Freud in 60 Minutes: Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes

By Walther Ziegler

The Viennese physician and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud moved from hypnotizing his patients to interpreting their dreams and discovered thereby the hitherto unexplored dimension of the unconscious mind. Each of us, argued Freud, has hidden wishes, desires, and drives which influence our actions below the level of our awareness. A great role is played here, already from childhood on, by sexual desire and pleasure. The nursing infant still lives entirely by the “pleasure principle”, taking everything into his mouth, crying when he wants something, and laughing when he is satisfied. But he must soon learn to obey the rules set by his parents, teachers and society in general. The infantile “pleasure principle” is brutally superseded by the “reality principle”. This is an experience we all must undergo. But it is also one which sometimes leads to grievances and traumatization, as do other aspects of the development of our sexuality and of our relationships. Freud was a doctor and practiced a revolutionary method of treatment: psychoanalysis. He was the first to discover that the way people experience their own lives is often to be traced back to experiences which cannot, indeed, be altered but can be emotionally re-evaluated. Furthermore, Freud impressively explains how our “psychical apparatus” functions day to day and how we process in every second, with lightning speed, our drives, thoughts and perceptions. The small book “Freud in 60 Minutes” explains Freud’s new and revolutionary perspective on human life step by step, by means of many examples and over forty quotes from Freud’s own works. In the second part of the book it is asked: “Of what use is Freud’s discovery to us today?” It is astounding how important and helpful his insights can be for forming and directing our own lives, provided they are applied rightly. The book forms part of the popular series “Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes”.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Jul 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9783741230271

Walther Ziegler

Dr. Walther Ziegler ist promovierter Philosoph und Hochschuldozent. Als Auslandskorrespondent, Reporter und Nachrichtenchef des Fernsehsenders ProSieben produzierte er Filme auf allen Kontinenten. Seine Reportagen wurden mehrfach preisgekrönt. Von 2007 bis 2016 bildete er in München junge TV-Journalistinnen und Journalisten aus und leitete eine University of Applied Sciences für Film- und Fernsehstudiengänge. Er ist zugleich Autor zahlreicher philosophischer Bücher. Als langjährigem Journalisten und Wissenschaftler gelingt es ihm, den Zeitgeist ganzer Epochen spannend und anschaulich auf den Punkt zu bringen.

Book preview

Freud’s Great Discovery

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is without a doubt one of the most important thinkers of the 20th Century. He has marked the way modern Man sees and understands himself more deeply, perhaps, than any other writer. It is largely due to Freud that we nowadays no longer look on ourselves as creatures of pure reason but rather as beings governed by feelings such as anxiety, longing and desire. For two thousand years, philosophy interpreted Man only in terms of his reason. The I think, therefore I am of the French philosopher Descartes, for example, amounted to a claim that logical thought formed the essence of what it was to be human. The body was seen as a mere servant of the mind.

Freud fundamentally contradicts this way of seeing things. Man – such was Freud’s provocative stance here – is, on the contrary, essentially a creature of drives and instincts, a homo natura. It is, first and foremost, these drives, instincts and needs that Man obeys and his mind is just these drives’ servant, a mere secondary phenomenon. For, as Freud writes:

Our perception of the world and our actions are, said Freud, determined not so much by reason as by feelings and emotions of which we are not aware. We believe, indeed, that we are acting logically and rationally but in fact we are governed by unconscious wishes. If we face the truth, says Freud, we are forced to the conclusion that:

The philosophers, then, had erred in their overestimation of reason and had, for two thousand years, followed a false path. This radical insight brought down on Freud the hostility of many practicing philosophers. Heidegger accused him of gawking at states of the soul and the other great German existentialist Karl Jaspers even dismissed Freud’s discovery of unconscious desires and drives as mere philosophy of the anus. Freud reacted calmly to such criticisms, noting merely that:

Philosophers did indeed initially dismiss Freud’s idea of an unconscious mind as a logical impossibility. If as Freud claimed, they argued, the human psyche comprises an unconscious realm, then we cannot, by definition, consciously know anything about this realm; it is inaccessible to knowledge and it is impossible that books, such as Freud’s, should be written about it. But if, on the other hand, we can in fact seize and know this realm well enough to speak or write about it, then what we seize and know cannot really be called unconscious; it must be considered part of our conscious understanding. One way or the other, then, the idea of an unconscious realm is superfluous, indeed senseless.

Yet Freud insisted that the unconscious mind did exist, even if it mostly remained inaccessible to rational understanding. He rebutted his critics by specifying that this unconscious mind was something which we do not constantly rationally cognize but rather sporadically recognize. It is in dreams, hypnosis, attacks of laughter or tears, or through involuntary misspeaks, defence mechanisms, symptoms or slips, that what is contained in the unconscious emerges, albeit in disguised form, to the conscious surface of our minds. In dreams, for example, wishes and anxieties that we have pushed out of our waking mind find expression. Some dreams are downright insistent, recurring again and again with slight variations. For Freud, this indicates that unconscious impulses refuse to be simply shut out and repressed. They make sure that they are heard by slipping their message stubbornly into dream after dream. Freud writes:

Only when we pay attention to a dream’s specific content, decipher its meaning (which can often be more helpful