“The Principle of Multiple Function”: Revisiting a Classic Seventy-Five Years Later

Robert Waelder was widely regarded as a preeminent psychoanalytic theoretician, teacher, and author.1 Born in 1900, the same year that Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, Waelder died in 1967. While in his twenties, he was already prominently recognized in the circle of Viennese psychoanalysts for his incisive and searching intelligence and the intellectual vitality afforded him by his prior education in physical chemistry. His mastery of Freud's theoretical evolution was leavened by his cultural and literary erudition, and when Freud's radical theoretical proposals appeared in 1926 in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, there was no one as well prepared as Robert Waelder to explain to psychoanalysts everywhere how to integrate Freud's prior views with his revolutionary new proposals about the relation of anxiety, defense, and symptoms. “The Principle of Multiple Function: Observations on OverDetermination” was written with this as its main purpose.2

With the erosion of time, it is often not appreciated today that reading Waelder's classic paper without this essential contextual link to Freud's historic monograph alters the meaning of the paper substantially. In fact, Waelder discussed Freud's revolutionary proposals of 1926 three times. The first was his 1928 review of Inhibitions,