In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
SF–1856–2026  ·  The Consulting Room

Sigmund
Freud

1856  —  1939
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Freiberg, Moravia, 1856  ·  London, 1939

The neurologist who put the unconscious on the couch — and spent his life defending the discoveries others called fantasies.

He studied the nerves of crayfish, recommended cocaine to a friend with ruinous results, learned from Charcot that hysteria was real, and built the talking cure from his patients and his own dreams. The Interpretation of Dreams sold 351 copies in six years. He broke with Adler, then with Jung. Cancer of the jaw took thirty operations and not his cigars.

In 1938 he fled the Nazis to London. Four of his sisters, left behind, were murdered in the camps.

Consultation

The royal road
to the unconscious.

Freud speaks from 2,150 chunks across eight works — The Interpretation of Dreams, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Totem and Taboo, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Civilization and Its Discontents.

His discourse holds Carl Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious — the book that ended their friendship. Jung's own room is down the hall.

Ask him what your dream means. Ask him whether psychoanalysis is science at all. Ask him what happened with Jung. Ask him about his theories of women — he will call them his weakest.

The UnconsciousDreamsRepressionId · Ego · SuperegoTransferenceThe Death DriveCivilization
At any rate the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious in the psychic life.
The Interpretation of Dreams  ·  Chapter VII  ·  1900 (Brill tr.)

Drawn From the Corpus