Hi all:
I have been working on the iceberg problem and have realized there is a second issue involved. I spent the last couple of days with the working hypothesis that some other psychoanalyst used the iceberg metaphor and that it got attributed to Freud because, as Allen Esterson pointed out, almost every notion gets attributed to Freud. The problem, I thought, would be to disentangle who said what when in the early 1900s. (I leave the first-use issue alone for now.)
First, I went to the American Psychoanalytic Association web site - http://apsa.org/ -. It has a search engine that purports to seach over 35,000 documents. I thought I would begin there with the term "iceberg", assuming I would need to start working on restriction terms. To my surprise, the engine pulled up only 1 document from 1997. My guess is that the search engine does not look into documents, only document titles. However, the results suggest that authors didn't consider the iceberg metaphor important enough to write an entire article about it.
Next, I went to the library to search in the writings of early American psychoanalysts (like A. A. Brill). Unfortunately, ASU had not jumped on the psychoanalysis bandwagon in the early years of the 20th century and our collection is erratic. I thought that I would check both the early and more current works. I found no occurrence of an iceberg metaphor. I never thought I would wish we had more books on psychoanalysis.
I had no luck with the collected works of Anna Freud. (We are missing 2 volumes -- what kind of upbringing had that thief?)
Finally, I went to the "Psychoanalytic Study of the Child" collections and checked the index for every 5 years from 2005 to 1975. "Iceberg" didn't occur -- ever.
Here I think is a another mystery. Textbooks portray the iceberg analogy as a common one in psychoanalysis and attribute it to Freud. My search results so far suggest, to the contrary, that it is not a common analogy among psychoanalytical writers.
Further, and I would like Allen Esterson to comment, the iceberg analogy seems unlike most of the analogies I have seen in the literature. Most of the analogies I have seen suggest movement, forces in conflict, or animate beings in conflict. The iceberg analogy is literally a frozen, static structure that lacks dynamism.
So, a second mystery is why is the iceberg analogy so widely used in textbooks when it does not seem to represent psychoanalytical writings?
Ken --------------------------------------------------------------- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --------------------------------------------------------------- --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
