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Freud in Oceania

Category Archives: Freud’s theoretical development

Slips of the Mind

08 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by Christine in Freud's theoretical development

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Freud's diagrams from 'The Ego and the Id' (1923)

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On 6 January 1923 the  editor of the Adelaide Register published an explanation for Absent-Mindedness,  a reflection perhaps from Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

‘At once the most amusing and the least convincing of the doctrines which Freud has reduced from psychoanalysis is that which insists that accidents never happen’, the editor wrote. ‘He believes that slips of the pen and tongue and crockery, printers’ errors, failures to remember names and to perform acts, and many other things which are put down to “absence of mind” are due to the overlooked presence of the “unconscious” mind, which often accounts for things lost, mislaid or broken’.

Skeptical indeed!! The editor continues, despite his doubts, with a good account of Freud’s theory…

‘According to the theory there is a back stairs or nursery region of the mind which never grows up. It retains the interests and the ideas of infancy, added to by later repressed memories, and perhaps by all so-called “forgotten” experiences. This unconscious mind is illogical and non-moral, and alert for opportunities left to it by the carelessness of the conscious to gain expression for itself by taking control of the brain. The unconscious mind is aware of the objects of unconscious thought, somewhat as the secondary person in cases of dual personality is aware of the primary, though in both cases the reverse is seldom the case. And being so aware, the unconscious assimilates the new objects in its own irrational, emotional way, working by association and not by reason. Retaining its infantile zest for mud-pies, for instance, the sculptors unconscious is thinking of these while his sublimated conscious interest is busy with his clay model’.

Cover of

Cover of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

The editor continues, providing further information about Freud’s theory of mind, the breakdown of ego, and the consequent emergence of the id…

‘The real self is the responsible self. However over comparatively unimportant matters the responsible self may relax guard – just as, in insanity, it loses the battle altogether. This relaxed guard explains the slips of the tongue and pen, and all that Freud and Ernest Jones call “the psychopathology of everyday life”.

“Freud sees that, when plausible theory is explained by examples , absurdity appears; but he meets it unmoved. With that astonishing frankness about himself which repels the reserve, he tells how the loss of a knife nearly upset his belief in the theory. the knife was beautiful and useful as well as valuable, and he had it in constant use for many years. Even unconsciously he thought he could not have wished to lose it. Then he remembered the circumstances of its acquisition. His wife had given it to him, and the superstition of which he makes no secret made him fear lest it should ‘cut the love’. He lost the knife during a period of estrangement from his wife. Doubtless his unconscious (everyone’s conscious is superstitious, he maintains) had arranged the loss in hope of restoring the love’.

It is interesting indeed, that such a coherent explanation of Freud’s theory is provided for readers’ perusal, despite apparent doubts about its veracity. It may be that the editor was wise, arguing against Freud’s ideas as the common reader might, in order to explain a new idea. Freud’s theories had been circulating in the Australian press and bookshops for a little over a decade.

What does ‘Freudian’ mean?

31 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by Christine in Freud's theoretical development, Published Histories of Psychoanalysis

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Since the Freud Archives have been opened, clearer accounts the development of Freud’s ideas have been published – complete with the debates, discussions, disagreements, disputes not to mention emotional blood-letting amongst the great man, his disciples, foes and peers. Freud emerges not just as a genius but an ambitious man  bent on holding his identification with ‘Freud’ and ‘Psychoanalysis’. Historical accounts which do not flinch at Freud’s ambition and its costs – close friendships and affiliations and accusations of intellectual property theft – humanise  this rather reified figure, I think.

Freud’s was also a journey  into uncharted territories. He changed his mind over time. In his  2008 history, ‘Revolution in Mind: the creation of psychoanalysis‘, George Makaris outlines the conundrum lying before followers of Freud in the 1920s. Carl Jung and Alfred Adler had rejected Freud’s psychosexual theory of the unconscious. The Great War and its aftermath – a time of social ferment and change – also provided a milieu in which Freud’s highly specific theory of the unconscious was disputed and ultimately rejected – by Freud – in favour of more provisional, and evolving, theories of  mind and unconscious. On pages 322 through to 323 Makaris writes of the conundrums that emerged.

Which Freud did a Freudian follow? How could there be a Freud when there were divergent Freuds?  …

Theoretical physicists are free to question the most basic assumptions of their field, but it is paralyzing for engineers to do so.  Psychoanalysis did not have separate cadres of theoreticians and practitioners. Science and therapeutics, as well as the competing imperatives of the lab and clinic, were all packed into the same clinical encounter. [There had been a desire] in the growing clinical community to have a stable theory to use, and Freud’s reshuffling of his scientific claims could potentially throw practice into confusion. And just as there had been no clear way to adjudicate among the theories of Freud, Adler and Jung, there seemed to be no clear way to adjudicate between Freud and Freud. Freud’s multiple theories of the unconcious highlighted the provisional nature of all these claims, and their distance from empirical verification and consensus…

Over the next years, new voices would emerge and argue that a community of psychoanalysts could be unified by other means than a committment to a highly specific theory of the unconscious.

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