SE XX (1925-1926) p177-258

‘The Question of Lay Analysis, Conversations with an Impartial Person’ is a 1926 book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, advocating the right of non-doctors, or ‘lay’ people, to be psychoanalysts. It was written in response to Theodore Reik’s being prosecuted for being a non-medical, or lay, analyst in Austria.

Available on the internet at http://staferla.free.fr/Freud/Freud%20complete%20Works.pdf / The question of lay analysis Conversations with an Impartial Person (1926) [JE thinks this is the James Strachey translation]

Quotation

We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. … after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology. SE XX P212

Citation

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-The Logic and Surprises of Supervision at the Time of the Parlêtre : 7th March 2015 (Italy) : Éric Laurent, see this site (5 Authors A-Z (Laurent or Index of Authors’ texts)

Laurent p119, He was constantly on his guard against therapeutic ideology. He put this in a decisive manner in his 1926 text, ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’: “I only want to feel assured that the therapy will not destroy the science”,[2] he said. He also evoked the counterpoint to this deviation of psychoanalysis as therapy: “If the representatives of the various mental sciences are to study psychoanalysis […] they must learn to understand analysis in the only way that is possible – by themselves undergoing an analysis.”[3]

Footnote [2] Freud, S., “The Question of Lay Analysis” (1926), SE XX p.254.

Quote from SEXX p254 : From Postscript : 1927

[p3386] From Postscript : 1927 : Sigmund Freud : The real point at issue, it will be said, is a different one, namely the application of analysis to the treatment of patients; in so far as it claims to do this it must be content, the argument will run, to be accepted as a specialized branch of medicine, like radiology, for instance, and to submit to the rules laid down for all therapeutic methods. I recognize that that is so; I admit it. I only want to feel assured that the therapy will not destroy the science. Unluckily analogies never carry one more than a certain distance; a point is soon reached at which the subjects of the comparison take divergent paths. The case of analysis differs from that of radiology. A physicist does not require to have a patient in order to study the laws that govern X-rays. But the only subject-matter of psycho-analysis is the mental processes of human beings and it is only in human beings that it can be studied. For reasons which can easily be understood, neurotic human beings offer far more instructive and accessible material than normal ones, and to withhold that material from anyone who wishes to study and apply analysis is to dock him of a good half of his training possibilities. I have, of course, no intention of asking that the interests of neurotic patients should be sacrificed to those of instruction and scientific research. The aim of my small volume on the question of lay analysis was precisely to show that, if certain precautions are observed, the two interests can quite easily be brought into harmony and that the interests of medicine, as rightly understood, will not be the last to profit by such a solution.

Footnote [3], Ibid., p248.

From Section VII of The Question of Lay Analysis : 1926 : Sigmund Freud, [p3341], The use of analysis for the treatment of the neuroses is only one of its applications; the future will perhaps show that it is not the most important one. In any case it would be wrong to sacrifice all the other applications to this single one, just because it touches on the circle of medical interests.

For here a further prospect stretches ahead, which cannot be encroached upon with impunity. If the representatives of the various mental sciences are to study psychoanalysis so as to be able to apply its methods and angles of approach to their own material, it will not be enough for them to stop short at the findings which are laid down in analytic literature. They must learn to understand analysis in the only way that is possible – by themselves undergoing an analysis. The neurotics who need analysis would thus be joined by a second class of persons, who accept analysis from intellectual motives, but who will no doubt also welcome the increase in their capacities which they will incidentally achieve. To carry out these analyses a number of analysts will be needed, for whom any medical knowledge will have particularly little importance. But these ‘teaching analysts’ – let us call them – will require to have had a particularly careful education. If this is not to be stunted, they must be given an opportunity of collecting experience from instructive and informative cases; and since healthy people who also lack the motive of curiosity do not present themselves for analysis, it is once more only upon neurotics that it will be possible for the teaching analysts – under careful supervision – to be educated for their subsequent non-medical activity. All this, however, requires a certain amount of freedom of movement, and is not compatible with petty restrictions.

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– SE XX p212 in Introduction to Female Sexuality – The early psychoanalytic controversies : 1999 : Russell Grigg, Dominique Hecq & Craig Smith, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Grigg or Index of Authors’ texts)

From Introduction, P7 of Grigg, Hecq & Smith, However, much later, when the explanation given for why the sexual life of women is “a dark continent” for psychology’ is that the ‘nature of femininity’ is itself a riddle, Freud adopts a new caution regarding the applicability of the Oedipal model to the little girl.[4]

Footnote [4], ‘Femininity’, SE 22:113. [Reference to this text is further down]

See Lecture XXXIII – Femininity : 12th July 1932 (Published 1933) : Sigmund Freud, at this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19320712 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts), Published www.Freud2Lacan.com

SE XXII p113-114 (& the argument goes further….

To-day’s lecture, too, should have no place in an introduction; but it may serve to give you an example of a detailed piece of analytic work, and I can say two things to recommend it. It brings forward nothing but observed facts, almost without any speculative additions, and it deals with a subject which has a claim on your interest second almost to no other. Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity-

Haupter in Hieroglyphenmützen,

Haupterin Turban und schwarzem Barett,

Perückenhäupter und tausend andre

Arme, schwitzende Menschenhaupter …[1]

Footnote [1] Heads in hieroglyphic bonnets,

Heads in turbans and black birettas,

Heads in wigs and thousand other

Wretched, sweating heads of humans ….

{Heine, Nordsee [Second Cycle, VII, ‘Fragen’].)

Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem-those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply-you are yourselves the problem. When you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is ‘male or female?’ and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty. Anatomical science shares your certainty at one point and not much further. The male sexual product, the spermatozoon, and its vehicle are male; the ovum and the organism that harbours it are female. In both sexes organs have been formed which serve exclusively for the sexual functions; they were probably developed from the same [innate] disposition into two different forms. Besides this, in both sexes the other organs, the bodily shapes and tissues, show the influence of the individual’s sex, but this is inconstant and its amount variable; these are what are known as the secondary sexual characters. Science next tells you something that runs counter to your expectations and is probably calculated to confuse your feelings. It draws your attention to the fact that portions of the male sexual apparatus also appear in women’s bodies, though in an atrophied state, and vice versa in the alternative case. It regards their occurrence as indications of bisexuality,[1] as though an individual is not a man or a woman but always both–merely a certain amount more the one than the other. You will then be asked to make yourselves familiar with the idea that the proportion in which masculine and feminine are mixed in an individual is subject to quite considerable fluctuations. Since, however, apart from the very rarest cases, only one kind of sexual product-ova or semen-is nevertheless present in one person, you are bound to have doubts as to the decisive significance of those elements and must conclude that what constitutes masculinity or femininity is an unknown characteristic which anatomy cannot lay hold of.

Can psychology do so perhaps?

Footnote [1], [Bisexuality was discussed by Freud in the first edition of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), Standard Ed., 7, 141-4. The passage includes a long footnote to which he made additions in later issues of the work.]

SE XXII p116 : And now you are already prepared to hear the psychology too is unable to solve the riddle of femininity.

NOTE : in ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’ (1926e) Freud wrote, ‘We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys, … after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology. SE XX P212

See The Question of Lay Analysis : 1926 e : Sigmund Freud, at this site /3 Sigmund Freud (1926)

Section IV of The Question of Lay Analysis, Conversations with an Impartial Person : 1926 : Sigmund Freud, [p4355] Another characteristic of early infantile sexuality is that the female sexual organ proper as yet plays no part in it: the child has not yet discovered it. Stress falls entirely on the male organ, all the child’s interest is directed towards the question of whether it is present or not. We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology. But we have learnt that girls feel deeply their lack of a sexual organ that is equal in value to the male one; they regard themselves on that account as inferior, and this ‘envy for the penis’ is the origin of a whole number of characteristic feminine reactions.

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-The Structural Problem of Phobia : 1996 : Bernard Burgoyne, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Burgoyne or Index of Authors’ texts) or www.LacanianWorksExchange.net

P101 Burgoyne, . By 1962 he (Herbert Graf-Little Hans) had settled in Switzerland, where he was to become Head of Geneva’s Grand Théatre, focussing his work, as he always had, on the problem of the real expressive power of the word in operatic production. He sought to summarise these researches in a motto: ‘In the beginning was the word’. Freud had repeatedly emphasised this same Goethe reference in stressing the function of the word in his essay on lay analysis [The Question of Lay Analysis : 1926e]. The questions raised by both men converge on the same two themes, though with different solutions: in the field of general culture, certain effects within the field and functioning of words have ‘meant an advance in civilisation’ in Freud’s formulation – precisely the type of advance that Herbert was planning with his new forms in Opera and with his proposals for a corresponding ‘liberation’ of theatrical structure. ‘Look’, he said to Rizzo**, ‘I’m a Professor’s son … a know-how man who believes that certain aspects of operatic know-how can be passed on to others’. In seeking for the parallel effect in clinical work, Freud tried to deduce from the functioning of words and phrases ‘the delicate technique of psychoanalysis: “the art of interpretation, the struggle against resistances, and the handling of transference’. Graf for his part, sought to discover how words operating through the voice can gain access to what is real. The past, lost childhood and its lost loves, seek expression, but in Graf’s formulations, he took it that this can only be done outside of the domain of reason: that this real hinterland is approachable only within the dream

**See also www.Freud2Lacan.com /Home page (Interview with Herbert Graf (Little Hans)) for the interview by Francis Rizzo

P112 of Burgoyne, BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDUM :

Freud’s arguments as to the structural priority of phobia, and its relation to the network of threads of interpretation are to be found in:

Freud, Sigmund: The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) in The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Volumes IV V 1953. The Interpretation of Dreams : 6th November 1899 (published as 1900) : Sigmund Freud, See this site /3 Sigmund Freud (18991101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts)

Freud, Sigmund: Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’, 1909, in The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume X, London, 1955. See Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy – ‘Little Hans’: 1909 : Sigmund Freud, on this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19090101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts)

Freud, Sigmund: ‘The Question of Lay-Analysis: Conversations with an Impartial Person’, 1926-7, in The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XX, London, 1959. See this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19260101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts)