Presidential Address Variations on Some Freudian Themes

As we have reached the end of a long week in the course of which most of you have been working very hard, I felt that in this address I should offer you something of a diversion. All I propose to do is to share some thoughts that have occurred to me during the last few years on all kinds of subjects that matter a great deal to all of us. I may have already published some of them in one form or another, but the majority of them are casual reflections or old annotations hurriedly scribbled on a scrap of paper in response to contributions from colleagues and patients. What I have to offer could well be regarded as somewhat iconoclastic but wisdom does not come with age, as Bernard Shaw once said. Only experience increases as we get old and that can be oppressive or liberating.

As we approach the end of the century, psychoanalysis appears to become even more difficult than we ever suspected. Some of the changes that have been introduced have certainly not been easy to accept. Yet whenever a more audacious view, possibly a challenge to classical analysis, is put forward, it is de rigueur to quote Freud, no matter how often he had already contradicted or altered that view himself. The haunting thought for most psychoanalysts is: What would Freud have said about this or that?

It is said that when Robert Schumann heard Chopin playing his Variations on a theme by Mozart (Là ci darem la mano, to be precise) he turned to a friend, saying: 'That man is a genius'. Would Freud have said anything like that of some of the innovators in our field during the last momentous forty years? We would like to think, though, that in the face of some real advances, even if they could have been considered variations at first, Freud might have been as generous as Tchaikovsky. 'Look at what he has done to my piece—he has altered everything', bewailed Tchaikovsky, when the manuscript of his Variations on a rococo theme was returned to him by its first performer, Wilhelm Fitzenhagen. 'T