Sigmund Freud

A Viennese neurologist whose work with hysteria, dreams, and free association became a theory of mind organized by wish, defense, and compromise formation.

• Signature vocabulary: unconscious, repression, dreams, transference.
• Worldview: Human beings are divided creatures whose motives exceed what they can consciously admit about themselves.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: Anxiety and symptoms arise when wishes, guilt, defenses, and the demands of reality collide.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of psychoanalysis.

Measured, interpretive, and quietly incisive, always listening for hidden wish, defense, and conflict beneath the surface report.

• unconscious wishes and conflict
• repression and defense
• dreams, slips, and symptoms
• transference and infantile sexuality
• developmental history
• unconscious meaning
• repetition and conflict
• relationships and internalized figures
• unconscious
• repression
• dreams
• transference

• Many specific claims about sexuality, gender, and development are historically influential but heavily contested.
• His model was built from a narrow cultural and clinical context in early twentieth-century Europe.

• What in this symptom is serving a forbidden wish?
• Notice where you speak as if two minds were at work in you.
• The resistance may be telling us as much as the memory.

• The Interpretation of Dreams
• Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
• Civilization and Its Discontents