The Systems

Three rival theories of one darkness — Freud's repressed wish, Adler's striving from inferiority, Jung's inherited floor.

A course on the thought of The Unconscious.

Psychology

What you will learn

  • Define repression and the dynamic unconscious, and distinguish them from Janet's dissociation (active pushing by conflict vs passive splitting by weakness).
  • Explain the return of the repressed — the buried wish coming back disguised as symptom, dream, and slip — and why free association (following the resistance) replaced hypnosis.
  • State the dream thesis (every dream a disguised wish-fulfilment; the dream-work = the censorship at work) as the demonstration that repression can be caught nightly.
  • Meet the Anna O. origin and its legend-check: the 'first clean psychoanalytic cure' story is tidied history, not the messy record.
  • Handle the seduction→psychic-reality turn honestly: psychic reality is a genuine discovery AND real abuse occurs and must not be explained away — two questions that do not stand or fall together.
  • State Adler's break: the engine is not the repressed sexual wish but the striving from felt inferiority toward superiority (compensation).
  • Explain the guiding fiction — an unadmitted purpose (a fictional goal) that organizes the personality — and why this makes Adler's unconscious teleological (pulled by a goal), not a Freudian mechanics (pushed by the past).
  • Describe the neurosis as a covert strategy for securing fictional superiority or ducking a life-task, and the cure as turning the striving outward into social interest.

Course outline

  1. Freud: The Wish That Is Pushed Away — Freud took Janet's split-off idea and answered the question Janet left: WHAT is the buried content, and why is it buried? Not weakness but *repression* — an active force pushes an unacceptable wish…
  2. Adler: The Striving from Below — In 1911 I left Freud's circle — not because I misread him but because I read the same patients differently. The root of a neurosis is not a repressed sexual wish but a *striving*: from the child's…
  3. Jung: The Deeper Floor — I broke from Freud in 1913, and unlike Adler I did not narrow the unconscious — I opened its floor. My entry was measurable: the word-association test, where a stimulus word touching a sore spot…

Works read in this course

  • Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System — Charcot's Salpêtrière lectures (Sigerson trans.): hysteria as a lawful clinical entity, hypnosis as method
  • The Major Symptoms of Hysteria — Janet's 1907 Harvard lectures: dissociation, psychological automatism, the subconscious fixed idea
  • Psychological Healing — Janet's 1925 history + system of the psychotherapies: the cathartic cure and its priority
  • Selected Papers on Hysteria — Freud (Brill trans.): the early cases, from Charcot and Breuer to repression
  • The Interpretation of Dreams — Freud (Brill 1913): the dream as the royal road, the dynamic unconscious systematized
  • The Neurotic Constitution — Adler's 1912 system: organ inferiority, compensation, the guiding fiction
  • Analytical Psychology / Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology — Jung (1916): the complex, the word-association evidence, the collective unconscious
  • (secondary, authoring-only) Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970) — the scholarly history this course is built on — not ingested, not quoted

Terms introduced

the dynamic unconscious, the pathogenic secret, dissociation, hysteria, somnambulism, abreaction / catharsis, repression, the complex, transference, inferiority and compensation, the collective unconscious, the archetype

Part of the Simposeum course library.