1st: Metapsychology Notes

Notes in Metapsychology

by Vassilis Maoutsos

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We are starting here a study of all the works of Sigmund Freud as they are translated in English by James Strachey and his team. This study will take the form of weekly ‘Summaries’ based on a ‘Metapsychology Course’ that is run by the ‘Hellenic Institute of Classical Psychoanalysis’ for a number of years. We are going to pay special emphasis on the innumerable metapsychological issues that we find scattered all over Freud’s work rather than those which have formally characterized as such in Volume XIV. Of course, the word ‘metapsychology’ is not going to be defined from start. It was for Freud and it is still  for every psychoanalyst,  a very complex concept that cannot be separated from theory, technique and psychoanalytical clinical practice. Therefore, as the ‘Summaries’ unfold so the concept of ‘metapsychology’. In fact, the precise definition of ‘metapsychology’ will be given much later and near the end of the study of Freud’s works.

The first volumes of the Standard Edition will be treated briefly because the ideas in them are very condensed and it is important that the reader follows Freud’s often unstructured way of  writing his feelings and thinking rather than his own, mostly structured through his education and therefore scientifically sound. However, there will be constantly turning back to the ideas contained in those  first Volumes but at the same time avoiding as much as possible to make use of the proceeding ones.

In these ‘Summaries’ there will be plenty of room for criticism based on the fact that important things will be omitted and details will be stretched to their limit. Any such criticism will be absolutely justified. Indeed, here we are not going to spend much space discussing things that are psychoanalytically well known e.g the stages of the psychosexual development of the child. The Course itself was constructed for people who are well familiarized with Psychoanalysis, anyway.  After all, metapsychology interprets and contains psychoanalysis rather than the other way round. To that end, metapsychology takes precedence of psychoanalysis. In any case and in spite of the enormous difficulties in trying to follow rationally the relationship between metapsychology and applied psychoanalysis through Freud's 23 Volumes we have reasons to believe that it can be done. After all, this is the essence of what we call ‘psychoanalysis’ in its totality. 

2nd: Metapsychology Notes

Notes in Metapsychology

by Vassilis Maoutsos

 The Works of Sigmund Freud

English Standard Edition

Volume I

In the last very successful Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association on ‘Psychoanalytical Practice: Convergences and Divergences’ there was the opportunity once again to observe how far has psychoanalysis moved from Freudian concepts of the Unconscious, the defenses, the transference or, even counter-transference issues. Nowadays, we are in the fast and efficient information era and the predominant view is that if psychoanalysis is to survive she must follow the manifest  demands that society has. Thus, it seems that models of thinking, psychoanalytical well-contacted research projects, psychoanalysis by phone, shuttle psychoanalysis, Bion’s theories on thinking, are some of the issues that describe the psychoanalytical framework of the immediate future.

 It all sound so exciting because we at last live the long awaiting time of  the great openness in psychoanalysis. Everything is now ready to be discussed and debated without prejudice. In that sense, Dr Eizirik, who presided over these changes for a number of years will remain in the history of psychoanalysis as the Chairman who opened the Aeolus Flask. The time that analysts followed faithfully and almost obsessionally the interpretations and theoretical ideas of their analyst and/or supervisor without really believing all-heartedly in them seems to be eroded. Nowadays every young analyst feels considerably freer to talk as any proper scientist does about his personal and professional concerns, like, for example, the lack of patients in his practice, things relevant to his job and his academic queries.  

 But although this is undoubtedly a very important step forward is it enough for a new beginning in psychoanalysis?. The debate on Convergences and Divergences in Psychoanalytical Practice and Theory has to include not only what WE – contemporary analysts – say but also what  Freud REALLY said, as well. In Chicago, this was missing to a considerable degree. It was as if ‘Freud’ has been sufficiently studied and understood so that it is redundant to continue talking about his works at length. Those of us who believe that this is not true should, of course, keep the right to argue about the Freudian view in parallel with the rest who argue in support of so many different views. For it is now the right time to sit down calmly and read again in total what Freud really said! We may then find out too many new things that had been overlooked in the enthusiasm of idealization and relief from the compartmentalization that has taken place over the few decades of the psychoanalytical history. It may be difficult but it is the only way to discover the modernity of psychoanalysis now that so productive debates have started.

As a small contribution to this debate we will here examine almost exclusively Freud’s work from the beginning following the volumes of the English Standard Edition. We will do that by editing and publishing on a weekly basis in this page the so called ‘Meta-psychological Summaries’ of the entire Freud’s work as they were extracted from the ‘Meta-psychology Seminar’ that is being going on for several years.    

We wish that in this newly created Site there is stimulating writing that will mainly enhance the interest of professionals (and secondarily ordinary people) in Classic Psychoanalysis. It will be even more fruitful if through this Site we could draw the lines of the differences  and similarities between Classic Psychoanalysis and other 'Psychoanalyses’. The later ones being basically developmental in their approach are no doubt most prominent nowadays and much easier to comprehend than classic psychoanalysis. But the former is the only straightforward way to comprehend what Freud really meant by the term psychoanalysis. And there are sound reasons to believe that in the course of these Notes we will make a step forward in understanding not only the theory but  also the practical, and the  clinical, implications of this. In addition, these reasons suggest that it is only by means of meta-psychology that this kind of comprehension can take place.

Indeed, meta-psychology had been Freud’s main interest from as early as 1893 although he never expressed it in this way. I hope that we will often have the opportunity to discuss all these on the basis of Freud’s writings alone rather than in conjunction with other parameters. Then, we may still disagree with what he himself says but we will at least know firsthand what he did say!    

Let’s go in the text itself. In the present volume (SE Vol. I) we find various articles, correspondence with his close and trustworthy friend  Fliess, early research papers, his impressions from his trip to Paris and from professor Charcot and, of course, the ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’. All these had been written by Freud at the outset of his neurological research works and published psychological conceptions but they are not necessarily the earliest. And yet, it is indeed most appropriate that James Strachey, putting aside the chronological order of things, calls this volume ‘Pre-Psychoanalytical’. This is justified in the sense that this material primarily tries to be scientific rather than psychological.

This is indeed a very major issue. We have to take into account the fact that for Freud – a serious and dedicated scientist – anything that was not to be scientific was suspect.  In the process there was  to be only one exception and that was regarding human psychology  which was bound to be 'meta-psychological'. Thus, after the 'Project' whereas ‘Pre-psychoanalytical’ is rightly taken to mean ‘scientific’ anything ‘Psychoanalytical’ should be taken as Meta-psychological, a point to which we will return many times in the course of these ‘Notes’.

The importance of this distinction has a paradoxical dimension: Freud – for very good reasons that are not mentioned in this volume - considered his psychological studies most scientific though of a different order than we usually think when we are using this term. In effect, for him who - I repeat it - was a dedicated scientist there was another science to the ordinary one and it was no other from the science of ‘meta-psychology’. On the firm foundation of such a belief he was, from a certain point onwards, working upon in order to examine psychological phenomena. Let us not examine here what this meta-psychology is. Information about this new way of looking at things is scattered everywhere in his work and the essence of this unique alternative scientific method will become apparent gradually.

In this volume Freud does not refer to such topics. On the contrary, sidestepping so many interesting things  that are mentioned above, he refers to his familiar clinical subjects: ‘hysteria’, ‘suggestion’, ‘motor paralyses’, ‘hypnosis’ which he tries to explain in terms of ‘quantities’ as he does with so many other things that he studies,  ‘levels of consciousness’, ‘traumatic memories’, ‘ego formation’, ‘word presentations’, ‘neurones’, ‘φ, ψ and ω neuronal functions’, and, of course, normal human expressions of the mind like ‘attention’, ‘cognition’, ‘memory’ and the rest. All these are the topics that every proper scientist should be concerned with. But he also refers to ‘pleasure’ and ‘displeasure’. From such an early stage these most important psychoanalytical  concepts were in his mind. One wonders why a researcher of neurology was taking seriously such obscure parameters. For Freud the answer is obvious: the latter  ('displeasure') meant the subjective presence of something abnormal inside one’s existence whereas the former ('pleasure') meant the subjective absence of that something inside. Therefore, pleasure is not a human problem, displeasure is. And if displeasure could be quantified on the basis of the zero point of pleasure then an immediate connecting advancement would have taken place between the biological and the psychological. So, elementarily simple and fundamentally scientific was Freud's thinking and he retained this capacity at both phases in his lifetime, the scientific as well as the meta-psychological.    

These are the issues that will really concern Freud for the rest of his life in his twenty three volumes that we will examine and, I might add that, broadly speaking, this is the stuff that concerns every human being when he turns for reasons of his own to psychological matters: how and why the mind (his mind) feels displeasure the way that it does? Thus, the next question: is there anything else that a patient  or , indeed any human being, be concerned with prior to this question if he happens to wonder about his feelings?

And yet, at some point the scientific method that Freud tried to deal with in the ‘Project’ – his major work in this volume - is on the surface totally abandoned and he decides to start examining exactly the same things differently. Let us not misunderstand his motive: Freud does not abandon the scientific method because it failed and therefore he adopted the psychological one (i.e meta-psychological). He abandoned it because - as we can witness from his letters to Fliess, among other sources - he does not really believe any more that it can remotely solve the particular problems that displeasure creates. If he continued to believe at the slightest in it he would then have tried endlessly experimenting and testing out his various hypotheses as he was used to do. His hypotheses were neither better nor worse than those of psychologists and researchers of today and yesterday – hypotheses that are put forward all the time in research programmes. For instance, an increasing number of research proposals which are strikingly similar to Freudian proposals in Volume I are today funded with enormous amounts on money so that big psychological departments of the most respectable Universities are eagerly working on them although without any of the expected results as we had the opportunity to debate  in  the Chicago Psychoanalytical Conference (2009). Needless to say, this is never going to stop happening. as I am sure Freud would have been first to admit. The majority of such hypotheses have already been researched again and again with slight differences each time and  psychoanalytically speaking we never expect it to stop. What is important and relevant at this point in our 'Notes' is to realize that Freud abandoned the scientific method on behalf of the psychological method because he had started conceiving of the meta-psychological method as well as his self-analysis both of which he adopted ever after even though he had been using them in a fragmented and hesitant way long ago. These  two things are the only reasons that psychoanalysis became what it is today: the visualization of psychoanalytical concepts of the unconscious in meta-psychological  rather than scientific terms and through personal analysis. Had Freud had not reversed to these two unique movements he would have been remembered as a good researcher and nothing more.   

So, Freud in Volume I of the Standard Edition talks about all the great problems of psychology and psychiatry using an endless number of hypotheses and suggestions of great scientific value as it is recognized by supporters and opponents alike. But his hypotheses exhausted him at some point and then he changed his approach (but never his fundamental questions) and started his trip into psychoanalysis-proper. Let us not forget that what Freud did is not unknown to every  scientist dedicated to his subject matter. Is there any dedicated psychologist or psychiatrist who reading about the φ,ψ,ω  theory of the neurons, no matter how scientifically important it seems to be, has not felt that all these are not right, that they are even irrelevant to clinical practice?. This is what  happened to Freud who, contrary to the rest of us, felt that the time had come for him to abandon these things for good. It was so simple and so complex at the same time. 

In a way in order to understand the Standard Edition we have to do just what Freud did - to put ourselves into his shoes, so to speak! We will keep all the great psychological and psychiatric issues open for discussion as Freud develops them in his remaining twenty two volumes but we will try to be not-scientific but meta-psychological as Freud did. 

As a small example of what this means I will refer to the so much discussed case – ‘mysterious’ according to Strachey - of the Qη quantity as it is written in the Project. Historically speaking there are plenty of suggestions and questions surrounding this awkward quantity that he mentions and the Greek ‘η’(ita) that Freud consistently used to describe and to accompany this exclusively internal human quantity that he repeats in the Project. However, for Freud, who at this stage was thinking metapsychologically about the bipolar couple of meanings pleasure=subjective non-existence and displeasure=subjective existence  (although he was still hesitant at the time of the Project to let himself free to speak as he really felt), the meaning of the quantity Qη was absolutely self evident and needed no further clarification whatsoever. Indeed, suppose that the quantity Qη was with rough breathing (not with smooth breathing as it is written by Freud). Then, this would mean ‘the Q’. In other words it would mean the over-determined quantity that the system possesses at any given time of not pleasure or search for it (page 297 of the text for detail description). In other words, when Qη exists as an affect or state of consciousness in the subject it is ‘the Q’ but as soon as it gives pleasure it is instantly transformed into ‘a Q’ having lost its capacity for subjective mental functioning until it later reappears once again as ‘the Q’ i.e Qη. Freud, however - a scrupulous writer - uses smooth breathing instead of rough breathing. Why he does this?  We might, superficially thinking, say that we could ignore  his mistake and excuse him on the grounds that he has made a very simple and understandable error in his knowledge of Greek. In this case the above explanation would remain absolutely valid. However, I doubt if this applies to Freud on this occasion. He uses ita with smooth breathing and without stress  – a word that does not exist in Greek – intentionally. In this way he wants to describe a most fundamental human process.  According to this process the internal quantity Qη does and does not exist at one and the same time. Exactly like the energy of hunger, let’s say. It exists and yet it does not exist in consciousness when it is satisfied. The instinct constantly stay behind for its next appearance a little later. There are plenty of instances that indicate that scientifically something may make little sense but metapsychologically it may be full of sense: a quantity exists internally but cannot be found because does not exist all the time! This is the apotheosis of the negative as we will explain at a later ‘Notes’. Not that it is always easy to think in this way as a psychoanalyst outside the consulting room but it is now the right time to do so if we want to follow Freud's clear thinking.

From that point of view there is no reason in discussing any further the so deeply scientific Volume I .  It only happens for historical reasons and as a guide to the series of themes that logically occupied Freud’s mind from the beginning. The logic of clinical phenomena, diagnoses, observations, neurones and the rest at times of scientific weakness occupies the mind of everyone who is most responsibly engaged in the field of psychology or psychiatry and for that reason alone the Project will always remain useful as a reminder of the meta-psychological method that goes beyond the scientific.   

3rd: Metapsychology Notes

Notes in Metapsychology

by Vassilis Maoutsos

The Works of Sigmund Freud

English Standard Edition

Studies in Hysteria

by Breuer and Freud

Volume II, 1893-95

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Here we, once again, should not pay too much attention to the chronological order of Freud’s writing. By reading this Volume we notice that the psychological method (i.e meta-psychological as we have called it) proceeds the scientific one which as we mentioned in the last ‘Notes'  had been tried out for very long time unsuccessfully and is described in detail in Volume I. This was, of course, most evident in the ‘Project’, It was also stressed in the last ‘Notes’ that Freud must have suffered quite a lot according to his own accounts in deciding at last to abandon the scientific method. We added there that his suffering was not unlike that of every clinical psychologist or psychiatrist who goes through the same difficulties during his career. Eventually, the vast majority of scientists gives in the scientific method for reasons not relevant at this point and unlike to what happened with Freud himself. 

The first part of this Volume contains the so called ‘Preliminary Communication’: a joint effort of Breuer and Freud on Hysteria which together with the rest of the contents of this volume rightly constitute, according to many psychoanalysts, the beginning of psychoanalysis. In the ‘Notes’ of this Volume we will not stay in the most celebrated historical and terminological points because they have exhaustively been discussed over long time by many authors. In addition, it is not these points that really give the greatest meta-psychological significance to such a small but monumental contribution that Freud has made here.  No doubt Freud in spite of his great friendship with Breuer in no way he wanted to be attributed to him the ‘Studies on Hysteria’. He thought that it was by far the work of Breuer - something that often is taken to mean an expression of Freud’s modesty. Freud was not  just modest for the sake of it. He was a very kind man but never at the cost of the truth as he understood it. In this particular case he had no reason to be modest because he greatly valued the work of his friend as well as his disagreement with him about the fundamental  and catalytic role that sexuality played in the creation of symptoms. So, Breuer was indeed pioneer in studying hysterical patients as a pure scientist. He was preoccupied with their biologically unexplained somatic ailments and he devised similar therapeutic methods to treat them. It could not make sense to him at all what this strange phenomenon of hysteria was if not a degenerative condition - a position from which he had eventually and reluctantly been convinced to the contrary by observations upon  his patients and under the influence of Freud. On the other hand, he was able to accept – like we all do at some point and perhaps much easier than Freud - that a doctor could afford to talk loosely about something  biological called ‘hysterical’ and of belonging to ‘psychology’ without fully realizing what is actually either the former or the later. Freud too, up to this time and for a period after the ‘Project’, constantly and passionately wanted to create biological theories to explain those hysterical symptoms of his patients although he kept talking of ‘psychological phenomena’. Breuer played around a lot with the idea of the psychological trauma of some kind that gets connected with an idea and produces eventually hysterical symptoms in adulthood. Then, of course, the trauma comes and goes in a game of hiding in the unconscious of the individual patient. With hypnosis, abreaction, suggestion or whatever other means were used to pull out of the second consciousness of the subject that sick idea that runs an almost independent existence inside the nervous system, would be welcome to Breuer. 

In the last part of this Volume Breuer tried to explain somehow theoretically all those so strange for him medical events that the entity of hysteria exhibits. Exhausted as he was of his many unproductive years and efforts to understand biologically the somatic symptoms of hysteria he started his own part of the theoretical exposition of hysteria in this Volume by stating clearly that ‘little mention will be made of the brain and none whatever of molecules. Psychical processes will be dealt with in the language of psychology and indeed it cannot possibly be otherwise.’ It is pretty obvious that Breuer – a most typical doctor of his time – had eventually given up the medical way of making sense of those symptoms and could not possibly be otherwise after what he had gone through.  But it is very doubtful if he believed in 'psychology' in the way that Freud had started to do. His words are the result of total frustration rather than faith in human psychology not just because of what  unfortunate things had happened with Anna O. but because of his close and emotional association with Freud who had kept exposing the inadequacies of their medical expertise with his constant questioning. Then, Breuer  started theorizes very academically about the ‘ideas’ and the ‘excitations’ of the nervous regions of the brain. He formulated the semi-psychological theory that if ideas and excitations are the result of ‘traumatic experiences’ then they are bound to get ‘affectively dissociated’ due to lack of tolerance of such a heavy burden by the nervous system and thus are created ‘double states’ of the mind with one of them staying in a ‘hypnoid’ form and the other in a no hypnoid state. After that the ‘splitting’ of the mind follows. Not only the famous case of Anna O. but all five clinical cases that are described by the two authors in the clinical section of Volume II indicate the splitting that Breuer first described.

We really have to conclude that Breuer was indeed the main author and the main instigator of the ‘Studies on Hysteria’ and that the reason that Freud insisted so much for his friend’s work to get published was for no other reason than his powerful belief that his own  smaller contribution in this Volume was a necessary step forward in his associate’s important work.

So, what was this small but important contribution that Freud made in the ‘Studies on Hysteria’? Freud’s contribution to this Volume is minimal and maximal at the same time. It is his monumental description of the technique of Free Associating. While he is again talking about hypotheses and theories – something that he always liked to do during his lifetime – by close observation we discover that in his contribution in this Volume he makes neither of the two. He only observes and describes his patients and throws doubts upon everything that himself, Breuer and Charcot had been doing with their patients up to that time. He was obviously no less frustrated than Breuer was about his failure to understand hysteria and subsequently actual neuroses and obsessions in any conceivably scientific (i.e biologically rooted) way. But here he chooses the exact opposite direction of dealing with his frustration than Breuer had done before him. On the surface, he has now abandoned his medical identity completely – despite the theories and hypotheses that he refers to - and he has decided that he will learn all from start as if he knew nothing about medicine or about the nervous system or even about himself. He will learn them from his patients! So, he calls upon his patients to start teaching him by free associating what is going on into their minds and why they themselves think that these things happen to them and he finally assures them that if he finds something useful to say while he is leitening to them only then he will intervene.

In actual fact, in Volume II we could only see one hypothesis and no other: the principle of constancy.  A little later on he will tell us in the ‘Project’ that we can distinguish nothing but quantity of energy in the nervous system and never quality -  quality is primarily alien to the nervous system. Quality is a secondary thing that has no primary value. Therefore, we could hardly say at this point that Freud makes theory when he states the very minimal: no quality only quantity, no scientific knowledge of hysteria only subjective quantitative!. And considering that both these are making mention of what is absent they leave very little space for objection. For objecting would have meant adding something  and proving its existence as well. What one can say when Freud admits his ignorance and that this is his great advantage in the therapy of his patients and in addition that his aim in therapy is to bring the patient down to his basics without qualitative differences? Such a simple theory  is most scientific because it refers to provable things. However, it could only be described as a unique theory because it makes the observer observed and it is in support of the negative over the positive - in support of the quality that misrepresent quantity.

In fact, the thing that Freud is saying more than anything elese is that there is a tendency in the human psyche towards the quietening of things that have artificially become complicated and that it is succeeded in that aim by a constant rush of energy wherever there is an unbalancing so that things get back into a quietening order. This applies to everything psychological according to his observation  upon his patients. So, all that his patients needed, all that he needed, all that every nervous system needs, all that the troubled waters of the oceans need, all that the winds need, all that a ball falling from up in the air to the ground needs, all electrical currents need, is stability. We could easily now conceive the ‘zero point’ that was mentioned in Volume I as the reference point for this stability. 

Here, is the first major psychoanalytical paradox: none of all these are great ideas and this is exactly the greatest idea of all. Quantity, stability, tendency to zero, movement of energy constitute  according to Freud the fundamentals of human psychology because this is what happens in nature not because of any scientific hypothesis! Qualitative things are an infringement in the natural process if they exist. They may be useful in all sort of things but they are apparently trouble making on psychological matters.

The conclusion is that when Freud in consultation with Fliess and Breuer discovered that there was really nothing to be expected from his (and theirs) scientific inquiries he decided that he would go anti-scientific and with admittedly considerable hesitation at first did what his instinct was telling him to do: during analysis he puts himself in the place of doctor-and-patient at one and the same time and he also put the patient in the  patient-and-doctor position at one and the same time. There were now not two but four presences acting simultaneously. This four dimensional schema had earlier being proposed by Breuer himself as a semi philosophical idea rather than as a therapeutic method: ‘There exists in human beings the strange fact’ Breuer says ‘of self-consciousness, We are able to view and observe, as though they were objects, ideas that emerge in us and succeed one another. This does not happen always, since occasions for self-observation are rare’. Breuer was almost ready to say what Freud said had he not been so distant from himself due to his intellectual preoccupation, as most psychologists and psychiatrists are in the course of their clinical duties. Indeed, Freud’s method of free association in Volume II made use of exactly this dual human capacity - of being simultaneously object and subject. This is exactly re-created in the psychoanalytical situation of two people: the four dimensional encounter as a minimal precondition for in-depth communication between two people. He  sharply downgraded human cognition and the belief that the doctor knows about psychological matters in the way that he knows about other parts of human physiology or science, in general. In the ‘Studies in Hysteria’ Freud refers to cathexes that effectively substitute human knowledge and more precisely medical knowledge. These affective states that cause the cathexes have nothing to do with a decision making rational process although they are over-rational because they obey t he principle of constancythat overdetermines everything. Whenever there is psychological instability the attempt is for ‘libido’ – something like electrons, water, air – to rush, to cathect and to close the gap.

 We must agree that with such elementary ideas it is impossible to say that Freud created a new theory unless a new theory is the theory of the negative and most elementary. And it is for this very reason that he did not want to associate himself with Breuer’s complex theoretical schemata. Had he done so all the simplicity of his marvellous four dimensional conception and the expression of his decision to disassociate himself from all those theories that he had in the past subscribed to would have vanished.

So the beginning of psychoanalysis it is marked in this great work of Volume II with the exposition of free associations as the sine qua none of therapy. It is a paradoxical principle which makes the start of meta-psychology: there is no a priori scientific knowledge on matters of human psychology but only affective knowledge which is shared between patient and analyst in a system of exchange of affective cathexes. This might be translated into intellectual knowledge. However, this is not necessarily relevant from the therapeutic point of view.

With one simple move Freud puts behind him his own past, Charcot, Fliess, Breuer and all that constituted knowledge, science, medicine, quality v. quantity and scientific progress. But let us not been misled: Freud was referring only to patients - and mainly to hysterical patients - and his anti-scientific stand was not his last word on this matter. In fact, the new anti-scientific science that he was advocating in a surprisingly confident way destined to stand in a superior position to the existing one on psychological matters.

4th: Metapsychology Notes

Notes in Metapsychology

by Vassilis Maoutsos

The Works of Sigmund Freud

English Standard Edition

Early Psycho-Analytic Publications

Volume III, 1893-99

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Freud’s shorter writings have been published in five volumes. The contents of the first one are to be discussed here. These are very important works because we find scattered all the crucial metapsychological points that Freud wrote about later on – many of which are reportedly lost – and constitute the essence of psycho-analysis. At this point in time Freud may still want to think scientifically rather than meta-psychologically although the breaking point is in sight.

Charcot 1893: The first of his shorter papers is an Obituary to Charcot, his great teacher whom he had gone to visit for three months and learn from the great master  of his time the secrets of the most bizarre at that time mental-like disease called 'hysteria'. The striking feature of his writing is the admiration that he holds for the ‘theatrical’ Professor and at the same time the huge distance that he keeps from him – reminiscent, I would say, of his distance from Breuer in ‘The Studies on Hysteria’. The distance is only in relation to the way he understands hysteria.because otherwise he has a great respect for him. Charcot believed without any doubt that heredity was at the root of that mental condition – probably of all mental conditions - whereas Freud’s mind was traveling elsewhere and not least in the sphere of doubting almost everything scientifically based inpsychology!  But the most important thing is that Freud needed at this point in time to be in Paris for this short period and listen Charcot first hand, before he acquired the courage and the certainty to put forward his own ideas which seemed to have already been shaped in his own mind. Charcot was the greatest authority of his time on hysteria and relative medical topics. Freud wanted to be sure that when he would start putting forward his revolutionary ideas he would not have duplicated someone else’s positions and he would also have known the most advanced concepts that had been said so far on the subject of mental illness beyond hypnosis and abreaction.    

On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena 1893: Here we are dealing with a lecture that he refers to Anna O. (Breuer’s famous patient) and in his joint publication with Breuer the ‘Studies on Hysteria’, with emphasis upon the trauma, hysteria, memory, hysterical symptoms and their interconnections. He also refers to Charcot and his method of hypnosis and suggestion. But the impressive point that he makes in this short paper is that he states the four ways in which an unpleasant situation can be erased from the mind: a. Extinction ( or, modification) that takes place through muscular movement b. Extinction by means of production of contrasting ideas relevant to the trauma c. Extinction by withdrawing of affect from the trauma and forgetting it d. Extinction by a counter-trauma of the subject of a verbal nature.

5th: Notes in Metapsychology

Metapsychology Notes

by Vassilis Maoutsos

The Works of Sigmund Freud

English Standard Edition

Early Psycho-Analytic Publications

‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ 1894

‘Obsessions and Phobias’ 1895

Volume III, 1893-99

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We will keep reminding the reader as often as it becomes necessary that these ‘Notes’ do not have as their main aim to repeat the important psychoanalytical points of Freud’s works. These have been studied so much and so deeply that one feels that it is redundant to carry on saying more or less things that have already been explored from so many different ankles and they will no doubt continue to be academically discussed and analyzed.

Here, we need to concentrate in a systematic way on the widely spread metapsychological issues of Freud’s works. Although at least seven of Freud’s metapsychological papers are lost we have reasons to believe that this is not excuse for not knowing what Freud really said beyond the psychologically sound and so far known. The paradoxical thing is that what he actually said is in many respects more than apparent although one has justified difficulties to stay on those important points for long. because of his own defenses. Freud himself had difficulty to stay fearlessly in his own conceptions. on a permanent basis. This was the case for long time before his trip to France and for at least few years after that. I would add that Freud being himself not analyzed by someone other than himself never really developed to the fullest degree his capacity to be uncompromisingly free of some social hesitations that  had it happened it would have helped further the organizing of his writings towards our easier understanding of his work. For instance, it is not uncommon for Freud to say something extremely important in passing or in parenthesis and to find it again years later presented in the same way in the main text of his writing. An important example is mentioned below. On the other hand, we have to acknowledge that psychoanalysis and metapsychology in particular, refer to patients (i.e individuals who ask for psychoanalytical help or consider themselves in a state of need) and it is therefore most appropriate that whatever is discussed in these Notes has applicability in the main to these people and not the general public who may very well be indifferent to its 'illnesses'. 

The comments of James Strachey at the end of the first of the present  two papers are no doubt extremely useful and very well thought. However, we must point out that they have the same academic ally scientific orientation that characterizes Strachey's whole work. This is by no means helpful from the metapsychological point of view that requires from the reader affective part-taking in the study of Freud's text without of course losing his critical ability. In a way, if Freud abandoned the scientific approach from a certain point onwards as we have seen, the same must do his modern reader in order to follow his thinking. Strachey goes from 1894 to 1926 and beyond in order to make his useful interconnections in the development of Freud’s thinking. This is certainly academically sound. However, it dilutes the very powerful present state in Freud’s perception of things and deprives the reader from feeling the power of Freud’s simple, clinical and deeply experiential thinking. Freud’s writing is a hugely emotional endeavour although at times it is covered by a scientific (if not medical) studiousness. After all, let us not forget that if  Freud was in many respects a different man after his return from France that was not because he had learned there something extraordinary (or even – within limits - unknown) to him. He had mainly learned to trust himself and not to feel obliged to present neurological studies (or even the ‘Project’ itself) that he did not believe in as if they were the carriers of psychological truth. He then, of course, had had to ask himself what else could have remained in a scientist’s mind to search for other than why he has the desire for scientific knowledge. This  troubling question, however, was posed to him before he had gained so much in self-confidence so that to follow it faithfully. The question itself could wait for very long to be answered.

In the present monumental paper Freud goes further than he did in the paper of last ‘Notes’. At first, he wants to examine if there can be a unifying view of all mental conditions that he met in his practice i.e. psychoses and neuroses alike. Not wanting to go into unconvincing psychological or neurological theories he implicitly asks himself the simple question: what a man in psychological distress  considers that he is made of? He replies that it is certainly his body and his ideas followed by words and thoughts, mentioned in his previous paper. There is something more, though. Ideas, words, thoughts and bodily movements are important and absolutely relevant to hysteria but they are not all that a patient is made of. The human being in distress – says Freud in this paper with a sort of innocence - is also made of something conventionally called ‘affects’. So, a patient is made of his body, his ideas (words, thoughts, and opinions), his affects and nothing else. These are his constituent elements because there is nothing else that he can experiencially see in himself. The doctor himself understands him because he himself must have gone psychologically along similar lines with his patient in order to be able to communicate with him.

So far so good, although nobody would certainly say that this is a great discovery that Freud has made here. And yet, as we will see, it is a most fundamental statement. But Freud proceeds in making further trivial discoveries: what are these three elements for? He, again experiencially, answers through his previous paper that the body seems to obey more or less passively to the great demands of the ‘foreign body’ which incidentally in the present paper he goes further calling it ‘parasite’. The scenery, therefore, is now occupied by the remaining powerful dyad ideas and affects. The idea by itself is nothing. The ‘foreign body’ or any other configuration may produce ideas if it so wishes but they constitute no problem for the individual. Nobody is harm and gets ill by just listening to ideas or by producing ideas himself. It is only when something happens with the experiencially peculiar  thing called ‘affect’ (or, ‘excitation’ of nerves, from the biological point of view) that a person reports a psychological problem that concerns himself  and it is treated by the doctor, the psychoanalyst, the psychotherapist, the social worker etc.

Consequently, ‘psychological problem’ is nothing else but ‘affective’ states of ‘displeasure’, a term that we recall that we have found powerfully stated in Volume I. It was described there  as the fundamental ‘negative’: a wish to get rid of something that unbalances the inner  system rather than to acquire something extra, something new. It experientcally consists in a complaint of the individual of the existence of something inside him which comes against the state of the universal tendency for piece, constancy, stability, the zero point. Thus, from the clinical point of view, psychological problems are called the pathologically experienced events according to both patient and doctor that are covered by the terms hysterical, obsessional, phobic, psychotic. These are all the result of something that happens between ideas and affects within the terrain of the body. What these might be ? - asks Freud implicitly. As the result of the experiential knowledge that we have of ourselves and without the need for a hypothetical undertaking we know for certain that these two remaining elements of human existence (ideas and affects) are united in a dynamic relationship. There is no human being who does not recognize it.

Now before we go into examining what Freud tells us that happens between ideas and affects let’s leave Freud’s text aside for a moment. So, we will ask ourselves the type of question that Freud must have frequently asked himself from the time that he abandoned the ‘Project’: if a car that is supposed to travel along a motorway suddenly disappears then what is the Police Investigator dealing with the case called typically to search for? He is going to try and find out: a. the possibility that the car is abandoned in the fields along the highway b. that the driver has changed route turning in one of the side roads c. that the motorway was for some reason (e.g snow falling) cut off. Any investigator would think similarly about any dyad of a similar kind. If we now call the vehicle ‘affect’, the motorway ‘idea’ and the huge landscape ‘human body’ then the investigator dealing with the case might wish to call ‘case a’ hysteria, ‘case b’ obsession, ‘case c’ psychosis. This is the way that these three elements always interact among themselves in life and Freud certainly felt that the same should be the case in psychological terms. Indeed, the affect (being the least specified of the three) can do anything it wants in order to get back to a state of stability (metapsychologically we could call it pleasure) that it has lost for any reason, no matter what the Police Investigator might think that it ought to have done. The affect (vehicle with its driver) stops, changes direction, moves freely again, gets isolated by chance events, it is free to do anything it wants serving goals that are difficult to be understood by the superficial eye of a policeman. In short, the affect does anything it wants in any naturally occurring triadic relationship of a similar kind and there should be no reason whatsoever that things would have been very different at the level of human psychology. This is how Freud certainly thought and we all are bound to think similarly under similar circumstances. There is, however, one additional thing for the investigator to know. How much petrol did the driver have in his petrol tank for his journey? The investigator might want to call the petrol of the vehicle ‘energy force’. This quantitative question has nothing to do with the quality of the petrol used. Certainly the vehicle could not have travelld endlessly. It should somehow have stopped somewhere! Again, common sense dictates that this is exactly how everyone should face such an issue.  

And now let us ask ourselves: are the above sufficiently great ideas in order to call them big discoveries when they happen always in nature anyway? In fact, any investigator incapable of thinking in this elementary way would justifiably have been dismissed from service. Therefore, we can hardly believe that Freud has made any big discovery in this monumental work that we so often read to have been the case. Therefore, we have to conclude that the greatness of this work is precisely that here Freud breaks through the human defenses that refuse to see the obvious. 

His work is indeed and without any doubt monumental to the extreme for two other reasons. Freud has first and for most uncovered here the human incapability (psychological, psychiatric or social) in dealing with elementary things when it comes down to examining his own psychological problems. He has introduced for the first time extensively the concept of ‘defense’ as the reason for such an incapability: nothing can really be remembered of the reasons that the affect left an idea, went to another, was cut off in another, how it all happened and so on and so forth. In the case of the driver of the vehicle he knew why he did what he did during his trip although he might choose to say nothing. The ‘affect’ on the other hand could not recall anything. This is what one sees in his clinical practice with his patients as Freud reminds us.

In short, Freud step by step examines the reasons that all these need to be experiential and not scientifically explained. His main query was to find out what was the reason that he had failed so badly with his perfectly planned ‘Project’, something that he had never forgotten. After all, what happens to the patient due to his defenses cannot be at all different from what happens to the doctor who fails to understand despite his advanced knowledge. We remember that Freud (and Breuer) had already discovered the method of free associating – the four dimensional situation - as we have already seen in Volume II.     

So, we are entering the second metapsychological contribution of Freud in this paper. The explanation that is given for the defensive difficulty in seeing the obvious in human psychology is given in the text: ‘….in mental functions something is to be distinguished – a quota of affect or sum of excitation – which possesses all the characteristics of a quantity (though we have no means of measuring it), which is capable of ……’.  Now, let us carry on with our metaphor of the police investigator for one more second: in the course of his search for the lost vehicle (and the assumed driver inside it) the investigator is flying in a helicopter. Then, he finds that the vehicle disappears by a kind of bizarre transformation and magically at the very moment that it is seen by the investigator, be it in the fields, in a side road, in a cut off part of the motorway or whatever combination of the three.  It is like a hide and seek game that it plays! He will then report back to his superior as a matter of routine that he found it and lost it. However, after a hundred times that it happens the Police Department will eventually call the government and report that the case is not strictly speaking in its jurisdiction because it is a matter of scientific research belonging to the study of objects with extraordinary powers. It is certain that the matter will be resolved in due course with the co-operation of two departments now, the police and the department of scientific research. So, when Freud says that ‘though we have no means of measuring it’ he refers exactly to this same  most paradoxical phenomenon of the need for constant research to resolve something that we know that it will...never be resolved!. But why such a hopeless statement?

Here Freud makes his very first clear and unequivocal distinction between scientific and psychological matters coming closer to the reason that he failed with the Project although he does not acknowledge it as such: Why we have no means of measuring the affect, the excitation of the nerves involved in hysteria, obsession, psychosis? We already have a partial answer that is found in conjunction with the ‘pleasure’ concept in Volume I and its compliment here: ‘In hysteria’ Freud says ‘the incompatible idea is rendered innocuous by its sum of excitation being transformed into something somatic’. So, the reason that the sum of excitation cannot be measured is because something in surplus comes its way. Now, we can see that from the experiential point of view the thing called ‘affect’ of the idea by changing ideational route it gets the needed satisfaction to get rid of something in surplus and then it behaves as if there has never been any problem. The patient – or, indeed, the examining doctor the only thing that they notice is that the satisfaction stops the understanding of what has happened almost mysteriously as soon as it has reached a certain level. Therefore, by a closer observation we safely conclude - and by making use of no hypotheses whatsoever but only common human experiences - that the obstacle in measuring the affect scientifically is no other but the principle of pleasure/displeasure that has its deepest roots in the natural phenomenon of the universal constancy and consistency. But there is one more thing to be elucidated in the context of this important paper.

The police investigator in psychological matters is not other than the driver of the vehicle himself. If that was not the case the measuring of the energy, distance, road changing and the rest could have been monitored perfectly well by the police investigator in the helicopter no matter what games the driver played. So, we inevitably arrive at an impossible situation: the driver (the affect) is always split into two parts when we refer to hysteria, obsession, phobia, psychosis. ‘Consequently’ says Freud ‘the memory-trace of the repressed idea has, after all, not been dissolved, from now on, it forms the nucleus of a second psychical group’. The two-dimentional man of  Breuer has now become the two-dimentional patient of hysteria, obsession, psychosis and phobia not as a philosophical or medical opinion but as a fact inside the consulting room. A fact that gets out of the most elementary human thinking at the cutoff point before pleasure starts becoming displeasure again. For it is indeed so intolerable to perceive for long the oneness of one’s self to become two selves. Then, the second part (the investigator) must constantly be kept repressed. In this text Freud has introduced us in the great distinction between researching human psychology as opposed to anything else. He has introduced us into the state of affairs that the police investigator is always internally and what the consequences are going to be of such an eventuality. It is not exaggeration to say that if Freud had written only 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense' he would still have been enlisted as one of the greatest thinkers of all times.  

With all the above in mind in the second paper on Obsessions and Phobias Freud tries to elucidate  mainly the concept of Phobia considering that the mobility of affect in the case of Obsessions is pretty understandable and obvious. He gets into a difficult situation when he refers to the various connections of anxiety and phobias. We would not like to go at this point into later works of his which  concerni themselves with anxiety. However,  on the basis of all that is so far known we can see what is at stake in creating  such a difficulty in progressing about the issue of phobia beyond the assertion that it is tightly linked to anxiety constitutionally or not. Indeed, the existence of a foreign body of a parasitic nature as it is experiencially felt produces an affective state that at its most basic level is ‘anxiety’. This very generic and important entity we are bound to find it in front of us too often in the future.      

6th: Notes in Metapsychology

Metapsychology Notes

by Vassilis Maoutsos

English Standard Edition

Early Psycho-Analytic Publications

‘On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia Under the Description Anxiety Neurosis’ 1895

Volume III, 1893-99

Freud already has set up to this very early stage the most important meta-psychological principles.

1. He was not going to follow the ‘scientific method’ that he had attempted to do in the ‘Project’

2. He was going to describe only those things that he felt  they were clinically sound and absolutely uncontroversial (e,g the existence of ‘psychosis’ or ‘neurosis’ or ‘hysteria’)

3. He would describe illogical things presented in the context of his psychiatric practice as if they were rational because he was covered by the fact that this is how they were described to him by his patients.

4. He would always be open and sincere in what he experienced inside himself to be each one case clinically and he would never be hypothetical or vague in his opinion. Thus, he would not bother if he was distancing himself further from the way that he expressed himself in the ‘Project’.

5. He accepted the concept of the ‘Unconscious’ up to this point only in the sense that there is something ‘unknown’ about one’s self in every adult human being who visited him for psychological treatment.

6. He started his clinical considerations about hysteria, obsessions, phobias, psychosis from the simple fact that the human being as defined in point 5 exists in three obvious dimensions made of soma, affects, ideas (thoughts, words, concepts), which interact among themselves during the therapy.

7. In the sphere of psychological treatment the doctor differs from the patient in one thing only: the former did not ask the latter for help. So, each one of the two participants exists in two dimensions in the context of free associating. Thus, is created the four dimensional psychoanalytical encounter that Breuer had first indicated in the Studies on Hysteria.

8. The affects are unquantifiable entities as it is experientially expected to be. The body and the ideas are measurable entities.

9. The patient visiting the doctor wants only peace of mind. Thus, he pursues pleasure in the sense of wanting to get rid of anything that is troubling him i.e unknown things that he is having in surplus inside him causing him discomfort.

10. In trying to understand human psychology the problem is only one: The interrelationships between body, affects, ideas are always misleadingly perceived because the affects are not constantly synchronized internally with the other two as they would rationally be expected to do. Thus, they act as if they get externalized inducing away bodily manifestations and ideas. If and when these three constituent elements get automatically synchronized as they would normally be expected to do then every psychological symptom disappears mysteriously obeying to the law of pleasure that we can only assume that must dictates the life of every biological being. Then, they all stay more or less internally and the patient gets well.   

By 1895 Freud has established these preliminary but firm metapsychological positions without having found himself in the need to make use of any objectionable hypotheses, although he himself often likes to claim to have made one or another ‘hypothesis’. All the above points are agreeable and simple to  be accepted by everyone with the exception of the last one (10).  This one has an enormously inherent difficulty because the idea of automatization was not discussed explicitly by Freud. That was to be the determining factor in many future developments of psychoanalysis.

In the present paper Freud stresses the clinical side of things. His subject is on the one hand what his patients call ‘anxiety’, affect or symptom and on the other the overinclusive diagnostic category of his time called ‘neurasthenia’.  He discusses it not in terms of a 'hypothesis' but in terms of 'clinical facts' that cannot be doubted because every doctor experiences them in his practice. He, in effect, is telling us that it is one thing for an individual to be considered neurasthenic and awkward with a variety of unspecified somatic and bad character manifestations and another thing to complain specifically of the affective state of anxiety. Nobody would disagree with that. Indeed, in the latter case a new dimension has made its appearance into the subjective human existence. This is the libido-energy of the affect as an internally felt – not as a neurasthenically acted out - experience that flows all over the internal space producing the subjective state of anxiety.

One could say a lot about the distinction that Freud makes here between Neurasthenia and Anxiety Neurosis as well as Hysteria, although the last is discussed in this paper in an indirect only way. On the surface it all sounds as if Freud talks about phenomenology saying that  the mysterious and somatic-like symptom of anxiety dominates the clinical picture of any patient who suffers from this neurosis and it is different from those suffering from the more general condition of neurasthenia.The cause of the anxiety symptom relates one hundred per cent with the sexual life of the sufferer be it as it may sexual abstinence or sexually related dis-satisfaction. On the other hand Neurasthenia is the result of masturbatory activity. We must consider at this point that this is how Freud had found it to be in his clinical practice at the time and taking into account the social and cultural environment that he lived in we have no good reason to believe that he is wrong in what he says about his patients. However, his main insistence that it is the sexual life of the individual with all its ramifications that causes so severe clinical conditions sounds today to the non-analyst exactly as it sounded then: so bizarre, to say the least. Could it not be better for Freud – one might ask - to say, for instance, that the cause of the anxiety was the excessive consumption of meat or carbohydrates which made people fat and anxious as a consequence and that the cause of neurasthenia was something similar? After all, the uncompromising idea of 'noxae' that he introduces here and he repeats many times could be present and justifiable on all the above counts i.e meat metabolites noxae or carbohydrates noxae or ‘sexual noxae’ and so on. What is so special about sex life other than its provocative nature?

That was the question that was asked by an experienced on metapsychological issues member of the Wednesday Seminar. The member of our group added that it could be a substance analogous to cholesterol that causes the anxiety, a chemical agent of some kind, even a sexual by-product of the produced 'noxae' after chronic masturbation or the lack of it. Anyway, why should it be specifically sexual the noxae and nothing else? It is a superb question the answer to which to my knowledge rarely is given in metapsychological terms at psychoanalytical quarters although it is given in the same paper by Freud himself. Indeed, Freud clearly writes that there is a 'deflection' of 'somatic sexual' excitation from the 'psyche' and that as a consequence we are faced with 'abnormal' employment of that excitation i.e anxiety. In other words, he claims that besides the 'somatic' there is another system in the human being called 'psyche'. The two are communicating with each other. So the somatic contents of the former if it gets too much by means of excessive production it goes into the latter and then it gets 'deflected' into everywhere. Is there something analogous let's say with cholesterol under conditions of abnormal or insufficient fat metabolism? The answer is no. Cholesterol never gets into another system and then it never gets 'deflected' into the everywhere. Another system perhaps beyond the 'somatic' , could it exist that something like this might happen?. Is there perhaps any substance that we know of jumping from the somatic level into another level and then into thin air? The answer is no. So, it is only in states of 'anxiety' that we can observe a substance called 'libido' that can do that- as Freud names it in this paper. And regarding that new system called 'psyche' its features are that it is new, biological-like,functioning like the rest but grossly inefficient if one considers that it cannot deal with the energy (libido) that it is supposed to cope with. So, here we have for the very first time the explicit experiencially view that the system psyche is connected in an immature way with the soma and it is  controlled by the sexual quantity produced by the 'foreign body'. This is so not because  Freud thought of it like it but because his patients refer to him in those terms in the course of their analysis. In other words, Freud does not invite for discussion anybody to exchange ideas with but only clinicians with similar experiences to his own.   

Also, Freud makes here his first major clinical contribution on the basis of his previous  paper titled ‘The Neuropsychoses of Defence’ already discussed: In hysteria the affect cannot be worked out whereas in Neurasthenia gets out through the body or through ideas. and words In Anxiety Neurosis the affect cannot be worked out either and stays psychically. In Neurasthenia the attempt to get pleasure is made through masturbatory activity that is a caricature of externalizing sexual activity. In tAnxiety Neurosis the attempt to get pleasure is made through unsatisfactory internal combinations that for some reason frighten the individual. They eventually get out but in the form of anxiety. At the end, the noxae which are produced by the foreign body always get out  but it greatly matters by which way - through masturbation, orgasmic sexual  activity or sexual frustration.

With all that background in mind what remains to be answered is the question of the colleague at the Seminar  which had to do with the reason that this new and so imperfect ‘psychic’ system involved 'sexuality' and not the urinary or the cardiovascular systems or none of the known somatic systems whatsoever in order to be expressed. Let's start answering that question by asking ourselves : what is the most logically imperfect and uncontrollable thing that we constantly do in life? Is it smoking? Is it thinking? Is it eating too much? Is it working? Is it sleeping? None of all these! It is only sexual loving of our body or of another person. Therefore, the origin of  the symptom  'anxiety'  in the first instance closely relates to dissatisfying sexuality because it has exactly the same characteristics with it:  they both cannot be controlled, their elimination leads to satisfaction and they are biological-like. In a way it is  almost pre-determined that sexuality and anxiety go hand-in-hand.

But above all these the important thing to notice in this paper and in the future development of Freud's writings is that he makes a very clear distinction between external  working through of accumulated libido via masturbation  and internal working through of accumulated libido via the psyche. And let us not forget that although Freud links it all with affects he constantly combines them with bodily functions and ideas. In other words masturbation and psychic elaboration takes place in all three constituent elements of his patients' free associations. After this paper the system 'psyche' is not only  inseparably linked to sexuality and to the body in the way that we have seen but it also has a way to have no-anxiety and this is its capacity to produce 'orgasm', a new concept in the metapsychological dictionary that we could hardly claim to know what exactly it is.

7th: Notes in Metapsychology

Metapsychology Notes

by Vassilis Maoutsos

The Works of Sigmund Freud

English Standard Edition

Early Psycho-Analytic Publications

‘A Reply to Criticisms of my Paper on Anxiety Neurosis’ 1895

Volume III, 1893-99

 ___________________________________________________________________________________

Lowenfeld’s criticism of Freud’s last work presented in the last 'Notes’ are not different from the ones that every rational scientist would have raised. However, as we have said more than once already , Freud had decided after the ‘Project’ not to bother any more about the scientific method of examining the psychological complaints of his patients and by extension of himself  (as a patient) . The problem, of course, was how to communicate his thoughts and his conceptions to others after having deprived himself of the tool of sequential speech and meaningful arguments. So, he decided to find a  new form of communication based on the concept that he called the ‘unconscious’.  This 'unconscious' was not like the one that he loosely used until now. The new 'unconscious'  was  well specified with rules that Freud had started carefully making a number of subliminal assertions to this effect  so that they would not provoke rejection of his approach by his readers and followers. He first and for most relied upon what he called  his clinical experience and practice. When a doctor refers to his work with patients everyone has to respect it  more as opposed to reference to his ideas. Therefore, he had very good reasons to avoid at all cost to refer to theories and hypotheses  of a metapsychological vague character while talking about the unconscious as an entity. He owned it to himself, to his audience and to his unshakable belief that only  the very minimal, carefully measured and well controlled logical arguments could contribute positively to the therapeutic results of acknowledged mental  states.  His main ally would have to be his clinical practice. 

This is the reason that in this paper – as in so many that will follow – Freud jumps from theory-like to clinical facts and hypotheses-like to clinical facts again. This method of Freud in the years to come was destined to be mocked because people could not and did not want to understand the hard task that Freud had been faced with after he had rejected the scientific method and the perfectly justified reasons that he had in writing in such a way.   

In the present reply to his critic he stands by his thesis that anxiety neurosis is different or, more precisely, ‘almost the opposite’ from neurasthenia because there is a consistent and chronic sexual frustration of the individual  when he masturbates which is entirely different from not being sexually satisfied. In fact, somatic sexual tension is not worked over psychically in anxiety. He faces his friend’s  Lowenfeld arguments one by one as if at times he was an academic of the highest order. His points about heredity – which we will examine also in the next summary – are of particular significance for the academic style that Freud adopts. And yet, from time to time he makes remarks and interventions which clearly show his real thinking and intentions. They  reveal that he had no concern for the conventional way that he was obliged to argue.

Freud states that the ‘anxiety of the neurosis corresponds to a somatic sexual tension which has been deflected from the psychical field – a tension which would otherwise have made itself felt as libido’. He also says that ‘there exists a specific aetiological factor for anxiety neurosis which can be replaced in its operation by stock noxae in a QUANTITATIVE sense, but not in a QUALITATIVE one…’. Further down he speculates that ‘the nervous system has the power to master a certain amount of somatic sexual excitation even when the latter is deflected from its aim, and that disturbances only occur when that quantum of excitation receives a sudden increment’. And finally: ‘In phobias the anxiety is linked to a definite ideational or perceptual content and the arousal of this psychical content is the chief condition for the emergence of the anxiety. When this happens anxiety is generated, just as for instance sexual tension is generated by the arousal of libidinal ideas. The connection of this process, however, with the theory of anxiety neurosis has not yet been elucidated.’

In the last paragraph of the last ‘Notes’ I wrote that : ‘In other words masturbation and psychic elaboration takes place in all three constituent elements of his patients' free associations.’ I wanted, of course, to point out the open ended meaning that Freud left for both masturbation and psychic elaboration regarding ideas, affects and bodily functions so that both 'masturbation' and 'psychic elaboration' to be freed from the misconception that the former refers to the body and the later to the mind (ideas and affects). They both refer to all three constituent elements.  Freud always refers to adult patients complaining about their life problems and therefore masturbation or psychic elaboration are abstracts belonging to the newly described psychic system of adulthood rather than to a well defined organic configuration(s) or to children. Looking therefore upon ideas, affects and bodily functions as the three constituent elements of the existence of his patients in his consulting room , Freud sees them either masturbating or working through their problems in abstraction and therefore in fantasy. He has reached to this point without the need for any theory and only with the help of clinical facts and a very elementary way of biological thinking which can hardly be disputed by anyone without contradicting himself.

With this background in mind Freud tells us in the present paper that it is indeed ultimately ideational , affective and perceptual the cause of the anxiety and not just somatic as one would have thought it to be if he had not read his previous paper in its minute details. Not only that but he explains that the mysterious sexual noxae are always QUANTITATIVE and have nothing to do with quality  either somatic or ideational or affective. We can see clearly how important Freud considers the  quantitative human fantasy to be understood as being primary when he is pursuing the therapeutics of anxiety as opposed to the qualitative human fantasy that is to be understood as secondary and for this reason it results in no therapeutic success. He wants to describe elementarily the abstractly-masturbatory [not  just biological] or abstractly-psychological way of his patients contact with him . He knows that every doctor of psychological medicine knows what he is talking about. And all these are happening within the psychical field that no doubt has its own limits like any conceivable operating system. Indeed, they are all so reasonable if only one did not have to think from time to time that they refer exclusively to the unconscious of his patients.  

Freud in his previous and present work is gradually and steadily building up a ‘psyche' system which is like a ghost that although it exists in all its mentioned details at the same time nobody can prove its existence and yet there can be no doubt whatsoever that it is there! In these two last papers Freud has really gone very far. His idea of sexuality is progressively getting clearer : everything is sexual but of all that is sexual very little is biological and the most is relevant to ideas and affects. It is like he is suggesting that in humans sex is taking place primarily with their feelings and the connected ideas rather than their bodies. That's why everything is sexual. After these two papers a huge area for study opened up.

8th: Notes in Metapsychology

Metapsychology Notes

by Vassilis Maoutsos

The Works of Sigmund Freud

English Standard Edition

Early Psycho-Analytic Publications

‘Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses’ 1896

Volume III, 1893-99

 ____________________________________________________________________________

We have stressed more than once the difficulty in communication that Freud had  after he decided to leave aside the scientific method of examining the symptoms of his patients and to adopt a method that was most uncertain and vague not knowing where it would lead him to. For it was a method that whatever he was to say it had to be said in rational and scientific-like terminology and style which he had just rejected. Otherwise he would not have been understood.  Of course, at the bottom of such a difficulty laid the restriction of the use of language as an exclusive tool of communication.  Other non verbal techniques like sexual involvement of any kind with the patient, religious practices , oriental experimentation of training the mind in certain ways, artistic education that usually are used for therapeutic purposes had not place in his approach . The reason was that these methods could not appreciate the use of language as well as the simplicity of the system 'psyche' and the complexity of the defenses against the threat that this new system apparently imposed upon the old status quo of the mind, whatever this might have been. The above methods aspired the exact opposite. His patients had had every opportunity to try these non-verbal therapies and they found them  as much confusing then as today.

This being the case, Freud was absolutely clear as to what he was doing: trying to treat medically diseases that his patients imagined as being somatic when in fact  he knew that they were actually ‘psychological’ (he still did not quite know what this word meant) although he had to follow all the steps and the rituals that proper scientists (doctors, in particular) followed. As for the method that he applied it was no other than that of the free associating of his patients and probably of himself . This impossible task Freud found that it had as its limit the degree of heredity that could be raised as an obstacle to the therapy: the intense feeling followed by the extreme conviction or idea of the patient and others around him that the neurotic disease is built in his  biological system itself rather than that it is created by his psyche system. Thus, Freud had to take account of the objections not only of  people like Lowenfeld and Charcot but first and for most of his own patients who might had decided to see their problems as if they were medical and in the extreme case they might argue to him that their diseases were even hereditary or, the equivalent, untreatable.

He, therefore, raises in the present paper all sort of scientific-like arguments against the idea of heredity of the neuroses arguing in exactly the same way like any  biological scientist would have argued in order to prove that the cause of the neuroses - hysteria and obsessions - is not other but the sexual trauma of childhood. Looking closely upon the text we find that Freud does not really bother to convince anyone with his  scientific arguments because he knew full well that such an extreme and important fantasy as it is the fantasy of heredity taking the form of a scientific-like inquiry can never go away as a potentiality and indeed there is no reason why it should even be attempted to make it go away from people’s mind as an extreme form  of psychic creation. Indeed, this fantasy must be so important and necessary for the stability and the proper functioning of the mind at times of urgency  that the psyche system will never abandon it. He, therefore, thought that it is most important to go forward with the issue regarding the actual treatment of his patients under the difficult conditions that  they may be faced with always interpreting their fantasy of heredity. Having captured such an extreme fantasy as that one, Freud was going to make full use of it in this and many other of his works.   

By using the opportunity that was given to him from the extreme human fantasy about the hereditary aspects of his patients ‘psychological’ diseases, Freud extended his understanding of  what an  fantastic base neuroses - obsession and hysteria - stem from. He repeated in every possible way that his argumentation was a clinical and not a theoretical one. This did not prevent him from throwing extremely unpredictable and crucial theoretical schemata at every point he felt that his reader will be in tone with his way of writing even if his reader’s thinking objected to it due to the amazement that he experienced of the said idea rather than for any other reason. I think that from this present work onwards Freud introduces actively this extremely important and to my knowledge unique method of progressing his theses. According to it he pursuits something only to the degree that he is at the maximal psychological contact with his reader with the minimal hypothetical content in his argument. This method is by itself a great psychoanalytical writing technique that not many analysts have managed to practice since. The practical result of this method (resembling in contemporary terms to a precursor of projective identification in scientific authorship) has been the inhibition of the reader’s intellect from producing constantly counter-arguments in order to simply invent obsessive objections to felt experiences.

So, if those ‘psychological’ diseases (hysteria and obsessions) are the result of  the fantasy of heredity - this  being  the most extreme and the most complex thing that can be said about these conditions  - then its opposite, namely that they are very simple, with elementary differentiation and of the same exactly origin is the simplest but equally credible fantasy. The former has its appeal in the strength of knowing and the latter in the weakness of the unknown. There is now one more thing that needs to be answered and that is to name the origin of these two fantasies, of strength and weakness.  No doubt, the simplest and most desirable thing in life is no other but the pleasant sensations that one gets from  sexual activity including masturbation that they were discussed in the last 'Notes'. Therefore, it is by no means unexpected that when searching in an anti-scientific way (as Freud had decided to do) to explain inexplicable aspects of the human existence anyone would inevitably end up in the pleasure of the sexual sphere which ignores tensions. The topic of  heredity and the codes of human gonidioma give the paralytic pleasure of knowing the unknown.  

Freud having decided to follow the anti-scientific method is most consistent in attributing hysteria  with its powerful bodily fantasy to passive sexual experiences and obsessions with its powerful  ideational fantasy to active sexual involvement during childhood. Here, ‘passive’ and ‘active’ are temporary aspects of memory in the sense that something passive (hysteric) is more remote from memory than an active (obsessional) one. In short, Freud is telling us that for a ‘patient’ - who is by definition preoccupied with disorganized somatic, ideational or affective fantasies - he can be treated either psychoanalytically with an active participation on his part or scientifically with  a passive participation on his part. The extreme form of the last is heredity. This being the case we have to remember that they are both fantasy constellations. 

This is how Freud expresses this condensed and double universal human fantasy in his text: ‘all these [sexually abnormal] agents, which occur only too frequently in modern life, seem to agree in the fact that they disturb the equilibrium of the psychical and somatic functions in sexual acts, and that they prevent the psychical participation necessary in order to free the nervous economy from sexual tension’. It is a sentence that by itself speaks for a very good part of the total psychoanalytical building. At this point though we can only stress that the fantasy of heredity that Freud used in this paper has led him to conclude one of the strongest ever clinical statement: that modern life is the situation that constantly produces agents that are added up in the elementary sexual human act and they in turn constantly disturb the act of the psychical participation from serving the natural function of freeing sexual tension by means of sex i.e intercourse, ejaculation, orgasm or masturbation.   

9th: Notes in Metapsychology

Metapsychology Notes

by Vassilis Maoutsos

English Standard Edition

Early Psycho-Analytic Publications

‘Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ 1896

Volume III, 1893-99

____________________________________________________________________________________________

This paper of Freud is the continuation of his earlier one with the same title. However, it can also stay in its own right. Freud felt the need to elaborate on the concepts of his previous work because only the most basic had been included there. We recall that what had there been stressed was the three dimensional existence of the visiting patient i.e bodily, ideational and affective. Of those three it was the affective that was causing the symptoms of anxiety because as far as the patient was concerned it interfered actively with the other two without any logical or effective control over it.

In the illustrative example that we had given in those 'Notes' the Police Investigator despite his great experience could not make any sense whatsoever as to what was happening with the appearance and disappearance of the vehicle. And, in view of the fact that the vehicle under no circumstances could be found we concluded without the need for any hypothesis whatsoever that the investigator and the driver were one and the same person. It is like saying that there was an unspoken agreement between the two not to reveal what the vehicle and his driver were contemplating. Ideas and bodily functions are ultimately left to the unknown wishes of the affects, as far as the patient is concerned. Ideas by themselves can exist without any problem whatsoever. They only become problematic when they get linked up with the bizarre parameter of ‘affect’ that they are transformed into ‘memories’, into foreign body and acquire a ‘traumatic’ character for the patient. The same is true regarding the ‘body’. It all happens in a close circuit. And, when this happens to the ideas or to the body – for the latter we actually have no evidence  yet that it is not masqueraded as if it is not an idea but a real material object - then, as we have said in the last 'Notes',  the regression goes as far as to attribute everything to the most pleasurable thing of all which is no other but the ordinary sexual function. Then, this biological adult function becomes most complex.

So powerful is the role of pleasure (i.e satisfaction of the need of the wondering affect) that ideas and body (the latter as a caricature of a material-like object) obey silently to her command for piece and quietness to the zero point for as long as it can last. These are the dynamics of ‘repression’: a simple automatic act, like all those that deterministically occur according to the laws of nature around us. The only reason that although we can see it so easily everywhere we cannot see it in ourselves or, in the patient’s position, is because in this case driver and investigator coincide (The Breuer’s ‘splitting’) with the driver always pursuing pleasure but allowing the investigator to believe that one day will find out the reasons of his irrational behavior.

And, as the affective ‘sexual noxae’ accumulate they grab ideas of shame, reproach, punishment, morality and so on against a fantasy of animal instincts. This is the ‘first system of defense’ against the fantasy of the powerful animal instinct. The sexual noxae can be affective, somatic or ideational constructs in a state of regression but the affective component is always present. This regression can go as far back as to the level of childhood because this is supposed  to be the most irrational excitation of the human being. Furthermore, ‘a second system of defense’ is built if the first fail temporarily to bring pleasure. This will not be out of weakness but as the result of allowing the investigator to all the time postpone his decision to arrest that awkward driver who, as we have said, is no other but himself i.e the double consciousness. Indeed, we must never forget the  detail that so much tormented Charcot, Breuer, Freud and many others that at the end driver and investigator are two aspects of the same person in disharmony with no one of the two to want the defeat of the other. This ‘secondary system’ is allowed to remove itself even more from the affective irrationality and to exaggerate the ideational or bodily fantasies to an even more somatic-like or intellectual-like sphere: ‘shame’, ‘reproach’, ‘punishment’, ‘morality’ 'psychosomatics' and ‘society’ get most prominent. They all  seem to be able to defeat the superiority of the unshakable animal-instinct. Thus, Freud rightly argues that in all obsessional states there is a ‘substratum of hysterical symptoms’.

If we follow Freud’s way of thinking it still  sounds as if it is elementary. Because, he actually describes nothing more than the application of  natural laws into the split system of the investigator and the driver who are communicating between themselves inside the consulting room of the doctor as if they were  separate and alien. This,  may sound  as an extreme simplification. However,  let us see it  in the tough context of the doctor who also have the same fundamental division of hysteria and obsessions inside himself. This may be to a degree only comparable to the patient  but it is there.  We can perhaps suspect the size of the clinical problem that Freud had been faced with this four-dimensional encounter inside his consulting room that we have spoken about in Volume II. IUnder these circumstances something elementary may indeed become the most difficult thing to resolve!    

10th: Notes in Metapsychology

Metapsychology Notes

by Vassilis Maoutsos

 The Works of Sigmund Freud

English Standard Edition

Early Psycho-Analytic Publications

The Aetiology of Hysteria 1896

Volume III, 1893-99

Here we are discussing a historic lecture that Freud gave in front of a very difficult audience of mainly medical people who were not ready to listen critically the radical views that the author put forward. His ideas were not new as they had already been described in previous works. And yet, as always happens with Freud, one must be prepared to be surprised unexpectedly by the metapsychological view that he subliminally introduces at the right time and in a descriptive way  in order to make it as less refutable by his reader as it can possibly ever be this sort of provoking   material.

So, in this work Freud describes the most controversial concept of the ‘trauma’ in the context of a ‘reality’. Although the trauma is revived during adolescence, producing the symptoms of hysteria it has, in fact, occurred in childhood or, more precisely, in very early childhood, through the involvement of the suffering individual in a kind of a ‘sexual’ encounter with adult(s) at that time. Of course, the revival of the unconscious material and its ‘repressed memory’ as the result of an external event is a straightforwardly naturally occurring phenomenon. Indeed, the reconstruction in the present of similar circumstances to any event of the past is inevitably having similar or even the same results with those of the past.

But if we follow Freud’s main thesis as a simple hypothesis there is no doubt that those medical people who were present in the audience would rightly have been very annoyed by a doctor who claimed that children had been molested by their parents and other adults and that was the reason of their hysteria. We have, of course, to point out here that Freud by insisting on the reality of the sexual involvement of the individual during his childhood he implies that the memory of the described event(s) was precise as far as he was concerned and that his patient was sincere in what he was saying even if his memory was inaccurate and also that his memory was not the product of suggestion as the result of his contact with the doctor. As it is known, Freud at a later stage in his career that we will examine in due course, was referring to the importance of ‘fantasy’ of his patients’ sexual involvement rather than the reality of the memory. This, does not contradict the obvious, namely that it is self-evident that an adult describing events of his childhood is impossible to be expected to be accurate and precise.  He is only expected to be sincere and co-operative.    

So, we are now moving to the most important aspect of Freud’s discovery in relation to the ‘trauma’. The conception of  Freud’s audience about the so called ‘sexual hypothesis’ has two very serious misgivings that dangerously misrepresent what Freud was really saying. At first, it is seen as a ‘hypothesis’ that metapsychologically is not sensible to be made if psychoanalysis is going viably to exist outside the area of sciences. ‘Hypotheses’ are scientific constructs to prove or disprove a physically occurring phenomenon that we have no other way to prove its existence. But from the moment that Freud repudiated the scientific method he replaced, as we have seen, the scientific method with the ‘experiential’ method that nevertheless had to be equally if not more trustworthy than the scientific one. Such an impossible task he had set to himself and this is ultimately the reason that psychoanalysis alone as opposed to religions, sciences and metaphysics will always be respected for its depth and used therapeutically for its endless possibilities. Therefore, Freud was not actually referring to a proper ‘hypothesis’ despite the fact that he himself is using the exact word in the text. Secondly, the ‘trauma’ is not something that needs so deep consideration: if we look at it as a diversion of the experience from the self-evident ‘principle of pleasure’ then ‘trauma’ is nothing but the increase of the amount of energy that the subject experiences rather than the decrease of it. So, ‘trauma’, from that point of view is everything that increases out of proportion the  libidinal energy  of the psychic system or, prevents the system from releasing its energy. As it has already been introduced in Volume I the naturally occurring phenomenon of the dyad more pleasure/less energy implies that the concept of the ‘trauma’ is an inevitable consequence in every unbalance of that relationship.

Therefore, there is no point in making the distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ regarding ‘the trauma’ because it all depends upon the subject who sensually or for any other reason, experiences plentiful energy inside himself that cannot be released in socially acceptable ways. It may, for instance, be the case that a parent exploits his child's sexually but the child having ways of releasing this extra burden upon his psychic system have no problem whatsoever in later life. I suppose that there can be no practitioner who is ignorant of this fact.

The idea of the ‘trauma’ must be looked at  in purely psychoanalytical terms. Indeed, clinical psychoanalysis itself is a ‘trauma’ that is used therapeutically with powerful implications.  'Life’ itself is full of ‘traumas’ of all kinds from the very first moment of one’s existence and it is pointless to discuss the ‘trauma’ as if  it is an exception and indeed a bad exception occurring in childhood. And yet, clinical psychoanalysis should be seen as an exceptional trauma that for specific therapeutic reasons increases the energy of the psychic system. And if it then releases it does it up to the point that Freud considered it to be technically necessary for the success of the analysis. 

11th: Notes in Metapsychology

Metapsychology Notes

by Vassilis Maoutsos

On Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses, 1898

Early Psycho-Analytic Publications,

Volume III, 1893-99

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This is a very important work because it exemplifies what has been said in his previous works about the aetiology of Actual Neuroses (Neurasthenia and Anxiety Neurosis) and Psychoneuroses. Thus, neurasthenia is the result of excessive masturbatory activity, anxiety neurosis is the result of unconventional sexual intercourse of any kind and psychoneurosis is the result of a sexually determined intrapsychic conflict which although cannot be readily remembered by the sufferer due to its occurrence in childhood it unconsciously affects the life of the individual. ‘Civilization’ is indeed a huge issue determining the form that each individual will suffer from. Through civilization the masturbatory activity, the variety of sexual activity and the events of childhood have all acquired richness and freedom that are bound to have increased the said conditions.

Having said all these one really wonders if it is possible to believe that all those crippling and serious conditions are of such ridiculously simple aetiology. Is it possible that they are the result of a) a somatic (sexual) dysfunction b) a specifically sexual dysfunction and c) a dysfunction that has to do with the form that this particular function takes place and by no means with the content, the quantity the quality or the anatomical structure of the serving organs of the function? The answer to all these is most positive. Indeed, one has to be careful when he reads Freud’s text. For he in no place suggests that masturbation as such is a bad thing. What is bad is the masturbation of the adult, the incomplete sexual intercourse of the adult and the sexual repression of the adult. If that is the case then Freud does not refer to sexuality but to intense human relationships that naturally ought to have as their ultimate end result the somatic contact of the sexual intercourse. He does not refer only to this either. As we said elsewhere to the degree that these human relationships do not end up in simple sexual intercourse if they destined to have done so, then the implication is that there is a counterpart to these unconsummated relationships that is equivalent to masturbation, to coitus interruptus or to conflict of sexual repression. In these cases the sexual sphere for the first time ever appears to distance itself from the somatic and practically its significance becomes catalytic in every human situation of adulthood for it is by definition the fate of every act in a civilized society to apply to at least two people i.e the subject and the society or one of its members. Thus, the somatic sexual intercourse - where every human relationship ends up and starts all over again - becomes also the mental sexual intercourse, mental masturbation, mental coitus interruptus and mental sexual repression. They are all connected to a prototype that occurred in childhood from where they receive their energy and become deferred actions. When Freud says to his patient ‘As you yourself very well knew, you fell ill as a result of long-continued masturbation.’ to which the patient agrees, it is most obvious that he agrees in both the act of masturbation plus the fantasy of the innumerable times that he had wanted to masturbate,  for the mental cannot be separated from the somatic. 

In 1898 Freud cannot proceed any further as to what is ‘the mental’ but he has clearly set the ground for very safe conclusions to come based on the immense advantage that so far he has committed himself to no hypothetical statements that any individual reader could refuse without running the risk of contradicting himself later due to personal experience. Freud by doing so has placed strict limits to the sphere of intellectualism in the examination of human psychology.  

12th: Metapsychology Notes

12th: Notes in Metapsychology

by Vassilis Maoutsos

The Works of Sigmund Freud

English Standard Edition

The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness, 1898

Volume III, 1893-99

As Freud introduces more and more the various facets of sexuality into his work he is at the same time shows bit by bit what this ‘sexuality’ is all about. Surely, it is not simply sexual intercourse but something much more than this. In the present short paper Freud once again astonishes his reader by choosing to speak about all these through a mental phenomenon involving on this occasion not one of his patients but himself. Therefore, we cannot fail to notice that he is primarily interested in avoiding generalizations but allowing anyone ready to identify with him to do so and draw his own conclusions. By doing so he once again bypasses the traditionally scientific way of writing on behalf of something that serves his interest in the study of the unconscious much more fundamentally. So, Freud describes an event of forgetting the name of the well known Italian Renaissance painter Signorelli while he was in the company of a friend. Despite his efforts he could not retrieve. Instead he was bringing into his mind the names Boltraffio and Botticelli. Freud explains how on the basis of recent events he kept bringing into his mind other names and words but not the required ‘Signorelli’. I am not really sure if it is worth arguing about Freud’s explanations regarding the precise reasons of his forgetfulness. Forgetfulness of this kind is pretty common and the explanations may vary. To my understanding it is only if it is treated as a dream – in other words, if it is submitted to analytic treatment - we can be sure of the true meaning of a forgetfulness of this kind.

In going beyond these details it is most important to appreciate the concept of ‘affect liberation’. In experiencing the attempts to remember he word, let’s say, Signorelli, a lot of byproducts come into surface - totally irrelevant words under pressure. This is to say that the system Psyche  which  as we have said in previous Summaries Freud has started describing, does not really bother about the word Signorelli that the subject is consciously eager to retrieve to his memory because it is occupied with more important things that burden it at an unconscious level. Therefore, it is much more meaningful to talk nonsense about the serious issues that the subject refuses defensively to talk rather than to make light talk about Signorelli etc.

It is again rather difficult to object to Freud’s position without being in trouble with one’s own self. However, there is one point that is of special interest here. The case of forgetfulness complicates further the fullness of the mind with unknown material that needs expression as well as the old standing question of where this material comes from. It is, of course, very meaningful to say that it is sexual material in the sense that a. it is clinically found to be so b. it is the only somatic stimulation that is affect linked and c. cannot be satisfied in adulthood without an object (it is dependable and therefore weak by itself). Still, we are far from realizing beyond doubt the precise nature of this sexual material and the massive quantity that characterizes it to the point of allowing no space to remember the word Signorelli in the course of a holiday.  

13th: Metapsychology Notes

13th: Notes in Metapsychology

by Vassilis Maoutsos

The Works of Sigmund Freud

English Standard Edition

Screen Memories, 1899

Volume III, 1893-99

The issue of memory is again the subject of this excellent piece of Freud’s work. However, on this occasion, contrary to the last one, he engages himself with the seemingly complex phenomena of remembering something in the place of something else, of creating a  false memory as if it was real and of attributing memories to one’s childhood as if it is the ultimate truth. Under these conditions we could easily claim that Freud with this paper of his he entirely turns up side down our own preconceptions about the accuracy of human memory but also about what we sometimes wrongly think that he has advocated on such an important issue in the field of psychoanalysis like this one.

Again, it is not worth staying on the actual clinical material of the case and the assumptions that Strachey makes that Freud is in the main talking about himself rather than another patient. The significance of the analysis that he makes is superb and the reader must enjoy for himself the symbolisms that he is using going step by step in the direction of showing the childhood memory being linked together with the free associations of his patient and the real events of his life. Thus, the strong sexual aspects of his patient’s fantasies become apparent together with the sensual elements in it. He concludes that when there are difficulties in allowing a memory to appear then there is ‘a compromise’ formation between the concealed part and the actual current event. This compromise formation is ‘the screen memory’. We must admit that Freud in his conception he has once again said the obvious as we know it from physics and daily experience namely that when two forces are coming against each other the third dimension that will be created will always be something standing in between the two. So, something embarrassing because of its sexual connotation being brought into surface by something innocent but reminiscent of the first will create a bizarre verbal or artistic structure that will go halfway to satisfy them both. 

Freud is describing again another life situation resembling to a dream. It is really amazing that once he started examining mental phenomena in the known anti-scientific way and with all its consequences about the role of the unconscious we constantly find the split two dimensional man of Breuer (conscious, unconscious) and the three dimensional man of analysis (observer, conscious, unconscious) to dominate every clinical picture. There is no need for the physician to do something more than to apply consistently the laws of nature ( not of logic) to the psyche system and everything starts getting unfolded. And the unfolding goes as far as ‘childhood’. It is there that once consciousness has arrived then everything almost magically gets clear. In the present context the vehicle to travel inside the dream and reach the childhood fantasy and desire is the screen memory. But not even that is enough in order to exhaust our curiosity with the impressively elementary nature of the psyche system. Strachey as well as Freud point out that the screen memory is there to cover up an earlier forbidden memory. However, on rarer occasions like the present one the screen memory covers up a later event. If we look closely into the essence of these two statements we then have once again in front of our eyes the phenomenon of circularity that we will so often have the opportunity to observe from now on. As Freud questions, are there ‘….any memories at all’. In other words it is grossly in doubt if we can really dare to say that our memories are real. It is even more doubtful if we can claim that our childhood memories are real. Thus, the childhood fantasy is a psychological necessity rather than a reality. No patient can live out his therapy without it. It is like saying that patients (i.e individuals in mental distress) for some reason that is not to be examined in this work, need, uncompromisingly, to reach the point of been able to refer to their childhood. And so, the screen memory is in the centre of an oscillating event whereas when a sexual memory of the event approaches the screen memory it loses its ‘repressed’ character and then it turns to the present and discovers that a present event increases its repressing character. This is a continuous process that every doctor of psychological medicine is bound to find in front of him all the time. This circularity is found everywhere in psychoanalysis and it covers every positive and negative aspect of all events as long as they can be described. The law of circularity was constantly present in Freud’s writings without ever to call it like that. Metapsychologically we will see in due course that especially from the practical (clinical) point of view there is nothing more important in analysis.            

14th: Notes in Metapsychology

14th: Notes in Metapsychology

by Vassilis Maoutsos

The Works of Sigmund Freud

English Standard Edition

The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900

Volume IV,

This had probably been Freud’s most liked work as he himself had indicated more than once. In starting examining this volume metapsychologically we could claim as an introduction that the reason that he felt that way in the course of his life and after eight editions of this work cannot be obscure. As we have stressed we should never overlook the fact that Freud abandoned the scientific method after the ‘Project’ but he never abandoned the principles that it represented. In that sense here we have the first after the Project of Freud’s major and comprehensive piece of work which by enlarge talks psychologically (not medically) and without concern for following proper research methods about ‘dreams’  albeit immense interest is given in the empirical aspects that could not be denied by his reader because of their general acceptability. And in order to do that it is of the utmost importance that he chooses a seemingly biological phenomenon known to every human being rather than to the scientific community only. All these were by no means ways of watering down his frustration as the result of his failure to make progress at the ‘Project’ that he has by now abandoned. On the contrary, he sensed that he had discovered an entirely new research method in psychology i.e Metapsychology. He was naturally proud of that and at the same time rather scared of its results at this stage. However, he will from now on use systematically psychological concepts as if they were biological with the implicit challenge to any disbeliever to come forward and discredit them, if he could! In practice, as we know, nobody could do (or, can do) that except for affective reasons of his own. Indeed, the simplicity of the arguments, their universality as the result of their biological basis, the powerful empiricism and his unwillingness to pretend that he addresses exclusively the high powered medical community only made any sincere discussant of Freud’s positions to think more than twice before he brought up an objection. For instance, when Freud introduces the ‘internal’ versus the ‘external’ or the ‘mental energy’ versus the ‘physical energy’ in this volume he is not hypothesizing. Instead, he is challenging the reader to claim for himself that this is not the case. In other words, that he is not agreeing with the existence of a mental energy inside himself or an interior space inside himself. Whoever would dare to say that would be in severe trouble with himself, primarily. These are the foundations of the uniqueness of ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ that we are going to examine. And to all these we have to add one more thing: Everything that is going to be said in the remaining nineteen volumes is here, in this study, as well! Yes, this is true. However, Freud knowing so well from his own analysis the human resistance to the subjective truth is never going to say neither here nor in the future more than it is absolutely necessary at any given time. This is a special sort of respect for the reader. The fact that he by now knows the Oedipal Complex from his own analysis does not mean that he is going to throw it out enthusiastically when he is aware of the torment due to the ‘mental energy’ that it is accumulated in it no matter how understandable it may be in ordinary and rational terms.

He at first, as he always does, starts very smoothly. Talks about how people in history and in science have treated dreams as if they were states alien to the dreamer but also very relevant to the dreamer. It has always been known that the dream relates to ‘recent’ actual events in the life of the dreamer and that the ‘memory’ of these events may well be indirect and based on relatively ‘insignificant’ things. Also, dreams are known to relate to bad sleep in the event, for instance that the dreamer went to bed with a heavy stomach. At all events dreams can be the ‘response’ of ‘internal’ or ’external’ stimulation that try to awake the dreamer.

In all these reviews of the existing literature on the subject of dreams at his time Freud tries to make it apparent that scientists and lay people alike in trying to understand dreams are in fact unwillingly working upon the admission of the existence of an Unconscious system. A powerful system inside the individual that determines not only where the dream will direct the enquiry under consideration but also how the results will be formulated so that they serve unconscious motives. Freud works upon these foundations regarding the strength of the unconscious very methodically and openly. He uses simple language and the reader enjoys the common sense that he is using although he may claim things that are incredible if they were presented differently.

15th: Notes in Metapsychology

15th: Notes in Metapsychology

by Vassilis Maoutsos

The Works of Sigmund Freud

English Standard Edition

The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900

Volume IV,

So, in Chapter I of Volume IV Freud is basically reviewing everything that has been said about dreams up to his time, showing every so often a confidence that they will all soon be revised from start on the basis of a much more fundamental and comprehensive thinking i.e the theory of repression. He is touching upon issues like the ‘forgetting’ of dreams, the sensual aspects of dreams that relate mainly vision and hearing with the concept of ‘hallucinating’ during dreaming, the human ‘morality’ that seems to get lost during dreaming and it is expressed with rude and ‘involuntary ideas’ that stand out of the acceptable ethical values and boundaries of the individual concerned.

Within the spirit of examining the so far accumulated scientific knowledge about dreams, Freud goes into the various ‘theories’ as he calls them that had been said about dreams up to that time. This seems to be in order to satisfy the need of his readership for scientifically based thinking rather than because he feels that they have something to offer him in terms of research findings and interconnections of his findings with them. After all in the few citations of his work at the time he had found ‘ironical’ comments about his work.

Those theories that Freud is talking about were purely scientific in the sense that they were evolving around one or two basic hypotheses and they reached conclusions like, for instance, that during dreaming the human brain gets some rest because it has got tired from the day’s work or, that dreaming does a special kind of work during sleep that cannot be done at another time by the brain. From that point of view alone the fact that dreams were related to ‘mental diseases’ was to be expected in one or another way as an inevitable result. 

In summarizing this first chapter and having in mind the one and only real hypothesis of ‘repression’ that Freud has really made it was by itself more than enough on the basis of this hypothesis to reach to the concepts of amnesia, hallucination and involuntary ideas as the most prominent features of dreaming and without the help of any additional hypothesis. This in fact was, as we will see below a most crucial aspect for the future of psychoanalysis. But the dogma of no-scientific hypothesis other than the hypothesis of repression that Freud introduced was destined to accompany everything that was to follow and it had profound effects not just upon dreaming but the human being in its totality.  Indeed, the human being after that in the state of a divided being by nature could never have reliably been studied properly by his own self. What we gradually see is that Freud realizes step by step that his abandonment of the ‘Project for a scientific psychology’ was fully justified and meaningful – a realization that could immensely intrigue his imagination.