Consider a strategy for teaching Freud in which the educational goal is to present candidates with an integration of the historical and the concept based methods. These two approaches can be combined by following the questions that Freud asked himself, making it possible to weave the past and the present of psychoanalytic thinking together in a lively way.
The didactic emphasis is shifted from Freud's thinking to what he was thinking about and the questions he was trying to answer. It places Freud's contributions in a context of evolving ideas and allows candidates to think about the relevance of his thinking for questions we are still asking today. The method involves a dialogue, a tension between the history of Freud's ideas and the evolution of his concepts. We will try to give a feel for this strategy in relation to two of Freud's seminal works.
Freud himself suggests this method. In his preface to the second edition of the Preliminary Communication, he wrote, “I can give no better advice to anyone interested in the development of catharsis into psychoanalysis than to begin with the Studies on Hysteria and thus follow the path that I myself have trodden.” In these early cases, Freud asks what hidden factors could account for the perceptible discontinuities between apparent symptoms and presumed but unknown causes.
He comes to appreciate the power of unconscious ideas and feelings, the role of conflict and psychological defense, as well as the relationship of pathogenic memories to their somatic expression. He discovers free association, resistance, and begins to understand transference. He presents his first ideas about pathogenesis and therapeutic action and investigates the impact of reality on mental representation and memory.
Since these are issues that we wrestle with today, if we can establish a kind of fluctuating figure and ground between past and present, thinking about clinical phenomena comes alive as a process. Candidates learn how to think about the mind, not just what to think about it.
Consider this second example. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud both demonstrates that dreams have meanings that can be interpreted and presents the results of his ongoing investigation of unconscious mental processes, processes he calls “the dreamwork.” Again, navigating according to his question is most enlightening. He asks, “What is the nature of the latent dream thoughts and what alterations have they undergone to form the manifest dream?”
He goes on to develop the concept of the dreamwork, which leads to elaboration of the concepts of the primary process and the secondary process, unconscious motivation, modes of representation and symbolization, regulatory principles, and the economic point of view. He elaborates the functioning of defense, and it becomes the basis for his first model of mind, the topographic model, giving us our concept of the dynamic unconscious. By emphasizing Freud's questions, candidates are encouraged to understand the provisional nature of theory building, to join Freud in his enthusiasm for exploring the unknown, and hopefully to develop their own potential to be psychoanalytic investigators.
In deciding how to include Freud in the curriculum, it is also important to plan the curriculum as an organic whole, thereby making the curriculum greater than the sum of its parts. Each specific course decision will reflect the educational goals, the interests, and the resources of an institute, with Freud's contribution being an essential part of the overall educational strategy. Highlighting the dialectic between questions Freud asked and the answers they led to models a process of inquiry as well as teaching a body of thought.
Correction
In the Fall/Winter 2003 TAP, the insert practice guideline should have been titled “Informed Consent to Review” rather than “Committee on Peer Review.” We have reprinted the insert so it will be titled correctly for your future reference. Our apologies to the hard working Peer Review Committee and to the members.
Ellen Rees, M.D., is training and supervising analyst and former chair of the Curriculum Committee at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She is on the Editorial Board of JAPA and a member of Project 2000. Lee Jaffe, Ph.D., is a member of the Editorial Board of TAP.