The various mechanisms of unconscious conflicts and the ways they operate and stay concealed have never been better described and illuminated by anyone than they are by Freud. We have not been as good as he was at this and we still rely on his lucid descriptions of unconscious processes for making sense of what…

Apart from displacement, among the other important themes that Nietzsche introduces into modern thought that have become indispensable to psychotherapy is the emphasis on the need to give shape to one's own life, rather than relying on values inherited from religion and traditional morality to give this to us. This ethical ideal of self-formation is…

Freud's development of psychoanalysis did not happen in a vacuum. He drew for inspiration on a wide range of predecessors in 19th century medicine, psychology and philosophy, as well as the great dramatists, poets and novelists of the past. As he himself was the first to acknowledge, the idea of the unconscious mind, the idea…