Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis : $b a course of twenty-eight lectures delivered at the University of ViennaFreud, Sigmund
Science
Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis : $b a course of twenty-eight lectures delivered at the University of Vienna
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
as well as on the negative side it frequently exceeds the limits
regarded as desirable in civilized society. Of these three possible
factors, whether one of them has been at work in the case before us, or
two of them, or whether all three together have taken part, I cannot
tell you; though only because the analysis of the case could not be
continued beyond the second hour.
I perceive now that I have been speaking entirely of things which you
were not yet prepared to understand. I did so in order to carry out the
comparison between psychiatry and psycho-analysis. But I may ask you one
thing at this point: Have you observed anything in the nature of a
contradiction between the two? Psychiatry does not employ the technical
methods of psycho-analysis, neglects any consideration of the content of
the delusion, and in pointing to heredity gives us but a general and
remote ætiology instead of first disclosing the more specific and
immediate one. But is any contradiction or opposition contained in this?
Is not the one rather a supplement to the other? Is the hereditary
factor inconsistent with the importance of experience and would they not
both work together most effectively? You will admit that there is
nothing essential in the work of psychiatry which could oppose
psycho-analytic researches. It is therefore the psychiatrists who oppose
it, and not psychiatry itself. Psycho-Analysis stands to psychiatry more
or less as histology does to anatomy; in one, the outer forms of organs
are studied, in the other, the construction of these out of the tissues
and constituent elements. It is not easy to conceive of any
contradiction between these two fields of study, in which the work of
the one is continued in the other. You know that nowadays anatomy is the
basis of the scientific study of medicine; but time was when dissecting
human corpses in order to discover the internal structure of the body
was as much a matter for severe prohibition as practising
psycho-analysis in order to discover the internal workings of the human
mind seems to-day to be a matter for condemnation. And, presumably at a
not too distant date, we shall have perceived that there can be no
psychiatry which is scientifically radical without a thorough knowledge
of the deep-seated unconscious processes in mental life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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