What is Psychoanalysis? From the Freud Museum London
A 4 part video series
Psychoanalysis is a theory of the mind and a method of helping people in mental distress. It is based a very simple idea that human behaviour is determined by unconscious motives that are the products of childhood encounters with love, loss, sexuality and death.
It's about the things we keep hidden from ourselves
In this episode:
Is psychoanalysis weird?
A talking cure
The unconscious
The ego is not master in its own house
Psychoanalysis and the ‘cognitive approach’
Freud's account of sexuality was very different to mainstream ideas about it
In this episode:
An enlarged concept of sexuality
Infantile sexuality
Perversion is something we’re born with
Normal and abnormal
Psychosexual stages of development: oral, anal, phallic
Repression
Sexuality and symptoms
The emotional world of little children is not a peaceful world!
In this episode:
The emotional world of children
His Majesty the Baby
The mother as first love object
Is it sexual?
Jealousy, rivalry, hatred and anxiety
The role of the father Gender: Freud didn’t think you were just ‘born a boy’ or ‘born a girl’
There is no perfect resolution of the Oedipus complex
It marks us for life
Freud discovered a mind at war with itself.
In this episode:
A fractured self
Id, Ego, Superego
Why did Freud develop a new model?
Devils and angels
People fall ill of their moral ideals
A horse and a rider
The ego is like a politician
The goal of psychoanalysis: stop the ego being so silly