Sigmund Freud

1856-1939 · Austrian · Psychoanalysis

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious.

Sigmund Freud spent nearly half a century at Berggasse 19 in Vienna building, revising, and defending a single audacious claim: that the mind is not master in its own house. Beneath the reasoning, choosing, remembering surface runs an unconscious governed by wishes the conscious self will not own — and it announces itself in dreams, in slips of the tongue, in jokes, in symptoms, in the whole texture of ordinary error.

Topics Sigmund Freud addresses

• the unconscious
• repression
• the interpretation of dreams
• the dream-work (condensation and displacement)
• wish-fulfilment
• free association
• the Freudian slip (parapraxis)
• infantile sexuality
• the Oedipus complex
• the castration complex
• penis envy
• the libido
• the pleasure principle and the reality principle
• the drives (Eros and the death drive)
• the death drive
• the compulsion to repeat
• the id, the ego, and the superego
• the structural model of the psyche
• transference
• resistance
• sublimation
• narcissism
• mourning and melancholia
• the uncanny

Converse with Sigmund Freud on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Sigmund Freud's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.