Freud’s century: Priscilla Roth

Another article from BPAS this a journalistic one about psychoanalysis is readable and broad enough to include all depth psychology. Here is one paragraph:

And yet in any of the recent millennium lists of the greatest thinkers of the 20th Century, Sigmund Freud, the Viennese medical doctor who was the discoverer and founding father of psycho-analysis, is always among the top few. And these same, sceptical, no-nonsense citizens entirely accept and are often guided by ideas and attitudes that come directly from Freud, or from later psychoanalytic writing. For instance, everyone knows what a Freudian slip is, i.e. the sudden ‘accidental’ betrayal of a person’s true thoughts, unthinkingly blurted out from his or her unconscious. Indeed, the very idea of an unconscious from which such personal truths might spring is a psychoanalytic concept. As are ‘ambivalence’ (as in ‘I have ambivalent feelings about him’), ‘sibling rivalry’, ‘neurosis’, and ‘Oedipus complex’. At the end of the twentieth century, we all speak Freud.

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