The Freudian Unconscious

Although Sigmund Freud distanced psychoanalytic work from specific concern with ethics, in working from and against Freud, both Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein developed accounts of mental life that turn on how the mind copes with anxiety triggered by negotiating the line between good and bad in human life. What drives unconscious activity, on these views, is precisely the need to wind up on the good-side of many shifting good/bad divides that we face in a day-to-day way and over various stretches of our lives. Focusing on the interpretation of a dream and concentrating on the role of anxiety over good and bad, this presentation discusses the character of the Freudian unconscious.