Chapter 14 Comments on the Psychoanalytic Concept of Work (1964/6a)

This paper is a revised version of a paper given in German to the 1st Psycho-Analytical Congress in Frankfurt am Main, 1964, on the occasion of the opening of the Sigmund Freud Institut. It was published in German in Psyche 20 (5) (1966), and has been translated into English for this book.

I shall attempt in this paper to pursue one particular aspect of psychoanalysis; namely, the role that our theory and practice assign the concept of psychic work. Yet since this one aspect affects so many areas, my comments cannot be comprehensive. My interests are primarily clinical in nature, and I intend to present more an examination of our tools than a description of new ideas.

First I will briefly refer to a few specific kinds of psychic work that, thanks to Freud’s research, form the main foundation of psychoanalysis. They are dream-work, joke-work, creative work, and the work of mourning. I will limit myself to the important elements of Freud’s descriptions, and not refer to the rich literature on this topic. Finally I will view the analytic situation from the perspective of the concept of work.

It was apparent even with the pre-analytic, hypnotic cathartic method that the therapeutic process demanded work on the part of the patient. The work in that method involved remembering each experience associated with the symptom of hysteria. It was difficult and painful, and the patient required much help, which the doctor provided by hypnosis, talk, encouragement, sympathetic words, questions, and so forth. Inferred from these memories were the genesis of the symptoms of hysteria, the psychic trauma, the strangulated affect, and pathological forgetting, which actively expels the pathological experiences from consciousness and thus removes them from the thought process. Our attention was directed especially at the difference between normal and pathological forgetting since the interest in mental work proceeds from the clinical observation that

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