Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939)

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Lecture

• Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939)

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Meanings of PA

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

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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)
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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

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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 --gt 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.

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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.

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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 --gt
  Overdetermination
• (b) Memories seemed to have been actively
  (unconsciously) repressed by patients.
• (c) Freud detected intrapsychic conflict in
  patients.

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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 --gt pathogenic ideas.
• Freud and Breuer referred to many hysterical
  symptoms as conversions (emotional into physical
  energy).

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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 --gt 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.

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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

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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 --gt
  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

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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 --gt
  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.

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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.

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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 --gt Oedipus complex.

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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.

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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 --gt months or years to complete.
• Freud did not provide the quick and specific
  cures for hysterical symptoms he had originally
  hoped for

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Metapsychology

• Freud sought to place his clinical discoveries
  within a broader theoretical context --gt 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.

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Analytic phase Structural Theories1923-1939

• 1923 The Ego and the Id.
• Personality theory of id, ego, superego
• 1938 Vienna -gt 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) --gt instincts.
• (b) Demands imposed by external reality
• (c) Moral demands impinge on the mind
  independently of the instincts and external
  reality.

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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 --gt compromise.
• Psychic agency responsible for compromise the
  ego.
• Some of the ego's compromises --gt Hysterical
  symptoms (maladaptive).

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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.

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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.

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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)
• --gt Freud had overemphasized sexuality.