“No Country for Old Men”philosophical.space/303/freud.pdf•Ego: “I”, the self, the part that relates to external world, decides, and acts •Superego: observes the self and

“No Country for Old Men”Freud

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

•The Interpretation of Dreams

•The Development of Psychoanalysis

•Beyond the Pleasure Principle

•Cultural Commentary


The Interpretation of Dreams

•“there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams”

•“if this procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which

•Has a meaning and which

•Can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.”


Wish Fulfillment

•“When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfillment of a wish.”


Wish Fulfillments?

•Freud offers many examples of dreams as wish fulfillments

•But there is an obvious objection:


Wish Fulfillments?

•Nightmares!

•Dreams involving fear or anxiety

•Dreams of unpleasant things or events

•Dreams repeating ordinary events


Freud’s Response

•“We must make a contrast between the manifest and the latent content of dreams.”

•Manifest content: distressing

•Latent content: wish fulfillment


Manifest and latent content

•“But in cases where the wish-fulfillment is unrecognizable, where it has been disguised, there must have existed some inclination to put up a defence against the wish; and owing to this defence the wish was unable to express itself except in a distorted shape.”


Psychic Forces

•One constructs the wish expressed by the dream

•The other exercises censorship and forcibly brings about distortion in the expression of the wish

•It permits thoughts to enter consciousness


1st Agency(Id)

Constructswish

2nd Agency(Superego)

Censor

Pass

Repress

Distort


Dreams

•First agency—creative: Dreams express wishes on its part

•Second agency—defensive: Wishes of the first may be approved for consciousness, but they may distress this agency, which distorts them


Dreams

•Sleep lowers resistance of the second agency

•Wishes emerge in dreams that could not emerge in conscious, waking life

•Dreams are thus a unique window into the unconscious


Consciousness

•The “essential nature” of consciousness:

•Admission to consciousness as separate psychic act

•Sense organ perceiving data arising elsewhere


Three Parts of the Self

•Ego: “I”, the self, the part that relates to external world, decides, and acts

•Superego: observes the self and makes judgments; conscience; internalization of parental authority via identification

•Id: “It”, alien to the ego, dark, inaccessible, instinctual needs and desires, energy, pleasure principle




Principles

•Id: pleasure principle—seek pleasure

•Ego: reality principle—adapt yourself to the external world and meet its demands

•Superego: morality

•Ego must strive to meet all three constraints

•Life is hard!


Problem: Trauma

•People who have suffered trauma often dream of their trauma

•But that doesn’t seem to be a wish fulfillment

•Manifest: they don’t want to experience it again

•Latent: there’s no other explanation


Trauma

•Options:


Trauma

•Options:

•Normal function of dreaming is disrupted

•Among the dreamer’s wishes are masochistic ones

•“A dream is an attempt at the fulfillment of a wish.” (New Introductory Lectures)—the wish is to have things turn out differently

•(never mentioned by Freud) The theory is false! Dreams aren’t wish fulfillments


Id as distinctively sexual

•The energy of the Id is sexual

•Many of the Id’s desires involve infantile sexual fantasies

•Desire, in fact compulsion, to repeat experiences is a strong additional drive


Trauma

•Desire to repeat trauma explains dreams

•But Freud goes further:

•Desire to repeat is desire for the past

•Inorganic matter preceded organic

•Death wish: “the aim of all life is death.”


Civilization and its Discontents

•Freud applies his theories to culture and civilization

•Society faces the same conflict as the ego

•Must meet constraints of the id (desire), the superego (morality), and the external world (reality)


Desire and happiness

•Happiness requires satisfying desire

•Need for novelty

•But this leads to conflict with superego (morality) and with reality, including other people

•So, we must suppress or repress desires


Civilization

•Civilization introduces mechanisms for suppressing, repressing, and sublimating desires

•Civilization is thus at war with the id


Civilization

•“...our so-called civilization itself is to blame for a great part of our misery, and we should be much happier if we were to give it up and go back to primitive conditions.”


Civilization

•“...it is impossible to ignore the extent to which civilization is built up on renunciation of instinctual gratifications, the degree to which the existence of civilization presupposes the non-gratification (suppression, repression, or something else?) of powerful instinctual urgencies.”


•“...men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked... a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment. The result is that their neighbour is to them not only a possible helper or sexual object, but also a temptation to them to gratify their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without recompense, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him. Homo homini lupus [Man is wolf to man]; who has the courage to dispute it in the face of all the evidence in his own life and in history?”


Culture

•“Culture has to call up every possible reinforcement in order to erect barriers against the aggressive instincts of men and hold their manifestations in check by reaction-formations in men’s minds.”

•“Civilized man has exchanged some part of his chances of happiness for a measure of security.”


Guilt

•Civilization’s chief weapon is guilt

•Superego needs to convince the ego to restrain id

•Guilt is its primary tool


Guilt

•“The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through a heightening of the sense of guilt.”

•Guilt = anxiety, fear of the superego

•Does civilization make us neurotic?


Freudian Suspicion

•“Psychoanalysis is justly suspicious.

•One of its rules is that

•whatever interrupts the progress of analytic work is a resistance.”


Made-up Social “Science”

•Freud’s cultural commentary includes a lot of conjecture

•Origins of religion: sons overthrow, kill father

•Saving the fire—sexual significance, distinguishing men from women


Popper’s critique

•Karl Popper contrasted Freud’s method with Einstein’s

•Einstein’s theory made risky predictions

•Freud’s, like Marx’s, didn’t


Death Wish

•Problem is introducing death wish makes the theory useless

•It explains everything

•It predicts nothing

•So, Popper insists, it has no scientific content


Documents

“No Country for Old Men”philosophical.space/303/freud.pdf•Ego: “I”, the self, the part that relates to external world, decides, and acts •Superego: observes the self and