Psychoanalysis (1890s – present)
The movement Freud started in Vienna — by listening to neurotic patients and taking their dreams, slips, and jokes seriously as data — that permanently changed how the West talks about the mind.
What Defined It
Psychoanalysis makes a few foundational bets, all of which were scandalous in 1900 and most of which are common sense now:
- The unconscious exists. Most of mental life happens below awareness. What we take for our conscious “self” is the surface of a much larger system.
- The unconscious pushes back. Desires, memories, and conflicts don’t vanish when they’re inadmissible — they get repressed. Repression costs energy, and when it fails, the material returns as symptoms, dreams, or slips.
- Early childhood is determinative. The family drama — especially the Oedipal configuration — shapes adult desire, anxiety, and authority relations.
- Interpretation is the cure. The method is free association and the analysis of dreams, parapraxes, and transference (the patient re-enacts old relationships with the analyst). Insight relaxes repression.
- Drives organize the psyche. Eros (life/sexual drive) and later Thanatos (the death drive) are Freud’s two engines.
Freud built this system across a 40-year project. The foundational texts in our vault:
- [[a-general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis|A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis]] (1915–17) — the accessible lecture series, the best single entry point.
- [[dream-psychology|Dream Psychology]] — the dream as the “royal road to the unconscious.”
- [[beyond-the-pleasure-principle|Beyond the Pleasure Principle]] (1920) — introduces the death drive; psychoanalysis rotates toward pessimism.
- [[civilization-and-its-discontents|Civilization and Its Discontents]] (1930) — the whole theory scaled up to the history of civilization.
- [[mass-psychology-and-other-writings|Mass Psychology]] — group identification, the leader, the crowd.
After Freud
The movement split almost immediately. Jung left in 1913 to build analytical psychology (collective unconscious, archetypes). Adler split off to found individual psychology (inferiority, power). Melanie Klein developed object relations in Britain (the inner world as a theater of part-objects). Lacan, in Paris from the 1950s, “returned to Freud” via structural linguistics — the unconscious is structured like a language.
By the late 20th century, classical Freudianism lost ground in clinical psychology (to CBT and neuroscience) but kept its grip on literary theory, film studies, feminist theory, and continental philosophy, where its conceptual vocabulary remains indispensable.
Key Figures
Freud (founder), Jung, Adler, Ferenczi, Abraham, Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Winnicott, Bion, Lacan, Kristeva, Žižek (philosophical Lacanian), Erich Fromm.
Why It Matters
Psychoanalysis gave the 20th century its inner vocabulary: unconscious, repression, projection, transference, the id, the ego, the superego, the Oedipus complex, the defense mechanism, the Freudian slip, the uncanny. Even readers who reject Freud’s specific theories keep using his map. Literature, cinema, and political theory in particular cannot be cleanly disentangled from the psychoanalytic inheritance.
Connections
- Freud — the movement’s founder
- A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
- Dream Psychology
- Beyond the Pleasure Principle
- Civilization and Its Discontents
- Mass Psychology
Lineage
- Predecessors: 19th-century psychiatry (Charcot, Breuer on hysteria); Nietzsche’s psychology of drives; Pessimism (Schopenhauer’s Will is a precursor of the death drive); Romanticism’s interest in dreams and the unconscious
- Successors: Analytical psychology (Jung); object relations (Klein, Winnicott); Lacanian psychoanalysis; humanistic psychology; psychoanalytic literary and film theory; the whole 20th-century “depth” model of the self