Freud: Foundations

Six ways the hidden mind gives itself away

A course on the thought of Sigmund Freud.

Psychology

What you will learn

State my central thesis — that most of mental life is unconscious, and that the unconscious is DYNAMIC (kept out by a force), not merely 'what is not now in mind'.
Distinguish the preconscious (available at will) from the repressed unconscious (barred), and see why the difference matters.
Define a parapraxis and state my claim that it is meaningful and determined, not accidental.
Explain the mechanism — a slip as a compromise between an intention and an interfering, suppressed counter-intention — and name my criterion for reading one.
Distinguish manifest content (the dream as remembered) from latent content (the hidden dream-thoughts), and state my thesis that a dream is a disguised wish-fulfilment.
Name the operations of the dream-work (condensation, displacement, the censorship) and explain why the dream must be a DISGUISE, not a plain statement.
State that a neurotic symptom has a SENSE — a hidden meaning tied to the patient's history — and define repression as the force that produces it.
Explain the symptom as a compromise-formation, and see it as the same mechanism as the slip and the dream, only lasting.

Not Master in Its Own House — The founding claim, and the wound it inflicts: consciousness is the small lit surface of a far larger mind, and the hidden part is not merely dormant but actively held down.
The Slip That Succeeds — The smallest and most everyday proof: a slip of the tongue is not a random error but a bungled achievement — a suppressed intention breaking through the one you meant to voice.
The Royal Road — The dream is not nonsense but the most direct route to the unconscious: a disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish, its meaning hidden by the dream-work from a censorship that never fully sleeps.
The Symptom Has a Sense — A neurotic symptom is not a meaningless malfunction but a compromise: the repressed wish and the force that represses it settle their conflict in a disguised formation the patient cannot decode but…
The History of a Wish — The forbidden wishes the neurosis disguises have a history: the libido develops through a fixed series of stages, and the Oedipus complex of early childhood is the nucleus around which the neuroses…
The Three Masters — The mature map of the mind: not regions (conscious, unconscious) but agencies — the id that wants, the super-ego that forbids, and the ego that mediates between them and the world, master of none of…

A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1916-17) — the Introductory Lectures (Hall translation) — my own lecture course for a lay audience, from parapraxes through dreams to the theory of the neuroses; the best single source for this tier.
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) — the Brill translation of my central work — the dream-work, the censorship, and the dream as the disguised fulfilment of a wish.
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) — the Brill translation — forgetting, slips of the tongue and pen, and bungled actions read as meaningful.
Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (1905) — the Brill translation — infantile sexuality, the libido, and the psychosexual line of development.
The Ego and the Id (1923) — the Riviere translation — the mature structural model of id, ego, and super-ego.
Collected Papers (1924-25) — the Riviere translations of the shorter papers, including 'Repression' and 'A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis' (the 'third wound').

the unconscious, repression, wish-fulfilment

Part of the Simposeum course library.