Psychoanalysis is called upon to process the unconscious and examine its processes.
WHAT IS PSYCHOANALYSIS
You are not at the center of your own self, as inside you there is another subject, the unconscious.
The importance of the discovery of the unconscious was highlighted by Freud himself when he referred to how “humanity, in the course of time, has had to endure from the hands of science two great
outrages against its naive self-love”.
“The first was when humanity discovered that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system hardly conceivable in its magnitude. This is associated in our minds with the name “Copernicus,” although Alexandrian science had taught much the same thing.
The second occurred when biological research robbed man of his apparent superiority under special creation, and rebuked him with his descent from the animal kingdom, and his ineradicable animal nature. This re-valuation, under the influence of Charles Darwin, Wallace and their predecessors, was not accomplished without the most violent opposition of their contemporaries.
But the third and most irritating insult is flung at the human mania of greatness by present-day psychological research, which wants to prove to the ‘I’ that it is not even master in its own home, but is dependent upon the most scanty information concerning all that goes on unconsciously in its psychic life.
Earth is no longer at the center of the universe, man belongs to the animal kingdom, and the Ego is subjected to unconscious processes it can neither predict nor control.
It is at precisely this point that psychoanalysis is born in order to process and study the unconscious.
Psychoanalysis focuses on man as the subject of his own discourse, requiring of him to bear the weight of his own existence, of his desire, at a time during which the value of human life is constantly undermined despite the laws and institutions enforced to protect it.