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WorkSigmund Freud

The Unconscious

Freud's case that most of the mind's work happens where awareness never reaches, argued from how anyone knows another person's mind.

by Sigmund Freud68 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Das Unbewußte
First published
(aged 59)
Original language
German

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Overview

The right to speak of an unconscious mind, Sigmund Freud notes at the start of this essay, was disputed on many sides. His answer rests on something everyone already does. Nobody perceives another person's consciousness; we infer it from what the other says and does. Psychoanalysis asks only that we turn the same inference on ourselves, and treat the acts we cannot connect with the rest of our mental life — slips, dreams, ideas that arrive from nowhere — as we would treat someone else's. What that reveals is not a second consciousness hidden inside us but mental activity that is not conscious at all. Freud compares the step to Kant's: perception does not show us things as they are in themselves, and inner perception does not show us the mind as it is. He then describes what the unconscious is like. It knows no negation and no doubt, it is not ordered in time, and its ideas are images of things, which can reach consciousness only once they are joined to words. For that last claim he turns to schizophrenia, using cases supplied by Victor Tausk, a Viennese analyst. A young woman brought to a clinic after a quarrel complained that her eyes were not right, and explained that her lover was an Augenverdreher, an "eye-twister", German slang for a hypocrite; in her illness, Freud argues, the word had taken the place of the thing. The essay appeared in two instalments of the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse in 1915. It belonged to a series of twelve papers meant as the theoretical groundwork of psychoanalysis. Freud published five and never released the other seven, though a draft of one of them turned up in 1983.

Key concepts

What are thing-presentations and word-presentations?

A thing-presentation is the memory-image of a thing itself, built from what was seen, heard and touched; a word-presentation is the memory of the word for it. Freud argues that an idea in the unconscious is a thing-presentation alone, while a conscious idea is the thing-presentation joined to its word. Repression, on this account, refuses an idea the words that would let it into awareness.

What does Freud mean by cathexis?

Cathexis, Freud's Besetzung, is the charge of mental energy invested in an idea. An idea strongly invested presses for attention or action; one whose charge is withdrawn falls quiet. Freud describes repression, becoming conscious and falling ill as shifts of this charge from one idea or system to another.

What is a countercathexis?

A countercathexis is the energy the mind spends holding a repressed idea down. Repression is not done once and finished: the unconscious idea keeps pushing, so the preconscious must keep an opposing charge in place, often on a substitute idea that stands guard. Repression is therefore a standing expense, never a single act.

What is special about the system Ucs?

Freud lists four properties. Its contents stand side by side without contradiction, even opposite wishes. Their energy moves freely from idea to idea, which he calls the primary process. They are timeless, neither ordered by time nor worn away by it. And they take inner reality for outer, obeying the pleasure principle without regard to what the world allows.

Themes of the book

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

The Right to Speak of an Unconscious

How can anyone know about mental life that no one is aware of? The essay's opening section answers critics on their own ground, with an inference everyone already makes.

Consciousness, Freud argues, gives us only scraps: slips, dreams and sudden ideas that fit nowhere. We grant other people minds by inference from their behaviour; the same inference turned on ourselves shows acts that belong to no consciousness at all. A second, hidden consciousness would be a contradiction, so he speaks of mental acts that lack consciousness. To the objection that such things are merely brain processes he replies that nothing about the brain explains them, while they can be translated into conscious thought.

  • unconscious
  • consciousness
  • evidence
  • methodology
  • psychoanalysis

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How the Hidden System Runs

What is the unconscious like on the inside, and how does repression keep it there? Freud draws a map of the mind and asks what crosses its borders.

Freud treats unconscious and preconscious as two systems divided by a censor. Within the unconscious, ideas sit side by side without contradiction, shift their energy freely, are untouched by time and take inner reality for outer. Repression must be paid for continually with a counter-investment of energy. Feelings strictly cannot be unconscious, only the ideas they belong to, though a feeling can be suppressed. In a phobia the defence pushes an inner danger outwards, so it can be fled like an external one.

  • repression
  • preconscious
  • psychic energy
  • psychical topography
  • mental systems
  • primary process
  • censorship
  • affect
  • phobia
  • defense mechanisms

Enter a dialogue

When Words Replace Things

What does an idea need in order to become conscious? Schizophrenic speech, where words take the place of what they name, gives Freud his answer.

A patient who says her eyes are twisted because her lover is an 'eye-twister', or who treats every pore of his skin as a sexual opening, is not obeying images but words. Freud concludes that a conscious idea joins the image of a thing to the words for it, while the unconscious holds the thing-images alone. In schizophrenia the patient withdraws from the things but clings to the words. Abstract philosophy, he adds, risks a resemblance when its words forget the things behind them.

  • schizophrenia
  • language and thought
  • mental representation
  • symbolism
  • language
  • body
  • narcissism

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
68
distinct concepts
90
by passages held, corpus-wide
#595

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: “repression” and “unconscious”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 70 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
repressionunconscious19
consciousnessunconscious17
psychoanalysisunconscious11
consciousnessrepression10
psychoanalysisrepression8
consciousnesspsychoanalysis7
psychic energyrepression7
psychoanalysisschizophrenia5
language and thoughtschizophrenia4
language and thoughtunconscious4
preconsciousrepression4
preconsciousunconscious4
psychic energyunconscious4
consciousnesspreconscious3
language and thoughtrepression3
repressionschizophrenia3
consciousnesslanguage and thought2
consciousnessschizophrenia2
psychic energypsychoanalysis2
schizophreniaunconscious2
language and thoughtpsychoanalysis1
preconsciouspsychic energy1

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

    Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.

     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) you are here 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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