Cafe Lit. 41: Sigmund Freud & Freudian Psychoanalysis

Subject: Sigmund Freud & Freudian Psychoanalysis
Date: 20:00 25 Oct. 2007
Presented by: Pasha Javadi

Sigmund Freud, physiologist, medical doctor and father of psychoanalysis, is generally recognised as one of the most influential and authoritative thinkers of the twentieth century. He articulated and refined the concepts of the unconscious, of infantile sexuality, of repression, and proposed a tri-partite account of the mind's structure, all as part of a new conceptual frame of reference for the understanding of human psychological development and the mental conditions. Freud's innovative treatment of human actions, dreams, and indeed of cultural artefacts as invariably possessing implicit symbolic significance has proven to be extraordinarily fecund, and has had massive implications for a wide variety of fields, including anthropology, semiotics, and artistic creativity and appreciation in addition to psychology. However, Freud's most important and frequently re-iterated claim, that with psychoanalysis he had invented a new science of the mind, remains the subject of much critical debate and controversy.