Sigmund Freud’s dreams and their role in his Self-Analysis

All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Course material will be sent 1 day before the event. The course will start at 13:30pm and end at 17:00pm on both days and includes a tea break. All attendees will also receive access to the recording, available to watch back for 3 months.

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Freud used many of his own dreams as examples of dream interpretation in his masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams. But, it is less well-known that his analyses of these dreams formed an important part of his self-analysis, conducted over the years leading up to the publication of this work.

On this course, we will study Freud’s self-analysis, using the intimate letters he wrote at the time to his friend and collaborator in Berlin, Wilhelm Fliess – and putting what we learn from these letters – which were never intended for publication – together with what Freud reveals to us in his masterpiece.

A picture will emerge of how – as he became increasingly adept at interpreting his dreams - Freud was able to reconstruct many of the most important experiences of his earliest childhood. And we will explore the relationship between what he learned – and what he didn’t learn – from his self-analysis, and the crucial steps in the creation of the foundations of psychoanalysis.

Freud and Jung remain the leading authorities in our contemporary understanding of dreams. What they agreed upon was that dreams have a meaning – but, beyond that, they disagreed on almost every point in their understanding of dreams and in their way of working practically with them. Jung remained close to the Romantic view of dreams, and always maintained that dreams could be prophetic. Freud, on the other hand, developed his theory of dreams on the basis of a neurological model of the functioning of the brain. In this three-hour course, we will examine the creation of Freud’s theory of dreams and his discovery of a method of interpreting them. We will then explore

Jung’s searching critique of Freud’s whole approach to dreams, and study Jung’s contrasting way of understanding dreams and of working with them in psychotherapeutic practice.

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Speaker:

Keith Barrett BA PhD received his first degree in philosophy from Oxford University after having spent three years working as a nursing assistant in psychiatric hospitals. It was in this practical context that Keith first encountered existentialism and psychoanalysis. He then began postgraduate studies on both Freud and Heidegger, leading finally to a PhD from the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL for a dissertation on ‘Freud’s Self-Analysis’. Keith has been a philosophy teacher for over 20 years, and has been delivering courses at the Freud Museum for over a decade, where he has developed a series of introductory lectures on Freud, psychoanalysis after Freud, and the overlap of philosophy and psychoanalysis.

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Tickets: £ 45

Freud Museum Members and Patrons receive 20% off the standard ticket price on all events, courses, conferences and On Demand programming.

A limited number of £20 bursary tickets will be available for those unable to pay the full amount. Please email perry@freud.org.uk to apply for a bursary.