As the Ideas of Freud s Followers Continued to Evolve They

Sigismund (Sigmund) Freud was born either on March 6 or May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia, which is now part of the Czech Republic. Freud was the firstborn child of Jacob and Amalie Nathanson Freud. Sigmund remained the favorite of his young, indulgent mother, which may have partially contributed to his lifelong self-confidence. When Freud was about a year and a half old, his mother gave birth to a second son, Julius, an event that was to have a significant impact on Freud's psychic development. Sigmund was filled with hostility toward his younger brother and harbored an unconscious wish for his death. When Julius died at 6 months of age, Sigmund was left with feelings of guilt at having caused his brother's death. In 1885, he received a traveling grant from the University of Vienna and decided to study in Paris with the famous French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Through hypnosis, Freud became convinced of a psychogenic and sexual origin of hysterical symptoms. Breuer taught Freud about catharsis, the process of removing hysterical symptoms through "talking them out." While using catharsis, Freud gradually and laboriously discovered the free association technique, which soon replaced hypnosis as his principal therapeutic technique. During the late 1890s, Freud suffered both professional isolation and personal crises. Freud completed his greatest work, Interpretation of Dreams (1900/1953).

Distinctness of Psychoanalysis
First, the twin cornerstones of psychoanalysis, sex and aggression, are two subjects of continuing popularity. Second, the theory was spread beyond its Viennese origins by an ardent and dedicated group of followers, many of whom romanticized Freud as a nearly mythological and lonely hero. Third, Freud's brilliant command of language enabled him to present his theories in a stimulating and exciting manner. Freud's understanding of human personality was based on his experiences with patients, his analysis of his own dreams, and his vast readings in the various sciences and humanities.

Levels of the Mental Life

Unconscious
The unconscious contains all those drives, urges, or instincts that are beyond our awareness but that nevertheless motivate most of our words, feelings, and actions. To him the unconscious is the explanation for the meaning behind dreams, slips of the tongue, and certain kinds of forgetting, called repression.

Unconscious processes often enter into consciousness but only after being disguised or distorted enough to elude censorship. Freud (1917/1963) used the analogy of a guardian or censor blocking the passage between the unconscious and preconscious and preventing undesirable anxiety-producing memories from entering awareness. To enter the conscious level of the mind, these unconscious images first must be sufficiently disguised to slip past the primary censor, and then they must elude a final censor that watches the passageway between the preconscious and the conscious.

Freud believed that a portion of our unconscious originates from the experiences of our early ancestors that have been passed on to us through hundreds of generations of repetition. He called these inherited unconscious images our phylogenetic endowment.

Preconscious
The preconscious level of the mind contains all those elements that are not conscious but can become conscious either quite readily or with some difficulty (Freud, 1933/1964). The contents of the preconscious come from two sources, the first of which is conscious perception. The second source of preconscious images is the unconscious.

Conscious
Consciousness, which plays a relatively minor role in psychoanalytic theory, can be defined as those mental elements in awareness at any given point in time. It is the only level of mental life directly available to us. Ideas can reach consciousness from two different directions. The first is from the perceptual conscious system, which is turned toward the outer world and acts as a medium for the perception of external stimuli. The second source of conscious elements is from within the mental structure and includes nonthreatening ideas from the preconscious as well as menacing but well-disguised images from the unconscious.

Provinces of the Mind
To Freud, the most primitive part of the mind was das Es, or the "it," which is almost always translated into English as id; a second division was das Ich , or the "I," translated as ego; and a final province was das Uber-Ich, or the "over-I," which is rendered into English as superego. These provinces or regions have no territorial existence, of course, but are merely hypothetical constructs. They interact with the three levels of mental life so that the ego cuts across the various topographic levels and has conscious, preconscious, and unconscious components, whereas the superego is both preconscious and unconscious and the id is completely unconscious.

id - unconscious, chaotic, out of contact with reality, and in service of the pleasure principle.

As the region that houses basic drives (primary motivates), the id operates through the primary process. Because it blindly seeks to satisfy the pleasure principle, its survival is dependent on the development of a secondary process to bring it into contact with the external world. This secondary process functions through the ego.

ego - is the executive of personality, in contact with the real world, and in service of the reality principle.

When performing its cognitive and intellectual functions, the ego must take into consideration the incompatible but equally unrealistic demands of the id and the superego. In addition to these two tyrants, the ego must serve a third master—the external world. Thus, the ego constantly tries to reconcile the blind, irrational claims of the id and the superego with the realistic demands of the external world. Finding itself surrounded on three sides by divergent and hostile forces, the ego reacts in a predictable manner—it becomes anxious. It then uses repression and other defense mechanisms to defend itself against this anxiety (Freud, 1926/1959a).

The ego has no strength of its own but borrows energy from the id. In spite of this dependence on the id, the ego sometimes comes close to gaining complete control, for instance, during the prime of life of a psychologically mature person.

superego - serves the moral and idealistic principles and begins to form after the Oedipus complex is resolved.

The superego has two subsystems, the conscience and the ego-ideal. Freud did not clearly distinguish between these two functions, but, in general, the conscience results from experiences with punishments for improper behavior and tells us what we should not do, whereas the ego-ideal develops from experiences with rewards for proper behavior and tells us what we should do. Guilt is the result when the ego acts—or even intends to act—contrary to the moral standards of the superego. Feelings of inferiority arise when the ego is unable to meet the superego's standards of perfection.

Dynamics of Personality
Freud postulated a dynamic, or motivational principle, to explain the driving forces behind people's actions. To Freud, people are motivated to seek pleasure and to reduce tension and anxiety. This motivation is derived from psychical and physical energy that springs from their basic drives.

Drives
Freud used the German word Trieb to refer to a drive or a stimulus within the person. Freud's official translators rendered this term as instinct, but more accurately the word should be "drive" or "impulse." Drives operate as a constant motivational force. As an internal stimulus, drives differ from external stimuli in that they cannot be avoided through flight.

The various drives can all be grouped under two major headings: sex or Eros and aggression, distraction, or Thanatos. These drives originate in the id, but they come under the control of the ego. Every basic drive is characterized by an impetus, a source, an aim, and an object. A drive's impetus is the amount of force it exerts; its source is the region of the body in a state of excitation or tension; its aim is to seek pleasure by removing that excitation or reducing the tension; and its object is the person or thing that serves as the means through which the aim is satisfied (Freud, 1915/1957a).

Sex. The aim of the sexual drive is pleasure, but this pleasure is not limited to genital satisfaction. Freud believed that the entire body is invested with libido. Besides the genitals, the mouth and anus are especially capable of producing sexual pleasure and are called erogenous zones.

Sex can take many forms, including narcissism, love, sadism, and masochism. The latter two also possess generous components of the aggressive drive.

Narcissism involves love of self, whereas love is often accompanied by narcissistic tendencies, as when people love someone who serves as an ideal or model of what they would like to be.

primary narcissism - Infants are primarily self-centered, with their libido invested almost exclusively on their own ego.

secondary narcissism - is not universal, but a moderate degree of self-love is common to nearly everyone; During puberty, adolescents often redirect their libido back to the ego and become preoccupied with personal appearance and other self-interests.

A second manifestation of Eros is love, which develops when people invest their libido on an object or person other than themselves

Sadism is the need for sexual pleasure by inflicting pain or humiliation on another person. Carried to an extreme, it is considered a sexual perversion, but in moderation, sadism is a common need and exists to some extent in all sexual relationships.

Masochism, like sadism, is a common need, but it becomes a perversion when Eros becomes subservient to the destructive drive.

Aggression The aim of the destructive drive, according to Freud, is to return the organism to an inorganic state. Because the ultimate inorganic condition is death, the final aim of the aggressive drive is self-destruction. E.g. teasing, gossip, sarcasm, humiliation. humor, and the enjoyment of other people's suffering.

Anxiety
Sex and aggression share the center of Freudian dynamic theory with the concept of anxiety. In defining anxiety, Freud (1933/1964) emphasized that it is a felt, affective, unpleasant state accompanied by a physical sensation that warns the person against impending danger.

Neurotic anxiety is defined as apprehension about an unknown danger. The feeling itself exists in the ego, but it originates from id impulses.

A second type of anxiety, moral anxiety, stems from the conflict between the ego and the superego.

A third category of anxiety, realistic anxiety, is closely related to fear. It is defined as an unpleasant, nonspecific feeling involving a possible danger.

Defense Mechanisms
Freud first elaborated on the idea of defense mechanisms in 1926 (Freud, 1926/1959a), and his daughter Anna further refined and organized the concept (A. Freud, 1946). Although defense mechanisms are normal and universally used, when carried to an extreme they lead to compulsive, repetitive, and neurotic behavior. Because we must expend psychic energy to establish and maintain defense mechanisms, the more defensive we are, the less psychic energy we have left to satisfy id impulses. This, of course, is precisely the ego's purpose in establishing defense mechanisms—to avoid dealing directly with sexual and aggressive implosives and to defend itself against the anxiety that accompanies them (Freud, 1926/1959a).

Repression
The most basic defense mechanism, because it is involved in each of the others, is repression. Whenever the ego is threatened by undesirable id impulses, it protects itself by repressing those impulses; that is, it forces threatening feelings into the unconscious (Freud, 1926/1959a). In many cases the repression is then perpetuated for a lifetime. For example, a young girl may permanently repress her hostility for a younger sister because her hateful feelings create too much anxiety.

First, the impulses may remain unchanged in the unconscious. Second, they could force their way into consciousness in an unaltered form, in which case they would create more anxiety than the person could handle, and the person would be overwhelmed with anxiety. A third and much more common fate of repressed drives is that they are expressed in displaced or disguised forms.

Reaction Formation
One of the ways in which a repressed impulse may become conscious is through adopting a disguise that is directly opposite its original form. This defense mechanism is called a reaction formation. Reactive behavior can be identified by its exaggerated character and by its obsessive and compulsive form (Freud, 1926/1959a).

Displacement
Freud (1926/1959a) believed that reaction formations are limited to a single object; for example, people with reactive love shower affection only on the person toward whom they feel unconscious hatred. In displacement, however, people can redirect their unacceptable urges onto a variety of people or objects so that the original impulse is disguised or concealed. For example, a woman who is angry at her roommate may displace her anger onto her employees, her pet cat, or a stuffed animal. She remains friendly to her roommate, but unlike the workings of a reaction formation, she does not exaggerate or overdo her friendliness.

Fixation
Psychical growth normally proceeds in a somewhat continuous fashion through the various stages of development. The process of psychologically growing up, however, is not without stressful and anxious moments. When the prospect of taking the next step becomes too anxiety provoking, the ego may resort to the strategy of remaining at the present, more comfortable psychological stage. Such a defense is called fixation. Technically, fixation is the permanent attachment of the libido onto an earlier, more primitive stage of development (Freud, 1917/1963).

Regression
Once the libido has passed a developmental stage, it may, during times of stress and anxiety, revert back to that earlier stage. Such a reversion is known as regression (Freud, 1917/1963).

Projection
When an internal impulse provokes too much anxiety, the ego may reduce that anxiety by attributing the unwanted impulse to an external object, usually another person. This is the defense mechanism of projection, which can be defined as seeing in others unacceptable feelings or tendencies that actually reside in one's own unconscious (Freud, 1915/1957b).

An extreme type of projection is paranoia, a mental disorder characterized by powerful delusions of jealousy and persecution. Paranoia is not an inevitable outcome of projection but simply a severe variety of it. According to Freud (1922/1955), a crucial distinction between projection and paranoia is that paranoia is always characterized by repressed homosexual feelings toward the persecutor. Freud believed that the persecutor is inevitably a former friend of the same sex, although sometimes people may transfer their delusions onto a person of the opposite sex.

Introjection
Whereas projection involves placing an unwanted impulse onto an external object, introjection is a defense mechanism whereby people incorporate positive qualities of another person into their own ego. For example, an adolescent may introject or adopt the mannerisms, values, or lifestyle of a movie star.

Sublimation
Each of these defense mechanisms serves the individual by protecting the ego from anxiety, but each is of dubious value from society's viewpoint. According to Freud (1917/1963), one mechanism—sublimation—helps both the individual and the social group. Sublimation is the repression of the genital aim of Eros by substituting a cultural or social aim. The sublimated aim is expressed most obviously in creative cultural accomplishments such as art, music, and literature, but more subtly, it is part of all human relationships and all social pursuits.

Stages of Development

Infantile Period
Infants possess a sexual life and go through a period of pregenital sexual development during the first 4 or 5 years after birth.

Oral Phase
Because the mouth is the first organ to provide an infant with pleasure, Freud's first infantile stage of development is the oral phase. The sexual aim of early oral activity is to incorporate or receive into one's body the object-choice, that is, the nipple. During this oral-receptive phase, infants feel no ambivalence toward the pleasurable object and their needs are usually satisfied with a minimum of frustration and anxiety. As they grow older, however, they are more likely to experience feelings of frustration and anxiety as a result of scheduled feedings, increased time lapses between feedings, and eventual weaning.

The oral-sadistic period. During this phase, infants respond to others through biting, cooing, closing their mouth, smiling, and crying. Their first autoerotic experience is thumb sucking, a defense against anxiety that satisfies their sexual but not their nutritional needs.

Anal Phase
The aggressive drive, which during the first year of life takes the form of oral sadism, reaches fuller development during the second year when the anus emerges as a sexually pleasurable zone. Because this period is characterized by satisfaction gained through aggressive behavior and through the excretory function, Freud (1933/1964) called it the sadistic-anal phase or, more briefly, the anal phase of development. This phase is divided into two subphases, the early anal and the late anal.

During the early anal period, children receive satisfaction by destroying or losing objects. At this time, the destructive nature of the sadistic drive is stronger than the erotic one, and children often behave aggressively toward their parents for frustrating them with toilet training.

Then, when children enter the late anal period, they sometimes take a friendly interest toward their feces, an interest that stems from the erotic pleasure of defecating. Frequently, children will present their feces to the parents as a valued prize (Freud, 1933/1964).

anal character—people who continue to receive erotic satisfaction by keeping and possessing objects and by arranging them in an excessively neat and orderly fashion.

Freud (1933/1964) hypothesized that people who grow into anal characters were, as children, overly resistant to toilet training, often holding back their feces and prolonging the time of training beyond that usually required. This anal eroticism becomes transformed into the anal triad of orderliness, stinginess, and obstinacy that typifies the adult anal character.

Phallic Phase
At approximately 3 or 4 years of age, children begin a third stage of infantile development— the phallic phase, a time when the genital area becomes the leading erogenous zone. This stage is marked for the first time by a dichotomy between male and female development, a distinction that Freud (1925/1961) believed to be due to the anatomical differences between the sexes. Freud (1924/1961, p. 178) took Napoleon's remark that "History is destiny" and changed it to "Anatomy is destiny." This dictum underlies Freud's belief that physical differences between males and females account for many important psychological differences. Masturbation, which originated during the oral stage, now enters a second, more crucial phase.

Male Oedipus Complex Freud (1925/1961) believed that preceding the phallic stage an infant boy forms an identification with his father; that is, he wants to be his father. Later he develops a sexual desire for his mother; that is, he wants to have his mother. This condition of rivalry toward the father and incestuous feelings toward the mother is known as the simple male Oedipus complex. The term is taken from the Greek tragedy by Sophocles in which Oedipus, King of Thebes, is destined by fate to kill his father and marry his mother.

Freud believed that these feelings of ambivalence in a boy play a role in the evolution of the castration complex, which for boys takes the form of castration anxiety or the fear of losing the penis.

Female Oedipus Complex The phallic phase takes a more complicated path for girls than for boys, and these differences are due to anatomical differences between the sexes (Freud, 1925/1961). Like boys, pre-Oedipal girls assume that all other children have genitals similar to their own. Soon they discover that boys not only possess different genital equipment, but apparently something extra. Girls then become envious of this appendage, feel cheated, and desire to have a penis.

penis envy is a powerful force in the formation of girls' personality. Unlike castration anxiety in boys, which is quickly repressed, penis envy may last for years in one form or another. Freud (1933/1964) believed that penis envy is often expressed as a wish to be a boy or a desire to have a man. Almost universally, it is carried over into a wish to have a baby, and eventually it may find expression in the act of giving birth to a baby, especially a boy.

Freud (1931/1961, 1933/1964) suggested that when pre-Oedipal girls acknowledge their castration and recognize their inferiority to boys, they will rebel in one of three ways. First, they may give up their sexuality— both the feminine and the masculine dispositions—and develop an intense hostility toward their mother; second, they may cling defiantly to their masculinity, hoping for a penis and fantasizing being a man; and third, they may develop normally: that is, they may take their father as a sexual choice and undergo the simple Oedipus complex. A girl's choice is influenced in part by her inherent bisexuality and the degree of masculinity she developed during the pre-Oedipal period.

In summary, the female and male phallic stages take quite different routes. First, the castration complex for girls takes the form of penis envy—not castration anxiety. Second, penis envy precedes the female Oedipus complex, whereas for boys the opposite is true; that is, the castration anxiety follows the male Oedipus complex. Third, because penis envy takes place prior to the female Oedipus complex, little girls do not experience a traumatic event comparable to boys' castration anxiety. Fourth, because girls do not experience this traumatic event, the female Oedipus complex is more slowly and less completely dissolved than the male Oedipus complex.

Latency Period
Freud believed that, from the 4th or 5th year until puberty, both boys and girls usually, but not always, go through a period of dormant psychosexual development. This latency stage is brought about partly by parents' attempts to punish or discourage sexual activity in their young children. If parental suppression is successful, children will repress their sexual drive and direct their psychic energy toward school, friendships, hobbies, and other nonsexual activities.

Continued latency is reinforced through constant suppression by parents and teachers and by internal feelings of shame, guilt, and morality. The sexual drive, of course, still exists during latency, but its aim has been inhibited. The sublimated libido now shows itself in social and cultural accomplishments.

Genital Period
Puberty signals a reawakening of the sexual aim and the beginning of the genital period. During puberty, the diphasic sexual life of a person enters a second stage, which has basic differences from the infantile period (Freud, 1923/1961b). First, adolescents give up autoeroticism and direct their sexual energy toward another person instead of toward themselves. Second, reproduction is now possible. Third, although penis envy may continue to linger in girls, the vagina finally obtains the same status for them that the penis had for them during infancy. Parallel to this, boys now see the female organ as a sought-after object rather than a source of trauma. Fourth, the entire sexual drive takes on a more complete organization, and the component drives that had operated somewhat independently during the early infantile period gain a kind of synthesis during adolescence; thus, the mouth, anus, and other pleasure-producing areas take an auxiliary position to the genitals, which now attain supremacy as an erogenous zone.

Maturity
The genital period begins at puberty and continues throughout the individual's lifetime. It is a stage attained by everyone who reaches physical maturity. In addition to the genital stage, Freud alluded to but never fully conceptualized a period of psychological maturity, a stage attained after a person has passed through the earlier developmental periods in an ideal manner. Unfortunately, psychological maturity seldom happens, because people have too many opportunities to develop pathological disorders or neurotic predispositions.

Therapy/Application

free association, patients are required to verbalize every thought that comes to their mind, no matter how irrelevant or repugnant it may appear. The purpose of free association is to arrive at the unconscious by starting with a present conscious idea and following it through a train of associations to wherever it leads. The process is not easy and some patients never master it. For this reason, dream analysis remained a favorite therapeutic technique with Freud. (We discuss dream analysis in the next section.)

The transference situation is vital to psychoanalysis. Transference refers to the strong sexual or aggressive feelings, positive or negative, that patients develop toward their analyst during the course of treatment. Transference feelings are unearned by the therapist and are merely transferred to her or him from patients' earlier experiences, usually with their parents. However, negative transference in the form of hostility must be recognized by the therapist and explained to patients so that they can overcome any resistance to treatment (Freud, 1905/1953a, 1917/1963).

Freud (1933/1964) noted several limitations of psychoanalytic treatment. First, not all old memories can or should be brought into consciousness. Second, treatment is not as effective with psychoses or with constitutional illnesses as it is with phobias, hysterias, and obsessions. A third limitation, by no means peculiar to psychoanalysis, is that a patient, once cured, may later develop another psychic problem. Recognizing these limitations, Freud felt that psychoanalysis could be used in conjunction with other therapies. However, he repeatedly insisted that it could not be shortened or modified in any essential way.

Dream Analysis
Freud used dream analysis to transform the manifest content of dreams to the more important latent content. The manifest content of a dream is the surface meaning or the conscious description given by the dreamer, whereas the latent content refers to its unconscious material.

The basic assumption of Freud's dream analysis is that nearly all dreams are wish fulfillments. Freud believed that dreams are formed in the unconscious but try to work their way into the conscious. To become conscious, dreams must slip past both the primary and the final censors (refer again to Figure 2.1). Even during sleep these guardians maintain their vigil, forcing unconscious psychic material to adopt a disguised form. The disguise can operate in two basic ways—condensation and displacement.

Condensation refers to the fact that the manifest dream content is not as extensive as the latent level, indicating that the unconscious material has been abbreviated or condensed before appearing on the manifest level. Displacement means that the dream image is replaced by some other idea only remotely related to it (Freud, 1900/1953).

In interpreting dreams, Freud (1917/1963) ordinarily followed one of two methods. The first was to ask patients to relate their dream and all their associations to it, no matter how unrelated or illogical these associations seemed. Freud believed that such associations revealed the unconscious wish behind the dream. If the dreamer was unable to relate association material, Freud used a second method— dream symbols—to discover the unconscious elements underlying the manifest content. The purpose of both methods (associations and symbols) was to trace the dream formation backward until the latent content was reached.

Freudian Slips
Freud believed that many everyday slips of the tongue or pen, misreading, incorrect hearing, misplacing objects, and temporarily forgetting names or intentions are not chance accidents but reveal a person's unconscious intentions. In writing of these faulty acts, Freud (1901/1960) used the German Fehlleistung, or "faulty function," but James Strachey, one of Freud's translators, invented the term parapraxes to refer to what many people now simply call "Freudian slips."

Parapraxes or unconscious slips are so common that we usually pay little attention to them and deny that they have any underlying significance. Freud, however, insisted that these faulty acts have meaning; they reveal the unconscious intention of the person: "They are not chance events but serious mental acts; they have a sense; they arise from the concurrent actions—or perhaps rather, the mutually opposing action— of two different intentions" (Freud, 1917/1963, p. 44). One opposing action emanates from the unconscious; the other, from the preconscious. Unconscious slips, therefore, are similar to dreams in that they are a product of both the unconscious and the preconscious, with the unconscious intention being dominant and interfering with and replacing the preconscious one.

· determinism versus free choice. On this dimension Freud's views on the nature of human nature would easily fall toward determinism. Freud believed that most of our behavior is determined by past events rather than molded by present goals.

· pessimism versus optimism. According to Freud, we come into the world in a basic state of conflict, with life and death forces operating on us from opposing sides. The innate death wish drives us incessantly toward self-destruction or aggression, while the sexual drive causes us to seek blindly after pleasure. For these reasons, psychoanalytic theory is essentially pessimistic.

· causality versus teleology. Freud believed that present behavior is mostly shaped by past causes rather than by people's goals for the future. Therefore, we rate Freud's theory very high on causality.

· conscious versus unconscious. psychoanalytic theory obviously leans heavily in the direction of unconscious motivation. Freud believed that everything from slips of the tongue to religious experiences is the result of a deep-rooted desire to satisfy sexual or aggressive drives.

· social versus biological influences. Freud's medical training disposed him to see human personality from a biological viewpoint. Because Freud believed that many infantile fantasies and anxieties are rooted in biology, we rate him low on social influences.

· uniqueness versus similarities. On this dimension, psychoanalytic theory takes a middle position. Humanity's evolutionary past gives rise to a great many similarities among people. Nevertheless, individual experiences, especially those of early childhood, shape people in a somewhat unique manner and account for many of the differences among personalities.

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