Prof Brendan Kelly continues his mission on Sigmund Freud by his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Evaluation
For causes too advanced to elucidate, I’ve undertaken to learn all 24 volumes of the Normal Version of the Full Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, on the price of 1 quantity per yr, over the course of 24 years.
Prof Brendan Kelly.
Picture: Ruth-Medjber
Final yr, the fourteenth instalment within the Freud Venture was dedicated to On the Historical past of the Psycho-Analytic Motion, Papers on Metapsychology and Different Works (1914-1916) (Irish Medical Occasions, March 2024). This was Quantity Fourteen of the Normal Version, translated from the German underneath the final editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (Classic: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Evaluation). This yr, Yr Fifteen of the Freud Venture, brings us to Quantity Fifteen, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Evaluation (Elements I and II) (1915-1916).
Freud’s Introductory Lectures comprise 28 lectures that he delivered on the College of Vienna between 1915 and 1917. They’re divided into three sections, the primary two of that are on this quantity.
The primary part is titled ‘Parapraxes’ and consists of 4 lectures coping with ‘Freudian slips’ or errors in speech, reminiscence, or behaviour which reveal unconscious processes. The second part explores ‘Desires’ over the course of 11 quite detailed lectures. The third part contains 13 lectures dedicated to Freud’s ‘Common Principle of the Neuroses’; these make up the following quantity within the Normal Version of Freud’s work and will likely be thought-about subsequent yr.
This yr, we concentrate on desires.
‘Symbolism in Desires’
Freud positioned nice weight on desires. He was obsessed by their content material, their kind, their that means, and their symbolism. This preoccupation is very obvious in his lecture on ‘Symbolism in Desires’ within the current quantity. On this particularly participating contribution, Freud outlines his idea of desires intimately, and argues that ‘if we’re acquainted with the atypical dream-symbols, and as well as with the dreamer’s persona, the circumstances by which he lives and the impressions which preceded the prevalence of the dream, we are sometimes ready to interpret a dream straightaway’ (p. 151).
However whereas desires are worthwhile sources of symbols, symbols may be discovered elsewhere, too, as Freud readily admits: “The sector of symbolism is immensely huge, and dream-symbolism is barely a small a part of it: certainly, it serves no helpful function to assault the entire drawback from the route of desires” (p. 166).
Symbols seem in myths, fairy tales, sayings, songs, poetry, and common language, in addition to desires. We’re surrounded by symbols, each after we sleep and after we are awake.
So, why are dream-symbols particular? Why are they accorded such significance? Freud writes that dreaming is ‘psychological life throughout sleep’ (p. 88) and ‘desires are psychical phenomena’ of some significance (p. 100).
They’re due to this fact worthy of consideration. Symbols in desires are usually not the one supply of that means, however they’re an particularly wealthy path to the unconscious. Put merely, desires matter.
‘The Dream-Work’
Freud outlines two processes in relation to desires. The primary is the ‘dream-work’ which is ‘the work which transforms the latent dream into the manifest one’ (p. 170). In different phrases, Freud sees ‘dream-work’ because the psychological processes that rework the latent content material of a dream (the hidden, unconscious ideas and needs) into the manifest content material (the dream as it’s consciously remembered). Freud believed that dream-work serves as a means for the unconscious thoughts to disguise and categorical repressed needs in a much less threatening kind whereas we sleep.
The second course of is the reverse of this. It’s the ‘work of interpretation’ by the analyst and affected person, ‘which endeavours to reach on the latent dream from the manifest one’ (p. 170). In different phrases, the ‘work of interpretation’ entails analysing and decoding the manifest content material of a dream (what the dreamer consciously remembers) to uncover its latent content material (the hidden, unconscious ideas, needs, or conflicts it represents). It means understanding the ‘dream-work’ in reverse.
All through these lectures, Freud delves deep into the that means of desires, the character of the ‘dream-work’, and the worth of the ‘work of interpretation’.
The latter is crucial for understanding the dream’s deeper psychological that means and is prime to a lot of Freud’s interpretative work and his understanding of the human thoughts.
All instructed, Quantity Fifteen of the Normal Version of Freud’s work supplies a handy overview of lots of Freud’s central theories, particularly as they pertain to desires.
I sit up for comparable insights within the subsequent instalment of the Normal Version, Quantity Sixteen, which presents the rest of his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Evaluation (Half III) (1916-1917). That quantity will likely be thought-about subsequent yr, Deo volente, in Yr Sixteen of the Freud Venture. 
Creator
Brendan Kelly is Professor of Psychiatry at Trinity School Dublin and writer of The Fashionable Psychiatrist’s Information to Up to date Follow: Dialogue, Dissent, and Debate in Psychological Well being Care (Routledge, 2025).
