Analytic Work: The Essential and the Accidental in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This article explores what is essential to analytic work by drawing not only on Freud, but also on two additional sources: Friedman’s (2019) notion of the psychoanalytic phenomenon as described in Freud’s book on technique; and Weber’s (1991, 2000) understanding of Freud’s metapsychology as a creation of terms that are necessary in order to work with a non-observable object, the unconscious. Using Freud’s emphasis on the importance of dreams as a form of thinking, the author links the work of Friedman and Weber and extends it in doing a close reading of a specific passage by Freud, showing that the precarious nature of metapsychology is understandable as a form of paradigmatic logic. A dream of the author’s gives a certain counterpoint to the paper.

Keywords:

• Dreams
• Freud
• Papers on Technique
• Lawrence Friedman
• Samuel Weber
• metapsychology

Acknowledgment

The author would like to thank Lawrence Friedman for the inspiration of his work and for his very kind assistance in helping me bring this paper to the light of day.

Notes

1 In this section, certain information has been added to the transcript in brackets to help contextualize the details of the dream for the reader.

2 In sections on Weber’s work, the quotations from Freud are Weber’s translations. Where there is a difference from the Standard Edition, I have noted the difference in square brackets as [S. E. …].

3 Freud wrote in German: “So operieren wir also stets mit einem großen X.” Strachey did not translate einem großen X at all, as if it were not even there. Weber repairs Strachey’s amputation of a capital X in his translation of Freud.

4 Strachey relentlessly translated the German word Trieb as “instinct” in the S. E. This translation has had profound unfortunate consequences on Anglophone psychoanalysis. It is a distortion of Freud’s theory, giving the unconscious an instinctual-biological nature that is not the Freudian “drive.” The English title should be “Drives and their Vicissitudes.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard B. Simpson

Richard B. Simpson is a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist and is a member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society.