Freud's narrow escape and the discovery of transference.

Contends that Freud discovered transference in connection with material derived from his treatment of Emma Eckstein. The last chapter of Studies on Hysteria by J. Breuer and S. Freud (1895) in which Freud's 1st published use of the term transference occurs, can be read as a working through of the crisis that occurred when Eckstein nearly died. This concept, it is argued, explained Freud's patient's disturbed feelings toward him as a "false connection" and thereby helped to free him of feelings of personal involvement in her libidinal demands. The story of the troubled circumstances under which Freud discovered transference provides insight into the defensive nature of the concept. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A re-reading of Studies on Hysteria: the Freud-Breuer break revisited.

Argues that the commonly accepted view that J. Breuer and Freud ended their relationship simply because the former objected to the latter's claim as to the sexual etiology of the psychoneuroses is a myth (propounded by Freud and E. Jones) that masked an ongoing polemic in Studies on Hysteria. Breuer objected to Freud's claim that symbolic processes unconsciously determine symptoms. What disturbed both Freud and Breuer was Freud's vision of an interpenetration of intelligence and sexuality operating according to the laws of language completely out of the ego's awareness. The unconscious link between sexuality and intellection remains as problematic today. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What Freud called "the psychology for neurologists" and the many questions it raises.

Freud wrote his Psychology for Neurologists (which Strachey called A Scientific Project) in 1895. He wrote it in a feverish state within a month, yet quickly buried it. His intensity in writing it and in suppressing it has not been explained, but intriguing hints about it from Freud's correspondence with Fliess are discussed here. The work remains, however, foreshadowing many of Freud's important psychological concepts. Further, although it is often dismissed because of archaic neurological ideas, many neurological guesses that Freud presented in Psychology for Neurologists are in keeping with neuroscience of today. Aspects of mechanisms of the brain, understanding dreams, developmental perspectives and clinical ramifications all relate to what Freud said in this draft for a monograph. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Recollecting Freud.

Reviews the book, Recollecting Freud by Isidor Sadger (2005). The author, Isidor Sadger (1867-1942), was a Viennese neurologist who first heard Freud lecture in September 1895, and then later joined (1906) Freud's Wednesday Psychological Society. The name of that organization was later changed to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and Sadger remained in it until 1933. The book itself contains, he tells us, "nothing other than what I personally experienced, and the impressions that Freud's character, his actions and writing made on me. In no place have I sought to present biographical details that I did not myself witness" (p. 5). This review is presented in two parts: (1) an examination of its merits and limitations, and (2) an explanation of how a text first written in the late 1920s came to be published now for the first time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The mysterious metamorphoses of Bertha Pappenheim: Anna O. revisited.

Re-examines the life of Bertha Pappenheim, also known as J. Breuer and Freud's (1895) Anna O, in an attempt to understand her breakdown at age 21 and her emergence as a creative leader and reformer 8 yrs later. Understanding any life demands a theory that considers the individual's unique biological, familial, and sociocultural background, recognizes continuity over the lifespan, and contains a principle to account for such continuity. Classical drive theory does not meet these criteria. Based in part on J. Lichtenberg's (1989) concept of "self-righting," it is assumed that growth toward a healthy achieving self can occur at any age, given propitious conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anna Freud (1895–1982).

Presents an obituary for Anna Freud. No one would have been more surprised than Anna Freud herself to find a memorial tribute to her in the pages of the American Psychologist. She never took a course in psychology and always referred to her field as psychoanalysis, not psychology. It is perhaps a sign of the changing face of American psychology that this obituary has been requested. Anna Freud was born on December 3, 1895, and was the last of Sigmund Freud's six children and the third of his daughters. None of the other children went anywhere near the practice of analysis. With the death of Anna Freud on October 9, 1982, at the age of 86, the last direct link to the founder of psychoanalysis has disappeared. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud's forgotten evolutionary project.

In the last decades psychoanalysis has tended to recast itself as a hermeneutic discipline geared at the retelling of human lives, and Freud is recast as a great writer in the humanist tradition rather than as the scientist as which he saw himself. Although this reconceptualization has good reasons, it tends to obscure the fact that Freud primarily saw himself as a theorist of human nature. One of Freud's deepest convictions was that psychopathology needs to be explained on the basis of evolutionary biology. This paper argues that this may have been one of Freud's greatest ideas. The reason it has been "repressed" by psychoanalysis is that Freud based it on Lamarckian principles. The current flourishing of evolutionary psychology and psychiatry may well turn Freud into one of the precursors of the psychology of the future. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Catharsis in psychotherapy: A new perspective.

Reviews contemporary thinking about catharsis in psychotherapy, which is still dominated by J. Breuer and Freud's work with the cathartic method. Psychoanalysts view the fact that Freud abandoned catharsis as evidence of its ineffectiveness, while the emotive therapies developed in the 1960's returned to Freud's earliest view that neurosis results from repressed affect and can be cured by cathartic uncovering. Emotional memories continue to be thought of as foreign bodies lodged in the human psyche and requiring purgation. It is argued that this view divorces people from responsibility for their conduct and encourages a fractionation of human experience into feeling, thought, and action. It is proposed that catharsis is, instead, a label for completing a previously restrained or interrupted sequence of self-expression. It is accompanied by recovery manifestations of some sort, for example, tears or angry shouting. Implications of this view for psychotherapeutic practice are proposed, using examples of patients going through catharsis. It is concluded that therapists should allow catharsis as a means of helping patients discover their predilections, but should recognize this as a preliminary step. After blocked aspects of self have been discovered, then the patient must begin to claim responsibility for choosing more congruent actions and appropriate social expressions, thereby defining a richer, more satisfying existence. (60 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Toward a cognitive theory of catharsis.

Reviews 4 counseling analog studies which conclude that (1) expression of anger, either verbally or physically, does not automatically reduce anger, and (2) a cognitive process needs to accompany emotional expression. Results contradict the "hydraulic model" (J. Breuer and S. Freud, 1937) of emotions. An alternate model is proposed suggesting that anger expression will lead to anger reduction if it leads to coping with the anger-instigating event. Coping is achieved through dealing with the environment or through changing one's self-perceptions and attitudes. The model is extended to the emotion of sadness, and it is suggested that the experience and expression of emotions in general are therapeutic only if they facilitate a cognitive assimilation or working through process. (43 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"The reception of my Freud-critique in the psychoanalytic literature": Response to Professor Adolf Grünbaum.

The present is a response to Adolf Grünbaum's outrage (see record 2007-10890-018) at my article (see record 2006-05420-005), and others. Grünbaum challenged my articles with a mixture of ad hominem and ad rem arguments claiming that I misrepresented his ideas about Freud and psychoanalysis. In this response, I propose to disentangle these two classes of arguments and point out factual, textual, methodological, and theoretical errors in Grünbaum's various arguments. I review a number of Freud's passages from his seminal contributions to psychoanalytic method: Studies on Hysteria and The Interpretation of Dreams, and other writings to show that Freud himself did not make explicit another cardinal distinction: that between what he operationally formulated as the psychoanalytic method, procedure, or technique versus the various etiological theories of psychological, that is, emotional disorders. Neither was this distinction honored by Grünbaum, and that is his cardinal error. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Misconceptions about Freud's seduction theory: Comment on Gleaves and Hernandez (1999).

D. H. Gleaves and E. Hernandez (see record 1999-01068-004) write in relation to the seduction theory that "recent writers now argue that... Freud never made discoveries of sexual abuse" (p. 332) and that "the assertion that Freud did not make discoveries of abuse is unwarranted" (p. 324). In this article an outline of the case that Freud had no adequate grounds for his 1896 claims of having uncovered infantile "sexual scenes" is given. Some of the more important misconceptions and erroneous arguments in Gleaves and Hernandez's article are then examined. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Wolf Man's subjective experience of his treatment with Freud.

Little is known about how Freud actually conducted a treatment. However, from Serge Pankejeff's (the Wolf Man's) subjective experience of his treatment with Freud, as reported in his memoirs and published interviews, one can gain a unique perspective on Freud's technique and the therapeutic action of this technique. The purpose of this article is to extract from Pankejeff's subjective experience of Freud those aspects of their work together that were most memorable and meaningful for the patient. Freud's work with Pankejeff has been severely criticized for breaching his own technical recommendations. However, the authors suggest that, in fact, it was these very controversial interventions that were experienced by Pankejeff as most therapeutic. Furthermore, the authors propose that Freud extracted from Pankejeff's symptoms those features that confirmed his theory of infantile sexuality and, in so doing, overlooked Pankejeff's grief and depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud and the image of man.

Discusses Freud's contributions to the modern image of man. Two figures stand out massively as the architects of our present-day conception of man: Darwin and Freud. Freud's was the more daring, the more revolutionary, and in a deep sense, the more poetic insight. Freud presented the image of man as the unfinished product of nature: struggling against unreason, impelled by driving inner vicissitudes and urges that had to be contained if man were to live in society, host alike to seeds of madness and majesty, never fully free from an infancy anything but innocent. What Freud was proposing was that man at best and man at worst is subject to a common set of explanations: good and evil grow from a common process. It is our heritage from Freud that the all-or-none distinction between mental illness and mental health has been replaced by a more humane conception of the continuity of these states. Freud's sense of the continuity of human conditions, of the likeness of the human plight, has made possible a deeper sense of the brotherhood of man. It has in any case tempered the spirit of punitiveness toward what once we took as evil and what we now see as sick. We have not yet resolved the dilemma posed by these two ways of viewing. Its resolution is one of the great moral challenges of our age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud's memory erased.

In the past 20 years, much has been written about the death of psychoanalysis and, along with it, its founder, Sigmund Freud. In this article, it is argued that a great deal of what has been erased is Freud's thinking on the importance of memory and the uncovering of repression for the therapeutic process and for mental health. From the beginning of his psychoanalytic writings, Freud was interested in the function that memory played in psychoanalysis, both as theory and as therapeutic technique. Although he continued to develop and revise his theory well into his eighties, Freud never ceased to believe in the utmost significance of uncovering repression for the human psyche. The aim here is to revive what is believed to be some of Freud's most important contributions on the subject of memory and to offer some suggestions as to why these intellectual gems have been neglected in recent years or, when not neglected, divorced from their originator. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Volume I. The Formative Years and the Great Discoveries, 1856-1900.

Reviews the book, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Volume I. The Formative Years and the Great Discoveries, 1856-1900 by Ernest Jones (see record 1954-03633-000). According to the reviewer, the first volume of the trilogy Dr. Jones promises is a book of unparalleled interest and importance for psychologists of all schools and theoretical persuasions. It presents an absorbing story which will never be more fully nor better told. The historical importance of Freud and his ideas hardly needs to be labored, and it is perhaps enough to say that this book is, in the reviewer's opinion, the best available introduction to an understanding of the man and of psychoanalysis as he developed it. For it presents the work as well as the life of Freud, and carefully traces the development of psychoanalytic ideas up to their first great climax in The Interpretation of Dreams. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Body and separation: Three variations on a theme.

One of the central insights put forward by Freud in his 1920 essay "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" was that the task of negotiating a separation from the mother goes hand-in-hand with the development of a sense of one's body as a discrete, bounded entity. My suggestion in this article is that these tasks, of separation from the mother and the task of developing a discrete sense of one's own body, occur simultaneously, such that the particular form in which each aspect of this dual task is accomplished bears the marks of, and has implications for, the other. I illustrate my claim with three case examples, arranged to form a continuum, in which the tangling of fears regarding these twin developmental tasks has been particularly pronounced. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Will the real Freud stand up, please?

Comments on an article by T. Parisi (see record 1987-21061-001). Parisi's article is helpful in placing Freud's theory construction in an accurate historical context. He correctly argued that views of Freud that portray him as a wrong-headed neurophysiologist, a frustrated physicalist, or a biological reductionist are wrong. B. Silverstein takes issue with Parisi on his view of Freud, without arguing for or against the Freudian position. Parisi pointed out that Freud's research and clinical experience helped him to see more clearly than anyone before or since that a theory of mind would have to successfully incorporate two fundamentally different classes of phenomena: the physical (biological) and the mental. While avoiding mysticism, Freud did hold to a dualistic position. Very early in his career, Freud espoused a dualistic-interactionist position in which equal but qualitatively different status was granted to the physical and to the mental. Even though Freud could not conceive of the mechanism that allowed mind and body to interact, he believed causal efficacy could flow in both directions. With psychoanalysis, Freud developed a theory of relationships between mind and body without providing a metaphysical or mechanical account of how the mind-body interaction that the theory assumed must occur did occur. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Why Freud failed: Some implications for neurophysiology and sociobiology.

Many parallels have recently been drawn between Freud's early work and the goals of the contemporary neurophysiology of mind and sociobiology. In this article it is argued that the portrayal of Freud as a reductionist and a biological determinist is incorrect. As a consequence, so is the perceived alignment of Freud with neurophysiology and sociobiology. But it is also true that, in his early work, Freud faced many of the same problems and issues that confront those interested in theories of mind and of human nature, and an understanding of how Freud faced these issues may inform our increasing interest in views of mind and behavior emanating from the life sciences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

From "Anna O." to Bertha Pappenheim: Transforming private pain into public action.

Bertha Pappenheim ("Anna O.") was treated for hysteria by J. Breuer when she was a young adult. As a mature adult she became a leading social worker, writer, and feminist activist in the German Jewish community. This article examines her therapy with Breuer, her own struggle for recovery, and some links between her earlier and later life, in particular the lack of intimate relationships in her life and her work against the victimization of women. Throughout the article psychoanalytic interpretations, social history, and feminist analyses are integrated to provide a contextualized examination of Pappenheim's life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Looking for Skinner and finding Freud.

Sigmund Freud and B. F. Skinner are often seen as psychology's polar opposites. It seems this view is fallacious. Indeed, Freud and Skinner had many things in common, including basic assumptions shaped by positivism and determinism. More important, Skinner took a clear interest in psychoanalysis and wanted to be analyzed but was turned down. His views were influenced by Freud in many areas, such as dream symbolism, metaphor use, and defense mechanisms. Skinner drew direct parallels to Freud in his analyses of conscious versus unconscious control of behavior and of selection by consequences. He agreed with Freud regarding aspects of methodology and analyses of civilization. In his writings on human behavior, Skinner cited Freud more than any other author, and there is much clear evidence of Freud's impact on Skinner's thinking. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)