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‘I would not have believed … that psychoanalysis could mean so much to someone else or that anyone would be able to read so much in my words.’
Since Socrates, in European cultures one would be hard put to find a thinker and a scientist more humble, more self-questioning and more self-convinced than Sigmund Freud. From the very beginning, as his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess testifies, Freud had no doubt that he had through an act of heroic and unique courage undertaken to understand in himself, and others, what humans had always sought to repress, mythologise, or rationalise in terms other than the truth of the experience itself. To say what he was discovering, Freud was compelled to borrow the vocabulary of the language as it existed; but Freud had to distort and extend it to yield the meanings and insights he meant it to communicate. Hence a completely new language gradually crystallised in Freud's hermeneutics of human epistemology. Freud himself was fully and painfully aware that in time the concepts he had so diligently created to establish a new instrument of self-discovery, would get taken over by the vulgar zeal of shallow familiarity.
What Freud in affection had attributed to Lou Andreas–Salomé, Laplanche and Pontalis have with singular devotion and industry turned into an instrument of research and discovery of what Freud's concepts really entail. It was a daunting task that they have accomplished with an authentic veracity and exactitude.
March, 1973
M. Masud R. Khan
Aversion to psycho-analysis sometimes takes the form of disparaging comments about its terminology. Naturally, psycho-analysts do not endorse the abuse or