…

November 14, 1897, Freud sent a letter to Fliess, writing: “True self-analysis is impossible, else there would be no [neurotic] illness

We should also recall that Freud as a clinician could be idiosyncratic, judgemental, and aristocratic; never a fan of the “ furor therapeuticus” (Reik 1956: 6), at
times he considered people unworthy of analysis. To his friend and colleague Sandor Ferenczi, Freud wrote that “ Patients are a rabble” (Ferenczi 1988: 93); and to
Sachs he once referred aloud to patients as “the fools” [die Narren] (Sachs 1945:
105). Elsewhere he simply remarked that “ In the depth of my heart I can’t help
being convinced that my dear fellowmen, with a few exceptions, are worthless” (in
Roazen 1991: 329). Or again, as Freud told Victor von Weizsaecker, “ You surely
agree that most people are stupid”

Julius Tandler put it this way in a private memorandum of November 29, 1931:
“ [Freud] is a person who is only accountable to his own law, who lives according
to its direction and cannot subordinate himself to rules” (in Freud 1992: 284). As
Freud once remarked, “ I discovered analysis; that is enough to excuse me (in Wortis 1984:17).

But what is, and who occupies, this exceptional position? Parroting Roazen
again, Where’s Freud? Outside the exchange of transference/counter-transference, a
position that is, rigorously understood, non-positional, Freud-the-subject is not
erased exactly, but is from the outset generalized as the fractured structure o f psychoanalysis itself, a sort of ghost in the influencing machine. To be the law, then, is
to be this irreducible structure, the chiasmatic container of conflict, two in one; the
simultaneous condition, in other words, of reason and madness beyond the confines
of our law of non-contradiction. In turn, from out of this inaugural incompleteness
is fashioned the grounds upon which all institutional and therapeutic successes
sit—and inevitably slip.

In fact, around this time Freud was beginning to realize a central, horrible truth
of psychoanalysis. “I had learnt,” he writes, “that psycho-analysis brings out the
worst in everyone” . Such were, according to Freud, “the crapule that
surrounds me” (in Natenberg 1955: 189).