Sigmund Freud: Conflict & Culture
The Individual: Theory

Freud understood dreams (like jokes, slips of the tongue, and other symptoms) to be signs of concealed, conflicting desires. He considered powerful desires to be always in conflict, and his theories tried to account for how these conflicts give rise to unintentional expression. Dreams and other unconscious acts conceal even as they reveal wishes that we would rather not face more directly.

In part description of his methods and results, in part autobiography, and in part speculation on the workings of the mind, The Interpretation of Dreams marks the beginning of psychoanalysis. The book also reveals Freud's powers as a writer, weaving intriguing stories together with ambitious theory. Its key idea on which so much else is built: the dream is the expression of a disguised wish. He returned to this idea throughout his career.

The books Freud wrote after The Interpretation of Dreams explored other areas of everyday life in which disguised wishes appear. These books provide more examples of how the unconscious finds some outlet in even the most familiar aspects of our lives. Freud collected jokes that seemed to him particularly expressive, even jokes on war. From his perspective, strong desires will always find some way of expressing themselves.

In the spring of 1915, Freud wrote a series of papers on metapsychology, the fundamental principles that guide the mechanisms of the mind. He destroyed some of these essays but did publish five. This particular one explains why Freud thought it crucial to posit the existence of an unconscious that interacts with conscious life.

By the 1920s Freud had developed a new map of the mind to better explain the dynamic interaction of the conscious and unconscious. In this text, he explores how the conscious ego helps one navigate in the world even as it tries to find ways of both satisfying the desires of the id and meeting the high standards of the super-ego.

In this paper from the series on metapsychology, Freud explicates the concept of "repression," which he called the cornerstone of psychoanalysis. Desires are repressed (bringing distress) because satisfying them would bring even greater distress. But the repressed desires remain active within us, seeking some expression or gratification, even as they are denied. The manuscripts on narcissism and masochism explore some of the ways in which these desires remain active.

Freud was fond of creating metaphors for the psychological mechanism of repression. An archaeological excavation or a children's toy called the "wunderblock," were for him excellent tangible representations of this mechanism. On a wunderblock, the writing can be erased from the covering paper, but its traces remain, if barely visible, in the soft tablet underneath. Erasure, like repression, is only partially successful.

Through the 1890s, Freud confided his doubts, anxieties, ideas and ambitions in letters to Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin physician. These letters form a record of Freud's self analysis, as well as some of his attempts to diagram neurological components of sexuality. In this letter, Freud announces that he no longer believes that neurosis is caused by sexual attacks on children, and that he is now concentrating on the interrelationship of fantasy and memory.

The Oedipus myth seemed to Freud to be an allegory of his ideas on human development. His own Oedipus tale emphasizes neither the child abandoned to die nor the adult who solves the riddle of the Sphinx. Freud's Oedipus is the boy fated to kill his father and marry his mother, a fate indicative of the most fundamental human desires. For Freud, accepting the prohibition against incest -- accepting the renunciation of a primordial desire -- is the crucible in which human subjectivity and culture are formed.

Freud considered this book one of the pillars of psychoanalysis. It contains his thinking on infantile sexuality, on the fundamental bisexuality of humans, on the continuum between normal and unusual sexual practices, and on the Oedipus complex. Freud's theories brought countless responses, including a query from an American mother worried about her homosexual son. The 79-year-old Freud's response to her encourages tolerance and an acknowledgment of the varieties of sexual expression.

In his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, written in the aftermath of World War I, Freud speculated that there existed death drives in conflict with sex drives. This opposition, he thought, could explain much about the fundamental forces shaping individuals and societies, while also pointing toward explanations for their self-destructive and outwardly aggressive behavior.

Even as Freud confessed his relative ignorance about the desires of women, he speculated that their sex drives helped form a distinctive female subjectivity. These speculations provoked lively controversies among his followers and critics which continue today. In Freud's view, the little girl had to come to terms with her self-perception of being a failed boy. As he put it, "Anatomy is destiny."