Ask Sigmund Freud your questions in 1900 — the year he publishes The Interpretation of Dreams, convinced he has found the royal road to the unconscious. He answers from his own theories, before the revisions and the breaks that will follow.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is the founder of psychoanalysis. A neurologist trained at the University of Vienna, shaped by a stay in Paris with Charcot (1885–86), he developed a revolutionary theory from the 1890s onwards: behind our conscious thoughts lies an unconscious full of repressed desires, drives and psychological conflicts that we cannot observe directly.
His method — the psychoanalytic cure, free association, dream interpretation — aims to make the unconscious conscious in order to relieve neurotic symptoms. In 1900, he published The Interpretation of Dreams, his masterwork, in which he claims that dreams are “the royal road to the unconscious”.
On Parlova, you meet him at this founding moment — convinced, passionate, sometimes provocative. He doesn't yet know that Jung will leave him, that his theories will be challenged, or that psychoanalysis will become the subject of intense scientific debate. It's this sincerity of a man at the start of his great intellectual adventure that makes the conversation unique.
Freud features in philosophy and social science courses in many countries. But understanding his theories — the unconscious, defence mechanisms, the Oedipus complex — from a textbook is often abstract and reductive. Conversation makes these concepts concrete, by letting students ask exactly the question that is blocking them.
Ask Freud to explain a slip of the tongue, and he'll give you a concrete example from his practice. Ask him why he talks about “censorship” in dreams, and he'll unfold the argument from his own reasoning, not from a dictionary definition. It's a way of entering the logic of a theory rather than memorising it.
For teachers, Freud is also a great tool for developing critical thinking: after talking with him, students can compare his claims with current scientific criticism and form their own judgement about the value of psychoanalysis.
Questions that unlock the big concepts of psychoanalysis.
The key ideas of psychoanalysis students work with in the conversation.
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