Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 and died in 1939. He was a successful psysiologist, medical doctor, and psychologist. He was recognized as one of the most influential and respected thinkers of the twentieth century. He originally worked in close association with Joseph Bruer, and created the theory of psychology.
He refined teh concept of the unconscious, of infatile sexuality, of repression, and proposed a tri-partite account of the mind’s structure, all as a part of a dramaticallynew conceptual and therapeutic frame of reference for the understanding of human psychological development of psychoanalysis as it exists today, it can in almost all fundamental respects be traced directly back to Freud’s original work.
Further, Freud’s innowative treatment of human actions, dreams and indeed of cultural artefacts as invariably possessing implicit symbolic significance has proven to be extordinarily fecund, and has had massive implications for a wide variety of fields, including anthropology, semiotics, and artistic creativity and appreciation in addition of psychology. However, Freud’s most important and frequently re-interated claim, that with psychoanalysis he had inventeed a new science of the mind, remains the subject of much critical debate and controversy.
Life Freud was born in Frieberg, Moravia in 1856, but when he was four years old his family moved to Vienna, where Freud was to live and work until the last year of his life. In 1937 the Nazis annexed Austria, and Freud who was jewish, was allowed to leave for England. For these reasons, it was above all with teh city of Vienna that Freud’s name was destined to be deeply associated for posterity, founding as he did what was to become known as the first Viennese school of psychoanalysis from which, it is fair to say, psychoanalysis as a movement and all about subsequent developments in this field flowed.
The scope of Freud’s interests, and of his professional training was very broad. He always considered himself first and foremost a scientist, endeavouring to extend the compass of human knowledge, and to this end (rather than to the practice of medicine) he enrolled at the medical school at the Universtity of Vienna in 1873. He concentrated initially on biology, doing research in physiology for six years under the great German scientist Ernst Brucke, who was director of the Physiology Laboratory at the University, thereafter specialising in nerology.
He recieved his medical degree in 1881, and having become engaged to be married in 1882, he rather reluctantly took up more secure and financially rewarding work as a doctor at Vienna General Hospital. Shortly after his marriage in 1886- which was extremely happy, and gave Freud set up a private practice in the treatment of psychological disorders, which gave him much of the clinical material on which he based his theories and his pioneering techniques.
In 1885-86 Freud spent the greater part of a year in Paris, where he was deeply impressed by the work of the French neurologist Jean Charcot, who was at the time using hypnotism to treat hysteria and other abnormal mental conditions. When he returned to Vienna, Freud experrimented with hypnosis, but found that its beneficial effects did not last.
At this point he decided to adopt instead a method suggested by the work of an older Viennese colleague and friend, Josef Breur, who had discovered that when he encouraged a hysterical patient to talk to uninhibitedly about the earliest occurences of the symptoms, the latter sometimes gradually abated. Working with Breur, Freud formulated and developed the idea that many neuroses (phobias, hysterical paralyses and pains, some forms of paranoia, etc. ad their origins in deeply traumatic experiences which had occured in the past life of the patien t but which were now forgotten, hidden from consciousnessm; the treatment was to enable the patient to recall the experience to consciousness, to confront it in a deep way both intellectually and emotionally, and in thus discharging it, to remove the underlying psychological causes of the neurotic symptoms. This technique, and the theory from which it is derived, was given its classical expression in Studies in Hysteria, jointly published by Freud and Breuer in 1895.
Shortly thereafter, however, Breuer, Found that he could not agree with what he regarded as the excessive emphasis which Freud placed upon the sexual origins and content of neuroses, and the two parted company company, with Freud continuing to work alone to develop and refine the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. In 1900, after a protracted period of self-analysis, he published The Interpretation of Dreams, which is generally regarded as his greatest work, and this was followed in 1901 by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and in 1905 by Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory was initially not well recieved – when its existence was acknowledged at all it was usually by people who were, as Breuer had forseen, scandalised by the emphasis placed on sexuallity by Freud – and it was not until 1908, when the first International Psychoanalytical Congress was held as Salzberg, that Freud’s importance began to be generally recognized.
This was greatly facilitated in 1909, when he was invited to give a course of lectures in the United States, which were to form the basis of his 1916 book Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. From this point on Freud’s reputation and fame grew enormously, and he continued to write clinical studies. He was also not adverse to critically revising his views, or to making fundamental it – this way most clearly evidenced by his advancement of a completely new tripartite (id, ego, and super-ego) model of the mind in his 1923 work The Ego and the Id.
He was initially greatly heatened by attracting followers of the intellectual calibre of Adler and Jung, and was psychoanalysis – thus giving rise to the first two of many schisms in the movement – but he knew that such disagreement ovet the basic principles had been part of the early development of every new science. After a life of remarkable vigour and creative productivity, he died of cancer while exiled in England in 1939. Backdrop To His Thought Although a highly original thinker, Freud was also deeply influenced by a number of diverse factors which overlapped and interconnected with each other to shape the development of his thought.
As indicated above, both Charcot and Breuer had a direct and immediate impact upon him, but some of the other factors, though no less important than these, were of a rather different nature. First of all, Freud himself was very much a Freudian – his father had two sons by a previous marriage, Emmanuel and Philip, and the young Freud often played with Philip’s son John, who was his own age. Freud’s own self-analysis – which this gave rise. This analysis revealed to him that the love and admiration which he had felt for his father were mixed with very contrasting feelings of shame and hate (such a mixed attitude he termed ambivalence).
Particularly revealing was his discovery that he had often fantasised as a youth that his half-brother Philip ( who was of an age with his mother) was really his father, and certain other signs convinced him of the deep underlying meaning of this fantasy – that he had wished his real father dead, because he was his rival for his mother’s affections. This was to become the personal (though by no means exclusive) basis for his theory of the Oedipus complex. Secondly, and at a more general level, account must be taken of the contemporary scientific climate in which Freud lived and worked.
In most respects, the towering scientific figure of nineteenth century science saw Charles Darwin, who had published his revolutionary Oigin of Species when Freud was four years old. The evolutionary doctrine radically altered the prevailing conception of man had been seen as a being different in nature to the members of the animal kingdom by virtue of his possession of and immortal soul, he was now seen as being part of the natural order, different from non-human animals only in degree of structural complexity.
This made it possible and plausible, for the first time, to treat man as an object of scientific investigation, and to concieve of the vast and varied range of human behavior, and the motivational causes from which it springs, as being amenable in principle to scientific explanation. Much of the creative work done in a whole variety of diverse scientific fields over the next century was to be inspired by, and defive sustenance from, this new world-view, from which Freud, with his enormous esteem for science, accepted implicity.
An even more important influence on Freud, however, came from the field of physics. The second 50 years of teh nineteenth century saw monumental advances in contemporary physics, which were largely initiated by the formulation of the principle of the conservation of energy by Helmholz. This principle states, in effect, that the total amount of energy in any given physical system is always constant, that energy is moved from one part of the system it must reappear in another part.
The progressive application of this principle led to the monumental discoveries in the fields of thermodynamics, electromagneticism, and nuclear physics which, with their associated technologies, have so comprehensively transformed the contemporary world. As we have seen, when he first came to the University of Vienna Freud worked under the direction of Ernst Brucke, who in 1874 published a book setting out the view that all living organisms, including the human one, are essentially energy-systems to which, no less than to inanimate objects, the principle of the conservation of energy applies.
Freud, who had great admiration and respect for Brucke, quickly adopted this new dynamic physiology with enthusiam. From there it was but a short conceptual step – but one which Freud was the first to take, and on which his claim to fame is largely grounded – to the view that there is such a thing as psychic energy, that the human personality is also and energy system, adn that it is the function of psychology to investigate the modifications, transmissions, and conversions of pcychic energy within the personality which shape and determine it.
This latter conception is the very cornerstone of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. The Theory of the Unconscious Freud’s theory of the unconscious, then, is highly deterministic, a fact which, given the nature of nineteenth century science, should not be surprising. Freud was argualbly the first thinker to apply deterministic principles sytematically to the sphere of the mental, and to hold that the broad spectrum of human behavior is explicable only in terms of the (usually hidden) mental processes or states which determine it.
Thus, instead of treating the behavior of the neurotic as being casually inexplicable – which had been teh prevailing approach for centuries – Frued insisted, on the contrary, on treating it as behaviour for which is meaningful to seek an explanation by searching for causes in terms of the mental states of the individual concerned.
Hence the significance which he attributed to slips of the tongue or pen, obsessive behavior, and dreams – all, he held, are determined by hidden causes in the person’s mind, and so they reveal in covert form what would otherwise not be known at all. This suggests the view that freedom of the will is, not completely an illusion, certainly more tightly cicumscribed than is commonly believed, for it follows from this that whenever we make a choice we are governed by the hidden mental processes of which we are unaware and over which we have no control.
The postulate that there are such things as unconscious mental states at all is a direct function of Freud’s determinism, his reasoning here being simply that the principle of casuality requires that such mental states should exist, for it is evident that there is frequently nothing in the conscious mind which can be said to cause neurotic or other behaviour.
An unconscious mental process or event, for Freud, is not one which merely happens to be out of consciousness at a given time, but is rather one which cannot be, identified with consciousness or that which can be an object of bulk of it lying below the surface, exerting a dynamic and determining influence upon the part which is amenable to direct inspection, the conscious mind. Deeply associated with this view of the mind is Freud’s account of the instincts or drives.
The instincts, for Freud, are the pricnipal motivating forces in the mental realm, and as such they energise the mind in all its functions. There are, he held, an indefinitely large number of such instincts, but these can be reduced to a small number of basic ones, which he grouped into two broad generic categories, Eros (the death instinct), which covers all the instincts towards aggression, self-destruction, and cruelty.
Thus it is a mistake to interupt Freud as asserting that all human actions spring from motivations which are sexual in their origin, since those which derive from Thanatos are not sexually motivated – indeed, Thanatos is the irrational urge to destroy the source of all sexual drives an importance and centrality in human life, human actions, and human behaviour which was new (and to many, shocking), arguing as he does both that the sexual drives exist and can be dizcerned in children from birth (the theory of infantile sexuality), and that sexual energy (libido) is the single most important motivating force in adult life.
However, even here a crucial qualification has to be added – Freud effecticely redefined the term sexuality here to make instincts or drives is essentially that the human being is energised or driven from birth by the desire to acquire and enhance bodily pleasure. Infantile Sexuality Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality must be seen as an integral part of a broader developmental theory of human personality.
This had its origin in, and was a generalisation of, Breur’s earlier discovery that traumatic childhood events could have devastating negative effects upon the adult individual, and took the form of the general thesis that early childhood sexual experiences were the crucial factors in the determination of the adult personality. From his account of the instincts or drives it followed that form the moment of birth the infant is driven in his actions by the desire for bodily/sexual pleasure, where this is seen by Freud in almost mechanical terms as the desire to release mental energy.
Initially, infants gain such release, and derive such pleasure, though the act of sucking, and Freud accordingly termed the anal stage. Then the young child develops an interest in its sexual organs as a site of pleasure (the phalic stage), and develops a deep sexual attraction for the parent of the opposite sex, and a hatred for the parent of the same sex (the Odeipus complex). This, however, gives rise to (socially deprived) feelings of guilt in the childm, who recognizes it can never supplant the stronger parent.
In the case of a male, it also puts the child at risk, which he percieves – if he persists in persuing the sexual attraction for his mother, he may be harmed by the father: specifically, he comes to fear that he may be castrated. This is termed castration anxiety. Both the attraction for the mother and the hatred fo rthe father are usually repressed, and the child usually resolves teh conflict of the Odipus comples by coming to identify with the parent of the same sex. This happens at the age of 5, whereupon the child enters a latency period in which sexual motivations become much less pronounced.
This lasts until puberty, when mature genital development begins, and the pleasure drive refocuses around the genital area. This, Freud belived, is the sequence or progression implicit in normal development, and it is to be observed that at the infant level the instinctual attempts to satisfy the pleasure drive are frequently checked by parental control and social coercion. The development process, then, is for the child essentially a movement through a series of conflicts, the successful resolution of which is crucial to adult mental health.
Many mental illnesses, particularly hysteria, Freud held, can be traced back to unresolved conflicts experienced at this stage, or to events which otherwise disrupt the normal pattern of infatile development. For example, homosexuality is seen by some Freudians as resulting from a failure the conflicts of the Oedipus complex, particularly a failure to identify with the parent of the same sex: the obsessive concern with washing and personal hygiene which characterises the behaviour of some neurotics is seen as resulting from unresolved conflicts/repressions occuring at the anal stage.
Neuroses and the Structure of the Mind Freud’s account of the unconscious, and the psychoanalytic therapy associated with it, is best illustrated by his famous tripartite model of the structure of the mind or personality (although, as we have seen, he did not formulate rhis until 1923), which has many points of similarity with the account of the mind offered by Plato over 2,000 years earlier. The theory is termed triparte simply because, again like Plato, Freud distinguished three structural elements within the mind, which he called id, ego, and super-ego.
The id is the part of the mind in which are situated teh instinctual sexual drives which require satisfaction: the super-ego is that part which contains the conscience,socially-aquired contros mechanisms (usually imparted in the first instance by the parents) which have been internalized: while the ego is the conscious self created by the dynamic tensions and interactions between the id and the super-ego, which has the task of recognizing their conflicting demands with teh requirements of external reality.
It is this sense that teh mind is to be understood as a dynamic energy-system. All objects of consciousness reside in the ego, the contents of the id belong permanently to the unconscious mind, while the super-ego is an unconscious screening-mechanism which seeks to limit the blind pleasure-seeking drives of the id by the imposition of restrictive rules.
There is some debate as to how literally Freud intended this model to be taken (he appears to have taken it extremely literally himself), but it is important to note that what is being offered here is indeed a theoretical model, rather than a description of an observable object, which functions as a frame of reference to explain the link between early childhood experience and the mature adult (normal or disfunctional) personality.
Freud also followed Plato in his account of the nature of mental health or physiological well-being, which he saw as the establishment of a harmonious relationship between the three elements which constitute the mind. If the external world offers no scope for the satisfaction of the id’s pleasure drives, or, more commonly, if the satisfaction of some or all of these drives would indeed transgress the moral sanctions laid down by the super-ego, then an inner conflict occurs in the mind between its constitutient parts or elements – faliure to resolve this can lead to later neurosis.
A key concept to prevent conflicts from becoming too acute, such as repressinon (pushing conflicts back into the unconscious)m sublimation (channelling the sexual drives into the achievement socially acceptable goals, in art, science, poetry,etc. ), fixation (the failure to progress beyond on of the developmental stages), and regression (a return to the behaviour characteristics of one of the stages).
Of these, repression is the most important, and Freud’s account of this is as follows: when a person experiences an instinctual impulse to behave in a manner which the super-ego deems to be peprehensible (e. g. a strong erotic impulse on the part of the child towards the parent of the opposite sex), then it is possible for the mind push it away, to repress it into the unconscious. Repression is thus on of the central defense mechanisms by which the ego seeks to avoid internal conflict and pain, and to reconcile reality with the demands of both id and super-ego.
As such it is completely normal and an integral part of the developmental process through which every child must pass on the way to adulthood. However, the repressed instinctual drive, as an energy-form, is not and cannot be destroyed when it is repressed – it continues to exist intact in the unconscious, from where it exerts a determining force upon the conscious mind, and can give rise to the disfunctional behaviour characteristic of neuroses.
This is one reason why dreams and slips of the tongue possess such strong symbolic significance for Freud, and why their analysis became such a key part of his treatment – they represent instances in which the vigilance of the super-ego is relaxed, and when the repressed drives are accordingly able to present themselves to the conscious mind in a transmuted form. The difference between normal repression and the kind of repression which results in neurotic illness is one of degree, not of kind – the compulsive behavioys of the neurotic is itself a behavioural manifestation of an instinctual drive repressed in childhood.
Such behavioural symptoms are highly irational ( and may even be percieved as such by the neurotic), but are completely beyond the control of the subject, because they are driven by the now unconscious repressed impulse. Freud positioned the key repressions, for both the normal individual and the neurotic, in teh first five years of childhood, and , of course, held them to be essentially sexual in nature – as we have seen, repressions which disrupt the process of infantile sexual development in particular , he held, lead to a strong tendency to later neuroses in adult life.
The task of psychoanalysis as a therapy is to find the repressions which are causing the neurotic symptoms by delving into the unconscious mind of the subject, adn by bringing them to the fore front of consciousess, to allow the ego to confront them directly and thus to discharge them. Of these, repression is the most important, and Freud’s account of this is as follows: when a person experiences an instinctual impulse to behave in a manner which the super-ego deems to be peprehensible (e. a strong erotic impulse on the part of the child towards the parent of the opposite sex), then it is possible for the mind push it away, to repress it into the unconscious. Repression is thus on of the central defense mechanisms by which the ego seeks to avoid internal conflict and pain, and to reconcile reality with the demands of both id and super-ego.
As such it is completely normal and an integral part of the developmental process through which every child must pass on the way to adulthood. However, the repressed instinctual drive, as an energy-form, is not and cannot be destroyed when it is repressed – it continues to exist intact in the unconscious, from where it exerts a determining force upon the conscious mind, and can give rise to the disfunctional behaviour characteristic of neuroses.
This is one reason why dreams and slips of the tongue possess such strong symbolic significance for Freud, and why their analysis became such a key part of his treatment – they represent instances in which the vigilance of the super-ego is relaxed, and when the repressed drives are accordingly able to present themselves to the conscious mind in a transmuted form.
The difference between normal repression and the kind of repression which results in neurotic illness is one of degree, not of kind – the compulsive behavioys of the neurotic is itself a behavioural manifestation of an instinctual drive repressed in childhood. Such behavioural symptoms are highly irational ( and may even be percieved as such by the neurotic), but are completely beyond the control of the subject, because they are driven by the now unconscious repressed impulse.
Freud positioned the key repressions, for both the normal individual and the neurotic, in the first five years of childhood, and , of course, held them to be essentially sexual in nature – as we have seen, repressions which disrupt the process of infantile sexual development in particular , he held, lead to a strong tendency to later neuroses in adult life. The task of psychoanalysis as a therapy is to find the repressions which are causing the neurotic symptoms by delving into the unconscious mind of the subject, adn by bringing them to the fore front of consciousess, to allow the ego to confront them directly and thus to discharge them.
