ABSTRACT
Freud analysed phenomena like the Taboo of Virginity (1918a) and ‘A seventeencentury demonological neurosis’ (1923d) to explain and validate psychoanalysis.
He derived from those and similar socio-historical phenomena psychical subtleties that were not possible to notice directly in clinical work. We should therefore consider correcting the definition of applied psychoanalysis: the theory of psychoanalysis needed the analysis of issues that pertain to the human subject in his other non-clinical, or in his individual capacities. However, Freud’s application of non-clinical issues to psychoanalysis is not uniform – i.e., some issues such as literary and autobiographical characters agreed with clinical psychoanalysis in clear ways, but other issues had the function of discovering aspects of the psyche that clinical work was insufficient to reveal. Thus, what is important to revise in the proposition of applied psychoanalysis is the prevailing belief that clinical psychoanalysis could be applied to other phenomena to show that the analysis of non-clinical phenomena could be applied and also serve the clinical theory very well. Therefore, I will name some works that had the capability and the prerogative of enriching the theory of psychoanalysis in its clinical form, whether in health or in sickness.
