Although it
appeared in fall of 1899, Sigmund Freud's ground-breaking
book Die Traumdeutung (Interpretation of dreams) bears
the impressum date 1900. This indicates Freud's own
self-awareness of the revolutionary quality of this book,
which was fated to become the founding document of his
new "science," psychoanalysis. Freud was not the inventor
of the "unconscious," but he was the first to valorize it
as playing a fundamental role in human psychic existence.
Above all, for Freud the unconscious was a form of
super-memory, an absolute mnemonic storehouse that
records all the empirical and mental experiences of the
individual. These hidden, or, as Freud liked to say,
"repressed" memories could be called up by simple events,
experiences, dreams, or fantasies. Above all, Freud
believed that the chronic repression of certain memories
stored in the unconscious was responsible for
psychological pathologies such as neurosis or psychosis,
and that the elevation of these memories from the
unconscious to the conscious mind could effect a cure of
these psychic ills. Since Freud explicitly defined
psychoanalysis as a science in the empirical and
experimental sense, his greatest challenge was
discovering an empirically based methodology that would
give him access to the internal workings of the mind. His
theory of the dream as a systematically distorted
expression of the unconscious wishes of the individual
brought the required breakthrough, systematically
defining the necessary psychic "data" that could be
subjected to analysis by the physician. Parallel to dream
analysis, Freud employed his infamous "associative
method" to encourage his patients to divulge unconscious
thoughts and ideas, thereby providing further psychic
data for analysis.
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