A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
I ask you to give your particular attention to the significance of this
subject. If I invite a person to tell me what occurs to him in relation
to some certain element of his dream I am asking him to abandon himself
to free association, _controlled by a given premise_. This demands a
special delimitation of the attention, quite different from cogitation,
in fact, exclusive of cogitation. Many persons put themselves into such
a state easily; others show an extraordinarily high degree of
clumsiness. There is a higher level of free association again, where I
omit this original premise and designate only the manner of the
association, e.g., rule that the subject freely give a proper name or a
number. Such an association would be more voluntary, more
indeterminable, than the one called forth by our technique. But it can
be shown that it is strongly determined each time by an important inner
mental set which, at the moment at which it is active, is unknown to us,
just as unknown as the disturbing tendencies in the case of errors and
the provocative tendencies in the case of accidental occurrences.
I, and many others after me, have again and again instigated such
investigations for names and numbers which occur to the subject without
any restraint, and have published some results. The method is the
following: Proceeding from the disclosed names, we awaken continuous
associations which then are no longer entirely free, but rather are
limited as are the associations to the dream elements, and this is true
until the impulse is exhausted. By that time, however, the motivation
and significance of the free name associations is explained. The
investigations always yield the same results, the information often
covers a wealth of material and necessitates lengthy elaboration. The
associations to freely appearing numbers are perhaps the most
significant. They follow one another so quickly and approach a hidden
goal with such inconceivable certainty, that it is really startling. I
want to give you an example of such a name analysis, one that, happily,
involves very little material.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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