psychoanalysis

The essence of psychoanalysis can be defined as the discovery of the significance of conflicting tendencies in man, of the power of the „resistance“ to fight against the awareness of these conflicts, of the rationalizations that make it appear that there is no conflict, and of the liberating effect of becoming aware of the conflict, and of the pathogenic role of unsolved conflicts.― Freud not only discovered these general principles but was the first to devise concrete methods of how to study the repressed: In dreams, symptoms, and in behavior of daily life. The conflicts between sexual impulses and the ego and superego form only a small part of the conflicts that, in their tragic failure to be solved as well as in their productive solutions, are central in many people’s existence. (…) Freud smashed the conventional view that man’s thinking and his being are identical, that he unmasked hypocrisy; that his theory was a critical one, inasmuch as he questioned all conscious thought, intentions, and virtues and demonstrated how often they are nothing but forms of resistance to hide the inner reality. ― (1989a [1974-75]: The Art of Being, New York (Continuum) 1993, pp. 56f.)