The history of the psychoanalytic movementFreud, Sigmund
History
The history of the psychoanalytic movement
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis -- History
on to tell the world something of the change in his opinions concerning
my psychoanalysis. On the contrary, as permanent reviewer of a medical
journal, he showed a preference to follow its development with his
hardly serious comments.
Whatever I possessed of personal sensitiveness was blunted in those
years, to my advantage. But I was saved from becoming embittered by a
circumstance that does not come to the assistance of all lonely
discoverers. Such a one usually frets himself to find out the cause of
the lack of sympathy or of the rejection he receives from his
contemporaries, and perceives them as a painful contradiction against
the certainty of his own conviction. That did not trouble me, for the
psychoanalytic fundamental principles enabled me to understand this
attitude of my environment as a necessary sequence. If it was true that
the associations discovered by me were kept from the knowledge of the
patient by inner affective resistances, then this resistance must
manifest itself also in normal persons as soon as the repressed material
is conveyed to them from the outside. It was not strange that these
latter knew how to give intellectual reasons for their affective
rejections of my ideas. This happened just as often with the patients,
and the arguments advanced—arguments are as common as blackberries, to
borrow from Falstaff’s speech—were the same and not exactly brilliant.
The only difference was that in the case of patients one had the means
of bringing pressure to bear, in order to help them recognize and
overcome their resistances, but in the case of those seemingly normal,
such help had to be omitted. To force these normal people to a cool and
scientifically objective examination of the subject was an unsolved
problem, the solution of which was best left to time. In the history of
science it has often been possible to verify that the very assertion
which, at first, called forth only opposition, received recognition a
little later without the necessity of bringing forward any new proofs.
That I have not developed any particular respect for the opinion of the
world or any desire for intellectual deference during those years, when
I alone represented psychoanalysis, will surprise no one.
II
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