Freud's Fundamental Psychiatric Orientation1

I am quite aware that a psycho-analyst needs no small amount of tact and restraint whenever in the course of his work he goes beyond the standard lines of interpretation, and that his listeners or readers will only follow him as far as their own familiarity with analytic technique will allow them. He has every reason therefore to guard against the risk that an increased display of acumen on his part may be accompanied by a diminution in the certainty and trustworthiness of his results. It is thus only natural that one analyst will tend too much in the direction of caution and another too much in the direction of boldness.

The above is the characteristically cool statement of Freud made at the very outset of his first attempt at an interpretation of the Schreber case.

It is not very difficult to sense in this statement a certain bold defensiveness, and at the same time a certain protest against that timidity of interpretation which, while giving the impression of caution, does in reality lack both scientific prudence and creative imagination. It is no wonder that Freud felt it necessary to put the reader on guard against imprudent psycho-analysis, and to put himself on guard both against too much caution and too little boldness. It was the year 1911, a critical time in the history of psychiatry, when the various psychiatric trends of the last part of the nineteenth century converged and diverged in most dramatic and baffling fashion. Only some fifteen years before, Kraepelin had formulated his purely Hippocratic conception of dementia praecox, and the organically minded Eugen Bleuler was already introducing a new concept—that of schizophrenia—which replaced not only in form but also in substance the whole structure of Kraepelinian psychiatry. About four years previously Jung had written his monograph still using the term 'dementia praecox, ' still using the orientation of the organicist, and yet offering some brilliant suggestions as to the psychodynamics of this