History of the Development of
PSYCHOANALYSIS

        Papers on this topic

- The Cathartic Therapy, by Jean Chiriac
- About Case Anna O., by Sigmund Freud
- The Secret Committee
- History of the Psychoanalytic Movement
(ebook), by Sigmund Freud
- Freud and Jung Lectures at Clark University in 1909

Thousands of pages have been written about the history of psychoanalysis. Among the most influential pages, we may mention those signed by Ernest Jones, the author of one Sigmund Freud biography, and Fritz Wittels.

Freud himself wrote essential things about the history of psychoanalysis several times. His work entitled An Autobiographical Study (The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, volume 20, ed. by James Strachey et al. The Hogart Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London 1953-74), and other essays ordered by encyclopedias and editors provide the most authorized framework for placing psychoanalysis in a scientific, social and cultural context.

What should a history of psychoanalysis include then?
I think that, in the first place, it should make reference to the main moments of the emergence, development and assertion of psychoanalysis, its first intuitions and discoveries, what their evolution was, meetings worth remembering, failures and other such events making the intimate structure of the psychoanalytical movement.

For instance, the discovery of cathartic therapy that psychoanalysis is based on, or the case of Anna O. The first Congress of Psychoanalysis, the Wednesday meetings and the Secret Committee especially created for the purpose of protecting psychoanalysis from malignant influences. The first cooperations and most significant breaks, dissidences. All these and a lot more make the basic elements of Freudian psychoanalytic movement.

The pages dedicated to the psychoanalytic movement will be an attempt at briefly covering these stages.

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