By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 12/17/2009 5:35 PM
The book that Shelby's ability to love, work AND play led me to is Sigmund Freud and his Impact on the Modern World, the 2001 volume in a series The Annual of Psychoanalysis,from the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society (Jerome A Winer and James Anderson, eds.)
Several weeks ago, I polled the membership of the American Psychoanalytic Association to see if anyone could tell me about the origin of the phrase, which has always delighted me because of its brevity and utility, that the evidence for normality, or psychoanalytic cure, was "the ability to love and to work". (Some add "play") I got many interesting answers. Everyone seemed to agree that there is no direct source in Freud's writing, and that the first and clearest statement of the idea, attributed to Freud, occurs in Erik Erikson's Childhood and Society.
My colleague Harold Blum wrote definitively that the Freud quote is apocryphal. He mentioned that what Freud did write can be found in "Recommendations on Analytic Technique", (Standard Edition, 12, p. 119) "one...must be content if one has won back some degree of capacity for work and enjoyment...". That's pretty close.
What jumped out at me from the Freud and His Impact book was a wonderful article by Alan C. Elms entitled "Apocryphal Freud: Sigmund Freud's Most Famous "Quotations" and Their Actual Sources". Elm suggests that three quotations have emerged in scholarly work and mass media and amount to "Freud's Greatest Hits". These are
"What do women want?"
"To love and to work"
"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar".
Elm's detailed and highly enjoyable scholarship suggests that only the first of these might actually have been uttered by Freud, and then only in a particular context that may have been quite different from what later generations have assumed. The pleasure of this article comes in the scholarship and gentle humor. Elms concludes by suggesting that those who would like to quote more thoughtfully "should turn to Freud's own writings...they contain enough wise, provocative, and truly Freudian quotations to carry us through at least another century."
True enough. But I remain attached to the old apochrypha, perhaps now more than ever. Something of the wonder and power of psychoanalysis comes through to me in the strange fact that some of our most treasured quotations are, well, made up. |