Freud: Foundations

Six ways the hidden mind gives itself away

A course on the thought of Sigmund Freud.

Course outline

1. Not Master in Its Own House — The founding claim, and the wound it inflicts: consciousness is the small lit surface of a far larger mind, and the hidden part is not merely dormant but actively held down.
2. The Slip That Succeeds — The smallest and most everyday proof: a slip of the tongue is not a random error but a bungled achievement — a suppressed intention breaking through the one you meant to voice.
3. The Royal Road — The dream is not nonsense but the most direct route to the unconscious: a disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish, its meaning hidden by the dream-work from a censorship that never fully sleeps.
4. The Symptom Has a Sense — A neurotic symptom is not a meaningless malfunction but a compromise: the repressed wish and the force that represses it settle their conflict in a disguised formation the patient cannot decode but…
5. The History of a Wish — The forbidden wishes the neurosis disguises have a history: the libido develops through a fixed series of stages, and the Oedipus complex of early childhood is the nucleus around which the neuroses…
6. The Three Masters — The mature map of the mind: not regions (conscious, unconscious) but agencies — the id that wants, the super-ego that forbids, and the ego that mediates between them and the world, master of none of…

Part of the Symposium course library.