Freud's Self-Analysis and the Nature of Psychoanalytic Criticism

In the spring of 1897, Freud turned to an intensive and systematic self-analysis which led him to the discovery of the Oedipus complex. This utterly astonishing feat is one of the great examples of what Henri F. Ellenberger (1970) has called the 'creative illness'—the process of discovery on which depth-psychology has so far been dependent for achieving revolutions that destroy so-called normal assumptions about the human mind. In his essential work, Ellenberger (1970) provides substantial support for his claim that the science of depth-psychology is founded on personal experiences of a special kind, and that these experiences cannot be 'reduced' to the principles followed by other sciences. In the specific instance of psychoanalysis, it would be hard for anyone to disagree with the view offered by Laplanche & Pontalis (1967, p. 454): that its discovery 'is intimately bound up with the personal exploration that Freud undertook of himself'. By now various aspects of Freud's self-analysis have been studied critically and some important conclusions have been suggested. One writer (Buxbaum, 1951) believes that perhaps Freud's major limitations as a psychologist stem from his inability to get at the root of his psychosexual involvement with Wilhelm Fliess, his all-important friend, supporter, authority-figure and de facto analyst at the time of the self-analysis. Another (Schorske, 1973) suggests that Freud's psychic needs at that time steered him away from active participation in the political life of his era and caused him to use psychoanalytic theory as a virtual substitute for the realities of political existence. A very recent argument, constructed with great learning and persuasiveness, has been made in order to demonstrate that the crucial limitation of Freud's self-analysis was its failure to lead him to an awareness of his primary identification with his mother, a failing so serious as to make his sel