Freud’s Unconscious – The Psychoanalysis of a Dream, and its Dreamer

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August 17, 2020May 22, 2021Owen Hewitson2 Comments

A story about the origins of psychoanalysis, and of its creator Sigmund Freud. Taking Freud as our example to show how psychoanalysis works – presenting the dream as a microcosm of Freud’s unconscious, and showing what Lacan meant when he said the unconscious is structured like a language.

Links to the works referenced: Freud’s ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ – https://amzn.to/2DSJsIq

Leclaire’s ‘Unconscious Desire: With Freud, Reading Freud’ is in this collection – https://amzn.to/3kUpRYL

Diane O’Donoghue’s ‘On Dangerous Ground’ – https://amzn.to/3iOGinO

By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com

All content on LacanOnline.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

2 thoughts on “Freud’s Unconscious – The Psychoanalysis of a Dream, and its Dreamer”

CC says:

June 6, 2021 at 11:22 pm

will you turn this video into an article? please?
Michael Miller says:

September 10, 2021 at 12:08 am

This is fantastic, Owen, thank you!

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Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst, 1901–1981. Trained as a psychiatrist, he abandoned the profession in favour of psychoanalysis in the early thirties. After publishing his paper on the Mirror Stage in 1949, for which he is probably best known to the general public, in the early fifties Lacan embarked on a project he called the ‘Return to Freud’.

Lacan began holding yearly seminars, starting in 1952, re-examining Freud’s work. At the time, the theory and technique of psychoanalysis was facing a complete overhaul at the hands of post-Freudian psychoanalysts, many of whom had emigrated to the United States after the war. Lacan railed against their teaching of Freud, seeing it as an oversimplification of his work and a corruption of psychoanalytic technique reducing it to the status of life management. Through his seminars he offered another interpretation of Freud’s work and psychoanalytic theory. Inventive, radical and adventurous, many still believe Lacan’s to be a creative mis-reading of Freud.

However Lacan’s seminars grew in popularity and as his teaching developed from a reading of Freud’s text to an elaboration of his own concepts his teaching became more influential. Lacan continued to give yearly seminars until the year before his death in 1981. By that time, he had become a major intellectual figure in public life and had both created and disbanded his own school, separating his members both from the established psychoanalytic institutions and from each other.

Today, Lacanian theory is advanced by a number of disparate groupings of his followers and the technique of psychoanalysis he developed is practiced clinically by Lacanian analysts around the world.

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New site, fantastic resource: LacaninIreland.com

2 thoughts on “Freud’s Unconscious – The Psychoanalysis of a Dream, and its Dreamer”

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