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Appropriation of Freedom: Freud's conception of the individual self-relation

Thursday 21 June 2007 | 1 hour 34 minutes 46 seconds

This lecture develops Freud's implicit idea of the freedom of the will. For Freud, the 'healthy' person is very often determined by the same kind of irrational powers to which the neurotic personality is subjected. On the basis of a 'normalised' concept of repression, Freud has to explain how a normal subject should be able to gain emancipation from these unconscious constraints of his or her will. What conception of the individual self-relationship will enable us to solve this problem? How might we clarify the link Freud established between individual autonomy and the reflexive appropriation of one's own past?