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 (1916-17) 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” (1916-17, 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 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 today his views on hysteria and its psychical basis [or any other aspect of psychoanalysis] can 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.

(Breuer and Freud, 1893-5, pp. 185-186)