The history of the psychoanalytic movement — John Shaqi
The history of the psychoanalytic movementFreud, Sigmund
History
The history of the psychoanalytic movement
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis -- History
According to the testimony of a colleague who was an eyewitness of the
developments at Burghölzli, it may be asserted that psychoanalysis
awakened an interest there very early. Already in Jung’s work on occult
phenomena, published in 1902, there was an allusion to dream
interpretation. Ever since 1903 or 1904, according to my informer,
psychoanalysis came into prominence. After the establishment of personal
relations between Vienna and Zürich, a society was also founded in
Burghölzli in 1907 which discussed the problems of psychoanalysis at
regular meetings. In the bond that united the Vienna and Zürich schools,
the Swiss were by no means the merely recipient part. They had
themselves already performed respectable scientific work, the results of
which were of much use to psychoanalysis. The association-experiment,
started by the Wundt School, had been interpreted by them in the
psychoanalytic sense and had proved itself of unexpected usefulness.
Thus it had become possible to get rapid experimental confirmation of
psychoanalytic facts, and to demonstrate experimentally to beginners
certain relationships which the analyst could only have talked about
otherwise. The first bridge leading from experimental psychology to
psychoanalysis had thus been constructed.
In psychoanalytic treatment, however, the association-experiment enables
one to make only a preliminary, qualitative analysis of the case, it
offers no essential contribution to the technique, and is really not
indispensable in the work of analysis. Of more importance, however, was
another discovery of the Zürich School, or rather, of its two leaders,
Bleuler and Jung. The former pointed out that a great many purely
psychiatric cases can be explained by the same psychoanalytic process as
those used in dreams and in the neuroses (Freudsche Mechanismen). Jung
employed with success the analytic method of interpretation in the
strangest and most obscure phenomena of dementia præcox, the origin of
which appeared quite clear when correlated with the life and interests
of the patient. From that time on it became impossible for the
psychiatrists to ignore psychoanalysis. Bleuler’s great work on
Schizophrenie (1911), in which the psychoanalytic points of view are
placed on an equal footing with the clinical-systematic ones, brought
this success to completion.
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