Introducing Psychoanalysis

When psychoanalysts talk of a “dynamic” unconscious, they add a lot more weight to the notion by their assumptions of the role that it is always playing in our lives.

In Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), the metaphor of depth is reproduced in the distinction between the “manifest content” of the dream and the unconscious “latent content”.

Psychoanalysis is more than a particular set of concepts and therapeutic procedures.

The metaphor of “depth” implies a stratified concept of the mind, one layer laid upon another.

Freud, psychoanalysis is about memories, thoughts, feelings, phantasies, intentions, wishes, ideals, beliefs, psychological conflict, and all that stuff inside what we like to call our minds.