Inside the Revolution: Power, Sex, and Technique in Freud’s “‘Wild’ Analysis”

Abstract

This essay situates Freud’s “‘Wild’ Analysis” in its local and global histories, even while reading it for what it can tell us about psychoanalysis now. Even as it is taken on its own terms, this essay serves also as a means to consider psychoanalysis as host to crucial tensions, its ideas and their relation to technique, its traffic in power, and sexuality and the primal crime. Using a clinical vignette, the essay argues the heterogeneity and multiplicity inherent to psychoanalysis are a gift to later generations, even if they made trouble for Freud. In celebration and critique, it examines, in effect, where Freud was and where psychoanalysis is now.

Notes

¹ A note on quotation and translation: I am relying heavily on verbatim quotes from “‘Wild’ Analysis.” Given that Freud wrote in German, this not uncommon practice runs a risk for the Anglophone readers: translators can and do make mistakes. Perhaps this risk is mitigated here by my reliance on two translations, Strachey (referred to as S) and Bance (referred to as B), between which I have selected the version that seems to me the more accurate in its context.

² The foregoing statements belong to a larger argument about relational psychoanalysis and technique that I lack the scope to make in this context.

³ As did a colleague in an entirely different field, who’d read it in graduate school.

⁴ Here I join Widlöcher’s (2001) critique of the necessity “for theoretical coherence, which is what led Freud to join the ‘presexual’ and biological sexuality” (p. 23).

⁵ The question of “wild” analysis endured: even “in 1920 at the International Conference at The Hague, many analysts were shocked by Groddeck’s describing himself as a ‘wild analyst’ and by his associating freely, instead of reading his prepared paper. Only a few—among them Rank, Ferenczi, Horney, Fromm-Reichmann, and Simmel—shared Freud’s interest and affection” (Alexander, Eisenstein, & Grotjahn, 1966, p. 211).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Muriel Dimen

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D., is Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Editor-in-Chief, Studies in Gender and Sexuality; and associate editor, Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Her most recent anthology is With Culture in Mind. Her most recent authored book is Sexuality Intimacy Power, which won the 2006 Goethe Award from the Canadian Psychological Association for the Best Book of Psychoanalytic Scholarship.