Freud And The Spoken Word

There is extensive literature on Freud and language; however, there is very little that looks at Freud’s use of the spoken word. In Freud and the Spoken Word: Speech as a key to the unconscious, Ana-María Rizzuto contends that Freud’s focus on the intrapsychic function and meaning of patients’ words allowed him to use the new psychoanalytic method of talking to gain access to unconscious psychic life. In creating the first ‘talking therapy’, Freud began a movement that still underpins how psychoanalysts understand and use the spoken word in clinical treatment and advance psychoanalytic theory. With careful and critical reference to Freud’s own work, this book draws out conclusions on the nature of verbal exchanges between analyst and patient. Ana- María Rizzuto begins with a close look at Freud’s early monograph On Aphasia, suggesting that Freud was motivated by his need to understand the disturbed speech phenomena observed in three of the patients described in Studies on Hysteria. She then turns to an examination of how Freud integrated the spoken word into his theories as well as how he actually talked with his patients, looking again at the Studies in Hysteria and continuing with the Dora case, the Rat Man and the Wolf Man. In these chapters, the author interprets how Freud’s report of his own words shed light on the varying relationships he had with his patients, when and how he was able to follow his own recommendations for treatment and when another factor (therapeutic zeal, or the wish to prove a theory) appeared to interfere in communication between the two parties in the analysis. Freud and the Spoken Word examines Freud’s work with a critical eye. The book explores his contribution in relation to the spoken word, enhances its significance, and challenges its shortcomings. It is written for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, Freud’s scholars and academics interested in his views on the words spoken in life and in psychoanalysis. Argentine born Ana-María Rizzuto trained in psychoanalysis in Boston and was for forty years in the PINE Psychoanalytic Center Faculty and is Training and Supervisory Analyst Emerita. She has made significant contributions to the psychoanalysis of religious experience and has written in national and international journals about the significance of words in the clinical situation. She has written three books and lectured about her work in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Japan.

There is extensive literature on Freud and language; however, there is very little that looks at Freud’s use of the spoken word. In Freud and the Spoken Word: Speech as a key to the unconscious, Ana-María Rizzuto contends that Freud’s focus on the intrapsychic function and meaning of patients’ words allowed him to use the new psychoanalytic method of talking to gain access to unconscious psychic life. In creating the first ‘talking therapy’, Freud began a movement that still underpins how psychoanalysts understand and use the spoken word in clinical treatment and advance psychoanalytic theory. With careful and critical reference to Freud’s own work, this book draws out conclusions on the nature of verbal exchanges between analyst and patient. Ana- María Rizzuto begins with a close look at Freud’s early monograph On Aphasia, suggesting that Freud was motivated by his need to understand the disturbed speech phenomena observed in three of the patients described in Studies on Hysteria. She then turns to an examination of how Freud integrated the spoken word into his theories as well as how he actually talked with his patients, looking again at the Studies in Hysteria and continuing with the Dora case, the Rat Man and the Wolf Man. In these chapters, the author interprets how Freud’s report of his own words shed light on the varying relationships he had with his patients, when and how he was able to follow his own recommendations for treatment and when another factor (therapeutic zeal, or the wish to prove a theory) appeared to interfere in communication between the two parties in the analysis. Freud and the Spoken Word examines Freud’s work with a critical eye. The book explores his contribution in relation to the spoken word, enhances its significance, and challenges its shortcomings. It is written for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, Freud’s scholars and academics interested in his views on the words spoken in life and in psychoanalysis. Argentine born Ana-María Rizzuto trained in psychoanalysis in Boston and was for forty years in the PINE Psychoanalytic Center Faculty and is Training and Supervisory Analyst Emerita. She has made significant contributions to the psychoanalysis of religious experience and has written in national and international journals about the significance of words in the clinical situation. She has written three books and lectured about her work in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Japan.

The nine interdisciplinary essays in this volume were presented in 2003 in Berlin at the Fourth International Conference on Word and Music Studies, which was sponsored by The International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). The nine articles in this volume cover two areas: "Surveying the Field" and "Music and the Spoken Word". Topics include postmodernism, philosophy, German literary modernism, opera, film, the Lied, radio plays, and "verbal counterpoint". They cover the works of such philosophers, critics, literary figures, and composers as Argento, Beckett, Deleuze, Guattari, Feldman, Glenn Gould, Nietzsche, Schubert, Strauss, Wagner, and Wolfram. Three films are discussed: Casablanca, The Fisher King, and Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.

The traditional dating of the origin of psychoanalysis to 1900, when Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, ignores the massive body of work he produced well before this date. Covering fields as diverse as neurology, physiology, philosophy, and pharmacology, this wealth of unjustly neglected material was to have a profound influence upon the development of psychoanalytic theory and technique. This fascinating study of the hidden roots of psychoanalysis features contributions from an international panel of authorities on Freud's early writings, and highlights the unparalleled originality of his pre-analytic work. Seeking to restore the openness that originally existed between psychoanalysis and the other sciences, these papers consider Freud's outstanding scientific achievements within neurology and his achievements as a psychologist. Freud's early fascination with cocaine and his substantial monograph on the coca plant are reconsidered in the light of research that places the episode in its historical context. The influence of philosophical writings upon Freud's thought is demonstrated careful consideration of the origins of Freudian concepts in the works of Aristotle, Brentano and John Stuart Mill.

The volume begins with what is in common to contemporary phenomenological historians and historiographers. That is the understandings that temporality is the core of human judgment conditioning in its forms how we consciously attend and judge phenomena. For every phenomenological historian or historiographer, all history is an event, a span of time. This time span is not external to the individual, rather forms the content and structure of every judgment of the person. It is the logic used by the individual to structure the phenomenon attended. Rather than the phenomenon being seen as something solely external, it is understood by phenomenologists as also of our immediate awareness and thought. Thus, the phenomenological method discerns all judgment as based upon one’s span of attention of inner or outer phenomena.. There is an intentionality to attention. One intends one’s own foci. Attention is the temporal duration of that intending. The volume offers a text that enables contemporary historians, graduate students, and even undergraduates who are well taught, to understand both the history of phenomenology as a method of inquiry, and the contemporary practice of phenomenological historical and historiographical thought.

If there ever was one word that could represent the essence of Freud's work, that word would be 'unconscious'. Indeed, Freud himself regarded his 1915 paper 'The Unconscious' as central to clarifying the fundamentals of his metapsychology. The paper delineates the topographic model of the mind and spells out the concepts of primary and secondary process thinking, thing and word presentations, timelessness of the unconscious, condensation and symbolism, unconscious problem solving, and the relationship between the system Ucs and repression. Examining these proposals in the light of contemporary psychoanalytic theory as well as from the perspective of current neurophysiology and ethology, nine distinguished analysts take Freud's ideas further in ways that have implications for both psychoanalytic theory and practice.

First published in 1982. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.