A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis — John Shaqi
A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
Do not be offended, therefore, if, for the present, I treat you as I
treat these neurotic patients. Frankly, I shall dissuade you from coming
to hear me a second time. With this intention I shall show what
imperfections are necessarily involved in the teaching of psychoanalysis
and what difficulties stand in the way of gaining a personal judgment. I
shall show you how the whole trend of your previous training and all
your accustomed mental habits must unavoidably have made you opponents
of psychoanalysis, and how much you must overcome in yourselves in
order to master this instinctive opposition. Of course I cannot predict
how much psychoanalytic understanding you will gain from my lectures,
but I can promise this, that by listening to them you will not learn how
to undertake a psychoanalytic treatment or how to carry one to
completion. Furthermore, should I find anyone among you who does not
feel satisfied with a cursory acquaintance with psychoanalysis, but who
would like to enter into a more enduring relationship with it, I shall
not only dissuade him, but I shall actually warn him against it. As
things now stand, a person would, by such a choice of profession, ruin
his every chance of success at a university, and if he goes out into the
world as a practicing physician, he will find himself in a society which
does not understand his aims, which regards him with suspicion and
hostility, and which turns loose upon him all the malicious spirits
which lurk within it.
However, there are always enough individuals who are interested in
anything which may be added to the sum total of knowledge, despite such
inconveniences. Should there be any of this type among you, and should
they ignore my dissuasion and return to the next of these lectures, they
will be welcome. But all of you have the right to know what these
difficulties of psychoanalysis are to which I have alluded.
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