Sigmund Freud's 'New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1932-33)'
- 1. 1 Sigmund Freud (1932-33). New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, translated by James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1991). The new introductory lectures constitute a supplement to the introductory lectures that Sigmund Freud delivered at the Vienna Psychiatric Clinic (1915-1917). They were not delivered in person as Freud had become too old and was ill with cancer, but were meant for publication. They were written with the intelligent lay-person in mind and do not address all the main areas in psychoanalysis (unlike the introductory lectures). Some of these lectures summarize the earlier lectures, but there is also a lot of new material. Freud tried to moderate the expectations of his readers by explaining that since psychoanalysis is a new area, readers must be attentive to questions of methodology and what is or is not possible in explaining human behaviour. The main topics covered here include the theory of the dream-work, an analysis of the psychical personality, the relationship between anxiety and the instinctual life, the psychoanalytic description of femininity, and an exploration of the ‘explanations, applications, and orientations’ of psychoanalysis. Freud also considers the question of whether psychoanalysis constitutes its own Weltanschauung or whether it belongs to the scientific world-view. It is worth noting at the outset that Freud thought that the theory and practice of psychoanalysis should be a scientific enterprise since it does not seek to explain everything, but concentrates mainly on clinical material and is careful when it considers the relevance of its findings to extra-mural situations.
- 2. 2 This volume is rather modest in its scope and will make more sense to readers who have been through the introductory lectures or are already preoccupied with the main precepts of psychoanalysis. I say this because Freud does not make any attempt to get the reader interested in psychoanalysis in these lectures unlike in the introductory lectures or in the five lectures that he delivered at Clark University in 1909. Freud assumes that those who read the new introductory lectures are doing so because he has already whetted their appetite with the previous volume. That is probably why the topics chosen for this volume are eclectic and not a synoptic version of the former or of psychoanalysis as a discourse. I will start with the last two lectures first since they have general applications for anybody interested in the scope of psychoanalytic explanation before looking at the earlier lectures that are specifically about the Freudian doctrine. This will also make it easier for the readers of this review to relate the scope of the theory with the doctrinal content of the theory. Freud’s main contention is that psychoanalysis is not a Weltanschauung in the sense in which he thought Marxism was. Freud’s main critique of Marxism was that it attempted to answer all the questions put to it. Freud wanted psychoanalysis to work with a sense of limits. In other words, it must clearly differentiate between what is within and without the scope of its explanatory powers. If a discourse expands to a point where its explanatory scope is in excess of its doctrinal content, it become akin to a religion – that is, it begins to serve as a source of consolation rather than as a form of scientific explanation. This is more or less the essence of the Freudian critique of both Marxism and religion. Freud’s main concern therefore was that psychoanalysis should be more careful to delineate its limits since this will increase the validity of its interventions. It is interesting to note that this is not just a preoccupation with Freud, but a point that has been raised recently by Jacques-Alain Miller. When Freud considers the applications of psychoanalysis, his main preoccupation is to differentiate psychoanalysis from the individual psychology of Alfred Adler which, as he points out, does not subscribe to the main precepts of psychoanalysis but reduces all of human behaviour to the inferiority complex (which itself is rooted in organ inferiority).
- 3. 3 Freud argued that this was not only a reductive explanation of human behaviour but does not account for a range of symptoms that psychoanalysis could make sense of. Freud also differentiates between the analysis of adults and children and explains the methodological differences in these two forms of analysis. The main problem was that children do not have a full-fledged psyche that analysts attribute to adults. So it is much more difficult to get children to free-associate in the way in which adult patients are expected to. The dynamics of the transference and repetition are also different since children have not lived long enough to repeat events from early childhood and they are not emotionally distant enough from their parents to partake of the transference. These insights are also relevant Freud felt in the context of education. Training is psychoanalysis will make it possible for educators to understand children better and cope more effectively with the forms of resistance to the learning process. Knowledge of psychoanalysis can also help us to socialize children more effectively. As far as the uses of psychoanalysis in medicine is concerned, Freud argues that it is much more likely to make a difference in a physician’s practice if he internalized it thoroughly rather than use it now and then. Now that the reader has more clarity about the scope of psychoanalytic explanation, it is important to turn to the doctrinal revisions that Freud introduced in this series of lectures. The most important of these pertains to the dream-work. Though Freud uses the term ‘revisions,’ the lecture is basically a summary of his understanding of the dream-work as a specific instantiation of the formations of the unconscious. Or, more specifically, the mechanisms that constitute the dream-work which comprise condensation, displacement, secondary revision, symbolism, and the analytic distinction between the manifest content and the latent content of dreams. These psychic mechanisms which Kenneth Burke and Jacques Lacan simplified later on under the aegis of metaphor and metonymy exist in order to disguise the representation of the wish in the dreams of adults. So, unlike the dreams of children which directly represent their wishes, the dreams of adults are subject to forms of distortion. The psychic mechanisms listed above make it possible to distort the representation of dreams by condensing signifiers or displacing affects from one signifier to another.
- 4. 4 Furthermore, the meaning of a dream is not reducible to what the dreamer sees in the dream. Every single element in the dream-work has to be subject to free association and secondary revision in the analytic situation before the analyst can interpret the dream. Freud’s preoccupation with dreams is related to the fact that all the psychic mechanisms of consequence can be found in the dream-work. The dream-work represents the best instantiation of the fact that the unconscious is not just a cauldron seething with affects, but is a highly structured mechanism which Jacques Lacan would compare to the structure of a language. Freud also compares his theory of dreams to the concepts of occultism and telepathy. That is because analysts often report patients having dreams involving forms of thought transference or which involve predictions about the future. It is not clear in the first instance whether these are no more than a co-incidence or whether there is more to dreams than even Freud knew. These lectures also include a description of Freud’s structural theory of the psyche comprising the id, the ego, and the super-ego. Freud compares this model of the psyche with the topographical model comprising consciousness, the preconscious, and the unconscious. Freud’s main preoccupation in this lecture is to explain how these psychic agencies interact with each other, and make sense of the endemic conflict within the psyche of the neurotic subject. He also identifies the transformative mechanisms in the psyche like identification and relates it to the oedipal matrix in which the child grapples with the difference between being ‘like’ a parent and ‘having’ a parent in the sense of making an object choice. Freud also relates the structural model with the topographical model since they do not map neatly on to each other. That is because the id, the ego, and the super-ego all have an unconscious component. He also relates repression to the unconscious since the relationship between these categories is widely misunderstood. Repression is subordinate to the unconscious and is not the same as the unconscious. Freud summarizes his dissection of the personality by arguing that his goal has been to make that which is unconscious conscious. This process is compared to the draining of the Zuider Zee in his oft-cited formulation: ‘Where id was, there ego shall be.’
- 5. 5 It is this formulation which acted as a spur to the growth of ego psychology and would be re-formulated by Jacques Lacan in his critique of the ego psychologists, Heinz Hartmann and Rudolf Lowenstein. Freud also discusses the relationship between ‘anxiety and the instinctual life’ and explains his controversial theory of femininity in these lectures. Freud made a number of references to anxiety in his work and had previously considered the relationship between ‘symptoms, inhibition, and anxiety.’ The main analytic distinction in Freud’s theory of anxiety is the distinction between fear and anxiety along with the need to work out a typology of anxiety. Freud’s argument was that it is important to domesticate anxiety in the form of fear. That is because fear relates to a specific object that can be clearly named whereas anxiety could be ‘expectant’ or ‘free-floating.’ So it is not clear why the patient is anxious and what the object of anxiety might be. Freud also considers the libidinal economy of anxiety since the emergence of anxiety is itself related to the presence of un-sublimated libido. This was Freud’s position when he was trying to make sense of the actual neuroses. In the psychoneuroses however, the situation pertaining to anxiety is much more complicated. Freud’s analysis in this paper is related mainly to the psychoneuroses rather than to the actual neuroses. Freud also points out that he does not seek recourse to the ontology of instincts; he is fully aware that ‘instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness.’ Only those who understand this proposition will be able to make sense of instinctual behaviour in neurotic subjects. The huge amount of misunderstanding on what Freud meant by the life and death instincts is related to not understanding that instincts are mythical entities. And, finally, Freud synthesizes his earlier work on ‘Female Sexuality’ and ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’ in his lecture on ‘Femininity.’ Freud was fond of referring to feminine sexuality as the ‘dark-continent’ – i.e. something which remains unexplored and eludes any easy explanation. This invocation of the dark-continent was in the form of a spatial metaphor, but feminine desire was not any easier to explain either as evidenced by his famous question: Was Will das Weib?
- 6. 6 Freud doesn’t pretend that he has an answer to this question, but nonetheless takes this occasion to differentiate between traditional notions of masculine and feminine and compares it to the analytic distinction between active and passive. He also considers the constitutive bisexuality in the human subject and how forces of socialization attribute greater levels of activity to men and greater levels of passivity to women though that is not true for all male or female subjects in the empirical sense. Freud is mainly concerned here with how male and female subjects traverse the oedipal matrix and how the distinction between the sexes is of crucial consequence to their sense of identity. This lecture also has a number of controversial propositions on the origins of envy and the sense of justice in men and women which have been subject to a number of feminist critiques. Suffice it to remark that this lecture is still important if only as a point of departure for the description of femininity rather than as a point of arrival. Though this is a good book, it is better to read it after reading the introductory lectures that Freud delivered at the University of Vienna or the five lectures that he delivered at Clark University. But for those already acquainted with the basic rudiments of psychoanalysis, this will be an invaluable read. The best of these lectures is undoubtedly that on anxiety, which if read in conjunction with the volume on meta-psychology in this series from the Penguin Freud Library, will be an enormous source of insights for those working in the Freudian field. SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN