You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is the most difficult chapter as far as I am concerned, because it touches on the real watershed period in Freud's work at the end of the First World War, and is followed by the great revolution in his thinking which was to build up during the 1920s and emerge as the Structural Theory. It is the most difficult chapter because it is extremely complicated: the evidence is difficult to comprehend and indeed I do not understand it very well, and so do not expect to be able to clarify it for anyone else. I would begin by emphasizing once more that the approach towards Freud in this book is through his clinical work and his clinical thinking, dealing with his theories - which are expressed as explanatory theories - as having essentially no explanatory power. It seems to me that the approach made to the mind which is based on trying to explain things, is a wrong one, and for this reason I shall take the theories as modes of thought which are intended to be useful in the consulting room and in thinking, writing and talking about one's clinical experience: modes of thought which are intended to gather together, to categorize and to help demonstrate the inter-relationships of the various phenomena that one meets in the consulting room while investigating people's minds. I am going to discuss a watershed period in relation to Freud's modes of thought, and it is very difficult to pick it out in the papers of this time; for we are in effect somewhere between the ‘Wolf Man’ (whose clinical work was carried out between 1910 and 1914 and written up during the war) and ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ of 1920, which contains the seeds of the new Structural Theory.
Now while in the development of the concept of the ideal ego into that of the ego ideal, which I demonstrated in the chapter on ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ and the paper ‘On narcissism’, the formation of this Structural Theory was already under way, it was not yet dealt with as such, but rather as an agency in the mind.