Sigmund Freud

So my guess...

Maybe this is a little bit like my own Freudian slip here, but I just feel like her attitude is just kind of like, oh, yeah, there it is.

And she touched it.

She's not into it, but he's like, whoa! Yeah.

you did a good job and it can play a role in both the problem and the solution.

Let's just talk about it in the problem side for a minute, right? So by courtroom of the mind, what I'm referring to there is that, and this goes all the way back even to Sigmund Freud's observation that we kind of, all humans are hourly and daily.

going through our lives, doing away with the people who get in our way or who insult us.

So we're almost always and endlessly, obsessively putting other people on trial inside our minds, judging whether they've offended us or not and whether they're guilty, deciding whether they should be punished or not.

And unfortunately, Dr. Sarno, the back surgeon, was not the best researcher in psychology in the world.

But he took his theories more toward a Freudian approach, and he contextualized a great deal of reasons that people were experiencing pain.

as being related to suppressed anger, which is a very Freudian concept, as opposed to today what most specialists in this area more consider to be a sort of a suppressed stress reaction to kind of life stressors or major life changes.

Anyway, so he basically threw away his scalpel and went over other principles related to the pain management.

And, you know, what he discovered was that it was people's desperation for pain relief and people's contextualizing the existence of pain that there was a unresolved medical issue.

And it may sound maybe obvious today, but it definitely was not obvious at the time, so in early 30s.

Because both of them, Severn and Ferenczi and Bonaparte and Freud, in both of these dyads, the problem was that how to offer the analysand a space to relive and also create a safe space that this can be, what can really help.

And Freud was not able to do that.

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This led her eventually to pursue a dissertation in history, and it was focused on the history of psychoanalysis in Central Europe.

She discovered Sanda Forenzi's work, and she was drawn to that, he being a student and clinician devoted to the study and treatment of patients suffering from trauma.

And he used an approach different than Freud's.

I think it's where Shihei gives one of her most useful insights because it reverses the main way in which repetition has been framed by mainstream psychology.

Sigmund Freud and his inheritors used the concept of repetition compulsion to pathologize this experience that we often have of finding ourselves in the same toxic situation over and over again.

Like, why is every relationship like this? Why do I always wind up hurt in the same way? And the answer that the Freudians basically give, and then this seeps into pop psychology, is that, hey, you know what? You're asking for it.

You remember this awful thing and like a moth attracted to the flame, you just come back and you start circling it again until you get burnt.

And what you're trying to do, this is the sort of, you know, generous interpretation that comes out of that is you're trying to re-experience a difficult situation so that you can experience perhaps a different outcome or you can express a kind of dignity or mastery in relation to that difficult situation.

What's actually going on and what really repeats itself in the world is power and oppression.

And the repetition of the incursions of power and oppression are what trap people into submissive and predetermined loops.

Classical Freudians are describing a kind of internal spiral, shame spiral, that you have to work on independently unless you want to keep this stuff happening to you because you're asking for it.

Times about grief and humor and darkness and humor.

And I have to just read this quote from Freud because, of course, that was the brilliance of the show, right? The mix, right? of darkness and humor.

So Freud said, humor is not resigned, it is rebellious.

It signifies not only the triumph of the ego, but also of the pleasure principle.

which is able here to assert itself against the unkindness of the real circumstances.

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the collected reminiscences are called the dream material we treat this material by a universally valid scientific method if you ever have to work up experimental material you compare the individual units and classify them according to similarities you proceed exactly in the same way with dream material you look for the common traits either of a formal or a substantial nature certain extremely common prejudices must be got rid of i have always noticed that the beginner is looking for one trait or another and tries to make his material conform to his expectation this condition i noticed especially among those colleagues who were formerly more or less passionate opponents of psychoanalysis their opposition being based on well-known prejudices and misunderstandings when i had the chance of analyzing them whereby they obtained at last a real insight into the method the first mistake generally made in their own psychoanalytic work was that they did violence to the material by their own preconceived opinion they gave vent to their former prejudice against psychoanalysis in their attitude towards the material which they could not estimate objectively but only according to their subjective fantasies if one would have the courage to sift dream material one must not recoil from any parallel the dream material generally consists of very heterogeneous associations out of which it is sometimes very difficult to deduce the tertium comparisonis i refrain from giving detailed examples as it is quite impossible to handle in a lecture the voluminous material of a dream i might call your attention to rank's article in the jahrbruch ein traum der sichseberdutte a dream interpreted by itself there you will see what an extensive material must be taken into consideration for comparison hence for the interpretation of the unconscious we proceed in the same way as is universal when a conclusion is to be drawn by classifying material the objection is very often heard why does the dream have an unconscious content at all in my view this objection is as unscientific as possible every actual psychological moment has its special history every sentence i pronounce has beside the intended meaning known to me another historical meaning and it is possible that its second meaning is entirely different from its conscious meaning i express myself on purpose somewhat paradoxically i do not mean that i could explain every individual sentence in its historical meaning this is a thing easier to do in larger and more detailed contributions it will be clear to every one that a poem is apart from its manifest content especially characteristic of the poet in regard to its form its content and its matter of origin although the poet in his poem gave expression to the mood of a moment the literary historian will find things in it and behind it which the poet never foresaw the analysis which the literary historian draws from the poet's material is exactly the method of psychoanalysis the psychoanalytic method generally speaking can be compared with historical analysis and synthesis suppose for instance we did not understand the meaning of baptism as practiced in our churches to-day the priest tells us that baptism means the admission of the child into the christian community but this does not satisfy us why is the child sprinkled with water to understand this ceremony we must choose out of the history of rites those human traditions which pertain to this subject and thus we get material for comparison to be considered from different standpoints one the baptism means obviously an initiation ceremony a consecration therefore all the traditions containing initiation rites have to be consulted to the baptism takes place with water this special form requires another series of traditions namely those rites where water is used three the person to be baptized is sprinkled with water here are to be consulted all those rites where the initiated is sprinkled or submerged et cetera for all the reminiscences of folk-lore the superstitious practices must be remembered which in any way run parallel with the symbolism of the baptismal act in this way we get a comparative scientific study of religion as regards baptism we accordingly discover the different elements out of which the act of baptism has arisen we ascertain further its original meaning and we become at the same time acquainted with the rich world of myths that have contributed to the foundations of religions and thus we are enabled to understand the manifold and profound meanings of baptism the analyst proceeds in the same way with the dream he collects the historical parallels to every part of the dream even the remotest and he tries to reconstruct the psychological history of the dream with its fundamental meaning exactly as in the analysis of the act of baptism thus through the monographic treatment of the dream we get a profound and beautiful insight into that mysterious fine and ingenious network of unconscious determination we get an insight which as i said before can only be compared with the historical understanding of any act which we had hitherto regarded in a superficial and one-sided way this digression on the psychoanalytic method has seemed to me to be unavoidable i was obliged to give you an account of the method and its position in methodology by reason of all the extensive misunderstandings which are constantly attempting to discredit it i do not doubt that there are superficial and improper interpretations of the method but an intelligent critic ought never to allow this to be a reproach to the method itself any more than a bad surgeon should be urged as an objection to the common validity of surgery i do not doubt that some inaccurate descriptions and conceptions of the psychoanalytic method have arisen on the part of the psychoanalytic school itself but this is due to the fact that because of their education in natural science it is difficult for medical men to attain a full grasp of historical or philological method although they instinctively handle it rightly the method i have described to you in this general way is the method that i adopt and for which i assume the scientific responsibility in my opinion it is absolutely reprehensible and unscientific to question about dreams or to try to interpret them directly this is not a methodological but an arbitrary proceeding which is its own punishment for it is as unproductive as every false method if i have made the attempt to demonstrate to you the principle of the psychoanalytic school by dream analysis it is because the dream is one of the clearest instances of those contents of the conscious whose basis eludes any plain and direct understanding when anyone knocks in a nail with a hammer to hang something up we can understand every detail of the action but it is otherwise with the act of baptism where every phase is problematic we call these actions of which the meaning and the aim is not directly evident symbolic actions or symbols on the basis of this reasoning we call a dream symbolic as a dream is a psychological formation of which the origin meaning and aim are obscure inasmuch as it represents one of the purest products of unconscious constellation as freud strikingly says the dream is the via regia to the unconscious besides the dream we can note many effects of unconscious constellation we have in the association experiments a means for establishing exactly the influence of the unconscious we find those effects in the disturbances of the experiment which i have called the indicators of the complex the task which the association experiment gives to the person experimented upon is so extraordinarily easy and simple that even children can accomplish it without difficulty it is therefore very remarkable that so many disturbances of an intentional action should be noted in this experiment the only reasons or causes of these disturbances which can usually be shown are the partly conscious partly not conscious constellations caused by the so-called complexes in the greater number of these disturbances we can without difficulty establish the relation to images of emotional complexes we often need a psychoanalytic method to explain these relations that is we have to ask the person experimented upon or the patient what associations he can give to the disturbed reactions we thus gain the historical matter which serves as a basis for our judgment the intelligent objection has already been made that the person experimented upon could say what he liked in other words any nonsense this objection is made i believe in the unconscious supposition that the historian who collects the metaphors monograph is an idiot incapable of distinguishing real parallels from apparent ones and true documents from crude falsifications the professional man has means at his disposal by which clumsy mistakes can be avoided with certainty and the slighter ones very probably the mistrust of our opponents is here really delightful for any one who understands psychoanalytic work it is a well-known fact that it is not so very difficult to see where there is coherence and where there is none moreover in the first place these fraudulent declarations are very significant of the person experimented upon and secondly in general rather easily to be recognized as fraudulent in association experiments we are able to recognize the very intense effects produced by the unconscious in what are called complex interventions These mistakes made in the association experiment are nothing but the prototypes of the mistakes made in everyday life which are for the greater part to be considered as interventions.

Freud brought together such material in his book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

These include the so-called symptomatic actions which from another point of view might equally as well be called symbolic actions and the real failures to carry out actions such as forgetting, slips of the tongue, etc., all these phenomena are the effect of unconscious constellations and therefore so many entrance gates into the domain of the unconscious when such errors are cumulative they are designated as neurosis which from this aspect looks like a defective action and therefore the effect of unconscious constellations or complex interventions the association experiment is thus not directly a means to unlock the unconscious but rather a technique for obtaining a good selection of defective reactions which can then be used by psychoanalysis at least this is its most reliable form of application at the present time i may however mention that it is possible that it may furnish other especially valuable facts which would grant us some direct glimpses but i do not consider this problem sufficiently ripe to speak about investigations in this direction are going on I hope that through my explanation of our method you may have gained somewhat more confidence in its scientific character, so that you will be by this time more inclined to agree that the fantasies which have been hitherto discovered by means of psychoanalytic work are not merely arbitrary suppositions and illusions of psychoanalysts.

Perhaps you are even inclined to listen patiently to what those products of unconscious fantasies can tell us.

of this i

gave a detailed example in my work avant lungen und symbol der libido the fantasy of self-sacrifice means sacrificing infantile wishes i have shown this in the work just mentioned and in the same place i have referred to the parallels in the history of religions the problems of the incest complex freud has a special conception of the incest complex which has given rise to heated controversy he starts from the fact that the oedipus complex is generally unconscious and conceives this as the result of a repression of a moral kind it is possible that i am not expressing myself quite correctly when i give you freud's view in these words at any rate according to him the oedipus complex seems to be repressed that is seems to be removed into the unconscious by a reaction from the conscious tendencies It almost looks as if the Oedipus complex would develop into consciousness if the development of the child were to go on without restraint and if no cultural tendencies influenced it.

Freud calls this barrier which prevents the Oedipus complex from ripening the incest barrier.

You know, we do things, and then we feel terrible about the way we did that, or we have experiences that don't make any sense, like anxiety when there's nothing to be afraid of.

So why does that happen? Well, I think when, you know, Freud said, it comes out of your unconscious.

Well, okay, and everybody's kind of worried about that.

What is this unconscious? I don't want to have one of those.

In fact, I think that's rarely the right choice.

Alfred Adler, who is a contemporary of Freud and Jung, he said that you should not take on other people's tasks.

And that's one of those things where I'm going to make sure that you're going to be a great teacher and I'm going to force that into you.

Well, you can't really force that into into people.