Freud’s Intuitive Discovery of Psychoanalysis and the Essential “Classical” Rules of Practice.

I expect that neurological, neuropsychological, and psychoanalytic discoveries will ultimately reveal a link between intuition and the unconscious. By knowing how to analyze such link it will be possible to answer this question: Do great thinkers uncover what they discover about the human subject and human nature by intuition or do they unconsciously sleepwalk to their great thoughts. Did Freud discover psychoanalysis intuitively or through a process of organized thinking? The differences in answering this question could help us decide if psychoanalysis is something that has to be taken the way Freud proposed it with minimum elaboration, or we could take it as a starting point in a progressive process of thinking.    

There is something about the start of psychoanalysis that forces that question on us: Why did Freud start so early in his psychoanalytic journey by thinking and working on the proper conditions of practicing it (1910,1912)?  Did he intuitively foresee that there are surprises awaiting us if we followed him in the path to therapy? Or did he anticipate that practicing psychoanalysis will lead to more than just replacing hypnotism with free association?   

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In a previous publication (‘Understanding Classical Psychoanalysis,2017) I underline the great intuition that Freud had to standardize the practice of his new discovery, ‘psychoanalysis’. In my opinion then, and now, a profession based on listening to a person speaking about himself in order to lead patients to change their intrapsychical dynamics has to be done in a consistent predictable environment, and treatment has to be decided only by achieving its success within that unchangeable protocol. This is not the familiar medical model of therapy in which the physician is the one who decides about the treatment. Standardizing the conditions of doing psychoanalysis was Freud’s ‘intuitive’ work on the patient’s disclosures. They have to be derived from within an identical process of work, with very limited external interference and variations that could affect the analyst’s unfolding of the unconscious aspect of the patient’s self, as well as affecting the analysand’s gains of insight. There was also the requirement of maintaining a necessary distance (mild in the case of the patient) between the patient and the analyst. Freud’s tripartite protocol for doing psychoanalysis and the regularity of the patient’s sessions added to restricting analysis to what the patient says about himself formed the criterium of the correctness of the analytic process.

The rules of practicing analysis, which were inherited ‘blindly’ up till now, were founded on the available knowledge of what psychoanalysis was, then. I have to add that early psychoanalysis and most of current points of view are basically of functional nature (causes like deprivations and effects like reaction formation, etc.), which limit or eliminate the uncovering of the intrapsychic psychodynamics which is the forming influence of the psychopathological condition.

There was an underlying tendency to use the new vocabulary improvised by new discoveries as theoretical background of an advancing psychoanalysis. But the main trend was to make psychoanalyzing an act of ‘making sense’ of the psychoneurotic conditions, assuming that this ‘making sense’ is the curable factor.

Things have changed overtime: in the first place we know now much more about the structures of psychical phenomena.. We also know that obvious functional understanding of psychological manifestation is more likely to be misleading and limiting of the analyst’s field of work. Moreover, we deal now with much more healthy patients- in terms of the old criteria of pathology, which makes our work in need for serious revisions of our blind rules of practice. Thirdly, we should have realized by now that the practice of psychoanalysis as therapy is related to the intrapsychical structures of the patients and not about pressures, deficiencies, lacks, deprivations that still demands satisfactions, etc. The rules of psychoanalysis that we followed till now in terms of the number of sessions per week, the length of time of a session, duration of therapy for cure (or training), couch, vacations, etc., were arbitrarily established in the past, and were chosen to fit the analysts’ professional needs (not the patient’s requirements).

In other words, the rules of practicing psychoanalysis did not come from the patients’ need or from understanding what psychoanalysis is about, because there was very little known about any of that till few decades ago. But I assume that we know now what unconsciousness versus consciousness means, how to interpret psychological material and reconstruct interrelated psychical manifestations which changes the nature of our work from receiving the remnants of transference to showing the patient the intrapsychical distortions in his transference relationship with the analyst. We are not automats who just follow a prescribed way of practice; we are supposed to know the psychodynamics of the human subject and the way to deal with them to affect the required changes.

Learning and Training in Psychoanalysis:

The history of psychoanalysis shows that it had to begin with a period of apprenticeship, which lasted much longer than the usual apprentice periods in other professions. Both the master craftsmen and student in psychoanalysis were learning a totally unexplored field of knowledge. However, in a gradual way knowledge about human psyche accumulated and most of the pioneer apprentices turned that knowledge into a theoretical body (though stubbornly most senior analysts wanted it to remain some details of a profession of psychotherapy). By the seventies of last century there was a firm body of knowledge, and interest in that knowledge in neighboring fields of academics, to turn psychoanalysis from an apprenticeship to an academic branch or program. Doing that conflicted with the personal interests of the leading psychoanalysts, or the training analysts. Although that at the present time there are great kafuffles, debates, and complaints about the Training Psychoanalyst status they is a resistance to SEE that we cannot have a training system based on apprenticeship without having master craftsman (A training senior). How could we maintain the model of apprenticeship in training candidates in an IPA and alike institutes without “training analyst”?

Back to the standard rules of practice:

·       The standers rules of practice, which we follow till now, were very useful but were arbitrarily decided then.

·       They reflected an early status of psychoanalysis based on a limited knowledge of what psychoanalysis is.

·       Knowing what we know now about psychoanalysis, as well as

psychoanalyzing (interpretation and reconstructing) demand a review of our practices.

If the notion of a need for a new psychoanalysis is accepted a revision of the practice will come as a natural outcome. If that notion is rejected there will be no need for revising those rules because they will die with the dying psychoanalysis.

Whatever the way will lead us to  the link between the psychoanalysis we adopt and the method we will apply it is not arbitrary: we practice the psychoanalysis that dictates its own method.