Chapter 1. Introduction. Second Thoughts

It is customary to find in a book of collected papers on psychoanalysis, a number of case histories; this book is no exception. Ostensibly there is an account of the patient's history, some detailed reports of sessions with the patient's associations and the interpretations the analyst has given. It has always seemed to me that such reports are open to the objection that the narrative and the interpretations given are only two different ways of saying the same thing, or two different things said about the same fact. With the years my suspicion has ripened into conviction. I have attempted to formulate this conviction in three books, Learning from Experience, Elements of Psycho-Analysis, and Transformations, each one carrying the discussion a little further and making the formulations more precise.

Now the time has come to reprint old papers, I find that the change in my views about psychoanalytic method makes me unwilling to let them go out without showing what that change is. For those who want the papers as they were originally printed, here they are, but I have added a commentary which involves an evolutionary change of opinion. I do not regard any narrative purporting to be a report of fact, either of what the patient said or of what I said, as worth consideration as a ‘factual account’ of what happened. In the first place, I do not attribute to memory the significance it is usually given. The fact of involuntary distortions is so well established by psychoanalysis itself that it is absurd to behave as if our reports were somehow exempted from our own findings. Memory is born of, and only suited to, sensuous experience. As psychoanalysis is concerned with experience that is not sensuous – who supposes that anxiety has shape, colour or smell? – records based on perception of that which is

sensible are records only of the psychoanalytically irrelevant. Therefore in any account of a session, no matter how soon it may be made after the event or by what means, memor