ABSTRACT
The psychology of the unconscious was markedly different from the psychology of consciousness. The central episode in the history of psychoanalysis was Sigmund Freud's abandonment of his seduction theory of hysteria and its replacement by the Oedipus complex. The seductions had never really happened, but reflected unconscious phantasies of having sexual relations with the parent of the opposite sex. Over the course of Freud's letters to Wilhelm Fliess, psychoanalysis developed from a reductive physiological theory that emphasized real experience to a theory that was purely psychological. In the first decades of the twentieth century Freud published his ideas in a series of books and papers, the latter in journals he controlled. This chapter considers Freud's official psychoanalysis under three heads: interpretation, the dynamics and structures of the mind (motivation and personality), and his extension of psychoanalysis as a theory of culture and society.
