Internationale Zeitschrift für Ärztliche Psychoanalyse

1. On the Psychological Foundation of Freudism. Dr. Luise V. Karpinska.

2. The Activity of Unconscious Death Wishes.—

3. A Contribution to the Understanding of the Tic. Dr. J. Sadger, Vienna.

1. On the Psychological Foundation of Freudism.—The investigation of the psychic mechanism of the neuroses was the starting point of the Freudian psychology.

One of the first analogies noted by the author is the close resemblance of the psychoanalytic method to the experimental method. In both cases not merely the external observation is regarded as sufficient, but the subject's introspection is needed also; and in both cases the subject has to report without critique just what he observes.

There are, however, differences between the two methods. Experimental psychology seeks the general conditions of psychical phenomena; while psychoanalysis, on the other hand, takes the individual concrete experience in its immediate, manifold, psychical reality, does not divorce itself from the individual person, but seeks to understand their interrelationship.

The psychoanalytic method favors the finding of affect-constellations, since any critique is excluded. Thus freed, the conscious affects of our intimate personal life may be pictured.

The author finds a close analogy between the conceptions of Herbart and Freud. They both start from the presupposition that unconscious psychic causal connections are necessary to understand conscious phenomena. These presuppositions are developed by Herbart in the well-known manner. While Herbart's theory is a dynamics of ideas, Freud's theory is a dynamics of affects, these affects being separable from ideas and being capable of increase, transference, and diminution. The “false connection” between affect and idea Freud calls “Transposition.” Thus arise phobias and compulsions. There is also a peculiarity of feelings, the so-called “ambivalence,” meaning opposite feelings for the same thing, i. e., love and hate for the same person.