Sigmund Freud
Reading in dreams and symptoms the wishes we do not know we have.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis, both a method of treatment and a theory of the mind built on the claim that much of mental life is unconscious. Working in Vienna from 1886, when he opened his practice, until his exile to London in 1938, he read dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes and neurotic symptoms as compromises between wishes and the forces that repress them, and he extended this account to sexuality, morality, religion and civilization.
What does it mean to be moved by wishes one does not know one has?
The essentials
A life in dates
Biography- 1856–1860Birth and move to Vienna
- 1873–1886Medicine and Paris
- 1905–1913Sexuality and the movement
- 1920–1930A new theory of the psyche
- 1938–1939Exile and death
Biography
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis, both a method of treatment and a theory of the mind built on the claim that much of mental life is unconscious. Working in Vienna from 1886, when he opened his practice, until his exile to London in 1938, he read dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes and neurotic symptoms as compromises between wishes and the forces that repress them, and he extended this account to sexuality, morality, religion and civilization.
Philosophy
Freud holds that ideas incompatible with a person’s other wishes are not destroyed but pushed out of awareness, where they remain active and return in disguised forms such as symptoms, slips and dreams. Repression is not a single act but a constant expenditure of force against what keeps pressing to return.
Reading guides
Original introductions to enter the works, discover their central questions and take the reflection further.
Bibliography
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
Who came before, who came after.
Above the timeline, each solid arc marks a documented reading, back in time or forward; dotted arcs pair kindred questions.
A first reading.
From dream to hidden wish
Follow Freud’s method from the specimen dream of Irma’s injection to the thesis that dreams fulfil wishes and to the mechanisms that disguise them.
The Interpretation of DreamsRethinking sexuality from childhood
Examine how the Three Essays separate the drive from its object, place the origins of sexuality in childhood and trace its reorganisation at puberty.
Three Essays on the Theory of SexualityCivilization, aggression and guilt
Trace the argument of Civilization and Its Discontents from the oceanic feeling to aggression, the super-ego and the sense of guilt as the price of culture.
Civilization and Its Discontents