Concept
Psychical reality
Freud's term for what has, in the subject's mental life, the force and consistency of reality, above all unconscious wishes and the fantasies bound up with them. After giving up the seduction theory in 1897 he came to hold that for neurosis it matters little whether a scene was lived or imagined: what counts is psychical reality, not material reality. Das Unbewußte (1915) names its replacement of external reality as a feature of the unconscious system.
Development
1900
introduced by Sigmund Freud
The closing pages of Die Traumdeutung speak of psychical reality as a particular form of existence not to be confused with material reality. In the Introductory Lectures (Lecture XXIII) Freud states that in the world of the neuroses psychical reality is the decisive kind.
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900);Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1917)
Relations
- 1900 introduced by Sigmund Freud
The closing pages of Die Traumdeutung speak of psychical reality as a particular form of existence not to be confused with material reality. In the Introductory Lectures (Lecture XXIII) Freud states that in the world of the neuroses psychical reality is the decisive kind.
Works
- 1900
Freud's book on dreams, issued by Deuticke in November 1899 with the imprint date 1900, argues that a dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. It sets out a method of interpreting dreams through the dreamer's associations and distinguishes the manifest content of a dream from the latent dream-thoughts. The dream-work turns the latter into the former through condensation, displacement, considerations of representability and secondary revision. The seventh chapter proposes a model of the psychical apparatus made up of the systems unconscious, preconscious and conscious, with a censorship between them and two modes of functioning, the primary and the secondary process. The book is also the first printed statement of the theme Freud later named the Oedipus complex. Freud enlarged it in many later editions.
- 1917
Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
Twenty-eight lectures that Freud delivered at the University of Vienna in the winter terms of 1915–16 and 1916–17 to an audience of physicians and lay listeners, published in three parts by Hugo Heller in 1916–17. They became his most widely read general account of psychoanalysis. The first part treats parapraxes, such as slips and errors, as acts that carry meaning. The second sets out the theory of dreams: the dream censorship, symbolism, the dream-work and wish-fulfilment. The third offers a general theory of the neuroses, moving from the sense of symptoms, resistance and repression through the sexual life of human beings, the development of the libido and its organisations, regression and fixation, and the paths by which symptoms form, to anxiety, narcissism and the libido theory, and finally transference and analytic therapy.
See also
People
References
- The Interpretation of Dreams1900Evidence for a relation
- Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis1917Evidence for a relation