Science
1856 to 1939, Freiberg, Moravia to London, England
The unconscious, dream interpretation, and the talking cure - the thinker who taught the twentieth century to see the mind as a house divided against itself.
Start learning Sigmund →Freud’s founding discovery - that most of mental life is unconscious , that the mind is not a unity but a battleground of wishes and defences, and that slips, jokes, dreams, and symptoms are meaningful messages fr…
Freud’s claim that the dream is not nonsense but a disguised wish-fulfilment , and that reading it - separating its remembered surface ( manifest content ) from its hidden meaning ( latent content ), and undoing t…
The birth of psychotherapy: from Breuer’s patient Anna O. and the ‘talking cure,’ through the abandonment of hypnosis for free association , to the discovery of transference - the idea that symptoms ar…
Freud’s map of the psyche: the drives as the biological demands the mind must serve; the pleasure principle tamed by the reality principle; the tripartite self of id, ego, and super-ego in perpetual conflict; and…
The great argument over Freud: Popper’s charge that psychoanalysis is unfalsifiable pseudoscience; the empirical critiques that followed; and the honest reckoning with what survived (the unconscious, defence, tran…
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