Remembering, Repeating and Working-through

by Sigmund Freud

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy

Unknown Binding

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

[Kaden]

Transference is le dumb.

Facts: "Young and childish people in particular are inclined to make the necessity imposed by the treatment for paying attention to their illness a welcome excuse for luxuriating in their symptoms."

Working through it = Subjugating yourself to the analyst, blah blah familial complex: "to work through it, to overcome it"; "Only when the resistance is at its height can the analyst, working in common with his patient, discover the repressed instinctual impulses which are feeding the resistance"; "If he holds fast to this conviction he [the analyst] will often be spared the illusion of having failed when in fact he is conducting the treatment on the right lines."

[Eleutheria A.cl · Rating 5 out of 5]

When people forget, they do not just simply thrug those unhappy and unwanted off, these things were just shoved back into unconsciousness by repression. But all the trauma and unsettled mess are still there, by the force of resistance that prevents calling them up into the realm of consciousness, what produces memories used instead to justify acting out. Things and messes do not want to be remembered, or for some certain reason not allow to be known or remembered, will be carried out by repeating actions without being aware so.

It's easy to expand the theory onto a more social and cultural scale, that, a community, a certain group of people, a tribe, or even a nation, when their ruling class wish to seek more control of power, they will change even eliminating some certain part of history while doing education, but as the memories of concrete experiences, those do not been properly remembered still affects, people just act it out without knowing so. For instance, when certain historical event happened in large scale but censored and silenced after, those who do not even experience will sense a strong restriction like a taboo while glancing back, urging them to glance away, stagnating and stiffing certain aspects of their lives. Anyway, why still restricts? Because those powers of un-settlements will neither be at ease nor at peace if not recognized properly. Like a patient with such issues, such society as a organic system are suffering from mental discomfort even illness because they put too much power on forgetting, while all those negative traits manifest as social phenomena the way those repressed elements establish themselves as his manifest personalities - his lethargy, his unproductive attitude, his pathological characteristics.

And in most cases, those restriction are so strong that the society or the individual both as organic entity really do not want to remember anything, not only bcs it is too painful to face the event and memories, but also bcs it is too painful and shameful to face honestly oneself.

To identify an restriction is never enough. It's all about walking through and it's all about arduous works. A physician cannot point out a restriction and what it restricts then expect the patient will admit its existence, content and power - they have to experience it at its most intensity, the physician has to be very patient and unyielding because this is a process cannot be accelerated, but cannot be prevented as well, once things has taken onto it own course. Probably out of the same kind of reason that the truth tellers, the whistle blowers, and the leakers (especially those unyielding ones) are always hated and hunted by authorities. Once something is pointed out, there are wheels roll unstoppable if the stimulation is not interrupted. The same way parties and power groups attack each other by "revealing dirty secret" as long as it looks matching the resistance and tabooed blank they make known.

[Oleksandr Molodchyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...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.
For instance, the patient does not say that he remembers that he used to be defiant and critical towards his parents’ authority; instead, he behaves in that way to the doctor. He does not remember how he came to a helpless and hopeless deadlock in his infantile sexual researches; but he produces a mass of confused dreams and associations, complains that he cannot succeed in anything and asserts that he is fated never to carry through what he undertakes. He does not remember having been intensely ashamed of certain sexual activities and afraid of their being found out; but he makes it clear that he is ashamed of the treatment on which he is now embarked and tries to keep it secret from everybody. And so on."

I didn’t understand half of the text but the main thing is that when you have observed something a long time ago you may not remember it in a way of “remembering it” but you may remember it in a way of acting it out. It is scary in a way because it would imply you can’t just observe some really bad action and if you don’t remember it it doesn’t affect you, it is stored in your unconscious mind and WILL affect you.

[Blaze-Pascal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short pithy essay on some very basic aspects of the therapeutic process. Still a lot holds true today... especially in terms of how our bodies remember.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

essential

[aliyah overturf · Rating 2 out of 5]

not my fav and i honestly don’t remember much about it. except for the self-hatred and self-sabotage stuff, that was real as shit.

[C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"[...] a patient's analysis does not mean the end of his illness, and that we need to treat the illness not as a matter of fact belonging to the past, but as a force operating in the present"

[Armahn Rassuli · Rating 5 out of 5]

“For when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie.”