Chapter 1 Rediscovering Psychoanalysis

From the time I was six or seven years old, I was aware of psychoanalysis as a form of treatment for psychological problems, such as feeling unhappy and frightened all the time; but it was not until I was 16, on reading Freud’s (1916–1917) Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, that I first discovered psychoanalysis as a set of ideas concerning how we come to be who we are. In using the term discovered, I am borrowing a word from a memorable sentence in that introductory lecture series: “I shall not, however, tell it [psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method] to you but shall insist on your discovering it yourself” (1916–1917, p. 431). How better to be introduced to psychoanalysis than by means of an invitation not to be taught, but to discover?

I have spent a good deal of my life since that initial discovery rediscovering psychoanalysis. In an important sense, a psychoanalytic life cannot be spent in any other way. After all, psychoanalysis, both as a set of ideas and as a therapeutic method, is from beginning to end a process of thinking and rethinking, dreaming and re-dreaming, discovering and rediscovering.

The thread that weaves through every page of this book is the idea that it is the analyst’s task to engage in a process of rediscovering psychoanalysis in everything that he or she does: in each analytic session, in each supervisory hour, in each meeting of a psychoanalytic seminar, in each reading of an analytic work, and so on.

Rediscovering psychoanalysis entails an act of freedom of thought and an act of humility; an act of renewal and an act of fresh discovery; an act of thinking for oneself and an act of recognition that

no one who attempts to put forward to-day his views on hysteria and its psychical basis [or any other aspect of psychoanalysis] can

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avoid repeating a great quantity of other people’s thoughts … Originality is claimed for very little of what will be found in the following pages.

In this book, I wil