Lecture: Special Effect Cases, Anatomy Of – Question and Answer Period (2) (1958)

Now, you’ll find, inevitably, some Freudian analysis type thing run off a case. It’s inevitable. But boy, it’s so late on the track that if Freud ever made anybody sane by getting the time that they saw a little girl with no clothes on and that made them crazy and Freud made them realize that this was the case and so forth, and if anybody turned sane at that point and stayed sane, I’ve never seen it. I have never seen it.

I have made people feel better by using straight Freudian analysis the way I got it from Commander Thompson who imported it to the US Navy, not via Catherine Horney. Wonderful pun on that name. Why this person should become an authority on Freud is beyond me entirely. Crude remark. Excuse me, ladies. But Freud’s a pretty crude subject.

But I got what I knew about Freudian analysis from a chap who had just talked with and listened to Freud for a couple of years. You know. And it was fairly straight from the horse’s mouth. And it had factors in it that you don’t find in his books. And also had factors in it which seemed awfully simple and reasonable. And Freud was much more interested in association. He was much more interested in association than he was in sex. And later on in his career actually did start changing his mind over to social. And he was getting – he was getting awfully warm; if he’d gone along for another couple of decades with any enthusiasm at all, why, he might have really fallen into something.

He had this thing, see, when he talked about creativeness, he’s always talking about artists. See? He’s talking about artists. Only to him being artistic was a dramatization of being sexual. See, artistry was a dramatization of a suppressed second dynamic; and an artist became an artist because he was no fun in bed or something.

That’s not true. I’ve lived with an awful lot of artistic people and I’ve listened to an awful lot of their women and it’s just not true that they’re in bad shape. It’s quite remarkably the opposite. So I don’t think Freud was a very good observer.¹

Notes