Freud: Scholar

The whole edifice, put on trial

A course on the thought of Sigmund Freud.

Course outline

1. The Dream That Would Not Fulfil — The central thesis put under pressure by its own hardest case: the war neurotic's dream that returns him, night after night, to the terror — which fulfils no wish. Rather than explain the exception…
2. Fantasy or Event — The evidential crisis at the origin of psychoanalysis: my early view that neuroses were caused by real infantile seductions, its collapse, and the turn to infantile phantasy and psychic reality — and…
3. Is It a Science? — The deepest methodological reckoning: Popper's charge that psychoanalysis explains every outcome and forbids none, so it is not falsifiable and not a science; Grünbaum's sharper argument that…
4. The Ledger — The honest verdict of a century: what has been discarded (the general theory of dreams as wish-fulfilment, the universal Oedipus complex, penis-envy and the account of female development, the…

Part of the Symposium course library.