Lecture

Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939)

Meanings of PA

Theory of personality Theory of the mind Method for analyzing psychological processes Therapy school Framework for analyzing cultural products Worldview

Traditional Psychology and PA

Traditional psychology: Ambivalent attitude towards psychoanalysis.

Mainstream psychology

Psychoanalysis

Psychology of variables

(the individual disappears)

Psychology of the subject (the

individual is the focus)

Historical division of PA:

I. Pre-analytic phase: 1881 - 1894 II. Analytic phase:

Trauma theories 1895 - 1899 Topographic theories 1900 - 1922 Structural theory 1923 - 1939

III. Post-Freudian approaches

Freud's Early Life

Sigmund Freud was born 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia. His family moved to Vienna in 1860, where Freud remained until the

Nazis forced him to London in 1938. Unusual family constellation --> sensitized Freud to family

relationships? Outstanding student. Freud enrolled in the University of Vienna's medical school in 1873 Outstanding teachers:

Franz Brentano Ernst Brücke

Interest in mechanistic physiology.

Preanalytic phase: 1881 - 1894

1881: MD. Charcot Josef Breuer (Anna O = Bertha Pappenheim) Free association Training at Vienna's General Hospital: Studied under the famous

brain anatomist Meynert (1833-1893). Freud: Diagnosis of localized brain injuries.

1885: Meynert's support for a traveling grant to study in Paris with Charcot.

Lectured to the Vienna Medical Society about his study with Charcot and hysteria.

Freud felt that he became an outsider.

Preanalytic phase: 1881 - 1894

Patients of hysteria were treated with: Hypnosis Cathartic method Pressure technique Free association

Free association: Encourage patients to let their thoughts run free, and to honestly report whatever comes to mind, even if it seems irrelevant, embarrassing or anxiety arousing.

With free association Freud discovered several new and interesting features of hysterical illness. (a) A whole series of pathogenic ideas were often behind an individual

hysterical symptom --> Overdetermination (b) Memories seemed to have been actively (unconsciously) repressed

by patients. (c) Freud detected intrapsychic conflict in patients.

Analytic phase: Trauma theories 1895 - 1899

1895: Studies on Hysteria (together with Breuer) Seduction theory Studies on Hysteria (1895): First great classic of the new field

psychoanalysis. Freud and Breuer offered the hypothesis that hysterics suffer

mainly from memories of emotionally charged experiences that have been somehow placed beyond the reach of ordinary consciousness --> pathogenic ideas.

Freud and Breuer referred to many hysterical symptoms as conversions (emotional into physical energy).

Continued

1896: Freud published his seduction theory of hysteria in a medical journal article.

Patients recalled scenes of early sexual mistreatment, often by parents or other close relatives.

Freud: All hysterics must have undergone sexual abuse as children.

Symptoms function as defenses against psychologically dangerous pathogenic ideas.

Seduction theory --> Critical reception from medical colleagues, who stopped referring patients to Freud.

Freud himself soon began to believe that his patients' childhood seductions had often been imaginary rather than real.

Masson (see film) charged that Freud merely caved in to the medical establishment by disavowing an unpopular point of view.

Analytic phase: Topographic theories 1900 - 1922

1900 The Interpretation of Dreams 1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 1909 Clark University Conscious, preconscious, unconscious Psychosexual stages Development of psychoanalytic treatment

Topographic theories Interpretation of dreams

Manifest content: Consciously experienced content of the dream. Fantastic images, often unintelligible to the dreamer.

Latent content: inspires the dream (in consciousness only after free association).

Dreamers often resist the uncovering of this latent content (much as hysterical patients resisted the recollection of their pathogenic ideas).

The sleeping mind transforms latent into manifest content by means of dream work. (a) Displacement: The manifest content symbolizes the latent content in

a "safe" way with images less distressing than the latent content --> Defensive function.

(b) Condensation: Several different latent thoughts may be symbolized by a single image of the manifest content.

(c) Concrete representation: Manifest content typically represents latent ideas by means of concretely experienced sensations

Dreams: The Primary and Secondary Thought Processes.

Freud saw both dreams and hysterical symptoms as resulting from similar unconscious symbolic processes.

Freud hypothesized opposed modes of mental activity: one unconscious and associated with dream and symptom formation (primary process), the other conscious and responsible for rational thought (secondary process).

Infants are born with the capacity for dreams but have to learn how to think rationally --> unconscious mode of thought = primary process; conscious mode = secondary process.

Adults' dreams and hysterical symptoms: Secondary-process thinking is abandoned in favor of the developmentally earlier primary process. Primary-process thought plays a positive role in creative and artistic thinking.

Dreams: The Wish-Fulfillment Hypothesis:

Freud had concluded that all dreams represent the fulfillment of wishes. Dreams: stimulated by latent wishes. Symptoms: stimulated by sexual memories. Seduction scenes reported by hysterical patients indirectly reflected sexual

wishes rather than actual experiences.

Theory of Childhood Sexuality:

Patients, outwardly morally virtuous, secretly and unconsciously harbored sexual fantasies that respectable society would never tolerate.

Self-analysis: Free association of his own dreams and symptoms. Unconscious hostile wishes toward his consciously loved father. "Sexual" wishes regarding his mother.

Death = Absence. Sexuality = Any kind of sensual, physical gratification.

Freud concluded that anyone who honestly subjected himself or herself to analysis by free association would discover traces of similar wishes --> Oedipus complex.

1905: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.

Freud postulated a generalized form of human sexual drive, present from birth onward.

Human infant: Born in a state of polymorphous perversity capable of taking sexual (sensuous) pleasure from the stimulation of any part of the body. In earliest infancy: the mouth or oral zone predominates as the locus of

this form of sexual gratification. When toilet training begins, the anal zone assumes particular

importance. After children have developed fuller control over their bodies:

Stimulation of the genital zone becomes a major source of sexual pleasure. Age of five: Oedipus complex emerges.

Latency stage (lasts until the physical maturation of puberty): Child enters a psychologically tranquil period suited for learning.

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Freud realized that a patient has not ambivalences toward parents or other significant people but also toward the therapist.

Transference feelings: Patients tended to transfer onto Freud, as the therapist, motives and attributes of the important people from their past lives who were implicated in their neurotic symptoms.

Enduring cure requires the uncovering and analysis of the entire complex of underlying conflicts --> months or years to complete.

Freud did not provide the quick and specific cures for hysterical symptoms he had originally hoped for

Metapsychology:

Freud sought to place his clinical discoveries within a broader theoretical context --> a general model of the mind (metapsychology).

Freud's earliest metapsychological theorizing: neurophysiological background.

Later: Freud decided to avoid neurological technicalities by expressing his metapsychology in completely psychological terms.

Analytic phase: Structural Theories1923-1939

1923 The Ego and the Id. Personality theory of id, ego, superego 1938: Vienna -> London The Ego and the Id: Three different kinds of demands conflict with

one another. (a) Demands from the body itself (biologically based urges for

nourishment, warmth, sexual gratification) --> instincts. (b) Demands imposed by external reality; (c) Moral demands impinge on the mind independently of the

instincts and external reality.

Continued

Separate systems to process the three kinds of psychic demands. (a) The id as the repository of unconscious powerful impulses and

energies from the instincts. (b) A perception-consciousness system: Conveys information about

external reality to the mind. (c) Moral demands originate from an agency which Freud called the

superego. Thus the id, the perception system, and the superego all have

conflicting demands on the psyche --> compromise. Psychic agency responsible for compromise: the ego. Some of the ego's compromises --> Hysterical symptoms

(maladaptive).

Defense Mechanism

Freud saw everyday life as dominated by ego compromises he called defense mechanisms (together with Anna Freud). Displacement: Redirecting an impulse toward a substitute target that

resembles the original in some way, but is safer. Projection: Reversing unacceptable impulses by attributing them to

someone else instead. Intellectualization: An emotion-charged subject is approached in a

strictly intellectual manner that avoids emotional involvement. Denial: Believing and behaving as if an instinct driven event had never

occurred. Rationalization: Acting because of a motive but explaining the behavior

on the basis of another, more acceptable one. Sublimation: Channeling energy from an instinct to produce a creative

and socially valuable result.

Civilization and Its Discontents

Love poses problems because of the possibility of losing the loved person through desertion, death, or other separation.

Few human experiences are more catastrophic than the loss of a loved person, and those who have once lost at love may be reluctant to try it again as the answer to the human dilemma.

World War I: Civilization is developing in a way as to increase opportunities for expression of the instincts of aggression and death, while decreasing them for sexuality and love.

After and beyond Freud

Freud left an extraordinary intellectual legacy. For psychotherapists and psychologists, Freudian theory remains a major

source of both inspiration and contention. International Psycho-Analytic Association Erik Erikson (1902-1994) proposed a series of psychosocial stages. The object relations school places less emphasis than Freud did on the

role of the instincts and more on the details of relationships with love objects.

Alfred Adler (1870-1937) Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) Karen Horney (1885-1952) --> Freud had overemphasized sexuality.