ABSTRACT
The most basic ideas of psychoanalytic theory were initially enunciated in Josef Breuer’s and Sigmund Freud’s “Preliminary communication” of 1893, which introduced their “Studies on hysteria”. But the first published use of the word “psychoanalysis” occurred in Freud’s 1896 French paper on “Heredity and the aetiology of the neuroses”. It is important to distinguish between the validity of Freud’s work qua psychoanalytic theoretician, and the merits of his earlier work, which would have done someone else proud as the achievement of a lifetime. Freud was one of the founders of neuro-psychopharmacology. According to Freud’s theory of transference, the patient transfers on to his psychoanalyst feelings and thoughts that originally pertained to important figures in his or her earlier life. The “hermeneutic” reconstruction of psychoanalysis slides illicitly from one of two familiar senses of “meaning” encountered in ordinary discourse to another.
