Freud: Applied

The instrument — how the hidden wish is actually reached

A course on the thought of Sigmund Freud.

Course outline

1. The Fundamental Rule — The instrument's first principle: since the patient cannot tell you a wish the repression forbids, you ask instead for everything — free association — and read the resistance, the place the flow…
2. A Specimen Dream — The method shown whole on one dream — my own Dream of Irma's Injection: the manifest report, the associations gathered element by element, the condensations and displacements undone, and the wish…
3. The Case of Little Hans — A real case read: a five-year-old's crippling terror of horses, analysed (through the father) as a phobia — the Oedipal dread of the father, too dreadful to hold, displaced onto an external object…
4. The Past in the Room — The strangest and most decisive phenomenon of treatment: the patient begins to feel toward the analyst the love, demand, and hostility that belonged first to the parents — transference, a new edition…
5. The Work of Cure — Why insight alone does not cure, and what does: working-through — the repeated labour of overcoming a resistance after it is named. The aim is not the abolition of the id but the widening of the…

Part of the Symposium course library.