A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

Freud's first lecture opens with an odd move. He tells his audience he will try to talk them out of coming back.

It is exactly what he does with patients. Most doctors play down the difficulty of a new treatment and promise results. Freud does the reverse: he spells out the length, the effort and the sacrifice, and promises nothing, because the outcome depends on the patient's own understanding and perseverance.

So he treats the lecture hall the way he treats a neurotic patient. He lists what stands in the way of psychoanalysis, and warns anyone tempted to make a career of it that universities and society will turn suspicious and hostile. Whoever still comes back next time, he adds, is welcome. The invitation is real. It simply arrives after the warning.

The first difficulty is that psychoanalysis cannot be shown. A medical student sees the specimen, the reaction, the twitching muscle. In analysis "nothing occurs but the interchange of words between the patient and the physician."

Freud does not apologise for that. Words were originally magic, he says, and they can still make a person blessed or drive him to despair. But you cannot even sit in on the words. The patient would fall silent before a single impartial witness, because what he says is what he hides from others, and from himself.

So how is anyone to be convinced? Freud's answer is practical: learn it first on yourself. There are ordinary mental events, common to everyone, that a person can examine in his own life. That is why these lectures begin not with illness but with mistakes.

Why, according to Freud, can a student not simply watch a psychoanalytic treatment the way he would watch an operation?

• The patient speaks freely only inside a private relationship and would fall silent before a witness.✓Correct answer
• The method is still guarded, and analysts refuse to show their technique to outsiders.
• Nothing important happens in the talk itself; the real change takes place later, in the body.
• The patient's symptoms vanish for the moment whenever an audience is present in the room.

What analysis needs is what a person conceals from others and even from himself, so it comes out only in a special relationship with the physician. The obstacle is the nature of the conversation, not secrecy about the method.

Then Freud names the two claims that make the whole world bristle.

The first is that mental processes are in themselves unconscious, and the conscious ones are only isolated acts, parts of a larger whole. We usually treat "mental" and "conscious" as the same thing, so this sounds like nonsense, or like a mystery cult fishing in murky water. Freud insists it is not a quarrel over words but a new way of standing in the world.

The second is that sexual impulses, in a narrow and a wider sense, play a large part in nervous illness, and have also fed the highest achievements of culture.

He even explains why both are resisted. People first find an unpleasant idea untrue, and only then go looking for arguments against it.

Freud held that mental processes are, in themselves, unconscious, and that conscious thoughts are only isolated parts of mental life.

True✓Correct answer

This is the first of the two claims he says offend everyone. He does not describe the unconscious as a small cellar under a conscious house; he says consciousness is the exception, a few acts within a mental life that is unconscious in itself.

Freud starts with things that happen to every healthy person: saying the wrong word, writing or reading something that is not there, mishearing, forgetting a familiar name for a moment, mislaying the keys.

He hears the protest coming. With hallucinations and delusions waiting to be explained, why spend an hour on a housekeeper who lost her keys?

His reply is to ask how anyone reads important things. A young man does not wait for a declaration to know a woman likes him: a glance, a gesture, a handshake held one second too long will do. A detective does not expect the murderer to leave his photograph and address at the scene. Great matters betray themselves by faint signs, and a science that throws away the trifles has thrown away its evidence.