Freudian Thought

The concept of education—its dangers and promises and its illusions and revelations—is elaborated throughout Sigmund Freud's (1856–1939) great corpus of 24 volumes on studies of psychoanalysis. Known in English as The Standard Edition (1886–1940), Freud's clinical and theoretical writing represents the human through its lifelong controversies in learning to live: as vacillating between the demands of fantasy and reality; as an internally divided, erotic, finite creature; as unconsciously affected by its infantile history of helplessness and dependency; as an amalgam and expression of group psychology and its conflicted, intersubjective design; and as suffering from both meaning and its absence or loss. Given the conflicted nature of the human, Freudian thought focuses on the limitations of cognition with the translation of the dynamic unconscious into speech, ...