(All Rights Reserved - James O.
Richards)
The
Shaping of the "Second
Sigmund
Freud and the Revolt Against
Outline of Lecture
I. Introduction
II. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
IV. What is the Personality?
V. How Does the Personality Function?
VI. How Does the Personality Develop?
Introduction
Sigmund Freud played a large role in the Revolt Against Europe we have been examining. But you should not think of Freud as a conscious enemy of the Enlightenment tradition as, say, Friedrich Nietzsche was. He was himself a rationalist and a scientist in his approach to studying human behavior. He created psychoanalysis, a science of discovering and healing human aliments for which there is no physical explanation. But he is part of the Revolt Against Europe because of the implications of his ideas about man and human behavior. Indeed, Freud put the last nail in the coffin of basically good, basically free, basically rational man. Man is driven by forces in his unconscious; they explain his behavior. He may think he is rational, determining what he will do or not do. But that is like a puppet moving about on a lighted stage. Forces hidden behind the stage and the screen were pulling the puppet strings. Freud (rationally) tells us that man is driven by irrationality, and offers to describe (with reason) those irrational forces.
Freud knew the significance of what he was
saying: he compared himself to Copernicus and Darwin. Just as they, he had
destroyed an illusion about man, an illusion perhaps even more cherished than
those they destroyed. Copernicus had shown that man was not at the center of
the universe; Darwin that man was not lord and master of life. Freud said he
had shown ("the most wounding of all") that man was not even master
of himself. That such ideas could have come from a man who came from,
and lived, a very traditional life may strike you as one of the most surprising
things about him.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Freud was born in
1856 in what is now the
Freud spent a lot of time in his early practice studying nervous diseases,
particularly hysteria, a disorder afflicting women
with various kinds of symptoms, including paralysis. He spent months in
Freud turned from hypnosis to a technique he called "free association", encouraging a spontaneous flow of thoughts to uncover hidden roots for nervous problems. As he observed his patients, he identified what he called "repression" and "resistance" and a mental province he called the "unconscious." Without knowing it, patients caused a memory to be inaccessible to the conscious mind and resisted the awareness of that memory. Freud used free flow of speech, slips of the tongue, and interpretation of dreams to get into the unconscious and the root of the patient's problems. Then he made his most shocking find: infantile sexuality. Listening to his patients, Freud discovered a psychological foundation to the ancient myth of Oedipus, the Greek figure who killed his father and married his mother, all unknowingly. The child, he asserted, had strong ambivalent feelings about the parents. If a male, he resented and wished to remove the father so as to possess the mother (the Oedipal version); if a female, she resented and wished to remove the mother so as to possess the father (the Electra version). At the same time the child had feelings of love and respect for the parent of the same sex, the one being wished away. Freud's work on dreams was published in 1900 in Interpretation of Dreams. In 1904 came The Psychopathology of Everyday Life which described how slips of the tongue, of the pen, of actions, of memory were based on unconscious traumatic memories. In 1905 appeared Wit in Relation to the Unconscious showing how in jokes and reaction to them lay real hidden motives growing out of conflict and repression.
Other major works followed over the years. In 1910 appeared The Origin and Development
of Psychoanalysis. Freud also took up the social and religious
application of his theories and studied biographies for evidence of his
theories. In 1914 he published Totem and Taboo
whose premise was that society began as an act of parricide and incest. In
myth, embedded in human consciousness and remembered since, the younger males
clubbed together and killed the patriarch and took his wives. Then to prevent
themselves from doing this again, they adopted parricide and incest as taboos
(forbidden practices). Freud also did a study of Leonardo da Vinci to
illustrate his theory that sexual childhood experiences caused homosexuality.
In 1917 came A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Civilization
and Its Discontents (1930) pursued Freud's theme that civilization came
into being and could exist only by denial and sublimation of the life
instincts. In the struggle between the pleasure principle and reality
principle, the reality principle had to win out if civilization were to exist.
Another way of putting it was that for Freud, civilization could only exist at
the expense of happiness. (Think about that in terms of the Enlightenment view
where the right to happiness is guaranteed by the state!) Freud continued
publishing until the last year of his life, 1939, when Moses and Monotheism
appeared. In 1938 when the Nazis took
?
1. Before going into Freud's ideas, is there anything you wish to say about
Freud himself?
2. Man is not even master of himself?
The Theory of Psychoanalysis
Freud himself coined the word "psychoanalysis." By this he meant both a method and a theory. As a method, the word meant the investigation of unconscious thoughts by getting the patient to reveal those thoughts or hints of them, and then, by helping the patient understand the meaning of those unconscious thoughts, to effect a therapy. As a theory, psychoanalysis means the bringing of the unconscious into consciousness so that the patient through recognition and understanding of unconscious thoughts may be healed.
Freud developed psychoanalysis after recognizing that the conscious and unconscious provinces of the mind interacted in ways his patients were unaware of. Ideas, thoughts, feelings, and images stood for one thing in the conscious part of the mind; but under the influence of the unconscious province of the mind they meant something quite different. Early life experiences, he believed, had produced sexual and aggressive impulses which were unacceptable and which had been forced out of the consciousness into the unconscious realm. The Oedipus/Electra impulse to desire the parent of the opposite sex and hate the parent of the same sex was crucial and happened during the period from 4 to 6 in the child's development. The child, pained and naturally frustrated because of this impulse, repressed it. But it still lurked in the unconscious, and, depending on the strength of the impulse and the child's ability to repress it, posed a threat to the child's development. It continued to live in the fantasies and fears of the child and later the adult. If strong, it produced neurotic behavior; even if weak, it lingered to affect the way the adult responded to intimacy and love relationships.
In psychoanalysis Freud sought to bring these painful and repressed memories to the consciousness. There with his help the patient could understand the root of his neurosis and be cured. This was not a simple, quick task. The hidden repressed impulses often were difficult to uncover. They conflicted with conscious thoughts or with other unconscious ideas. Freud found that often patients in therapy had difficulty in freely associating, grew silent, or stuttered, which he took to be signs that the experiences being repressed were so disturbing that the patient could not deal with them. By clinical experience Freud concluded that those experiences frequently were of a sexual nature so abhorrent and threatening that the individual could not, except through long psychoanalysis, become conscious of them. After trying hypnosis, Freud next turned to what he called a 'talking cure'. The patient lay on a couch, relaxed; Freud placed himself so that he was out of sight. Then with as few words as possible, he encouraged the patient to speak freely and without premeditation (free association) so that he could sense the underlying meaning of what the patient said. Freud was particularly interested in the patient's dreams because he believed that dreams were "the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious". Dreams interested him because behind the "manifest" meaning lay a "latent" meaning which was the more important. Probing dreams, slips of tongue (parapraxes), free-associations, and the patient's responses to questions, Freud began to dredge up to the conscious those repressed ideas, images, and thoughts which produced the neurotic symptoms. Almost always, he found that what had been repressed was the sexual instinct and the conflict this set up in the young child. The cure came when the patient became aware of what he had repressed and confronted it directly. The result was a purging or catharsis which released the psychic energy dammed up by repression which had caused the neurotic illness.
?
A brief digression. I visited Freud's apartment on a
trip to
What is the Personality?
Freud said the human personality consisted of three components: id, ego, and superego.
The id (from the Latin word "it") is the reservoir of instincts in the personality, everything that forms part of man's basic drives such as sex, hunger, and aggression. These furnish the physic energy of the personality and make demands for fulfillment of the "pleasure principle." The id is not in contact with reality. It "knows no values, no good and evil, no morality."
The ego (from the Latin "I") is the part of the personality which mediates between the id and reality. It receives energy from the id, translating id wishes into fulfillment. "In it," Freud said, "is generated, while it is functioning, the phenomenon of consciousness." Its function is the protection of the organism, "for the id, blindly striving to gratify its instincts, in complete disregard of the superior strength of outside forces, could not otherwise escape annihilation." In this way, Freud continued, "it dethrones the pleasure-principle, which exerts undisputed sway over the processes in the id, and substitutes for it the reality-principle, which promises greater security and greater success." Compared to the id, "the ego stands for reason and circumspection, while the id stands for untamed passions...."
The third component, the superego, is society's
system of values implanted in the individual. It has been called the moral arm
of the personality. It functions to hold up ideals and moral goals over
realistic ones and to see that the personality realizes them and strives for
perfection. How does it relate to the ego? It makes demands on the ego like the
id and external reality do. If these demands are not met, "it punishes the
ego with feelings of tension which manifest themselves as a sense of
inferiority and guilt." When the ego is forced to acknowledge its
weakness, Freud said, "it breaks out into anxiety: reality anxiety in face
of the external world, normal anxiety in face of the super-ego, and neurotic
anxiety in face of the strength of passions of the id."
How Does the Personality Function?
Freud took the positivist position that man was an organization of physical and psychic energy. These two converge in instincts which Freud defined as an "inborn psychological representation of an inner bodily source of excitation." Hunger, for example. Instincts play a larger role than environmental forces in Freud. They move the organism to take action. Hunger moves the organism to take action to reduce the tension created by hunger. But ego, sensing reality, says that edible food may not be available, or not then. And the Super-ego, speaking for ideal moral reasons or taboo reasons, says that available food may not be religiously, morally, or socially acceptable. (Eating pork for a Jew; human flesh for a human; any flesh for a vegetarian, and so on). Instincts, Freud went on to say, are of two kinds: life (eros) and death (thanatos). Life instincts performed using a form of energy he termed the libido which arises from erogenous zones. Death instincts, he said, were more difficult to discern. But Freud said all life had death as its goal. This aggressiveness led in its most visible manifestation to a desire for self-destruction. He called any investment of energy to fulfill an instinct "object-cathexis." Energy used to restrain the id he called "anti-cathexis." The tension set up by the demands of the id, the environment, and the super-ego Freud called "anxiety", a concept central to his theory about how the personality functioned. Anxiety motivated the person to do something to relieve tension.
Most of the ego's trouble came from the id and
primarily from the libido. Sexual drives began at the beginning of life ( a
declaration which shocked contemporaries). Up to Freud, the conviction was that
sexual urges had to be overcome as children grew to adulthood. Bad or perverse
sexual urges had to be eliminated by punishment and threat of punishment. But
Freud made sex central to human development, starting at the mother's breast
and ending only with death. Freud believed that the ego had to defend itself against
the sexual urges of the id and concluded that it did so using a variety of
"defense mechanisms". It repressed them to the unconscious. It also
"sublimated" sexual urges to other activities and aims. And it
directed the libido towards itself, "narcissism". The resulting
neuroses from these defenses were outgrowths of efforts to prevent satisfaction
of sexual urges, to substitute for them something else, or a mixture of the
two. We mentioned earlier the Oedipus/Electra complex as the identification of
sexual and aggressive urges towards the parents. It was this sexual energy
which the ego had to defend itself against. And the result was the illness
which Freud found in his patients.
How Does the Personality Develop?
Freud emphasized childhood as the time of greatest importance in the development of the personality. Personality developed as the ego responded to pressures and threats and learned how to reduce tension and defend itself. In addition to defense mechanisms mentioned earlier, Freud called another identification: a person taking on the characteristics of another and making them part of his own personality. Another was displacement: a person frustrated in one area learns to transfer energy to another area.
The stages through which the personality developed, Freud said, were the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages. How a person resolved conflicts arising during these stages influenced the person's personality. And it determined whether the person remained fixated at any of the stages.
Oral - The stage from birth to about 18 months centered on the sensual pleasure derived from sucking, biting, and chewing.
Anal - The stage from about 18 months to 3 years centered on the pleasure derived from bowel and bladder elimination, retention, and control.
Phallic - The stage from about ages 3-4 to 6 focused on the pleasure obtained from the genitals and on the sexual feelings toward the parent of the opposite sex.
Latency - The fourth stage from about age 6 to puberty was the period when sexual impulses are repressed.
Genital - The last stage was that in which sexuality matures and the person focuses on pleasure derived through sexual contact with the opposite sex. (Freud saw homosexuality as aberrant.)
By age 5 or 6, the personality was almost completely formed. The person should have resolved the Oedipus/Electra conflict and the Super-ego should have been formed. But the person who failed to resolve conflicts at earlier stages would have what he called fixations or traits associated with the unresolved conflicts. The healthy person would have an ego in charge, firmly controlling the id and Super-ego. For those who failed to achieve that and needing therapy, Freud likened his job as psychoanalyst to land reclamation: "[the object]...is to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of vision, and so extend its organization that it can take over new portions of the id. Where id was there shall ego be. It is reclamation work, like the draining of the Zuyder Zee."
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Your own observations about Freud's theory of personality development?
A
If there is time I want to read you some Freud
to show you how he used dreams to understand what was going on in the
unconscious.
Sigmund
Freud and the Second
Freud and his science of human behavior do not leave us much in the way of rational man. His theories depict man as a kind of mechanism: a machine whose internal forces make him do what he does. Reason is useful only in explaining the way the mind works. Freud proposes a science of human behavior. But what does the science tell us? Remember that this mind is mainly id, with the ego sitting on top like the tip of an iceberg. And you know how much iceberg there is below the water line.
What about changing society for the better? Will it make any difference? He believed that society and its civilized apparatus rose from the ability of men to repress their ids. In Civilization and its Discontents, he wrote