The unconscious

Where the Soviet take on Hegel's I and we privileges the we, Freud flips the order: he begins with the single I, split into conscious and unconscious, reaching society afterward.

Put simply Shore's contrast: the Soviet reading of Hegel puts the group ("we") before the individual ("I"). Freud reverses this. He starts from the single self, split into conscious and unconscious, and reaches society afterward.

Freud is in many ways Marx's opposite pole yet asks a very similar question: both are theorists of modernity, trying to explain why modern life leaves people so miserable.

Put simply Shore: Freud is in many ways Marx's opposite, yet he asks much the same question. Both try to explain why modern life leaves people so miserable.

The cure is nothing but talk: the analysand speaks uncensored, the analyst coaxes fragments of the unconscious out through the cracks, and symptoms become manageable rather than magically fixed.

Put simply Freud's cure is only talk: the patient speaks freely, without self-censoring, and the analyst draws bits of the unconscious out through the cracks. Symptoms become manageable, not magically cured.

What matters in the mind happens below awareness: Freud holds that "mental processes are essentially unconscious," with conscious ones only scattered fragments of the whole.

Picture the unconscious as a dark psychic closet: whatever the conscious mind cannot bear gets shoved in, the pile grows for a lifetime, and nothing is ever thrown out.

Put simply Paul Robinson pictures Freud's unconscious as a dark closet: whatever the conscious mind cannot bear gets shoved in, the pile grows for a lifetime, and nothing is ever thrown out.

Freud's self is a structure whose parts only make sense together: two vertical layers, unconscious beneath conscious, cut across by three horizontal parts, id, ego and superego.

Put simply Freud pictures the self as parts that only make sense together: an unconscious layer beneath a conscious one, crossed by three parts, the "id" (desire), the "ego" (the I) and the "superego" (conscience).

We can never fully know ourselves: what is most basic in us sits in the unconscious, so the self stays opaque to itself and permanently at odds with itself.

Put simply Freud: we can never fully know ourselves. What is most basic in us lies in the unconscious, so the self stays hidden from itself and always at odds with itself.

Shore's closing contrast: unlike Marxism, psychoanalysis offers no exit; it may ease some symptoms, but no reordering of society can promise a happy ending.

Against Freud, consciousness cannot be cleanly cut into an opaque unconscious and a transparent conscious half; the whole of it is translucent, neither one nor the other.

Put simply Sartre, against Freud: the mind cannot be neatly split into a hidden unconscious part and a fully visible conscious part. All of it is "translucent": neither hidden from itself nor fully clear to itself.

Culture, taken broadly to include language, art, customs, tools and belief, operates largely unconsciously, a Freudian premise; anthropology's task is to expose the deep laws beneath it.

Put simply Lévi-Strauss: culture, meaning language, art, customs, tools and beliefs, works mostly without our being aware of it, an idea taken from Freud. The anthropologist's job is to uncover the hidden rules beneath it.

Where Freud has violence repressed into the unconscious, Girard has it transferred outward onto a surrogate victim: projected onto someone else rather than locked in the psyche.

Put simply Shore's contrast: Freud says we push violence down into the unconscious mind. Girard says we push it out onto a substitute victim, blaming someone else instead of locking it inside ourselves.