The place of Germanic language and culture in Freud's discovery of psychoanalysis between 1895 and 1900
Anzieu, D.; Freud, S.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 67: 219-226
1986
ISSN/ISBN: 0020-7578 PMID: 3522462 Document Number: 268611
Freud's self-analysed dreams between 1895 and 1900 point out: His attachment to his German mother tongue and the use of its peculiarities to represent certain polymorphous perverse fantasies of childhood (voyeurism, masochistic mostly); the recourse to living foreign languages (English and French mostly) to name the parts of the self both left alive and foreign to the consciousness; the use of Latin and Greek words to constitute one scientific universal language fitting to the knowledge of the unconscious. For Freud, the German culture is the culture to which he belongs; the antique Mediterranean culture being the culture of reference. It allows him to get free from the motherly symbiosis and to discover the Oedipus complex. The variety of languages and cultures is necessary to the preconscious activity of the psychoanalyst to whom it provides 'intermediate ideas'.