In Analysis

IN ANALYSIS WITH FREUD HIMSELF

Anna G, a gifted and tenacious young psychiatrist, educated to the clinical standards of the Burghölzli in Switzerland, arrived in a Vienna ravaged by inflation, hunger, and inflation, in 1921. In the midst of the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, she was there to undertake a cursus of analysis with professor Freud. Thus, she ventures to Berggasse, 19. The master, now 65 and empoverished by the war, has assembled a financially comfortable clientèle. Freud is unmovable: fixed fees, a daily session of one hour, six days out of seven for four months. Military-style intervention? No, but high- pressure tactics. In those days, becoming well did not mean crying over one’s momentary feelings.

Three quarters of a century have gone by when, Anna Koellereuter, psycho-analyst, discovers the two precious notebooks where her grand-mother has commented, with great finesse, her analysis with Freud. April 1921-July 1921. Four decisive months and
eighty sessions, dense, intense. Freud, hardly distracted, follows the break lines of the young woman’s psychic conflict. Anna G, caught up in an endless engagement, is in love with a handsome sculptor but can’t manage to make the leap. It is with the skill of an archeologist that Freud examines the psychic layers. The current strata, is her amorous indecision; the one underneath concerns her brothers; finally, the most profound, reveals her parents. «Have you read Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria: Dora»? asks the master. Yes, but I have no memory, reflects Anna G.

Transference, the road to a cure

«Your dream is a total copy of that of Dora. You are putting yourself in the shoes of Dora and we well know she is in love with her father,» Sound the alarm! Freud is overstepping. The overwhelming reference to Dora, the most well-known hysteric in psychoanalysis, falls heavily on Anna. «I love you in such an undescribable fashion, as I have never loved anyone, it seems to me», she declares. «It is a tranference to me of the ancient love, suggests Freud, and of the love sentiment you used to experience toward your father. Disappointment, amorous jealousy, etc, will follow as well.» It is the crucial issue of transference, prime agent in establishing a cure, that Freud is accepting with total equanimity. «This love for your father was so without measure that all that followed it was but its mere shadow.»

A forced interpretation? Suggestion, analyst interference, self-delusion? Psychoanalysis was long forced to deal with this reproach. But Anna’s love admission
bears witness that the nub of the psychic conflict has been found. To all his critics, Freud answered in Construction dans l’analyse(1937): «Without boasting, I can affirm that there never was any abuse of suggestion in my analytic practice.» Anna G, a young 27 year old woman, cannot untangle herself from a fantasy love for her father. She decides she has a donjuanesque temperament, wants the penis of a seducer, would like a child with her own parent. «People are extraordinarily inventive where the unconscious is involved», comments Freud. Thus a recourse to the symbolic, that holy fixture of the couch, the cheap trick of the psycho-analyst short on interpretation. In this line of thought, an umbrella would be a virile member, and a small box would suggest female intimacy. Thus anything goes. It is the subject of analysis, according to Freud, who makes a difference. «If he accepts the interpretation, all is well, but if he contradicts it, it is but a sign of his resistance, and we are still right,» The interpretation is a looser if and only if the subject over-reacts. In July, Freud tells her: «You are in the grips of rebellion against your parents.» Anna has earned her psychic independance.
«The young G girl has become totally transparent and, in effect, the analysis is over; but I have no way of knowing what life has in store for her from now on» writes Freud to Pastor Pfister. In 1923, she marries her beloved sculptor and the couple will have four children. So indeed this is the journal of a mission accomplished!


from: LIRE, mars 2010
a review of Mon Analyse avec le professeur Freud, par Anna G
Texte de Alain Rubens