Sigmund Freud - The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud

Thus for Freud the most real part of the drama of the soul goes on behind the scenes. Most things that we think we do from conscious motives, most of the thoughts that come into our minds, are but the surrogates and the s}Tnbols for the processes that go on beneath the threshold. Ideas are so censored before they get admission to con- sciousness that we have often little notion of their real nature, and can only wonder that the apparently meaningless idea should haimt us so.

If these conclusions are substantiated, we seem to have a new light shed on the old question of the unconscious. It becomes for us the most real part of ourselves; the expression of our deepest tendencies. It is a realm far larger and far deeper than consciousness; it holds secrets that we thought lost forever. The psychologist would explain the unconscious from the nature of consciousness; Freud, on the other hand, explains consciousness from the nature and function of the unconscious.

The assertion that much of our thinking is symbolic in its nature, due to the fact that it serves as a sort of safety-valve for the escape of our repressed complexes, is of course a problem which can never be solved by appeal to consciousness alone. And it is so with most of the other positions which Freud has taken; we are following pathways where introspection is no guide. Thus he would have us shift the emphasis in psychology from a study of consciousness over to a study of the unconscious. Consciousness, for him, is but the surface; it is in the depths below consciousnes that true reality is found.

We may then sum up the contribution which Freud has made to the psychology of the unconscious as follows: he has supposed that the unconscious consists of two streams of tendencies, or energy, one stream striving to revive all the time experiences which would be repugnant to us, and which we have outgrown, and the other striving to check the revival of such tendencies. As a result of this conflict, we have intro- duced into our thoughts and acts, especially in conditions when barriers are somewhat down (as in dreams, lapses, neuroses, reveries), a vast deal of the symbolic and the indirect methods of presentation.

Now is such activity as we have been considering mental in its nature — are the unconscious associations and connections of which we have been speaking really associations and thoughts that go on under- neath the surface? Or are we dealing with a very complex degree of nervous activity, and with that alone? Freud nowhere states his own position definitely, though it is perhaps too easy to accuse him of lean- ings toward the mental interpretation. What he has done is rather to open up new lines of approach to the problem, to give us a consistent and closely reasoned interpretation of observed facts. Psychologists are beginning to recognize that, right or wrong, he must be reckoned with. He has given a stimulus to work along this line that may go a long way toward the ultimate solution of some of our baffling psycho- logical problems.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

PREFACE

PART I. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ERRORS

FIRST LECTURE. INTRODUCTION

SECOND LECTURE. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ERRORS

THIRD LECTURE. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ERRORS —(CONTINUED)

FOURTH LECTURE. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ERRORS —(CONCLUSION)

PART II. THE DREAM

FIFTH LECTURE. DIFFICULTIES AND PRELIMINARY APPROACH

SIXTH LECTURE. HYPOTHESIS AND TECHNIQUE OF INTERPRETATION

SEVENTH LECTURE. MANIFEST DREAM CONTENT AND LATENT DREAM THOUGHT

EIGHTH LECTURE. DREAMS OF CHILDHOOD

NINTH LECTURE. THE DREAM CENSOR

TENTH LECTURE. SYMBOLISM IN THE DREAM

ELEVENTH LECTURE. THE DREAM–WORK

TWELFTH LECTURE. ANALYSIS OF SAMPLE DREAMS

THIRTEENTH LECTURE. ARCHAIC REMNANTS AND INFANTILISM IN THE DREAM

FOURTEENTH LECTURE. WISH FULFILLMENT

FIFTEENTH LECTURE. DOUBTFUL POINTS AND CRITICISM

PART III. GENERAL THEORY OF THE NEUROSES

SIXTEENTH LECTURE. PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PSYCHIATRY

SEVENTEENTH LECTURE. THE MEANING OF THE SYMPTOMS

EIGHTEENTH LECTURE. TRAUMATIC FIXATION — THE UNCONSCIOUS

NINETEENTH LECTURE. RESISTANCE AND SUPPRESSION

TWENTIETH LECTURE. THE SEXUAL LIFE OF MAN

TWENTY-FIRST LECTURE. DEVELOPMENT OF THE LIBIDO AND SEXUAL ORGANIZATIONS

TWENTY-SECOND LECTURE. THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT AND REGRESSION — ETIOLOGY

TWENTY-THIRD LECTURE. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SYMPTOMS

TWENTY-FOURTH LECTURE. ORDINARY NERVOUSNESS

TWENTY-FIFTH LECTURE. FEAR AND ANXIETY

TWENTY-SIXTH LECTURE. THE LIBIDO THEORY AND NARCISM

TWENTY-SEVENTH LECTURE. TRANSFERENCE

TWENTY-EIGHTH LECTURE. ANALYTICAL THERAPY

Table of Contents

Few, especially in this country, realize that while Freudian themes have rarely found a place on the programs of the American Psychological Association, they have attracted great and growing attention and found frequent elaboration by students of literature, history, biography, sociology, morals and aesthetics, anthropology, education, and religion. They have given the world a new conception of both infancy and adolescence, and shed much new light upon characterology; given us a new and clearer view of sleep, dreams, reveries, and revealed hitherto unknown mental mechanisms common to normal and pathological states and processes, showing that the law of causation extends to the most incoherent acts and even verbigerations in insanity; gone far to clear up the terra incognita of hysteria; taught us to recognize morbid symptoms, often neurotic and psychotic in their germ; revealed the operations of the primitive mind so overlaid and repressed that we had almost lost sight of them; fashioned and used the key of symbolism to unlock many mysticisms of the past; and in addition to all this, affected thousands of cures, established a new prophylaxis, and suggested new tests for character, disposition, and ability, in all combining the practical and theoretic to a degree salutary as it is rare.

These twenty-eight lectures to laymen are elementary and almost conversational. Freud sets forth with a frankness almost startling the difficulties and limitations of psychoanalysis, and also describes its main methods and results as only a master and originator of a new school of thought can do. These discourses are at the same time simple and almost confidential, and they trace and sum up the results of thirty years of devoted and painstaking research. While they are not at all controversial, we incidentally see in a clearer light the distinctions between the master and some of his distinguished pupils. A text like this is the most opportune and will naturally more or less supersede all other introductions to the general subject of psychoanalysis. It presents the author in a new light, as an effective and successful popularizer, and is certain to be welcomed not only by the large and growing number of students of psychoanalysis in this country but by the yet larger number of those who wish to begin its study here and elsewhere.

The impartial student of Sigmund Freud need not agree with all his conclusions, and indeed, like the present writer, may be unable to make sex so all-dominating a factor in the psychic life of the past and present as Freud deems it to be, to recognize the fact that he is the most original and creative mind in psychology of our generation. Despite the frightful handicap of the odium sexicum , far more formidable today than the odium theologicum , involving as it has done for him lack of academic recognition and even more or less social ostracism, his views have attracted and inspired a brilliant group of minds not only in psychiatry but in many other fields, who have altogether given the world of culture more new and pregnant appercus than those which have come from any other source within the wide domain of humanism.