Wild Analysis

by Sigmund Freud, Adam Phillips (Editor), Alan Bance (Translator)

'Psychoanalytic treatment utilised the patient's capacity to love and desire as a means to an end. The stuff of romance became the stuff of cure. When Freud is writing about technique in psychoanalysis - and these papers [in Wild Analysis] represent his most significant contributions to the subject over three decades of work - it is important to remember that he is talking about what a couple, an analyst and a so-called patient, can do in a room together. For better or worse.' Adam Phillips

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Psychoanalysis

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1910

About the author

Dr. Sigismund Freud (later changed to Sigmund) was a neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, who created an entirely new approach to the understanding of the human personality. He is regarded as one of the most influential—and controversial—minds of the 20th century.

In 1873, Freud began to study medicine at the University of Vienna. After graduating, he worked at the Vienna General Hospital. He collaborated with Josef Breuer in treating hysteria by the recall of painful experiences under hypnosis. In 1885, Freud went to Paris as a student of the neurologist Jean Charcot. On his return to Vienna the following year, Freud set up in private practice, specialising in nervous and brain disorders. The same year he married Martha Bernays, with whom he had six children.

Freud developed the theory that humans have an unconscious in which sexual and aggressive impulses are in perpetual conflict for supremacy with the defences against them. In 1897, he began an intensive analysis of himself. In 1900, his major work 'The Interpretation of Dreams' was published in which Freud analysed dreams in terms of unconscious desires and experiences.

In 1902, Freud was appointed Professor of Neuropathology at the University of Vienna, a post he held until 1938. Although the medical establishment disagreed with many of his theories, a group of pupils and followers began to gather around Freud. In 1910, the International Psychoanalytic Association was founded with Carl Jung, a close associate of Freud's, as the president. Jung later broke with Freud and developed his own theories.

After World War One, Freud spent less time in clinical observation and concentrated on the application of his theories to history, art, literature and anthropology. In 1923, he published 'The Ego and the Id', which suggested a new structural model of the mind, divided into the 'id, the 'ego' and the 'superego'.

In 1933, the Nazis publicly burnt a number of Freud's books. In 1938, shortly after the Nazis annexed Austria, Freud left Vienna for London with his wife and daughter Anna.

Freud had been diagnosed with cancer of the jaw in 1923, and underwent more than 30 operations. He died of cancer on 23 September 1939.

Reviews

[شمس]

What did surprise Freud—and is a persistent theme of the writings in this volume—was something far more important: people’s commitment to their own unhappiness. It was as though modern people had, beneath their fashionable hedonisms, a virtually religious devotion to their own misery. —Adam Philips, Introduction
__________
The self-sacrifice entailed in opening yourself up to a stranger, in the absence of any compulsion by illness, is richly rewarding. Not only will you realise, in a much shorter time and at less emotional cost, your intention of learning about your own hidden depths, but gain at first hand impressions and convictions that you would strive in vain to acquire from books and lectures . . . anyone who appreciates the great value of the self-knowledge and increase in self-control thus achieved will continue subsequently to explore his own psyche through self-analysis, and accept that he must expect constantly to find out something new both about himself and the external world. —Advice to Doctors on Psychoanalytic Treatment

You will notice during your narrative that a number of thoughts will occur to you, which you would like to reject because of certain critical objections. You will be tempted to sat that this or that does not fit in here, or it’s completely unimportant, or it’s pointless, therefore you don’t need to say it. Don;t give in to this criticism, but say it anyway, precisely because you are averse to doing so. You will learn and appreciate the reason for this prescription later; it is the only one you have to follow . . . And finally, don’t forget that you have promised to be completely honest, and don’t gloss over something because for some reason you feel uncomfortable talking about it.. —On Initating Treatment
__________
Have we aimed too high? Are the majority of our patients even worth all the effort we put into this work? —Postscript to The Question of Lay Analysis

__________
Advice to Doctors on Psychoanalytic Treatment
But this is precisely what you must not do; if you follow your expectations, you run the risk of never finding out anything you do not know already; if you follow your inclinations, then you are bound to distort whatever your perceive.

On Initiating Treatment
Even intelligent people seem to forget the necessary correlation between time, work, and successful outcome.

To put it bluntly, psychoanalysis always involves long stretches of time, six-month periods or whole years; longer than most sufferers expect. You therefore have a duty to inform the patient about this state of affairs before he finally opts for treatment. In general I think it is more honourable, but also more expedient, to be open with him—short of deliberately trying to deter him—about the difficulties and sacrifices entailed in analytic therapy, this depriving him of any justification for claiming later that he had been enticed into a treatment whose scope and significance he had not realised. Anybody deterred by such statements would later have shown himself to be unsuitable for treatment anyway. It is a good thing to operate this kind of selectivity before beginning treatment. However, as sufferers become progressively more enlightened, the number of those passing this initial test is increasing.

Perhaps the widely held belief is true, that people forced by poverty into a life of hard work are less prone to neurosis.

Before concluding these remarks about initiating analytic treatment, I would like to say a word about the formal staging of the setting in which the therapy is carried out. I strongly advise positioning the patient on a coucghm, while you seat yourself behind him. Out of his sight. This arrangement has a historical dimension: it is a relic of the hypnotherapy out of which psychoanalysis developed. But here are many reasons for keeping it. First, there is a personal motive, which others may share with me. I cannot bear to be stared at for eight hours a day or longer. Since I like to give myself over to my own unconscious thoughts while I listen, I do not want the patient trying to interpret my expression, not do I want to influence what he is telling me.

Sooner rather than later the patient will have to be advised that the therapy is a matter between the doctor and himself only; and no one else, however intimate or however curious, should be taken into his confidence.

Patients often object particularly to the recommended arrangement whereby the doctor sits out of sight behind them; they beg to be allowed to take up a different position for the session, mainly because they cannot bear not to have the doctor in full view. This is regularly denied to them, but they cannot be prevented from so arranging things that they utter a few sentences before the beginning of the session, or after it has been declared closed and they have already got up from the couch. Thus they divide the consultation into an official part, during which they mostly behave in a very inhibited way, and a ‘cosy’ part, where they speak really freely and talk about all sorts of things that they believe are not part of the treatment. The doctor does not put up with this division for long. He notes what is said before or after the session, and by using it at the first opportunity he demolishes the dividing wall thee patient was trying to build. It will have been built out of the material of a transference-resistance.

[Rob Sica · Rating 4 out of 5]

A new translation of key texts by Freud concerning the precarious dynamics of psychoanalytical therapy.

[sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Hardest book i’ve ever read