A Brief Side Trip

The self-study of psychoanalysis has been something of an on-and-off preoccupation of mine that began when I was in my teens and continues to this day. And let me be very clear right at the outset here that when I speak of psychoanalysis I'm speaking exclusively of the writings and theories of its creator, Sigmund Freud, and not those of his followers and successors nor of the simplifications and bastardizations of psychoanalysis that call themselves psychoanalysis today, nor of any number of a myriad of other psychologies and psychotherapies that go by any number of other names but still refer informally to their disciplines as psychoanalysis.

My study began not at the beginning, so to speak, but at a little past the middle, also so to speak, with my reading of Freud's slender volume, The Ego and The Id (1923). So riveted was I by what I read that I went on to read everything of Freud's on which I could lay my hot little hands — everything, that is, except those writings intended by Freud to be introductory texts on psychoanalysis for the non-specialist: Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1910), Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1916-17), and, New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1933). Why I skipped the reading of those elementary volumes (i.e., elementary compared with Freud's theoretical and metapsychological writings intended for professionals) is something of a mystery to me as they were among the most readily available. But skip them I did, and for reasons equally mysterious have just this past week taken up reading the latter two and found myself astonished anew by Freud's lucidity of explication of even the most difficult material, and by his disarming candor concerning what psychoanalysis understands about the structure and dynamics of the human psychic apparatus and what it doesn't yet understand, and which types of pathological disturbances of that apparatus psychoanalysis is competent to deal with therapeutically and which not.

Also astonishing in the light of the ready availability of these volumes is just how appallingly ignorant of the fundamental theoretical concepts of psychoanalysis are so many of today's most strident critics of psychoanalysis, including those with professional credentials who ought to know better (see this 2004 S&F post for more on this). It's almost as if (perhaps precisely as if) those critics had a professional or personal investment in showing the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis to be the mere effusions of a sexually obsessed, imaginative 19th-century writer of speculative essays rather than the fruit of the rigorous investigations of a brilliant and relentlessly self-critical physician whose discoveries of the structure and dynamics of the human mind were light-years ahead of their time even though they had to be arrived at using the limited technical methods and processes at their discoverer's disposal, and be expressed by him metaphorically using the limited technical language of the time in order to be communicated at all.

But not to worry. Strident critics notwithstanding, Freud and the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis will ultimately prevail, and those strident critics recognized for the ankle-nipping lilliputians they so clearly are.

Trust me.