Notes on Freud's Personality and Style of Thought

ADDENDUM:1. Abstract from Meeting of the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society, December 4, 1964."Freud's Cognitive Style, " Robert R. Holt, Ph.D.

Dr. Holt conceptualized Freud's cognitive style primarily in terms of categories of rhetoric, although other categories were used as well. He described Freud as being a man of the obsessive-compulsive personality type who nevertheless possessed an extraordinary intuitive gift. He had a predominantly verbal intelligence and mode of thinking. He was extraordinarily gifted at memory, concentration, etc., and had no notable gifts along sensori-motor lines.

Freud's thinking dealt in antitheses and polarities: Eros versus Thanatos, analysis versus synthesis, Conscious versus Unconscious. Antithetical dynamic concepts characterized his style. Freud's thinking shows an unusual tolerance for intolerance, for inconsistency, and ambiguity. He did not, when he came upon something new, revise his theories completely. Rather, he would simply add the new. For example, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, first published between 1900 and 1905, went through several editions until as late as 1925. Although during this time Freud had changed his conceptual model radically, he did not make any new revisions but simply added things. "Freud built theory, then, much as FDR constructed the Executive branch of the government: when something wasn't working well, he seldom reorganized; he just supplied another agency or concept to do the job."

Freud's tendency was toward sweeping generalizations—to stretch the bounds of his concepts. Sexuality is a notorious example of this. In his earliest papers, the sexual etiology of the neuroses was literal seduction involving stimulation of the genitals. Soon the concept of sexuality was expanded to include all of the partial drives, based on the oral, anal, and urethral erogenous zones. Then he extended the con