Freud, psychoanalysis and the psychosomatic problem

According to the author an unbroken hallucination of the pleasure principle is underlying the vision of mankind as in biotechnical medicine as well as in a concept of science that is reduced to technical progress. Psychosomatics is to overcome the false rationality of such thought.     

Freud, Fliess, and the parenthood of psychoanalysis

This paper focuses upon the roles of procreation, fatherhood, and identification with the fertile mother in Freud's creation of psychoanalysis. Fatherhood and motherhood, pregnancy and birth, children and siblings, figure prominently in Freud's self-analysis and in his relationship with his prototransference object, Wilhelm Fliess. Although Freud attributed his self-analytic interest and revived oedipal conflict to the death of his father, becoming a parent himself was also a significant determinant. Birth as well as death reactivated his childhood and stimulated his creative ferment.     

弗洛伊德精神分析宗教心理观新探

弗洛伊德的精神分析宗教心理观深受达尔文的生物进化思想、费尔巴哈的人本主义宗教哲学理念、弗雷泽的"巫术先行论"和冯特民族文化宗教心理观的影响。其主要特点是:力求运用类比推理揭示宗教心理的深层根源;主张通过科学的信念战胜非理性的宗教幻觉;试图依据摩西案例阐明宗教的历史发展进程。其历史贡献在于:在探讨宗教信仰深层心理机制方面独树一帜;延续了冯特开创的宗教文化心理的研究取向;针对传统宗教弊端的揭批精神值得后人铭记。其历史局限表现在:夸大了本能冲突在宗教心理形成中的作用;用强迫症案例类推宗教心理缺乏科学依据;对宗教功能的绝对否定伤害了信徒的情感。     

Wilhelm Reich and Anna Freud: His expulsion from psychoanalysis

This article describes the growth of hostility towards Wilhelm Reich in the psychoanalytic community over his Marxist ideology and activism as well as disagreements over the death instinct. It brings to the fore the behind the scenes political manipulations between Ernest Jones and Anna Freud to effect the expulsion of Reich both from the Vienna and Berlin local psychoanalytic societies and from the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). It describes Reich's reactions to these events and the pressure placed on other psychoanalysts to stop supporting him and also the revision of history about the expulsion. It discusses the use of the term "crazy" as it was used in the psychoanalytic movement. Further the article discusses personality attributes of Anna Freud leading to counter-transference possessiveness to children and women, especially patients. It briefly touches on the attitudes of both Sigmund and Anna Freud toward sex and how this furthered the clash with Reich. It discusses the similarity between Anna's actions toward the Burlingham children and what happened to the children of Reich.     

Letter to Freud: on the plight of psychoanalysis

In the form of a letter, the writer communicates to Freud her appreciation for the incomparable richness and complexity of the psychoanalytic enterprise in its century-long evolution from classical, Freudian origins to new developments in theory and technique. At the same time, concern is expressed about the continuity and survival of psychoanalysis in a cultural milieu that has absorbed its once radical ideas about sexuality and unconscious motivation while resisting its viability as a method of treatment.     

Rosalia H.: with Freud in a prelude to psychoanalysis

Abstract

The case of Fräulein Rosalia H. is discussed quite briefly by Freud in one of his contributions to Studies on hysteria. This case of ‘retention hysteria’ was included in another much longer case study, and it is designed to illustrate how a ‘mnemic symbol’, which operates to condense a group of memories, may be formed during the course of an analysis. A new symptom thus appears which may throw more light on the circumstances which gave rise to the presenting symptom. Despite the richness of this case, Freud does not refer to it again in his writing and there has been very little discussion of it in psychoanalytic commentaries. This paper explores how the case serves as a transition point from pre-psychoanalytic conceptions of symptomatology and clinical practice, and how it can be read as a prelude to psychoanalysis proper.     

From Freud to the present day: difference,not knowing and its relation to psychoanalysis

In order to know and to understand we are often tempted to use defined models and theories. But catastrophe happens when you project models onto phenomena where they don’t belong. Difference exists and not all phenomena can be forced to reside within existing models. We can project our already known theories and ideas onto what we think we see through certain frames that we create but the cost may be dear. There is no one way to understand the unconscious and the psyche. Psychoanalysis is always open for revision and development. Old models can be broken and new thought created. The unconscious is an impossible yet generative resource. We need to stay open to not knowing – constantly look at the frame and stay alert to its constructed nature. We need our frame to work with the unconscious but not to the detriment of the spirit of that unconscious.     

Flechsig and Freud: late 19th-century neurology and the emergence of psychoanalysis

The author analyzes the potential influences of Paul Flechsig's work on early Freudian theory, particularly on Sigmund Freud's 1966b/1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology. Gehirn und Seele, a discourse authored by Flechsig in 1894, is the focus of this analysis. The author believes that the links between the intellectual production of both German-speaking neurologists have been underrated to this day and attempts to establish that the early Freudian approach to many key issues in the history of psychoanalysis--dreams, unconscious processing, and drives, to name a few--was not unique but shared with some distinguished colleagues in neuropathology and psychiatry. Thus, he attempts to shed additional light on the transition from state-of-art neurology in the last decade of the 19th century to the creation of psychoanalysis as a discipline on its own.     

Psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis appropriated, psychoanalysis applied

The assumptions which predominate in the reading of psychoanalytic theory differ from those involved in listening to the patient in the psychoanalytic process. A weakness of much applied psychoanalysis is that these two sets of assumptions are confused and theoretical certainty is substituted for clinical exploration. This difference in assumptions is illustrated by the different assumptions about the signifier in two poems. In Freud's work on Leonardo, both attitudes toward the signifier are present, but the clinical aspect is located in Freud's method, not in his historical construction. The problems of maintaining a similar clinical stance in applied psychoanalysis are explored, and Freud's tendency toward historical certainty is speculatively considered as an instance of the parallelism phenomenon.