Freud’s Major Discoveries and Innovations

Sat 05,2025

Freud’s Major Discoveries and Innovations

Freud, through his work with hysteric patients, came to understand that the symptoms from which they suffered embodied a meaning that was simultaneously hidden and revealed, or conscious and unconscious.

This led him to develop his “talking cure”, which revolutionised the interaction between patient and therapist. By inviting them to speak whatever crossed their minds, his patients provided Freud with associations leading back to repressed childhood experiences, wishes and fantasies, that had resulted in unconscious conflicts; once brought into consciousness these conflicts could be analysed, and the symptoms then dissolved.

This procedure became not only a potent method of treatment but also an efficient tool for studying the human psyche, leading to the development of an ever more sophisticated psychoanalytic theory of how the mind works and, in recent years, to joint and comparative studies in the new field of neuro-psychoanalysis.

Freud’s early discoveries led him to some groundbreaking new concepts:

The Unconscious

Psychic life goes beyond what we are conscious of, also beyond what is preconscious in the sense of what we could become aware of once we tried to think of it. A major part of our mind is unconscious, and this part is only accessible with psychoanalysis.

Dreams are wish-fulfilments

Most often they express the fulfilment of infantile sexual wishes or fantasies. Since they appear in disguise (as absurd, strange or incoherent scenes) they require analysis to reveal their unconscious meaning. Freud called the interpretation of dreams the royal road to the unconscious.

Psychosexual development

Freud recognised that the progressive maturation of bodily functions centred on the erotogenic zones (mouth, anus, genitals) comes along with pleasures and fears experienced in the relationship with the care-taking objects, and these structure the development of the child’s mind.

Early childhood experiences

Early childhood experiences are an amalgam of fantasy and reality. They are characterised by passionate wishes, untamed impulses, and infantile anxieties. For example, the wish to be in control and independent is linked to fears of being manipulated or abandoned; to separate from an important care-taker could lead to feeling exposed, helpless and alone; to love one parent might risk to lose the love of the other. Thus early wishes and fears result in conflicts which, when they aren’t resolved, are repressed and become unconscious.

The Oedipus Complex

The Oedipus Complex is the core complex of all neuroses. A child of age four to six becomes aware of the sexual nature of the parents’ relationship, from which they are excluded. Feelings of jealousy and rivalry arise and have to be sorted out, together with the questions of who is male and who is female, who can love and marry whom, how are babies made and born, and what can the child compared to the adult do or not do. The resolution of these challenging questions will shape the character of the adult mind and the super-ego.

The Ego, the Id and the Super-Ego

The Ego is the major seat of consciousness, the mind’s agent that exercises the repressions, and integrates and consolidates various impulses and tendencies before they are translated into action. The Id is the unconscious part of the mind, the site of the repressed and the unknowable memory traces of early life. The Super Ego is the mind’s guide and conscience, a retainer for prohibitions to keep to, and ideals to strive for.

Repression

Is the force that keeps dangerous fantasies related to unresolved portions of childhood conflicts unconscious.

Free association

Describes the emergence of thoughts, feelings and fantasies when they are uninhibited by restrictions through fear, guilt, and shame.

Transference

Is the ubiquitous tendency of the human mind to view and identify new situations within the templates of earlier experiences. In psychoanalysis transference occurs when a patient views the analyst like a parental figure, with whom they can re-experience the major infantile conflicts or traumas as if within the original child-parent relationship.

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Freud’s Major Discoveries and Innovations