An Outline of Psychoanalysis

263 Pages·2003·13.7 MB·English

by  Sigmund Freud (Helena Ragg-Kirkby transl., Malcolm Bowie Intro.)

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An Outline of Psychoanalysis
SIGMUND FREUD
An Outline of Psychoanalysis
Translated by Helena Ragg-Kirkby
with an Introduction by Malcolm Bowie
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE NEW PENGUIN FREUD
GENERAL EDITOR: ADAM PHILLIPS
An Outline of Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia; between the ages of
four and eighty-two rus home was in Vienna: in 1938 Hitler's invasion
of Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he died in
the following year, His career began with several years of brilliant
work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system, He was
almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris,
his interests first turned to psychology; and after ten years of clinical
work in Vienna (at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older col
league) he invented what was to become psychoanalysis. This began
simply as a method of treating neurotic patients through talking, but
it qUickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings
of the mind in general. Freud was thus able to demonstrate the
development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on
the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental
discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday
thoughts and actions. Freud's life was uneventful, but his ideas
have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but also the whole
intellectual climate of the twentieth century.
Helena Ragg-Kirkby was born in 1971 and educated at Sheffield
University and University College London. Her publications include
Adalbert Stifter's Late Prose: The Mania for Moderation (2000).
Helena Ragg-Kirkby is Lecturer in German at Leeds University.
Professor Malcolm Bowie was born in Aldeburgh in 1943. Previously
Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature and a Fellow of All
Souls College in the University of Oxford, Malcolm Bowie became
the Master of Christ's College, Cambridge, in 2002. His publications
include Henri Michaux: A Study of his Literary Works (1973), Mal
larmi and the Art of Being Difficult (1978), Freud, Proust and Lacan:
Theory as Fiction (1987), Lacan (1991), Psychoanalysis and the
Future ofT heory (1993) and Proust Among the Stars (lggB). Malcolm
Bowie is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of
Literature.
Adam Phillips was formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Char
ing Cross Hospital in London. He is the author of several books
on psychoanalysis including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored,
Darwin's Worms, Promises, Promises and Houdini's Box.
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N_ FolgB cler Vorlest.ngen zur Elnfahrung In dJe Paychoanolyse first published in '933 in
Vienna
Abn.ss cler I'rychoano1yse first published in 1940 in l~ 'leI0chrl.ft fUr
P~undlm<>go"5(I)
This tnDslat!OII publisbed in Penguin Classics 2003
Slgmund Freud's German texts coUected in ees.""",,/te Werke (1940-52)
Copyright 0 Imogo Publishing Co., Ltd, London, '940, '94'
Translation and editorial matter copyright Cl Helen8 Ragg-lGrkby, 2003
Introduction copyright I:) Malcolm BowIe, 2003
All rights reSl!lVed
Tbe mnral rights of the translator and the author of the Introduction have heen asserted
Set in ,01".5 pt PostSeript Adobe New Caledonia
Typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bul)' St Edmunds, Suffolk
Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
EXL-ept in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
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Contents
Introduction by Malcolm Bowie vii
Translator's Preface xxiii
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis:
New Series
1 Revision of the Dream-theory 3
z Dreams and Occultism 26
3 The Analysis of the Psychical Personality 52
4 Fear and the Drives 74
5 Femaleness 102
6 Explanations, Applications, Orientations 126
7 On the Question ofa Weltanschauung 147
Notes 171
An Outline of Psychoanalysis 173
Part One: The Nature of Things Psychical 175
Chapter 1: the Psychical Apparatus 175
Chapter 2: the Theory oft he Drives 178
Chapter 3: the Development of the Sexual Function 181
Chapter 4: Psychical Qualities 185
Chapter 5: Explanatory Notes Concerning the
Interpretation of Dreams 193
Part Two: The Practical Task
200
Chapter 6: the Psychoanalytical Technique 200
Chapter 7: a Sample of Psychoanalytical Work 211
v
Contents
Part Three: What We Gain For Our Theory 223
Chapter 8: the Psychical Apparatus and the External
World 223
Chapter 9: the Internal World 233
Notes 235
vi
Introduction
On 16 January 1938, in the old hall of the Musikverein, Bruno Walter
conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in a valedictory performance of
Mahler's ninth symphony. The occasion was special in many ways.
Walter was the work's dedicatee, and had given its premiere a
quarter of a century before; the orchestra was Walter's own, as it
had once been Mahler's; notables, including the Austrian Chan
cellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, were present in the hall, and F. W.
Gaisberg, the pioneering record producer, was on hand with his
technical assistants to commit the event to disc. 1 Listening to this
extraordinary performance today, one becomes an eavesdropper on
a vanished style of orchestral playing: the players, with their studied
lilt, their poised rubato and their unanimous portamenti, are speak
ing in a shared local dialect. This is how Mahler himself made them
sound, one imagines, and theirs is an artistic tradition, soon to be
despoiled, that for a memorable hour or so on that winter evening
was still perfectly coherent and intact.
Almost as moving as the coordinated sound of strings, woodwind
and brass, however, are the murmur of the expectant audience at
the start of the record, and the coughs and shuffiings that enter the
acoustic picture from time to time. Real people were there to
hear Walter and his band play. People who had colds, or were
uncomfortable in their seats. Jews and non-Jews were there together,
both in the ranks of the orchestra and in the auditorium. Despite
the ingrained presence of antisemitism in the former capital of the
Austro-Hungarian empire, and despite occasional outbursts from
rabble-rousing politicians, the professional bourgeoisie of the city
vii
Introduction
seemed to have its own codes of tolerance and took pride in the
cultural cross-currents that ran through its social and artistic life.
Yet within two months of this concert, the Anschluss was to divide
this composite Viennese population irreversibly. The Vienna
Philhannonic was to be 'Aryanized', and the Jews who had been
in Walter's audience were, like those who had been players, to have
an intolerable choice visited upon them: they could leave the
country, stripped of their property and livelihood, or remain to face
persecution at the hands of a murderous new political order.
Freud's second series of Introductory Lectures and his Outline of
Psychoanalysis belong to this threshold moment in European his
tory, and indeed offer their own muted commentary on the rise
of Nazism and the impending destruction of the European Jews.
Affinities between Freud and Mahler abound. They were born
within four years of each other, inhabited the same social world and
had acquaintances in common. Each recognized the other's genius,
and, on one memorable afternoon in August 1910, Freud took
Mahler on as a very short-tenn patient: at Mahler's request they
strolled together through Leiden to discuss the composer's marital
difficulties.2 At a much deeper level the two temperaments were
akin. Both men were ironists, artists in retrospection, enthusiasts for
nature, and both had a keen sense of human limitation. Seen inside
the larger flux of natural growth and decay, the perturbations of the
human individual were a Lilliputian sideshow, but neither of these
commanding Viennese figures found this lack of proportion unduly
discouraging. Freud's short paper 'On Transience', written during
the First World War, could almost be a footnote to the 'Ewig ... ,
ewig .. .' ('Eternally. .. , eternally. . .') on which the final movement
of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde ends: 'As regards the beauty of
Nature,' Freud had written, 'each time it is destroyed by winter it
comes again next year, so that in relation to the length of our lives it
can in fact be regarded as eternal' {'Was die SchiJnheit der Natur
betrifft, so kommt sie nach jeder ZerstiJrung durch den Winter im
niJchsten Jahre wieder, und diese Wiederkehr darf in Verhiiltnis zu
unserer Lebensdauer als eine ewige bezeichnet werden'J,3 For a
moment at least, mankind could be rescued by natural beauty from
viii
Introduction
his own littleness; beyond transience lay a thoroughly earthly vision
of eternity.
The affinity between Freud and Mahler was, of course, much
more than a mere convergence between two creative personalities.
If we place the two of them in the company of Karl Kraus, Robert
Musil, Joseph Roth, Italo Svevo, Arthur Schnitzler and other
members of that extraordinary late-Habsburg generation, we can
see them all as the bewildered but defiantly inventive denizens of a
crumbling empire. They were all self-conscious latecomers in the
history of a regime, and witnesses to the ending of a world. When
Freud wrote the words 'Finis Austriae' in his diary on 12 March
1938 he was reacting to the German invasion that had begun that
morning, but he was also writing the epitaph for a culture that had
been a long time dying and had talked to itself often of its own
demise.4
An emphasis on endings and leave-takings certainly helps us to
understand the tenor of these extraordinary times. The M usikverein
concert, as a social occasion, redramatized the palpable sense ofloss
and regret that is already there in the notes of Mahler's score. Long
before Walter raised his baton, the composer had set the stage for
an event of this kind. Valediction came naturally to him, and there
was now every reason for hearing his personal swansong as the
slightly premature requiem for a threatened nation state. Freud,
too, had anticipated the catastrophe that was about to envelope
Austria. His anatomy of human destructiveness, born of the First
World War and its aftermath, had been elaborated in successive
essays of the 1920S, and his central concept of the Todestrieb, the
death drive, had been launched, in part, to make sense of the recent
mass slaughter that Europe had seen.s The psychoanalytic theory of
the human drives, that is to say, had already been adjusted to take
account of the continent's next massive spate of mechanized killing.
But there is a real danger of misunderstanding Freud's writings of
the 1930S if we place too much emphasis on their intimations of
disaster.
The problem of historical understandingthat these writings pose
for modern readers springs at once into relief if we simply consider
ix