What is Freud's idea of the unconscious?

Famed psychologist Sigmund Freud believed dreams were symbolic expressions of desire.

Who was Freud and what did he say?

Sigmund Freud is one of the most famous psychologists and is widely cited—but do you really know the basics of what he taught? Here's a super brief breakdown of his major insights.

Carl Jung proposed the controversial idea of the 'collective unconscious'—all humans share a common psychic realm.

Salvador Dalí idolized Freud but was disappointed after they met

Sigmund Freud's writings on dreams and the unconscious profoundly influenced Dalí and his work, and the artist came to idolize the Austrian psychoanalyst. When they met, Freud viewed Dalí as an odd curiosity, and the artist came away disappointed, significantly lowering his opinion of the psychoanalyst.

Surrealism toyed with ideas from psychoanalysis

The movement's artists were interested in the ideas being explored in the burgeoning fields of psychology and psychoanalysis. Dalí, in particular, often created works that toyed with Freudian theories.

What is psychoanalysis?

This nine-minute video, the first of a four-part series, seeks to answer the questions: what is psychoanalysis, and is it weird? The answer to the latter question is overwhelmingly yes. The answer to the first question is a bit...

Wilhelm Wundt's place in the history of psychology

While ancient philosophers considered the central problems of psychology, it was Wilhelm Wundt who first called himself one. Here's a quick video overview of his contribution.

The ideas of Einstein and Freud combined in 'The Persistence of Memory'

The Persistence of Memory was painted on a canvas roughly the size of a sheet of paper, depicting a desolate landscape with melting clocks, ants, and a distorted figure. The piece incorporates Freud and Einstein's ideas, resulting in a haunting composition symbolizing time's fluidity and Dalí's personal anxieties.

For most of recorded history dreams were considered divine in origin.

Wilhelm Wundt, the forgotten father of modern psychology

He was the first psychologist to call himself one, and he influenced a whole generation of early psychologists. Learn about the life and works of Wilhelm Wundt with this thorough entry from a philosophy encyclopedia.

What it means to call something 'Lynchian'

David Lynch was one of American cinema's most influential directors. He brought a singular, unsettling vision to the silver screen. Critics, however, have trouble pinning down what it means when other artists try to recreate that vision. This essay untangles his influence, tracing the word "Lynchian" back to its earliest utterances and attempting to define a notoriously slippery term.

How your subconscious influences your decisions

How much of your desires and daily choices are truly yours? One of the most effective ways to influence someone's subconscious is when they're asleep. To study this possibility, researchers trained participants to be able to dream lucidly, a phenomenon that occurs when a dreamer knows they're dreaming.

The study of dreams, formally called oneirology, has evolved over the centuries, from anecdotal interpretations to advanced brain imaging.

Studies of psychedelic use may help shed light on the nature of consciousness

The nature of consciousness—what it is, where it comes from, and how it manifests as moment-to-moment experience—remains under debate by scientists. Recent studies show psychedelics were found to boost low-frequency brain signals known as delta waves, a behavior also seen during dream states.

Dream interpretation has evolved from ancient mystical explanations, to dream reports, to tracking electrical activity in the brain and more.

Dreaming under the Nazi Regime

Days after Hitler seized power, a man told psychoanalyst Charlotte Beradt that he had dreamed of being forced to raise his arm in a Nazi salute ("It took me half an hour to get my arm up, inch by inch"). Beradt recorded this dream and many others so they "might one day serve as evidence." This is an English translation of her work, "The Third Reich of Dreams."

What do your dreams mean, according to science

Humans have been interpreting dreams as signs from deities, spirits, or the psyche for ages, and research shows that reflecting on and analyzing one's dreams can be beneficial. In alignment with dreams' elusive nature, they have no objective or clearly assigned meaning. However, variations of common dreams, such as a surprise exam in a forgotten class, are rife with shared primal fears.

Existentialism has been used as a therapeutic tool, with 2 Swiss psychiatrists pioneering the philosophy's concepts to help patients navigate their issues.

Sartre wrote an 8-hour screenplay for a Freud biopic

Sartre was hired to write the screenplay for what would eventually become John Huston's 1962 film "Freud: The Secret Passion," about the life of the psychoanalyst. Sartre, however, had trouble sticking to the parameters of Hollywood. An early draft was estimated to be five hours long. Rather than shortening it, as Huston suggested, Sartre extended it to eight hours and was eventually removed from the production.

The history of brainwashing in America

"Brainwashing" refers to a coerced shift in worldview, often associated with cults or oppressive totalitarian governments. Though such processes are not well understood on a neurological level, they hold an outsized role in public imagination, particularly in science fiction and dystopias. This article reviews the history of the term, first popularized by Edward Hunter in 1950, and the subsequent use of the approach in pop psychology, the CIA, and more.

Sleep is no longer considered a binary state—scientists are seeking to map a variety of liminal states between sleep and waking, including the hypnagogic state associated with boosts of creativity.

Freud and Jung were once friends. What drove them to break up?

Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud and Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung were fast friends, immediately hitting it off the first time they met in 1907. This four-minute video dives into the intellectual divide that drove them apart.

During dream sleep, the brain connects new information learned during the day with information already stored in the mind, creating a revised mind-wide web of associations.

Jungian archetypes can reveal personality traits

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung argued that we’re drawn to familiar character types—such as heroes, caregivers, or rebels—because they reflect universal archetypes embedded in the human subconscious. He believed these patterns shape behavior, motivation, and personal growth.

Panpsychism suggests that all matter possesses consciousness

The theory describes consciousness as a fundamental, ubiquitous property, rather than separate or emerging from matter. Cosmopsychism posits that the universe is conscious, while some critics argue that consciousness itself may be an illusion.

Nightmares are unpredictable, but are linked to stress, anxiety, trauma, and more.

The dreaming brain, as understood by scientists

Technology has advanced to where the seemingly separate fields of psychology and neuroscience are asking the same questions about dreams, such as whether they're more closely related to perception or visualization. Some field-intersecting findings include research that shows people with impaired face perception don't dream of faces, those with brain legion-related cognition difficulties deal with similar issues in dreams, and children's dreams change in parallel to their cognitive development.

Dreams largely occur during REM sleep (but not entirely).

What is transcendentalism?

The 19th-century movement, largely centered around the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson, believed that individuals needed to form transcendent connections with the universe. For many transcendentalist philosophers, writers, and religious figures, that meant seeking it in nature. This Stanford explainer on the philosophy digs deep into its major concepts and figureheads.

Why the nature of consciousness is such a difficult problem

David Chalmers is one of the leading philosophers of consciousness. In this video, he outlines some of the major questions in this field, including the "hard problem of consciousness," which seeks to find neural correlate for every conscious experience.

George Orwell: What is fascism?

This 1944 article by George Orwell attempts to answer the question, "What is fascism?" Orwell's book Animal Farm was published at about the same time at the article, and he penned 1984, a book with anti-totalitarianism sentiments, a few years afterward. In this article, Orwell argues that the term "fascism" has become near "meaningless" due to being essentially demoted to a swearword.

Visualizing how we dream via Google search trends

When dreams perplex us, we often want to understand them—and in the age of Google, millions go to its search engine to find answers. Now, researchers have compiled a decade's worth of dream-related queries to glean dream trends across seven languages. See what dream was most commonly searched in Arabic in 2015, or what fears and hopes are specific to one culture and time alone with this unique visual essay.

Many writers considered 'existentialist' didn't identify with the term

“Existentialism” was first introduced in 1943 by philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir readily adopted the term, but others, such as Albert Camus and Martin Heidegger, rejected it. Earlier philosophers, like Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, were long dead by the time the word was in vogue.

Friedrich's paintings embody the romantic notion of 'the sublime'

Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s art uses vast, massive scale and masterful compositions to convey complex ideas of power, decay, permanence, and more. But his landscapes also present beautiful, overwhelming portraits of nature that perfectly embody philosopher Edmund Burke’s concept of “the sublime.”

Take a deep dive into the neuron

Neurons are the basic unit of the brain and nervous system—electrically excitable cells that sends signals throughout the body. They can communicate with each other, fire in sequence, and conspire to do everything from drive body movement to help form memories. Check out this intro-level overview to learn more about their structure and how they work.

How seizures (potentially) alter consciousness

Seizures occur when intense electrical activity floods the brain, prompting significant loss of self-control and a variety of sensory disruptions and hallucinations. Cultures interpret the episodes differently, with many contemporary norms viewing them as negative while others characterize them as intense spiritual occasions. Author Fyodor Dostoyevsky viewed his seizures this way, as well as cultures in Mongolia, some Shamanic indigenous religions, and others.

Browse and explore dozens of major psychology theories

There are a ton of different psych theories—so here's a breakdown of some of the major ones according to the general psychological focus.

Apophenia, the cognitive bias that leads people to find meaning in randomness, helps explain why humans look for meaning in their dreams and even in their tea leaves.

Humans experience the world subjectively. What does that mean for scientific research?

When you close your eyes, do you see static or colorful patterns or an "intrinsic grey" known as Eigengrau in German? This variation of our internal experiences is just the tip of the iceberg, one that scientists are increasingly studying and...

Dreams have long been used for religious and political power.

Friedrich's perspective draws in viewers

Friedrich produced several works, including "Wanderer," portraying figures with their back to the viewer. The effect—called Rückenfigur, or ”figure from the back”—can create complex emotions of longing, immersion, or awe.

Defining Dalí's surreal aesthetic

Salvador Dalí is known for his modernist paintings, but his surreal aesthetic has lived on long after his passing, with elements of his art making their way into fashion, film, and interior decorating. This incisive Artnet explainer unpacks the elements that make up Dalí's larger artistic vision and highlights the ways they still appear throughout popular culture.

The term schizophrenia was coined by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1908

He launched the word during a lecture at the German Psychiatric Association in Berlin. In his talk he focused on the splitting of psychic functioning as a defining feature of the disease and noted it wasn't associated with dementia or factors like early puberty onset.

Existentialism is a loosely defined philosophy that encouraged authentic living

The writers and thinkers often characterized as “existentialist” sometimes contradict one another. Considering that, boiling the philosophy down to a set of tenets can be difficult. Generally, those associated with existentialism were inspired by the 19th-century works of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, and they believed that individuals needed to defy conformity and define the meaning of life for themselves.

Mathematicians often solve problems using wordless mental processes

It's a common technique among expert mathematicians, where thinkers rely on intuition, blurry perceptions and subconscious work—no writing, no formulas. The state is distinct from daydreaming, and often relies on sudden illuminations stemming from extended periods of subconscious reflection.

Two scientists argue consciousness evolved through 'unlimited associative learning,' the ability to learn almost any new pattern during a lifetime.

Can physics explain where consciousness comes from?

Consciousness is a complex emergent phenomenon of the brain, which is primarily composed of neurons and glial cells. Since all matter is composed of atoms that follow the laws of physics, there may be quantum processes beyond classical electrochemical interactions that can explain where consciousness comes from.

The debate on why humans are conscious—and what that means

Understanding what consciousness is, and why and how it evolved, is perhaps the greatest mystery known to science. Watch interviews with the world's leading experts on what it is and whether we'll ever know.

Sleep is often viewed individually, when its impact and meaning may be more communal

At any given point, roughly 2 billion people may be asleep on Earth. The typical scientific description of sleep focuses on its individual impact, but the phenomenon shapes whole cultures and eons. This essay prompts a fresh rethinking of the importance of sleep for humanity.

The theory behind Dalí's 'Un Chien Andalou'

The 16-minute "Un Chien Andalou," or "an Andalusian dog," was shocking for 1929, when it was released and remains unsettling today. This brief video essay explores how the film sought to disrupt standard conceptions of art and meaning, making it an essential example of surrealism.