[00:02.56]Psychoanalyst---Sigmund Freud
[00:04.94]There are no neutrals in the Freud wars.
[00:09.83]Admiration, on one side; skepticism, on the other.
[00:13.05]But on one thing the contending parties agree:
[00:15.97]for good or ill, Sigmund Freud,
[00:18.67]more than any other explorer of the psyche,
[00:22.22]has shaped the mind of the 20th century.
[00:24.07]The very fierceness and persistence of his detractors
[00:27.44]are a tribute to the staying power of Freud's ideas.
[00:30.90]There is nothing new about such confrontations;
[00:34.15]they have dogged Freud's footsteps
[00:36.63]since he developed the luster of theories
[00:39.21]he would give the name of psychoanalysis.
[00:41.88]His fundamental idea has struck many as a romantic,
[00:45.69]scientifically improvable notion.
[00:48.17]His contention that the catalog of neurotic ailments
[00:52.10]to which humans are susceptible is nearly always
[00:55.07]the work of sexual maladjustments,
[00:57.20]and that erotic desire starts not in puberty but in infancy,
[01:01.64]seemed to the respectable nothing less than obscene.
[01:05.11]His dramatic evocation of a universal
[01:08.97]Oedipus complex, in which the little boy
[01:11.43]loves his mother and hates his father,
[01:13.91]seems more like a literary conceit than a thesis
[01:17.07]worthy of a scientifically minded psychologist.
[01:19.73]The book that made his reputation in the profession—
[01:22.96]although it sold poorly—was “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900),
[01:29.10]an indefinable masterpiece—part dream analysis,
[01:32.97]part autobiography, part theory of the mind,
[01:36.40]part history of contemporary Vienna.
[01:39.48]The principle that underlay this work was that
[01:42.70]mental experiences are part of nature.
[01:45.13]The most nonsensical notion,
[01:47.69]the most casual slip of the tongue,
[01:49.86]the most fantastic dream, must have a meaning
[01:53.34]and can be used to unriddle the often
[01:55.93]incomprehensible maneuvers we call thinking.
[01:58.39]In 1974, he published another book.
[02:01.94]A glance at its chapter headings will
[02:04.57]indicate some of the aspects of behaviour covered by the book:
[02:07.71]Forgetting of proper names
[02:09.93]Forgetting of foreign words
[02:12.49]Childhood and concealing memories
[02:14.82]Mistakes in speech
[02:16.65]Mistakes in reading and writing
[02:18.80]Broadly, Freud demonstrates that
[02:21.85]there are good reasons for many of the slips
[02:24.01]and errors that we make. We forget a name because,
[02:27.52]unconsciously, we do not wish to remember that name.
[02:31.27]We repress a childhood memory
[02:33.86]because that memory is painful to us.
[02:36.38]A slip of the tongue or of the pen betrays a wish
[02:40.08]or a thought of which we are ashamed.
[02:42.38]Freud was intent not merely on originating a sweeping theory
[02:46.08]of mental functioning and malfunctioning,
[02:48.92]he also wanted to develop the rules of psychoanalytic therapy.
[02:53.24]As to the first, he created the largely silent listener
[02:57.86]who encouraged the analysand to say
[03:00.99]whatever came to mind, no matter how foolish,
[03:03.84]repetitive or outrageous,
[03:05.75]and who intervened occasionally to interpret
[03:09.42]what the patient was struggling to say.
[03:11.50]The efficacy of analysis remains a matter of controversy,
[03:14.57]though the possibility of mixing psychoanalysis
[03:17.95]and drug therapy is gaining support.
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