The Psychology of Love by Sigmund Freud

The Psychology of Love by Sigmund Freud

    This volume brings together Freud's main contributions to the psychology of love. His illuminating discussions of the ways in which sexuality is always psychosexuality – that there is no sexuality without fantasy, conscious or unconscious – have changed the ways we think about erotic life. In these papers Freud develops his now famous theories about the sexuality of childhood and the transgressive nature of human desire. In the famous case study of the eighteen-year-old 'Dora', we see Freud at work, both putting into practice and testing his sexual theories that were to change the modern world.

Extract

     Having shown in my Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, that dreams can generally be interpreted, and that once the task of interpretation has been accomplished they can be replaced by irreproachable thoughts which can be inserted at a particular place in the psychical context, in the pages below I should like to give an example of the one practical application that the art of dream-interpretation seems to permit. In that book1 I have mentioned how I came to the problem of dreams. I encountered it along the way as I was attempting to heal psychoneuroses by means of a particular process of psychotherapy, when my patients told me – amongst other events from their mental life – their dreams, which seemed to demand interpolation in the long connection leading from the mor­bid symptom to the pathogenic idea. Then I learned how to translate, without further assistance, from dream language into the immedi­ately comprehensible language in which we express our thoughts. This knowledge, I should stress, is indispensable for the psychoanal­yst, because the dream is one of the ways in which psychical material can reach consciousness when it has, because of the resistance that its content provokes, been excluded from consciousness, and become repressed and thus pathogenic. The dream is, to put it more succinctly, one of the detours around repression, one of the chief means of so-called indirect representation in the psychical sphere. This fragment from the history of the treatment of a hysterical girl is intended to show how dream interpretation intervenes in the work of analysis. At the same time it should give me my first public opportunity to represent my views concerning the psychical processes and organic conditions of hysteria in a manner detailed enough to avoid further misunderstanding. I shall not apologize for this degree of detail, since it is now known that one cannot match the great demands that hysteria places upon the doctor and researcher by responding with affected disdain, but only by immers­ing ourselves affectionately in the subject.

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