Psychoanalysis · Viennese neurology · 1856–1939

Sigmund Freud

Reading in dreams and symptoms the wishes we do not know we have.

Příbor · Vienna · London

Philosophy

Ideas that shift your perspective.

The unconscious and repression

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.

A situation to think through

Freud traced his own failure to recall the name of the painter Signorelli to a chain of associations leading to death and sexuality, themes he preferred to keep out of mind.

Dream-work

The dream-work translates latent dream-thoughts into the manifest dream through condensation, displacement, regard for representability and secondary revision. The meaning lies not in the images taken alone but in the associations to which each element leads.

A situation to think through

A dream figure with one friend’s face and another’s voice may condense two people towards whom the dreamer has similar, unspoken feelings.

Drive and libido

Freud describes the drive as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, defined by its source, pressure, aim and object. Libido names the energy of the sexual drives; from 1920 he set the life drives, gathered under the name Eros, against a death drive that tends towards dissolution.

A situation to think through

An infant who goes on sucking after it has been fed shows, for Freud, a pleasure that has detached itself from the need for nourishment.

Id, ego and super-ego

In The Ego and the Id of 1923 Freud divides the psyche into the id, the reservoir of the drives; the ego, which mediates between the id, external reality and conscience; and the super-ego, formed by taking in parental authority. Large parts of the ego and the super-ego are themselves unconscious.

A situation to think through

Someone who falls ill just after achieving a long-desired success may, in Freud’s terms, be meeting the severity of their own super-ego.

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Linked thinkers

Read and answered: Plato
Denis Diderot
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Stuart Mill
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Friedrich Nietzsche
Read by: Virginia Woolf
Franz Kafka
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Jean-Paul Sartre
Simone de Beauvoir
Michel Foucault

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