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Mind if I lie down on the couch for a while? I really need a session. And please, turn off that vibrating pillow, meaning your free-floating mind. We want an hour of analysis, more or less in the wild. The time has come to put Psychoanalysis on the couch.
My name is Psychoanalysis. Yes, THE Psychoanalysis - female in gender, mind you. I am close to one hundred years old. The exact date of my birth is unknown. This, at least, has meant I have been spared the astrological readings, so far. The exact time of my birth is obscure, and what is more, so is the parentage. There is of course no doubt that Sigmund Freud claims paternity. But when pressed in public, he has always had to defend the claim:
For psycho-analysis is my creation; for ten years I was the only person who concerned himself with it, and all the dissatisfaction which the new phenomenon [he means me!] aroused in my contemporaries has been poured out in the form of criticisms on my head … I have never heard that Breuer's great share in psycho-analysis has earned him a proportionate measure of criticism and abuse. As I have long recognized that to stir up contradiction and arouse bitterness is the inevitable fate of psycho-analysis, I have come
First delivered as a presentation at the Psychoanalytic Seminar of Zurich in January 1992 as part of the cycle, ‘On the Terminability of Psychoanalysis.’ German-language original published in Entfernte Wahrheit [Distant Truth] , edited by Martin Kuster. Stage performance in Italian by Stefano Benni at the 50-year celebration of Psicoterapia e scienze umane, Bologna, December 17, 2016. Translated from the German by Nicholas Evangelos Levis, The Graduate Center, CUNY, 2017. With thanks to Kate Kelley for editorial assistance.
BERTHOLD ROTHSCHILD, born 1937 in Zurich, Switzerland, where he studied medicine and later specialized in psychiatry, is now a retired psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He has been teaching and supervising for over 40 years in Switzerland (Zurich Psychoa
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First delivered as a presentation at the Psychoanalytic Seminar of Zurich in January 1992 as part of the cycle, ‘On the Terminability of Psychoanalysis.’ German-language original published in Entfernte Wahrheit [Distant Truth] , edited by Martin Kuster. Stage performance in Italian by Stefano Benni at the 50-year celebration of Psicoterapia e scienze umane, Bologna, December 17, 2016. Translated from the German by Nicholas Evangelos Levis, The Graduate Center, CUNY, 2017. With thanks to Kate Kelley for editorial assistance.
BERTHOLD ROTHSCHILD, born 1937 in Zurich, Switzerland, where he studied medicine and later specialized in psychiatry, is now a retired psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He has been teaching and supervising for over 40 years in Switzerland (Zurich Psychoa