Beginning with Freud's Questions #3

Because psychoanalytic knowledge is increasingly complex, it is important for candidates to be able to keep their eyes on the evolution of concepts that are fundamental to a psychoanalytic point of view. We will continue to describe a strategy whose educational aim is to create a conceptual skeleton for the curriculum that helps candidates integrate the past and present of psychoanalytic ideas. Beginning with Freud, this strategy highlights the investigation of clinical phenomena and the evolution of essential concepts within the context of the history of psychoanalytic ideas.

In addition to those we have described in our first columns, certain of Freud's writings are particularly useful for presenting an integration of the historical and the conceptual points of view. In “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911), Freud gives us two fundamental hypotheses: Mental life is regulated by the pleasure principle and the reality principle; and there are two forms of mental processes in mental life, the primary process and the secondary process. He embeds these hypotheses in the larger question of “the relation of neurotics and mankind in general to reality” and so takes up the psychological significance of the real external world. He gives us a glimpse of the functioning of consciousness and unconsciousness, attention and memory, motivation and defense, and thinking and fantasy in a developmental context.

Freud introduces his concept of the compulsion to repeat in “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (1914), which puts before us the interrelatedness of childhood and adult experience. He tackles the relationship between remembering unconsciously in action and remembering consciously in words, portraying the transference as a playground in which the past takes form in the present. With this, Freud foreshadows our attempts to understand the phenomena of transference and of enactment, and to understand the functioning of different memory systems. He describes acting instead of remembering, inviting us to consider the functioning of defense and its tenacity in the therapeutic process, and gives us the concept of working-through.

We only have enough space to sketch a shift in pedagogical emphasis to include a focus on our conceptual heritage, but we hope the shift from Freud's thinking to what he was thinking about will be clear. “On Narcissism” (1914) introduces the concept of narcissism, which now has a rich history in our theorizing. Freud continues his exploration of the ego's relationship to its objects in “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), providing the foundation for our exploration of the nature and functioning of identification and other processes of internalization in a dyad, the impact of object loss and the process of mourning. Freud more fully articulates the nature of unconscious mental processes, their relationship to consciousness and to the processes of repression in “The Unconscious” (1915). Our basic concepts, the dynamic unconscious, psychic determinism, psychical reality, unconscious motivation, and unconscious fantasy emerge from his conceptualizations.

Our graduates take their place in a field with a pluralistic perspective. It is crucial that they be able to think about how recent models define and use our most essential hypotheses and concepts. We have tried to describe an educational strategy that may help them.