For example, if a teenager is away at camp and asks “is daddy coming?” instead of “is Danny coming?”, Freud might argue that this slip indicates that they unconsciously wish their father were with them, not their friend Danny. A Freudian slip is an accident in speech, action, or memory that Freud thought revealed the contents of the unconscious mind.
Freud argued that dreams provide a unique window into the unconscious mind, and he explored this uncharted territory by dividing dreams into manifest content (the surface-level details and storyline of a dream) and latent content (the psychological meaning of a dream).įreud’s next major work, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), saw him continue to examine unconscious mental activity by turning his attention to repressed memories and what we have come to know as Freudian slips. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), one of his earliest books, Freud introduced the idea he remains most known for: the unconscious mind, a zone of mental activity outside of our conscious access which he believed held the key to understanding a wide array of mental illnesses. Let’s take a quick look at four texts which stand out as particularly significant within his larger body of work. Over the course of his five-decade career, Freud wrote more than a dozen books and hundreds of essays and articles.
Through both his therapeutic practice and his theoretical writing, Freud was the driving force behind the emergence of psychoanalysis, a method for understanding the human mind and its ailments which had, and in certain ways continues to have, a profound impact on a wide range of activity beyond the field of mental health. Born in 1856 in the Austrian Empire, Freud was a neurologist who was particularly interested in neuropathology. There are certain figures whose names become so central to the popular understanding of their field that they can almost seem to stand for the whole of it.
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