The history of the psychoanalytic movementFreud, Sigmund
History
The history of the psychoanalytic movement
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis -- History
with the reproach of not having put to good account one’s life-task.
Thus a new religio-ethical system was founded which, exactly like
Adler’s, was obliged to give new interpretations, to distort or set
aside the actual results of analysis. As a matter of fact they have
caught a few cultural higher notes from the symphony of the world’s
by-gones, but once again have failed to hear the powerful melody of the
impulses.
In order to hold this system together it was necessary to draw away
entirely from the observations and technique of psychoanalysis. Now and
then the enthusiasm for the higher cause even permits a total disregard
for scientific logic, as for instance, when Jung maintains that the
Œdipus complex is not “specific” enough for the etiology of the
neuroses, and ascribed this specificity to laziness, that is, to the
most universal quality of animate and inanimate bodies! Moreover, it is
to be remarked that the “Œdipus complex” only represents a capacity on
which the psychic forces of the individual measure themselves, and is
not in itself a force, like the “psychic laziness.” The study of the
individual man has shown and always will show that the sexual complexes
are alive in him in their original sense. That is why the study of the
individual was pushed back by Jung and replaced by the judgment of the
essential facts from the study of the races. As the study of the early
childhood of every man exposed one to the danger of striking against the
original and undisguised meaning of these misinterpreted complexes, it
was, therefore, thought best to make it a rule to tarry as little as
possible at this past and to place the greatest emphasis on the return
to the conflict. Here, moreover, the essential things are not at all the
incidental and personal, but rather the general, that is to say, the
“non-fulfilment of the life-task.” Nevertheless, we know that the actual
conflict of the neurotic becomes comprehensible and solvable only if it
can be traced back into the patient’s past history, only by following
along the way that his libido took when his malady began.
How the New Zürich therapy has shaped itself under such tendencies I can
convey by means of reports of a patient who was himself obliged to
experience it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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