ABSTRACT
While Freud did not distinguish psychoanalysis proper from psychoanalytic psychotherapy, he did distinguish the gold of psychoanalysis from the copper of suggestion. Let’s examine the context of this remark, made at the Budapest Congress in 1918, an extremely optimistic moment for psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis had achieved government recognition for its contributions to the treatment of war neuroses, the central topic of the congress. Speaking about the future of psychoanalysis, Freud (1919d) imagined a time when private and public funding would make the treatment accessible to all. We began this book with this quote from Freud. It is worth repeating here in its entirety, as it is so central to our main thesis.
It is possible to see that at some time or other the conscience of society will awake and remind it that the poor man should have just as much right to assistance for his mind as he now has to the life-saving help offered by surgery; and that the neuroses threaten public health no less than tuberculosis, and can be left as little as the latter to the impotent care of individual members of the community. When this happens, institutions or out-patient clinics will be started, to which analytically-trained physicians will be appointed, so that men who would otherwise give way to drink, women who have nearly succumbed under their burden of privations, children for whom there is no choice but between running wild or neurosis, may be made capable, by analysis, of resistance and of efficient work. Such treatments will be free. It may be a long time before the State comes to see these duties as urgent … Probably these institutions will first be started by private charity. Some time or other, however, it must come to this.
