CHAPTER 2
FREUD: PSYCHOANALYSIS
I. Overview of Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory
Freud’s psychoanalysis is the best known of all
personality theories because it (1) postulated the primacy of sex and aggression—two
universally popular themes; (2) attracted a group of followers who were
dedicated to spreading psychoanalytic doctrine; and (3) advanced the notion of
unconscious motives, which permit varying explanations for the same
observations.
II. Biography of Sigmund Freud
Although he was born in the
Czech Republic in 1856 and died in London in 1939, Sigmund Freud spent nearly
80 years of his life in Vienna. A physician who never intended to practice
general medicine, Freud was intensely curious about human nature, and in his
practice of psychiatry he was perhaps more interested in learning about the
unconscious motives of his patients than in curing neuroses. Early in his
professional career, Freud believed that hysteria was a result of being seduced during childhood by a sexually
mature person, often a parent or other relative. However, in 1897, he abandoned
his seduction theory and replaced it
with his notion of the Oedipus complex.
Some recent scholars have contended that Freud’s decision to abandon the
seduction theory in favor of the Oedipus complex was a major error and
influenced a generation of psychotherapists to interpret patients’ reports of
early sexual abuse as merely childhood fantasies.
III. Levels of Mental Life
Freud saw mental functioning
as operating on three levels: the unconscious, the preconscious, and the
conscious.
A. Unconscious
The unconscious consists of
drives and instincts that are beyond awareness but that motivate many of our
behaviors. Unconscious drives can become conscious only in disguised or
distorted form, such as dream images, slips of the tongue, or neurotic
symptoms. Unconscious processes originate from two sources: (1) repression, or the blocking out of
anxiety-filled experiences and (2) phylogenetic
endowment, or inherited experiences that lie beyond an individual’s
personal experience.
B. Preconscious
The preconscious contains
images that are not in awareness but that can become conscious either quite
easily or with some level of difficulty.
C. Conscious
Consciousness is the only
level of mental life directly available to us, but it plays a relatively minor
role in Freudian theory. Conscious ideas stem from either the perception of
external stimuli (perceptual conscious
system) or from unconscious and preconscious images after they have evaded
censorship.
IV. Provinces of the Mind
Freud conceptualized three
regions of the mind: the id, the ego, and the superego.
A. The Id
The id, which is completely
unconscious, serves the pleasure
principle and seeks constant and immediate satisfaction of instinctual
needs. As the region of the mind that contains the basic instincts, the id
operates through the primary process.
B. The Ego
The ego, or secondary process, is governed by the reality principle; that is, it is
responsible for reconciling the unrealistic demands of both the id and the
superego with the demands of the real world.
C. The Superego
The superego, which serves
the idealistic principle, has two
subsystems: the conscience and the ego-ideal. The conscience results from punishment for improper behavior whereas
the ego-ideal stems from rewards for
socially acceptable behavior.
V. Dynamics of Personality
The term dynamics of personality refers to those
forces that motivate people. The concept includes both instincts and anxiety.
A. Instincts
Freud grouped all human
drives or urges under two primary instincts: sex (Eros or the life instinct) and aggression (the destructive or death instinct).
1. The Sexual
Instinct
The aim of the sexual instinct is pleasure, which can be gained through
the erogenous zones, especially the
mouth, anus, and genitals. The object
of the sexual instinct is any person or thing that brings sexual pleasure. Both
the aim and the object are flexible, so that many sexually motivated behaviors
may seem to be unrelated to sex. For example, narcissism, love, sadism, and
masochism all possess large components of the sexual drive even though they may
appear to be nonsexual. All infants possess
primary narcissism, or self-centeredness, but the secondary narcissism of adolescence and adulthood is not universal.
Sadism, which is the reception of
sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on another, and masochism, which is the reception of sexual pleasure from painful
experiences, satisfy both sexual and aggressive drives.
2. The Destructive
Instinct
The destructive instinct
aims to return a person to an inorganic state, but it is ordinarily directed
against other people and is called aggression.
B. Anxiety
Only the ego feels anxiety, but the id, superego, and outside
world can each be a source of anxiety. Neurotic
anxiety is apprehension about an unknown danger and stems from the ego’s
relation with the id; moral anxiety
is similar to guilt and results from the ego’s relation with the superego; and realistic anxiety, which is similar to
fear, is produced by the ego’s relation with the real world.
VI. Defense Mechanisms
Defense mechanisms operate unconsciously to protect the ego against the
pain
of anxiety.
A. Repression
Repression involves forcing unwanted, anxiety-loaded experiences into
the unconscious. It is the most basic of all defense mechanisms because it is
an active process in each of the others. Many repressed experiences remain
unconscious for a lifetime, but others become conscious in a disguised form.
B. Undoing and
Isolation
Undoing is the ego’s
attempt to do away with unpleasant experiences and their consequences, usually
by means of ceremonial repetitious actions. Isolation is marked by obsessive
thoughts. It is the ego’s attempt to isolate an experience by surrounding it
with a blacked-out region of insensibility.
C. Reaction
Formation
A reaction formation is marked by the repression of one impulse and the
ostentatious expression of its exact opposite.
D. Displacement
Displacement is the redirecting of unacceptable urges and feelings onto
people and objects in order to disguise or conceal their true nature.
E. Fixation
Fixations develop when psychic energy is blocked at one stage of
development, making psychological change difficult.
F. Regression
Regressions take place when a person reverts to earlier, more infantile
modes
of behavior.
G. Projection
Projection is seeing in others those unacceptable feelings or behaviors
that actually reside in one’s own unconscious. When carried to extremes,
projection can become paranoia,
which is characterized by delusions of persecution.
H. Introjection
Introjection involves the incorporation of positive qualities of
another person in order to reduce feelings of inadequacy.
I. Sublimation
Whereas other defense
mechanisms are of dubious social value, sublimations contribute to the welfare
of society. They involve elevating the aim of the sexual instinct to a higher
level and are manifested in social and cultural accomplishments.
VII. Stages of Development
Freud saw psychosexual
development as proceeding from birth to maturity through four overlapping
stages: the infantile stage, the latency stage, the genital stage, and the
psychologically mature stage.
A. Infantile Period
The infantile stage
encompasses the first 4 to 5 years of life and is divided into three subphases.
1. Oral Phase
During the oral phase, an
infant is primarily motivated to receive pleasure through the mouth. Weaning is the principal source of
frustration during this stage.
2. Anal Phase
At about the second year of
life, a child goes through an anal phase when toilet training is the chief frustration. If parents use punitive
training methods, a child may develop the anal
triad of orderliness, stinginess, and obstinacy, all of which mark the anal character.
3. Phallic Phase
Boys and girls begin to
have differing psychosexual development during the phallic phase, which occurs
around 3 or 4 years of age. For both genders, suppression of masturbation is the principle source of
frustration. At this time, young children experience the Oedipus complex in which they have sexual feelings for one parent
and hostile feelings for the other. The male castration complex, which takes the form of castration anxiety, or fear of losing the penis, breaks up the male
Oedipus complex and results in a well-formed male superego. For girls, however,
the castration complex, in the form of penis
envy, precedes the female Oedipus complex, a situation that leads to only a
gradual and incomplete shattering of the female Oedipus complex and a weaker,
more flexible female superego.
B. Latency Period
Freud believed that
psychosexual development goes through a latency stage—from about age 5 until
puberty—in which the sexual instinct is partially suppressed.
C. Genital Period
The genital period begins
with puberty, when adolescents experience a reawakening of the genital aim of
Eros, and it continues throughout adulthood.
D. Maturity
Freud hinted at a stage of
psychological maturity in which the ego would be in control of the id and
superego and in which consciousness would play a more important role in behavior.
VIII. Applications of Psychoanalytic Theory
Freud built his theory on
observations from history, art, and literature, but his primary source of data
came from his clinical experiences with neurotic patients whose dreams and
slips of the tongue he analyzed as part of his psychotherapy. His
psychoanalytic theory has been applied to psychotherapy, dream interpretation,
and Freudian slips.
A. Freud’s Early
Therapeutic Technique
During his early years as a
therapist, Freud used a very aggressive technique whereby he strongly suggested
to patients that they had been sexually seduced as children. He later abandoned
this technique, along with his belief that most patients had been seduced
during childhood. The current frequency with which therapy patients accuse
their parents or other adults of criminal sexual acts has prompted some
investigators to look at the validity of these claims.
B. Freud’s Later Therapeutic
Technique
Beginning in the late
1890s, Freud adopted a much more passive type of psychotherapy, one that relied
heavily on free association, dream interpretation, and transference. The goal
of Freud’s later psychotherapy was to uncover repressed memories, and the
therapist uses dream analysis and free association to do so. With free association, patients are required
to say whatever comes to mind, no matter how irrelevant or distasteful.
Successful therapy rests on the patient’s transference
of childhood sexual or aggressive feelings onto the therapist and away from
symptom formation. Patients’ resistance to
change is seen as progress because it indicates that therapy has advanced
beyond superficial conversation.
C. Dream Analysis
In interpreting dreams,
Freud differentiated the manifest
content (conscious description) from the latent content (the unconscious meaning of the dream that lies
hidden from the dreamer). Nearly all dreams are wish-fulfillments, although the
wish is usually unconscious and can be known only through dream interpretation.
Dreams that are not wish-fulfillments follow the principle of repetition compulsion and often occur
after people have had a traumatic experience. To interpret dreams, Freud used
both dream symbols and the dreamer’s associations to the dream content.
D. Freudian Slips
Freud believed that parapraxes—that is, slips of the tongue
or pen, misreadings, incorrect hearings, misplacing of objects, and temporary
forgetting of names or intentions—are not chance accidents but reveal a
person’s unconscious intentions.
IX. Related Research
Although Freudian theory
has generated much related research, it rates low on falsifiability because most research findings can be explained by
other theories. Throughout the years, however, many researchers have
investigated hypotheses inspired by psychoanalytic theory.
A. Defense
Mechanisms
George Valliant has added
to the list of Freudian defense mechanisms and has found evidence that some of
them are neurotic (reaction formation
idealization, and undoing), some are immature
and maladaptive (projection, isolation, denial, displacement, and
dissociation), and some are mature and
adaptive (sublimation, suppression, humor, and altruism). Valliant found
that neurotic defense mechanisms are successful over the short term; immature
defenses are unsuccessful and have the highest degree of distortion; whereas
mature and adaptive defenses are successful over the long term, maximize
gratification, and have the least amount of distortion
B. Oral Fixation
Some recent research has
found that aggression is higher in people who bite their finger nails than it
is in non-nail biters, especially in women. Other research found that people
who are orally fixated tend to see their parents more negatively than do people
who are less orally fixated.
X. Critique of Freud
Freud regarded himself as a
scientist, but many present-day critics consider his methods to be outdated,
unscientific, and permeated with sexual bias. On the six criteria of a useful
theory, we rated psychoanalysis high on its ability to generate research, very
low on its falsifiability, and average on organizing knowledge, guiding action,
and being parsimonious. Because it lacks operational definitions, we rated
psychoanalysis low on internal consistency.
XI. Concept of Humanity
Freud’s view of humanity was
deterministic and pessimistic. He also emphasized causality over teleology,
unconscious determinants over conscious processes, and biology over culture,
but he took a middle position on the dimension of uniqueness versus
similarities among people.