Freud: Scholar

The whole edifice, put on trial

A course on the thought of Sigmund Freud.

Psychology

What you will learn

State the strongest counterexample to the wish-fulfilment thesis (the traumatic/repetitive dream) and explain why it resists the theory.
Explain how Freud revised rather than abandoned the theory (the repetition-compulsion beyond the pleasure-principle), and evaluate whether self-revision under evidence is a strength or a weakness of a theory.
Reconstruct why Freud abandoned the seduction theory — the specific grounds — and what 'psychic reality' claimed in its place.
Evaluate the Masson charge that the abandonment was a moral failure that discounted real abuse, distinguishing the evidential question from the moral one and holding the genuine tension.
State Popper's falsifiability charge and Grünbaum's suggestion/tally critique precisely, and distinguish them.
Evaluate the charge using my own distinction between clinical observation and metapsychological speculation, and assess in what sense psychoanalysis is and is not a science.
Assemble an honest two-column ledger of Freudian claims — discarded vs surviving — and justify each placement by the kind of evidence that bears on it.
Articulate why Freud remains a major figure even where specific doctrines have fallen — distinguishing the durable framework from the discarded specifics.

The Dream That Would Not Fulfil — The central thesis put under pressure by its own hardest case: the war neurotic's dream that returns him, night after night, to the terror — which fulfils no wish. Rather than explain the exception…
Fantasy or Event — The evidential crisis at the origin of psychoanalysis: my early view that neuroses were caused by real infantile seductions, its collapse, and the turn to infantile phantasy and psychic reality — and…
Is It a Science? — The deepest methodological reckoning: Popper's charge that psychoanalysis explains every outcome and forbids none, so it is not falsifiable and not a science; Grünbaum's sharper argument that…
The Ledger — The honest verdict of a century: what has been discarded (the general theory of dreams as wish-fulfilment, the universal Oedipus complex, penis-envy and the account of female development, the…

Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) — the Hubback translation — the traumatic dreams that repeat, the child's fort-da game, and the repetition-compulsion 'beyond' the pleasure-principle; my most openly speculative work, and his own revision of the dream theory.
The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914) — my narrative of the movement, including his account of why the seduction theory broke down and gave way to the theory of infantile phantasy and psychic reality.
The Future of an Illusion (1927) — the Robson-Scott translation — Freud on religion, science, and the soft but persistent 'voice of the intellect'; the source of this course's closing note.
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) — the Brill translation — the original statement of the wish-fulfilment thesis this tier tests, including its own treatment of anxiety and punishment dreams.
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1916-17) — the Hall lectures — my own most careful lay defence of the theory's empirical basis and its status as a science.

the repetition-compulsion, psychic reality, falsifiability

Part of the Simposeum course library.