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WorkSigmund Freud

Zur Theorie des Unbewußten

(lit.: On the Theory of the Unconscious)

Four short papers on how the unconscious thinks: Egyptian words with opposite meanings, a hypnotist's experiment, and the mind undressing for sleep.

by Sigmund Freud66 passages held

  • German, the original language
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First published
(aged 54)
Original language
German

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Overview

Four short papers make up this volume on the site, all from the years when Sigmund Freud was turning the findings of The Interpretation of Dreams into a general theory of the mind; each first appeared on its own. "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words" (1910) begins with a puzzle from the dream book, that dreams ignore the word no and happily fuse opposites, and with Freud's chance reading of a pamphlet published in 1884 by the philologist Karl Abel, who claimed that ancient Egyptian had many words meaning both a thing and its contrary. "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning" (1911) sets out how the infant mind, ruled at first by the pleasure principle, learns to take account of what is real even when it is unpleasant. The reality principle, Freud argues, does not abolish the pursuit of pleasure but secures it, trading a pleasure now for a surer one later, and he reads the promise of reward in the afterlife as that trade projected into myth. "A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis" was first published in English, in London in 1912, in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, and in German only the following year. It rests its case on the post-hypnotic experiments of the French physician Hippolyte Bernheim, whose subjects, ordered under hypnosis to do something half an hour after waking, did it on time without remembering why. "A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams", one of the five papers Freud published from a planned series of twelve on the foundations of psychoanalysis, was written in 1915. It opens on the observation that every night people take off their clothes, their spectacles and their false teeth, and often curl up like an unborn child, and that the mind strips down in the same way before it dreams.

Key concepts

In how many senses does Freud call something unconscious?

In three. Descriptively, an idea is unconscious if we are not aware of it but have evidence that it is there, as with any memory not being recalled. Dynamically, it is unconscious because forces keep it out of awareness, however strong it is. And finally the word names a system of the mind with its own rules, the system Freud abbreviates as Ucs.

What is the preconscious?

The preconscious holds ideas that are not conscious at the moment but can become so without resistance, like a name you know but are not thinking of. Freud separates it from the unconscious proper, whose ideas are barred from awareness however hard one tries. The distinction lets him say that being out of mind is not the same as being repressed.

What is reality testing?

Reality testing is the mind's way of telling whether something comes from outside or only from within. Freud ties it to movement: a perception that action can make disappear belongs to the world, one that persists whatever we do belongs to us. In sleep the ego gives up this test along with movement, which is why a dream's wish, once it reaches perception, is believed.

What is the narcissism of sleep?

It is the withdrawal of all interest from the outside world back into the self that sleep requires. The sleeper wants nothing from anyone, and the wish to sleep is the ego's chief wish at night. That is why dreams are so self-centred: in every dream, Freud says, the dreamer's own person plays the main part, however disguised.

What are the pleasure-ego and the reality-ego?

They are the two attitudes the ego passes between. The pleasure-ego can do nothing but wish and work towards gaining pleasure and avoiding pain. The reality-ego has only to look after what is useful and guard against harm. The second does not replace the first for good: it serves the same pleasure on a longer path, and sometimes gives way to it again.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Mind That Knows No 'No'

Why do dreams treat opposites as the same thing? "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words" looks for the answer in the history of language.

The dream book had found that dreams simply ignore contradiction and love to fuse opposites. In Karl Abel's pamphlet on ancient Egyptian Freud thought he saw the same habit in the oldest speech: words that meant a thing and its contrary, told apart by a picture written beside them, and only later split into two words. Latin still keeps traces. Freud concludes that the dream's way of thinking is archaic rather than merely confused, and that dream interpretation would understand itself better through the history of language.

  • linguistics
  • word meaning
  • ancient languages
  • contradiction
  • language and thought
  • dreams
  • dream interpretation

Enter a dialogue

Learning to Want What Is Real

How does a mind built for pleasure come to put up with reality? "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning" traces the change and its price.

The infant at first hallucinates what it wants; disappointment teaches it to picture the world as it is, to pay attention, remember, judge, and to think, which Freud calls a trial action that holds the real one back. The reality principle does not abandon pleasure but postpones it for a surer one. One region stays exempt: fantasy, where the old pleasure rules on. The sexual drive learns the lesson late, which Freud makes a source of neurosis, and the artist is the one who leads fantasy back into reality.

  • reality principle
  • pleasure principle
  • reality testing
  • fantasy
  • action
  • neurosis

Enter a dialogue

The Unconscious, Proved and Put to Sleep

What entitles anyone to speak of ideas no one is aware of, and what becomes of them when we sleep? The English note of 1912 makes the case; the supplement of 1917 follows the mind into the night.

Against philosophers who equate mental with conscious, the note points to the post-hypnotic subject who carries out an order without knowing he received it. An unconscious idea is not merely weak, it is active and kept away from awareness. The supplement then follows the sleeper. Withdrawing interest from the world, the mind returns towards the womb and its own self, and a wish that slips through is pushed back into perception as a hallucination. Acute confusion after an unbearable loss works the same way, with no waking to end it.

  • unconscious
  • consciousness
  • preconscious
  • hallucination
  • regression
  • sleep
  • wish fulfillment
  • narcissism
  • psychosis

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
66
distinct concepts
107
by passages held, corpus-wide
#599

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “consciousness” and “unconscious”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 18 pairings. 70 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
consciousnessunconscious12
hallucinationreality testing6
dreamsunconscious5
repressionunconscious5
dreamshallucination4
dreamsregression4
dreamsrepression4
hallucinationregression3
consciousnessrepression2
hallucinationunconscious2
reality testingregression2
reality testingunconscious2
consciousnesshallucination1
consciousnessreality testing1
consciousnessregression1
dreamsreality testing1
linguisticsregression1
regressionunconscious1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)

    Begun from his own dreams in the 1890s and enlarged in edition after edition, this is where Freud sets out the method of interpretation that his later books apply to slips of the tongue, jokes and myths.

     DE
  2. 1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)

    The dream book's method carried into waking life; its slips and forgettings became the opening part of the lectures Freud later gave to beginners in Vienna.

     DE
  3. 1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)

    Freud's only book-length study of comedy, and the one most built from borrowed material: puns, anecdotes and Jewish jokes, each taken apart in turn.

     DE
  4. 1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung

    Two early excursions from the clinic, gathered here in one volume: the seed of Freud's later books on religion, and his short account of where a writer's stories come from.

     DE
  5. 1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten you are here DE
  6. 1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos

    Two essays from 1913 and 1917, gathered here in one volume, that show Freud the reader of Shakespeare and Goethe: the dream-book method applied to a stage motif and to the first page of a famous autobiography.

     DE
  7. 1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)

    The first of Freud's books on society and religion, where he moves from the patient to the human species; Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion and his last book, on Moses, all build on its story of the murdered father.

     DE
  8. 1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus)

    A short essay written as Jung was breaking with Freud, and the hinge between his early theory of the drives and the later picture of ego and super-ego.

     DE
  9. 1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale)

    The paper that opens Freud's 1915 theoretical series by defining its basic term; the companion essays on repression and on the unconscious build on it.

     DE
  10. 1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg

    Freud's direct responses to the First World War, gathered in one volume on this site: a long essay of 1915 on disillusionment and death, and a short one of 1916 on transience and mourning.

     DE
  11. 1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)

    Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.

     DE
  12. 1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)

    Freud's own introduction to his work, and the closest thing he wrote to a textbook: his books on dreams and on everyday slips retold for listeners, then carried on into a general theory of neurosis.

     DE
  13. 1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche)

    A rare venture by Freud into aesthetics, a field he says psychoanalysts seldom feel drawn to, written in 1919 beside the first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

     DE
  14. 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)

    The hinge of Freud's later work: the 1920 book that introduces the death drive, followed within three years by the new map of the mind in The Ego and the Id.

     DE
  15. 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse)

    The bridge between Freud's speculations on prehistory and his new model of the mind: its chapter on a "grade in the ego" sets out the ego ideal that The Ego and the Id would rename two years later.

     DE
  16. 1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es)

    The book in which Freud's later model of the mind takes its final shape; the essays and books that follow it, on anxiety, religion and civilisation, all speak its language of ego, id and super-ego.

     DE
  17. 1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie

    Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.

     DE
  18. 1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)

    Written three years after The Ego and the Id, it rebuilds the theory of neurotic symptoms in that book's terms, starting from the difference between a symptom and an inhibition, a restriction the ego places on itself.

     DE
  19. 1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion)

    Freud's most direct case against religion, written fourteen years after Totem and Taboo had traced it to the murdered father, and the opening of the late cultural writings that continue in Civilization and Its Discontents.

     DE
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