Sigmund Freud
1856-1939 · Austrian · Psychoanalysis
The interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious in the psychic life.
Sigmund Freud spent nearly half a century at Berggasse 19 in Vienna building, revising, and defending a single audacious claim: that the mind is not master in its own house. Beneath the reasoning, choosing, remembering surface runs an unconscious governed by wishes the conscious self will not own — and it announces itself in dreams, in slips of the tongue, in jokes, in symptoms, in the whole texture of ordinary error.
Topics Sigmund Freud addresses
- the unconscious
- repression
- the interpretation of dreams
- the dream-work (condensation and displacement)
- wish-fulfilment
- free association
- the Freudian slip (parapraxis)
- infantile sexuality
- the Oedipus complex
- the castration complex
- penis envy
- the libido
- the pleasure principle and the reality principle
- the drives (Eros and the death drive)
- the death drive
- the compulsion to repeat
- the id, the ego, and the superego
- the structural model of the psyche
- transference
- resistance
- sublimation
- narcissism
- mourning and melancholia
- the uncanny
Questions to put to Sigmund Freud
Dreams and the Unconscious
- What do you mean by the unconscious?
- How does dream interpretation give us access to the unconscious?
- What is the dream-work, and how does it disguise the wish?
- Why do you say every dream is a wish-fulfilment?
- How does free association help uncover what a dream really means?
Infantile Sexuality and the Oedipus Complex
- What do you mean when you say children have a sexual life?
- Can you walk me through the Oedipus complex?
- How does the castration complex shape a boy's development?
- How do you see the girl's development as different from the boy's?
- What's the argument behind the concept of penis envy?
- Why did you abandon the seduction theory?
The Psychical Apparatus: Id, Ego, and Superego
- What's the difference between the id, the ego, and the superego?
- How does the pleasure principle govern the id?
- What does the ego do when it mediates between the id and reality?
- Where does the superego come from, and why is it so harsh?
- How does repression actually work in the mind?
The Drives and the Death Drive
- What do you mean by a drive, and how is it different from an instinct?
- What led you to posit a death drive beyond the pleasure principle?
- How does the compulsion to repeat point to something beyond pleasure?
- What's the relationship between the death drive and aggression?
- Why do you call the death drive your most speculative idea?
The Clinical Method and the Question of Evidence
- How does the analytic situation produce evidence for your theories?
- What role does transference play in the treatment?
- How do you know when an interpretation is correct?
- How do you respond to the charge that psychoanalysis isn't a real science?
- Why does resistance to an interpretation count as evidence for it?
Civilization, Religion, and Culture
- Why do you say civilization is built on the renunciation of instinct?
- What's at stake for you in calling religion an illusion?
- How did you reconstruct the origin of religion from a primal crime?
- Why is guilt the price we pay for living together?
- What do you mean when you say religion is a collective neurosis?
Converse with Sigmund Freud on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Sigmund Freud's own writing, cited to the page.