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Love, Seduction, and Trauma
(1987)
Action and interaction, and emotion and thought as the inner wellsprings of action, play a central role in the lives of individuals, families, and society, spanning the continuum between everyday life and disorder. Until now, the narrative tradition has been the main methodology for portraying and formulating human action and interaction, and little has been written about the dramatic approach to life, disorder, and therapy. Since the essence of drama is action, dialogue, character, and emotion, it is time to give drama its due. The author proposes a methodological concept – dramatology – analogous to narratology, to highlight the dramatic method of investigating action and interaction in life, disorder, and therapy. Breuer and Freud presented both aspects of dramatology: dramatization in dream and fantasy, and dramatization in act, focusing on the person. This approach was elaborated by psychoanalysts with an interpersonal orientation, focusing on the person and speech as action. Dramatology is applied to exploring ongoing patient–therapist interactions as reality and as transference. Analyzing unconscious and latent dramatization in dream, fantasy, and enactment with free association is enhanced by utilizing clarification and confrontation, focusing on the manifest and mutually observable expressive form and style of actions and enactments, defenses and resistances, and the discharge and meaning of emotions. Dramatology puts forward a new paradigm for psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis.
By 1900, Freud had formulated an original and operational method of psychoanalytic treatment and research: the technique of free association. In 1912–1915 and later writings, he recommended it as a fundamental procedure and process, called the fundamental rule, in psychoanalytic therapy. In recent years, free association as a method has been variously misrepresented, misunderstood, and denied by some schools of psychoanalysis. This paper reviews the history of free associations and argues for upholding the continuity and relevance of Freud's fundamental methodology and for a renewal of interest in reciprocal, i.e., interactive and interpersonal, free association.
Freud and the Interpersonal
(1997)
The goal of this communication is to uncover a hitherto unacknowledged interpersonal aspect in Freud: his implicit dyadic conception of symptom formation and interpretation, the competing claims of the object relation and the interpersonal schools notwithstanding. It is argued that Freud delineated a number of models of symptom formation: a drive, dream, and a dyadic, or relational model. I have renamed the dyadic model the love model? This has implications concerning areas of consensus and conflict among the various psychoanalytic schools of thought.
Freud's interest in Schreber's famous Memoirswas not to examine Schreber, a life, in all its historicity, but to use the book as case material to illustrate a specific theory he had formulated in 1908: the causal connection between repressed homosexual libido and the paranoid syndrome. While of undoubted heuristic value, this causal connection has not stood the test of time as a universal clinical formulation. In singling out this combined drive and developmental explanatory theory, Freud left untapped many descriptive, diagnostic and dynamic aspects in the story of Schreber. – This formulation also illustrates the perennial tension in psychoanalysis between the breadth of method and the narrowness of theory, or doctrine. Whereas method addresses such general issues as the creation of meaning in health and disease, of meaning as mediated by language, memory, perception and imagination, trauma and transference, theory is concerned with the role of specific etiological forces and factors. The theory in question, the sexual etiology of neuroses and psychoses, has been variously contested during Freud's lifetime and thereafter. – The debates about the privileged role of sexuality were important in the history of psychoanalysis, the psychoanalytic movement, the various Freudian and now-Freudian schools, and the Freud-Jung relationship. The differences between Freud and Jung concerning the libido theory and Schreber led to their fateful clash and final parting of the ways.