A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis — John Shaqi
A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
Now, am I unduly suspicious if I suspect that at the same moment in
which psychoanalysis emerges before you, your resistance to
psychoanalysis also raises its head? Are you not anxious to raise the
objection that the information given by the subject we questioned, and
who committed the slip, is not proof sufficient? He naturally has the
desire, you say, to meet the challenge, to explain the slip, and hence
he says the first thing he can think of if it seems relevant. But that,
you say, is no proof that this is really the way the slip happened. It
might be so, but it might just as well be otherwise, you say. Something
else might have occurred to him which might have fitted the case just as
well and better.
It is remarkable how little respect, at bottom, you have for a psychic
fact! Imagine that someone has decided to undertake the chemical
analysis of a certain substance, and has secured a sample of the
substance, of a certain weight--so and so many milligrams. From this
weighed sample certain definite conclusions can be drawn. Do you think
it would ever occur to a chemist to discredit these conclusions by the
argument that the isolated substance might have had some other weight?
Everyone yields to the fact that it was just this weight and no other,
and confidently builds his further conclusions upon that fact. But when
you are confronted by the psychic fact that the subject, when
questioned, had a certain idea, you will not accept that as valid, but
say some other idea might just as easily have occurred to him! The
trouble is that you believe in the illusion of psychic freedom and will
not give it up. I regret that on this point I find myself in complete
opposition to your views.
Now you will relinquish this point only to take up your resistance at
another place. You will continue, "We understand that it is the peculiar
technique of psychoanalysis that the solution of its problems is
discovered by the analyzed subject himself. Let us take another example,
that in which the speaker calls upon the assembly 'to _hiccough_ the
health of their chief.' The interfering idea in this case, you say, is
the insult. It is that which is the antagonist of the expression of
conferring an honor. But that is mere interpretation on your part, based
on observations extraneous to the slip. If in this case you question the
originator of the slip, he will not affirm that he intended an insult,
on the contrary, he will deny it energetically. Why do you not give up
your unverifiable interpretation in the face of this plain objection?"
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