This lecture notes discusses the topic "psychoanalysis", defined as a set of psychological theories and therapeutic techniques with a core belief that all people possess unconscious thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories has its origin in the work of the Austrian neurologist and social philosoph...
As is well known, psychoanalysis defined as a set of psychological theories and
therapeutic techniques with a core belief that all people possess unconscious thoughts,
feelings, desires, and memories has its origin in the work of the Austrian neurologist and
social philosopher Sigmund Freud.
In fact, Freud was considered to be the founding father of psychoanalysis.
In a lucid and non-specialist description of the discipline, Freud describes psychoanalysis
as comprising:
(1) a discipline founded on a procedure for the investigation of mental processes that
are otherwise inaccessible because they are “unconscious”;
(2) a therapeutic method for the treatment of neurotic disorders; and
(3) a body of psychological data evolving into a new scientific discipline.
Freud’s third and broadest category comprises his work on culture, which based largely
on the view that culture is a product of the diversion or sublimation of sexual energy,
and art, which provides the starting-point for the many varieties of psychoanalytic
criticism. Freud’s two series of Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis provide an
excellent overview of Freudian theory. Later, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand
POntalis’s The Language of Psychoanalysis provides an essential guide to the concepts
and terminology in psychoanalysis.
Although the history of psychoanalysis is inseparable from that of Freud’s life and of the
long self-analysis which led him to write his great Interpretation of Dreams, it is clear
that his new science is rooted in the traditions of nineteenth-century psychology and
biology. Freud’s ventures into anthropology, which he views as an integral part of his
new scientific discipline, are also influenced by nineteenth-century theories of evolution
and by their attendant Eurocentrism. Hence, the analogy between the “mental life of
savages and neurotics” posited in Totem and Taboo, and the argument that the life of
the individual re-enacts or repeats the life of the species. It is also clear that Freud’s
descriptions of the workings of the unconscious, with its flows of energy, and of Libido
and its mechanism of discharge, owe much to the physics and hydraulics of his age.
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