Freud - Complete Works (479 page)

2875

ON THE HISTORY OF THE PSYCHO-ANALYTIC MOVEMENT

(1914)

2876

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2877

ON THE HISTORY OF THE PSYCHO-ANALYTIC MOVEMENT

Fluctuat nec mergitur
¹

(On the coat of arms of the City of
Paris)

I

No one need be surprised at the subjective
character of the contribution I propose to make here to the history
of the psycho-analytic movement, nor need anyone wonder at the part
I play in it. For psycho-analysis is my creation; for ten years I
was the only person who concerned himself with it, and all the
dissatisfaction which the new phenomenon aroused in my
contemporaries has been poured out in the form of criticisms on my
head. Although it is a long time now since I was the only
psycho-analyst, I consider myself justified in maintaining that
even to-day no one can know better than I do what psycho-analysis
is, how it differs from other ways of investigating the life of the
mind, and precisely what should be called psycho-analysis and what
would better be described by some other name. In thus repudiating
what seems to me a cool act of usurpation, I am indirectly
informing the readers of this
Jahrbuch
the events that have
led to the changes in its editorship and format.

  
¹
[ ’It is tossed by the waves, but
does not sink’.]

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2878

   In 1909, in the lecture-room of
an American university, I had my first opportunity of speaking in
public about psycho-analysis.¹ The occasion was a momentous
one for my work, and moved by this thought I then declared that it
was not I who had brought psycho-analysis into existence: the
credit for this was due to someone else, to Josef Breuer, whose
work had been done at a time when I was still a student engaged in
passing my examinations (1880-2). Since I gave those lectures,
however, some well-disposed friends have suggested to me a doubt
whether my gratitude was not expressed too extravagantly on that
occasion. In their view I ought to have done as I had previously
been accustomed to do: treated Breuer’s ‘cathartic
procedure’ as a preliminary stage of psycho-analysis, and
represented psycho-analysis itself as beginning with my discarding
the hypnotic technique and introducing free associations. It is of
no great importance in any case whether the history of
psycho-analysis is reckoned as beginning with the cathartic method
or with my modification of it; I refer to this uninteresting point
merely because certain opponents of psycho-analysis have a habit of
occasionally recollecting that after all the art of psycho-analysis
was not invented by me, but by Breuer. This only happens, of
course, if their views allow them to find something in it deserving
attention; if they set no such limits to their rejection of it,
psycho-analysis is always without question my work alone. I have
never heard that Breuer’s great share in psycho-analysis has
earned him a proportionate measure of criticism and abuse. As I
have long recognized that to stir up contradiction and arouse
bitterness is the inevitable fate of psycho-analysis, I have come
to the conclusion that I must be the true originator of all that is
particularly characteristic in it. I am happy to be able to add
that none of the efforts to minimize my part in creating this
much-abused analysis have ever come from Breuer himself or could
claim any support from him.

   Breuer’s discoveries have
so often been described that I can dispense with discussing them in
detail here. These were the fundamental fact that the symptoms of
hysterical patients are founded upon scenes in their past lives
which have made a great impression on them but have been forgotten
(traumas); the therapy founded upon this, which consisted in
causing them to remember and reproduce these experiences in a state
of hypnosis (catharsis); and the fragment of theory inferred from
it, which was that these symptoms represented an abnormal
employment of amounts of excitation which had not been disposed of
(conversion). Whenever Breuer, in his theoretical contribution to
the
Studies on Hysteria
(1895), referred to this process of
conversion, he always added my name in brackets after it, as though
the priority for this first attempt at theoretical evaluation
belonged to me. I believe that actually this distinction relates
only to the name, and that the conception came to us simultaneously
and together.

  
¹
In my ‘Five Lectures’
(1910
a
), delivered at Clark University.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2879

   It is well known, too, that after
Breuer made his first discovery of the cathartic method he let it
rest for a number of years, and only took it up again at my
instigation, on my return from my studies under Charcot. He had a
large consulting practice in medicine which made great claims on
him; I myself had only unwillingly taken up the profession of
medicine, but I had at that time a strong motive for helping people
suffering from nervous affections or at least for wishing to
understand something about their states. I had embarked upon
physical therapy, and had felt absolutely helpless after the
disappointing results from my study of Erb’s
Elektrotherapie
, which put forward such a number of
indications and recommendations. If I did not at the time arrive on
my own account at the conclusion which Möbius established
later, that the successes of electrical treatment in nervous
patients are the effects of suggestion, there is no doubt that only
the total absence of these promised successes was to blame.
Treatment by suggestion during deep hypnosis, which I learned from
Liébeault’s and Bernheim’s highly impressive
demonstrations, then seemed to offer a satisfactory substitute for
the failure of electrical treatment. But the practice of
investigating
patients in a state of hypnosis, with which
Breuer made me acquainted - a practice which combined an automatic
mode of operation with the satisfaction of scientific curiosity -
was bound to be incomparably more attractive than the monotonous,
forcible prohibitions used in treatment by suggestion, prohibitions
which stood in the way of all research.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2880

   We have recently received a piece
of advice, purporting to represent one of the latest developments
of psycho-analysis, to the effect that the current conflict and the
exciting cause of illness are to be brought into the foreground in
analysis. Now this is exactly what Breuer and I used to do at the
beginning of our work with the cathartic method. We led the
patient’s attention directly to the traumatic scene in which
the symptom had arisen, and we endeavoured to discover the mental
conflict in that scene and to release the suppressed affect in it.
In the course of this we discovered the mental process,
characteristic of the neuroses, which I later named
‘regression’. The patient’s associations moved
back from the scene which we were trying to elucidate to earlier
experiences, and compelled the analysis, which was supposed to
correct the present, to occupy itself with the past. This
regression led constantly further backwards; at first it seemed
regularly to bring us to puberty; later on, failures and points
which still eluded explanation drew the analytic work still further
back into years of childhood which had hitherto been inaccessible
to any kind of exploration. This regressive direction became an
important characteristic of analysis. It appeared that
psycho-analysis could explain nothing belonging to the present
without referring back to something past; indeed, that every
pathogenic experience implied a previous experience which, though
not in itself pathogenic, had yet endowed the later one with its
pathogenic quality. The temptation to confine one’s attention
to the known present exciting cause was so strong, however, that
even in later analyses I gave way to it. In the analysis of the
patient I named ‘Dora’, carried out in 1899, I had
knowledge of the scene which occasioned the outbreak of the current
illness. I tried innumerable times to submit this experience to
analysis, but even direct demands always failed to produce from her
anything more than the same meagre and incomplete description of
it. Not until a long détour, leading back over her earliest
childhood, had been made, did a dream present itself which on
analysis brought to her mind the hitherto forgotten details of this
scene, so that a comprehension and a solution of the current
conflict became possible.

   This one example shows how very
misleading is the advice referred to above, and what a degree of
scientific regression is represented by the neglect of regression
in analytic technique which is thus recommended to us.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2881

   The first difference between
Breuer and myself came to light on a question concerning the finer
psychical mechanism of hysteria. He gave preference to a theory
which was still to some extent physiological, as one might say; he
tried to explain the mental splitting in hysterical patients by the
absence of communication between various mental states
(‘states of consciousness’, as we called them at that
time), and he therefore constructed the theory of ‘hypnoid
states’, the products of which were supposed to penetrate
into ‘waking consciousness’ like unassimilated foreign
bodies. I had taken the matter less scientifically; everywhere I
seemed to discern motives and tendencies analogous to those of
everyday life, and I looked upon psychical splitting itself as an
effect of a process of repelling which at that time I called
‘defence’, and later, ‘repression’. I made
a short-lived attempt to allow the two mechanisms a separate
existence side by side, but as observation showed me always and
only one thing, it was not long before my ‘defence’
theory took up its stand opposite his ‘hypnoid’
one.

   I am quite sure, however, that
this opposition between our views had nothing to do with the breach
in our relations which followed shortly after. This had deeper
causes, but it came about in such a way that at first I did not
understand it; it was only later that I learnt from many clear
indications how to interpret it. It will be remembered that Breuer
said of his famous first patient that the element of sexuality was
astonishingly undeveloped in her and had contributed nothing to the
very rich clinical picture of the case. I have always wondered why
the critics did not more often cite this assertion of
Breuer’s as an argument against my contention of a sexual
aetiology in the neuroses, and even to-day I do not know whether I
ought to regard the omission as evidence of tact or of carelessness
on their part. Anyone who reads the history of Breuer’s case
now in the light of the knowledge gained in the last twenty years
will at once perceive the symbolism in it - the snakes, the
stiffening, the paralysis of the arm - and, on taking into account
the situation at the bedside of the young woman’s sick
father, will easily guess the real interpretation of her symptoms;
his opinion of the part played by sexuality in her mental life will
therefore be very different from that of her doctor. In his
treatment of her case, Breuer was able to make use of a very
intense suggestive
rapport
with the patient, which may serve
us as a complete prototype of what we call
‘transference’ to-day. 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 event’,¹ he broke off
all further investigation. He never said this to me in so many
words, but he told me enough at different times to justify this
reconstruction of what happened. When I later began more and more
resolutely to put forward the significance of sexuality in the
aetiology of neuroses, he was the first to show the reaction of
distaste and repudiation which was later to become so familiar to
me, but which at that time I had not yet learnt to recognize as my
inevitable fate.

   The fact of the emergence of the
transference in its crudely sexual form, whether affectionate or
hostile, in every treatment of a neurosis, although this is neither
desired nor induced by either doctor or patient, has always seemed
to me the most irrefragable proof that the source of the driving
forces of neurosis lies in sexual life. This argument has never
received anything approaching the degree of attention that it
merits, for if it had, investigations in this field would leave no
other conclusion open. As far as I am concerned, this argument has
remained the decisive one, over and above the more specific
findings of analytic work.

  
¹
[In English in the original.]

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2882

   There was some consolation for
the bad reception accorded to my contention of a sexual aetiology
in the neuroses even by my more intimate circle of friends - for a
vacuum rapidly formed itself about my person - in the thought that
I was taking up the fight for a new and original idea. But, one
day, certain memories gathered in my mind which disturbed this
pleasing notion, but which gave me in exchange a valuable insight
into the processes of human creative activity and the nature of
human knowledge. The idea for which I was being made responsible
had by no means originated with me. It had been imparted to me by
three people whose opinion had commanded my deepest respect - by
Breuer himself, by Charcot, and by Chrobak, the gynaecologist at
the University, perhaps the most eminent of all our Vienna
physicians. These three men had all communicated to me a piece of
knowledge which, strictly speaking, they themselves did not
possess. Two of them later denied having done so when I reminded
them of the fact; the third (the great Charcot) would probably have
done the same if it had been granted me to see him again. But these
three identical opinions, which I had heard without understanding,
had lain dormant in my mind for years, until one day they awoke in
the form of an apparently original discovery.