Psychoanalysis Today and Tomorrow

It is difficult to say exactly when psychoanalysis was born, even more difficult to specify its field at present and virtually impossible to predict what it will become in the future.

We may agree with Strachey (see Freud, 1896, p. 151, note 1), (or Breuer & Freud, 1895, p. 48, note 2) that the word 'psychoanalysis' appears for the first time in 'L'hérédité et l'étiologie des névroses' (Freud, 1896), written for the Revue de Neurologie; however, there is no doubt that the transition from associative coercion to psychoanalysis was slow and gradual. This is evident from the final case histories of the Studies on Hysteria(Breuer & Freud, 1895), especially those of Miss Lucy and Fräulein Elisabeth von R, in which Freud increasingly comes to realise that forgetting is substantially bound up with resistance to remembering. The conceptual step, on the other hand, is clear-cut: from coercion with application of the hands to free association.

It is, therefore, a sufficiently close approximation to say that psychoanalysis has now been in existence for a century, divided into two halves by Freud's death.

During his lifetime, by virtue of his incomparable genius and great authority—which, as Roazen, Grosskurth, Speziale-Bagliacca and others have pointed out, was not always free of authoritarian elements—Freud was able to contain within himself (but only up to a point, as some escaped his grasp) the various strands which de facto made up psychoanalysis and which separated into schools at the end of the 1930s. In these new strands of thought it is possible to discern here and there the traces left by Jung and Adler, the great dissidents of the second decade of the twentieth century. Like other authors, I believe that after fifty years, as the result of a mourning process which required a long period of working through, we analysts have been more prepared to acknowledge the painful loss resulting from Freud's death; we are now finally emerging from a kind of theoretical orphanho