My Psychoanalytic Journey

(1) Psychoanalysis and the Sense of Guilt (1958) Freud believed that guilt was a type of anxiety in which love and hate coexisted. Guilt, he thought, developed in early childhood in the context of the child’s first three-person (triangular) relationship. In the Oedipal situation, a boy develops sexual desires for his mother, and in hopes of having his mother to himself, he comes to hate his father and long for his death. At the same time, the boy loves and respects his father. And so this ambivalence — both hate and love for his father — results in his first experience of guilt. In time, the boy comes to introject his father, thus giving birth to his superego. Klein believed that guilt developed before the Oedipal stage in the context of the two-person (mother-child) relationship. She believed that the infant at times feels aggressive, destructive impulses toward its mother. As the infant comes to learn that the mother has survived her aggression, she attempts to make reparations and f

One: Hermeneutic Analysis vs. Deductivism Summers discusses two different psychoanalytic traditions, one which prioritizes patient experience and the other which prioritizes “abstract theoretical concepts.” Freud at different points in his writings advocated both traditions. In Studies on Hysteria, The Interpretation of Dreams, and his papers on technique, he favored a hermeneutic method, believing it was the analyst’s job to discover and interpret each patient’s individual unconscious experience. In other writings — e.g., The Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915), and An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1930) — he advanced what he believed were universal truths about human nature and psychopathology. For instance, he came to believe that all neuroses resulted from repressed Oedipal conflicts. This first tradition (hermeneutic analysis) often conflicts with the second tradition (deductivism). As Summer writes, “An analytic stance that presumes re

Chapter Two Freud’s primary aim is to show that dreams can be interpreted. Many lay individuals share this view, but they interpret dreams in a manner in which Freud finds unsatisfactory. Some believe that dreams should be interpreted in a symbolic manner. In the Book of Genesis, for instance, Joseph interpreted the Pharaoh’s dream of seven fat cows followed by seven lean cows to mean that seven years of feast would be followed by seven years of famine. The problem with this type of interpretation is that it’s not based on any type of method; rather, successful interpretation depends upon “hitting on a clever idea” or intuition. Others use the decoding method to interpret dreams. According to this method, every dream element contains a universal meaning. So, for example, if a certain letter appears in a dream, then one should consult a dream book to find out what the letter means. The problem with this method is that it depends upon the dream book, “and of this we have no guarantee.” F