ABSTRACT
It is customary to find in a book of collected papers on psycho-analysis, a number of case histories; this book is no exception. Ostensibly there is an account of the patient’s history, some detailed reports of sessions with the patient’s associations and the interpretations the analyst has given. It has always seemed to me that such reports are open to the objection that the narrative and the interpretations given are only two different ways of saying the same thing or two different things said about the same fact. With the yean my suspicion has ripened into conviction. I have attempted to formulate this conviction in three books, Learning from Experience, Elements of Psycho-Analysis, and Transformations, each one carrying the discussion a little further and making the formulations more precise. Now the time has come to reprint old papers I find that the change in my views about psycho-analytic method makes me unwilling to let them go out without showing what that change is. For those who want the papers as they were originally printed, here the papers are, but I have added a commentary which involves an evolutionary change of opinion. I do not regard any narrative purporting to be a report of fact, either of what the patient said or of what I said, as worth consideration as a “factual account” of what happened. In the first place, I do not attribute to memory the significance it is usually given. The fact of involuntary distortions is so well established by psycho-analysis itself that it is absurd to behave as if our reports were somehow exempted from our own findings. Memory is born of, and only suited to, sensuous experience. As pyscho-analysis is concerned with experience that is not sensuous—who supposes that anxiety has shape, colour or smell?—records based on perception of that which is sensible are records only of the psycho-analytically irrelevant. Therefore in any account of a session, no matter how soon it may be made after the event or by what master, memory should not be treated as more than a pictorialized communication of an emotional experience. The accounts of cases in this book, though sincerely supposed by me at the time to be factually correct (I exclude alterations made and acknowledged on account of discretion), should now be regarded as verbal formulations of sensory images constructed to communicate in one form what is probably communicated in another; for example, as pyscho-analytic theory, either in the same paper or in some part of psycho-analytic literature. If this seems a harsh reassessment, I reply that progress in psycho-analytic work will cease unioss this reassessment is seen to be essential; it should be the jumping off point for a new attitude to scientific work—others no less than our own. The papers are reprinted in their original form for those who find it easier to regard them as factual reports. I have added commentary to express my changed view.
