The Unconscious (Modern Classics Translated Texts)

by Sigmund Freud

he invented what was to become psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients through talking, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general.

a dethronement of Man started by Copernicus continued by Darwin and completed by Freud.

an essential element in the psyche’s predisposition to neurosis results from the delay in educating the sexual drive to take account of reality, and from the conditions that make this delay possible.

A momentary pleasure with uncertain consequences is given up, but only in order to obtain, by the new approach, a more secure pleasure later on.

The doctrine that the – voluntary or enforced – renunciation of earthly pleasures will be rewarded in the afterlife is simply the mythopoeic projection of this psychic transformation.

religions have been able to bring about the absolute renunciation of pleasure in this life in return for the promise of recompense in a future existence;

by so doing they have not conquered the plea...

Bernard Shaw’s words: ‘To be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of least resistance.

From anxiety hysteria, I shall take a well-analysed example of an animal phobia.

Phobias might be worth a mention

We have good reason, then, to revise our deduction regarding our own person: what we have within us is not a second consciousness, but psychic acts that are devoid of consciousness.

We can also reject the term ‘subconsciousness’ as incorrect and misleading.

The unconscious comprises, on the one hand, acts that are merely latent, temporarily unconscious but otherwise no different from conscious ones, and, on the other, processes such as repressed ones, which, if they were to become conscious, would contrast starkly with the other conscious ones.

For him, squeezing out the contents of a blackhead is evidently a substitute for masturbation.