A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
If only that were all! We have made discoveries for which we were at
first unprepared. Knowing and knowing is not always the same thing;
there are various kinds of knowing that are psychologically by no means
comparable. "_Il y a fagots et fagots_,"[39] as Molière says. The
knowledge of the physician is not the same as that of the patient and
cannot bring about the same results. The physician can gain no results
by transferring his knowledge to the patient in so many words. This is
perhaps putting it incorrectly, for though the transference does not
result in dissolving the symptoms, it does set the analysis in motion,
and calls out an energetic denial, the first sign usually that this has
taken place. The patient has learned something that he did not know up
to that time, the meaning of his symptoms, and yet he knows it as little
as before. So we discover there is more than one kind of ignorance. It
will require a deepening of our psychological insight to make clear to
us wherein the difference lies. But our assertion nevertheless remains
true that the symptoms disappear with the knowledge of their meaning.
For there is only one limiting condition; the knowledge must be founded
on an inner change in the patient which can be attained only through
psychic labors directed toward a definite end. We have here been
confronted by problems which will soon lead us to the elaboration of a
dynamics of symptom formation.
I must stop to ask you whether this is not all too vague and too
complicated? Do I not confuse you by so often retracting my words and
restricting them, spinning out trains of thought and then rejecting
them? I should be sorry if this were the case. However, I strongly
dislike simplification at the expense of truth, and am not averse to
having you receive the full impression of how many-sided and complicated
the subject is. I also think that there is no harm done if I say more on
every point than you can at the moment make use of. I know that every
hearer and reader arranges what is offered him in his own thoughts,
shortens it, simplifies it and extracts what he wishes to retain. Within
a given measure it is true that the more we begin with the more we have
left. Let me hope that, despite all the by-play, you have clearly
grasped the essential parts of my remarks, those about the meaning of
symptoms, about the unconscious, and the relation between the two. You
probably have also understood that our further efforts are to take two
directions: first, the clinical problem--to discover how persons become
sick, how they later on accomplish a neurotic adaptation toward life;
secondly, a problem of psychic dynamics, the evolution of the neurotic
symptoms themselves from the prerequisites of the neuroses. We will
undoubtedly somewhere come on a point of contact for these two problems.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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