Domain

Remarks

"Golden Siggie"

• That's how Sigmund Freud's mother called him
• His studies, experiments, theories and even self-analysis are simultaneously insightful and controversial

Psychoanalysis theories

• The unconscious: potent sexual and aggressive drives struggle with their defences for supremacy
• Neurotic ailments = sexual mal-adjustments
• Erotic desire starts in infancy
• Penis envy: what women wish to have
• Freudian slip: slip of the tongue = e-mail direct from the unconscious
• Repression: involuntary exclusion of unsettling feeling from conscious thought
• Oedipus complex: children of 6-9 form erotic attachment to parent of opposite sex and hatred of parent of same sex
• Castration anxiety: fear of boys
• Sublimation: unconscious shifting of unacceptable drive into culturally acceptable behaviour
• Transference: unconscious shifting of feelings about one to another
• Superego: part of mind where rules reside
• Id: part of mind where primal needs and drives emerge
• Ego: mind to remain down-to-earth by referencing Superego and Id
• Phallic symbols: penal symbols

Vision

• Theories for mental analysis
• Develop the process and rules of therapy
• The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
• Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)

Principle

• All mental experiences however subtle like the slip of the tongue, the glance, the sweep of the hand, dreams or nightmares must have a meaning and valuable to unriddle the often incomprehensible processes of thinking