Freud's Self-Analysis and His Scientific Ideas*

In a recent study of the manner in which Freud altered some of his hypotheses, Sadow and his collaborators (1968), suggested that a successful piece of self-analytic work had been the source of clinical evidence on which Freud had erected each portion of his scientific edifice. The fact that some of his momentous early discoveries had come about in the course of his self-analysis has been vividly illustrated in the Fliess correspondence (Bonaparte, Freud & Kris, 1950). Erikson has written that this correspondence reveals

“… that basic psychological insight cannot be approached without the involvement (and not gained without the analysis) of the observer's impulses and defenses …”

Sachs (1944) also believed that Freud “had made his own mind his chief laboratory, his untiring self-analysis became the basis for all his analytic discoveries.”

Freud's solution of the puzzle of understanding dreams through successful analysis of his own “Dream of Irma's Injection” (1900) and his discovery of the universal Oedipus complex by achieving insight into his infantile libidinal wishes toward his mother and aggression against his father (Kris, 1950), are the most prominent examples of the process described by all these studies. Yet the examples of Freud's self-analytic discoveries have thus far covered only the period before 1900. The purpose of this historical essay is to show that Freud's later scientific ideas may have been the fruit of similar introspective efforts.