Otto Fenichel
Encyclopedia
Otto Fenichel was a psychoanalyst
of the so-called "second generation".
Otto Fenichel started studying medicine in 1915 in Vienna. Already as a very young man, when still in school, he was attracted by the circle of psychoanalysts around Freud
. During the years 1915 and 1919, he attended lectures by Freud, and as early as 1920, aged 23, he became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
.
In 1922 Fenichel moved to Berlin. During his Berlin time, until 1934, he was a member of a group of Socialist and/or Marxist psychoanalysts (with Siegfried Bernfeld
, Erich Fromm
, Wilhelm Reich
and others). After his emigration – 1934 to Oslo, 1935 to Prague, 1938 to Los Angeles – he organized the contact between the worldwide scattered Marxist psychoanalysts by means of top secret "Rundbriefe", i.e. circular letters. Those Rundbriefe, which became publicly known only in 1998, can be counted among the most important documents pertaining to the problematic history of psychoanalysis between 1934 and 1945, especially in regard to the problem of the expulsion of Wilhelm Reich
from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1934.
proposed by Melanie Klein
."
He continued his study of sexuality in a further article, of 1936. For Jacques Lacan
, "the symbolic parity Madchen = Phallus, or in English the equation Girl = Phallus, in the words of M. Fenichel, to whom he gives the theme of an essay of some merit," was a useful building-block for his comprehension of the Imaginary and Symbolic
orders. In the essay Fenichel examined a man's "female identification [...] with a 'little girl' - for example with a (real or imaginary) little sister and, on a deeper level, with one's own penis."
Three years later, in his article "Trophy and Triumph", Fenichel pointed out, that the feeling of triumph "results from the removal of anxiety and inhibition by the winning of a trophy. [...] The trophy is a super-ego derivative since it is a symbol of parental authority. [...] it threatens the ego in the same way that the super-ego threatens the ego where unresolved Oedipus phantasies are at work."
Building on such works, and upon countless others by his peers and predecessors, Fenichel produced his textbook of 1945. "For countless students and professionals Fenichel is synonymous with his Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis; and this text is regarded as synonymous with reliable and comprehensive psychoanalytic knowledge."
Under its objectivist surface, Fenichel in fact took a firm line on many of the controversies of the day, characterizing the "clinical material of British analysts [...] as doubtful"; attacking the neo-Freudian
's "insight into the formative power of social forces upon individual minds does not require any change in Freud's concepts of instincts, as certain authors believe"; and repeatedly sideswiping "Alexander
's opinion. [...] This thesis, however, does not seem very convincing".
He was also not shy of hinting at his continuing Marxist millennial hopes for "other social conditions. [...] Would it not be a first task of such a mental hygiene to provide work, bread, and satisfaction of the basic needs for everybody?"
It was however the encyclopedic aspects of his work which aroused most criticism, Lacan leading the charge in the name of his "return to Freud": "the idea that reading Freud in order to understand Freud is preferable to reading Mr. Fenichel." Lacan considered that it was "no contribution to the theoretical status of psycho-analysis for a writer like Fenichel to reduce, by an enumeration of the 'main sewer' type, the accumulated material of the psycho-analytic experience to the level of platitude [...] everything is explained in advance." More moderate criticism in the same vein was that in "his great compendium on the interpretation of neurotic behaviour [...] Fenichel tended, in his categorical taxonomy, to cling to symptomatic descriptions of neurotic activity, perhaps oversimplifying complex procedures."
Fenichel himself had warned from the start: "All the examples tend only to illustrate mechanisms; thus they are illustrations but not case histories." Nevertheless his work may have inevitably reinforced "the temptation, rooted in the acquired knowledge of psychoanalytic theory [...] to try to mastermind the analytic process, rather than to follow it."
No account of Fenichel's work would be complete without a mention of his "Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique", on "how psychoanalysis actually is done, the questions of psychoanalytic technique and of special technical problems". #Of [classic] treatises on the subject [...] those by Otto Fenichel (1941), Edward Glover
(1955) and Ralph R. Greenson
(1967) are perhaps the best known."
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
of the so-called "second generation".
Otto Fenichel started studying medicine in 1915 in Vienna. Already as a very young man, when still in school, he was attracted by the circle of psychoanalysts around Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
. During the years 1915 and 1919, he attended lectures by Freud, and as early as 1920, aged 23, he became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society was formerly known as the Wednesday Psychological Society. They commenced their meetings in Freud’s apartment in 1902...
.
In 1922 Fenichel moved to Berlin. During his Berlin time, until 1934, he was a member of a group of Socialist and/or Marxist psychoanalysts (with Siegfried Bernfeld
Siegfried Bernfeld
Siegfried Bernfeld was an Austrian psychologist and educator who was a native of Lemberg, which is now Lviv, Ukraine...
, Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
Erich Seligmann Fromm was a Jewish German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory.-Life:Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, at Frankfurt am...
, Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry...
and others). After his emigration – 1934 to Oslo, 1935 to Prague, 1938 to Los Angeles – he organized the contact between the worldwide scattered Marxist psychoanalysts by means of top secret "Rundbriefe", i.e. circular letters. Those Rundbriefe, which became publicly known only in 1998, can be counted among the most important documents pertaining to the problematic history of psychoanalysis between 1934 and 1945, especially in regard to the problem of the expulsion of Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry...
from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1934.
Writings
Fenichel was a prolific writer on psychoanalysis, and published some forty articles between "Introjektion und Kastrationkomplex" (1925) and "Neurotic Acting Out" (1945). In the interwar debate on female sexuality, "three long, carefully reasoned, and thoroughly documented papers by the brilliant young analyst Otto Fenichel" formed his main contribution. Of the first, Freud wrote: "Fenichel (1930) rightly emphasizes the difficulty of recognizing in the material produced in analysis what parts of it represent the unchanged content of the pre-Oedipus phase and what parts have been distorted by regression. [...] He also rejects the 'displacement backwards' of the Oedipus complexOedipus complex
In psychoanalytic theory, the term Oedipus complex denotes the emotions and ideas that the mind keeps in the unconscious, via dynamic repression, that concentrate upon a boy’s desire to sexually possess his mother, and kill his father...
proposed by Melanie Klein
Melanie Klein
Melanie Reizes Klein was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst who devised novel therapeutic techniques for children that had an impact on child psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis...
."
He continued his study of sexuality in a further article, of 1936. For Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
, "the symbolic parity Madchen = Phallus, or in English the equation Girl = Phallus, in the words of M. Fenichel, to whom he gives the theme of an essay of some merit," was a useful building-block for his comprehension of the Imaginary and Symbolic
The Symbolic
The Symbolic is a part of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, part of his attempt 'to distinguish between those elementary registers whose grounding I later put forward in these terms: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real - a distinction never previously made in psychoanalysis'.-The...
orders. In the essay Fenichel examined a man's "female identification [...] with a 'little girl' - for example with a (real or imaginary) little sister and, on a deeper level, with one's own penis."
Three years later, in his article "Trophy and Triumph", Fenichel pointed out, that the feeling of triumph "results from the removal of anxiety and inhibition by the winning of a trophy. [...] The trophy is a super-ego derivative since it is a symbol of parental authority. [...] it threatens the ego in the same way that the super-ego threatens the ego where unresolved Oedipus phantasies are at work."
Building on such works, and upon countless others by his peers and predecessors, Fenichel produced his textbook of 1945. "For countless students and professionals Fenichel is synonymous with his Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis; and this text is regarded as synonymous with reliable and comprehensive psychoanalytic knowledge."
Under its objectivist surface, Fenichel in fact took a firm line on many of the controversies of the day, characterizing the "clinical material of British analysts [...] as doubtful"; attacking the neo-Freudian
Neo-Freudian
The Neo-Freudian psychiatrists and psychologists were a group of loosely linked American theorists of the mid-twentieth century, who were all influenced by Sigmund Freud, but who extended his theories, often in social or cultural directions...
's "insight into the formative power of social forces upon individual minds does not require any change in Freud's concepts of instincts, as certain authors believe"; and repeatedly sideswiping "Alexander
Franz Alexander
Franz Gabriel Alexander was a Hungarian-American psychoanalyst and physician, who is considered one of the founders of psychosomatic medicine and psychoanalytic criminology.- Life :...
's opinion. [...] This thesis, however, does not seem very convincing".
He was also not shy of hinting at his continuing Marxist millennial hopes for "other social conditions. [...] Would it not be a first task of such a mental hygiene to provide work, bread, and satisfaction of the basic needs for everybody?"
It was however the encyclopedic aspects of his work which aroused most criticism, Lacan leading the charge in the name of his "return to Freud": "the idea that reading Freud in order to understand Freud is preferable to reading Mr. Fenichel." Lacan considered that it was "no contribution to the theoretical status of psycho-analysis for a writer like Fenichel to reduce, by an enumeration of the 'main sewer' type, the accumulated material of the psycho-analytic experience to the level of platitude [...] everything is explained in advance." More moderate criticism in the same vein was that in "his great compendium on the interpretation of neurotic behaviour [...] Fenichel tended, in his categorical taxonomy, to cling to symptomatic descriptions of neurotic activity, perhaps oversimplifying complex procedures."
Fenichel himself had warned from the start: "All the examples tend only to illustrate mechanisms; thus they are illustrations but not case histories." Nevertheless his work may have inevitably reinforced "the temptation, rooted in the acquired knowledge of psychoanalytic theory [...] to try to mastermind the analytic process, rather than to follow it."
No account of Fenichel's work would be complete without a mention of his "Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique", on "how psychoanalysis actually is done, the questions of psychoanalytic technique and of special technical problems". #Of [classic] treatises on the subject [...] those by Otto Fenichel (1941), Edward Glover
Edward Glover (psychoanalyst)
Edward George Glover was a British psychoanalyst. He first studied medicine and surgery, and it was his elder brother, James Glover who attracted him towards psychoanalysis...
(1955) and Ralph R. Greenson
Ralph Greenson
Dr. Ralph Greenson was a prominent American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. While working with Mrs Eunice Murray, Greenson is famous for being Marilyn Monroe's psychiatrist. and the basis for Leo Rosten's 1963 novel, Captain Newman, M.D...
(1967) are perhaps the best known."
Writings
- Otto Fenichel: Psychoanalysis as the Nucleus of a Future Dialectical-Materialistic Psychology (1934). In: American Imago, Vol. 24. (1967), pp. 290–311
- Otto Fenichel: The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. 3 vols, 1945
- Otto Fenichel: 119 Rundbriefe. Hg. Johannes Reichmayr und Elke Mühlleitner, 2 Bände, Frankfurt: Stroemfeld 1998
- Otto Fenichel et al. eds., Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel (1987).
See also
- Healthy narcissismHealthy narcissism'Some psychoanalysts and writers make a distinction between "healthy narcissism" and "unhealthy narcissism"...the healthy narcissist being someone who has a real sense of self-esteem that can enable them to leave their imprint on the world, but who can also share in the emotional life of...
- Narcissistic rage and narcissistic injury
- Narcissistic supplyNarcissistic supplyNarcissistic supply is a concept in some psychoanalytic theories which describes a type of admiration, interpersonal support or sustenance drawn by an individual from his or her environment ....