Freud: Applied

The instrument — how the hidden wish is actually reached

A course on the thought of Sigmund Freud.

Psychology

What you will learn

State the fundamental rule of free association and explain WHY it is the way to reach a wish the patient cannot report directly.
Define resistance and explain how it is used as a positive indicator — the block marks the buried material — rather than a mere obstacle.
Trace an interpretation as the dream-work run in reverse — from manifest elements, through associations, to the latent wish.
Show, on the Irma specimen, how condensation and displacement are undone by the dreamer's associations, and why the analyst uses the dreamer's material, not his own ingenuity.
Analyse a phobia as a displacement — an internal conflict converted into a fear of an external, avoidable object — using the Little Hans case.
Connect the case to the psychosexual line: read the horse-dread as the disguised Oedipal fear, and see why displacement OUTWARD offers the child a relief the inner conflict could not.
Define transference and explain it as a 'new edition' of an infantile relationship reprinted onto the analyst.
Explain the paradox that transference is BOTH the chief resistance and the decisive instrument of cure — and why the conflict must be made present to be resolved.

The Fundamental Rule — The instrument's first principle: since the patient cannot tell you a wish the repression forbids, you ask instead for everything — free association — and read the resistance, the place the flow…
A Specimen Dream — The method shown whole on one dream — my own Dream of Irma's Injection: the manifest report, the associations gathered element by element, the condensations and displacements undone, and the wish…
The Case of Little Hans — A real case read: a five-year-old's crippling terror of horses, analysed (through the father) as a phobia — the Oedipal dread of the father, too dreadful to hold, displaced onto an external object…
The Past in the Room — The strangest and most decisive phenomenon of treatment: the patient begins to feel toward the analyst the love, demand, and hostility that belonged first to the parents — transference, a new edition…
The Work of Cure — Why insight alone does not cure, and what does: working-through — the repeated labour of overcoming a resistance after it is named. The aim is not the abolition of the id but the widening of the…

A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1916-17) — the Introductory Lectures (Hall translation) — my own lecture course for a lay audience; here the lectures on the technique, transference, and the therapy of the neuroses.
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) — the Brill translation — the dream-work and, in Chapter II, the specimen Dream of Irma's Injection, decoded association by association.
Collected Papers Vol II — Clinical Papers and Technique (1924) — the Riviere translations of my papers on method — the handling of dreams in analysis, the dynamics of transference, and 'Recollection, Repetition and Working Through'.
Collected Papers Vol III — Case Histories (1925) — the Riviere translations of the great case histories, including 'Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy' — Little Hans.
The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis (1910) — my Clark University lectures — the clearest short account of how the method grew out of hypnosis into free association and the reading of resistance.

free association, resistance, transference

Part of the Simposeum course library.