Freud's reconsideration

Abstract

This paper is a reflection on the early Freud and what is original in psychoanalysis, a reflection on what lies on this side of freudism. It aims at reconsidering the situation, object of analysis, i.e. the relationship between two persons, where the treatment that one of them gives to the other and to himself is being analyzed, where to analyze signifies to give a meaning, this being done through the feelings of one of the two persons involved: the analyst. It deals with what the analyst feels. From this viewpoint some of the subject matters of “Studies on Hysteria” are dealt with. It is pointed out that there were two directions at the beginning: one which
discovers what is happening, the things themselves and the analyst’s implications; the other one tries to place what is discovered into patterns of thought, through schematizing and by abstracting from concrete experience. These two directions
define Freud and freudism. The first chapter shows the oscillation at setting as a subject matter the research
of the etiology or of the motivations, the person being considered either determined by reasons beyond his control, or moved by desires. Further on remembering is studied, as a particular form of relationship, this being opposed to considering it as
the setting to work of a function whose running is checked. Another chapter shows how the patient and the analyst organize their experience and their field, starting from the basic point that what we call an association is already an interpretation, which transforms into an ordered sequence what would have been a mere succession. Finally this paper attempts to show how the
unconscious is the result of a substantialization and a retrospective illusion to which Freud and Breuer had already called attention.
Analysis is then understood as the analysis of the vicissitudes of the associationdissociation analyst-analyzand. If Freud understood that what he did was to take the lead and state his guess and confront the analyzand with it, what matters then is the
end of this confrontation, how the analyzand takes in what he is told, or even the fact of saying something. For even if the interpretation is nut adequate, the analyzand can take it (or not, and this is optional) as a starting point to get to an adequate one.
The reconsideration of Freud allows us to see psychoanalysis as carrying implicitly an anthropology, in the broad sense of the term. This supposes that the fundamental human fact is that man is always in the society of his fellow men, dealing with them; that this relationship does not derive from some other factor (premature birth for instance) but it is primary and the rest derives from it. The
psychoanalytic concepts studied in this paper appear as rationalizations of this primordial dealing; these rationalizations lead to an understanding of this dealing or else to a substracting of it and placing ah that is understood into a mythical interior of
the analyzand; interior which comes before any effective experience.