Freud, Sigmund

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), one of the figures who has shaped the intellectual landscape of contemporary thought, is the founder of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, as it is commonly known, is a form of psychotherapy (“analysis”) that operates through the investigation of the human psyche. It also offers a rich theory of the development and function of the psyche.

Coming from a middle-class Jewish family, Freud originally trained as a doctor and adhered to a nineteenth-century scientific ideal for his whole life. His interests soon focused on mental illnesses, especially neuroses, and after a short stay in Paris where he studied with Jean-Martin Charcot, he set up a private practice in Vienna, where he was to spend almost all his life. Initially influenced by Joseph Breuer, a Vienna consultant, he eventually developed his own technique and ideas largely on his own. The first major statement of psychoanalysis was The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900. From then onward, Freud produced a constant flow of publications, tirelessly developing, questioning, and reformulating his own theoretical concepts. Psychoanalysis gradually gained an international audience but remained outside institutionalised medicine and university teaching. Freud, having fled occupied Vienna in 1938, died in London a year later. Psychoanalysis, while still largely marginal to official institutions, was to gain unprecedented growth after World War II, both as a therapeutic technique and as a theory of the psyche.

Freud's intellectual honesty precluded a well-polished theoretical edifice, and the vast domain of inquiry he opened up is still, more than a half century after his death, both fascinating and open to interpretation, not least regarding the relationship between the psyche and the social.

The analytic process, based on the person's own free association of thoughts, led Freud to postulate the existence of the “unconscious” as a specific level of operation of the [Page 294]psyche, irreducible to consciousness, which it underlies. Dreams are the “royal road” to the unconscious, and their analysis is the basis for Freud's inferences. The unconscious is always/already represented. That is, the unconscious is never a field of pure psychical energy, but it always refers to representations or images. These follow a specific mode of functioning, different in a number of aspects from that of conscious thought (some of its features being condensation, displacement, timelessness, exemption from contradiction, and disregard for external reality). At the same time, the unconscious in Freud's early work is primarily the repressed; it comprises thoughts, representations, images, and so on, which have been hidden from consciousness as a defensive act to prevent unpleasure. In many cases of neurosis, the lifting of repression is the primary means of analytic cure. The repressed usually has a sexual content, overt or covert. This led Freud to the assumption that the sexual drives, or libido, constitute the form of psychical energy relevant to the functioning of the unconscious.

Freud's distinction between consciousness and the unconscious, known as his first topography, appears to be exactly that: It indicates location, levels within the psyche, and their corresponding modes of functioning. The analysis of the unconscious in particular as a level irreducible to consciousness marks Freud's great contribution. However, a crucial question remains open: Can we discern within the unconscious a form of agency, or is it only on the level of consciousness that a subject can be said to exist? While Freud does not broach the question directly, he does so implicitly. The ultimate function of a dream is to satisfy “an unconscious will.” Although this wish may originate in the organic substratum of the psyche, all too often it expresses a subject's wish qua subject. In the very formulation of a wish, a form of subjectivity is always implied and, moreover, this “subject” in the dream takes a certain representational form, an “image.” Also, the function of repression, which occurs totally within the unconscious, presupposes a subject performing it. There is, therefore, an implication of a form of subjectivity within the unconscious, a subjectivity different from that of consciousness.

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