Freud - Complete Works (679 page)

4161

DR.
SÁNDOR FERENCZI

(ON HIS 5Oth BIRTHDAY)

(1923)

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4163

DR. SÁNDOR FERENCZI

(ON HIS 50th BIRTHDAY)

Not many years after its publication (in
1900),
The Interpretation of Dreams
fell into the hands of a
young Budapest physician, who, although he was a neurologist,
psychiatrist and expert in forensic medicine, was eagerly in search
of new scientific knowledge. He did not get far in reading the
book; very soon he had thrown it aside - whether out of boredom or
disgust is not known. Soon afterwards, however, the call for fresh
possibilities of work and discovery took him to Zurich, and thence
he was led to Vienna to meet the author of the book that he had
once contemptuously cast aside. This first visit was succeeded by a
long, intimate and hitherto untroubled friendship, in the course of
which he too made the journey to America in 1909 to lecture at
Clark University at Worcester, Mass.

   Such were the beginnings of
Ferenczi, who has since himself become a master and teacher of
psycho-analysis and who in the present year, 1923, completes alike
the fiftieth anniversary of his birth and the first decade of his
leadership of the Budapest Psycho-Analytical Society.

   Ferenczi has repeatedly played a
part, too, in the external affairs of psycho-analysis. His
appearance at the Second Analytical Congress, at Nuremberg in 1910,
will be remembered, where he proposed and helped to bring about the
foundation of an International Psycho-Analytical Association as a
means of defence against the contempt with which analysis was
treated by official Medicine. At the Fifth Analytical Congress, at
Budapest, in September, 1918, he was elected President of the
Association. He appointed Anton von Freund as Secretary; and there
is no doubt that the combined energy of the two men, together with
Freund’s generous schemes of endowment, would have made
Budapest the analytic capital of Europe, had not political
catastrophes and personal tragedy put a merciless end to these fair
hopes. Freund fell ill and died in January, 1920. In view of
Hungary’s isolation from contact with the rest of the world,
Ferenczi had resigned his position in October, 1919, and had
transferred the Presidency of the International Association to
Ernest Jones in London. For the duration of the Soviet Republic in
Hungary Ferenczi had been allotted the functions of a University
teacher, and his lectures had attracted crowded audiences. The
Branch Society, which he had founded in 1913,¹ survived every
storm and, under his guidance, became a centre of intense and
productive work and was distinguished by an accumulation of
abilities such as were exhibited in combination by no other Branch
Society. Ferenczi, who, as a middle child in a large family, had to
struggle with a powerful brother complex, had, under the influence
of analysis, become an irreproachable elder brother, a kindly
teacher and promoter of young talent.

  
¹
Its Inaugural General Meeting was held on
May 19, 1913, with Ferenczi as President, Dr. Radó as
Secretary, and Drs. Hollós, Ignotus and Lévy as
members.

Dr. Sandor Ferenczi (On His 50th Birthday)

4164

   Ferenczi’s analytic
writings have become universally known and appreciated. It was not
until 1922 that his
Popular Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
were
published by our
Verlag
as Volume XIII of the
‘Internationale Psychoanalytische Bibliothek’. These
lectures, clear and formally perfect, sometimes most fascinatingly
written, offer what is in fact the best ‘Introduction to
Psycho-Analysis’ for those who are unfamiliar with it. There
is still no collection of his purely technical medical writings, a
number of which have been translated into English by Ernest Jones.
The
Verlag
will fulfil this task as soon as more favourable
times make it possible. Those of his books and papers which have
appeared in Hungarian have passed through many editions and have
made analysis familiar to educated circles in Hungary.

   Ferenczi’s scientific
achievement is impressive above all from its many-sidedness.
Besides well-chosen case histories and acutely observed clinical
communications (‘A Little Chanticleer’,
‘Transitory Symptom-Constructions during the Analysis’,
and shorter clinical works) we find exemplary critical writings
such as those upon Jung’s
Wandlungen und Symbole der
Libido
, upon Régis and Hesnard’s views on
psycho-analysis, as well as effective polemical writings such as
those against Bleuler on alcohol and against Putnam on the relation
between psycho-analysis and philosophy, moderate and dignified in
spite of their decisiveness. But besides all these there are the
papers upon which Ferenczi’s fame principally rests, in which
his originality, his wealth of ideas and his command over a
well-directed scientific imagination find such happy expression,
and with which he has enlarged important sections of
psycho-analytic theory and has promoted the discovery of
fundamental situations in mental life: ‘Introjection and
Transference’, including a discussion of the theory of
hypnosis, ‘Stages in the Development of the Sense of
Reality’ and his discussion of symbolism. Finally there are
the works of these last few years - ‘The Psycho-Analysis of
the War Neuroses’,
Hysterie und Pathoneurosen
and, in
collaboration with Hollós,
Psycho-Analysis and the
Psychic Disorder of General Paresis
(in which the medical
interest advances from the psychological conditions to the somatic
determinants), and his approaches to an ‘active’
therapy.

   However incomplete this
enumeration may seem to be, his friends know that Ferenczi has held
back even more than he has been able to make up his mind to
communicate. On his fiftieth birthday they are united in wishing
that he may be granted strength, leisure and a frame of mind to
bring his scientific plans to realization in fresh
achievements.

4165

PREFACE TO AICHHORN’S
WAYWARD YOUTH

(1925)

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4167

PREFACE TO AICHHORN’S
WAYWARD YOUTH

None of the applications of psycho-analysis
has excited so much interest and aroused so many hopes, and none,
consequently, has attracted so many capable workers, as its use in
the theory and practice of education. It is easy to understand why;
for children have become the main subject of psycho-analytic
research and have thus replaced in importance the neurotics on whom
its studies began. Analysis has shown how the child lives on,
almost unchanged, in the sick man as well as in the dreamer and the
artist; it has thrown light on the motive forces and trends which
set its characteristic stamp upon the childish nature; and it has
traced the stages through which a child grows to maturity. No
wonder, therefore, if an expectation has arisen that
psycho-analytic concern with children will benefit the work of
education, whose aim it is to guide and assist children on their
forward path and to shield them from going astray.

   My personal share in this
application of psycho-analysis been very slight. At an early stage
I had accepted the from
bon mot
which lays it down that
there are three impossible professions - educating, healing and
governing - and I was already fully occupied with the second of
them. But this does not mean that I overlook the high social value
of the work done by those of my friends who are engaged in
education.

   The present volume by August
Aichhorn is concerned with one department of the great problem -
with the educational influencing of juvenile delinquents. The
author had worked for many years in an official capacity as a
director of municipal institutions for delinquents before he became
acquainted with psycho-analysis. His attitude to his charges sprang
from a warm sympathy with the fate of those unfortunates and was
correctly guided by an intuitive perception of their mental needs.
Psycho-analysis could teach 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.

   It must not be assumed that this
gift of intuitive understanding will be found in everyone concerned
with the bringing-up of children. Two lessons may be derived, it
seems to me, from the experience and the success of August
Aichhorn. One is that every such person should receive a
psycho-analytic training, since without it children, the object of
his endeavours, must remain an inaccessible problem to him. A
training of this kind is best carried out if such a person himself
undergoes an analysis and experiences it on himself: theoretical
instruction in analysis fails to penetrate deep enough and carries
no conviction.

Preface To Aichhorn's Wayward Youth

4168

   The second lesson has a somewhat
conservative ring. It is to the effect that the work of education
is something
sui generis
: it is not to be confused with
psycho-analytic influence and cannot be replaced by it.
Psycho-analysis can be called in by education as an auxiliary means
of dealing with a child; but it is not a suitable substitute for
education. Not only is such a substitution impossible on practical
grounds but it is also to be disrecommended for theoretical
reasons. The relation between education and psycho-analytic
treatment will probably before long be the subject of a detailed
investigation. Here I will only give a few hints. One should not be
misled by the statement - incidentally a perfectly true one - that
the psycho-analysis of an adult neurotic is equivalent to an
after-education. A child, even a wayward and delinquent child, is
still not a neurotic; and after-education is something quite
different from the education of the immature. The possibility of
analytic influence rests on quite definite preconditions which can
be summed up under the term ‘analytic situation’; it
requires the development of certain psychical structures and a
particular attitude to the analyst. Where these are lacking - as in
the case of children, of juvenile delinquents, and, as a rule, of
impulsive criminals - something other than analysis must be
employed, though something which will be at one with analysis in
its
purpose
. The theoretical chapters of the present volume
will give the reader a preliminary grasp of the multiplicity of the
decisions involved.

   I will end with a further
inference, and this time one which is important not for the theory
of education but for the status of those who are engaged in
education. If one of these has learnt analysis by experiencing it
on his own person and is in a position of being able to employ it
in borderline and mixed cases to assist him in his work, he should
obviously be given the right to practise analysis, and
narrow-minded motives should not be allowed to try to put obstacles
in his way.

4169

JOSEF BREUER

(1925)

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4171

JOSEF BREUER

On June 20, 1925, there died in Vienna, in his
eighty-fourth year, Josef Breuer, the creator of the cathartic
method, whose name is for that reason indissolubly linked with the
beginnings of psycho-analysis.

   Breuer was a physician, a pupil
of the clinician Oppolzer. In his youth he had worked at the
physiology of respiration under Ewald Hering, and later, in the
scanty hours of leisure allowed by an extensive medical practice,
he occupied himself successfully with experiments on the function
of the vestibular apparatus in animals. Nothing in his education
could lead one to expect that he would gain the first decisive
insight into the age-old riddle of the hysterical neurosis and
would make a contribution of imperishable value to our knowledge of
the human mind. But he was a man of rich and universal gifts, and
his interests extended in many directions far beyond his
professional activities.

   It was in 1880 that chance
brought into his hands an unusual patient, a girl of more than
ordinary intelligence who had fallen ill of severe hysteria while
she was nursing her sick father. It was only some fourteen years
later, in our joint publication,
Studies on Hysteria
(1895
d
) - and even then unluckily only in a much abbreviated
form, censored, too, from considerations of medical discretion -
that the world learnt the nature of his treatment of this
celebrated ‘first case’, with what immense care and
patience he carried out the technique when once he had discovered
it, till the patient was freed from all the incomprehensible
symptoms of her illness, and what insight he obtained in the course
of the work into the mental mechanisms of the neurosis.

   We psycho-analysts, who have long
been familiar with the idea of devoting hundreds of sessions to a
single patient, can form no conception of how novel such a
procedure must have seemed forty-five years ago. It must have
called for a large amount of personal interest and, if the phrase
can be allowed, of medical libido, but also for a considerable
degree of freedom of thought and certainty of judgement. At the
date of the publication of our
Studies
we were able to
appeal to Charcot’s writings and to Pierre Janet’s
investigations, which had by that time deprived Breuer’s
discoveries of some of their priority. But when Breuer was treating
his first case (in 1881-2) none of this was as yet available.
Janet’s
Automatisme psychologique
appeared in 1889 and
his second work,
L’état mental des
hystériques
, not until 1892. It seems that
Breuer’s researches were wholly original, and were directed
only by the hints offered to him by the material of his case.

Josef Breuer

4172

   I have repeatedly attempted -
most recently in my
Autobiographical Study
(1925
d
),
in Grote’s series,
Die Medizin der Gegenwart
- to
define my share in the
Studies
which we published jointly.
My merit lay chiefly in reviving in Breuer an interest which seemed
to have become extinct, and in then urging him on to publication. A
kind of reserve which was characteristic of him, an inner modesty,
surprising in a man of such a brilliant personality, had led him to
keep his astonishing discovery secret for so long that not all of
it was any longer new. I found reason later to suppose that a
purely emotional factor, too, had given him an aversion to further
work on the elucidation of the neuroses. He had come up against
something that is never absent - his patient’s transference
on to her physician, and he had not grasped the impersonal nature
of the process. At the time when he submitted to my influence and
was preparing the
Studies
for publication, his judgement of
their significance seemed to be confirmed. ‘I believe’,
he told me, ‘that this is the most important thing we two
have to give the world.’

   Besides the case history of his
first patient Breuer contributed a theoretical paper to the
Studies
. It is very far from being out of date; on the
contrary, it conceals thoughts and suggestions which have even now
not been turned to sufficient account. Anyone immersing himself in
this speculative essay will form a true impression of the mental
build of this man, whose scientific interests were, alas, turned in
the direction of our psychopathology during only one short episode
of his long life.