Chapter 2 Freud: Psychoanalysis 53while using both dream interpretation and hypnosis, Freud told his patients to expect
that scenes of childhood sexual experiences would come forth (Freud, 1896/1962).
In his autobiography written nearly 30 years after he abandoned his seduction
theory, Freud (1925/1959) stated that under the pressure technique, a majority of his
patients reproduced childhood scenes in which they were sexually seduced by some
adult. When he was obliged to recognize that “these scenes of seduction had never
taken place, and that they were only phantasies which my patients had made up or
which I myself had perhaps forced upon them [italics added], I was for some time
completely at a loss” (p. 34). He was at a loss, however, for a very short time. Within
days after his September 21, 1897, letter to Fliess, he concluded that “the neurotic
symptoms were not related directly to actual events but to phantasies.... I had in
fact stumbled for the first time upon the Oedipus complex” (Freud, 1925/1959, p. 34).
In time, Freud came to realize that his highly suggestive and even coercive
tactics may have elicited memories of seduction from his patients and that he lacked
clear evidence that these memories were real. Freud became increasingly convinced
that neurotic symptoms were related to childhood fantasies rather than to material
reality, and he gradually adopted a more passive psychotherapeutic technique.
Freud’s Later Therapeutic Technique
The primary goal of Freud’s later psychoanalytic therapy was to uncover repressed
memories through free association and dream analysis. “Our therapy works by
transforming what is unconscious into what is conscious, and it works only in so
far as it is in a position to effect that transformation” (Freud, 1917/1963, p. 280).
More specifically, the purpose of psychoanalysis is “to strengthen the ego, to make
it more independent of the superego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge
its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where id was,
there ego shall be” (Freud, 1933/1964, p. 80).
With free association, patients are required to verbalize every thought that
comes to their mind, no matter how irrelevant or repugnant it may appear. The
purpose of free association is to arrive at the unconscious by starting with a pres-
ent conscious idea and following it through a train of associations to wherever it
leads. The process is not easy and some patients never master it. For this reason,
dream analysis remained a favorite therapeutic technique with Freud. (We discuss
dream analysis in the next section.)
In order for analytic treatment to be successful, libido previously expended
on the neurotic symptom must be freed to work in the service of the ego. This
takes place in a two-phase procedure. “In the first, all the libido is forced from the
symptoms into the transference and concentrated there; in the second, the struggle
is waged around this new object and the libido is liberated from it” (Freud,
1917/1963, p. 455).
The transference situation is vital to psychoanalysis. Transference refers to
the strong sexual or aggressive feelings, positive or negative, that patients develop
toward their analyst during the course of treatment. Transference feelings are unearned
by the therapist and are merely transferred to her or him from patients’ earlier expe-
riences, usually with their parents. In other words, patients feel toward the analyst
the same way they previously felt toward one or both parents. As long as these