Sigmund Freud (1856 1939) Meanings of pa theory of personality

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.

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.