Mounir’s Reviews > Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis: Part III [The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works: Vol 16] > Status Update

No one who has any experience of the rifts which so often divide a family will, if he is an analyst, be surprised to find that the patient's closest relatives sometimes betray less interest in his recovering than in his remaining as he is. When the neurosis is related to conflicts between members of a family, the healthy party will not hesitate long in choosing between his own interest and the sick party's recovery.

All the libido, as well as everything opposing it, is made to converge solely on the relation with the doctor. In this process the symptoms are inevitably divested of libido. In place of his patient's true illness there appears the artificially constructed transference illness, in place of the various unreal objects of the libido there appears a single, and once more imaginary, object in the person of the doctor.

We look upon successes that set in too soon as obstacles rather than as a help to the work of analysis; and we put an end to such successes by constantly resolving the transference on which they are based. [..] In every other kind of suggestive treatment the transference is carefully preserved and left untouched; in analysis it is itself subjected to treatment and is dissected in all the shapes in which it appears.

sufferers from narcissistic neuroses have no capacity for transference.. They reject the doctor, not with hostility but with indifference. For that reason they cannot be influenced by him either; consequently the mechanism of cure which we carry through with other people - the revival of the pathogenic conflict and the overcoming of resistance due to repression - cannot be operated with them.

By that means the transference, which, whether affectionate or hostile, seemed in every case to constitute the greatest threat to treatment, becomes its best tool, by whose help the most secret compartment of mental life can be opened.

'Angst [anxiety]'. 'Furcht' [fear]. and 'Schreck [fright]... I think 'Angst' relates to the state and disregards the object, while 'Furcht' draws attention precisely to the object. It seems that 'Schreck'.. does have a special sense; it lays emphasis on the effect produced by a danger which is not met by any preparedness for anxiety. We might say, therefore, that a person protects himself from fright by anxiety.

A true artist.. understands how to work over his daydreams.. to make them lose what is too personal about them and repels strangers, and to make it possible for others to share in the enjoyment of them.. to tone them down so that they do not easily betray their origin from proscribed sources.. he possesses the mysterious power of shaping some particular material until it has become a faithful image of his phantasy.

The ultimate aim of mental activity, which may be described qualitatively as an endeavour to obtain pleasure and avoid unpleasure, emerges, looked at from the economic point of view, as the task of mastering the amounts of excitation (mass of stimuli) operating in the mental apparatus and of keeping down their accumulation which creates unpleasure.

Indeed there are cases in which even the physician must admit that for a conflict to end in neurosis is the most harmless and socially tolerable solution... even the physician may occasionally take the side of the illness he is combating... He knows that there is not only neurotic misery in the world, but real, irremovable suffering as well, that necessity may even require a person to sacrifice his health...