IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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hard way’, as his patient angrily reproached him for interrupting her (ibid, p.62). Freud reports that at one point she told him “in a definitely grumbling tone that I was not to keep on asking her where this and that came from, but to let her tell me what she had to say” (ibid, p. 63) . From such experiences, Freud gradually realized that he “gained nothing” by interrupting the patient and he “cannot evade listening to her stories in every detail to the very end” (ibid, p.61). In a footnote of Freud’s “Project to Scientific Psychology” (1895), Strachey writes: “This situation of a firmly held cathexis on the one hand and a simultaneous travelling cathexis of attention on the other figures prominently in different forms throughout the Project . (See, for instance, Sections 15 to 18 of Part I and Section 1 of Part III.) In more than one passage (e.g. pp. 362 and 373) the travelling cathexis is undirected and, as in the first sentence of this Section, ‘disinterested’. It is difficult not to see in this a kinship with what was to be the earliest form of ‘free association’ in the technique of psycho- analysis - namely the form in which some specific parapraxis or element of a dream is held as a starting-point, while another part of the mind embarks on a stream of associations.” (Freud, 1895 p. 376, n-1; Italics added). In the case of Dora (1905e [1901]), Freud discusses his innovative technique, looking back: “At that time [In Study of Hysteria] the work of analysis started out from the symptoms, and aimed at clearing them up one after the other. Since then, I have abandoned that technique, […] I now let the patient himself choose the subject of the day's work, and in that way I start out from whatever surface his unconscious happens to be presenting to his notice at the moment. (1905 e [1901], p.12) II. Bb. The Fundamental Rule during Topographic Theory In his own words, in the late 1890’s he took the “most momentous step” (Freud 1924, p. 195) by abandoning hypnosis in favor of free association. From here on, without hypnosis, patients would be prompted to speak freely without censoring their thoughts. In the context of the Topographic theory of the Systems Cs, Pcs, and Ucs (Freud, 1900), dammed up fantasy and its energy (in the Ucs) would be converted into symptoms, when the Censor in the Preconscious prevented unacceptable thoughts from becoming Conscious. Anxiety (leading to the resistance) during this stage of theory development was viewed as resulting from repression: anxiety was a byproduct of dammed-up libido (sexual excitation). This theory of symptom formation had implications for technique. The primary purpose of the psychoanalytic clinician was to free the libido by bringing the unconscious libidinal wishes into consciousness. In the early Topographic model, resistances were seen as an inevitable barrier to be overcome , although not in the same sense as during the hypnotic phase, when the resistances were bypassed completely. Instead, after the resistances were brought into consciousness, the psychoanalyst was called upon to use various methods (e.g.,

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