Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis

Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis is a work by Abraham, Karl (1927).

Core claims

• Abraham’s six-stage model of libidinal development is not a refinement of Freud’s three-stage schema but a fundamentally different diagnostic architecture, one that maps psychopathology onto precise developmental arrests with a granularity no prior framework achieved.
• The consistent foregrounding of repressed hostility toward the mother — rather than the father — across Abraham’s clinical papers constitutes an independent theoretical center of gravity that prefigures object relations theory decades before Melanie Klein systematized it.
• Abraham’s applied psychoanalytic work (on Amenhotep IV, Segantini, myths, criminology) demonstrates that the Oedipus complex functions not as a metaphor imported into cultural analysis but as a falsifiable historical hypothesis, a claim far more radical than the cultural psychoanalysis that followed from Rank or Reik.

Related questions

• How does Abraham’s two-phase oral stage (sucking and biting) compare with Melanie Klein’s paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, and where does Klein depart from Abraham’s developmental logic?
• In what ways does Abraham’s insistence on the mother as primary site of repressed hostility challenge or complement Neumann’s archetypal account of the Terrible Mother in The Great Mother (1955)?
• How does Abraham’s method of applied psychoanalysis in his study of Amenhotep IV differ epistemologically from Jung’s amplificatory method in Symbols of Transformation, and what does this difference reveal about the divergent trajectories of Freudian and Jungian cultural analysis?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-psyche/abraham-selected-papers-psychoanalysis/

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