Freud's Psychoanalysis: Interpretation and Property

Psychoanalysis, writes Freud (1923), is “an art of interpretation” (239). In his major contributions to the history of psychoanalysis, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (1914) and An Autobiographical Study (1925), Freud revisits those defining moments when he first claims a knowledge unavailable to others, a knowledge that allows him to distinguish himself as psychoanalysis. In these critical encounters, property is allocated, identities are shaped, meaning is contested—the proper, in all senses, is distributed. Such scenes of interpretative election double as rites of initiation, passages into maturity that prove (both test and confirm) Freud's responsibility for psychoanalysis. Claiming responsibility rather than originality, Freud can assert a moral right to psychoanalysis without arguing for genetic ownership. He can advance an alternate origin story less indebted to the essentialist narrative of a decisive break between pre-psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis “proper.”1 Freud approaches ownership from the outside; he assumes responsibility for psychoanalysis, an assumption (“taking upon oneself”) that identifies him with psychoanalysis and, the one supporting and propping up the other, effectively creates both himself and Psychoanalysis in a single act. His paternity—which has more to do with affiliation than filiation—involves adopting contingent, local, even nonexistent properties and, through what amounts to an instituting act, contracting them into service as “psychoanalysis.”

In On the History, Freud recalls the silence with which his early researches were greeted by an unresponsive and even hostile scientific community.2 He is careful to add that this isolation is not without its compensations: in a familiar autobiographical topos, ascetic withdrawal generates mystical conversion. “I learnt to restrain speculative tendencies and to follow the unforgotten advice of my master, Charcot: to look at