can in fact find in such things a yield
of pleasure.
This being the case, although humor is an autonomous process, it is encountered most often mixed with
other forms of the comic, in which it finds a mode of
expression, with which it is often confused, and for
which it intervenes as a mechanism that inhibits any
emotions that would obstruct its development.
Nonetheless, Freud considers humor as a particularly salubrious activity, making of it the rarest and
most elaborate form of defense. Yet its benefits turn
out in fact to be costly, necessitating a large outlay,
since while this economic process, being neither denial
nor repression, leads to a reversal of emotional tone, it
does not eliminate the painful representation. Freud
explained this as the result of a new topographical
arrangement: the humorist takes the psychic emphasis
off the ego and displaces it onto his superego: ‘‘Look!
here is the world, which seems so dangerous! It is
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nothing but a game for children—just worth making a
jest about!’’ (1927d, p. 166).
In fact, humor leads to a set of notions whose origin, nature, history, and development thus all need to
be re-examined, as they all indubitably hark back to
the genesis of the ideal psychic agencies and their function in establishing a humorous attitude towards reality. All of these dimensions, indeed—whether it be the
invulnerable narcissistic kernel of which the humorist
is a living testimony, the exercise of the reality principle, the experience of pain, the mechanism of illusion,
or the alchemy of the emotions that it produces—
invite reflection on the precocious relations that were
formed between the humorist and his mother who
bequeathed to him this precious gift (Donnet, J.-L.,
1997; Kameniak, J.-P., 1998). For example, we need to
reflect—as did Freud—on the enigma of the ‘‘essence
of the Super-ego,’’ a superego that manifests itself in an
atypical form of functioning: as a reassuring and consoling agency—even a maternal one—that is barely
consistent with the severity usually associated with it,
whether in the commands it issues or in its role as
representative and guardian of the reality principle.
While humor was initially considered as a variety of
the comic genre, in the same way as wit (with which it
is often confused), Freud early on endeavored to distinguish it through topographical localization, the
kind of gratification it affords, the absence of the need
for a third person, and, finally, the specific nature of
the process, all of which make it a character disposition or trait rather than a random production. Consequently, over and above the defensive use that has been
classically recognized and associated with the process
of humor, we might want to ask whether it could have
a specific function of working-through, very different
from the relaxation which is brought about by the
comic effect, thus tempering any excess of emotion;
how any real ‘‘work of humor’’ is actually accomplished; and what its nature might be. Whereas, when
faced with the hostility of events, the risk of trauma
may appear to be significant, humor does allow the
subject to maintain the integrity of his psychic functions and their availability while also acknowledging
the ‘‘disruptive’’ nature of reality. We can surely envisage the possibility (Bergeret, 1973) that there are
hints of a working-through involved in humor, or, at
the very least, the establishment of the framework
needed for any possible integration of the sufferings
inflicted on the subject.
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Nevertheless, it cannot escape notice that there has
been a general lack of interest and a relative silence on
the part of contemporary analysts when it comes to
this subject, apparently so frivolous though in fact it
raises fundamental questions. Up until now, analytic
literature on this theme has scarcely extended beyond
a few scattered remarks or occasional articles, and
most of them use humor as a generic category succeeding that of ‘‘the comic’’ proposed by Freud. Consequently, they are more likely to discuss the techniques
and procedures of the modes of expression to which
humor resorts than to examine the process of humor
itself.
JEAN-PIERRE KAMENIAK
See also: Almanach der Psychoanalyse; Creativity; Jokes
and their Relation to the Unconscious; Paradox.
Bibliography
Bergeret, Jean. (1973). Pour une métapyschologie de
l’humour. Revue française de psychanalyse, 37, 4.
Donnet, Jean-Luc. (1997). L’humoriste et sa croyance. Revue
française de psychanalyse, 61, 3.
Gay, Peter. (1990). Reading Freud: Explorations and entertainments. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kamieniak, Jean-Pierre. (1998). Freud, un enfant de
l’humour. Lausanne-Paris: Delachaux & Niestlé.
Shentoub, Salem A. et al. (1989). L’Humour dans l’oeuvre de
Freud. Paris: Two Cities.
Further Reading
Poland, Warren S. (1990). Gift of laughter: Development of
a sense of humor in clinical analysis. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 59,197–225.
HUNGARIAN SCHOOL
Fundamentally, the ‘‘Hungarian School’’ denotes a
trend of thought developed by psychoanalysts who
worked in Budapest between the two world wars. Its
representatives worked independently. They shared a
theoretical view that did not recognize primary narcissism. From the beginning, they attributed a prominent
role to the mother-child relationship. As part of this
work, they contributed to the instinct theory (clinging
instinct, Imre Hermann) and the role of psychological deficiency (Sándor Ferenczi, Michael Bálint).
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HUNGARY
Commitment to treatment was emphasized, which
gave rise to methodological experiments (Ferenczi)
and led to two-person psychology (Michael Bálint).
They contributed to the development of ethnopsychoanalysis (Geza Róheim) and psychoanalytical
psychosomatics (Franz Alexander), and the introduction of psychoanalytical pedagogics (Ferenczi, Imre
Hermann, Michael Bálint).
The school was founded by Ferenczi as an analytical
circle around him in Budapest. In 1913 the Hungarian
Psychoanalytical Society was founded which, together
with the Viennese Society, became the most important
intellectual center in Europe.The cultural-social atmosphere of the age was, in many respects, favorable for
the development of psychoanalysis; reputed writers
and also joined the group. Freud supported the idea
that psychoanalysis should have several centers. At the
end of WWI in 1918, the International Congress was
held in Budapest and plans were made to found the
first psychoanalytical institution there.
The 1920s were the golden age of the Hungarian
School. Ferenczi’s theoretical work and methodological experiments mark this period. Several creative analysts among his students acquired worldwide repute
(Alexander, Alice Bálint, Melanie Klein, Róheim, René
A. Spitz). With regard to training, Ferenczi advocated
the introduction of compulsory personal analysis of
greater depth than in the case of patients. This gave
rise to the development of the Budapest model of
supervised analysis (Vilma Kovács).
Ferenczi’s death and the political situation in the
1930s, and specifically the persecution of Jews, caused
many to emigrate (Sándor Radó, C. Robert Bak, Alice
Bálint, Michael Bálint, Róheim), and many of those
who remained in Budapest fell victim to fascism during WWII. By the end of the 1930s the Hungarian
School as an intellectual community had lost its significance. Many of the emigrant analysts preserved the
spirit of the School in their work in their adopted
country (the Bálints and E. Gyömrôi in England;
Alexander, Therése Benedek, Sándor Lóránd, Margaret
Mahler, Radó, Danièle Rapaport, Róheim, and Spitz in
the U.S.). The small group in Budapest continued
their scientific activity.
After 1945, there was a brief period of upswing, but
in 1949 the communist government banned the
society and psychoanalysis was forced into semi-illegality. Its representatives—led by Imre Hermann—
76 4
ensured the survival of psychoanalysis, passing on the
spirit and traditions of the Hungarian School. In the
1970s, psychoanalysis was reinstituted (1975—study
group; 1983—provisional society; 1989—component
society).
The Hungarian School may be said to have two distinctive features. One is that its original representatives
catalyzed the development of psychoanalytical theory
and techniques. They discovered and described a number of phenomena which have continued to constitute
the foundation of psychoanalysis. The other is the
‘‘Ferenczi phenomenon,’’ according to which only
the essential development of psychoanalysis makes the
integration of theoretical and methodological work
possible.
HUNGARIAN GROUP
See also: Ferenczi, Sándor; Hungary.
Bibliography
Harmat, Pál. (1988). Freud, Ferenczi und die Psychoanalyse
in Ungarn. Tübingen: Diskord.
Harmatta János, Szónyi, Gábor. (1992). Hungary. In
P. Kutter (Ed.), Psychoanalysis international, a guide to
psychoanalysis throughout the world, (Vol. 1, Europe,
p. 173–184). Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: FrommannHolzboog.
Hidas, György. (1987). Die Psychoanalyse und ihre Schicksale in Ungarn. Sigmund Freud House Bulletin, 11 (2),
1–12.
Nemes, Lı́via. (1985). The fate of the hungarian psychoanalysts during the time of fascism. Sigmund Freud House
Bulletin, 9, 20–28.
Vikár, György. (1994). Der Beitrag der Budapester psychoanalytischen Schule zur Objektbeziehungstheorie. International Forum for Psychoanalysis, 10, 52–60.
HUNGARY
Hungary, a country that was primarily agricultural
until the mid-nineteenth century, entered the modern
era in 1867 with the creation of the Austro-Hungarian
monarchy. At the start of the twentieth century, in
Budapest, which had become a center of cultural life, a
group of radical intellectuals demanded the democratization of a country that had remained semi-feudal.
Unable to compete in the political sphere, they created
institutions like the Free School of Social Science,
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reviews like Huszadik Szàzad (Twentieth Century) and
Nyugat (Occident), to achieve their goal by means of
education. For psychoanalysis the Hungarian intelligentsia was fertile terrain, for it held that the liberation
of the individual and the liberation of society went
hand in hand.
Psychoanalysis was introduced to Hungary by
Sándor Ferenczi, who was its leading exponent. A
young neurologist, Ferenczi encountered Freudian
theory through Carl Gustav Jung’s word association
test and through the literature of analysis. After his
first visit to Freud in February 1908, he quickly became
an integral part of the Vienna group and assumed the
responsibility of bringing psychoanalysis to Hungary.
His efforts were well received in literary and artistic
circles, as shown in the writings of Géza Csáth, Dezsö
Kosztolànyi, Mihály Babits, and Frigyes Karinthy,
while most physicians remained reticent.
The Hungarian Psychoanalytic Association was
founded by Ferenczi in 1913. In addition to Ferenczi,
its members included the psychiatrist István Hollós,
the physician Lajos Lévy, the medical student Sándor
Radó, and the journalist and writer Hugó Ignotus
(Hugó Veigelsberg), the editor-in-chief of Nyugat.
During World War I, Ferenczi, who had been mobilized, cared for soldiers who had suffered trauma during combat. The psychoanalytic treatment of war
neuroses drew the attention of Hungarian officials,
with the result that the Fifth Congress of Psychoanalysis, organized in Budapest on September 28 and 29,
1918, was held at the Academy of Sciences in the presence of government representatives. During the congress, Antal (Anton) von Freund, who ran a large beer
hall, but also had a PhD in philosophy, a patient and
friend of Freud, provided funding for the creation of a
psychoanalytic clinic and publishing house. Ferenczi
was elected president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, but the political upheavals that
shook the country, especially Hungary’s independence
from Austria, the democratic revolution, the Bolshevik
revolution in Budapest in 1919 and its brutal repression, forced him to yield the presidency to the Briton,
Ernest Jones.
During the democratic government of Mihály
Károlyi, students and progressives demanded that psychoanalysis be officially recognized. Their demand
reached the Commune and Ferenczi was appointed
professor of psychoanalysis at the university, the first
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in the world. When the right-wing government of
Miklós Horthy came to power, the position was eliminated and, in 1920, Ferenczi was excluded from the
Hungarian medical association.
The 1920s turned out to be a phase of expansion for
psychoanalysis in Hungary. At the end of the war, Géza
Róheim, Imre Hermann, Zsigmond Pfeifer, and other
leading figures joined the Hungarian Psychoanalytic
Association. Cut off from playing a role in Hungarian
public life, psychoanalysts consulted, taught, and published. Róheim developed the notion of psychoanalytic
anthropology, Hermann worked on the psychology of
creativity, Pfeifer on children’s games. This was also
the period of the first wave of emigration. Sándor
Radó and Jenö Hárnik moved to Berlin and participated in the creation of the Institute for Psychoanalytic
Training. During the twenties, József Eisler, Sándor
Feldmann, Erzsébet Révész, Béla Felszeghy, Vilma
Kovács, and Alice and Mihály Bálint joined the
association.
Efforts were made to organize the teaching of psychoanalysis. Seminars on theory were established in
1919, and in 1925 a training method specific to
Hungary was developed by Ferenczi and Vilma
Kovács.
In 1925, István Hollós was fired from his position
as head physician at the psychiatric hospital of Lipótmezö because of his Jewish background. Two years
later he published My Farewell from the Yellow House,
in which he investigated psychosis from a new and
innovative point of view.
In 1928, Géza Róheim traveled to central Australia,
Normanby Island, and America. During his research,
financed by Marie Bonaparte, he combined anthropological research with psychoanalytic theory.
In 1930, a psychoanalytic clinic for children was
created under the direction of Margit Dubowitz. That
same year Lilian Rotter and Fanny Hann joined the
association. In 1931, in spite of several administrative
problems, a polyclinic was opened at 12 Mészáros
Street, with Ferenczi as director. The building and
funding were provided by Vilma Kovács and her
family; analysts from the association provided free
consultations.
Ferenczi’s students prepared Psychoanalytic Studies
for his sixtieth birthday, but the book wasn’t published
until after his death in 1933. István Hollós then
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became president of the association and Mihály Bálint
director of the polyclinic.
In 1935 and 1937 two meetings, known as the Four
Nations, were organized by the psychoanalytic associations of Vienna, Prague, Italy, and Hungary, the first in
Vienna, the second in Budapest, and devoted to the
problems of psychoanalytic training. At the second
meeting, Vilma Kovács detailed the characteristics of
the Hungarian method and Anna Freud read a paper
by Helene Deutsch criticizing the method.
Hungarian analysts also began a program to
develop public awareness of psychoanalysis. Kata Lévy
organized seminars with teachers, Alice Bálint with
mothers, and Mihály Bálint held discussion groups
with general practitioners. In 1933, Lilly Hajdu, a psychiatrist, joined the association.
During the late thirties, threatened by the rise of
anti-Semitism and fascism, a number of analysts
decided to emigrate. Among them were the Bálints,
Géza Róheim, Sándor Feldmann, and Edit Gyömröi.
The association continued to function under police
surveillance and under the direction of its non-Jewish
members, Endre Almássy and Tibor Rajka. In 1944,
when German troops invaded Hungary and put Hungarian Nazis in power, several analysts, including Zsigmond Pfeifer, Géza Dukes, László Révész, Miklós
Gimes, and József Eisler, became victims of persecution. Imre Hermann and István Hollós barely escaped
with their lives.
After 1945, psychoanalysts in Hungary resumed
their activities. They participated in the creation of a
mental health institute and worked in dispensaries.
But the Stalinist government, which came to power in
1948, forced the association to dissolve. From then on
psychoanalysis survived in a semi-clandestine fashion,
primarily through the help of Imre Hermann, who
trained the new generation of analysts: György Vikár,
Livia Nemes, Agnes Binét, Teréz Virág. The dark years
after 1956 were marked by the suicide of Lilly Hajdu,
whose husband was murdered by the Nazis and whose
son, a friend of Imre Nagy, had been executed along
with the prime minister. During the sixties, the Kádar
government became more tolerant of psychoanalysis.
István Székács, a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Association since 1939, also began to train
psychoanalysts, although not initially a member of
Hermann’s group.
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During the seventies, Hungarian analysts still did
not have an officially recognized association, but some
public manifestations of recognition took place. In
1969, for example, Imre Hermann was decorated on
his eightieth birthday and, in 1974, a commemorative
celebration was organized for the Ferenczi centenary.
In 1987 an international congress of psychoanalysis
was held in Budapest.
After democracy was restored in 1989, the
Hungarian Psychoanalytic Association was reconstituted and affiliated itself with the International Psychoanalytic Association. A new generation of analysts
was able to practice, teach, and publish openly.
The Ferenczi Society, a broad-based group of people interested in psychoanalysis, began to publish the
review Thalassa. While the first generation of analysts
trained by Imre Hermann was affected primarily by his
ideas, contemporary psychoanalysts were reevaluating
the ideas of Ferenczi, which they were forced to read in
foreign editions since his complete works had not yet
been published in Hungarian because of a lack of
funding. They also served as an inspiration for Otto
Kernberg.
Hungarian psychoanalysts of the 1930s developed
a number of specific ideas that justify referring to
them collectively as the Budapest School. These
include the importance of trauma in the etiology of
mental pathology, the attention given to object relations, consideration of dyadic relations and regression, and insistence on the importance of experience
in therapy. Hungarian training methods differed
from other methods in that the candidate’s first control analysis was undertaken by his own analyst to
further an understanding of the countertransference
and better understand his own transference to the
analyst.
Ferenczi’s students demonstrated considerable creativity. Imre Hermann developed the theory of clinging,
Géza Róheim the ontogenetic theory of culture, and
Mihály Bálint the theory of primal love (and several
others after his emigration). Lilian Rotter developed a
body of original work on female sexuality and Alice
Bálint on the mother-child relationship. István Hollós
and Lilly Hajdu examined psychoses from a psychoanalytic point of view.
ÉVA BRABANT-GERÖ
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Bibliography
Bálint, Michael. (1968). The basic fault: Therapeutic aspects
of regression. London: Tavistock Publications.
Brabant-Gerö, Éva. (1993). Ferenczi et L’école hongroise de
psychanalyse. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Ferenczi, Sandor. (1955). Selected Papers of Sandor
Ferenczi. (Vol. 3, Michael Bálint, Ed.). New York: Basic
Books.
Haynal, André. (1988). The technique at issue: Controversies
in psychoanalysis from Freud and Ferenczi to Michael Bálint.
(Elizabeth Holder, Trans.). London: Karnac. (Original
work published 1986)
Hermann, Imre. (1972). L’instinct filial. (G. Kassai, Trans.).
Paris: Denoël.
Hungarian Psychoanalytic Association. (1933).Lélekelemzési
Tanulmànyok (Psychoanalytic Studies). Budapest: Somló.
HYPERCATHEXIS
Freud employed the term ‘‘hypercathexis’’ to designate
an additional charge of instinctual energy cathecting
any already cathected psychical element. The word’s
primary application was in the description of the
economy of consciousness, but it also served in connection with the regulation of the flow of psychic
energy and the constitution of the preconscious realm.
The term was first used by Freud in the ‘‘Project for
a Scientific Psychology’’ (1950c [1895]), where it
referred to a mobile cathexis of the ego specific to consciousness, necessary to the mechanism of attention,
and consisting in a supplementary cathexis of neurones already cathected by perception. In Freud’s
account consciousness affected indications of quality.
It arose from the excitation, during perception, of particular neurones belonging to the system W. Attention
first addressed the indications of quality transmitted
by these already cathected neurones, and then, via a
facilitated pathway, focused on the perceptions themselves, which were thus hypercathected. ‘‘By this
means [the ego] is led to cathect precisely the right
perceptions or their environment’’ (p. 362). The ego
was hence able to distinguish cathexes of real perceptions from cathexes of wishes, and the reality principle
could be established.
According to Freud, the regulation of cathexes
within the psychical apparatus remained unconscious,
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and was effected automatically in accordance with the
pleasure/unpleasure principle. In The Interpretation of
Dreams (1900a), he pointed out that this initial
mechanism was fine-tuned by virtue of a cathexis of
attention, described as a ‘‘hypercathexis set up . . . by
the regulating influence of the sense organ of the Cs.’’
(p. 617), which at times could even work counter to
the primary mechanism by cathecting elements that
were a source of unpleasure and that would otherwise
succumb to repression.
In ‘‘The Unconscious’’ (1915e), Freud attributed
the emergence of the preconscious to a hypercathexis
of word-presentations by thing-presentations: ‘‘It is
these hypercathexes, we may suppose, that bring about
a higher psychical organization and make it possible
for the primary process to be succeeded by the secondary process which is dominant in the Pcs. . . . A presentation which is not put into words, or a psychical act
which is not hypercathected, remains thereafter in the
Ucs. in a state of repression’’ (p. 202).
In considering the question of traumas, in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle (1920g), Freud described the
anti-traumatic regulatory function of hypercathectic
energy, in the operation of the protective shield against
stimuli, as the last line of defense in the attempt to
bind the sum of excitation: ‘‘In the case of quite a
number of traumas, the difference between systems
that are unprepared and systems that are well prepared
through being hypercathected may be a decisive factor
in determining the outcome’’ (pp. 31–32).
RICHARD UHL
See also: Actual; Attention; Castration complex; Cathexis;
Conscious processes; Consciousness; Disavowal; Facilitation; Idealization; Narcissistic defenses; Protective shield;
Unconscious, the; Word-presentation.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams.
SE, 4–5.
———. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159–204.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE,
18: 1–64.
———. (1950c [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology.
SE, 1: 281–387.
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HYPNOID STATES
HYPNOID STATES
The notion of hypnoid states appeared in section 3 of
‘‘On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication,’’ published in January 1893 under the joint authorship of Sigmund Freud
and Josef Breuer in preparation for their Studies on
Hysteria of 1895. Hypnoid states involve a ‘‘splitting of
consciousness’’ or ‘‘double conscience’’ (1893a, p. 12),
in which ideas and affects are fragmented and then cut
off from normal waking consciousness, but which,
owing to what Freud a short time later called ‘‘false
connections’’ (1895d, p. 302), can give way to new,
pathogenic associations that engender hysterical
symptoms.
The notion of hypnoid states originated from Freud
and Breuer’s interest in hypnosis. Freud and Breuer
wrote that they wanted to replace ‘‘the familiar thesis
that hypnosis is an artificial hysteria by another—the
basis and sine qua non of hysteria is the existence of
hypnoid states’’ (1893a, p. 12). In themselves, such
hypnoid states are not abnormal (as witness the daydreams ‘‘to which needlework and similar occupations
render women especially prone’’ [p. 13]), but the hysteric is especially predisposed to them.
In fact, the notion of hypnoid states came from
Breuer, who used it in a major explanatory principle
in his account of the case of Anna O. and developed
it in the fourth paragraph of the chapter on ‘‘theoretical considerations’’ that he wrote for Studies on
Hysteria. By the time of that work, it is clear that
Freud was only paying lip service to this idea as a
concession to Breuer to obtain joint publication of
their work. To be sure, Freud agreed that hysterical
phenomena should be explained in terms of ‘‘dissociation’’ and a faulty recomposition, but unlike
Breuer (who in this regard held views similar to
those of Pierre Janet), he did not see in these phenomena a weakening of psychic functioning. On the
contrary, he saw them as the mark of the active work
of the defenses, above all repression. Freud later
explained his stance on these issues, notably in ‘‘On
the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’’
(1914d) and in ‘‘An Autobiographical Study’’ (1925d
[1924]). Indeed, the notion of hypnoid states seems
so contrary to metapsychology as a whole that it cannot be accepted as being a part of psychoanalysis.
ROGER PERRON
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See also: Amnesia; Anna O., case of; Breuer, Josef; Dream;
Studies on Hysteria; Hypnosis; Primary process/secondary process.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1914d). On the history of the psychoanalytic movement. SE, 14: 1–66.
———. (1925d [1924]). An autobiographical study. SE, 20:
1–74.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1893a). On the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena: preliminary communication. SE, 2: 1–17.
———. (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
HYPNOSIS
Hypnosis is the altered state of consciousness brought
on by a hypnotist using various techniques (staring at
an object, verbal commands, etc.). The English physician James Braid, in his Neurhypnology (1843), popularized, or may even have coined, the word ‘‘hypnotism.’’
‘‘Hypnosis’’ appears to have come into use later.
Braid sought to replace unscientific ideas and practices with a scientific conception of a ‘‘peculiar state of
the nervous system induced by a fixed and abstracted
attention of the mental and visual eye." He also hoped
to do away with what magnetizers called ‘‘rapport.’’ In
the mid-nineteenth century, the English physiologist
William Carpenter provided scientific support for
‘‘Braidism’’ by making hypnosis the paradigm of the
reflexive and automatic activity that he called ‘‘unconscious cerebration.’’ Introduced to the topic by the
young physiologist Charles Richet, Jean Martin
Charcot experimented with hypnosis on hysterical
patients in his clinic starting in 1878, basing himself
on Braid’s and especially Carpenter’s neurological
approach. In 1882, in an article that was noted by the
Académie des Sciences, he identified a pathology
unique to hysterics, the ‘‘grand hypnotism’’ characterized by three specific nervous states (catalepsy,
lethargy, and somnambulism).
Starting in 1860 in Nancy, where he had set up a
‘‘clinic,’’ Ambroise Liebeault also made use of hypnotism, employing methods established by J.-P. Durand
de Gros, one of the proponents of Braidism in France.
He paid special attention to Braid’s experiments with
suggestion, using hypnotic suggestion for therapeutic
purposes, unlike Charcot, whose practice was almost
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purely experimental. Hippolyte Bernheim went even
further and treated hypnosis as a particular type of
suggestion. He also popularized the term ‘‘psychotherapy,’’ which he borrowed from the Briton Hack Tuke,
and practiced psychotherapy by means of suggestion
with and without hypnotism. After 1884 two opposing
schools of hypnosis developed around Charcot and
Bernheim. In Paris, the emphasis was on the idea of a
pathological nervous state; in Nancy, on that of a link
or psychological influence that was not necessarily
pathological.
Nonetheless, although they often took their cue
from a particular school, some practitioners and
researchers tried to look beyond prevailing theoretical
and therapeutic dogmas. The psychotherapist could
thus refuse merely to issue commands, and attempt
through hypnosis, to discover memories forgotten
during waking life that could be at the root of neurotic
symptoms (see the case of Pierre Marie in L’Automatisme psychologique by Pierre Janet, 1889). Several stories of cures associated with the return of forgotten
memories were published at the end of the nineteenth
century.
In discussions of hypnotic suggestion the question
of ‘‘rapport’’ was again raised. Joseph Delboeuf introduced the idea of reciprocal suggestion. Pierre Janet
and Alfred Binet spoke of ‘‘electivity,’’ of ‘‘somnambulant passion’’ and ‘‘experimental love.’’ Additionally,
there was interest in the psychology of hypnotic states
of consciousness. These were described in terms of dissociation (Janet) or hypnoid states (Sigmund Freud
and Josef Breuer). Finally, contrary to the dominant
medical view at the time, the idea arose that the
unconscious was not only reflexological but psychological. Experiments with post-hypnotic suggestion, in
which a subject, while awake, obeys an order given
during a hypnosis that he has apparently forgotten,
seemed to the philosopher Henri Bergson to prove the
existence of unconscious ideas and a psychological
unconscious. Freud the psychoanalyst undoubtedly
emerged from this plethora of research and debate:
1885–1886 (Paris), 1889 (Nancy), and 1895 (publication of the Studies on Hysteria).
Hypnosis refers both to a state of consciousness (or
unconsciousness) and to a relationship. True to the
legacy of Charcot and Bernheim, present-day proponents of hypnology are still divided into ‘‘statists’’ and
‘‘relationists.’’ Some points of view, especially within
the relationist school, draw on psychoanalysis, while
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others seek to reinstate hypnotism as part of an antipsychoanalytic tendency. For hypnosis, like animal
magnetism before it, does not refer only to a state or to
a relationship. Since the nineteenth century it has
become a magical word with strong negative or positive connotations and as many staunch advocates as
militant opponents—a tireless vector of fascination
and stigma.
The practice, phenomenology, and theory of hypnosis have evolved, of course, since the time of James
Braid, and hypnosis can now be seen as a largely cultural phenomenon. All the same, some questions, contradictory and probably unanswerable, seem to remain
after more than a century. Is the hypnotic state akin to
sleep and dreaming, or to wakefulness and lucidity?
Does it imply an unconscious dispossession, or is it a
form of playacting? And is ‘‘hypnosis’’ a functional
concept that can explain certain phenomenon, or a
word that precipitates the very state it is supposed to
account for?
JACQUELINE CARROY
See also: Alienation; Anna O., case of; Autosuggestion;
Bernheim, Hippolyte; Cäcilie M., case of; Cathartic
method; Charcot, Jean Martin; Chertok, Léon (Tchertok,
Lejb); Cinema and psychoanalysis; ‘‘Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child’’; Congrès international de l’hypnotisme expérimental et scientifique, Premier; Cure; Delboeuf, Joseph Rémi Léopold; Emmy von
N., case of; Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis; Freud’s Selfanalysis; Freud, the Secret Passion; Group Psychology and
the Analysis of the Ego; Hypnoid states; Janet Pierre; Liebault Ambroise Auguste; ‘‘Lines of Advance in PsychoAnalytic Therapy’’; Look, gaze; Masochism; Negative hallucination; Psychoanalytic treatment; Psychotherapy;
Relaxation psychotherapy; Repression, lifting of; Resistance; Self-consciousness; Studies on Hysteria; Suggestion; Trance; Qu’est-ce que la suggestion? (What is
suggestion?).
Bibliography
Carroy, Jacqueline. (1991). Hypnose, Suggestion et Psychologie: l’invention de sujets. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
Chertok, Léon, and Stengers, Isabelle. (1992). A critique of
psychoanalytic reason: Hypnosis as a scientific problem from
Lavoisier to Lacan (Martha Noel Evans in collaboration
with the authors, Trans.). Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1989)
769
HYPOCHONDRIA
Ellenberger, Henri F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry.
New York: Basic Books.
Freud, Sigmund. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
HYPOCHONDRIA
Hypochondria is a psychopathological formation
whose locus of suffering, anxiety, or even (fantasized)
erasure is the body or one of its parts or functions,
even though the symptoms in most cases appear to
have no material cause. Symptoms can range from
minor, transient forms to massive, debilitating forms.
Despite some strong lines of evidence pointing toward
a link with various specific structural organizations of
the psyche, hypochondria is currently seen as transnosographic, as present as an element in a neuropsychosis or preceding certain psychoses.
Freud encountered hypochondria early on in his
work. On the basis of the semantics and nosology of
his era as well as his own theories, he placed hypochondria among the pure forms of ‘‘actual neurosis,’’
alongside neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis, and thus
outside of the realm of the defensive neuropsychoses.
His description of the actual neuroses contains the
same elements as hypochondria: the patient’s representational contents have a basis in current reality and
not in what has been repressed into the unconscious;
the patient’s meaningful contents or unconscious
overdeterminations capable of being symbolized do
not indicate an internal conflict with current reality.
For centuries, hypochondria has challenged medicine, philosophy, and even religion. Some ancient lines
of inquiry are echoed by modern investigations, notably on the enigmatic link between psyche and soma
and on similarities between hypochondria and melancholia. The absence of any material organic cause
has elicited a variety of hypotheses from psychoanalysts, including accounts of pathogenicity that extend
to delusions in the subject.
In ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’ (1914c),
Freud revised his account of hypochondria in light of
his theory that the libido is divided into the objectlibido and the (narcissistic) ego-libido. He placed
(bodily) ego-libido, the realm of hypochondriacal
anxiety, in opposition to object libido, the realm of
neurotic anxiety. As a function of this opposition, the
more one realm absorbs, the more the other is impoverished. Therefore, the idea of excessive, dammed-up
narcissistic libido is essential to understanding hypochondria. The chosen organ of hypochondria, which
has strong erotogenic potential, is nevertheless a
source of unpleasure, suffering, and anxiety owing to
this increase in tension, this damming up of libido.
Many authors have viewed this account, a schematic
model of dynamic energies, as problematic and
fraught with questions.
Has the enigma of hypochondria been fully deciphered by contemporary psychoanalysis? Freud
acknowledged this poorly understood disorder as an
awkward gap in his theories. Later it was deemed surprising that hypochondriacs had been the object of so
little psychoanalytic research, but in the 1990s there
were a number of studies on the topic. One reason that
psychoanalysis has paid little attention to hypochondria is that the autocratic attitude of hypochondriacs
has made analysts unreceptive to types of transference
unconducive to analytic listening. However, a broadening of treatment indications seems to have made
psychoanalysis more receptive to hypochondriacs, and
this has allowed psychoanalysis to draw conclusions
from them that go beyond Freud’s hypotheses. It is
also true that hypochondriacal behavior can emerge in
the course of any treatment, as a displacement or
means of discharge when the patient’s psyche is placed
under stress.
During the same period, Freud tried to understand
the possible relationship between hypochondria and
paraphrenia. In ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’’
(1914c) he wrote, ‘‘We may suspect that the relation of
hypochondria to paraphrenia is similar to that of the
other Ôactual’ neuroses to hysteria and obsessional
neurosis: we may suspect, that is, that it is dependent
on ego-libido just as the others are on object-libido,
and that hypochondriacal anxiety is the counterpart,
as coming from ego-libido, to neurotic anxiety’’ (p.
84). In this perspective he viewed hypochondria as the
first stage in delusion and linked it to narcissistic
pathologies affecting the body. Three years earlier he
wondered about the connections between hypochondria and paranoia. For example, in ‘‘Psycho-Analytic
Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of
Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’’ (1911c [1910]), his
text on Daniel Paul Schreber, he wrote, ‘‘I shall not
consider any theory of paranoia trustworthy unless it
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also covers the hypochondriacal symptoms by which
that disorder is almost invariable accompanied’’ (pp.
56–57, n. 3). Freud thus viewed hypochondria as a
precursor to psychosis and sometimes as an independent condition.
Some authors have interpreted hypochondria in
terms of true projections that are no longer directed
outward but instead are directed at the body, like an
internal paranoia. In his subsequent writings Freud
did not return to the comparison with melancholia,
nor did he reexamine his hypotheses in light of his second theory of the instincts or in terms of the concept
of primary masochism, as later authors did, thereby
somewhat undermining Freud’s classification of hypochondria as an actual neurosis.
Many others, notably followers of Melanie Klein,
have emphasized the close relationship between hypochondria and melancholic depression. Others have
inferred a masochistic dimension or a ‘‘locked-up’’
autoerotism. In the view of still others, the ‘‘hypochondriacal solution,’’ despite its fragile and largely
unstructured nature and despite being pregnant with
the death instinct, is the subject’s last bastion against
madness.
ALAIN FINE
See also: Actual neurosis/defense neurosis; Body image;
Eroticism, anal; Erotogenic zone; Erotogenicity; ‘‘On
Narcissism: An Introduction’’; ‘‘Neurasthenia and Anxiety Neurosis’’; Organ pleasure; Persecution; Psychoanalytical nosography.
Bibliography
Aisenstein, Marilia; Fine, Alain; & Pragier, Georges (Eds.).
(1995). L’hypocondrie. Paris: Presses universitaires de
France.
Freud, Sigmund. (1898a). Sexuality in the aetiology of the
neuroses. SE, 3: 259–285.
———. (1911c [1910]). Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides). SE, 12: 1–82.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
Jeanneau, Augustin. (1990). L’hypocondrie, ou La mentalisation de l’impossible. Cahiers du Centre pour la psychanalyse et la psychothérapie, 21, 83–99.
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Perrier, François. (1994). Psychanalyse de l’hypocondriaque.
In Jacques Sédat (Ed.), La Chaussée d’Antin (rev. ed.).
Paris: Albin Michel. (Originally published 1959)
Further Reading
Rosenfeld, Herbert. (1958). Observations on the psychopathology of hypochondriacal states. International Journal
of Psychoanalysis, 39, 121–124.
Stolorow, Robert D. (1977). Notes on the signal function of
hypochondriacal anxiety. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 58, 245–246.
HYPOCRITICAL DREAM
A hypocritical dream is one that in which the dream’s
wish is distorted (most often by the reversal of affect)
such that it cannot be discerned in the manifest dream
thoughts. Thus the wish is expressed ‘‘hypocritically,’’
in disguise.
Freud referred to hypocritical dreams in several passages of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a). He first
used the term in connection with a dream in which he
felt a great affection towards his friend R. But the analysis of the dream showed that in fact the latent wish
was to portray R. as a simpleton (1900a, pp. 137 ff.).
Freud also referred to a dream about a reconciliation
with a friend in which the latent wish was to free himself from this friend completely (p. 145n.). He
returned to the topic later in the book, writing that
‘‘There is one class of dreams which have a particular
claim to be described as Ôhypocritical’ and which offer
a hard test to the theory of wish-fulfillment’’ (p. 473).
Witness the repetitive dream of the poet Rosegger in
which he found himself each night back in the unfortunate situation of a apprentice tailor ill-suited for his
craft (pp. 473–75).
Freud referred to a similar dream of his own in
which he found himself back in a laboratory where he
had once worked in his younger days, ill-suited to the
chemical analyses he was required to perform. This
was, Freud says, a ‘‘punishment dream’’ (p. 476) that
followed upon his daytime thoughts of being too
proud of the success of his psychoanalyses. Such a
punishment dream, he goes on, is nothing but the
inverted expression of a wish. He modified this theory
considerably in his theoretical revisions of the twenties
(1920g, 1923b, 1924c). And the question of hypocriti771
HYSTERIA
cal dreams was, for Freud, closely linked to that of
repetitive dreams.
The term ‘‘hypocritical dream’’ is not frequently
used in present-day psychoanalysis. However, the
question that Freud posed under this rubric remains
essential: Is every dream the realization of a wish?
ROGER PERRON
See also: Dream.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4–5.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18:
1–64.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
———. (1924c). The economic problem of masochism. SE,
19: 155–170.
HYSTERIA
Hysteria refers both to a personality type and to a
cluster of psychoneurotic symptom formations. Its
manifestations—dramatic, physical, and affective—
may be viewed as an attempt to express and symbolize
a psychosexual conflict and, at the same time, to
defend against acknowledging that conflict. Symptoms
range from mental anxiety and phobia to the physical
signs of conversion disorder.
The term derives from hustera, the Greek word for
uterus, and was historically considered a female disorder. Writings on hysteria date to ancient Egypt and the
Kahun papyrus (ca.1900 BCE), which described the
disturbances caused by the ‘‘wandering uterus’’ that
manifested as symptoms in various parts of the body.
Greco-Roman doctors continued to associate hysteria
with the uterus and to treat it as a female complaint.
From the end of antiquity through the Middle Ages
and the Inquisition, recourse to supernatural explanations made it possible to consider hysteria a form of
demoniacal possession or witchcraft. The theatrical
and contagious nature of hysterical symptoms may
have been at the root of phenomena such as the ‘‘possessed’’ nuns of Loudun, the convulsionaries of SaintMédard, and the Salem witches. Hysterics and their
putative victims were often burned at the stake.
77 2
Identification of hysteria as a distinct entity dates to
1870, when Jean Martin Charcot, a doctor at the largest hospice in France, the La Salpêtrière, segregated
hysterics from other mental patients for purposes of
research and investigation.
As a concept hysteria acquired several meanings:
1. Conversion hysteria was a convulsive attack
characterized by paralysis, muscular contractions
and bodily contortions, visual disturbances,
including hallucination, pain and anesthesia,
and so on.
2. As a psychoneurosis, studied by psychoanalysis,
it was manifested by various symptoms and
inversion of affect. Thus, Sigmund Freud’s
patient Dora experienced sexual excitation not
as desire but as disgust, a hysterical displacement
of a genital sexual conflict (1905e).
3. The term ‘‘hysteric’’ also qualifies, pejoratively, a
certain type of distaff personality in which prominent use is made of dramatization, emotional
exuberance, colorful and exaggerated language,
continuous erotization, and seductiveness.
4. Finally, in everyday language, hysteria is the stuff
of ‘‘emotional outburst’’ and ‘‘making a scene.’’
Broadly speaking, conversion hysteria led to the discovery of psychoanalysis as a method of understanding
and treating psychopathological symptoms. Freud,
who famously attended clinical demonstrations by
Charcot, was struck by the indifference that hysterical
patients displayed toward their suffering. Although for
a time he suspected traumatic childhood seduction to
be at the root of hysteria, he came to view such
patients suffering ‘‘mainly from reminiscences’’
(1895d, p. 7)—that is, from a repressed traumatic
event that remained mnemonically unintegrated, and
could therefore only be expressed by conversion—
through a corporeal memory, so to speak.
The death of his father in 1897 and subsequent selfanalysis with Wilhelm Fliess led Freud to the discovery
of his childhood passion for his mother and of his hostile feelings toward his father. Although the Oedipus
complex did not appear as part of Freudian theory
until later, he abandoned the theory of traumatic
seduction; his key discovery was the notion of infantile
sexuality, together with the importance of fantasy as a
force that was both creative and disorganizing. At the
same time he developed the concept of psychic defense
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and discovered in dreams and dream-work a link with
hysteria.
In psychoanalytic theory, a hysterical crisis might be
thought of as the embodiment of a dream. Its symptoms included the same mechanisms of condensation,
displacement, symbolization, and disguise through
censorship. Hysteria expressed a conflict that, incapable of being elaborated mentally, is translated in altogether enigmatic fashion into physical symptoms. The
associative method of psychoanalysis could be used to
identify the fantasies and symbolic pathways within it.
Thus Freud described a hysterical woman who, with
one hand, tore off her clothes, and with the other, held
them against her body, simultaneously expressing the
struggle between impulse and defense, enacting in
effect a sexual scene in which she represented partners
of both sexes (1908a). Hysterical neurosis and hysterical relationships involve identification, constant
repression, and counter-cathexis that uses the Other as
the theater of conflict.
Due to the absence of an organic lesion and the tendency for symptoms to disappear without a trace, as
mysteriously as they came, hysterical conversion represented a provocative challenge to medicine. In general,
hysterics have historically triggered irritation, accusations of lying and malingering, and rejection.
Hysteria has always defied medicine and the social
order because sexuality is mixed up in it—in particular, female sexuality and the associated desire for
sexual pleasure. Freud, in 1937, referred to the ‘‘repudiation of femininity’’ (p. 252) in both sexes as
‘‘bedrock,’’ a stumbling block because of the mental
association of the female with castration. Symptomatically, hysteria is an illness of repudiated femininity.
More specifically, the anxiety that leads to this repudiation reflects the considerable libidinal energy
required by the constant pressure of libido, a pressure
that may be destructive of the ego.
JACQUELINE SCHAEFFER
See also: Activity/passivity; Actual neurosis/defense neurosis; Anna O., case of; Anxiety; Archeology, the metaphor of; Autoplastic; Autosuggestion; Breuer, Josef;
Cäcilie M., case of; Charcot, Jean Martin; ‘‘Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest’’; Conflict; Defense
mechanisms; ‘‘Dostoyevsky and Parricide’’; Elisabeth von
R., case of; Emmy von N., case of; Fantasy; Femininity;
Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis; ‘‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’’ (Dora, Ida Bauer); Freud,
the Secret Passion; Fright; Hypnoid states; Hysterical
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paralysis; Indications and contraindications for psychoanalysis in adults; Janet, Pierre; Katharina, case of; Lifting
of amnesia; Lucy R., case of; Mnemic symbol; Mnemic
trace, memory trace; Nervous Anxiety States and their
Treatment; Neurosis; Phobias in children; Phobic neurosis; Proton-pseudos; Psychoanalytical nosography;
Psychogenic blindness; Psychological types (analytical
psychology); Quota of affect; Reminiscence; Repression;
Seduction; Seduction scenes; Sexual trauma; Somatic
compliance; Studies on Hysteria; Symbol; Symptomformation.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1937). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE, 23: 209–253.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies in hysteria. SE, 2.
Jeanneau, Augustin. (1985). L’hystérie, unité et diversité.
Revue française de psychanalyse, 49 (1), 258–283.
Schaeffer, Jacqueline. (1986). Le rubis a horreur du rouge.
Relation et contre-investissement hystériques. Revue française de psychanalyse, 50 (3), 923–944.
———. (1997). Le refus du feminine. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Further Reading
Britton, Ronald. (1999). Getting in on the act: The hysterical
solution. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 80, 1–14.
Halberstadt-Freud, Hendrika. (1996). Studies on hysteria
one hundred years on: a century of psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 77, 983–996.
Kohon, Gregory. (1984). Reflections on Dora: The case of
hysteria. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 5, 73–84.
HYSTERICAL PARALYSIS
Hysterical paralysis designates various forms of loss of
mobility of the upper or lower limbs that are present
in certain patients without any indication of a direct
neurological cause.
Even before the Studies on Hysteria (1895d), the
problems that hysterical paralysis posed for the medical diagnostic model led Freud to introduce the first
elements of psychoanalysis in a work called, ‘‘Some
Points for a Comparative Study of Organic and Hysterical Motor Paralyses’’ (1893c).
To Freud, hysterical paralyses seemed too precisely
delimited in relation to their ‘‘excessive intensity’’
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HYSTERICAL PARALYSIS
(1893c, p. 164), and they appeared to be related more
to the way patients imagined their bodies than to any
distribution of lesions in real anatomy. Based as it was
on the fact that peripheral points on the body are
grouped at the level of the nerves that represent the
medullary centers of the cortex, Freud’s neurological
conception of ‘‘representation paralysis’’ went far
beyond what Charcot himself (1880–1893) called a
‘‘disease of representation.’’ Freud was in effect seeking
‘‘permission to move on to psychological ground’’
(1893c, p. 170), and he crossed that border on the
basis of the difference between organ and function.
This amounted also to placing paralysis on the level
representing both fantasy and action. By defining the
hysterical paralysis of the arm as ‘‘the abolition of the
associative accessibility of the conception of the arm’’
(1893c, p. 170), he raised both the question of trauma
and that of the affective value of a function, so anticipating what would later be known as associative links
and breaks, isolation and repression.
We see here too that what would later become the
‘‘innervation’’ of the repressed idea—‘‘psychical excitation that takes a wrong path,’’ as Freud wrote in 1894
(1950a, p. 195)—did not restrict the notion of conversion to a single idea of discharge, but installed it within
conflictual ambivalence, and this whether it was muscular contraction, paralysis, or anesthesia that was at
issue. Thus the symptom achieves the repression of the
representation and the return of the related affect to its
original innocent status as action. This disconnection
between affect and symptom is what Charcot referred
to as the ‘‘belle indifférence’’ of hysterics (cf. Freud,
1915d, pp. 155–56).
77 4
Thus conversion holds a precise position between
hypochondria, which seeks to mentalize the unrepresentable depths of the body’s interior, and, at the other
extreme, psychosomatic disturbances where improvement or somatic recovery dispense with the symbolic
level entirely. Between the two, conversion involves the
striated musculature in order to play out a drama at
the level closest to the body. The involvement of
the vegetative level is not excluded here, so long as it is
introduced into a fantasy, the desire of which
was expressed in its negative form as a paralysis
(Jeanneau, 1985).
AUGUSTIN JEANNEAU
See also: Charcot, Jean Martin; Conversion; Elisabeth von
R., case of; Hysteria; Innervation; Psychic causality; Psychic reality; Psychotic/neurotic; Somatic compliance;
Studies on Hysteria; Symptom-formation.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1950a). Extracts from the Fliess papers.
SE, 1: 173–280.
———. (1915d). Repression. SE, 14: 141–158.
———. (1893c). Some points for a comparative study of
organic and hysterical motor paralyses. SE 1: 155–172.
Freud, Sigmund and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies on Hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
Jeanneau, Augustin. (1985). L’hystérie, unité et diversité.
Revue française de psychanalyse, 49 (1), 258–283.
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I
I
The concept of the ‘‘I’’ appears in Jacques Lacan’s work
as a function that derives from the mirror stage. Piera
Aulagnier later develops this term in a different way
and defines it as nothing other than a knowledge of
itself: ‘‘the I is nothing more than the I’s knowledge of
the I’’ (1975/2001, p.114).
Despite their semantic proximity, the I, for both
Lacan and Aulagnier, is something clearly distinct
from the Freudian ego; the latter is an agency, even if it
claims to represent the totality of the person, and it
has to be understood in relation to the other agencies
(id, superego) and to the demands of reality and the
object, which it can also oppose by occupying its position and turning, narcissicistically, to the love of
the id.
Towards the end of his work (1923b), Freud ascribes
a different origin to the ego, no longer considering it
as a psychic agency or no longer defining its ‘‘character’’ only as a product of identifications but regarding
it as ‘‘the mental projection of the surface of the body’’
and thus primarily as a ‘‘bodily ego’’ that is derived
from sensations.
Jacques Lacan introduced the concept of ‘‘I’’ with
the mirror stage (1936, then 1949), in opposition not
to the Freudian ego but to the philosophy derived
from the Cartesian cogito. The mirror stage constitutes
an identification; namely, the transformation that
occurs in a subject when he assumes an image as his
own. This stage constitutes a fundamental identification that precedes the moment when the subject identifies with others through the mediation of language.
It comprises several phases: in the first, the child reacts
joyfully to the image but identifies it as belonging to
an other; in the second, he perceives its imaginary nature and seeks the other behind the mirror; in the third,
the child recognizes the image as his own. For Lacan,
this entails the progressive and structuring conquest of
the I through the intermediary of the subject’s own
body. ‘‘This Gestalt. . . symbolizes the mental permanence of the I at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination; it is still pregnant with the correspondences that unite the I with the statue in which
man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or with the automaton in which, in an
ambiguous relation, the world of his own making
tends to find completion’’ (1949/2002, p. 3]). Therefore the I simultaneously is alienated in this image,
because it is always external to it, and finds a stability,
if not a permanence, there. Here Lacan adduces the
concept of alienation: ‘‘[the subject] identifies his
sense of self with the image of the other and the image
of the other then captivates this sense in him’’ (1946–
50). In a second temporal phase, the subject is
mediated by language, thereby returning to the unconscious everything that does not pass into discourse.
Piera Aulagnier fundamentally modifies the
Lacanian concept of I by historicizing it, that is, by
defining it in terms of the dual processes of ‘‘selfhistoricization’’ and the ‘‘identificatory project.’’ However, it is principally in the mother-child relationship,
well before the mirror stage, that she locates the primary identification from which the I will subsequently
emerge. For the child, this identification develops
from the first experience of pleasure, and it is the
mother who identifies the child as the seeker of what
she is offering, which thus makes him dependent on
her own imagination. Similarly, in the mirror stage,
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ID
Aulagnier emphasizes that the child, having recognized
the specular image as his own, turns to his mother to
seek approbation in her gaze and thus to find the
‘‘junction between the image and the legend’’ (1975/
2001, p. 124). ‘‘She alone will be able to complete the
narcissistic image, to add that Ôsomething more’ that is
indispensable to its sheen and without which it would
cease to be anything more than it is in the real: an
effect of the laws of optics’’ (1975).
For Aulagnier, however, the I is not to be confused
with the precursor of the I that is constituted by the
subject’s representational activity in these early stages.
The I is first of all anticipated by the mother (as
‘‘word-bearer’’) and as this still-idealized I that is
formed during the ‘‘representative’’ stage, that is to say
the child’s psyche that represents itself as possessing an
absolute and immediate power over reality.
How does the I come into being? It is through the
act of enunciation, but rather than just any act, it is
that which names the affect: ‘‘the act of uttering a feeling is therefore at the same time the utterance of a selfnaming by the I’’ ( p. 97). To name the other with the
term of beloved, for example, is to designate the subject who is naming as that of the lover. Hence the
author’s formulation: ‘‘It is therefore in and by the
deferred action of naming the cathected object [affect
and kinship system] that the I comes about . . . the I is
nothing more than the knowledge that the I may have
of the I’’ (p. 98).
This knowledge has a sole purpose: to guarantee to
the I a knowledge of its past and its future, the former
being the precondition for the representability of the
latter. The I will be characterized by its work, which
differs from the enacting fantasy because it entails a
work of making-sense based on ‘‘ideational representatives.’’ Despite being anticipated by the mother at a
primitive stage, the I can subsequently occur only by
itself. The Other, the mother, no longer has the power
to respond to questions such as ‘‘who am I?’’ or ‘‘what
am I to become?’’: ‘‘To these two questions, which
must necessarily find an answer, the I will respond on
its own behalf by the continuous self-construction of
an ideal image that it claims as its inalienable right and
which assures it that the future will prove to be neither
the result of pure chance, nor forged by the exclusive
desire of another I’’ (p. 116).
What is possessed in this case is nothing but an outline, but what is cathected is the ideal image, as well as
77 6
the ability to construct it and to recognize oneself
through this process of construction. No philosophical
observation about freedom can be dissociated from
this definition of the I, as the author establishes it on
the basis of the preconditions for the emergence of the
I, and the way in which these preconditions can be
lacking in the case of psychosis.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Alienation; Apprenti-historien et le maı́tre-sorcier
(L’-) [The apprentice historian and the master sorcerer];
Aulagnier-Spairani, Piera, ex-Castoriadis-Aulagnier; Demand; Ego; Ego (ego psychology); Encounter; Graph of
Desire; Ideational representation; Identificatory project;
Individual; Individuation (analytical psychology); Infant
observation; Infantile psychosis; Integration; Need for
causality; Object; Other, The; Passion; Primal, the; Psychic
temporality; Psychoanalytic treatment; Psychotic potential;
Sartre and psychoanalysis; Self-consciousness; Self-image;
Sense/nonsense; Subject; Subject of the drive; Truth; Violence of Interpretation, The: From Pictogram to Statement.
Bibliography
Castoriadis-Aulagnier, Piera. (2001). The violence of interpretation. From pictogram to statement. (Alan Sheridan,
Trans.) Hove: Brunner-Routledge. (Original work published 1975)
Charron, Gyslain. (1993). Le discours et le Je. Klincksieck,
Canada: Presses de l’université de Laval.
Lacan, Jacques. (2002). Écrits: A selection. (Bruce Fink,
Trans.) London: Tavistock Publications.
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie. de (1998). Penser la psychose. Une
lecture de l’œuvre de Piera Aulagnier. Paris: Dunod.
ID
Linked with the ego and the superego, the id (das Es)
is the mental agency, in Freud’s ‘‘second topography’’
of 1923, that answers to the instincts and to the greater
part of the unconscious processes. In German, es is the
neuter personal pronoun. Its use as a noun, with an
initial capital—das Es—is perfectly regular. From the
standpoint of linguistics, es presents problems at the
border between semantics and the syntax of anaphora:
in order to understand what it signifies one must refer
to another part of the discourse that interprets it.
Thus es may be interpreted as any neuter noun in
German and is also used, like the English ‘‘it,’’ in many
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ID
impersonal constructions. Syntactically, es may be the
subject or object of transitive verbs. Consequently, an
idea designated ‘‘das Es’’ is liable to be indefinite and
impersonal, universal, diverse, ambiguous and equivocal, even contradictory.
Georg Groddeck used this term to refer to the universal unconscious agency—as force and as substance—that he considered to be his interlocutor and
object of study when he treated patients suffering from
somatic illnesses: ‘‘There is something common to the
body and the soul; there is an Id in them, a force by
which we are lived, even as we believe we are living
ourselves’’ (Groddeck to Freud, May 27, 1917).
Groddeck borrowed the term from the Berlin physician Ernst Schweninger, who had written, ‘‘The id
cures.’’ The idea of an energetic monism was in any
case a commonplace of the German culture of the
time. And of course Groddeck had been reading Freud
in the 1913–1917 period.
Freud first encountered the notion of the id in
Groddeck’s letter. His response in a letter of June 5,
1917, was critical: ‘‘The notion of the Ucs requires no
extension.’’ The Ucs (unconscious) system was
adequate for dealing with organic illnesses, for it influenced somatic processes. And why ‘‘cancel the difference between psychological and physical phenomena’’?
‘‘I am afraid,’’ Freud concluded, ‘‘that you are a philosopher as well and have the monistic tendency to disparage all the beautiful differences in nature in favor of
a tempting unity’’ (1960a, pp. 317–318). But in the
same letter Freud had dubbed Groddeck ‘‘an analyst of
the first order,’’ and subsequently he supported him,
having his Book of the It published by the Internationaler Psychoanalytisher Verlag just before his own The
Ego and the Id. Apropos of The Book of the It, he wrote
to Groddeck on March 25, 1923 that ‘‘The work . . .
expounds the theoretically important point of view
which I have covered in my forthcoming The Ego and
the Id’’ (1960a, p. 342).
The Freudian conception of the id, which he
worked out in the summer of 1922, was presented in
The Ego and the Id. That work, along with Beyond the
Pleasure Principle and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, constituted what Freud called ‘‘the third
step in the theory of the instincts’’ (1920g, p. 59). The
life and death instincts (Pleasure Principle) opened up
a dynamic space for the accommodation and study, in
Group Psychology, of the large-scale mental formations
of the ‘‘second step’’: ego, ego ideal, identifications. In
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The Ego and the Id, moving ‘‘closer to psycho-analysis’’
(1923b, p. 12), Freud confronted the ego and its
unconscious resistance on the one hand and the
unconscious/preconscious-conscious (Ucs./Pcs.-Cs.)
distinction on the other. As a result, this last system
was now seen as local, confined to the superficial layers
of the mental apparatus where the Ucs. was synonymous with the repressed; it was unable to explain the
resistance of the ego and inadequate as far as practice
was concerned. In order to take the ego into account it
was now necessary to move from the ‘‘local’’ examination of the symptoms and their treatment to a global
view of the mental personality and of psychoanalytical
treatment. This shift of level implied different
dynamics and forms, although it did not necessarily
mean that local forms and dynamics were surpassed or
modified.
Freud introduced the id as alien to the ego, as ‘‘the
other part of the mind,’’ global and unconscious,
incorporating the repressed and the forces by which
(in Groddeck’s terms) we ‘‘are lived’’: a realm large
enough to be that which the ego resists (1923b, p. 23).
‘‘We shall now look upon an individual as a psychical
id, unknown and unconscious, upon whose surface
rests the ego, developed from its nucleus the Pcpt.
[perceptual] system.’’ (p. 24). The resistance of the ego
was not identical to the familiar local resistances, for it
had a global aspect that it manifested in the treatment
(often after the local symptomatic features had been
worked on) precisely at the point where it was confronted by something alien to it. The inadequacy of
the Ucs./Pcs.-Cs. opposition was thus bound up with
the countertransference and with the orientation of
the treatment, issues that could not be addressed solely
in terms of the first topographical theory.
The introduction of the notion of the id bespoke a
fresh overall approach on Freud’s part to treatment
and the mental personality. Because of the life and
death instincts, it was possible to claim a place for this
new point of view ‘‘in the structure of science’’ (1923b,
p. 23) without falling into monism. The attribution of
the id’s paternity to Nietzsche, inaccurate on its face,
perhaps may be taken as a semantic reference to the
philosopher who, in criticizing philosophies of consciousness and of the subject, did the most to thematize the dynamics of the psyche.
The division of the mental personality into three
provinces, id, ego, and superego, would not have
been relevant had each of the three agencies not been
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ID
characterized by Freud, beginning in The Ego and the
Id, by sufficient ambiguity, diversity, and even contradiction. Since he did, the concept of the id would
remain stable until the end of his work. A main interpretant of the id is instinctual life. ‘‘We approach the
id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of
seething excitations. We picture it as being open at its
end to somatic influences, and as there taking up into
itself instinctual needs which find their psychical
expression in it, but we cannot say in what substratum.’’ (1933a [1932], p. 73). Since psychoanalysis is a
dynamic theory of the psyche, the ‘‘whole person’’ is
an interpretant of the id (p. 105), and psychoanalysis
is ‘‘a psychology of the id (and of its effects on the
ego)’’ (1924f, p. 209). The prevalence of the dynamic
aspect means that the ego and the superego emerge
from the id as ‘‘superficial strata’’ differentiated during
ontogenesis; ‘‘id and ego are originally one’’ (1937c, p.
240); the superego ‘‘is in fact a precipitate of the first
object-cathexes of the id’’ (1926e, p. 223). So the ego
and the superego are interpretants of the id. (In The
Ego and the Id, ‘‘es’’ is related to ego and superego in
an ambiguous manner.)
External reality is not an interpretant of the id
(since we are not dealing here with the instinctual
point of view), but it does illuminate the dominance
of the pleasure principle in the id. The id knows nothing of logic, nothing of negation; contrary instinctual
impulses coexist within it; the mechanisms of displacement and condensation are normal; dispersal and disorganization reign. And if, ‘‘in its blind efforts for the
satisfaction of its instincts, it disregarded that supreme
external power,’’ the outside world, if it did not have
the ego as its protective shield and guide vis-à-vis reality, then the id, motor of the psyche, ‘‘could not
escape destruction’’ (1933a [1932], p. 75).
The id is not only a motor—it is also the locus of
the motor; and in this respect, passive—it is a reservoir, or a storehouse (in which case reality is indeed an
interpretant of the id). The id is the original reservoir
of libido and of the destructive instincts that cathect
and nourish the ego and the superego and their cathexes; it is also a storehouse for active memory-traces
and, in this capacity, indifferent to time: ‘‘Wishful
impulses which have never passed beyond the id, but
impressions, too, which have been sunk into the id by
repression, are virtually immortal.’’ (1933a [1932],
p. 74). The id embraces the repressed, and by extension
the unconscious: ‘‘The impressions of early traumas
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. . . are either not translated into the preconscious or
are quickly put back by repression into the idcondition. Their mnemic residues are in that case
unconscious and operate from the id’’ (1939a, pp. 97–
98). The id also stores up human history: ‘‘The experiences of the ego seem at first to be lost for inheritance;
but, when they have been repeated often enough and
with sufficient strength in many individuals in successive generations, they transform themselves, so to say,
into experiences of the id, the impressions of which
are preserved by heredity. Thus in the id, which is capable of being inherited, are harboured residues of the
existences of countless egos; and, when the ego forms
its super-ego out of the id, it may perhaps only be
reviving shapes of former egos and be bringing them
to resurrection’’(1923b, p. 38). Such an archaic inheritance may include symbolism, the schemata of primal
fantasies, or memory-traces of the killing of the primal
father by the primal horde (1939a, pp. 98–101).
Although the id-ego-superego system entails not
only conflicts between these agencies but also intraagency conflict, there is no conflict within the id. Clinical experience allows for part of the id’s operations to
be inferred. The repressed is transformed there; the id
can destroy a repressed impulse, the libido of which is
diverted into other channels. The liquidation of the
Oedipus complex, which is not repression but rather
destruction in the id, is an example. A regression of
the libidinal organization can be brought about by the
id, as for example in compulsive neurosis.
Since psychoanalysis is an interpretant of the id,
any notion may be related to it. Furthermore, the id is
neither separated nor separable from the areas onto
which it opens: the somatic realm, the ego and superego, even external reality; from its dynamic dimension,
where the life and death instincts are to be found; from
its constituent elements: instinctual life, libido, hate,
repressed material, memory-traces, the unconscious;
or from the pleasure principle.
The articulation of the mental personality in accordance with the ego-superego-id scheme revived discussion on the following issues: the distinction
between neurosis and psychosis; the classification of
individuals into ‘‘libidinal types’’ defined by the particular conflicts that predominate in each case between
id, ego, superego, and reality; and the forms of resistance and the dynamics of working-through: Freud
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ID
tance that, even after ego-resistances have been
relaxed, demands a ‘‘period of strenuous effort’’ in
order to undo repressions (1926d, pp. 160, 159).
The conduct and aims of analysis were described by
Freud as follows: ‘‘During the treatment our therapeutic work is constantly swinging backwards and forwards like a pendulum between a piece of id-analysis
and a piece of ego-analysis. In the one case we want to
make something from the id conscious, in the other
we want to correct something in the ego. . . . The therapeutic effect depends on making conscious what is
repressed, in the widest sense of the word, in the id.’’
(1937c, p. 238). ‘‘Its intention is, indeed, to strengthen
the ego, to make it more independent of the superego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its
organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions
of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work
of culture—not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee’’
(1933a, p. 80).
Lastly, the question of anxiety was modified by the
advent of the division into id, ego, superego, and reality. Whereas anxiety had hitherto been seen as arising
from repressions, it was now acknowledged as intrinsic
to the psyche and indeed as a factor in the institution
of these divisions: ‘‘. . . the expression Ôanxiety of the id’
would stand in need of correction, though rather as to
its form than its substance. . . . The id cannot have
anxiety as the ego can; for it is not an organization and
cannot make a judgement about situations of danger.
On the other hand it very often happens that that processes take place or begin to take place in the id which
cause the ego to produce anxiety. Indeed, it is probable
that the earliest repressions as well as most of the later
ones are motivated by an ego-anxiety of this sort in
regard to particular processes in the id’’ (1926d,
p. 141). Freud distinguishes two cases: something in
the id may activate a danger-situation for the ego and
spark anxiety in it; alternatively, ‘‘a situation analogous
to the trauma of birth is established in the id and an
automatic reaction of anxiety ensues’’ (1926d,
pp. 140–41).
‘‘But one cannot flee from oneself; flight is no help
against internal dangers. And for that reason the
defensive mechanisms of the ego are condemned to
falsify one’s internal perception and to give one only
an imperfect and distorted picture of one’s id’’ (1937c,
p. 237). Depending on the epistemology to which one
subscribes (and on the resistance by which this choice
is motivated), one will be more or less inclined to
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accept the aspects of the unknown and the possible
that Freud introduced into the metapsychological
realm along with the id; these aspects are correlated
with intrinsic and universal psychic dynamics and cannot be reconciled with positivism, pragmatism, or
structuralism. In the history of psychoanalysis, what
Freud had called ‘‘the third step in the theory of the
instincts’’ came, after him, to be known as the ‘‘second
topography.’’
After Freud, the dynamic dimension of the id and
the importance of the instincts were concealed rather
than further developed by a good many psychoanalytic
tendencies. The ego psychology of Heinz Hartmann
and his followers, the emphasis on object relationships
(Ronald Fairbairn or Michael Balint in Great Britain,
Margaret Mahler and Otto Kernberg in the United
States), the foregrounding of the Self (Donald
Winnicott, Heinz Kohut)—all either play down the
notion of instinct (or drive) to the benefit of the object
or sideline it completely; in all cases the id no longer
has any raison d’être. Jacques Lacan’s ‘‘unconscious
structured like a language’’ gives no room to the id.
Melanie Klein, although she preserves the priority of
the instincts, gives pride of place to the aggressive and
death instincts. However, some French analysts who
are not exclusively Lacanian continue to work on
the id.
Freud himself gave his followers a free hand, as witness the following observation on the division into id,
ego, and superego: ‘‘It must not be supposed that these
very general ideas are presuppositions upon which the
work of psycho-analysis depends. On the contrary,
they are its latest conclusions and are Ôopen to revision.’ Psycho-analysis is founded securely upon the
observation of the facts of mental life; and for that
very reason its theoretical superstructure is still incomplete and subject to constant alteration’’ (1926f,
p. 266).
A coherent advance in metapsychology that
respected Freud’s requirements with respect to mental
dynamics would certainly not be able to dispense with
the conceptual tools of qualitative dynamics, as developed during the nineteenth century. This approach
posits spaces articulated with each other by sets of
dynamics that give rise to specific forms. It would
make it possible to illuminate the way in which the ego
and the superego arise from the id and from reality; to
specify and explain the various processes of identification; to characterize inherited memory-traces as well
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as types of governing dynamics; and to distinguish
between energies of different kinds—and this while
respecting the diversity of the id.
MICHÈLE PORTE
See also: Agency; Psychic apparatus; Resistance; Superego; Topographical point of view.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE,
18: 1–64.
———. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
———. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1–66.
———. (1924f [1923]). A short account of psycho-analysis.
SE, 19: 189–209.
———. (1926d). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. SE,
20: 75–172.
———. (1926e). The question of lay analysis. SE, 20:
177–250.
———. (1926f). Psycho-analysis. SE, 20: 259–270.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
and sense ‘‘B,’’ which refers to one of the two expressions (or ‘‘translations’’) of a drive within psychic processes, the other being the ‘‘quota’’ or charge, of affect.
Sense A is the conventional meaning in philosophy
and psychology. It is also found in Freudian metapsychology, a fundamental contribution of which was
to describe it according to sense B, which is specific to
psychoanalysis. Thus, there are two dimensions to
representation, the first focused on the internal/
external distinction (internal space of representation/
external space of perception and action), the second
on psychic topography (whether it involves the first
topographical subsystem of conscious/preconscious/
unconscious or the second of id/ego/superego, which
does not replace the first). A full description of these
two ‘‘orthogonal’’ dimensions does entail certain problems, however.
At this point it would be useful to introduce some
terminological guidelines.
The term representation translates at least three
terms used by Freud, although he never clearly distinguished among them:
Vorstellung. This is an everyday word that literally
means ‘‘that which is placed before, in front of, in
the foreground.’’ The implication of the word
‘‘representation’’ is obviously quite different since
it can mean that a second presentation is
involved (this implication is dominant in sense
A, but plays a less obvious role in sense B).
Repräsentant. This is a much less common word,
derived from Latin, which means ‘‘delegate,’’
‘‘representative’’ (Repräsentantenhaus: ‘‘House of
Representatives’’), and is primarily applied to
sense B (the drive ‘‘delegates’’ a representation in
psychic life).
Idee. The word means idea, conception, thought,
and so on. It is the term Freud often used to refer
to ‘‘dream thoughts.’’
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 209–253.
———. (1939a). Moses and monotheism. SE, 23: 1–137.
———. (1960a). Letters of Sigmund Freud (Ernst L. Freud,
Ed. Tania and James Stern, Trans.). New York: Basic Books.
Groddeck, Georg. (1928). The book of the it: Psychoanalytic
letters to a friend. Washington, DC: Nervous and Mental
Disease. (Original work published 1923)
———. (1977). Ça et Moi. Lettres à Freud, Ferenczi et quelques autres (R. Lewinter, Trans.). Paris: Gallimard.
Further Reading
Shulman, Michael E. (1987). On the problem of the id in
psychoanalytic theory. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 68, 161–174.
IDEA / REPRESENTATION
The term ‘‘representation’’ has two meanings in psychoanalysis: sense ‘‘A,’’ which is the conscious or preconscious evocation in internal mental space of an
object or person, even an event in the external world;
78 0
It is useful to distinguish the various senses of the
concept of representation from related concepts such
as ‘‘figuration’’ (especially in the dream work but also
in the case of many creative activities), ‘‘symbol’’
(sometimes used by Freud as a synonym for ‘‘representation’’), and ‘‘fantasy’’ (which can be considered as a
representation or as a system of representations of a
particular kind).
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Freud’s interest in these distinctions was evident
even before the advent of psychoanalysis. In ‘‘On
Aphasia: A Critical Study’’ (1891b), he defined aphasic
disorders from a structural perspective, as disorders of
semantic systems and, consequently, as disorders of
representational systems—the ‘‘things’’ evoked by
words. (We can trace the origin of the distinction he
made in 1915 between ‘‘thing representation’’ and
‘‘word representation’’ to this essay.)
Freud then transposed these ideas onto the problem
of the psychoneuroses. Even in his earliest descriptions
of the affects, he emphasized how ‘‘irreconcilable ideas
[representations]’’ come to be rejected by morality.
But psychoanalysis truly came into being when he
referred to this rejection as ‘‘repression,’’ an active process that changes the status of representations, now
unconscious but potentially active (through the return
of the repressed); and when, at the same time, he also
distinguished the vicissitudes of the two expressions
for drives, representation and affect. Strictly speaking,
it is only the representation that is subject to repression. It would be contradictory to speak of unconscious affects, emotions, or feelings, even though
Freud subsequently referred to an ‘‘unconscious feeling of guilt.’’ For what is unconscious is not the feeling
itself, which has disappeared, but the still active
mechanisms that generated it.
At this point we are confronted with, on the one
hand, ‘‘floating’’ affects that are deprived of representational support and, consequently, are easily
converted into anxiety, and, on the other hand, unconscious representations that attempt to return to satisfy
the desire, as well as unrepressed conscious representations that in general are not, or only slightly, imbued
with affect. It is these last, ‘‘suspended representations,’’ that the floating affect will invest (in the military sense of blockading, or investing, a stronghold as
well as in the economic sense, the way a fluid fills a
container). Through this mechanism, the unconscious
representation ‘‘delegates’’ the satisfaction of the desire
to a representation or a group of representations that
can enter consciousness. These views, which were
clearly expressed between 1894 and 1896 (Freud,
1894a, 1895c, 1895d, 1896b), were developed in 1915,
especially in ‘‘Repression’’ (1915d) and ‘‘The Unconscious’’ (1915e). André Green (1973) discussed these
issues in a remarkable essay.
We see, then, how Freudian metapsychology attempted to differentiate the two senses: the representation
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carries libidinal impulses that are cathected to it to the
extent that it is potentially engaged with the external
world, where the satisfaction will necessarily be sought.
But this also raises serious problems concerning the
relation between psychic reality and the reality of the
external world—problems that Freud continued to
struggle with throughout his career.
These problems are related to the activity of perception and memory. When the representation is, in the
A sense, the internal ‘‘double’’ of an object, event, or
person in the external world, it is assumed that the
external reality has already been perceived and some
trace of the perception has been retained. It is only
under these conditions that the representation, in the
B sense, will be able to be invested with a ‘‘quantum of
affect.’’
Freud at first followed a rather simplistic theory of
perception that was consonant with the empiricistassociationist school that dominated the late nineteenth century: perception functions like a recording
device that faithfully transcribes the formal qualities of
the perceived object, supplying ‘‘raw’’ material for the
associative process. The resulting representations are
themselves preserved unchanged in the form of ‘‘memory traces.’’ But this raises a rather difficult problem:
By what criteria can the subject distinguish a true perception (the German verb for perceiving is wahrnehmen, ‘‘to take to be true’’) from an illusion or
hallucination?
Moreover, clinical work soon revealed the extent to
which memory traces were manipulated through
repression when they reappeared during the return of
the repressed, were recathected by an affect, or were
used for the disguised fulfillment of a desire. The perception itself, initially subject to psychic conflict, cannot be mistaken for a simple record, or inscription. It
took a long time before Freud was able to acknowledge
that every perception, every memory trace, and therefore every representation, is ‘‘constructed’’ by the
dynamics of the psyche itself and undergoes a constant
process of retroactive reworking (Perron, 1995). The
controversies that ensued, advanced by ‘‘ego psychology,’’ concerning basal cognitive functions conceived
as ‘‘zones free of conflict,’’ fell within the framework of
these problems.
What enabled Freud to escape the empiricism of his
early work (rather than associationism) was the awareness of desire. In ‘‘A Project for a Scientific Psychology’’
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IDEA / REPRESENTATION
(1950c), he states that desire originates with psychic life:
under cover of need it reactivates the memory of the
satisfaction and ‘‘supplies something similar to a perception, in other words, a hallucination’’ (1950c.). We
must learn to distinguish between them and it is at this
point that the difficult question of the ‘‘reality test’’
arises. A solution was indicated in a series of Freudian
texts, including ‘‘Negation’’ (1925h) and Inhibitions,
Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d).
The difference can be found in the introduction of
disappointment, which should be added to the schema
of maternal care. While the infant’s needs are satisfied
by the mother (or her substitute), his desire is associated with an object, an object that will be progressively situated ‘‘externally’’ (and verified as such
through its absence). If there is no satisfaction, the
need persists (or is reborn, independent of hallucinatory satisfaction), and the child situates the desired
object ‘‘inside himself.’’ Subject and object come into
being together, along with the representation, now
defined (as distinct from hallucination) as that which
exists here, in me, in my internal space, but (not necessarily) there, in the external world. In this case, the
child must determine ‘‘if something present in the ego
as representation can also be found in the perception
(reality). As we have seen this is again a question of
outside and inside. The non-real, simply represented,
the subjective, is only inside; the other, the real, is also
present outside’’ (1925h).
Based on this information, a number of authors
attempted to construct a coherent theory of the ‘‘origins of psychic life’’ (Perron-Borelli, Perron, 1997),
including Donald Winnicott (transitional objects and
transitional space), Wilfred Bion (the transition from
beta elements to alpha elements, the function of the
maternal daydream, preconceptions), and Piera Aulagnier (from the pictogram to utterances, primal—
primary—secondary succession).
Fundamentally, as we have seen, representation is
constituted as a double of the absent object, which it
can evoke or cause to exist even when it is absent from
the world of perceptions and actions; it is an absent
presence. However, the same is true of the symbol.
And Freud often used the two terms synonymously.
He established a term-for-term correspondence, where
the relation between representant and represented was
equivalent to the relation between symbol and symbolized. But elsewhere he introduced a completely different approach, one—referred to as ‘‘structural’’
78 2
above—in which the material of psychic life consists of
‘‘systems’’ of representations that are more or less
cathected by affects. In these systems a representation
only assumes meaning and functionality through its
connection to other representations. This has analogies with linguistics, especially the work done by Ferdinand de Saussure and extensively employed by structural linguistics. We know, for example, that Jacques
Lacan used this as the basis for constructing a profoundly original metapsychology.
It is appropriate at this point to examine the sense
of the term ‘‘representation’’ that no longer refers to
the product of psychic work but to the work itself, the
process of representation. How is it distinguished
from the process of symbolization (Gibeault, 1989)?
Symbolization can be said to make use of material supplied by the systems of representation, which are
themselves constantly changing. This, however, raises
questions about the problem of fantasy.
It is difficult, in Freud’s writing as well as in the
later literature, to differentiate the two concepts. However, by consensus, the following distinctions are
generally accepted: Fantasy, much more so than representation, which need not be heavily cathected with
affect, is invested with desire and the hallucinatory (or
quasi-hallucinatory) satisfaction of this desire. Fantasy, however, cannot simply be characterized as a
strongly cathected representation. It would be preferable to treat fantasy as a particular type of representation centered on satisfaction: the typical structure of
the fantasy would, therefore, comprises an agent, an
action, an object of the action. Transformations of this
structure (through agent/object or active/passive
reversals, the substitution of agents and objects)—a
good example of which is provided in Freud’s article
‘‘A Child is Being Beaten’’ (1919e)—are part of the
process of representation (Perron-Borelli, 1997).
The psychoanalytic process is obviously an incessant process of binding and unbinding representations
and affects, giving them mobility in place of rigid and
repetitive bindings. In therapeutic procedures, like
those that make use of children’s drawings or psychoanalytic psychodrama, we see how perception,
memory traces, figuration, and representation are
interrelated. The procedure consists in encouraging
the patient to produce figurations (drawings, mimetic
actions) as perceptual objects. And it is preferable, to
avoid confusion, to use the term ‘‘figuration,’’ which is
precise where ‘‘representation’’ is ambiguous.
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IDEALIZATION
These figurations are based on psychic realities
known as representations (and their variant, fantasies). They are present as objects of perception to the
therapist and give rise in him to representations that
are more or less in line with those of the patient,
although not always perfectly aligned with them.
These overlapping representations and their constant
reworking are the very material of the therapeutic process to the extent that it attempts to remobilize the
psychic life of the patient. Donald Winnicott, with his
squiggle technique, and Marion Milner after him, have
done a remarkable job in describing these processes.
ROGER PERRON
See also: Psychic representative; Representative.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1925h). Negation. SE, 19: 233–239.
Gibeault, Alain. (1989). Destins de la symbolisation. Revue
Française de Psychanalyse, 53, 6, 1493–1617.
Green, André. (1999). The fabric of affect in the psychoanalytic discourse. (Alan Sheridan, Trans.) London, New York:
Routledge. (Original work published 1973)
Perron, Roger. (1995). Théories de la psychogenèse. In Encyclopédie médico-chirurgicale, volume Psychiatrie. Paris:
E.M.-C., fasc. 37-810-F-30.
Perron-Borelli, Michèle. (1997). Dynamique du fantasme.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Perron-Borelli, Michèle, and Perron, Roger. (1997). Fantasme, action, pensée. Algiers: Éditions de la Société algérienne de psychologie.
IDEALIZATION
Idealization is a concentrated libidinal investment in
an object that is thus exalted and overvalued. The term
first appeared in connection with Freud’s definition of
narcissism (1914), but the concept can already be
found in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), where Freud speaks of the biographer
who sacrifices the truth to idealize the biographical
subject, ‘‘reviving in him, perhaps, the child’s idea of
the father’’ (p. 130). From the time of the Three Essays
on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud used the
notion of ‘‘sexual overvaluation’’ in relation to fetishism and sexual deviations. This overvaluation makes
the subject dependent and submissive toward an object
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containing traces of the earliest oedipal attachments:
‘‘One always returns to one’s first love’’ (1905d, p.
154). This attitude reappears in the subject’s passionate
dependence on an idealized object.
Idealization involves an object of a drive, but not
the drive itself. Since the origin of this libidinal overinvestment is unconscious, the investment appears to be
an effect of the superior value of the object itself. The
subject denies, however, that he is overinvesting and
allows the overvalued object to remain overvalued.
The subject thus overcomes ambivalence toward the
object. This defense mechanism promotes an illusion
that has effects in reality, both for the subject and
those around the subject. The latter are at times forced
to conform with an alienating image, as members of
an idealized nation or race.
Idealization must be distinguished from both sublimation and identification with the ego ideal, even if
the notion of value is prominent in each. Idealization
and sublimation are comparable in that both notions
involve a modification of early object choices and sexual aims. These two notions also involve a psychical
working through that detaches the drive from its primitive support and sets it off in another direction as a
partial drive. Finally, both concepts involve valuations
expressed in the social sphere. But whereas sublimation allows the drive to deviate from its goal, idealization blocks it from attaining its goal—thus creating an
inhibition—because of a feeling of inequality between
the great object to be attained and the small subject
who feels libidinally impoverished in comparison with
the idealized object. Thus, in place of libidinal fulfillment, the subject experiences an inhibiting fascination
or, as the case may be, a destructive rage.
Similarly, idealization of the object is different from
identification with the ego ideal, first of all because in
the former case the ego has impoverished libido, while
in the latter case the ego introjects both the object and
its qualities. Furthermore, in idealization the object is
external to the ego, while in identification the object
becomes internal. Most important, in idealization the
object is set up in place of the ego ideal, while in identification it is the ego that takes the place of the object.
Idealization results from a failure of the superego
and the ego ideal to form at the outcome of the oedipal
conflict. In idealization, the ego cannot serve as the
ideal in a healthy process of identification that would
insure that the first idealized objects belong to the ego.
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Instead, the ego is dispossessed of its narcissistic libido
for the benefit of the independently existing, and thus
alienating, object. It is thus forced to externalize its
most important constitutive element, the ego ideal.
This results in an infantile situation of helplessness, a
‘‘paralysis derived from the relation between someone
with superior power and someone who is without
power and helpless’’ (1921c, p. 115). The notion of
idealization thus enables one to understand both individual psychological mechanisms (such as passion,
perversion, and psychotic identification) and collective
ones (such as a group’s fascination with its leader).
Numerous authors have contributed to enriching
the concept of idealization. Melanie Klein (1952) has
developed the notions of the idealized good object and
the persecutory bad object, Piera Aulagnier (1979) has
written on idealization in passion and psychosis, and
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1975) has discussed the
disease of ideality.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Bipolar self; Desexualization; Ego ideal; Idealizing transference; Intellectualization; Narcissistic defenses;
Paranoid-schizoid position; Passion.
Bibliography
Aulagnier, Piera. (1979). Les destins du plaisir: aliénation,
amour, passion. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine. (1985). The ego ideal: A psychoanalytic essay on the malady of the ideal (Paul Barrows,
Trans.). London: Free Association Books. (Original work
published 1975)
and treatment implications. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 45,
565–587.
IDEALIZED PARENTAL IMAGO
The idealized parental imago is a narcissistic configuration that arises from the child’s attribution of former, lost narcissistic perfection to an admired and
omnipotent self-object. A precursor of the Freudian
ego ideal, it can be the object of a fixation and not be
integrated into the self in order to lead to ideals, but
instead remain a concrete self-object.
This notion appeared in Heinz Kohut’s article,
‘‘Forms and Transformations of Narcissism’’ (1966),
and was formalized in his Analysis of the Self (1971).
The idealized parental imago accounts for the need
to merge with an all-powerful object and for religious and idealistic feelings of varying degrees of
intensity. It gives rise to an idealizing transference in
analysis.
In The Restoration of the Self (1977) Kohut conceived of it as a pole of the self, a possibility or potential for the self, which acquires its cohesion by
responses of the self-objects that promote a sense of
merging and calm. One pole can compensate for the
other; idealization can compensate for deficient mirror
responses. The self will be fragile only if both poles fail
in their function.
These views of Kohut have been criticized on
metapsychological grounds because they are based on
the notion of an independent line of development for
narcissism.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE, 7: 123–245.
AGNÈS OPPENHEIMER
———. (1910). Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his
childhood. SE, 11: 57–137.
See also: Alter ego; Bipolar self; Idealizing transference;
Narcissistic transference; Twinship transference/alter ego
transference.
———. (1914). On narcissism: an introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
———. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
Bibliography
Klein, Melanie. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 27, 99–110.
Kohut, Heinz. (1966). Forms and transformations of narcissism. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association,
14, 243–272.
Further Reading
———. (1971). The analysis of the self. New York: International Universities Press.
Lachmann, Frank M., and Stolorow, Robert D. (1976). Idealization and grandiosity: developmental considerations
———. (1977). The restoration of the self. New York: International Universities Press.
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IDEATIONAL REPRESENTATION
Further Reading
IDEALIZING TRANSFERENCE
An idealizing transference—in which an individual
seems to say ‘‘you are perfect, and I am a part of
you’’—is defined as the mobilization of an allpowerful object, either spontaneously or as a reaction to the loss of narcissistic equilibrium. It
illustrates the need for maintaining a narcissistic
fusion against feelings of emptiness and powerlessness. It emerges from a fixation point—a ‘‘prestructural imago,’’ that is, one prior to the formation of
agencies.
The term first appeared in 1968, in Heinz Kohut’s
‘‘The Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders,’’ and he developed the concept starting
in 1971, within the framework of narcissistic transferences, which are defined as the reactivation of narcissistic configurations in analyzable narcissistic
personalities.
It is important to distinguish three different
phenomena: the idealizing transference, the pseudoidealizations, and idealization in the treatment of
neurosis. The idealizing transference central to the
treatment is stable even if it is present in different
degrees, from the archaic fusion to a more evolved
ideal. A break in this transference leads either to a
more archaic idealizing transference, or a mirror
transference when the libido is withdrawn from the
archaic object.
The idealizing transference refers back to the imago
of the idealized parent.
Kohut has been accused, particularly by the
Kleinians, of letting patients develop an idealization
that is not a factor of development, but rather a
defense.
AGNÈS OPPENHEIMER
See also: Idealized parental imago; Self, the.
Bibliography
Kohut, Heinz. (1968). The psychoanalytic treatment of narcissistic personality disorders. In The search for the self
(vol. I, pp. 477–509). New York: International Universities
Press.
———. (1971).The analysis of the self. New York: International Universities Press.
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Gedo, John E. (1975). Forms of idealization in the analytic
transference. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 23, 485–506.
IDEATIONAL REPRESENTATION
The notion of ideational representation was proposed
by Piera Aulagnier. She distinguished three levels of
representation: the pictogram, the fantasy, and the
idea. Involved here are the three modes (representable,
figurable, thinkable) through which the psyche metabolizes the information it draws from its encounter
with reality. These three modes coexist, according to
Aulagnier in The Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram to Statement (1975/2001): ‘‘Every act, every
experience, gives rise conjointly to a pictogram, to a
representation and to Ôsense-making’’’ (p. xxx). The
ideational representation is thus at the basis of the
thinkable, which can be defined as a relational schema
that the I imposes on the elements of both its own
internal reality and the outside world in order to make
them conform and cohere with the logic of the discourse from which the I itself is produced.
What distinguishes the ideational representation
from the pictogram and the fantasy is the appearance
on the mental stage of the word-presentation and the
changes it will impose. On this point Aulagnier’s theory converges with that of Sigmund Freud, for whom
an idea becomes conscious in conjunction with the
appearance of the word-presentation. As he stated in
‘‘The Unconscious’’ (1915): ‘‘[T]he conscious presentation comprises the presentation of the thing plus the
presentation of the word belonging to it, while
the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the
thing alone’’ (p. 201). Aulagnier emphasized the
importance of the dimension of what is heard for
the mental inscription of word-presentations in The
Violence of Interpretation, recalling Ernest Cassirer’s
description of ‘‘the infant’s first encounters with language as a series of sound fragments, attributes of a
breast that he endows with the power of speech’’
(p. 55). There is then an adjunct of this ‘‘heard’’ to the
thing-presentation, but this is still within the primary
system, for the system of signification remains organized based on the postulate of the omnipotence of
the desire of the Other. There is thus a first step in the
infant’s psychic activity during language acquisition,
in which libidinal meaning has priority over linguistic
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IDEATIONAL REPRESENTATIVE
meaning. Nevertheless, according to Aulagnier, this
libidinal meaning traces an access to linguistic signification ‘‘by leading the psyche to accept that this meaning exists, that it is part of the representative’s inheritance and that this meaning is not unconnected to
the offer or refusal present in the psyche’s response’’
(p. 65).
Alongside this, the infant’s thinking activity and
thus the formation of ideational representations and
language acquisition are part of what the mother
expects for the child; at the same time these elements
are also what will enable to child to gain its independence by keeping its thoughts secret. In contrast, if
thinking is attacked by psychosis such secrecy is
impossible. Aulagnier did not situate this attack, as
Freud did in ‘‘The Unconscious,’’ in terms of a regressive treatment of word as thing, or of metaphor as
concrete object (as Harold Searles did in ‘‘The Differentiation between Concrete and Metaphorical Thinking in the Recovering Schizophrenic Patient ’’ [1962])
but instead on the basis of the fact that thinking,
which constitutes the equivalent of an erogenous
zone-function, can become the object of mutilations
or amputations, depending on the relational field in
which it develops.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram to
Statement, The.
Bibliography
Castoriadis-Aulagnier, Piera. (2001). The violence of interpretation: From pictogram to statement (Alan Sheridan,
Trans). Hove, England, and Philadelphia: Routledge.(Original work published in 1975)
Freud, Sigmund. (1915e). The Unconscious. SE, 14:
159–204.
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1998). Penser la psychose. Une
lecture de Piera Aulagnier. Paris: Dunod.
Searles, Harold F. (1962). The differentiation between concrete and metaphorical thinking in the recovering shizophrenic patient. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 10 (1), 22–49.
expression of the instinctual drive), the other being its
charge, or ‘‘quota’’ of affect.
It was essentially in his 1915 articles brought
together under the title ‘‘Metapsychology’’ (‘‘Instincts
and Their Vicissitudes,’’ ‘‘Repression,’’ and ‘‘The
Unconscious’’) that Freud dealt with these issues. The
ideational representative can be conceptualized as a
mnemic trace of old perceptions. Strictly speaking,
repression affects only this portion of the instinct;
accordingly, it can be rendered unconscious, but can
later return to consciousness in disguised form, with
new, ‘‘innocent’’ associations, when, under the pressure of the instinctual drive, it manages to cross the
barrier of censorship (this is the ‘‘return of the
repressed’’). Because of this, ideational representatives
undergo constant transformations, during which they
can again take on the charge of affects that had become
‘‘empty’’ at the time of repression. The other component of the psychic expression of the instinctual drive,
the ‘‘quota of affect,’’ is not subject to repression; it can
be ‘‘suppressed’’ (that is, undergo a quantitative
attenuation that may go as far as nullification),
undergo a qualitative change in nature (be felt differently), or be transformed into ‘‘free-floating’’ anxiety.
Of course, questions about what becomes of ideational representatives thus rejected ‘‘into the unconscious’’ have been raised: Are they really voided of
affective charge there? Do they also, in the unconscious, undergo transformations in such a way that
they change from there? Such issues quickly reach the
point of unknowability, since it is not possible to talk
about them except on the basis of returns of the
repressed. Undoubtedly, then, from a perspective that
is too exclusively topographical, the danger is to reify
the agencies of the psyche as ‘‘contents’’ (a notion
implicit in the expression ‘‘in the unconscious’’) and
to wonder about the status and fate of ideational
representatives conceived as discrete elements that
preserve their individuality and that can be traced.
This trap can be avoided by returning to the very
basis of the definition of the instinct, that is, the primacy of the economic, and by examining the conflictual dynamics at work in the transformations in
question.
IDEATIONAL REPRESENTATIVE
The ideational representative is one of the two components of the instinctual representative (the mental
78 6
ROGER PERRON
See also: Hallucinatory, the; Representative; Psychic
representative; Scotomization.
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Bibliography
Green, André. (1999). The fabric of affect in the psychoanalytic discourse (Alan Sheridan, Trans.). London and
New York: Routledge. (Original work published 1973)
———. (1995) La Causalité psychique. Entre nature et culture. Paris: Odile Jacob.
Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. (1973). The
language of psychoanalysis. (Donald Nicholson-Smith,
Trans.). London: Hogarth. (Original work published 1967)
Le Guen, Claude, et al. (1986). Le refoulement (les défenses).
Revue française de psychanalyse, 50, 1
IDENTIFICATION
Identification is an unconscious mental process by
which someone makes part of their personality conform to the personality of another, who serves as a
model. Described cursorily by Freud in the context of
psychopathology, the mechanism of identification has
come to refer to a principal mode of relating to others
and has been integrated in the processes that constitute the psyche. Identification should be distinguished
from imitation, which is a voluntary and conscious act.
The notion of identification, in spite of its novelty
and originality in the scientific or psychological vocabulary of the time, first appeared in Freud’s writings in
a letter to Wilhelm Fliess on December 17, 1896. It has
always retained the meaning he gave it then: ‘‘I have
confirmed, for instance, a long-standing suspicion
about the mechanism of agoraphobia in women. You
will guess it if you think of prostitutes. It is the repression of the impulse to take the first comer on the
streets—envy of the prostitute and identification with
her’’ (1985c, p. 182).
Freud often associated identification and hysterical
symptoms with each other in subsequent writings, but
he gave the concept a greater role in the Interpretation
of Dreams (1900a), especially in the commentary that
follows the dream of the ‘‘spiritual butcher,’’ as Jacques
Lacan referred to the dream of the dinner party where
Freud refers to the wife’s identification with a friend
and presumed rival (chapter 4). Freud remarks that
patients can ‘‘suffer as it were for a whole host of
others, and to play all the roles in a drama solely out of
their own personal resources.’’ The classic definition
follows: ‘‘[I]dentification is not simple imitation but
assimilation on the basis of a similar aetiological
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pretension; it expresses a resemblance and is derived
from a common element which remains in the unconscious’’ (1900a, p. 150).
There is little doubt for Freud that this ‘‘aetiological
claim’’ and ‘‘some factor held in common’’ are sexual
in nature. Freud completes his description by demonstrating the dynamic use of identification under cover
of another personality or composite formation,
through the process of condensation and the use of a
shared trait (the einziger Zug that Jacques Lacan translated as ‘‘unary trait’’), overcome censorship and realize the forbidden infantile wishes in the dream. The
concept changed little in the following years, and in
the Dora case it is used to account for the complexity
of hysterical phenomena.
But in 1909 Sándor Ferenczi focused interest on the
concept of identification when he introduced the similar notion of ‘‘introjection.’’ For Ferenczi the ego ‘‘is
always searching for objects to identify with, transference objects,’’ and introjects them in order to grow.
Object love is nothing but introjection. In the following years, in the study of Leonardo da Vinci (1910c),
Freud explored this new pathway when he wrote that
the young man who will become a homosexual
‘‘represses his love for his mother; he puts himself in
her place, identifies himself with her, and takes his
own person as a model in whose likeness he chooses
the new objects of his love’’ (p. 100).
Likewise, ‘‘little Hans’s’’ identification with the phobogenic animal, and therefore with his father (1909b),
of the Rat Man with his father or mother (1909d), of
little Arpad with a cock (Ferenczi, 1913), or the Wolf
Man united with his parents during the primal scene
(1918b [1914])—all are based on the model found in
Totem and Taboo (1912–1913a), namely, the identification with the dead father during the totemic meal.
The oral cannibalistic precursor of the mental
mechanism of identification, named ‘‘incorporation,’’
is clearly indicated in a note added in 1915 to the
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).
In 1915 the concept of identification was significantly modified, becoming a process integral to the
history of the libidinal bonds woven between the ego
and the other, even within the subject. The loss of an
object narcissistically invested resulted in a phenomenon that Freud described in Mourning and Melancholy (1916–1917g [1915]) as ‘‘an identification of
the ego with the abandoned object’’ (p. 249). It is
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important to understand that this identification, here
referred to as ‘‘melancholic,’’ is no longer partial and
determined by a common trait as was hysterical identification, but total and brought about by withdrawal of
the libido, which returns from the lost object to the
ego. This was soon after referred to as ‘‘narcissistic
identification’’ and considered to be more primal than
ordinary identification.
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
(1921c), Freud describes three forms of identification: ‘‘First, identification is the original form of
emotional tie with an object; secondly, in a regressive
way it becomes a substitute for a libidinal object-tie,
as it were by means of introjection of the object into
the ego; and thirdly, it may arise with any new perception of a common quality shared with some other
person who is not an object of the sexual instinct’’
(107–108).
The first of these modalities provides an opportunity for Freud to express the dialectic of being and having, which he used later on several occasions. ‘‘A little
boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he
would like to grow like him and be like him, and take
his place everywhere. We may say simply that he takes
his father as his ideal’’ (p. 105). But the initial ambivalence evolves under the pressure of the Oedipus
complex, either toward rivalry with the father or
homosexual cathexis through identification with the
mother. ‘‘It is easy to state in a formula the distinction
between an identification with the father and the
choice of the father as an object. In the first case one’s
father is what one would like to be, and in the second
he is what one would like to have’’ (p. 106). Seventeen
years later, on July 12, 1938, this opposition would
continue to disturb Freud, who left a brief trace in his
writings: ‘‘ÔHaving’ and Ôbeing’ in children. Children
like expressing an object-relation by an identification:
ÔI am the object.’ ÔHaving’ is the later of the two; after
loss of the object it relapses into Ôbeing.’ Example: the
breast. ÔThe breast is a part of me, I am the breast.’
Only later: ÔI have it’—that is, ÔI am not it’’’ (1941f
[1938], p. 299).
The second modality indicates the replacement of
an erotic attachment, associated with the Oedipus
complex, through identification and regression. A little girl coughs like her mother. ‘‘You are like her, but
through suffering.’’ Dora coughs like the love object,
her father. In both cases identification is only partial,
78 8
entirely limited, the ego restricting itself to borrowing
only one of the object’s traits.
The third modality is original. It introduces the
new concept of the ego ideal and embodies it in the
person of the ‘‘leader.’’ This projection of the ideal promotes the social life of subjects who will be able to
identify with one another through this common bond
to an other, instead of considering one another as rivals to be destroyed. Young girls with a crush on the
same singer are not jealous of one another; the loyal
partisans of a leader forget their quarrels and differences. One point needs to be remembered, however:
Identification is not here determined by the sexual
bond that characterized the community of hysterical
identification, which introduced the use of groups and
‘‘masses’’ in sociological research.
With the introduction of the ‘‘mythology’’ of the
life and death instincts, and the description of the second topographical subsystem, the concept of identification changed in ways that would continue to enrich
it. The nodal situation given to the Oedipus complex
led to the description of complex interconnected identifications with each of the parents, which are made
and unmade based on the number of possibilities for
change and the data concerning their bisexual
constitution.
Along with these ‘‘hysterical’’ forms of identification, narcissistic identification assumes particular
importance in the formation of the subject. ‘‘Since
then we have come to understand that this kind of
substitution has a great share in determining the form
taken by the ego and that it makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its Ôcharacter’’’ (1923b, p. 28). A number of post-Freudian
authors like Theodor Reik went so far as to see this as a
formative process for the ego itself. This insight helps
contextualize the following remarks by Freud concerning the necessary withdrawal of cathexis from libidinal
objects, which evolutionary change forces the id to
abandon: ‘‘It may be that this identification is the sole
condition under which the id can give up its objects.
. . . When the ego assumes the features of the object, it
is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id as a loveobject and is trying to make good the id’s loss by saying: ÔLook, you can love me too—I am so like the
object’’’ (p. 29–30).
Subsequently, Freud defined what he referred to as
‘‘primary identification’’ (primäre Identifizierung), a
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fundamental process in human mental development
that represents a mythical moment similar to that of
primary narcissism, primary repression, or even the
murder of the father by the primitive horde. The term
led to a number of contradictions and misunderstandings, for the term ‘‘primary identification’’ was used to
refer to infantile identification of the baby with its
mother, something not intended by Freud. As a sign of
becoming human he understands it to mean an identification with the ‘‘father in his own personal prehistory’’ (1923b, p. 31) that occurs prior to any form of
object choice. It splits the id from the ego ideal, the
first split that signifies their connection, which the theory of the formation of the superego subsequently
refines. The injunction associated with identification,
to ‘‘You ought to be like this (like your father),’’ contradicts the later admonition: ‘‘You may not be like
this (like your father)’’ (p. 34). In response to the evolution of the Oedipus complex and the fear of castration, the superego imposes itself as the introjection of
the father in his controlling capacity through a later
resumption of the primary identification. ‘‘Thus we
have said repeatedly that the ego is formed to a great
extent out of identifications which take the place of
abandoned cathexes by the id; that the first of these
identifications always behave as a special agency in the
ego and stand apart from the ego in the form of a
super-ego, while later on, as it grows stronger, the ego
may become more resistant to the influences of such
identifications. The super-ego owes its special position
in the ego, or in relation to the ego, to a factor which
must be considered from two sides: on the one hand it
was the first identification and one which took place
while the ego was still feeble, and on the other hand it
is the heir to the Oedipus complex and has thus introduced the most momentous objects into the ego’’
(1923b, p. 48).
In ‘‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’’
(1924d), Freud returned to his description while emphasizing the role of the fear of castration. Because of this,
‘‘the object-cathexes are given up and replaced by identifications. The authority of the father or the parents is
introjected into the ego, and there it forms the nucleus
of the super-ego, which takes over the severity of the
father and perpetuates his prohibition against incest,
and so secures the ego from the return of the libidinal
object-cathexis. The libidinal trends belonging to the
Oedipus complex are in part desexualized and sublimated (a thing which probably happens with every
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transformation into an identification) and in part inhibited in their aim and changed into impulses of affection’’
(p. 176–77). Here Freud uses the notion of introjection
as a sign of a form of assimilation that is more stable
and less labile than identifications would be, being closely associated with fantasy. This is a modification of the
concept defined earlier by Sándor Ferenczi and another
example of the terminological misunderstandings that
have hampered the evolution of the concept of identification. In any case ‘‘the super-ego retained essential features of the introjected persons—their strength, their
severity, their inclination to supervise and to punish’’ (p.
167), Freud wrote in ‘‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’’ (1924c).
Freud’s final thoughts on identification reveal his
confusion in the face of its conceptual complexity. In
chapter 31 of the New Introductory Lectures (1933a),
entitled, ‘‘Decomposition of the Psychic Personality,’’
he again attempts—and for the last time—to clarify
the various processes he designates as being part of
identification and concludes, ‘‘I am absolutely not
satisfied myself with these developments concerning
identification.’’ But he adds a comment that will open
a pathway to research on the phenomena of transmission between generations:
As a rule parents and authorities analogous to
them follow the precepts of their own super-egos in
educating children. Whatever understanding their
ego may have come to with their super-ego, they are
severe and exacting in educating children. They have
forgotten the difficulties of their own childhood and
they are glad to be able now to identify themselves
fully with their own parents who in the past laid such
severe restrictions upon them. Thus a child’s superego is in fact constructed on the model not of its parents but of its parents’ super-ego; the contents which
fill it are the same and it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the time-resisting judgments of value
which have propagated themselves in this manner
from generation to generation. . . . Mankind never
lives entirely in the present. The past, the tradition of
the race and of the people, lives on in the ideologies
of the super-ego, and yields only slowly to the influences of the present and to new changes; and so long
as it operates through the super-ego it plays a powerful part in human life, independently of economic
conditions (1933a, p. 67).
The ‘‘cruel’’ father himself had a father whom he
took as a model, as well as a mother, and they too had
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a mother and a father. Every parent replays in his child
the world of his own childhood as it has remained
engraved in his unconscious and his preconscious fantasies, far removed from the versions he communicates
to others or keeps hidden from his conscious memories. It is this universe of origins that the investigative
drive of every child explores to discover the secrets of
its birth and identity. For its personality is formed
with this material of composite images that may
one day return in the form of ‘‘visitors of the ego’’
(Mijolla).
Post-Freudian authors have emphasized the psychoanalytic situation surrounding the concept of identification, which Freud did not examine in terms of
identification. They have insisted on the necessity and
limits associated with transference identification from
the patient to the analyst, emphasizing that the analyst
must possess a certain amount of empathy (Einfühlung), the ability to ‘‘understand what is foreign to our
ego in other persons’’ (Freud, 1921c), and even to
understand and interpret the analysand’s unconscious.
Identification with Freud, the founding father,
although the source of intense disagreement among
his contemporaries and immediate successors, nonetheless remains one of the most vital areas of interest
for the analyst. Fantasies of identification, with Freud
or with individuals within the ‘‘psychoanalytic genealogy’’ of analysts, can lead to an understanding of certain theoretical propositions and events in the history
of psychoanalysis.
Both Anna Freud, through her work on identification with the aggressor, and Melanie Klein, through
her work on projective identification, have helped clarify various modes of identification that have confirmed the heuristic benefits of this evasive concept.
The interest in relations with the mother has led to a
misreading of primary identification, whose paternalphallic nature was identified by Freud. Following
Edith Jacobsen, other authors have presented it as a
pre-object archaic mother-child relation situated in a
state of fusion/confusion between the self and the notself (Sandler), and have distinguished it from the concept of ‘‘imitation’’ borrowed from psychological
models.
The distinction between ‘‘internalization,’’ comprising incorporation, imitation, and introjection, and
associated with the construction of identity
(Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein), and ‘‘externalization’’ as the distinction between internal objects and
79 0
external objects, has placed identification at the crossroads of these different systems. Its narcissistic pole
has also been elucidated in the so-called ‘‘mirror’’ relation between mother and child, which is distinct from
the specular identification of the child at the mirror
stage, described by Jacques Lacan (1949). ‘‘Secondary
identifications’’ have been isolated to describe the
identificatory processes associated with the appearance
and growth of the object relation, of pre-oedipal, oedipal and post-oedipal relations, and so on.
Psychoanalytic interest in more serious pathologies
has drawn attention to the challenges to identity,
whether these involve the behavioral disturbances of
adolescence or the depersonalization observed in borderline or psychotic patients. Long before he addressed
these issues in his essay on Justice Schreber (1912a),
Freud, in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess (December 9,
1899), noted that ‘‘paranoia dissolves the identification once more; it re-establishes all the figures loved
in childhood which have been abandoned . . . and
it dissolves the ego itself into extraneous figures’’
(1950a, p. 280).
More recently, research on identification has
branched off in several directions: ‘‘counter-identification,’’ the ‘‘identificatory project’’ (Piera Aulagnier),
‘‘archaic identification,’’ ‘‘heroic identification’’
(Didier Anzieu), and ‘‘fantasies of unconscious identification’’ (Mijolla). The number of statements made to
account for the richness of the concept seems interminable and psychoanalysts are still trying to determine its nature and formation.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Adhesive identification; Adolescent crisis; Allergic object relation; Alter ego; Animus-Anima (analytical
psychology); As if personality; Asthma; Autohistorization; Character formation; Collective psychology; Counter-identification; Cultural transmission; Dead mother
complex; Defense mechanism; ‘‘Dostoyevsky and Parricide’’; Ego; Ego and the Id, The; Ego ideal; Empathy;
Fetishism; Heroic identification; Holding; Homosexuality; Hysteria; Idealization; Identification fantasies; Identification with the aggressor; Identificatory project;
Identity; Imaginary identification/symbolic identification; Introjection; ‘‘Introjection and Transference’’; Little
Arpåd, the boy pecked by a cock; Mastery; Megalomania;
Melancholia; Melancholic depression; Midlife Crisis;
‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’; Narcissism; Object;
Orality; Object relations theory; Phantom; Primary
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IDENTIFICATION FANTASIES
identification; Psychotic potential; Self-hatred; Superego;
Thalassa. A Theory of Genitality; Transference (analytical
psychology); Transference and Countertransference;
Transference relationship; Transitional object, space.
Bibliography
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1916). Introjection and transference. In
his Contributions to Psychoanalysis (Ernest Jones, Trans.;
pp. 30–80). Boston: Richard G. Badger. (Original work
published 1909)
Florence, Jean. (1978). L’Identification dans la théorie freudienne. Brussels: Publications des facultés, Université
Saint-Louis.
Grunberger, Béla, and Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine (Eds.).
(1978). L’Identification: l’autre c’est moi. Paris: Tchou.
Kanzer, Mark. (1985). Identification and its vicissitudes.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 66, 19.
Mijolla, Alain de. (1986). Les Visiteurs du Moi, fantasmes
d’identification, Confluents psychanalytiques (2nd ed.).
Paris: Les Belles Lettres. (Original work published 1981)
Mijolla, Alain de. (1987). Unconscious identification fantasies and family prehistory. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 68, 397–403.
Further Reading
Silverman, Martin. (2002). The will to succeed and the capacity to do so: The power of positive identifications. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 71, 777–800.
Used similarly by Alain de Mijolla in ‘‘La désertion du
capitaine Rimbaud’’ (‘‘Captain Rimbaud’s desertion’’;
1975/1981), the notion of identification fantasies was
later used in the description of less pathological phenomena. It was especially useful in bringing a new theoretical
perspective to the study of transgenerational phenomena,
an area previously dominated by the overly mythical
idea of ‘‘transmission from unconscious to unconscious,’’ by providing the conditions for a more psychoanalytic consideration of the fantasmatic genealogy of
each individual. Transmission does indeed occur, but by
way of preconscious processes involving the third-party
transmitters that are the earliest objects: parents or
grandparents establish a relationship between the child
and preceding generations via stories, traditions, secrets,
and legends, which are thus perpetuated from generation to generation with varying degrees of alteration
along the way. Given this fact, it is important from a
psychoanalytic point of view to substitute the term
intergenerational for transgenerational (the latter in any
case being borrowed from other theoretical systems).
Identification fantasies often assume the guise of
screen-identifications that involve a staging of personalities that are foreign to the subject, such as fashionable
celebrities, idealized versions of people close to the
subject, or legendary figures, but analysis can reveal
their original, more modest, familial models.
The term identification fantasies originally referred to
imaginary constructions or even genuine unconscious
fantasmatic scenarios through which the subject
replaces a part of their Ego or Superego with a primordial figure from their family history, particularly the
father, mother, or grandparents, such that this figure
lives a small or large fragment of the individual’s own
existence as a substitute.
The notion of fantasies is essential, for the ‘‘truth’’
the child refers to in exploring his or her prehistory is
not necessarily that of actual, recognized and dated
events (although why not, if such information is available?), but can be made up of more or less disparate
fragments of representations and affects. These elements are often organized into ‘‘scenes’’ that fill gaps
in the individual’s history, and whose assimilation, or
introjection, to use Sándor Ferenczi’s first definition of
that term, enriches the Ego by providing additional
coherence to the subject’s psychic universe. Such fantasies are not decorative but rather, like any other fantasy, offer libidinal satisfaction and an outlet for the
actualization of desires within the dynamics of
the drives.
Only an interpretation that is integrated into an
ongoing analytic process, where the psychoanalyst’s
own identification fantasies are also activated, makes it
possible to detect these fantasies and understand their
meaning as expressed through symptoms, behaviors,
or even delusions, in the sense that Sigmund Freud
spoke of delusions in the case of the Rat Man (1909d).
Grandparents, whether living or dead, are an essential part of this process of fantasmatic genealogical
organization, since the conscious and unconscious
representations of them that are kept and transmitted
by the child’s parents are as essential to the formation
of identification fantasies as the child’s own perception
of external reality, if not more so.
Smith, Henry. (2001). Hearing voices: The fate of the analyst’s identifications. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 49, 781–812.
IDENTIFICATION FANTASIES
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WITH THE
AGGRESSOR
Psychoanalytic treatment is the best-adapted context for the recollection and opening up of identification fantasies, and for a repetition of the primitive
quest that led to their construction. It is because the
psychoanalyst allows the patient’s fantasies to resonate
within himself or herself, where they awaken echoes of
the analyst’s own intrapsychic explorations, that these
fantasies can become a common ground where interpretation is possible and communicable.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Identification; Intergenerational; Phantom; Primal fantasy; Secret.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1909d). Notes upon a case of obsessional
neurosis. SE, 10: 151–318.
Halfron, Olivier, Ansermet, François, and Blaise, Pierrehumbert (Eds.). (2000). Filiations psychiques. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
Mijolla, Alain de. (1981). La désertion du capitaine
Rimbaud. Les visiteurs du moi, fantasmes d’identifications.
Paris: Les Belles Lettres. (Originally published 1975)
Mijolla, Alain de. (1987). Unconscious identification fantasies and family prehistory. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 68, 397–403.
Mijolla, Alain de. (2004). Prehistoire, de famille. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
IDENTIFICATION WITH THE AGGRESSOR
Identification with the aggressor was first described by
Anna Freud in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms
of Defence, first published in German in 1936.
In that book, Anna Freud drew a distinction
between defenses directed against drive derivatives (to
protect the ego against instinctual demands) and
defenses against affects. The former included defenses
that had long been recognized, such as repression,
regression, reaction formation, introjection, projection, isolation, and undoing, as well as vicissitudes of
instinct such as reversal and turning against the self
which still need the intervention of the ego for their
operation. To these nine mechanisms Anna Freud
added a tenth: sublimation, or displacement of
instinctual aims. Nonetheless, Anna Freud was well
aware of the adaptive function of sublimation.
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Defenses against painful affects (which may be
regarded as ‘‘preliminary stages of defense’’) include
denial in fantasy, denial in word and deed, restriction of
the ego (a defensive form of altruism), and identification
with the aggressor, with which we are here concerned.
Jenny Wäelder, in a verbal communication to Anna
Freud, had already given a striking picture of this
mechanism in a five-year-old boy. Whenever the clinical material was about to touch on the question of
masturbation or masturbatory fantasies, the normally
inhibited little boy became extremely aggressive: for
example, he would pretend to be a roaring lion and
attack the analyst. He carried a rod about with him
and pretended to be a devil, using it to attack the stairs
and other parts of the room, and trying to strike his
mother and grandmother. Matters came to a head
when he began to brandish kitchen knives. Analysis
showed that he was expecting punishment for what he
regarded as forbidden activities. In his violent behavior he was both dramatizing and forestalling the
attacks that he feared, and the kitchen knives pointed
to his fear that his penis would be cut off.
A little boy whose Oedipus complex was at its
height used this defense mechanism to try to deal with
his sexual wishes towards his mother. Hitherto his
relations with her had been very happy, but were now
punctuated by outbursts of resentment. He would criticize her in the strongest terms for all sorts of reasons,
of which the most mysterious was curiosity. This was
not too difficult to explain: in his fantasies the mother
knew of his sexual wishes towards her and rejected his
advances with indignation. The indignation was replicated in his own outbursts of resentment, though he
did not reproach her on general grounds but on those
of curiosity. But the curiosity was a feature of his own
instinctual life, not his mother’s; he had found his scopophilic impulse the most difficult to master. Thus,
defensively, he reversed the roles of parent and child.
These and other examples are described by Anna
Freud. Essentially, identification with the aggressor
points to a particular phase in the development of
super-ego functioning, as she pointed out. For
although external criticism has been introjected, the
link between the fear of punishment and the offense
committed has not yet been established in the patient’s
mind. Once the criticism is internalized, therefore, the
offence is externalized—a maneuver that involves
another mechanism, the projection of guilt. As Anna
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Freud put it, intolerance of other people precedes
severity towards oneself.
CLIFFORD YORKE
See also: Altruism; Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence,
The; Ego psychology; Identification.
Bibliography
Freud, Anna. (1946). The ego and the mechanisms of defence.
New York, International Universities Press, 1966. (Original
work published 1936)
IDENTIFICATORY PROJECT
The notion of the identificatory project was proposed
by Piera Aulagnier to account for the I’s (the perceived
self ’s) work of identification as a function of future
time. In The Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram
to Statement (1975), Aulagnier defined the identificatory project as ‘‘that continuous self-construction of
the I by the I that is necessary if that agency is to be
able to project itself into a temporal movement, a projection on which the I’s very existence depends’’
(p. 114). The temporal dimension that is projected
onto both the past of memory (in auto-historization)
and the imagined future (in the identificatory project)
is the basis for the I’s ability to respond in its own
name to the unavoidable questions that sum up the
identification process: ‘‘Who am I?’’ and ‘‘What must
the I become?’’
Aulagnier’s theory of identification owes a great
deal to Jacques Lacan. For her, it is the mother who
initially identifies the preverbal infant as the entity
that demands what she gives; because of this, the
infant depends upon the maternal imaginary. But at
the same time, the infant self-represents itself based on
the ‘‘pictographic representation’’ it has of its earliest
experiences of pleasure. The second phase of identification, which follows this primary period, is specular
identification (the mirror stage). In Lacan’s theorization, this stage shapes the function of the I and establishes the imaginary register as the locus of the ego’s
identifications (‘‘The Mirror State As Formative of the
Function of the I As Revealed in Psychoanalytic
Experience’’ [1949/2004]). For her part, Aulagnier
emphasized that after the young child recognizes the
image in the mirror as being its own, it turns toward
his mother seeking approval in her gaze; this enables
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the child to see in the mirror ‘‘the junction between
the image and the legend’’ (p. 124). In these conditions, object-libido and ego-libido are joined together;
the baby discovers in the image the entity whose presence brings pleasure to the mother and in turn derives
pleasure from the valorization of this image that he
knows to be his own. Hence the definition that
Aulagnier proposed with regard to the second phase of
identification: ‘‘To be like the image that others admire
or to be like the image admired by those whom
the I admires are the two formulations that the narcissistic wish borrows from the field of identifications’’
(p. 126).
With the notion of ‘‘identification with the
projection’’ (1968/1986), which in The Violence of
Interpretation became the ‘‘identificatory project,’’ a
fundamental change took place. The immediacy of the
exchange of care, contact, and gazes was succeeded by
the temporal distance of the project(ion) referring to a
time in the future. However, the possibility of access to
the dimension of a genuine future (one that is not
merely a coming reactualization of the past) is not
automatic, and it is the trial of castration that gives the
subject such access.
Aulagnier likened what she calls the identificatory
project to what Freud called ‘‘ego ideals.’’ She also
underscored its difficulty: ‘‘The I’s task is to become
capable of thinking its own temporality. To do this it
must think, anticipate, and invest in a future timespace, despite the fact that lived experience will quickly
reveal that in doing so, the I is investing not only in the
unforeseeable, but also in a time that it might not even
have to live. In other words, the I is cathecting an
Ôobject’ and a Ôgoal’ that possess the properties that it
most abhors: precariousness, unpredictability, and the
possibility of inadequacy.’’
In the ‘‘something less’’ borne in the present, by
comparison with the ideal-filled future, Aulagnier proposed in The Violence of Interpretation to see ‘‘the
assumption of the castration trial in the identificatory
register’’ (p. 116), meaning that the I will never coincide with its ideal in the present of a realization, but
instead will always project it forward in time. The
identificatory register can thus be seen to be indissociable from the libidinal register, because a representation of the desiring subject always figures there. Being,
or rather, knowing who one is, is essentially knowing
who one wants to become. This opens the way for
extending these ideas into clinical practice, not only
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IDENTITY
with regard to psychosis, but in other areas ranging
from geriatric depression to adolescent turmoil.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: I; Identification; Mastery; Psychic temporality;
Time; Violence of Interpretation, The: From Pictogram to
Statement.
Bibliography
Aulagnier, Piera. (1986). Demande et identification. In Un
interprète en quête de sens. Paris: Ramsay. (Original work
published 1968)
———. (2001). The violence of interpretation: From pictogram to statement. (Alan Sheridan, Trans.). Hove, U.K.,
and Philadelphia: Brunner/Routledge. (Original work
published 1975)
———. (1978). La violence de l’interprétation du pictogramme à l’énoncé. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France,
1975, 363 pp.
Lacan, Jacques. (2004). The mirror state as formative of
the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic
experience. In Écrits: A selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.,
pp. 3–9). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1949)
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1998). Penser la psychose. Une
lecture de Piera Aulagnier. Paris: Dunod.
IDENTITY
Identity is not a Freudian concept. Theoreticians have
defined it in very different ways: as a structure that
accounts for narcissism and is part of the ego; as the
ability to remain the same despite changes; as a feeling
of continuity; or as the sum of representations of
the self.
The importance of the notion of identity in the
United States is related to its use in ego-psychology,
which considers the ego as a relatively autonomous
and potentially conflict-free structure. Many theories
of identity adapt a portion of Freud’s view of the ego.
Alongside the Freudian ego, which is a structure
defined by its functions, another ego—or identity
related to identifications—is posited (whether inside
or outside ego-psychology) and conceived of as the
outcome of a process of individuation.
The first mentions of the importance of the concept
of identity for clinical practice and psychopathology
date from the nineteen-fifties. When it first appeared
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in psychoanalytic discourse, the concept of identity
was associated with two approaches. The first was an
attempt to extend the Freudian perspective to a general psychology that would include the ego’s relationships with the surrounding world and guide research
on child development. The second sought to apply
psychoanalysis to pathologies, more serious than neurosis, characterized by disturbances of identity. Phyllis
Greenacre evoked the internal and external faces of
identity, and described their favorable and unfavorable
aspects. Ralph Greenson isolated a screen-identity syndrome. Margaret Mahler viewed identity as a facet of
development connected with object-relations, symbiosis, and the possibility of separation-individuation.
Two major psychoanalytical theorists have focused
on identity. In 1956 Erik Erikson introduced the concept of an ego identity formed during adolescence,
which served as a gauge of psychopathology. In 1961
Heinz Lichtenstein proposed giving identity the priority that the libido had for Freud. He considered it the
keystone of psychopathology and eventually reframed
Freudian metapsychology within a monist perspective
that challenged the dualistic concept of identification.
Erikson hoped to explain human development epigenetically; the various stages of his model could not
be reduced to the psychosexual level. The ego was not
propelled by drives alone but must confront the challenges posed by the environment. Ego identity was the
adolescent stage; it took over from various identifications and its successful establishment depended on the
resolution of earlier developmental crises. Erikson’s
ego identity was defined by the unconscious quest for
personal continuity, by the synthesis of the ego, and by
group loyalties. It reflected an existential dimension of
the ego. It was formed through a succession of syntheses of the ego whereby the conflicts of earlier stages
were integrated. The opposite of ego identity was a diffusion of identity, a pathological syndrome in which
representations of self and object are fluid and unintegrated, and oppositionalism and acting out are manifested. Otto Kernberg used this model as a diagnostic
criterion for borderline states.
Lichtenstein looked upon human identity as a permanent dilemma because of the absence of any form
of guarantee. The theme of an invariable identity arose
from an unconscious imprint derived from the mother
thanks to a process of mirror reflection. Variations on
this theme constituted the feeling of identity, a creation unique to the child. Pathological developments
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occurred when themes emerged that were impossible
to satisfy yet necessary for the maintenance of identity.
In such case a subject could be caught in a paradoxical
oscillation between the search for an annihilating
other and an isolating autonomy. The principle of
identity was the central motivation for the human
individual, who was obliged to maintain an identity
under more or less continual threat. This principle
replaced the reality principle in Lichtenstein’s account,
and the drives as well as the repetition compulsion
were subservient to it. Identity was assimilated to
narcissism, described as a primary thematic with secondary variants. It left room for the self, the fourth
metapsychological dimension and third paradigm of
psychoanalysis. Identity was part of an evolutionist
view that rejected dualism of any kind.
Historically speaking, theories of identity were
replaced by theories of the self and by the ‘‘self psychology’’ of Heinz Kohut.
These are psychological theories in which the
unconscious and libido are secondary. As Freud
pointed out, however, unity and synthesis are superficial concepts. Drawing on such criticism, Kohut
characterized Erikson’s identity as a descriptive psychosocial concept. Edith Jacobson questioned the relevance and universality of so-called disturbances of
identity, which she considered exaggerated. Roy
Schafer interpreted the emergence of the concept of
identity as symptomatic of a subjectivity stripped of a
mechanistic and reifying metapsychology and hence in
need of reformulation. Merely descriptive theories of
identity may be said to belong to the sphere of
phenomenology. When the conceptual focus is on
identity, the ego is cut off from its libidinal roots.
Furthermore, the view that underpins these theories is
exclusively developmental and completely rejects any
causality based on deferred effects.
AGNÈS OPPENHEIMER
See also: Adhesive identification; Adolescent crisis;
Anthropology and psychoanalysis; Double, the; Ego
(ego psychology); Ego-identity; Identification; Imposter; Object relations theory; Principle of identity
preservation; Projection and ‘‘paticipation mystique’’
(analytical psychology); Self-consciousness; Self-image;
Self representation; Sexual identity; Symbiosis/symbiotic relation.
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Bibliography
Erikson, Erik. (1956). The problem of ego identity. Journal
of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 56–121.
Greenacre, Phyllis. (1958). Early physical determinants in
the development of the sense of identity. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, 6, 612–627.
Greenson, Roger. (1958). Variations in classical psychoanalytic technique. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,
29, 200–201.
Lichtenstein, Heinz. (1983). Identity and sexuality. The
dilemma of human identity. New York: Jason Aronson.
Mahler, Margaret. (1958). Problems of identity. Journal of
the American Psychoanalytic Association, 6, 131–142.
IDEOLOGY
The word ideology refers to the study of ideas, a form
of general or abstract discourse, immobilized thought
(Piera Aulagnier, Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor), or any
doctrine claiming to justify a collective activity of a
political, religious, artistic, or other kind. When
Antoine Destutt de Tracy in his Mémoire sur la faculté
de penser (vol. 1, 1796–1798) and Élements d’idéologie
(1801) coined the word as an attempt to create a
science of ideas, he remained nominally a Platonist in
that he did not conceive of the term as derogatory,
which it has since become. However, the Platonic
‘‘ideology’’ Alexandre Kojève described in his Essai
d’une histoire raisonnée de la philosophie paı̈enne
(vol. II, Platon et Aristote) was not only a science of
ideas but claimed to be the science of objective reality,
the Cosmos noètos conceived by Plato as the real, or
essential world, interposed between the One and the
sensible world (Cosmos aisthètos). Destutt de Tracy
claimed to be an ideologue, as did Pierre Daunou,
Constantin-François Volney, Pierre Cabanis, and
Dominique Garat, but the term was used deprecatingly
by Napoleon and François René de Chateaubriand.
In the work of Karl Marx, ideology assumed a critical sense that displayed the opposition between the
‘‘noble’’ sense given to it by Destutt de Tracy and its
opposite, purely negative meaning; this opposition is
itself ‘‘ideological.’’ In the German Ideology, ideology is
always the reflection of an alienation, an alienation
obscured by the material conditions that determine
the representations that constitute that alienation.
Ideology, as an expression of alienation, is essentially
incapable of grasping the dialectical relationships that
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unite or resist those representations. By extension any
non-critical system of representation is considered an
ideology, for example, Catholic ideology or even
Marxist ideology understood as the dogmatization of
the results of Marx’s critical thought (Leninism,
Stalinism, etc.). Ideology would then be seen as the
discourse of a class, a party, or an association that
seeks to achieve or achieves cultural, political, economic, intellectual, spiritual, or other domination
over society and individuals.
The essence of ideology could therefore be to weld a
‘‘collectivity’’ into a defensive system of representations based on an unconscious causality, material or
structural, involving realities such as the Family, the
Nation, the Army, the Church, the State, and so on.
These can then be understood as ideological entities,
just as ‘‘fixed’’ as individual doctrines or representations. ‘‘System,’’ superstructure, doctrine, dogma, and
so on, then become other possible synonyms for
ideology.
Sigmund Freud gathered up all these meanings to
express a ‘‘vision of the world’’ (Weltanschauung)
whose various forms of representation philosophy elaborates in thought, which would make his research
into truth the pinnacle of ideology. For philosophy is
the work of sublimation while ideology, as Piera
Aulagnier has shown, is an avatar of the desire for
‘‘self-alienation’’ (Les Destins du plaisir, 1979). Ideology—always and everywhere—corresponds to a ‘‘sublimated abandonment to an abstract idea’’ (Freud,
Sigmund, 1921c). But as Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor has
noted, ‘‘it isn’t a question of sublimation but of intellectualization or desexualized abstraction; we do not
give in to an idea but to its author, whether a group or
an individual’’ (1992). Radical ideology might be a
form of destructive madness to the extent that ideology tends to exclude conflict and sharply reduce
ambivalence, thus resembling the discourse of
schizophrenia.
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1992). Le Plaisir de pensée. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
ILLUSION
Illusion is an error experienced by someone who is
misled (illudere) by the nature of evidence or the
seductive appearance of something that deceives. The
deceiver may be personified (Descartes’s ‘‘evil genius’’)
or limited to a physical or physiological cause (the illusions of the senses), or even an ontological structure
(the Platonic myth of the cave). However, the subject
can create his own illusion by taking his desires for reality. It is this last formulation that is embodied in the
Freudian approach to illusion, defined as a belief primarily motivated by the realization of a desire. To that
extent the illusion has much in common with dreams
and dreaming, where the philosophers of antiquity
had situated it.
The concept of illusion in Freud is gradually developed, reaching its culmination in The Future of an Illusion (1927c). In the Project for a Scientific Psychology
(1950c [1895]), illusion is confused with hallucination
in the context of perceptual illusion. But with the Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b), the concept is
further refined. In Freud’s case it would be wrong to
qualify the feeling of déjà vu or déjà éprouvé as illusion,
because theycorrespond, through displacement and
concealment, to an authentic unconscious daydream.
Thirty-five years later in ‘‘A Disturbance of Memory
on the Acropolis,’’ Freud would refer to false recognition (déjà vu, déjà raconté) as a part of the ‘‘illusions in
which we seek to accept something as belonging to our
ego, just as in the derealizations we are anxious to keep
something out of us’’ (1936a, p. 245).
Aulagnier, Piera. (1979). Les Destins du plaisir. Aliénation,
amour, passion. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
There is a certain amount of ambiguity concerning
the simple criterion that defines illusion as something
that doesn’t exist in reality, to the extent that the concept of reality is reconsidered in psychoanalysis as
mental reality. Moreover, the single stable criterion
used to define illusion in psychoanalysis is a belief
motivated by the realization of desire: ‘‘[W]e will call a
belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets
no store by verification’’ (1927c, p. 31).
Freud, Sigmund, (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
Freud identifies illusion as being mostly associated
with religion, art, and philosophy, but he also
DOMINIQUE AUFFRET
See also: Philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Bibliography
79 6
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acknowledges the hypothesis that science itself could
be an illusion, although he rejects it. In a deeper sense
the greatest illusion would be the belief in the happiness and goodness of human nature. This pessimism,
or realism, is first associated with the illusion that lasting sexual satisfaction is possible (‘‘ÔCivilized’ Sexual
Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,’’ 1908d) and
that social rules should be modified to procure happiness for individuals. Freud then assumes the position
of a defender of a realist position, which includes negativity instead of ignoring it: ‘‘Because we destroy illusion we are accused of endangering ideals’’ (1910d,
p. 147). In fact the only ideal he defends is that of
truth. He further distinguishes two types of illusions:
those that are not harmful since the illusion is obvious,
and those that are dangerous because they take the
place of an objective apprehension of reality (philosophy, ideology, and especially religion).
To the first category belongs art, which is said to
evolve from magic and which, as an artistic illusion,
produces the same affective effects as if it involved
something real (1912–1913a). ‘‘Art is said to be almost
always harmless and beneficent; it does not seek to be
anything but an illusion.’’ (1933a [1932], p. 160). In
what sense is art an illusion? Freud is forced to make
use of the concept of reality to determine this. ‘‘The
substitutive satisfactions, as offered by art, are illusions
in contrast with reality, but they are none the less psychically effective, thanks to the role which phantasy
has assumed in mental life’’ (1930a [1929], p. 75). Illusion, and especially the ability to take pleasure in it,
would therefore be the result of the magical omnipotence associated with the beginnings of mental life,
which led to the separation of the life of the imagination from the mental life grafted to reality, ‘‘At the time
when the development of the sense of reality took
place, this region [imagination] was expressly
exempted from the demands of reality-testing and was
set apart for the purpose of fulfilling wishes which
were difficult to carry out’’ (1930a [1929], p. 80).
But reality-testing is difficult to manage when defining illusion. Freud emphasizes it when he distinguishes
illusion from delusion: ‘‘Illusions need not necessarily
be false—that is to say, unrealizable or in contradiction
to reality’’ (1927c, p. 31). The example chosen (the illusion of a young woman of modest means of being able
to marry a prince) is not convincing, because within the
framework of erotomaniacal delusion, that same idea
(not illusory since it is realizable, Freud says) would
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indeed appear to contradict reality. We could therefore
say that delusion has more to do with a difference in
‘‘temporality’’—hope and expectation in one case, real
certainty on the other.
The difference between the potential reality of the
content of the illusion and the belief in its actual reality
is what allows reality testing to be used to define
the illusion. Illusion primarily involves the Weltanschauung and, in this regard, Freud emphasized
religious illusion. All religious doctrines are ‘‘illusions
and insusceptible of proof. No one can be compelled
to think them true, to believe in them’’ (1927c, p. 31).
The desire they realize is that of being protected and
loved by a father who is more powerful than the real
father. Infantile distress is the origin of religious need,
which Freud criticizes because of the weight it places
on education. He also feels—and this may sound paradoxical—that it is necessary to maintain religious
teaching as a basis of education and human life in
common. ‘‘If you want to expel religion from our
European civilization, you can only do it by means of
another system of doctrines; and such a system would
from the outset take over all the psychological characteristics of religion—the same sanctity, rigidity and
intolerance, the same prohibition of thought—for its
own defense’’ (p. 51). In other words even if for Freud
religion is a ‘‘serious enemy’’ of science, it would be an
illusion to believe that it is possible to renounce belief
for the benefit of knowledge alone.
The philosophical illusion that believes it can deliver an image of the world that is coherent and without
gaps is undermined by the progress of science; and
political illusion, such as communism, is an example
of a substitute for religion. The struggle against illusion is therefore a battle that will only yield incomplete
results, following a process of maturation that is
never realized: ‘‘Since we are prepared to renounce a
good part of our infantile wishes, we can bear it if a
few of our expectations turn out to be illusions’’
(1927c, p. 54).
In psychoanalysis the concept of illusion has, in the
work of Donald Woods Winnicott, undergone a completely different development than it has in Freud.
Winnicott (1953/1971) defines illusion as the necessary adaptation of the mother to the needs of the baby,
which allows her to experiment with narcissistic omnipotence from the beginning. This phase corresponds
to the primary creativity of the infant and is prolonged
during adulthood in art and religion. Winnicott’s
797
I M A G I N A R Y I D E N T I F I C A T I O N /S Y M B O L I C I D E N T I F I C A T I O N
ideas extended Freudian theories of the ‘‘purified pleasure ego’’ and the ‘‘reality test.’’ Winnicott postulates
the existence of ‘‘intermediate state between a baby’s
inability and growing ability to recognize and accept
reality’’ (1953, p. 90). This ability is strictly dependent
on what the mother allows the baby to feel. ‘‘The
mother’s adaptation to the infant’s needs, when good
enough, gives the infant the illusion that there is an
external reality that corresponds to the infant’s own
capacity to create’’(p. 95).
In other words, the reality test is experienced as a
frontal shock, but the reality is initially constructed by
the baby who perceives it as being part of himself. During a subsequent period, it will appear to be independent, but only gradually: ‘‘The mother’s eventual task
is gradually to disillusion the infant, but she has no
hope of success unless at first she has been able to give
sufficient opportunity for illusion’’ (p. 95). But illusion as a form remains and serves as a binding factor:
‘‘We can share a respect for illusory experience, and if
we wish we may collect together and form a group on
the basis of the similarity of our illusory experiences.
This is a natural root of grouping among human
beings’’ (p. 90).
This differs from the Freudian point of view, which
remains dependent on a certain proscientific militancy, while Winnicott situates himself at a level that
is both more metaphysical and more affective. ‘‘It is
assumed here that the task of reality-acceptance is
never completed, that no human being is free from the
strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that relief
from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of
experience which is not challenged (arts, religion,
etc.). This intermediate area is in direct continuity
with the play area of the small child who is ‘lost’ in
play’’ (p. 95).
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Belief; Certainty; Erotomania; Future of an
Illusion, The; Narcissistic elation; ‘‘Thoughts for the
Times on War and Death’’; Wish, hallucinatory satisfaction of a;
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1901b). The psychopathology of everyday
life. SE, 6.
———. (1927c). The future of an illusion. SE, 21: 1–56.
79 8
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on
psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
———. (1936a). A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis
(an open letter to Romain Rolland on the occasion of his
seventieth birthday). SE, 22: 239–248.
Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena, a study of the first not-me possession.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34, 89–97. Additional material in (1971). Playing and reality (pp. 1–30).
London: Tavistock.
IMAGINARY IDENTIFICATION/SYMBOLIC
IDENTIFICATION
Jacques Lacan differentiated between an imaginary
identification, that forms the ego from a symbolic one
that founds the subject. He discussed the first in his
essay on the ‘‘Mirror Stage’’ (1936) and he examined
the second primarily in his seminar on Identification
(1961–1962).
Imaginary identification involves the image of one’s
‘‘fellow being.’’ Before the subject develops the proper
neurological connection, he grasps the unity of his
body image by identifying with the image of the other,
the ideal ego. Thus the subject escapes the feeling of
having a fragmented body. The mirror stage is also the
source of the aggressive tension that characterizes relations with the one’s fellow being, and it is the source of
desire as the other’s.
Symbolic identification, or ‘‘signifier identification,’’ involves an ideal signifier—an insignia of the
Other or a unary trait—as the nucleus of the ego-ideal
that the subject depends on.
This situation is modeled on Freud’s second form
of identification, that is, an identification by adopting
a single trait taken from the object. In fact, imaginary
identification depends on symbolic identification. In
the mirror stage, the infant looks for a sign from the
maternal Other holding him up to the mirror in order
to confirm that the image is his. Behind the signifier of
the ego-ideal are the Name-of-the-Father and the symbolic phallus.
A subject’s sexual identity does not depend on his
relation to an image, but on his position in relation to
the symbolic phallus—a male subject has it, while the
female subject does not have it, but is it.
In the last years of his Seminar lectures, Lacan
introduced the idea of identification with a symptom
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and added it to the notions of imaginary and symbolic
identification.
MARC DARMON
See also: Body image; Demand; Ego ideal/ideal ego; I;
Identification; Mirror stage; Object a; Seminar, Lacan’s;
Unary trait.
Bibliography
Lacan, Jacques. (2002). The mirror stage as formative of the
I function as revealed in psychoanalytic experience. In
Écrits: A selection. (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W.
Norton. (Original work published 1949).
———. Le Séminaire-Livre IX, L’identification (1961–62).
(unpublished seminar).
IMAGINARY, THE (LACAN)
In the work of Jacques Lacan, the real, the symbolic,
and the imaginary are a central set of references. The
imaginary is the field of the ego.
In his 1936 essay ‘‘Au-delà du Ôprincipe de réalité’ ’’
(Beyond the reality principle), Lacan noted that Freud
discovered a meaning in patients’ complaints that
other physicians considered imaginary and thus illusory. In his first reading of Freud’s work, Lacan
emphasized the notion of the image by highlighting its
function: reflecting the subject’s discrete behaviors in
unified images. In the mirror stage, the subject identifies with these images and develops an ego concept in
relation to another.
In his first seminar, Lacan acknowledged that such
identification implies a radical alienation (1988a), but
he considered this identification to be essential to the
structure of the imaginary order and to the development of the human ego. At that time (1953–1954), he
was interested in the ethological work of Nikolaas
Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, which privileged the
function of the image as gestalt in the development of
the sexual instinct. Lacan believed that the development of the sexual drive of humans too is related to
the imaginary function. This would account for the
lure of images. As an example, he referred to the
female stickleback, a fish whose copulatory dance is set
in motion by the sight of a certain color patch on
the male’s back. Yet a paper cutout bearing the same
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markings can have the same effect on the female
(Lacan, 1988a, pp. 122–123). What matters is that
image is invested with libido. Lacan referred to libidinal investment as ‘‘what makes an object become desirable, that is to say, how it becomes confused with this
more or less structured image which, in diverse ways,
we carry with us’’ (1988a, p. 141).
But for the subject to come into being, one must
find ‘‘a guide beyond the imaginary, on the level of the
symbolic plane. . . . This guide governing the subject is
the ego-ideal’’ (1988a, p. 141). The ego-ideal, according to Lacan, is the Other (caregiver) speaking. From
that point on, the symbolic order (language) dominates over the imaginary order, which is reduced to
being a decoy. It took Lacan twenty years to restore the
imaginary to its full place alongside the real and the
symbolic, which he did within the topic of the Borromean knot (a set of three interlinked rings that come
apart if any one is removed).
In spite of Lacan’s focus, in 1982, on the importance
of knotting the three consistencies (the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary), many Lacanians continue to
neglect the imaginary. In his study of James Joyce
(2001), however, Lacan showed the difficulties that follow from a failure to give proper place to the imaginary. According to Marie-Christine Laznik-Penot
(1995), the treatment of autism also allows us to see
the difficulties that can follow from failure to accord
the imaginary order its proper place.
MARIE-CHRISTINE LAZNIK
See also: Blank/nondelusional psychoses; Demand; Desire
of the subject; Ethology and psychoanalysis; Fantasy,
formula of; Fort-Da; Frustration; Graph of Desire; I;
Identificatory project; Imaginary identification/symbolic
identification; Imago; Knot; Law of the father; Matheme;
Mirror stage; Object a; Optical schema; Other, the; Phallus; Privation; Real, the (Lacan); Real, Imaginary, and
Symbolic father; Schizophrenia; Self-image; Signifier;
Structuralism and psychoanalysis; Subject; Subject’s castration; Symbolic, the (Lacan); Symptom/sinthome;
Topology.
Bibliography
Lacan, Jacques. (1936). Au-delà du ‘‘principe de réalité.’’ In
his Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966, 73–92.
———. (1982). The seminar XXII of 21 January 1975: RSI.
In Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (Eds.), Feminine
sexuality. New York: W. W. Norton.
799
IMAGO
———. (1988a). The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 1:
Freud’s papers on technique (1953–1954) (John Forrester,
Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.
———. (1988b). The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 2: The
ego in Freud’s theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis
(1954–1955) (Sylvana Tomaselli, Trans.). New York: W. W.
Norton.
———. (2001). Joyce: le symptôme. In his Autres écrits.
Paris: Seuil.
Laznik-Penot, Marie-Christine. (1995). Vers la parole: trois
enfants autistes en psychanalyse. Paris: Denoël.
IMAGO
An unconscious prototype of personae, the imago
determines the way in which the subject apprehends
others. It is elaborated based on the earliest real and
fantasmatic intersubjective relations with family
members.
The term imago first appeared in work of Carl
Gustav Jung in 1912, and the same Latin word was
adopted in various languages. The concept was borrowed from a novel of the same name by Carl Spitteler
(1845–1924), published in 1906. In Jungian psychology, the term imago eventually replaced the term
complex.
The imago is linked to repression, which in neurosis, through regression, provokes the return of an old
relationship or form of relationship, the reanimation
of a parental imago. This regression is linked to particular quality of the unconscious, that of being constructed through historical stratification. ‘‘I have
intentionally given primacy to the expression imago
over the expression complex, for I wish to endow the
psychical fact that I mean to designate by imago, by
choosing the technical term, with living independence
in the psychic hierarchy, that is, the autonomy that
multiple experiences have shown us to be the essential
particularity of the complex imbued with affect, and
which is cast into relief by the concept of the imago,’’
Jung wrote.
Jung later replaced the term imago with archetype in
order to express the idea that it involves impersonal,
collective motifs, but in fact this idea was already present in his earliest descriptions of imagos. In 1933 he
again explained his choice of this term: ‘‘This intrapsychical image comes from two sources: the influence of
the parents, on the one hand, and the child’s specific
80 0
relations, on the other. It is thus an image that only
reproduces its model in an extremely conventional
way.’’ Finally, he situated the imago ‘‘between the
unconscious and consciousness, in a sense, as if in
chiaroscuro.’’ It is a partially autonomous complex
that is not completely integrated into consciousness.
Sigmund Freud, ‘‘forgetting’’ that Spitteler’s novel
had inspired Jung, used the same title, Imago, for the
review he created with Hanns Sachs and Otto Rank in
Vienna in March 1912.
The concept of the imago, very seldom used by
Freud, appeared in his writings for the first time that
same year, in ‘‘The Dynamics of Transference’’
(1912b), where he wrote: ‘‘If the Ôfather-imago,’ to use
the apt term introduced by Jung . . . is the decisive factor in bringing this about, the outcome will tally with
the real relations of the subject to his doctor’’ (p. 100).
In those rare texts where he used this term, the imago
refers only to an erotic fixation related to real traits of
primary objects. But elsewhere, Freud had already
shown the importance of the child’s links with its parents and had explained that the most important thing
is the way in which the child subjectively perceives its
parents; these ideas are contained in the notion of the
imago. He had also distinguished certain representations that had the status of the imago (the mnemic
image of the mother, or the image of the phallic
mother in the work of Leonardo da Vinci). However,
in ‘‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’’ (1924) he
used the term imago in the Jungian sense, in relation
to moral masochism and the superego. Indeed, he
wrote that behind the power exerted by the first
objects of the libidinal instincts (the parents) was hidden the influence of the past and traditions. In his
view, the figure of Destiny, the last figure in a series
that begins with the parents, can come to be integrated
with the agency of the superego if it is conceived of ‘‘in
an impersonal way,’’ but quite often, in fact, it remains
directly linked to the parental imagos.
At that time the term imago was commonly used in
the psychoanalytic community, but it was particularly
developed in the work of Melanie Klein. Besides the
classic imagos, she described ‘‘combined parental imagos’’ that provoke the most terrible states of anxiety.
She linked these to the ‘‘stage of the apogee of sadism,’’
which in 1946 became the ‘‘schizoid-paranoid position.’’ The analyst’s work is to bring forth the anxiety
linked to these terrifying imagos, thus facilitating the
passage to ‘‘genital love’’ (which in 1934 became the
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‘‘depressive position’’) by transforming these terrifying
imagos into helpful or benevolent imagos. In her view,
the young child develops cruel, aggressive fantasies
about the parents. The child then projects these fantasies onto the parents, and thus has a distorted, unreal,
and dangerous image of people around it. The child
then introjects this image, which becomes the early
superego. Klein thus described the early superego
more as an imago than as an agency.
Klein left it to Susan Isaacs to define what she
meant by imago: an image, or imago, is what is introjected during the process of introjection. It involves a
complex phenomenon that begins with the concrete
external object in order to become that which has been
‘‘taken into the self ’’ (p. 89), that is, an internal object,
Isaacs explained in ‘‘The Nature and Function of
Phantasy’’ (1948), adding: ‘‘In psycho-analytic
thought, we have heard more of ’imago’ than of
image. The distinctions between an ’imago’ and
’image’ might be summarized as: (a) ’imago’ refers to
an unconscious image; (b) ’imago’ usually refers to a
person or part of a person, the earliest objects, whilst
’image’ may be of any object or situation, human or
otherwise; and (c) ’imago’ includes all the somatic and
emotional elements in the subject’s relation to the
imaged person, the bodily links in unconscious phantasy with the id, the phantasy of incorporation which
underlies the process of introjection; whereas in the
’image’ the somatic and much of the emotional elements are largely repressed’’ (p. 93).
In his 1938 article entitled Les Complexes familiaux
dans la formation de l’individu (The family complexes
in the formation of the individual), Jacques Lacan
drew the connection between imago and complex. It
was at this time that he advanced his first theory of the
Imaginary. The imago is the constitutive element of
the complex; the complex makes it possible to understand the structure of a family institution, caught
between the cultural dimension that determines it and
the imaginary links that organize it. Lacan described
three stages in it: the weaning complex, the intrusion
complex (in which the mirror stage is described), and
the Oedipus complex. This complex-imago structure
prefigured what would become his topology of the
Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic.
ANTOINE DUCRET
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See also: Combined parent figure; Idealized parental
imago; Internal object; Maternal; Myth of the hero;
Phallic mother; Transference depression.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1912b). The dynamics of transference. SE,
12: 97–108.
———. (1924). The economic problem of masochism. SE,
19: 155–170.
Isaacs, Susan. (1948). Thje nature and function of phantasy.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 29, 73–97.
Jung, Carl Gustav. (1911-12, 1925 [1952a]), Psychology of
the unconscious. A study of the transformation and symbolism of the libido. A contribution to the history of the
evolution of the thought. Coll. works, Vol. 5, London,
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Lacan, Jacques. (1984). Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu. Paris: Navarin. (Original work published 1938)
IMAGO PUBLISHING COMPANY
The destruction by the Nazis of the Verlag (International Psychoanalytic Press) was a bitter blow to
Freud, and when he arrived in London in 1938 he tried
to find some way of restoring it.
Already, in May of that year, Hanns Sachs had suggested that he establish a periodical in the Unites States
that would be devoted to non-medical applications of
psychoanalysis, especially to culture, and to call it the
American Imago. In this way Sachs hoped to continue
along the path pursued by the original Imago, founded
by himself and Otto Rank in 1912, and of which he had
remained co-editor. The name ‘‘Imago’’ was taken from
the title of a novel by a Swiss poet, Carl Spitteler, that
had underlined the importance of the unconscious in its
motif, a love affair. According to Ernest Jones, Freud
favored the Sachs plan, for which financial backing had
been guaranteed by a well-wisher, but was somewhat
reluctant to agree to the title, though he quickly gave in,
and American Imago remains successful.
Freud was deeply concerned about the loss of his
own journals printed in German, as well as the Verlag.
He found a sympathetic and gifted writer, poet, and
publisher, John Rodker, who founded the Imago Publishing Company (IPC) in London. Rodker’s codirectors were Barbara Low and Martin Freud, and the
headquarters of the new company were located at 6,
801
IMAGO. ZEITSCHRIFT
F Ü R D I E
ANWENDUNG
DER
PSYCHOANALYSE. . .
Fitzroy Square in London. For a short time in 1939 a
combined Zeitschrift and Imago were published in
London, but failed to survive the beginning of the
Second World War.
Plans had already been made for the publication of
a new edition of Freud’s collected works, and the
Gesammelte Werke were published by the new company and replaced the original Gesammelte Schriften.
Its eighteen volumes were undoubtedly a publishing
triumph. Individual works by Freud were also published by the IPC in German, of which Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse (later translated as The Origins of
Psycho-Analysis (1954) by Eric Mosbacher and James
Strachey and edited by Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud
and Ernst Kris) was of cardinal importance, containing
as it did the most important letters to Fliess on the
subject as well as relevant drafts and notes. Other
major Freud works published by the IPC in English
translation were Three Essays of the Theory of Sexuality
(1905d), The Question of Lay Analysis ( 1926e), and On
Aphasia (1891b). The publishing house also issued
important works by other authors, of which Twins: A
Study of Three Pairs of Identical Twins (1952) by
Dorothy Burlingham is exemplary. Other publishing
arrangements for psychoanalytic books were well
established by the time the IPC closed, shortly after its
last publication in 1962.
CLIFFORD YORKE
See also: Gesammelte Werke; Low, Barbara.
Bibliography
Burlingham, Dorothy. (1952). Twins: A study of three pairs of
identical twins. London: Imago Publishing Co.
Freud, Sigmund. (1954a). The origins of psycho-analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, drafts and notes: 1887–1902. (Marie
Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris, Eds.). London:
Imago Publishing Co.
Grubrich-Simitis Ilse. (1995). Urbuch der Psychoanalyse.
Hundert Jahre Studien über Hysterie von Josef Breuer und
Sigmund Freud. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.
IMAGO. ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR DIE ANWENDUNG
DER PSYCHOANALYSE AUF DIE
GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN
Following the launch of Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse
and Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, Hugo Heller, the
80 2
publisher, in 1921 created Imago, the third psychoanalytic periodical under the editorial direction of
Sigmund Freud. While the two earlier publications
were primarily oriented toward clinical applications
and developments, Imago introduced an interdisciplinary approach to journal publishing, an approach
that Freud had already tested with the series ‘‘Schriften
zur angewandten Seelenkunde’’ (Essays on applied
psychology), published by Franz Deuticke. With
Imago, the concept was enlarged and expanded in periodical form.
The original title of the journal had been Eros and
Psyche, but that was changed to Imago, after the name
of a novel by Carl Spitteler (1845–1924). For Freud,
the name was sufficiently vague to be useful to his
enterprise (letter to Ernest Jones, January 14, 1912).
Directed toward other than clinical ends, the journal
served as a forum to introduce an experimental dialogue with neighboring fields such as anthropology, philosophy, literature, theology, and linguistics (see
Freud, 1913j).
Consistent with this approach, the first part contains a contribution from two lay analysts, the editorsin-chief of the publication, Otto Rank and Hanns
Sachs. This was ‘‘Entwicklung und Ansprüche der
Psychoanalyse’’ (Development and demands of psychoanalysis), in which the authors show that the methodology of psychoanalysis, although based on concrete
methods of therapy, continued to struggle, in its theoretical paradigms, with the relation between dreams
and artistic, mythological, and religious fantasies.
Consequently, it was necessary to test and develop the
knowledge obtained through the study of dreams,
neuroses, and symptom formation as part of a general
science of the mind based on the unconscious. Imago
was not only addressed to nonmedical lay practitioners but actively courted this target group in search
of authors, thereby exposing psychoanalysis to areas of
expertise outside therapy.
A number of Freud’s contributions to applied psychoanalysis appeared in Imago, ranging from excerpts
from Totem and Taboo in 1912 to early manuscript versions of Moses and Monotheism, which appeared in the
final volume, published in Vienna in 1937.
The periodical was the product of a flourishing
publishing business. Its success was based not only
on the quality of content but also the number of readers. Following its transfer to the Internationaler
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INCEST
Psychoanalytischer Verlag (International Psychoanalytic Press), it was the largest source of income for the
publisher. After the seizure of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag by the National Socialists in
1938, Anna Freud and other émigré analysts succeeded in continuing publication of Imago until 1941,
when it merged with the Internationale Zeitschrift für
Psychanalyse.
In 1939 Hanns Sachs, seeking to perpetuate the
Imago tradition in the United States, founded
American Imago, which still exists. After the Second
World War a number of psychoanalytic periodicals followed in the tradition of an interdisciplinary psychoanalytic journal, first introduced by Imago.
LYDIA MARINELLI
See also: American Imago; Applied psychoanalysis and the
interaction of psychoanalysis; First World War: The effect
on the the development of psychoanalysis; Heller, Hugo;
Imago Publishing Company; Internationale Zeitschrift für
(ärtzliche) Psychoanalyse; Internationaler Psychoanalytisher Verlag; Rank (Rosenfeld), Otto; Sachs, Hanns.
is the falsification of identity that creates the imposture, the borrowed identity being that of someone
else or that of an imaginary person with a different
name or a different profession. The success of the
imposture may depend on the complicity of others in
the lie.
In truth none of the descriptions given in the literature goes much further than these relatively superficial
findings. The attempt to create a composite picture of
the imposter has failed because of the inaccuracy of
the term itself, which is not conceptual, and the diverse
personalities included under this term.
However, several characteristics have been advanced
as being specific to the imposter. These include the
compulsion to enact the family romance, disorders in
the sense of identity (which are paradoxically relieved
by the borrowed identity), and a malformed superego.
Considered as a form of psychopathology, imposture
has been classified among the perversions. Imposters
are described as having usurped the role of the oedipal
father and as identifying with the maternal phallus at
an early age.
Bibliography
ANDRÉE BAUDUIN
Freud, Sigmund. (1913j). The claims of psycho-analysis to
scientific interest. SE, 13: 165.
See also: As if personality.
Freud, Sigmund, and Abraham, Karl. (1965). A psychoanalytic dialogue: The letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl
Abraham, 1907–1926 (Hilda C. Abraham and Ernst L.
Freud, Eds.). New York: Basic Books.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund, and Binswanger, Ludwig. (2003). The
Sigmund Freud–Ludwig Binswanger correspondence, 1908–
1938 (Gerhard Fichtner, Ed.). New York: Other Press.
Deutsch, Helene. (1955). The impostor: Contribution to
ego psychology of a type of psychopath. Psychoanalytic
Quarterly, 24, 483–505.
Freud, Sigmund, and Jones, Ernest. (1993). The complete
correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908–
1939 (R. Andrew Paskauskas, Ed.). Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Greenacre, Phyllis. (1958). Early physical determinants in
the development of the sense of identity. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, 6, 612–627.
IMPOSTER
IMPULSE. See Drive/instinct
Psychoanalytic tradition considers the nature of the
imposter by referring to the work of Karl Abraham originally; during the 1950s, to the work of Helene
Deutsch; and later to Phyllis Greenacre.
INCEST
Their work contained descriptions of clinical cases
as well as a comparison of famous imposters throughout history, like James MacPherson. The imposter is
someone who pretends to be someone they are not. It
Characterization and definitions vary across cultures,
but incest refers to sexual relations between close relatives. Prohibition may be according to custom or morality, and embodied in law. In psychoanalysis, the term
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INCOMPLETENESS
is also and especially discussed in terms of fantasy and
psychological conflict.
is Paul-Claude Racamier’s interesting treatment of the
‘‘incestual’’ (1995).
Freud mentioned incest for the first time in his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess (Draft N, dated May
31, 1897), in which he explained ‘‘saintliness’’ in terms
of its impious and anti-social character (1950a). A
family primordially promiscuous would be forced to
give up incestuous behavior in order to avoid being
socially isolated.
ROGER PERRON
Incest subsequently became a central theme in
Freud’s formulation of the Oedipus complex, defined
as a child’s conflict between sexual desire for the parent
of the opposite sex (the ‘‘positive’’ oedipal complex)
and repression of that desire. The theory was put forth
in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d) and
in Freud’s discussion of the case of ‘‘Little Hans’’
(1909b), among other works.
From the start Freud also discussed the incest taboo
in an anthropological context, in terms of its role in
the evolution of society. The first chapter of Totem and
Taboo (1912–13a) was devoted to ‘‘the horror of
incest’’ and was based on the work of contemporary
ethnologists. For Freud it was important to establish
that such a taboo operated in every human society.
This view gained some support in the work of later
anthropologists, including Claude Lévi-Strauss, who,
however, maintained reservations regarding Freud’s
obligatory corollary, that the Oedipus complex was
‘‘universal.’’ (See André Green [1995] for a discussion
of Lévi-Strauss’s views.)
Freud held that psychic energy which accumulates
through repression of sexual gratification, prohibitions owed to the oedipal situation, becomes an essential force propelling the development of civilization,
especially through channels of sublimation. In ‘‘ÔCivilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’’
(1908d), Freud suggested that repression can also provoke psychological disorders through the ‘‘dammingup’’ of libido (the ‘‘actual’’ neuroses) or by substitute
symptom formation (the psychoneuroses). The price
of civilized morality is high when repression adversely
affects too many individuals and distorts the social
fabric; Freud examined these issues in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c) and in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a).
The incest theme has received little attention in
contemporary psychoanalytic literature; an exception
80 4
See also: Ethics; Family romance; Framework of the psychoanalytic treatment; Law and psychoanalysis; Myth of
origins; Oedipus complex; Phantom; Privation; Prohibition; Psychology of the Unconscious, The; Secret; ‘‘Some
Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction
Between the Sexes’’; Tenderness; Totem and Taboo;
Transgression.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
———. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy.
SE, 10: 1–149.
———. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
———. (1908d). ‘‘Civilized’’ sexual morality and modern
nervous illness. SE, 9: 177–204.
———. (1912–13a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1–161.
———. (1930a). Civilization and its discontents. SE, 21:
57–145.
———. (1950a [1897]). Draft N. ‘‘Impulses, fantasies and
symptoms.’’ SE, 1: 173–280.
Green, André. (1995). La Casualité psychique. Paris: Odile
Jacob. Propédeutique. La métapsychologie revisitée. Paris:
l’Or d’Atalante.
Racamier, Paul-Claude. (1995). L’inceste et l’incestuel. Paris:
Éditions du Collège de psychanalyse groupale et familiale.
Further Reading
Simon, Bennett. (1992). Incest—see under ‘‘oedipus complex’’: the history of an error in psychoanalysis. Journal of
the American Psychoanalytic Association, 40, 955–988.
Simon, Bennett, and Bullock, Christopher. (1994). Incest
and psychoanalysis: Are we ready to fully acknowledge,
bear and understand? Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 42, 1261–1282.
INCOMPLETENESS
In psychoanalysis, the state of ‘‘incompleteness’’ does
not connote an imperfect or unfinished state, but rather
implies openness and retrospective reexamination.
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INCOMPLETENESS
The notion of incompleteness in the work of Sigmund
Freud presupposes two possibles and one constraint:
the integration of new ideas and the reexamination of
old ideas in retrospect, provided that the whole remains
coherent.
The image of the umbilical knot used by Freud in
connection with dreams in The Interpretation of
Dreams (1900a) to represent the unfathomable reaches
that are endlessly saturable with meaning—the ego’s
vanishing point—eventually found its homologue in
the realm of reality in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Some form of incompleteness can be deduced
from the integration of the new, from the working of
deferred action, from demands for the production of
coherence; it is a relationship that can be located in
psychoanalytic theory, clinical practice, and treatment.
Incompleteness in the realm of theory can be pinpointed, in terms both of Freud’s mental moves leading to theoretical creation and of the content of his
theories. Several authors, such as Didier Anzieu, Jean
Guillaumin, and Jean-Paul Valabrega, have established
parallels between certain of Freud’s personal mental
changes and his great moments of theoretical creation:
‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’’ (1950c [1895]);
the writings included in the Metapsychology of 1915;
the turning point of 1920, when dualism of the
instincts was introduced into the corpus; and the years
1937–1938, when the theory of trauma from the ‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’’ was revised to make it
coherent with the apparatus of the second topography,
to cite only a few.
In 1895 Freud was already well advanced in his theoretical conception of neurosis, particularly hysteria.
Under a certain amount of pressure from his colleagues, notably Wilhelm Fliess, who was formulating his
own theory of the ‘‘periods,’’ Freud found himself
urgently in need of a homogeneous, totalizing formulation of psychic mechanisms that would take into
account the theory of the neuroses and the normal psychic apparatus—hence his haste in writing ‘‘Project for
a Scientific Psychology.’’ This essay brings with it a
paradox that attests to Freud’s felicitous inability to
conceptualize a closed theoretical system: Based on the
neurological metaphor, he provided a coherent and
relatively finished system that he nonetheless called a
‘‘Project’’ in the sense of a sketch (Entwurf). History
showed that this was indeed just a sketch, whose hypercoherence was dismantled beginning in September
1897—at the same time as Freud’s work of mourning
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in connection with the death of his father—and whose
elements were reworked and used in subsequent theoretical developments.
Thereafter, Freud no longer allowed himself to be
dominated by the desire to devise a system that would
have an answer for everything. The topography, as well
as his theories of anxiety, the instincts, and the
neuroses, was modified in light of his clinical work,
leading to new theoretical acquisitions such as the
‘‘splitting of the ego in the process of defense,’’ for
example.
As the foundations of the psychic apparatus, the
instincts were a theoretical constant that was given
even greater emphasis with the introduction of the id
in the second topography. Principles and laws of psychic functioning came to modulate and use, to the
benefit of ideation and meaning, the power that is
inseparable from the notion of the instinct. This force
can meet with two economic vicissitudes: ‘‘binding’’
and ‘‘discharge.’’ Above all, after the metapsychological
complexification of the second topography, a balance
between binding and discharge was imposed, even if
Freud more particularly indicated the path of binding
culminating in the construction of more and more
representational units that can be subjectivized. After
1920, and mainly after 1923–1924, around the time of
‘‘The Ego and the Id’’ (1923b), the first trauma-based
theories of 1895 were reworked so that the notion of
trauma could be integrated and become a constituent
part of the Metapsychology. Not only is there a traumatic kernel in neurosis, but the id, even in its normal
state, is traumatic for the ego.
The relations of the instincts and the other psychic
contents (ideas) are marked by incompleteness. The
incompleteness of the fabric of representation and the
inexhaustible nature of the quest for meaning and
coherence attest to the fact that the relations between
the psychic agencies and objects satisfy a complex
dynamic, which Freud’s successors attempted to
theorize.
Incompleteness is at the heart of psychoanalytic
practice. Freud refused to reduce the scope of psychoanalysis to that of psychotherapy. To be sure, there are
the symptoms and suffering of patients, but analysis
opens up other horizons, as Freud unambiguously
declared in the ‘‘New Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis’’ (1933a [1932]): ‘‘I did not want
to commend [psychoanalysis] to your interest as a
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method of treatment but on account of the information it gives us about what concerns human beings
most of all—their own nature’’ (pp. 156–157).
From its own unfathomability to the multiplicity of
its exterior, the subject is constantly being transformed. The essential question of psychoanalysis has
become that of subjectivity, which today has plunged
it into a paradoxical situation. Without doubt, Freud
left it to his successors to establish a theory of the subject. They have not yet managed to construct one that
would be coherent with Freudian metapsychology, and
most often we must content ourselves with invoking
what Raymond Cahn has called the ‘‘process of subjectivation.’’ This places the emphasis on interpretative
intent in psychoanalysis, whose essential aim is no
longer simply bringing material into consciousness,
but also to enable a constant reworking, through discourse, of the representations and formations of
desire, identifications, and affect-fixating memories
upon which the analysand writes and rewrites their
history. ‘‘Where id is, there ego shall be’’ (1933a
[1932], p. 80). Rather than seeing in this the idealistic
aim of a Freud limited by a psychotherapeutic ideal,
we can infer the modesty of Freud, the psychoanalyst,
revealing the magnitude of the analyst’s clinical task. It
is not the completion of this task, even supposing that
would be possible, that would trigger the process of
the end of treatment, but perhaps the ability to work
through the grieving process it entails.
Whether the emphasis is placed on the subject’s
coming into being or on subjectivation, this presupposes the corollary idea of maintaining that entity,
which requires that it make constant adjustments in
relation to the agencies, its ideals, and others. Considering the power of the drives, the state of the subject is
precarious, always susceptible of dissolving into
actions or symptoms, especially when it is a question
of seeking out, through transference, ‘‘truths’’ and new
insights, as analysis according to Freud proposes to do.
The quest for truth and the quest for causality, moved
by the power of the drives, endow the very process of
subjectivation with its unstable and ever incomplete
character.
The completion and incompleteness of analysis
preoccupied Freud until the end of his work, as his
‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’ (1937c)
attests. Today, the idea of a completed analysis is
entirely relative, and opinion remains divided as to the
criteria for ending treatment. Respect for the idea of
80 6
incompleteness bears with its full weight on the ethics
of the psychoanalyst as one of the elements that protects the treatment from the alienation that would
result if the analyst were to impose their own desire
upon that of the analysand.
RENÉ PÉRAN
See also: Indications and contraindications for psychoanalysis for an adult.
Bibliography
Cahn, Raymond. (1997). Le processus de subjectivation à
l’adolescence. In M. Perret Catipovic, and F. Ladame
(Eds.), Adolescence et psychanalyse: une histoire (pp. 213–
227). Lausanne, France: Delachaux et Niéstle.
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams.
Part I, SE, 4: 1–338; Part II, SE, 5: 339–625.
———. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1–182.
———. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE,
23: 209–253.
———. (1950c [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology.
SE, 1: 281–387.
L’INCONSCIENT
The periodical, L’Inconscient, was founded by Piera
Aulagnier-Spairani, who was the editor-in-chief, and
Jean Clavreul and Conrad Stein. With the help of
Renée Andrau and Lucio Covello as editorial secretaries, the first issue, published by Presses Universitaires de France, appeared in January-March 1967. At
the time the psychoanalytic movement in France had
been wracked by divisions and internal dissension.
The Société Française de Psychanalyse (French
Psychoanalytic Society) had been dissolved and rival
institutions created. These included the Association
Psychanalytique de France (French Psychoanalytic
Association), which in 1965 became part of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and the École
Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris), directed by Jacques Lacan. Two students of Lacan’s
organization worked with a member of the Société
Psychanalytique de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic
Society), Conrad Stein, to create a review that was
open to the opposing points of view that were tearing
the French psychoanalytic movement apart. It was one
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of the attempts by psychoanalysts of the 1950s to
establish connections with organizations other than
the official psychoanalytic bodies, which pretended to
ignore one another when they were not actively jockeying for position.
Appropriately, the first issue was devoted to the
topic of ‘‘transgression,’’ and included essays by
Conrad Stein, Serge Leclaire, Michel Neyraut, Guy
Rosolato, and Piera Aulagnier. Other issues followed;
the issue devoted to perversion contained contributions from Jean Clavreul, André Green, Jean-Paul
Valabrega, and Georges Daumézon. Daumézon represented the symbolic link that united these disparate
personalities: The Sainte-Anne Hospital, where many
of these young psychoanalysts worked. (Most were
between thirty and forty years of age at the time.)
Over the course of eight issues, there were contributions from a wide range of practitioners, including
Serge Viderman, Lucien Israël, Irène Roublef,
Christian David, Michel de M’Uzan, Francis Pasche,
François Roustang, Jean-Luc Donnet, François Perrier,
Jean Gillibert, Joyce McDougall, Dominique Geachan,
Claude Robant, Robert Barande, and Cornélius
Costoriadis. Unfortunately, dissension within the psychoanalytic community led to the cessation of publication after two years. The final issue, of October 1968,
was devoted to the potentially explosive topic of psychoanalytic training. The founders argued among
themselves, a reflection of the dissension within the
Lacanian movement that had originated with Lacan’s
statements concerning ‘‘la passe’’ in October of the
previous year. A notice indicated that ‘‘the editors have
been unable to agree on the direction most suitable for
a review of psychoanalysis or on the role they felt it
should play.’’
Five months later Piera Aulagnier founded the
Quatrième Group, Organisation Psychanalytique de
Langue Française (Fourth Group: French Language
Psychoanalytic Organization) with François Perrier
and Jean-Paul Valabrega, and the review Topique. That
same year, 1969, Conrad Stein founded Études freudiennes, which also published points of view that differed from the French psychoanalytic mainstream. It
was several years, however, before the psychoanalytic
ecumenicalism of L’Inconscient was repeated in France.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Études freudiennes; France; Topique.
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The founder’s meeting of the Indian Psychoanalytic
Society took place in Calcutta in 1922 with Girindrashekhar Bose, a young Bengali doctor who had read
the English translations of Freud’s work, in the chair.
Of the fifteen original members, nine were college teachers of psychology or philosophy and five belonged
to the medical corps of the Indian Army, including
two British psychiatrists. In the same year, Bose wrote
to Freud in Vienna. Freud was pleased that his ideas
had spread to such a far-off land and asked Bose to
write Ernest Jones, then President of the International
Psychoanalytic Association, for membership of that
body. Bose did so and the Indian Psychoanalytic
Society, with Bose as its first president (a position he
was to hold till his death in 1953) became a fullyfledged member of the international psychoanalytic
community.
Cut off from the debate, controversy, and ferment
of the psychoanalytic centers in Europe, and dependent upon often difficult to acquire books and journals
for outside intellectual sustenance, Indian psychoanalysis was nurtured through its infancy primarily by the
enthusiasm and intellectual passion of its progenitor.
In the informal meetings of eight to ten people held on
Saturday evenings at the president’s house—which was
was to become the headquarters of the Indian Society
after Bose’s death—Bose read most of the papers and
led almost all the discussions.
Although psychoanalysis attracted some academic
and intellectual interest in the 1930s and 1940s, mostly
in Calcutta, the number of analysts was still small (fifteen) when in 1945 a second training center, under the
leadership of an Italian expatriate, Emilio Servadio,
was started in Bombay.
To judge from the record of publications of its
members, the small Indian society was fairly active up
through the 1940s. There was a persistent concern
with the illumination of Indian cultural phenomena
as well as attempts to register the ‘‘Indian’’ aspects of
the patients’ mental life. By the early 1950s, however,
the interest in comparative and cultural aspects of
mental life, as well as the freshness of the papers written by the pioneering generation of Indian psychoanalysts, was lost. Thereafter, most Indian contributions,
to judge from the official journal of the Indian
Society, have been neither particularly distinctive nor
original.
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INDICATIONS
AND
CONTRAINDICATIONS
FOR
PSYCHOANALYSIS
FOR AN
In the public arena, psychoanalysis has generally
had an indifferent, if not hostile, reception. At first
glance, the Indian indifference to psychoanalysis seems
surprising, given the fact that there has rarely been a
civilization in human history that has concerned itself
so persistently over the millennia with the nature of
the ‘‘self’’ and with seeking answers to the question,
‘‘Who am I?’’ As a colonized people, however, reeling
under the onslaught of a conquering European civilization that proclaimed its forms of knowledge and its
political and social structures as self-evidently superior, Indian intellectuals in the early twentieth century
felt the need to cling doggedly to at least a few distinctive Indian forms in order to maintain intact their civilization’s identity. The Indian concern with the ‘‘self,’’
its psycho-philosophical schools of ‘‘self-realization,’’
often appearing under the label of Indian metaphysics
or ‘‘spirituality,’’ has become one of the primary ways
of salvaging self-respect, even a means of affirming a
superiority over a materialistic Western civilization.
Psychoanalysis was seen to be a direct challenge to the
Indian intellectual’s important source of self-respect; it
stepped on a turf the Indian felt was uniquely his own.
Another reason for the rejection of Freudian concepts had to do with their origins. Derived from clinical experience with patients growing up in a cultural
environment very different from that of India, some of
the concepts, when transposed, did not carry much
conviction. The different patterns of family life and
the role of multiple caretakers in India seemed to push
in the direction of modifications of psychoanalytical
theory. Similarly, Freudian views of religion, derived
from the Judeo-Christian monotheistic tradition, with
its emphasis on a father-god, had little relevance for
the Indian religious tradition of polytheism where
mother-goddesses often constituted the deepest substratum of Indian religiosity.
Because of its relative isolation, Indian psychoanalysis has been decisively marked by the stamp of the
first Indian analyst, Girindrashekhar Bose (1886–
1953). Without experiencing the benefits of training
analysis himself, it was Bose who ‘‘analyzed’’ the other
members in a more or less informal manner. He developed a method of his own, similar to the active
therapy and forced fantasy method of Sándor Ferenczi,
which calls for a more active, didactic stance from
the analyst, and which came dangerously close to what
a lawyer is forbidden to do in the courtroom,
namely ‘‘lead the witness,’’ increasing the chances of
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suggestion. In hindsight, Bose’s important contribution to psychoanalysis was less his ‘‘theory of opposite
wishes’’ and more his questioning of some presumed
psychoanalytic universals, based on his clinical experience. In his letters to Freud, Bose points out differences in the castration reactions of his Indian and European patients and notes that the desire to be a female
is more easily unearthed in Indian male patients than
in European. Since cultural relativism was not on the
psychoanalytic agenda in the 1930s when Bose communicated his observations, they received little
attention.
The question of cultural relativism versus the universality of many psychoanalytic concepts and theories
is very much at the heart of contemporary analyst
Sudhir Kakar’s work. Based on clinical and cultural
data from India, Kakar has highlighted the cultural
aspects of the psyche in his many books and papers,
trying to show that mental representations of the culture play a significant role in psychic life.
The Indian Psychoanalytic Society has published a
journal, Samiksa, the Journal of the Indian Psychoanalytical Society, since 1946.
SUDHIR KAHAR
Bibliography
Hartnack, Christiane. (1990). Vishnu on Freud’s desk: psychoanalysis in colonial India. Social Research., 57 (4),
p. 921–949.
Kakar, Sudhir. (1996). Culture and psyche: Psychoanalysis
and India. New York: Psyche Press.
Vaidyanathan, T.G. (1996). Hinduism and psychoanalysis:
A reader. Delhi, Oxford University Press.
INDICATIONS AND CONTRAINDICATIONS
FOR PSYCHOANALYSIS FOR AN ADULT
Borrowed from traditional medicine, the notions of
indications and contraindications have been very
much present in the writings of Freud and his medical
following from the very beginnings of psychoanalysis.
Moreover, the indications and contraindications for
psychoanalysis have changed in the course of theoretical and practical developments that have profoundly
altered attitudes toward psychoanalytic treatment.
In Studies on Hysteria (1895d), Sigmund Freud and
Josef Breuer listed certain conditions for applying the
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cathartic method: ‘‘The procedure is not applicable at
all below a certain level of intelligence. . . . The complete consent and complete attention of the patients
are needed, but above all their confidence (1895d,
p. 264). In ‘‘Freud’s Psycho-Analytic Procedure’’
(1904a [1903]), Freud specified further indications
and contraindications: ‘‘Chronic cases of psychoneuroses without any very violent or dangerous symptoms are the most favourable ones for psycho-analysis:
thus in the first place every species of obsessional neurosis, obsessive thinking and acting, and cases of hysteria in which phobias and abulias play the most
important part; further, all somatic expressions of hysteria whenever they do not, as in anorexia, require the
physician to attend promptly to the speedy removal of
the symptoms. . . . The patient must be capable of a
psychically normal condition; during periods of confusion or melancholic depression nothing can be
accomplished even in cases of hysteria. . . . Deep-rooted
malformations of character, traits of an actually degenerate constitution, show themselves during treatment
as sources of a resistance that can scarcely be overcome. . . . If the patient’s age is in the neighbourhood of
the fifties the conditions for psycho-analysis become
unfavourable’’ (pp. 253–254).
Gradually, with the work of Karl Abraham, Ernst
Simmel, and Wilhelm Reich, the range of cases
regarded as appropriate for treatment expanded to
include psychoses and borderline conditions, even perversions and drug addiction—with uneven results. As
time went on, efforts were made to separate the issue
of indications from medical categories and traditional
diagnostic procedures, in order to create a suitable framework for understanding the metapsychological
factors underlying the demand for treatment and a
suitable framework allowing prediction of its results.
Otto Fenichel (1945) included in his contraindications, in addition to advanced age and unfavorable life
conditions, the ‘‘absence of a reasonable and cooperative ego’’ and the existence of significant secondary
gains derived from symptoms.
In 1955 Edward Glover, discussing the ‘‘transference
potential of the patient,’’ distinguished ‘‘accessible’’
cases (psychoneuroses, reactive depressions, psychosexual inhibitions, optional bisexuality) and ‘‘moderately accessible’’ cases (obsessional neurosis, fetishism,
alcoholism and drug addiction, chronic maladaptation, psychopathic delinquency) from ‘‘rebel cases’’
(psychoses, grave character disorders, and sexual
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disorders). The list presented by Sacha Nacht and
Serge Lebovici in 1958 was fairly close to this one.
The issue of indications and contraindications has
acquired another dimension with the notion of
‘‘analyzability,’’ especially after the Twenty-Fifth International Congress of Psychoanalysis (Copenhagen,
July 1967) and René Diatkine’s 1968 article. Diatkine
proposed evaluating the patient on first encounters to
prognosticate the evolution of future treatment: evaluation of imaginative capacities, flexibility in object
relations, screening for an ‘‘operational idea,’’ and so
on. Subsequently, McDougall (1972) used the notion
of the ‘‘anti-analysand’’ to characterize a patient who
dissembles normalcy, sometimes as a cover for serious
relational problems—a trait that poses a risk of making analysis impossible.
As a result of a growing interest in the role of the
psychoanalyst’s counter-transference, whether psychoanalysis is indicated has come to mean considering the
analyst’s particular capacities for empathy and tolerance for various kinds of pathologies in a candidate
patient. In 1945 Otto Fenichel noted that analysis
could be counterindicated with a given analyst for reasons other than the analyst’s sex or prior relationship
with the candidate analysand. Robert Barande has also
discussed ‘‘analyst indication.’’
The expansion of the range of indications and the
multiplication of approaches in psychoanalytic and
related forms of psychotherapy has modified,
sometimes in the direction of excessive laxity,
decisions about whether analysis is appropriate. This
proliferation has even been seen as a reason for the disappointment of those who expect miracles from a
psychoanalytic approach to difficult cases.
Finally, it is appropriate to recall what Freud wrote
to Ludwig Binswanger on May 28, 1911: ‘‘Truthfully,
there is nothing that man’s organization makes him
less apt for than psychoanalysis’’ (2003).
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Analyzability; Congrès des psychanalystes de
langue française des pays romans.
Bibliography
Diatkine, René. (1969). L’enfant prépsychotique. Psychiatrie
de l ’enfant, 12, 2, 413–446.
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INDIVIDUAL
Fenichel, Otto. (1945). The psychoanalytic theory of neurosis.
New York: W. W. Norton.
Freud, Sigmund. (1904a [1903]). Freud’s psycho-analytic
procedure. SE, 7: 247–254.
———. (2003 [1908–1938]). The Sigmund Freud–Ludwig
Binswanger correspondence, 1908–1938 (Arnold J. Pomerans, Trans.). New York: Other Press.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
Glover, Edward. (1955). The technique of psychoanalysis.
London: Tindall and Cox.
McDougall, Joyce. (1972). L’anti-analysant en analyse. Revue
Française de Psychanalyse, 36, 167–206.
———. (1992). Plea for a measure of abnormality. New
York: Brunner/Mazel. (Original work published 1978)
Nacht, Sacha, and Lebovici, Serge. (1958). Indications et
contre-indications de la psychanalyse chez l’adulte. In
Sacha Nacht (Ed.), Psychanalyse d’aujourd’hui. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Further Reading
Grand, Stanley. (1995). Classic revisited: Stone’s ‘‘The
widening scope of indications for psychoanalysis’’. Journal
of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 43, 741–764.
McNutt, Edith R. rep. (1992). Panel: Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy: indications, contraindications. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, 40, 223–232.
Stone, Leo. (1954). The widening scope of indications for
psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 2, 567–594.
INDIVIDUAL
The concept of the individual is not especially
Freudian, although analysis assumes that the analysand has a degree of psychic autonomy, individuality,
and even identity. The term ‘‘individual’’ (Einzeln) is
found in Freud, notably in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a [1929]), where it stands in opposition to
culture. More broadly, the concept is central to a variety of disciplines, such as ethnology, sociology, political theory, and philosophy.
Cultural historians have described the birth of individual love as an outgrowth of courtly love, the
appearance of the individual feeling of finitude and
death at the end of the Middle Ages, and the birth of
the modern conception of childhood within the family
81 0
in the eighteenth century (Philippe Ariès). With the
Enlightenment and Romanticism, the child became
‘‘the father of the man.’’ After 1900, childhood and
adolescence became distinct age categories and stages
of mental development. Scholars can trace the development of the concept of the individual across the
political, social, cultural, and religious landscapes
from the Renaissance to the Reformation to the
Enlightenment.
While having universal scope, psychoanalysis is
nonetheless marked with the imprint of Western culture, in which it was born. According to Claude LéviStrauss, this culture ‘‘vomits up’’ the individual, in
contrast with group societies (‘‘holistic’’ societies,
according to Louis Dumont), which ‘‘swallow’’ the
individual.
Ethnopsychoanalysis (Georges Devereux) examines differences in mental development according to
culture. The Oedipus complex described by Freud
refers to the symbolic figure of the father in Jewish
and Christian cultures, and it affords the possibility
of triangulation, which leads to individuation and
identity construction. Other oedipal modalities are
present in matrilineal societies, where the parent is
differentiated from the maternal uncle, who represents the paternal function—an arrangement consistent with limited individuality and extended dependence on the social group. The history of European
culture is marked by a gradual transition from a holistic society (during the Middle Ages) to a society of
individuals, and accompanying this transition was
the evolution of identity formation characteristic of
modernity.
If a conception of the individual is a precondition
for the development of psychiatry, the existence of the
self, the subject, is a precondition for the creation of
psychoanalysis. When the individual perceives his ego
as a double and perceives the uncanny nature of his
division, this perspective can be presented as a cure for
the suffering that the individual experiences in the face
of modernity. In Totem and Taboo (1912–1913a),
Freud hypothesized that a ‘‘mass psychosis,’’ a collective soul, in his text, ‘‘culture’’ (Kultur) in the sense of
a collective mental formation situated above the individual, to a large extent conditions the individual’s
mental functioning. Freud elaborated the concepts of
the ego ideal and superego, transitional formations
located between culture and the individual. He also
showed that the repression associated with anality in
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modern culture has an impact on the modalities of
identity formation during adolescence.
During the 1950s Margaret Mahler defined ‘‘individuation’’ as a process of separation to escape the primary union of the mother-child symbiosis. Working
with the uncertainties of individuation in infantile
psychosis, Mahler described a ‘‘symbiotic’’ stage of
child development, prior to the separation and individuation that ends absolute dependence. John Bowlby,
using an ethological approach to the mental development of the infant, developed the concepts of attachment and separation. José Bleger, employing the
concepts of symbiosis and ambiguity, showed that
traces of primitive undifferentiation persist, even
among the most evolved individuals, in the form of an
‘‘agglutinated nucleus.’’
Research by Alain de Mijolla (1981) and data
from group psychoanalysis and family therapy have
shown connections between subjectivity and the
Other in culture, in the family, and across generations, that is, connections among the intrasubjective,
intersubjective, and intergenerational dimensions of
the psyché.
HENRI VERMOREL
See also: Adolescence; Castration complex; Constitution;
I; Identity; Libidinal development; Object; Processes
of development; Self-consciousness; Self (true/false);
Symbiosis/symbiotic relation.
Bibliography
Ariès, Philippe. (1962). Centuries of childhood: A social history of family life (Robert Baldick, Trans.). New York:
Vintage Books. (Original work published 1960)
INDIVIDUATION (ANALYTICAL
PSYCHOLOGY)
Carl Gustav Jung considered individuation to be a step
or process that leads to a partial disengagement from
the control of the unconscious and from collective
rules and norms and feelings. This process is accompanied by a development of the rapport of the ego to the
self, through an ever closer recognition of the forces
and figures that structure—at first without our being
aware of it—our representations and behavior.
The earliest version of this notion can be found in
Gérard Dorn, in the sixteenth century, then in the
Goethean conception of the novel of apprenticeship
(Bildungsroman), as well as in the works of Arthur
Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. However, in
his writings of the second decade of the twentieth century, Jung gave it a whole different meaning and significance, inscribing it into his own experience, then
integrating it with the successive stages of his thought
on the relationship with the unconscious.
Jung mentions individuation for the first time in
1916 in his Seven Sermons to the Dead and in an essay
entitled ‘‘Adaptation, Individuation and Collectivity.’’
In the first of these, the emphasis was on the imperious
need for everyone to undo the obscure envelope of
their origin, distinguishing and differentiating themselves from it, to learn how to live as a unique being,
separate and alone (‘‘einzelsein,’’ he wrote). In the second work he stressed the debt contracted and the price
to pay by anyone who distances themselves from the
common knowledge and collective norms of a group.
———. (1930a [1929]). Civilization and its discontents. SE,
21: 57–145.
These works showed the impact of Jung’s own
experience on his work after the break with Freud
(during the period of 1912–1918). His experience led
to the emergence of images that, under the influence
of the emotions he was feeling, gradually took on voice
and shape: individuation for him was not only a necessity and a principle, on the basis of which a human
being is constituted in his singularity, it is also a
work—Jung soon was to call it a process (ein Prozess),
and even a work of long duration (the ancient alchemists, whom he studied from 1935–1936, referred to it
as their opus)—which one can learn to accompany,
support, and even provoke.
Mijolla, Alain de. (1981). Les Visiteurs du moi: Fantasmes
d’identification, confluents psychanalytiques. Paris: Belles
Lettres.
From one phase of his work to another, Jung was
always very specific about the stakes and the risks (of
exaltation, or inversely, of depression, or even psychotic
Bleger, José. (1981). Symbiose et ambiguı̈té: Étude psychanalytique (A. Morvan, Trans.). Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France. (Original work published 1967)
Dumont, Louis. (1986). Essays on individualism: Modern
ideology in anthropological perspective. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1983)
Freud, Sigmund. (1912–1913a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13:
1–161.
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INERTIA
breakdown) of individuation, as well as its modalities,
notably in the clinical conditions of analytic practice,
and its effects, possible or anticipated, on the future of
man and on that of the unconscious itself.
In 1918, he started working on some empirical exercises in graphics that made him experience a decentralization, which he later realized was close to that
produced by the use of mandalas, as well as the destabilization of the ego produced by Taoism. His reflections on the conditions of symbolic life for us today
came from these studies, and also from his later analyses of the history of Christianity and his encounters
with Amerindian and African religions. This includes
his conception, a rather fluid one, of the self in its relations with the ego: what is at stake presently in individuation can be all the more clearly grasped as one
becomes aware of its projections in ancient systems of
representation and practice.
Also, from his publication of The Relations between
the Ego and the Unconscious, in 1928, and with the help
of his analyses of alchemical literature and iconography, Jung explored the diverse stages that mark the
individuation process : recognition of ‘‘the shadow’’ or
‘‘shadows’’ proper to each, the more or less upsetting
or mediating effects of ‘‘the anima’’ or ‘‘the animus,’’
and especially the experience of the ‘‘Self.’’
Finally it should be noted that the Jungian reflection on individuation was part of a frequenting of the
unconscious that constantly assumed its compensatory capabilities and its capacity to maintain conjoined contradictory attitudes and even givens. From
this perspective the quaternary model of psychic
functioning that he introduced in his Psychological
Types (1921) was deepened and enlarged in the forties
and fifties to apply to the analysis of opposing movements (in the direction of incest and inversely
towards differentiation) that are stirred by the transference, expanding also to include a reflection on the
conditions for an integration of the feminine, and on
the question of evil.
Consequently, the Jungian problematic of individuation has provided access to and perspective on certain collective issues, but its pertinence for cultures
with a different history this is unknown.
CHRISTIAN GAILLARD
See also: Analytical psychology; Compensation (analytical psychology); Ego (analytical psychology); Extrover81 2
sion/introversion (analytical psychology); Self (analytical
psychology); Transference/counter-transference (analytical psychology).
Bibliography
Gaillard, Christian. (1995). Jung. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Humbert, Élie George. (1983). Jung. Paris: Éditions
Universitaires.
Jacoby, Mario. (1990). Individuation and narcissism: The psychology of the self in Jung and Kohut (Myron Gubitz,
and, in collaboration with the author, Françoise
O’Kane, Trans). London: Routledge. (Original work published 1985)
Kast, Verena. (1992). The dynamics of symbols: Fundamentals
of Jungian psychotherapy (Susan A. Schwarz, Trans.).
New York: Fromm International. (Original work published 1990)
INERTIA. See Principle of inertia
INFANS
The Latin term infans, derived from the Greek phèmi
(‘‘I speak’’), means ‘‘one who does not (or rather, not
yet) speak,’’ and refers to the baby before the acquisition of speech that marks the entry into childhood.
A number of authors (notably Melanie Klein and
Donald Winnicott) used the term to describe those
whose mode of communication is situated at a preverbal level. In the work of Jacques Lacan the term infans
took on a further dimension in his discussion of
language and its relation to the unconscious. Piera
Aulagnier elaborated a theory of the mother-infant
relation in terms of discourse (with the mother as
‘‘word-bearer’’). The discussion here will be limited to
the specific reference to language implied in the notion
of infans.
In French translations of authors like Klein or
Winnicott, terms such as bébé (baby), nourrisson
(nursling), petit enfant (small/young child), or infans
are used. A good many of Klein’s texts were originally
written in German, and she used the word infans,
which was translated in different ways in English and
then in French, according to Luis E. Prado de Oliveira.
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INFANS
Winnicott commented on the term infant, commonly
used in English, in ‘‘The Theory of the Parent-Infant
Relationship,’’ originally published in the International
Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1960. He explicitly referred
to the fact that the infant does not yet have the use of
verbal symbols or word-presentations. The baby’s
dependence on the mother’s care is therefore more
linked to maternal empathy than to any understanding
the mother might have of what could be verbally
expressed. In the work of Lacan, the ‘‘infans stage’’ precedes the advent of the subject through language. In
‘‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the
I As Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’’ (1949/
2004), he wrote: ‘‘The jubilant assumption of his specular image by the kind of being—still trapped in his
motor impotence and nursling dependence—the little
man at the infans stage thus seems to me to manifest
in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in
which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior
to being objectified in the dialectic of identification
with the other, and before language restores to it, in
the universal, its function as subject’’ (p. 4).
Piera Aulagnier’s theory of the infans stage is original in that she did not stop herself with merely noting
the preverbal relationship to the mother at this stage,
but also emphasizes that the mother plays the role of
‘‘word-bearer’’ in relation to the preverbal infant. This
can be understood only in the context of the anticipation of the baby’s I by the mother. In The Violence of
Interpretation: From Pictogram to Statement (1975/
2001), Aulagnier writes: ‘‘The mother’s words and
deeds always anticipate what the infant may know of
them’’ (p. 10).
The idea of the mother as word-bearer draws on
Lacan’s emphasis on the function of discourse. In The
Violence of Interpretation, Aulagnier reminded us that
‘‘Every subject is born into a Ôspeaking space’’’ and that
the I is ‘‘an agency constituted by discourse’’ (p. 71).
By ‘‘bearing’’ the word, the mother effects a twofold
junction: first, between the infant’s manifestations and
the outside world, by verbalizing them and giving
them meaning; and second, between the world and the
infant, since for the baby she serves as the representative of an external order, whose laws and demands she
articulates.
Unlike the bodily needs that the newborn, because
of its immaturity, cannot meet by itself, the psychic
needs involving representation in its primal form (the
pictogram) do not depend on intervention by a third
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party. But the infant does not yet have access to the
formation of ideas and naming, and it is thus in this
place of lack that the mother as word-bearer is
inserted. She fashions the objects that are presented to
the infant by endowing them with a libidinal meaning.
In Aulagnier’s words: ‘‘[F]or the senselessness of a real
that could have no status in the psyche, it substitutes a
reality that is human because it is cathected by the
maternal libido, a reality that may be reshaped by the
primal and the primary only because of that earlier
work’’ (p. 74).
On this point, which is crucial for thinking the relationship with the world, and which marks the way in
which that relationship depends on the relationship to
the other—here the mother—Aulagnier simultaneously underscores her indebtedness to Lacan and
her proximity to Wilfred Bion, from whom she considered herself to be fairly distant in other respects. With
regard to Lacan, she notes: ‘‘The contribution of
Lacan’s theory will be recognized here: indeed it might
be said that the object is capable of being metabolized
by the infant’s psychical activity only if, and as such,
the mother’s discourse has endowed it with a meaning
as evidenced by her naming of it. In this sense Ôswallowed’ with the object, Lacan was to see the primal
introjection of a signifier as the inscription of a unary
trait (trait unaire)’’ (p. 73).
As for Bion, she underscored her similarity to him
as regarding the idea of an object that initially resided
in the ‘‘maternal zone’’ and is then metabolized by the
infant into a pure representation of its own relationship to the world. On the other hand, she diverged
from both Lacan and Bion in her analysis of the consequences of this prosthetic function of the mother’s
psyche in terms of ‘‘violence.’’ In this respect, we can
assume that this notion that, a priori, seems surprising
in the context of mother-child relations, came from
another source—specifically, from the other violence
that marks the bonds between the mother and the
baby who will become psychotic, and specifically the
schizophrenic.
In what sense does the mother/word-bearer inflict
violence upon the infans? This necessary, ‘‘primary’’
violence is violence nonetheless, in that the infant feels
the imposition of the word-bearer’s interpretations of
the world. As Aulagnier explained in another work,
the mother maintains a ‘‘spoken shadow’’ relationship
with the infant, but the infant never completely coincides with this shadow that preexists it. The ‘‘violence’’
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INFANT DEVELOPMENT
is linked to the need to create and hold a subject-place
(the spoken shadow) where there are as yet only
potentialities. Accordingly, the future subject, the I,
will come into being in a space preformed by expectations that are not its own. This is the necessary violence of maternal interpretation. But just as there is no
such thing as a developmental tabula rasa, there can be
no human subject without this pre-form. It is the discrepancy between the infant and shadow that makes it
possible to situate a violence that will only really be
violent (secondary violence) if the mother imposes it
no longer upon the infant, but upon the I of the child.
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Apprenti-historien et le maı́tre-sorcier (L’-) [The
apprentice historian and the master sorcerer];
Controversial Discussions; Demand; Graph of Desire;
Helplessness; I; Ideational representation; Identificatory
project; Infant development; Megalomania; Narcissism;
Object; Other, the; Primary narcissism; Sense/nonsense;
Violence of Interpretation, The: From Pictogram to
Statement.
Bibliography
Castoriadis-Aulagnier, Piera (2001). The violence of interpretation: From pictogram to statement. (Alan Sheridan,
Trans.).. Hove, U.K., and Philadelphia: Brunner/Routledge. (Original work published 1975)
Aulagnier, Piera. (1984). L’Apprenti-historien et le maı̂tre sorcier. Du discours identificant au discours délirant. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Lacan, Jacques. (2004). The mirror stage as formative of the
function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.
In his Écrits: A selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.).. New York:
W. W. Norton (Original work published 1949).
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1998). Penser la psychose: Une
lecture de l’oeuvre de Piera Aulagnier. Paris: Dunod.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1960). The theory of the parentinfant relationship. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 41 (6), 585–595.
———. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment. London: Hogarth.
INFANT DEVELOPMENT
The term infant development refers to the processes of
psychic organization and transformation that lead the
preverbal infant from absolute dependency to the
81 4
earliest integrations of the ego during the first year
of life.
By studying the ‘‘psychical apparatus’’ in its structures, functioning, and development, Sigmund Freud
established facts and proposed hypotheses that are
indispensable to the study of early development.
Freud’s newborn is a being in a state of helplessness
(Hilflosigkeit) whose development requires that a
‘‘mutual understanding’’ be established between it and
its mother, as he explained in ‘‘Project for a Scientific
Psychology’’ (1950 [1895]). The infant is active, driven
by needs that give rise to the hallucination of satisfaction, which, according to The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900a), is the prelude to fantasies and thoughts. Its
oral component-instincts trigger the fundamental
mechanisms of projection and introjection, as
described in ‘‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’’
(1905d) and ‘‘Negation’’ (1925h). These mechanisms
gradually enable the infant to form an idea of its
mother as a total object; it can then bind its autoerotism to the love-object, as described in ‘‘Three Essays
on the Theory of Sexuality.’’ The parents’ narcissistic
investment in the infant, described in ‘‘On Narcissism:
An Introduction’’ (1914d), and the quality of the primary identifications that unite the baby with its parents, described in ‘‘The Ego and the Id’’ (1923), are the
basis for its own ‘‘life and death narcissism,’’ to borrow
André Green’s expression.
The earliest psychoanalytic writings on the psychic
life of infants came from Melanie Klein (1933) , Anna
Freud (1946), Donald Winnicott (1945), René Spitz
(1945), and John Bowlby (1951). From the beginning,
the quality of interrelations between mother-environment and the infant was universally accepted as being
a vital necessity, indispensable to human psychic and
somatic development. Early work in the field produced
such landmark concepts as ‘‘early organizers,’’
‘‘prototypes of ego-defense,’’ ‘‘archaic forms of communication’’ (Spitz); ‘‘tonic dialogues’’ (Julian de
Ajuriaguerra); ‘‘interactional epigenesis’’ (Erik Erikson);
and ‘‘interactive spiral’’ (Serge Lebovici).
Over time, Freud’s basic theories were further elaborated. Thus the conception of the oral instinct’s anaclisis on the alimentary function was broadened to
include sensory, affective, and object forms of nourishment. The theory of an attachment instinct (John
Bowlby) took into account the needs for contact that
play a major role at birth and in the evolution of the
separation-individuation process in the young infant
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INFANT DEVELOPMENT
(Mary Ainsworth, Margaret Mahler). The notion of
stages (Freud, Karl Abraham) was supplanted by that
of ‘‘positions,’’ with its greater focus on the analysis of
processes. Klein’s hypothesis of an ego that is active
from birth, operating through projections and introjections, has been accepted and appears to be compatible with Freud’s theory of ‘‘primary identification with
the parents’’ or fundamental narcissistic identification,
set forth in ‘‘The Ego and the Id.’’ The infant’s access to
a representation of the mother as total object and the
prevalence of the depressive position over paranoid
anxieties (Klein) precipitate the coming together of
the ego.
Recent works on ‘‘adhesive identity,’’ the ‘‘psychic
skin,’’ and the ‘‘skin-ego’’ (Esther Bick, Frances Tustin,
Didier Anzieu) have brought new developments to
these problematics. The theory of an early activation
of the ego’s reflexive function has also opened a field
for exploration. The advent of consciousness of self,
termed the ‘‘mirror stage’’ by Jacques Lacan, is, in
Winnicott’s view, a construction linked to ‘‘the mirror
of the mother’s face and the family.’’ According to
Winnicott, interiorization of the love-object enables
the infant to find or create potential spaces for representation of the self and the outside world.
In another problematic, Daniel Stern described
the evolution of different ‘‘senses of self ’’ and explored
the primitive forms of representations that result from
the ‘‘interpersonal bond.’’ Wilfred Bion (1962) analyzed how, through the earliest projections and introjections, there immediately develops between mother
an infant a process of thought, or reverie, that transforms the excitations that submerge the infant into
‘‘alpha elements.’’ The latter can be considered as protorepresentations elaborated in the coalescence of
‘‘infant’s body’’ and ‘‘mother-environment’’ (Piera
Castoriadis-Aulagnier, Monique Piñol-Douriez). They
are the malleable foundations of psychic construction,
and they undergo the transformations proper to the
depressive position and later developments. Through
maturation and interrelations, the ‘‘interactional epigenesis’’ leads the preverbal infant to love and to hate.
At the end of the first year, the infant is ready to
develop language, many of whose elements it already
understands, and which it is beginning to babble.
Although Freud made joint use of ‘‘direct observation and regressive analysis’’ (1905d) as working
methods, some psychoanalysts believe that direct
observation reflects an objectifying scientism and that
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because it is preverbal, the very young infant cannot be
subjected to a psychoanalytic approach. Nevertheless,
the theories elaborated on the basis of observation of
early development can feed into psychoanalytic practice, theory, and research.
MONIQUE PIÑOL-DOURIEZ AND MAURICE DESPINOY
See also: Adhesive identification; Anaclisis/anaclictic;
Anxiety; Archaic mother; Breastfeeding; Breast, good/
bad object; Combined parent figure; Creativity; Depressive position; Early interactions; Eroticism, oral; Experience of satisfaction; Family; Good-enough mother;
Handling; Helplessness; Holding; Identificatory project;
Infantile omnipotence; Infant observation (therapeutic);
Lack of differentiation; Maternal care; Maternal reverie,
capacity for; Mirror stage; Narcissism, primary; Optical
schema; Paranoid-schizoid position; Prematureness; Primal scene; Primary love; Primary object; Primary process/secondary process; Processes of development; Selfconsciousness; Self (true/false); Stranger; Sucking/
thumbsucking; Symbiosis/symbiotic relation; Thoughtthinking apparatus; Transitional object; Transitional
object, space; Transitional phenomena; Wish, hallucinatory satisfaction of a.
Bibliography
Bion, Wilfred R. (1962). Learning from experience. London:
Heinemann Medical Books.
Bowlby, John. (1951). Maternal care and mental health.
Geneva: W.H.O. Monographs.
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams,
Parts I and II. SE, 4–5.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–243.
———. (1914d). On narcissism: an introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
———. (1925h). Negation. SE, 19: 233–239.
Freud, Anna. (1946). The psychoanalytic treatment of children. London: Imago Publishing Co., Ltd.
Klein, Melanie. (1933). The early development of conscience
in the child. In S. Lorand (Ed.), Psycho-analysis Today.
New York: Covici-Friede.
———. (1987). Some theoretical conclusions regarding the
emotional life of the infant. In The writings of Melanie
Klein: Vol. 3. Envy and gratitude and others (pp. 61–93).
London: Hogarth. (Original work published 1952)
Lebovici, Serge. (1983). Le Nourisson, la Mère et le Psychanalyste. Paris: Le Centurion.
815
INFANT OBSERVATION
Spitz. René A. (1945). Hospitalism: an inquiry into the genesis of psychiatric conditions in early childhood. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, I, 53–74
Winnicott, Donald W. (1945). Primitive emotional development. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 26.
Further Reading
Tyson, Phyllis. (2002). The challenges of psychoanalytic
developmental theory. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 50, 19–52.
Tyson, Phyllis, and Tyson, Robert. (1990). Psychoanalytic
theories of development: an integration. New Haven/
London: Yale University Press.
INFANT OBSERVATION
Infant observation has long been considered an important training exercise for child psychotherapists and
for psychoanalysts (Bick, 1964). This has led to certain
theoretical developments commonly associated with
the work of Esther Bick (1968, 1986).
Bick began this work in 1948, shortly after Melanie
Klein had described the paranoid-schizoid position. In
Klein’s view of the paranoid-schizoid position, the ego
has a primary sense of a boundary between itself and
the external world. Bick described a variant of this process, in which boundary of the ego is not primary, but
comes from the sensations arising from skin contact.
Sufficient skin sensations are necessary to give the
experience of a boundary.
One of the processes she noticed interpersonally
was that the breaking of skin contact appeared to be
experienced by the infant as a hole from which it could
leak. She noticed the frequency with which infants
become incontinent of excreta, as well as loosing tears
from the eyes, and screams from the mouth. She
believed she was watching just that process which
Klein had described as the disintegration of the ego in
the early stages after birth. The fragmentation takes
the form of an experience of leaking into empty space.
Bick described various methods by which the infant
seemed to operate to plug that leaky gap. It might
grasp with the mouth so that literally the hole is filled.
Alternatively the hands may grasp as the mouth does;
or more distantly the eyes may become fixed upon a
point of light or some discrete object, as if clinging like
the clenched hands. In addition the infant may fix
aurally upon sounds, including the sound of its own
81 6
crying. These processes of filling, grasping, fixing, and
hanging on represent a method of completing a
boundary. However, the mother’s contact with the
baby’s skin remains the most potent, and perhaps natural, means of completing the boundary.
The theoretical ideas concerning the skin are related
to the notion of the ‘‘skin egos’’ developed by Didier
Anzieu (1985) and Pierre M. Turquet’s ‘‘skin-myneighbor’’ (1975).
Bick’s view was that the boundary between ego and
external world was first of all a phenomenon of the
body ego, and specifically the skin. Also, it is not a
given structure at the outset of life, but instead has to
be achieved through the experience of the mother
’’giving’’ the infant a sense of being enveloped, through
the mother’s innate understanding of the baby’s need
for skin contact. Thus the primary object that
stabilizes the ego is not Klein’s good internal object
internalized inside the ego boundaries, but is the ego
boundary itself. The skin is thus a bodily component
of the stability of the ego, and it is gained passively, at
first, from the external object (mother).
Bick thought she was extending Klein’s theories, by
displaying a psychic level prior to and beneath Klein’s
paranoid-schizoid position. However, this has not
been generally accepted.
ROBERT D. HINSHELWOOD
See also: Adhesive identification; Child analysis; Goodenough mother; Infant observation (direct); Lebovici, Serge
Sindel Charles; Processes of development; Symbiosis/
symbiotic relation.
Bibliography
Bick, Esther. (1968). The experience of the skin in early
object relations. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,
49, 558–566.
———. (1986). Further considerations on the functioning
of skin in early object relations: findings from infant observation integrated into child and adult analysis. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2, 292–299.
Pérez-Sánchez, Manuel. (1990). Baby observation. Perth:
Clunie Press.
Further Reading
Bick, Esther. (1964). Notes on infant observation in psychoanalytic training. International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
45, 558–566.
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Boyer, Diane, and Sorensen, Pamela. (1999). Tavistock
model of infant observation in neonatal intensive. Psychoanalytical Inquiry, 19,146–159.
Freud, Anna. (1953). Some remarks on infant observation.
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 8, 9–19.
Spitz, Rene A. (1950). Relevancy of direct infant observation. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 5, 66–73.
INFANT OBSERVATION (DIRECT)
The direct observation of babies is a way of learning
about the developing human mind.
In ‘‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality
in a Woman’’ (1920), Sigmund Freud stated that if
direct observation were sufficient to provide us with
information on the origins of human sexuality, he
would not have bothered to write his books. Arguably, we observe nothing that we do not already
know, and vision, although closely linked to the scopic instinct—the foremost tool of curiosity and
inquiry—is not a productive way of investigating psychic reality. Nevertheless, his observation of Little
Hans, related in ‘‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-YearOld Boy’’ (1909), provided him with the essential elements of his theory of the libido and castration anxiety. He believed he was able to see directly in the
child ‘‘these sexual impulses and these formations
built by desire that we have such difficulty uncovering
in the adult.’’ His observation of an eighteen-monthold child playing the Fort!/Da! game with a wooden
reel, related in ‘‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’’
(1920), by establishing the basis for his theory of the
death instinct, played a role not only in his theorizations of narcissism, but also because it provided a
paradigm for numerous currents of thought in child
psychoanalysis.
Freud and Melanie Klein, working within different
perspectives, encouraged their students to observe
infants, but without making this a separate field of
study. It was Donald Winnicott who, in ‘‘The Observation of Infants in a Set Situation’’ (1941), defined that
field by envisioning infant observation as a ‘‘set situation’’ capable both of providing information about the
infant carried by its mother and of establishing an
authentic therapeutic relationship with the infant,
working in a nonverbal mode. Winnicott proposed his
own reading of Freud’s ‘‘game of Fort!/Da!’’ and helped
us to see what distinguishes his interpretation from
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pure behavioral observation. He analyzed the sequence
of the baby’s behaviors in three stages: (a) hesitation,
which he interpreted as a ‘‘sign of anxiety about something’’ and a symptom of a conflict between the
infant’s desire and its interiorization of a threatening
maternal imago; (b) then the expression of self-confidence—which is close to what he called ‘‘omnipotence.’’ In some cases, this phase can lead to the world
of make-believe and shared play; and (c) the game of
appearance/disappearance of the object, in which the
infant, emerging from its depressive mood, expresses
its ability to restore the object through the game.
Winnicott thus establishes a difference between the
primitive processes, as they can be directly observed,
and the deeper processes that are already a reconstruction and elaboration of the primitive processes, linked
with experience of the environment. He made it
possible to utilize direct infant observation to better
understand psychic reality in the process of being
constructed.
The postwar period, in which psychoanalysts were
faced with the problem of early psychopathologies,
renewed interest in observation. René Spitz and John
Bowlby, borrowing their methods from genetic psychology and ethology respectively, proposed new
developmental models focused on, respectively, the
concept of organizers of the ego and attachment theory. An important research trend then developed,
mainly in the United States, that interpreted the baby’s
nonverbal behaviors as genuine mental acts. Her work
informed by the theories both Klein and Wilfred Bion,
the British investigator Esther Bick, in ‘‘Notes on
Infant Observation in Psycho-Analytic Training’’
(1964), for her part upheld the idea that the infant’s
mental life unfolds in a projective mode that must be
contained by psychic structures that are sufficiently
developed to support the emergence of the processes
of introjection. Originally conceived as a contribution
to the training of child psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, this method has been extended to other
objectives: research on the beginnings of the infant’s
mental and relational life, prevention and treatment
techniques used in families and in various institutional
settings (treatment and other centers for young children, nurseries, neonatal care services).
From an epistemological point of view, Didier
Houzel (1997) underscored the difference between an
ethological approach and observation that he characterized as psychoanalytical, which sticks to the
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proposed framework both internally (coming as close
as possible to the baby’s somatopsychic experiences)
and externally (type of contract established with the
family, means used by the various parties to abide by
or transgress the conditions, and finally the observer’s
capacity for empathy). Observation thus takes place in
two stages: encounter with the subject, and the
deferred working-over of transferential and countertransferential material.
DRINA CANDILIS-HUISMAN
See also: Infant observation (therapeutic).
Bibliography
Bick, Esther. (1964). Notes on infant observation in psychoanalytic training. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,
45, 558–566.
Freud, Sigmund. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a fiveyear-old boy. SE, 10: 1–149.
———. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18:
1–64.
———. (1920a). The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman. SE, 18: 145–172.
Winnicott, Donald. (1941) The observation of infants in a
set situation. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 22,
229–249.
INFANT OBSERVATION (THERAPEUTIC)
The method of observing the infant in its family environment, from birth to age two, using the rigor of the
analytic framework, was conceived by Esther Bick. The
observer visits the infant at home for one hour once
each week and maintains a strict neutrality. The field
of observation is the relationship that is established
between the baby and its mother, within the context of
the transference instituted between the mother and the
observer, and between the mother and her baby. The
objective is training the observer in analytic work
rather than the fabrication of an instrument for
research. This method, used for the training of psychoanalysts and childhood specialists, later proved to be a
remarkable tool for early treatment.
In 1948, at the request of John Bowlby, Bick developed a method of infant observation in a family
context. As Bick explained in ‘‘Notes on Infant Observation in Psycho-Analytic Training’’ (1964), the aim
81 8
was to provide an opportunity for practical experience
as a part of first-year training for therapists at the
Tavistock Clinic.
In 1963, Bick presented her method of observation
to the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPS). A consensus was established among the various English
schools that this method would be integrated into the
first-year curriculum; the attentive observation of an
infant’s development enables the future analyst to live
out a number of fundamental emotional experiences,
then to think them through within the framework of
the work group. It was Sigmund Freud’s grandson,
W. Ernest Freud—the ‘‘child playing with the
spool’’—who promoted this method for therapists at
the Anna Freud Center, as he related in ‘‘Infant Observation: Its Relevance to Psychoanalytic Training.’’
(1975). Bick’s method of observation is a part of analytic training within the Spanish and Belgian psychoanalytic societies. Bick herself recommended training in
this method for all categories of professionals involved
in children’s mental health.
In France, André Green strongly opposed the use of
direct observation, noting in ‘‘Entretien avec Pierre
Geissmann à propos de l’observation des bébés’’
(1992; Interview with Pierre Geissmann on infant
observation) that it carries the risk of externalizing
psychic life and confusing the infantile with the actual
infant, which runs contrary to the work of representation and the spirit of psychoanalysis.
Bick’s method was a conceptual innovation,
described as ‘‘a stroke of genius’’ by Martha Harris. It
is a precise technique used in a fixed framework,
whose goal is the training of the analyst. The observer
must be able to find a space within the family that is
sufficiently neutral, yet not rigid, to enable him or her
to experience the emotional impact of the baby’s presence, without taking action. He or she must come
unburdened by theoretical preconceptions, and be
receptive without interfering. After the observation,
the observer writes a report that conveys his or her
experiences to a work group, which keeps an eye on
methodological ethics and helps to make sense of the
observed material. Observing a baby presupposes an
ability to identify with the different points of view of
family members; this flexibility makes it a sound preparation for analytic work. Through the analysis of his
or her countertransference in relation to both the
mother and what he or she feels from the baby, the
observer can understand the impact of the mother’s
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fantasies on the baby’s mental space and perceive the
manner in which the baby responds to this. Thus, the
specific type of affective and counter-transferential
opening up inherent in observation makes it an aid to
the development of the future analyst’s capacities for
free-floating attention.
The observer’s presence is a source for change. It
often has beneficial effects for most families: helping
the mother emerge from postpartum depression,
developing the parents’ attention-giving abilities,
modulating the effects of repetition of the mother’s
past on the baby. Bick’s method opened the way for
new therapeutic possibilities. Infant observation in
day-care facilities, hospitals, and in the home has been
developed to sensitize staff, as a preventive measure
against early disorders, and with a view to therapeutic
intervention in cases of autistic or psychotic
pathologies.
In day-care facilities, the main indicators for setting
up observation are:
Mental dysfunction in the mother. The containing effects of observation serve as a protective
shield and allow for a reshaping of the imagos;
Children who have to be entrusted to a series of
foster care situations owing to inadequacies on
the part of the parents can benefit from the presence of an observer who follows them from one
place to the next;
When a child has a disability that is traumatic for
the parents. The observer tries to get them to
recognize the child’s performances and the support he or she needs;
Early autistic or psychotic disorders. The observer serves as a support for child-raising and the
parents. He or she identifies the sources of suffering, defense mechanisms, and factors that hinder
the child’s development, and helps to improve
the family’s responses in the form of caregiving
and listening skills.
In hospitals, in obstetrics wards and neonatal intensive care units, attention given to the baby, especially
when he or she seems to be disorganized, enables both
medical providers and parents to ‘‘think’’ the baby, to
find meaning in interactions, and to avoid functional
repetition.
Observation is a remarkable tool for prevention
and treatment. It is an aid to the baby, who is helpless
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in the face of its intense anxieties, to the mother in
need of solicitude, and to other caregivers.
CHRISTINE ANZIEU-PREMMEREUR
See also: Archaic; Infantile psychosis; Infant observation;
Infant observation (direct); Premature-prematurity;
Tenderness.
Bibliography
Bick, Esther. Notes on infant observation in psycho-analytic
training. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 45,
558–566.
Freud, W. Ernest. Infant observation: its relevance to psychoanalytic training. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 30,
75–94.
Green, André. Entretien avec Pierre Geissmann à propos de
l’observation des bébés. Journal de la psychanalyse de
l ’enfant, 12, 133–153.
Haag, Michel, and Geneviève Haag. L’observation des nourrissons selon Esther Bick (1901–1983) et ses applications.
L’Information psychiatrique, 1 (1995): 7–17.
Pérez-Sánchez, Manuel. (1981). L’observation des bébés.
Paris: Clancier-Guénaud.
INFANTILE AMNESIA
Infantile amnesia results from the repression of childhood polymorphous sexuality and the oedipal
complex during the latency period. It constitutes a
reference point and a model for subsequent (especially
hysterical) amnesias and repressions. It ‘‘hides the earliest beginnings’’ of our lives ‘‘up to the sixth or eighth
year’’ even though we have ‘‘good reason to believe
that there is no period at which the capacity of receiving and reproducing impressions is greater than precisely during the years of childhood’’ (Freud, Sigmund
1905d, p. 174–175).
The notion of amnesia is defined by Freud in his
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), when he
develops his conception of infantile sexuality. Having
conceived since 1895 of the notion of hysterical amnesia,
he now acknowledges an amnesia bearing upon the first
six to eight years of life, contrasting with the capacity
of the child’s memory and its ability to register impressions. The infantile impressions falling under this
amnesia constitute the reference point and model for
later amnesias in the adult, helped into being by the
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INFANTILE NEUROSIS
preexistence of a repressed that attracts to itself any elements of the subject’s current life that resemble it.
See also: Memories; Memory.
Freud compares infantile amnesia to the hysterical
amnesia of adults and suggests that in both cases the
process would consist ‘‘in a simple withholding of
these impressions from consciousness, viz., in their
repression’’ (1905d, p. 175). That withheld from consciousness (repressed) includes infantile sexuality,
defined as ‘‘polymorphous perversity,’’ which thus
allows Freud to say that ‘‘neurosis is the negative of
perversion.’’ This formulation could be attributed to a
belief that the lifting of amnesia (hysteric and infantile) would permit the subject to follow in a reverse
direction the path that leads from a childhood that did
not endure censorship to neurosis. But Freud came to
distinguish between a lifting of amnesia and a true lifting of repression in ‘‘Remembering, Repeating and
Working-Through’’ (1914g). In ‘‘Constructions in
Analysis’’ (1937d), this belief came up against the idea
of sexuality as structurally linked to anxiety through
the effects of the death drive.
Bibliography
The sexuality of the neurotic preserves important
pregenital infantile traits. The hysteric refuses the perverse dimension of these traits all the more so since the
child that they once were had already refused them during the latency period. Infantile amnesia creates for
everybody a kind of ‘‘enigmatic prehistory.’’ The infantile prehistory finds the infant, who is just beginning to
speak, imbued with primal fantasies that become the
object of a radical amnesia, primal repression. In the
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, this is not specifically a question of the Oedipus complex; however, it
much be understood that infantile amnesia bears upon
the entire ‘‘polymorphously perverse infantile sexuality/
Oedipus complex,’’ the oedipal conflict in turn reinforcing the censorship of infantile sexuality.
It is notable that Freud theorizes infantile amnesia
moreover starting from the observation of children
outside the analytic setting rather than from adults
recalling their childhoods in analysis. Infantile amnesia
covers over the mnemic traces of childhood, about
which Freud says in The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900a) that they are ‘‘outside of time’’ and ‘‘indestructible,’’ which would tend to define all unconscious
psychic life as infantile in its essence, on the condition
that what is psychically infantile be distinguished from
the real infant.
FRANÇOIS RICHARD
82 0
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4–5: 1–751.
———. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,
7: 123–245.
———. (1914g). Remembering, repeating and workingthrough (further recommendations on the technique of
psycho-analysis, II). SE, 12, 145–156.1
INFANTILE NEUROSIS
A psychogenic mental disorder, infantile neurosis
manifests expresses a psychic conflict that has been
symbolically noted in the subject’s early childhood.
The term is used to designate either a disorder characterized by neurotic pathology, with variable prognostications, or a transference neurosis, constituting
the prolegomenon of adult mental problems. Infantile neurosis is organized in terms of a dependency
model. This results in counter-transference reactions
on the part of the adult, which can be dangerous
for the future development of the child, especially if
the adult concerned remains oblivious to such a
possibility.
‘‘Little Hans’’ was treated by his father, who was in
turn ‘‘supervised’’ by Freud. Freud himself only saw
this five-year-old boy twice. Hans suffered from a phobia that prevented him from any activity, a fear that
arose from having seen a horse fall on the ramp at the
Vienna railroad station. When Freud saw Hans again
as an adult, his parents had separated and he had
drawn closer to his father. He did not recognize Freud,
and he did not appear to be very healthy mentally. The
son of a musician, by the end of his professional life he
was director of the Geneva Opera, but his career left
few traces. About all that is known about him is that
he was interested in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, that he
staged the story of Brunhilde and Wotan, and that he
was particularly taken with Siegfried’s search for a
mother in Brunhilde.
One might therefore agree with Jean Bergeret, who
argued that this boy had a phobia linked to the his
father’s relations with his wife, who had been analyzed
by Freud. Freud perhaps knew too much about this
family’s secrets. Despite the appearance of having been
cured of his phobia through Freud’s work of interpreINTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
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tation, Hans suffered from a neurosis that certainly
inhibited his creativity.
The cases of the ‘‘Wolf Man’’ and the ‘‘Rat Man’’
published by Freud have been the object of extensive
commentary. The Wolf Man, Sergei Pankejeff, suffered
from an infantile neurosis. Freud concentrated on
describing the key fantasy of observing the coitus of
the parents, especially in the context of the dream of
wolves. In this nightmare, the patient saw immobile
wolves, sitting on the branches of a tree and staring at
him. Eventually the Wolf Man was declared to be psychotic. He died at the psychiatric hospital of Vienna
after a number of psychotic episodes, which were treated by students of Freud. At the end of his life the Wolf
Man said terrible things about Freud to a Viennese
journalist. However, he had been supported by psychoanalysts, who purchased paintings in which he
depicted his dream.
In fact, it was on the basis of this dream that Freud
had decided to study the primal scene. He wanted to
determine if the wolves that observed Pankejeff were
placed in a situation opposite to the real one, when, as
a child, he witnessed his parents making love. It seems
probable that the coitus a tergo of animals had been
attributed by the child to humans.
It is known that the Wolf Man had made the rounds
of psychiatric services in Germany, ending up with
Freud after seeing many other doctors. After he was
financially ruined during the Russian Revolution, he
married one of his nurses in Vienna. She was somewhat able to contain his madness. It is understandable
that this man, who had paranoid tendencies, but was
also persecuted in reality, would try to protect himself
through various fantasies. But he needed to renounce
them in order to find some peace and be able to return
to a more normal life.
The Rat Man, who died during World War I, was
traumatized in his childhood by his relations with the
nurses who raised him and who had pathological sexual experiences with him. As an adult he suffered from
an obsessional neurosis; many notes about Freud were
found with him; and once in the course of a transference he attempted to transform Anna Freud into one
of his nurses, insulting her constantly.
Neurotic symptoms in childhood do not necessarily
lead to adult neuroses. In the adult, the existence of
neurotic symptoms can mask an underlying psychotic
structure. Furthermore, the study of the evolution of
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certain cases of autism treated by psychoanalysis
demonstrates frequent obsessional masking of psychoses, as is also the case in serious obsessional neuroses in children.
In Serge Lebovici’s report on the relation between
infantile neurosis and transference neurosis presented
to the Congrès des psychoanalystes de langue française
des pays romans, he recalled Anna Freud’s theory that
normal neurotic symptoms were a sign of good psychic
health in a child during the oedipal phase: the repression of the drive is generally insufficient at that time,
and thus transitory neurotic symptoms will arise. It has
been demonstrated that the absence normal infantile
neurosis is a sign of a predisposition to psychoses. However, subsequently Lebovici considered that his exposé
should have been slightly rectified: normal infantile
neurosis is also a sign of a solid narcissism, linked to a
narcissistic cathexis with ‘‘His Majesty the Baby’’ on the
part of his parents, who structure the ego of the child.
The organization of intersubjectivity demonstrates the
importance of family relations to the psychic life of the
child. The kinship system accords a huge place to the
imagined child, that is to say, to the imaginary and
phantasmic child of the mother. This is contemporaneous with the child’s proto-representations. This
ensemble communicates the presence of phantasmic
interactions and also shows the importance of the role
of the child in the psychic lives of the parents.
When this double process is satisfactory, the intergenerational transmission results in a solid and flexible
ego. However, when there are ‘‘ghosts in the nursery’’
(Selma Fraiberg), this double process fails and the cultural constitution of filiation becomes impossible,
illustrating the importance of studying the early interactive stage. But this work comes up against various
obstacles that are not oedipal.
The triangulation process starts relatively early. It is
preceded by a triadic arrangement, in the course of
which the father and mother, in present-day society,
play a specific role, allowing one to predict of the possible outcomes of triangulation. In the dull repetition
of interactions, certain events are fundamental to the
reconstitution of the interaction: they are ‘‘spoken
backwards’’— that is to say, they become truly significant events.
This perspective give understanding of the specific incidents in upbringing that demonstrate the
modalities of the transmission of attachment, as
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INFANTILE OMNIPOTENCE
John Bowlby anticipated them. Mary Ainsworth has
described this kind of attachment as the ‘‘strange situation,’’ transmitted according to genetic rules. The
mechanisms of transmission in the adult follow the
principle of a genetic transmission (Mary Main). Peter
Fonagy has built on this idea, considering that children
forced to deal with insecure transmission would benefit from a psychotherapeutic approach, which can
modify the givens of this genetic transmission, as can
be observed in thirty percent of cases. Studies on narration seem to confirm that episodic memory inscribes
these givens, emphasizing the importance of the
‘‘proto-narrative envelopes’’ described by Daniel Stern.
rate peoples who overestimate the power of wishful
thinking and the real-world effect of psychic acts.
Infantile omnipotence is also a feature of obsessional
pathology, in which it appears as superstitious or
magical thinking; in psychosis, as delusions of grandeur; and, finally and to a lesser extent, in creative people who are able to momentarily escape reality and
manipulate a world of fantasy. Sigmund Freud treated
the concept of omnipotent thinking at length through
investigations of primitive peoples and their beliefs in
telepathic and animistic thought, and also through
pathologies such as obsessional neurosis and psychotic
megalomania.
SERGE LEBOVICI
Although Freud did not discuss it in these terms,
narcissistic regression in sleep may be viewed as putting the dreamer in a situation typical of infantile
omnipotence, able to realize frustrated desires of the
previous day and, on a deeper level, to fulfill repressed
wishes. Dreams revive the earliest situation of the nursing infant who seeks to re-experience satisfaction
through primary process thinking—that is, to use hallucination to short-circuit reality. Perceptual identity
is achieved by means that are rapid, regressive, and
interior to the psychic apparatus. ‘‘It was only,’’ wrote
Freud, ‘‘the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction, the disappointment experienced, that led to the
abandonment of this attempt at satisfaction by means
of hallucination’’ (1911b, p. 219). Omnipotence in this
sense is essentially indistinguishable from the capacity
of the psychic apparatus to ignore reality and has universal purchase as an archaic function of the psyche.
See also: ‘‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy
(Little Hans)’’; ‘‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (Wolf Man)’’; Infantile, the; Neurosis; Phobias in
children; Prepsychosis; Psychoanalytical Treatment of
Children; Transference neurosis.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a fiveyear-old boy. SE, 10: 1–149.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
———. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile
neurosis. SE, 17: 1–122.
Lebovici, Serge. (1980). L’expérience du psychanalyste chez
l’enfant et chez l’adulte devant le modèle de la névrose
infantile et de la névrose de transfert. Revue Française de
Psychanalyse, 64, 5–6, 733–857.
Further Reading
Kris, Ernst, et al. (1954). Problems of infantile neurosis. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 9, 16–71.
Loewald, Hans W. (1974). Current status of the concept of
infantile neurosis: Discussion. Psychoanalytic Study of the
Child, 29, 183–190.
INFANTILE OMNIPOTENCE
The sense of omnipotence that arises in the fundamental misapprehension of reality which is central to
the period of primary narcissism, during which the
infant hallucinates its original love-object, persists into
childhood and is found among prehistoric and prelite82 2
For the child, learning the limitations that the reality principle imposes on the pleasure principle is in
effect a limitation on its sense of omnipotence. However, as Melanie Klein (1921 [1919]) noted, the child’s
sense of omnipotence is also tied to that which it
endows its parents and with which it identifies. Reality
opposes it in either case. The ‘‘decline of the omnipotence-feeling that is brought about by the impulse to
diminish parental perfection (which certainly assists in
establishing the limits of his own as well as of their
power) in turn influences the impairment of authority,
so that an interaction, a reciprocal support would exist
between the impairment of authority and the weakening of the omnipotence-feeling’’ (p. 17). In her view,
the child’s experience of omnipotence as increasing or
diminishing will determine whether he or she will
become bold and optimistic or fearful and pessimistic.
However, she added: ‘‘For the result of development
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not to be boundless utopianism and phantasy but
optimism, a timely correction must be administered by
thought’’ (p. 24). A compromise thus emerges between
the pleasure principle that regulates wishes and fantasies and the area in which the reality principle prevails
in the sphere of thoughts and established facts.
Donald W. Winnicott showed how the young
child’s mental activity can transform a ‘‘good-enough’’
environment into perfect surroundings. This transformation is necessary for object constancy not to be
disturbed. By contrast, a defective environment is
harmful because faulty adaptation overwhelms the
psyche-soma of the young child and prematurely
forces it out of the its narcissistic universe. In terms of
the illusion of creating the object and what he calls
‘‘transitional objects,’’ Winnicott (1952) wrote: ‘‘We
allow the infant this madness, and only gradually ask
for a clear distinguishing between the subjective and
that which is capable of objective or scientific proof.
We adults use the arts and religion for the offmoments which we all need in the course of realitytesting and reality-acceptance’’ (p. 224).
Omnipotence does not disappear as childhood
ends, but it delimits itself to specific areas and coexists
with the recognition that reality imposes limitations
upon it. Literary fiction and especially Romanesque
adventure permits safe enjoyment of omnipotence
through all manner of imagined danger. ‘‘It seems to
me, however,’’ wrote Freud (1908a), ‘‘that through this
revealing characteristic of invulnerability we can
immediately recognize His Majesty the Ego, the hero
alike of every day-dream and of every story’’ (1908a,
p. 150). Moreover, parents transmit omnipotence to
the child inasmuch as ‘‘they are inclined to suspend in
the child’s favour the operation of all the cultural
acquisitions which their own narcissism has been
forced to respect, and to renew on his behalf the claims
to privileges which were long ago given up by themselves. . . Illness, death, renunciation of enjoyment,
restrictions on his own will, shall not touch him; the
laws of nature and of society shall be abrogated in his
favour; he shall once more really be the centre and core
of creation—ÔHis Majesty the Baby’, as we once fancied
ourselves’’ (1914c, p. 19).
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: Alpha function; Amplification (analytical
psychology); Anxiety; Arrogance; Borderline conditions;
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‘‘Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest’’; Dead
mother complex; Dependence; Ego ideal; Ego ideal/ideal
ego; Encopresis; Inferiority, feeling of; Good enough mother;
Holding; Illusion; Infant observation (direct); Mania; Megalomania; Narcissism; Narcissistic defenses; Narcissistic
elation; Omnipotence of thought; Paranoia; Pregnancy,
fantasy of; Psycho-Analysis of Children, The; Quasi-independence, Transitional stage; Rite and ritual; Self (true/
false); Self esteem; Silence; Squiggle; Suicidal behavior;
Technique with children, psychoanalytic; Termination of
treatment; Transference/counter-transference (analytical
psychology); Transgression; Transitional phenomena; Transitional object; Transitional object, space.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1908e). Creative writers and day-dreaming. SE, 9: 141–153.
———. (1911b). Formulations on the two principles of
mental functioning. SE, 7: 213–226.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. SE, 14:
81–105.
Klein, Melanie. (1921 [1919]). The development of a child.
In: Love, guilt and reparation and other works, 1921–1945,
pp. 1–53. Delacorte Press, 1975.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1952). Psychosis and child care.
In: Collected papers (pp. 219–228). New York: Basic
Books, 1958.
INFANTILE PSYCHOSIS
Infantile psychosis has recently been replacing the
notion of infantile schizophrenia. Infantile psychosis
can be defined as precociously pathological organization that develops out of the integration of the earliest
relations. Later forms of exteriorization can also be
manifested in childhood. The age at the first outbreak,
the greater or lesser stability of the supports of equilibrium that are constituted, and the nature of the
defense mechanisms have significant repercussions on
the risk and incidence of later negative developments.
The principal psychic mechanisms at work lie
somewhere between the neurosis-psychosis opposition, posed by Freud, and the Kleinian theory of fantasy and the precocious Oedipus: the predominance of
projection and projective identification, the fusion
between real and imaginary, with infiltration of primal
shattering fears, direct instinctual expression and the
search for satisfaction by the shortest way, principally
in the register of oral drives.
823
INFANTILE PSYCHOSIS
Clinical polymorphism, the absence of pathognomonic signs, and the failure of any common etiology
of pathogenesis all characterize the category of the
infantile psychoses in child psychiatry. Psychosis is
diagnosed on the basis of the seriousness of perturbations, their atypical quality and their duration, in the
context of various presenting symptoms—such as
behavior problems, compromising of intellectual efficiency and functioning, retardation and/or language
anomalies, expressions of great anxiety, sleep, eating,
and sphincter conduit disorders; and in rare cases
delirium and hallucinations. In terms of occurrence, a
clear distinction has been established between schizophrenia that is declared in adolescence, without as
much variety in the forms it takes, and the child
schizophrenics who present more individualized
particularities.
In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association, psychoses are not listed as a disorder nosology,
but rather placed under the rubric of ‘‘general developmental disorders’’ among which figures infantile autism. The overall ‘‘a-theoretical’’ cast of the ensemble
and its descriptive corollaries suggest an organogenic
and negative conception of psychosis, implying interventions that consist principally in reeducation.
Until the beginning of the twentieth century, this
dominant understanding of infantile psychoses was
still borrowed in large measure from that of nineteenth-century psychiatry; advocating medical pedagogical treatment (Bourneville, Seguin, Vallee), as well
as psychometric approaches (Binet, Simon). Backwardness, states of idiocy and insanity, and their anatomical-clinical correlations in etiological matters
were some characteristics of the dominant conception.
A threefold transformation of thought then contributed to the emergence of infantile psychoses:
the application to ever younger children of models coming from advances in adult psychiatry and
psychoanalysis;
the rejection of these adulto-morphic models, as
clinicians took account of the specificities of
children;
the gradual passing of the hypothesis of homogeneity, and the recognition of the heterogeneity of clinical tableaux and their underlying
conditions.
82 4
Wilhelm Weygandt, Emil Kraepelin himself, and
especially Sancte de Sanctis in 1908 with ‘‘dementia
praecossime,’’ described the infantile forms of early
insanity. Yet all of this was merely followed the
Kraepelinian model of the child. With the introduction by Eugen Bleuler of the category of schizophrenics
(1911), the emphasis shifted from dementia to the dissociation of psychic functions (‘‘Spaltung’’). Among
disorders called secondary—‘‘responses of the sick
soul’’— was the hermetic isolation of ‘‘autism,’’ a term
coined by Bleuler by subtracting ‘‘eros’’ from the
Freudian notion of autoeroticism.
This new dynamic approach progressively influenced studies of children. From the thirties, in the
United States (Charles Bradley, Howard Potter) and
Europe (Georges Heuyer, Jacob Lutz, Léon Michaux),
the notion of infantile schizophrenia, an autonomous
endogenic illness resulting in a dramatic alteration in
the developmental curve, became a familiar one. For
Lutz, it was strictly opposed to organic and encephalopathic madness, or to gradually developing retardation. An overall conception of the malady was enlarged
to include different clinical types and an approach to
intra-familial relations. The work of Melanie Klein and
her treatment of psychotic, even autistic children
(cases of Dick, 1930; Erna, 1932) was especially influential, and took place well before the descriptions of
precocious infantile autism by Leo Kanner (1943) and
of symbiotic psychosis by Margaret Mahler (1952).
The emergence of the concept of infantile psychosis
first in the United States, then in Europe, from the end
of the 1940s is linked to several factors:
the dissemination of psychoanalytic works relative to children and concerning early development: Melanie Klein, already mentioned, Anna
Freud, René Spitz, Donald Winnicott;
a progressive disengagement from any etiological
presupposition;
a challenge to the notion of dementia as an endogenous condition with ineluctable processes
which had been itself a factor in negative
prognoses.
Post-Kleinian authors in Great Britain attempted
to make further progress in investigating the origins
of thought and its disorders: Herbert Rosenfeld
located the role of projective identification in the psychotic process; Wilfred Bion stressed the impact of
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destructive drives against activities of liaison, perception, and attention, while describing a normal projective identification; Hanna Segal developed the notion
of ‘‘symbolic equation’’ in schizophrenia, where the
symbol is confused with the thing it symbolizes.
In France, after the early work of theorization of
Serge Lebovici, René Diatkine, Conrad Stein, and
Denise Kalmanson came up with a comprehensive
psychological profile of infantile psychoses. The contributions of Roger Misès and Jean-Louis Lang should
also be emphasized as having illuminated the rapport
between psychoses and flaws in organic constitution.
While the neurosis-psychosis opposition still maintains considerable heuristic value, the complexity and
flexibility of the child’s systems have resulted in proposing the concepts of pre-psychosis, developmental
disharmony, and para-psychosis.
The British school, through Donald Meltzer, proceeded to a synthesis of the Kleinian concepts in the
very unfolding of the psychoanalytic process in the
child (1948) and the observation of stages of psychic
growth and of ‘‘dimensionality.’’ Esther Bick’s insight
into a primal mode of narcissistic identification,
‘‘adhesive identification’’ (1968), extended the hypothesis formulated by Winnicott of premature traumatic
separation and psychotic depression. Subsequently,
Frances Tustin developed an original conceptualization of autistic defense mechanisms, distinguishing
‘‘shell states’’ (autisms) from ‘‘confusable states’’ (schizophrenias), where there has been access to tridimensionality. Finally, the study of the competencies of the
infant, coupled with direct observation as well as the
notions of interactional epigenisis and phantasmic
interactions (Lebovici, 1983), posed the problem of
the consistency of psychoanalysis with new models of
premature dysfunctionalities (Didier Houzel, Bertrand
Cramer). The idea that the baby creates the mother as
much as she creates the baby has contributed to reflection on the access to maternality (Racamier, 1979) and
on the role maternal depression plays in the psychotic
process.
Leo Kanner described early infantile autism (1943),
and he deduced it from the Bleulerian concept of the
autism of schizophrenia. It was then applied to the
‘‘extreme autistic solitude’’ manifested from the start of
life beginning in certain children. However, the question of whether this is a special category, in spite of
Kanner’s integration of it in the general framework of
infantile psychoses, remains unresolved. The especially
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rigid homeostasis of their constitution locates these
children in the register of the unchangeable, capable of
no effect of projection, action or possession. A line can
be drawn here between autism and infantile psychoses.
Because the autistic system is relatively unstable, future
development, once a major breakdown has been
avoided, will include passage by ‘‘symbiotic’’ madness.
Some authors, however, see in this a confirmation of
the developmental continuity of various forms of child
psychosis.
Described by Margaret Mahler in the child of two
to four years of age, ‘‘symbiotic psychosis’’ is based on
a primal indistinction between the psyche of the baby
and that of the mother, and on a regression to this
state of ‘‘symbiosis.’’ Psychosis involves the tentative
restitution of the mania of omnipotent fusion with the
mother’s image. Marked by ambivalence, its symptomology includes a loss of functional skills and major
manifestations of disturbance at the prospect of a
separation from corporeal contact. Its onset is connected with maturation of the functions of the ego and
the unconscious mobility of parental cathexes. A
manifestly pathological ‘‘symbiotic’’ upsetting of equilibrium, a result of separation or sudden loss, can
result in a secondary autistic condition.
Other early developmental disharmonies, psychotic
in structure and composite clinical articulation, have
been described. One consideration is that psychoses
that are externalized later, from the age of four-to-five
to puberty, can be seen as evolving adjustments to
these early forms, and in continuity with them. On the
other hand, without underestimating the significance
of unrecognized fault lines, they surface in children
who seem safe from them. Clinical configurations correspond to variable classifications of the signs of a
need for help, polymorphic in nature, as has been
mentioned above. Pseudo-neurotic (phobias, obsessions) and pseudo-maladjustment forms should be
remarked, as well as complex motor or instrumental
disorders, and some school failures, where psychosis is
a factor.
The ensemble of these theories, not excluding neurobiological, environmental, and historical factors,
tends to be situated outside of linear reductive causality. For René Diatkine, the understanding of psychopathology necessitates a reflection on the etiology of
‘‘normalcy.’’ From the time of The Interpretation of
Dreams (1900a), the Freudian hypothesis of the hallucinatory return of the experience of satisfaction linked
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normal development and psychotic functioning. Melanie Klein, in her description of the precocious Oedipus
and schizoid-paranoid and depressive positions, situated ‘‘early psychotic stages’’ as potentialities in any
human being. Infantile psychoses were the result of
fixation at this early pre-psychotic phase, in which
splitting, introjection, and projection dominate. They
signify the failure of the depressive phase central to the
second six months of life, when the child is faced with
persecutory anxieties of annihilation. Projective identification, with its dimension of aggressive intrusion
into the body of the mother to control her from the
inside, was the key to narcissistic object relations of the
schizoid-paranoid position. However, Melanie Klein
has been criticized for using metaphors borrowed
from psychopathology to describe the general organization of the psyche—as well as for the absence of a
clear conceptual opposition between neurosis and
psychosis.
Serge Lebovici and René Diatkine are of the opinion
that the ensemble of psychic functioning and the economic equilibrium between different systems are what
permits the differentiation of every form of psychic
organization with regard to the ‘‘treatment’’ of projective identification. Consequently, according to
Diatkine, ‘‘the optimal form of development of the
pre-Oedipean organization’’ could be represented ‘‘as
an interaction between two psychotic positions (schizoid-paranoid and depressive positions)’’ (1955)
which is similar to some of Bion’s formulations. Psychosis would correspond to the relative primacy of the
primal processes in the lowering of tensions and the
reestablishment of economic equilibrium, a condition
of psychic continuity. The tendency toward repetition
of this primacy is what is pathognomonic. Cathexis
and meaning would be established, consequently,
accorded to a ‘‘primal’’ logic, without suppression of
secondary processes. René Diatkine emphasized the
crisis, decisive for psychic development, leading to the
installation of the object in the second six months of
life. The presence/absence opposition assumes qualitative significance, and the maternal object, lost by
definition as soon as constituted, is cathected ambivalently. The working through of the ambivalence is
crucial, the object of love and hate being doubly
inscribed, internally and externally. Symbiotic psychosis corresponds to the impossibility of workingthrough, a consequence of serous perturbations in the
earliest exchanges: painful representation becomes
82 6
non-representation. The environment can contribute
to the stabilization of this pathological equilibrium or
it can favor the constructive recapture of mental representations. Projective identification, which becomes
very significant when introjection organizes desire permanently in the depressive position, allows the loved
object to be spared by addressing itself to a third party.
This primal triangulation is the jumping off point of
the oedipean constitution, as in Kleinian formulations.
For Wilfred R. Bion, projected hatred and envy
become so intense, in the pathological projective identification, that the identificatory object, unable to contain and work through them, is experienced as a
‘‘superego,’’ crushing and destructive of the capacities
of psychic development. The inversion of the alpha
function necessary for the assimilation of emotional
experiences results in catastrophic hallucinations and
anxieties.
Donald W. Winnicott regarded failures of the early
processes of illusion-disillusion, shared between the
mother and the child, as the source of the psychosis
centered on phases of the formation of ‘‘the continuous feeling of existence.’’ The lack of access to a ‘‘primal maternal preoccupation’’ (1965) would deprive
the subject of an essential early period of illusion. For
Wilfred Bion, this particular maternal phase can be
considered from the point of view of a mutual projective relation of identification between the mother and
the baby, reintroducing the role of the object and the
environment into Kleinian theories. The containing
and working-through capacities of the mother are
what soothe the persecutory anxiety of the child
(‘‘capacity for maternal reverie’’).
Lacanian theorization relative to infantile psychoses
were developed on the basis of the concepts of the
foreclosure (the ‘‘Verwerfung’’ of Freud) of the Nameof-the-Father and of the mirror stage as ‘‘formative of
the function of the I.’’ The foreclosed signifiers, outside
of symbolization, return to the heart of the Real in hallucination. The mirror phase, between six and eighteen months, marks the first version of an ego in the
experience of a primal identification, anticipating a
corporal unity. For Maud Mannoni, psychoses are
inscribed in the maternal unconscious, with the psychotic child being unrecognized as a desiring subject,
excluded from access to oedipean triangulation, and
frozen as partial object subjected to maternal omnipotence. Finally, Piera Aulagnier’s notion of the ‘‘imaginary body of the child’’ should be mentioned. This
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introduces an imaginary working through by the
mother, prior to birth and anticipating the libidinal
cathexis of the baby. The pictographic representation
of the complementary object zone, attached to the primal process, bears witness to the disjunctive ruptures
of corporal space in psychosis.
In summary, it can be affirmed that, in clinical
practice, psychotic polarity is represented by projective
expansion, immediate hallucinatory satisfaction and
disorganization, whereas neurotic polarity is represented by the efficacy of symbolic transmission, the
multiplication of liaisons, and the capacity to differentiate and work through.
A desirable early psychoanalytic treatment,
extended in time, in the context of flexible institutional guidelines, should go along with a recognition
of the different levels, perceptible but unpredictable, of
psychic functioning of patients, as well as of related
family circumstances.
BERNARD TOUATI
See also: Adhesive identification; Anaclisis/anaclitic; Autism; Autistic capsule/nucleus; Autistic defenses; Black
hole; Breakdown; Child analysis; Deprivation; Developmental disorders; Dismantling; Empty Fortress, The; Individual; Infantile schizophrenia; Lack of differentiation;
Mirror stage; Primitive agony; Psychic envelope; Psychotic potential; Self-mutilation in children; Sucking/
thumbsucking; Symbiosis/ symbiotic relation; Tube-ego.
Bibliography
Bick, Esther. (1968). The experience of the skin in early
object relations. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,
49, 558–566.
Bion, Wilfred R. (1963). Elements of psychoanalysis. London:
Heinemann.
Bleuler, Eugen. (1952). The group of schizophrenias. (Joseph
Zinkin, Trans.). New York: International Universities
Press. (Original work published 1911)
Diatkine, René. (1994). L’enfant dans l’adulte ou l’éternelle
capacité de reverie. Neuchâtel-Paris: Delachaux & Niestlé.
Diatkine, René, and Simon, Janine. (1972). La psychanalyse
précoce. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Kanner, Leo. (1943). Autistic disturbances of affective contact. Nervous Child, 2, 217–250.
Klein, Melanie. (1948). Contributions to psychoanalysis.
1921–1945. London: Hogarth Press.
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Lebovici, Serge. (1983). Le nourrisson, la mère et le psychanalyste. Paris: Le Centurion.
Mahler, Margaret. (1952). On child psychosis and schizophrenia. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 7, 286–305.
Misès, Roger, and Moniot, Marc. (1970). Les psychoses de
l’enfant. In Encyclopédie médico-chirurgicale, vol. Psychiatrie. Paris: E.M.C.
Racamier, Paul-Claude. (1979). La maternalité psychotique.
(Commentaires et complément 1978 et 1979). Paris: Payot.
Further Reading
Volkan, Vamik. (1995). The infantile psychotic self and its
fates. Understanding and treating schizophrenics and other
difficult patient. Northvale, NJ: Aronson Inc.
INFANTILE SCHIZOPHRENIA
The French classification of childhood and adolescent
mental disorders describes two psychoses under two
rubrics: childhood-onset psychoses of the schizophrenic type and adolescence-onset psychoses of the schizophrenic type.
Nineteenth-century child psychiatry, it can be
assumed, followed the models proposed by adult psychiatry. Valentin Magnan applied the adult psychiatric
theory of degeneration to children. In the same vein,
Ernest Dupré applied the theory of constitutions to
children. Later, various authors described clinical cases
of children that showed obvious adult forms of schizophrenia. Thus, in 1905 Sancte de Sanctis described
dementia præcocissima on analogy with dementia præcox. In 1888 Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours wrote
the first treatise on child psychiatry, La folie chez
l ’enfant (Madness in children). A year earlier,
Hermann Emminghaus demonstrated that the
description of mental illness in children should be
separated from descriptions of adult mental illness.
In 1908 Theodore Heller described dementia infantilis, a clinical group of several illnesses generally of neurological origin with various components. At the First
International Congress on Child Psychiatry, held in
Paris in 1937, Lutz was the first to use the notion of
infantile schizophrenia, of which he made a critical
study. According to him, there are very few such cases.
His presentation was supported by Georges Heuyer.
Already English-speaking authors had extended the concept of infantile schizophrenia to cover everything in
current practice conventionally referred to as ‘‘childhood
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psychoses.’’ In 1943 Leo Kanner proposed isolating a
particular morbid illness under the term ‘‘infantile autism.’’ This particular psychosis does not evolve toward
schizophrenia. As a matter of practice, institutions that
treat children do not admit the notion of schizophrenia,
while the concept of autism is very widespread.
French psychiatry has described prepsychotic and
parapsychotic states that evolve toward a state of disintegration accompanied by mental retardation and that
can appear analogous to certain schizophrenic states
in adults. In English-speaking countries, especially in
institutions following the American classification in
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the notion of psychosis has disappeared and been replaced by the concepts of autism
and of pervasive developmental disorders. Some of the
latter disorders may develop into schizophrenia. In
German psychiatry, which long maintained its influence over the Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries, childhood autism has long been described as an initial form
of schizophrenia, with development into schizophrenia more or less inevitable.
Schizophrenia that begins during adolescence will
not be treated here, for it is generally at this age that
symptoms of schizophrenia are first manifested. Many
authors believe that schizophrenic adolescents, who are
often extremely intelligent, already had bizarre behavioral problems in childhood. Most authors, however,
believe that schizophrenia appears in the young adult
out of the clear blue sky. In conformity with this view,
the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), ‘‘Classification of Mental
and Behavioral Disorders’’ lists autism and childhood
disintegrative disorder, but not infantile schizophrenia.
Lastly, Roger Misès has described childhood borderline
pathologies, within which he included states that may
develop into schizophrenia. He sees this as a failure of
the development of narcissism. Although it is possible
to invoke some cases of infantile autism that have
unquestionably evolved in the direction of schizophrenic states, the onset of schizophrenia during the
latency period is altogether exceptional.
Psychiatric morbidity in children whose parents
suffer from mental disorders is significant. However,
these disorders are usually neuroses. When one parent
is schizophrenic, the child has a 20 percent chance of
being schizophrenic, whereas the rate is only 3 percent
when neither parent is schizophrenic. Children
adopted by parents listed on the schizophrenic register
82 8
are more likely to be psychotic than those who are
apparently the children of schizophrenics. These studies, carried out in Chicago and in the Scandinavian
countries, seem to be more probing than research
involving identical twins.
Some serious neurotic states, especially obsessivecompulsive disorders, may be a neuroticization of certain childhood and adult psychoses. This is what Joyce
McDougall and Serge Lebovici described in Un cas de
psychose infantile (A case of infantile psychosis; 1960).
They describe the case of a child whose analysis was
stopped by his parents. The parents wanted to place
the boy in the care of Bruno Bettelheim. The mother
of this boy said the boy was suicidal, and the boy,
according to his father, became a ‘‘homosexual schizophrenic’’ who was among ‘‘the wealthiest Americans.’’
At the end of his analysis, the boy would make sure
that the subway had indeed stopped in each station
and would go down to check its exact position. The
neuroticization of his ‘‘schizophrenia’’ thus led to an
obsession with checking that impeded subway trains
from leaving the station.
It is legitimate to wonder whether true obsessional
neuroses that appear from the latency period on are not
preschizophrenic. Generally, very bizarre obsessions are
involved, as in the case of a boy who wanted to make
certain that falling snow made no sound. These obsessional neuroses are not mild schizophrenias that have
already led to a degree of defensive obsessive behavior.
In adulthood, schizophrenic decompensations can
emerge, as in one case of traumatic schizophrenia in a
preadolescent girl who saw her sister, caught in the
eddying currents of the Loire River, drown. She first
blamed herself, in the manner of a delusional melancholic, then became schizophrenic.
Clearly, as these few cases show, infantile schizophrenia is rare.
SERGE LEBOVICI
See also: Autism; Deprivation; Double bind; Infantile
psychosis; Lack of differentiation.
Bibliography
McDougall, Joyce, and Lebovici, Serge. (1960). Un cas de
psychose infantile. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Misès, Roger. (1990). Les pathologies limites de l’enfance.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
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INFANTILE SEXUAL CURIOSITY
INFANTILE SEXUAL CURIOSITY
Infantile sexual curiosity must be distinguished from
the ‘‘investigative drive’’ in that the former directly
cathects sexuality. Secondarily, it can stimulate the
activity of the latter, which is also directed at nonsexual objects and gives rise to theories (infantile sexual theories). For Freud, in fact, the investigative drive
is ‘‘awoken’’ (geweckt) by sexual curiosity, which
responds to the ‘‘selfish’’ interest of self-protection
from the birth of younger siblings.
Sexual curiosity initially involves an interest in seeing the genital organs and sexual relations (scopophilic
drive). This visual pleasure can develop into voyeurism
without necessarily leading to a sublimated cathexis of
the enigma surrounding sexuality and of enigmas in
general. Although sexual curiosity is linked to the
investigative drive and constitutes the form in which it
first emerges, the quest for the sight of an object of
desire nevertheless continues to play a predominant
role. It may be surprising that Freud should accord
this preeminent position to sexual curiosity, to the
extent of regarding it as the starting point of the child’s
investigative activity, whereas in fact the child displays
from the earliest months an all-consuming curiosity
about everything that surrounds him.
In fact, this curiosity already differs from the scopophilic drive both through its choice of an absent
object, the mother’s penis (cf. Little Hans, 1909b), as a
preferred object and because it is not restricted to the
pleasure of seeing but immediately develops into a
need for self-comparison with the object being looked
at (‘‘The ego is always the standard by which one measures the external world,’’ 1909b, p. 107). Unlike the
scopophilic drive, which can undergo a perverse development (voyeurism) or invent the absent object by
remaining fixated on it (fetishism), sexual curiosity
goes beyond this register by cathecting its enigmatic
dimension. In this sense, it is already undergoing a
sublimatory development, even if the investigation has
not yet been formulated as an independent objective.
The existence of an enigma presupposes the existence
of a premonitory knowledge that is not necessarily
possessed. In the ‘‘Wolf Man’’ case (1918b [1914]),
concerning the primal scene, Freud hypothesizes that
the understanding of the sexual process, as well as its
meaning, is conceivable even at such an early age, if it
is compared with the instinctive knowledge of animals
(instinktives Wissen). This curiosity would then be the
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disposition to cathect a scene of which the meaning is
intuited, giving it an enigmatic quality. However, the
value of the scene in question derives only from that
which is not visible, that is to say its meaning, as
distinct from what is directly perceived. Sexual
curiosity differs from voyeuristic pleasure in the same
way, as can be stated following Freud: ‘‘An advance in
intellectuality consists in deciding against direct senseperception in favour of what are known as the higher
intellectual processes—that is, memories, reflections
and inferences’’ (1939a, [1934–38], pp. 117–118).
Sexual curiosity (epistemophilia) was extensively
discussed by Melanie Klein, who emphasized that it
precedes the child’s understanding of language and,
because of his immaturity, contributes a great deal of
frustration and a sense of ignorance that reinforce the
castration complex. Melanie Klein also emphasizes the
connection of this curiosity with sadism and the analsadistic libidinal position, which makes the child want
to appropriate the contents of the body and particularly the mother’s body, which is thought to possess
the penis and the babies.
Sexual curiosity does not necessarily mean that the
child is asking questions about sexuality. Rather, this
seems in fact to be displaced, with the child posing innumerable, often stereotypical questions to which he does
not appear to expect answers because they substitute for
those questions that repression prevents him from asking and in regard to which alone he could be satisfied.
Infantile sexual curiosity, in its denied form (inhibition, disgust) or its obsessional form, plays an important
role in infantile symptomatology. It has important consequences for learning at school (Klein, 1923). Freud
takes this viewpoint a step further by considering the
failure of infantile sexual curiosity as a paralyzing factor
in later life: ‘‘The impression caused by this failure in the
first attempt at intellectual independence appears to be
of a lasting and deeply depressing kind’’ (1910c, p. 79).
SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
See also: ‘‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’’
(Little Hans); Myth of origins; ‘‘On the Sexual Theories
of Children’’; Phallic stage; Phobias in children; ‘‘Sexual
Enlightenment of Children, The’’; Thought.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of
sexuality. SE, 7: 123–243.
829
INFANTILE,
THE
———. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy.
SE, 10: 1–149.
———. (1910c). Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his
childhood. SE, 11: 57–137.
———. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile
neurosis. SE, 17: 1–122.
Moses and monotheism: three essays. SE, 23: 1–137.
Klein, Melanie. (1923). The development of a child. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 4, 419–474.
Mellor-Picaut, Sophie. (1980). La vision et l’énigme. Topique, 25.
INFANTILE, THE
In Au vif de l’infantile (At the heart of the infantile;
1996), Florence Guignard wrote: ‘‘The basic structure at
the fringes of our animality, the repository and container
for our drives, libidinal or hateful as well as epistemophilic, the infantile is the Ômalleable’ alloy of the instinctual and structural that makes one oneself and not some
other person. Irreducible and unique, and by those very
qualities universal, the infantile is thus what enables our
psyche to come into being, in all the developments of its
psychic bisexuality organized by the Oedipus complex.’’
The concept of the infantile was born with psychoanalysis in the sense that Sigmund Freud’s discovery of
infantile sexuality caused the observation of psychic
phenomena to move from the level of consciousness to
the level of the unconscious. Both the child one sees in
reality and the childhood one remembers elicit reflection about processes of secondarization, and neither
constitutes the specificity of the infantile as it is revealed
within the psychoanalytic setting itself. It was by thinking about the psychic causality of pathological phenomena that Freud discovered the infantile origins of the
neuroses, and later the psychoses. In this way, he established a bridge between the actual structures of the
mind—that of the adult analysand, but also that of the
child in analysis—and the ways these structures have
been informed, through deferred action during an
infantile period that is reconstructed in analysis. Dreams
are what give the most direct access to the infantile
layers of the psyche, since the latter are so deeply hidden
by the processes of primary and secondary repression.
In ‘‘L’expérience du psychanalyste chez l’enfant et
chez l’adulte devant de modèle de la névrose infantile
et de la névrose de transfert’’ (The analyst’s experience
83 0
with children and adults in terms of the models of
infantile neurosis and transference neurosis; 1980)
Serge Lebovici specified the organizing aspects of infantile neurosis as opposed to neurosis in children. The
taking over of neurotic elaboration by infantile neurosis
enables the adult analysand to develop a genuine transference neurosis. In this conception the capacity to
develop a transference neurosis is based in the formation of bonding processes. The infantile is thus what
expresses a stratum of mental life that is as inaccessible
to consciousness as the unconscious material that
resides in it, yet it serves as a nodal point that makes it
possible to go back and forth between past and present.
In ‘‘L’enfant, l’infantile et la causalité psychique’’
(The child, the infantile, and psychic causality; 1994),
Bernard Brusset uncoupled the infantile from the historical, thus differentiating between causal biography
(that of the infantile) and reconstructed biography
(that of the child). Thus the infantile can be assimilated into the unconscious (Agnès Oppenheimer), to
the extent that the infantile is not observable, or that it
is observable only in the form of reconstruction or
deferred action. This view thus posits the infantile as a
turning point in the reworking of primal fantasies.
Making the infantile that which is unconscious and
unrepresentable opens the way for a rethinking of the
work of psychoanalytic observation both of the adult
and of the child by the adult: To be truly psychoanalytic, any observation must involve a dimension in
which the infantile within the observer responds to the
infantile of the person being observed. It is this transferential/countertransferential echo that means that
one is no longer faced with the child, but rather the
approach of the infantile. This involves putting into
perspective both the child and the infantile within the
adult, and recognizing, in the adult’s ‘‘infantile’’ reaction, not the child he or she once was, since that child
existed only for a time, but rather the infantile playing
itself out within the child.
CLÉOPÂTRE ATHANASSIOUS-POPESCO
Bibliography
Brusset, Bernard. (1994). L’enfant, l’infantile et la causalité
psychique. Revue Française de Psychanalyse, 58, 3, 693.
Guignard, Florence. (1996). Au vif de l’infantile. Paris: Delachaux and Niestlé.
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INFERIORITY, FEELING
Lebovici, Serge. (1980). L’expérience du psychanalyste chez
l’enfant et chez l’adulte devant le modèle de la névrose
infantile et de la névrose de transfert. Revue Française de
Psychanalyse, 44, 5–6, 733–857.
Oppenheimer, Agnès. (1994). Enfant, enfance, infantile.
Revue Française de Psychanalyse, 58, 3, 707.
OF
(INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY)
of a Comparative Individualistic Psychology and Psychotherapy (1912/1926). In Freud’s view, feelings of
inferiority were a superficial manifestation—important
in clinical work, to be sure, but understandable only
within the framework of a more general metapsychology.
ROGER PERRON
INFERIORITY, FEELING OF
The term ‘‘feeling(s) of inferiority’’ refers to a group of
representations and affects that reflect an individual’s
self-devaluation in relation to others. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Sigmund Freud mentioned a
dream marked by both feelings of inferiority and
infantile omnipotence. The thematic content of this
dream is explicitly anal, which is significant, since
Freud later often returned to anal issues as forces that
can have a positive or negative impact on self-esteem.
Freud addressed feelings of inferiority, notably, in
his analyses of the cases of the Rat Man (1909d),
Schreber (1911c), and the Wolf Man (1918b). He also
took up this theme in his formulations on narcissism
(1914c). But above all, he examined feelings of inferiority with especially keen insight within the framework of the oedipal complex. In his paper on a child’s
fantasy of being beaten (1919e), he wrote that this fantasy, as well as other, analogous perverse fixations,
were ‘‘precipitates of the Oedipus complex, scars, so to
say, . . . just as the notorious Ôsense of inferiority’ corresponds to a narcissistic scar of the same sort’’ (p. 193).
Within the oedipal framework, the threat of castration
that weighs upon the little boy distorts his self-esteem,
and the absence of a penis leads the little girl to devalue
herself. In both cases, feelings of inferiority are intimately linked to the guilt inherent in the oedipal
drama. The loss of love of the object and the sense of
rejection accentuate this feeling.
Freud revised these views when he formulated his
structural theory of ego psychology. ‘‘There is always a
feeling of triumph when something in the ego coincides with the ego ideal. And the sense of guilt (as well
as the sense of inferiority) can also be understood as
an expression of tension between the ego and the ego
ideal,’’ Freud wrote in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c, p. 131).
One can thus better understand why Freud so
firmly opposed Alfred Adler when Adler wanted to
make feelings of inferiority the keystone of his theoretical conceptions in The Neurotic Constitution: Outlines
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See also: Adler, Alfred; Compulsion; Fanon, Frantz; Feeling of inferiority (individual psychology); Masculine
protest (individual psychology); Social feeling (individual psychology).
Bibliography
Adler, Alfred. (1926). The neurotic constitution: Outlines of a
comparative individualistic psychology and psychotherapy
(Bernard Glueck and John E. Lind, Trans.). New York:
Dodd, Mead, and Co. (Original work published 1912)
Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE,
4: 1–338; SE, 5: 339–625.
———. (1909d). Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis.
SE, 10: 151–318.
———. (1911c). Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides). SE, 12: 1–82.
———. (1914c). On narcissism: an introduction. SE, 14:
67–102.
———. (1918b). From the history of an infantile neurosis.
SE, 17: 1–122.
———. (1919e). A child is being beaten: A contribution to
the study of the origin of sexual perversions. SE, 17: 175–
204.
———. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the
ego. SE, 18: 65–143.
INFERIORITY, FEELING OF
(INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY)
As early as 1907 Alfred Adler considered the state of
organic inferiority as a factor in neurosis before linking it to the newborn child’s state of physiological
immaturity. This state of inferiority is the source of
the feeling of inferiority that persists throughout life:
‘‘Being a man means having a feeling of inferiority that
constantly demands compensation’’ (1912/2002).
The life history of Alfred Adler, who suffered from
rickets as a child, goes some way to explaining his
insistence on the importance of the states of organic
831
INHIBITION
inferiority at the root of the feeling of inferiority. He
later observed the various modulations that the family
and cultural environment, as well as the child’s choices,
introduced into this feeling, which he saw as a stimulant
to psychic life. By way of compensation the child will
elaborate a directing fiction representing an ideal being
who has all the qualities that the child lacks, and will
project itself into the future ‘‘in the shape of the father,
mother, an older brother or sister, a schoolteacher, an
animal or a God’’ (1912/2002). The gap between the self
and the directing fiction is all the greater if the child has
suffered frustrations or ill treatment and encounters no
obstacles in its imaginary world.
Very early on this fiction will be adapted due to the
influence of social and cultural factors and will express
itself in the form of a counter-fiction (1912/2002). Psychic health is characterized by harmonious relations
between the fiction and the counter-fiction, whereas the
neurotic will remain under the control of the fiction,
making an effort ‘‘to shine while acting modestly, to conquer while remaining humble and submissive, to humiliate others with his own apparent virtues, to disarm
others with his passivity, to make others suffer through
his own suffering, to pursue a virile goal with feminine
means, to make himself small in order to seem big.’’
Compensation for an exacerbated feeling of inferiority can take the form of a superiority complex, the
different manifestations of which Adler described in
The Neurotic Constitution, whereas discouragement
will take the form of an inferiority complex. In this
case the subject will use neurotically rich symptoms to
flee all situations that threaten its prestige, hence
Adler’s definition of neurosis: ‘‘An attempt to maintain
the appearance of value at all costs, while desiring this
goal without paying the price’’ (1930/1927).
Cultural influence manifests itself in the elaboration
of the fiction through the choice of a model representing a virile ideal that leads to a mode of apperception
that is in accordance with the opposition relation:
masculine/dominant/superiority, feminine/defeated/
inferiority. The social influence constitutes the correcting element that determines the feeling of inferiority.
These two factors make up two lines of force that are
present in the formation of the child’s lifestyle, which
can be compared to the program of perception and
behavior with which the child complies unconsciously
(1929/1964).
FRANÇOIS COMPAN
83 2
See also: Cinema and psychoanalysis; Inferiority, feeling
of; Grandiose self; Object; Paranoia; Penis envy; ‘‘Some
Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction
between the Sexes.’’
Bibliography
Adler, Alfred (1972). The neurotic constitution: Outlines
of a comparative individualistic psychology and psychotherapy (Bernard Glueck and John E. Lind, Trans.). Freeport,
NY: Books for Libraries Press. (Original work published
1930)
———. (1964). Problems of neurosis: A book of case histories. (P. Mairet, Ed.). New York: Harper & Row. (Original
work published 1929)
———. (2002). The neurotic character. Fundamentals of
individual psychology and psychotherapy (Cees Koen,
Trans.). San Franscisco: Alfred Adler Institutes. (Original
work published 1912)
INHIBITION
Sigmund Freud defined inhibition as ‘‘the expression
of a restriction of an ego-function. A restriction of this
kind can itself have very different causes.’’ This definition appears in the opening pages of Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d [1925]).
Analogizing from a medical definition of the concept (‘‘restriction of an organ function’’) does not perfectly express the psychopathological specificity of the
notion of inhibition. Thus when Freud states that the
‘‘ego-function of an organ is impaired if its erotogenicity—its sexual significance—is increased,’’ (1926d
[1925]) this mechanism, which is borrowed from the
clinical psychoanalysis of hysteria, provides no psychopathological differentiation between the inhibition
and the symptom.
In the same volume he also underlines the links
between inhibition and the concept of anxiety: ‘‘Some
inhibitions obviously represent a relinquishment of a
function because its exercise would produce anxiety.’’
In this way Freud tries to delineate the concept by
comparing it with and distinguishing it from other
notions that have been described by analytic theory, as
indicated fairly clearly in the title of the work. Apart
from the fact that they enable us to isolate a pure form
of inhibition—‘‘The libido may simply be turned
away’’—these efforts lead Freud to distinguish two
types of inhibition ‘‘as a measure of precaution or
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INHIBITIONS, SYMPTOMS,
brought about as a result of an impoverishment of
energy.’’ The study of these different mechanisms
enables him to define the modalities of the opposition
between inhibition and symptoms: unlike inhibition,
‘‘the symptom cannot any longer be described as a
process that takes place within, or acts upon, the ego.’’
This opposition makes it possible to define inhibition
as a simple relinquishment at the level of the ego, where
the symptom accomplishes a veritable compromise
between the ego and the instinctual demands of the id.
Freud offers an illustration of this in relation to the horse
phobia in the case of Little Hans. In this case, ‘‘the inability to go out into the streets was an inhibition, a restriction which his ego had imposed on itself so as not to
arouse the anxiety-symptom.’’ The phobic symptom cannot be described as such except when there has been ‘‘the
replacement of his father by a horse. It is this displacement, then, which has a claim to be called a symptom.’’
Emphasizing the fundamentally imaginary status of
inhibition, Jacques Lacan reviewed his study in the
seminar devoted to anxiety by opposing it to the
notion of an act. The latter appears as a response of
the subject forced to adopt a position in relation to its
splitting. Unlike inhibition, the act ‘‘après-coup’’ inaugurates a new transformed subject: ‘‘Only action
engenders certitude in the subject.’’ By means of this
opposition, inhibition appears as an attempt on the
part of the subject to defer an option, a choice to be
made in relation to its desire. Like Freud’s dissatisfied
tone in relation to the theories developed in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Lacan’s proposed extensions confirm the difficulties of apprehending the
concept of inhibition but also its heuristic value.
NICOLAS DISSEZ
See also: Action-(re)presentation; Act, passage to the
Allergy; Civilization and Its Discontents; Drive/instinct;
Facilitation; Friendship; Idealization; Inhibitions, Symptoms
and Anxiety; Infantile sexual curiosity; Jokes; Knowledge or
research, instinct for; Oedipus complex, early; Ontogenesis;
Orgasm; Pleasure in thinking; Prepsychosis; Sexual theories
of children; Smell, sense of; Thought.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1926d [1925]). Inhibitions, symptoms
and anxiety. SE, 20: 75–172.
Lacan, Jacques. (1966). Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
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AND
ANXIETY
INHIBITIONS, SYMPTOMS, AND ANXIETY
Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety was published in
German in 1926, a year after Freud’s famous article
‘‘Negation’’ (1925h) and ‘‘An Autobiographical Study’’
(1925d). Ernest Jones wrote that the work was written
in July 1925, corrected in December, and then published in the third week of 1926 by Fisher Verlag of
Frankfurt.
Concerning this work Sigmund Freud wrote, ‘‘It
contains several new and important things, takes back
and corrects many former conclusions, and in general
is not good’’ (Jones, 1953–1957, vol. 3, p. 131). There
were a number of ‘‘contradictions’’ in the translations,
and it was not until 1936 that Alix Strachey finally produced a better translation, again according to the testimony of Ernest Jones, published by Hogarth Press in
the ‘‘International Psycho-Analytical Library’’ series.
In addition to Alix Strachey, ‘‘Freud had also given the
translation rights to H. A. Bunker in New York without informing either translator of the other’’ (Jones,
1953–1957). At the same time a thirteenth edition of
this text, lacking the passage about Alfred Adler and
Carl Gustav Jung, was published in the Encyclopaedia
britannica with a different title: ‘‘Psycho-Analysis:
Freudian School’’ (1926f).
In any event, this was obviously an extremely
important essay for the evolution of Freudian thought
and should be seen, in large part, as a response to the
ideas of Otto Rank in The Trauma of Birth (1929). As a
curious side note, it is worth noting that when Freud
was writing Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, his
daughter Anna was preparing ‘‘The Psychoanalytic
Treatment of Children’’; that is, while the father was
investigating anxiety, separation anxiety in particular,
his daughter was working on the distinction between
child and adult psychoanalysis.
Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety is divided into
ten chapters (without titles) and three addenda, entitled
‘‘Modification of Earlier Views,’’ ‘‘Supplementary
Remarks on Anxiety,’’ and ‘‘Anxiety, Pain, and Mourning.’’ Some commentators saw in the fact that Freud discussed pain in the final addendum a reflection of the
theoretical difficulties he had encountered in studying
the phenomenon, which he had discussed earlier in
Mourning and Melancholia (1916–1917g [1915]).
The first chapter discusses the connections between
inhibitions and symptoms. The second presents the ego
as the site of anxiety (‘‘There are good grounds for
833
INITIAL INTERVIEW(S)
firmly maintaining the idea that the ego is actually the
site of anxiety’’) and sees the role of repression from a
perspective different from Freud’s earlier one, which
viewed anxiety as the automatic consequence of repression. Chapter 3 takes up the relations between the ego
and superego. Chapter 4 returns to the phobia of ‘‘little
Hans’’ to show that ‘‘the motive force of the repression
was fear of castration’’ (p. 108). Chapter 5 focuses on
obsessional neurosis and the mechanism of the formation of symptoms within this context. Chapter 6 further
investigates the defense mechanisms of isolation and retroactive undoing within obsessional neurosis. Chapter 7
examines the problem of phobias. Chapter 8 provides a
brief interlude in which Freud analyzes the experience of
unpleasure and distinguishes object loss and the fear of
object loss—a distinction that provides the framework
for a discussion of automatic anxiety and signal anxiety.
Chapter 9 then focuses on the relations between symptom formation and the development of anxiety. Finally,
the last chapter distinguishes three factors that lead to
neuroses: a biological factor (‘‘the long period of time
during which the young of the human species is in a
condition of helplessness and dependence’’ [p. 154]), a
phylogenetic factor (the two-stage development of sexual life, with emphasis given to puberty), and a psychological factor (the defects of the mental apparatus lead
Freud to treat libidinal drives as dangers in the face of
which the ego can only restrain its own mechanisms and
tolerate the formation of symptoms ‘‘in exchange for
having impaired the instinct’’ [p. 156]).
The key points in this theoretical text are the following: Freud challenges Otto Rank’s view on the
trauma of birth, which Rank regarded as the prototype
of all later anxieties. For Freud:
In man and the higher animals it would seem
that the act of birth, as the individual’s first experience of anxiety, has given the affect of anxiety certain characteristic forms of expression. But, while
acknowledging this connection, we must not lay
undue stress on it nor overlook the fact that biological necessity demands that a situation of danger
should have an affective symbol, so that a symbol of
this kind would have to be created in any case.
Moreover, I do not think that we are justified in
assuming that whenever there is an outbreak of
anxiety something like a reproduction of the situation of birth goes on in the mind (pp. 93–94).
In other words, Freud wanted to retain Otto Rank’s
idea that birth provides a kind of mold or expressive
83 4
content for anxiety, but insisted that the mental content of the affect of anxiety is determined by later existential experiences and subsequent psychological
reworkings of the affects. He also insisted that anxiety
is experienced by the ego but not produced by it. Here
he returned to his theory of anxiety by making repression not the cause but the result of anxiety. Thus, what
is involved is not ‘‘automatic anxiety’’ but ‘‘signal anxiety,’’ which must now be accounted for. Signal anxiety
reflects the significant adaptive and maturational progress of the child to the extent that anxiety is no longer
a simple reaction to object loss but an anticipation of
the threat of the loss of love from the object.
Finally, the text provided Freud with an opportunity for further investigation of mental pain, which
reflects a loss of a part of the self rather than a loss of
the object, in the strict sense. This led Freud to recognize the importance of the more or less narcissistic
valence of the lost object, which serves to demarcate
mourning and melancholic depression.
BERNARD GOLSE
See also: Abandonment; Anxiety; Anxiety development;
Castration complex; Cathexis; Defense mechanisms; Ego;
Ego psychology; Erotogenicity; Isolation; Obsessional
neurosis; Pain; Phobias in children; Resistance; Signal
anxiety; Subsitutive formation; Undoing.
Source Citation
Freud, Sigmund. (1926d [1925]). Hemmung, Symptom und
Angst, Leipzig-Vienna-Zurich, Internat. Psychoanal.
Verlag; G.W., 14:111-205; Inhibitions, symptoms, and
anxiety. SE, 20: 77–172.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1916–1917g [1915]). Mourning and melancholia. SE, 14: 237–258.
Jones, Ernest. (1953–1957). Sigmund Freud: Life and work.
London: Hogarth Press.
Rank, Otto. (1929). The trauma of birth. London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. (Original work published 1924.)
INITIAL INTERVIEW(S)
The term initial or preliminary interview(s) refers to
the meeting or meetings that take place between a psychoanalyst and the person who must decide whether
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INITIAL INTERVIEW(S)
or not to enter into analysis. The purpose of the initial
interview or consultation is to determine the person’s
need for treatment.
The initial interview became standard procedure at
the same time that Sigmund Freud clearly instituted
the framework for the psychoanalytic situation:
patient lying down, analyst hidden from the patient’s
view. These conditions in fact produce a radical change
in a relationship that, during the preliminary interview, was fairly similar to consultation with a physician or psychologist, or indeed an interview for the
purpose of soliciting advice of any type.
The issue of course is whether analysis is indicated,
and this implies referring to criteria assessing ‘‘analyzability’’ and the degree to which such an undertaking
is possible. From the beginning, however, from the
phone call setting up the first meeting, the subtle
mechanisms of transference and counter-transference
are set in motion, shedding an entirely different light
on the criteria for choices.
It is because of these intersubjective parameters that
Freud advised, in ‘‘On Beginning the Treatment
(Further Recommendations on Technique of PsychoAnalysis)’’ (1913c):
I may add . . . that I have made it my habit, when I
know little about a patient, only to take him on at
first provisionally, for a period of one to two weeks.
. . . No other kind of preliminary examination but
this procedure is at our disposal; the most lengthy
discussions and questionings in ordinary consultations would offer no substitute. This preliminary
experiment, however, is itself the beginning of a psycho-analysis and must conform to its rules. . . .
Lengthy preliminary discussions before the beginning
of the analytic treatment, previous treatment by
another method and also previous acquaintance
between the doctor and the patient who is to be analyzed, have special disadvantageous consequences for
which one must be prepared. They result in the
patient’s meeting the doctor with a transference attitude which is already established and which the doctor must first slowly uncover instead of having the
opportunity to observe the growth and development
of the transference from the outset (pp. 123–125).
In 1930, his responses to his analysand Smiley
Blanton, as revealed in the latter’s Diary of My Analysis
with Freud (1971), showed no change in this point
of view. According to Blanton’s entry for March 7,
Freud told him: ‘‘[T]he lying down is but a matter of
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convenience. But there is one point that is essential:
the analysand must not see the face of the analyst. If
he did, he would be influenced by the face of the
analyst’’ (p. 50). In his entry for August 9, 1935, Blanton recalled: ‘‘In a discussion about technique, I asked
Freud if he advocated talking to a patient several hours
before analysis—or, rather, to begin an analysis with
several hours of discussion. He replied, ‘‘With a student in training it may be permissible. With a patient
who is there for treatment, no’’’ (p. 71).
In later years, trial analysis fell out of practice, and
the status of the preliminary interviews has become
somewhat vague; these vary, according to different
schools, in their frequency and duration, as well as in
terms of whether they may be free of charge. Some
practitioners limit them to one or two meetings, the
latter case being intended to assess the patient’s capacity for insight and working over, following the initial
meeting: Was there a dream, a parapraxis, a lifting of
amnesia, or an instance of acting out? Other analysts
advise having several interviews to avoid the possibility of having to interrupt an analysis that, too late,
turned out to be unjustified. Several authors have
emphasized the importance of preliminary interviews
with borderline patients, for whom, more than with
other patients, possible modifications to the analytic
situation may be considered.
The analyst’s listening attitude, the absence of
questions of a medical nature, discreet emphasis on
preconscious manifestations, recognition of mental
suffering and its possible modes of expression other
than acting out, and assessing possible lateral transferences (if a colleague has already interviewed the
patient) are among the themes evoked most frequently
by authors in their discussion of preliminary interviews. Similarly, these authors have underscored the
need, once the preliminary interviews have ended and
if a decision has been made to undertake analysis, to
establish clearly and in detail with the patient the conditions in which the treatment will take place. Such
conditions include the length and frequency of sessions, scheduled times for them, method of payment,
policy in case of absence from sessions, and vacation
periods.
Also to be considered is certain psychoanalysts’
practice of switching to a classical analytic mode of
treatment after a long series of sessions of psychoanalytically inspired therapy; in their view, this move is
similar to what happens after traditional preliminary
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INNERVATION
interviews. In all cases, there remains first and
foremost the problem, raised by Freud, of the psychoanalytic handling of the transference and countertransference, which in the classic view is only possible
within the psychoanalytic setting.
ALAIN DE MIJOLLA
See also: Analyzability; Framework of the psychoanalytic
cure; Psychoanalytic treatment; Face-to-face situation;
Indications and contraindications for psychoanalysis for
an adult; Technique with adults, psychoanalytic.
Bibliography
Blanton, Smiley. (1971). Diary of my analysis with Freud.
New York: Hawthorn.
Freud, Sigmund. (1913c). On beginning the treatment
(Further recommendations on technique of psycho-analysis I). SE, 12: 121–144.
Pulver, Sydney E. (1995). The technique of psychoanalysis
proper. In Psycho-Analysis, the major concepts, edited by E.
Moore Burness and B. D. Fine. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press.
Quinodoz, Danielle. (1992). The psychoanalytic setting as
the instrument of the container function. International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 73, 627.
For Freud the theory of conversion took shape
within the very broad framework of these meanings:
‘‘the inhibited antithetic idea can put itself into effect
by innervation of the body’’ (1892–93a, p. 122). As
soon as the term conversion appeared, it was often
linked to innervation. Two examples: ‘‘The affect that
is torn [from the repressed idea] would be used for a
somatic innervation. (That is, the excitation is Ôconverted’.)’’ (1895d, p. 285), and ‘‘in the case of conversion hysteria the ciruitous route led to the somatic
innervation; the repressed impulse broke its way
through at some point or other and produced symptoms’’ (1925d, p. 33).
The notion is not much used by psychoanalysts
today. Although linked to Freud’s earliest paraneurological speculations, it has nevertheless been retained in
relation to hysteria, for example, as a reaffirmation in
Freud’s opinion of a correspondence or an indissoluble
continuity between the psychical and the physical.
BERTRAND VICHYN
See also: Conversion; Hysterical paralysis; Mnemic symbol; Psychosomatic limit/boundary; Sum of excitation;
Symptom
Bibliography
Further Reading
Console, William, et. al. (1977). The first encounter: The
beginnings in psychotherapy. New York: Jason Aronson.
Freud, Sigmund. (1892–93a). A case of successful treatment
by hypnotism. SE, 1: 115–128.
———. (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 48–106.
Gill, Merton, et. al. (1954). The initial interview in psychiatric practice. New York: International Universities Press.
———. (1940e [1938]). Splitting of the ego in the process
of defence.SE, 23: 271–278.
Jacobs, Theodore J., and Rothstein, Arnold. (Eds.), (1990).
On beginning an analysis. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
INSIGHT
INNERVATION
Freud uses the term innervation throughout his work,
both with and without reference to hysterical conversion. We find it in its physiological and anatomical
meaning as an efferent or afferent mode of action of the
nervous system and/or distribution of nerves in a region
of the body: ‘‘sensation of innervation,’’ ‘‘voluntary or
involuntary innervation of the muscles,’’ ‘‘innervation
of the brain,’’ ‘‘body innervation.’’ But we also find,
more rarely: ‘‘innervation (tears),’’ ‘‘sensation of the
innervation of the word,’’ ‘‘sensation of speech innervation,’’ ‘‘innervation of images of movement.’’
83 6
In psychoanalysis, insight is a process whereby one
grasps a previously misunderstood aspect of one’s own
mental dynamics. It refers to a specific moment, observable during the treatment, when the patient becomes
aware of an inner conflict, an instinctual impulse, a
defense, or the like, that was previously repressed or
disavowed and that, when it emerges into consciousness, elicits surprise and a sense of discovery.
Two forms of the experience have been described.
The first involves a feeling of sudden discovery or
illumination—a kind of ‘‘Eureka!’’ moment. The second
is a slower, more gradual process where the subject and
usually the analyst as well experience a sensation of the
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INSTINCT
obvious: ‘‘Yes, that’s how it is. We knew this, of course,
but now it’s perfectly clear.’’ In all cases, something
other than simple intellectual comprehension is
involved. Frequently, understanding at a lower level,
laden with cultural references and general, abstract concepts constructed as defenses, is replaced by deeper
insight that leads patients to question their entire personal histories and thinking. This happens, for example,
when patients, after making defensive comments about
oedipal conflicts, relive and reabsorb their own oedipal
dramas. In such cases the economic and dynamic
charge of such a shift and the accompanying emotions
run far deeper than mere intellectual understanding.
Insight indicates a transition from the preconscious
to the conscious. Attentive analysts will often anticipate a coming moment of insight, though they may
feel that interpretation would be premature so long as
the moment has not yet arrived. When they sense that
the moment is truly imminent, they may choose to
facilitate the revelation by intervening.
When assessing whether psychoanalysis is indicated
during initial consultations, evaluating a patient’s
capacity for insight is especially important. The capacity for insight must likewise be tak