Mortal Secrets

Freud's technique for interpreting dreams was very straightforward. When a patient recounted a dream, Freud would isolate thoughts, feelings, conversations and images, and use each of these elements as a starting point for exploratory discussions and free association. Repressed material was then likely to 'fall in' to the flow of the patient's spee

The relevance of the death instinct isn't restricted to behaviour that is manifestly self-destructive. The death instinct is also expressed across a spectrum of mental states characterised by passivity and inertia. These states can be construed as small resistances and oppositions to vitality, and they seem particularly prevalent in the modern worl

After the latent content of a dream has been translated into the manifest content, the dream narrative might be subject to secondary revision. The logical part of the mind is still functioning, and it attempts to make the dream more intelligible. It acts like a newspaper editor making last-minute changes to an article before publication.

The idea of Rome as the Eternal City inspired one of Freud's most memorable metaphors. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud imagines a fantastical Rome ‘in which nothing that ever took shape has passed away, and in which all previous phases of development exist beside the most recent'. In this truly eternal city, every building would exist in

The Interpretation of Dreams was, in many respects, the original surrealist manifesto, pre-dating André Breton's by over twenty years.

A central tenet of Buddhism is that the self is illusory. We are more than our conscious minds and we are wrong to think of our autobiographical self as a 'true self'. Freud's 'ego' is also illusory, insofar as it generates a misleadingly comprehensive sense of selfhood, whereas in reality it is only a small part of a much larger, opaque totality.

We must reclaim as much of ourselves as we can. We must discover a personal morality shaped by experience rather than 'tribal' prohibitions. We must wrestle our minds free of prehistory so that we can make better, rational choices.

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, like so much of Freud's writing, transcends its apparent purpose and makes a super ordinate point about self-understanding. Small things matter. The humdrum and the mundane are as telling - perhaps even more so - as prizes, major undertakings, feats and exploits. Even something as inconsequential as dropping a

Uncovering a straightforward cause-and-effect relationship is a relatively rare occurrence in clinical practice. Given how the mind works, it is much more likely that the causes of a symptom will be convergent and complex. Many experiences (in childhood, adolescence and adulthood) will create memories (accessible, partially accessible or inaccessib