The Aim of Psychoanalysis

Although I have tried to write this short paper in such a way that it can be understood without specific reference to any previous work of mine, it is in fact a supplement to my paper on 'Cognitive Development' (1968).

The aim of an analysis may be defined in various ways. One of these is that it is to help the patient understand, and so overcome, emotional impediments to his discovering what he innately already knows. My aim in this paper is to elaborate this statement.

It should be obvious from my reference to innate knowledge that it is with the cognitive aspect of instinct (instinctive knowledge) that I am most concerned; and that, since I am devoting a paper to it, I consider it to have been insufficiently stressed in psychoanalytic theory before. But, at this point, I am arrested by that inner voice which those who have been analysed acquire and which strives to continue the analysis long after it is over and those who did it are dead. 'You claim, ' so it seems to say, 'a creativity which you deny to us: the child we misconceived or misbegot is now to be correctly conceived or begotten by yourself. Remember that, in the inner world, parthenogenetic creativity is a megalomanic delusion. All you can do, and surely this is enough, is to allow your internal parents to come together and they will beget and conceive the child.' I believe this to be profoundly true. Freud, under the influence of his electrostatic model of the mind, with its cathexes and counter-cathexes, may have insufficiently stressed the cognitive element in instinct about which so little was known at the time. But the notion of innate knowledge, always latent in idealistic philosophy and recently systematically studied by ethologists, is not mine. All I have to do is to allow theories, taken from different fields, to fertilize each other.

In my previous paper (1968) I tried to make a start by allowing one of Bion's notions (that innate preconceptions mate with realizations to form concept