Psych ∙ Ms. Wiley ∙ Intro to Sigmund Freud, D___
Name:
Background on Freud: Psychology's most famous figure is also one of the most
influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. Sigmund Freud's
work and theories helped shape our views of childhood, personality, memory,
sexuality and therapy. Other major thinkers have contributed work that grew out
of Freud's legacy, while others developed new theories out of opposition to his
ideas. In 2001, Time Magazine referred to Freud as one of the most important
thinkers of the last century. Freud’s ideas had such a strong impact on psychology
that an entire school of thought emerged from his work. While it was eventually
replaced by the rise of behaviorism, psychoanalysis had a lasting impact on
psychology, psychotherapy, and pop culture.
Freud’s Version of the Mind: Sigmund Freud believed that behavior and personality derives from the constant and unique
interaction of conflicting psychological forces that operate at three different levels of awareness: the preconscious, the
conscious, and the unconscious. To understand this conflict, let’s look at an example: Many of us have experienced what is
commonly referred to as a Freudian slip. These misstatements are believed to reveal underlying, unconscious thoughts or
feelings. Consider the following: James has just started a new relationship with a woman he met at school. While talking to her
one afternoon, he accidentally calls her by his ex-girlfriend's name. If you were in this situation, how would you explain this
mistake? Many of us might blame the slip on distraction or describe it as a simple accident. However, a Freudian theorist might
tell you that this is much more than a random accident. The Freudian view holds that there are inner forces outside of your
awareness that are directing your behavior. Freud might say that James misspoke due to unresolved feelings for his ex or
perhaps because of misgivings about his new relationship.
Before we can understand many of Freud’s theories, we must first understand his view of how the mind is organized. According
to Freud, the mind can be divided into three different levels:
The conscious mind includes everything that we are aware of. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and
talk about rationally in a civil society. A part of this includes our memory, which is not always part of consciousness but can be
retrieved easily at any time and brought into our awareness. Freud called this the preconscious.
The preconscious mind is the part of the mind that represents ordinary memory. While we are not consciously aware of this
information at any given time, we can retrieve it and pull it into consciousness when needed. The preconscious is also considered
a gatekeeper, a filtration system that either allows or disallows thoughts and memories from the unconscious to enter to the
conscious.
The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that outside of our conscious awareness. Most of
the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. This is the place
were latent (dormant, buried) sexuality and aggression is housed, which is often incompatible with modern society. According to
Freud, the unconscious continues to influence our behavior and experience, even though we are unaware of these underlying
influences.
Freud likened these three levels of mind to an iceberg. The top of the iceberg that you can see above the water represents the
conscious mind. The part of the iceberg that is submerged below the water but is still visible is the preconscious. The bulk of the
iceberg lies unseen beneath the waterline and represents the unconscious.
1.
Using the summary above, label the iceberg with the following terms: conscious,
preconscious, unconscious and include several characteristics for each below:
Freud’s Id, Ego, and Superego: According to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality, personality is composed of three
elements. These three elements of personality--known as the id, the ego and the superego--work together to create complex
human behaviors.
The id is the only component of personality that is present from birth. This aspect of personality is entirely unconscious and
includes of the instinctive and primitive behaviors. The id is driven by the pleasure principle, which strives for immediate
gratification of all desires, wants, and needs. If these needs are not satisfied immediately, the result is a state anxiety or tension.
The id is very important early in life, because it ensures that an infant's needs are met. If the infant is hungry or uncomfortable,
he or she will cry until the demands of the id are met.
However, immediately satisfying these needs is not always realistic or even possible. If we were ruled entirely by the id and the
pleasure principle, we might find ourselves grabbing things we want out of other people's hands to satisfy our own cravings. This
sort of behavior would be both disruptive and socially unacceptable. According to Freud, the ego tries to resolve the tension
created by the pleasure principle.
The ego is the component of personality that is responsible for dealing with reality. According to Freud, the ego develops from
the id and ensures that the impulses of the id can be expressed in a manner acceptable in the real world. The ego operates based
on the reality principle, which strives to satisfy the id's desires in realistic and socially appropriate ways. The reality principle
weighs the costs and benefits of an action before deciding to act upon or abandon impulses. In many cases, the id's impulses can
be satisfied through a process of delayed gratification--the ego will eventually allow the behavior, but only in the appropriate
time and place.
The last component of personality to develop is the superego. The superego is the aspect of personality that holds all of our
internalized moral standards and ideals that we acquire from both parents and society--our sense of right and wrong. The
superego provides guidelines for making judgments. According to Freud, the superego begins to emerge at around age five. The
superego acts to perfect and civilize our behavior. It works to suppress all unacceptable urges of the id and struggles to make the
ego act upon moral standards rather that upon realistic principles.
With so many competing forces, it is easy to see how conflict might arise between the id, ego and superego. Freud used the term
ego strength to refer to the ego's ability to function despite these dueling forces. A person with good ego strength is able to
effectively manage these pressures, while those with too much or too little ego strength can become too unyielding or too
disrupting. According to Freud, the key to a healthy personality is a balance between the id, the ego, and the superego.
2.
Complete the chart below with details from the summary above:
ID
EGO
SUPEREGO
Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development: Freud believed that human beings, from birth, possess an instinctual sexual
energy that develops in five stages. Each stage is characterized by an erogenous zone (an area of the human body that has
heightened sensitivity). Freud proposed that if a child experienced frustration in relation to any psychosexual developmental
stage, he or she would experience anxiety that would persist into adulthood as a neurosis, a functional mental disorder. This
theory is probably the most well-known as well as the most controversial of Freud’s work. His views, which identified infantile
forms of sexuality, were deemed inappropriate to the strict, Victorian society Freud was a member of. During each stage, an
unsuccessful completion means that a child becomes fixated on that particular erogenous zone and either over– or underindulges once he or she becomes an adult.
Oral Stage (Birth to 18 months). During the oral stage, the child if focused on oral pleasures, like the feeding at a mother’s breast
(or bottle) and the oral exploration of his/her environment (the tendency to place objects in mouth). The id dominates in this
stage, because neither the ego nor the superego is yet fully developed, and since the infant has no personality (identity), every
action is based upon the pleasure principle. Weaning is the key experience in the infant’s oral development, his or her first
feeling of loss consequent to losing the physical intimacy of feeding at mother’s breast. Yet, weaning increases the infant’s selfawareness that he/she does not control the environment, and thus learns delayed gratification, which leads to the formation of
the capacities for independence and trust. Too much or too little gratification can result in an oral fixation or oral personality
which is evidenced by a preoccupation with oral activities. This type of personality may
have a stronger tendency to smoke, drink alcohol, over eat, or bite his or her nails.
Anal Stage (18 months to three years). The child’s focus of pleasure in this stage is on
eliminating and retaining feces. Through society’s pressure, mainly via parents, the child
has to learn to control anal stimulation. Toilet training is the child’s key experience and
results in conflict between the id (demanding immediate gratification) and the ego
(demanding delayed gratification). In terms of personality, after effects of an anal
fixation during this stage can result in an obsession with cleanliness, perfection, and
control (anal retentive). On the opposite end of the spectrum, they may become messy
and disorganized (anal expulsive).
Phallic Stage (ages three to six). The pleasure zone switches to the genitals, as the child becomes aware of his/her body, the
bodies of other children, and the bodies of their parents. Freud believed that during this stage boy develop unconscious sexual
desires for their mother. Because of this, he becomes rivals with his father and sees him as competition for the mother’s
affection. During this time, boys also develop a fear that their father will punish them for these feelings, such as by castrating
them. This group of feelings is known as Oedipus Complex (after the Greek Mythology figure who accidentally killed his father
and married his mother). According to Freud, out of fear of castration and due to the strong competition of his father, boys
eventually decide to identify with him rather than fight him. By identifying with his father, the boy develops masculine
characteristics and identifies himself as a male, and represses his sexual feelings toward his mother. A fixation at this stage could
result in sexual deviancies (both overindulging and avoidance) and weak or confused sexual identity according to psychoanalysts.
(Note: Later it was added that girls go through a similar situation, developing unconscious sexual attraction to their father.
Although Freud Strongly disagreed with this, it has been termed the Electra Complex by more recent psychoanalysts.)
Latency Stage (age six to puberty). It’s during this stage that sexual urges remain repressed and children interact and play mostly
with same sex peers. This asexual stage is attributed to the development of the ego and superego. The stage begins around the
time that children enter into school and become more concerned with peer relationships and hobbies. The child learns to adapt
to reality and begins the process of what Freud termed “infantile amnesia,” where the child’s earliest traumatic or overly
sexual/evil memories are repressed.
Genital Stage (puberty on). The final stage of psychosexual development begins at the start of puberty when sexual urges are
once again awakened. Its purpose is the psychological detachment and independence from parents. As in the phallic stage, the
genital stage is centered on the genitalia, but the sexuality is consensual and adult, rather than solitary and infantile. The
psychological difference is that the ego is established and the person’s concern shifts from instinct and immediate gratification to
secondary process-thinking which gratifies desire symbolically and intellectually by means of friendship, love, and family.
3.
It would be far too awkward to come up with a question for this section, so … just move on.
Freud’s Dream Theory: Freud insisted that dreams are a form of fulfilling suppressed
wishes. If a wish (likely to be sexual in origin) goes unsatisfied during the dreamer’s
normal day, the mind reacts to this ‘internal stimuli’ by transforming it into a visual
fantasy – allowing the dreamer to satisfy his or her desire, the result of which is a
peaceful night’s sleep.
Freud believed the dream to be composed of two parts: the manifest and the latent
content. The manifest content can be thought of as what a person would remember
as soon as they wake – what they would consciously describe to someone else when
recalling the dream. Freud suggested that the manifest content possessed no
meaning whatsoever because it was a disguised representation of the true thought
underlying the dream. Freud believed that dreams needed to be censored in this way, otherwise the dreamer would become
distressed and would eventually wake up. The latent content, on the other hand, holds the true meaning of the dream – the
forbidden thoughts and the unconscious desires. These appear in the manifest content but will be disguised and unrecognizable.
Through case studies of dream interpretation, Freud came to believe dreams were full of symbolism, or our brain’s work at
disguising latent desires and feelings.
Dreams, if understood correctly, could lead to a greater understanding of the dreamer’s subconscious. Freud used the method of
free association to discover the underlying meaning behind the dream (the latent content).
The differences between the ‘manifest’ and the ‘latent’ content of dreams led Freud to
infer an intervening process, by means of which the unconscious wishes could be
transformed into conscious dreams. This intervening process was the so-called dreamwork, which involved mechanisms such as ‘displacement’ (substituting representational
elements for one another, e.g. your father is represented as a policeman),‘condensation’
(combining multiple elements into composite hybrids, e.g. ambition, excitement and
anxiety are all represented by a single image of an ascending escalator) and ‘regression’
(converting thoughts into perceptions, e.g. a person’s importance is represented by their
size).
Why did Freud think the mind functioned in this peculiar way during sleep? He offered a cascade of hypotheses. The sleeping
mind is disconnected from external reality but not from its innate (instinctual) dispositions. These dispositions are unmodulated
during sleep by the constraints of external reality. Instead of acting on one’s wishes during sleep, therefore, one imagines oneself
acting on them. The unconstrained imaginings of the sleeping mind themselves threaten to disturb sleep (i.e. they arouse
anxiety).The process of dream-work is therefore tendentiously biased in favor of more acceptable representational elements and
narratives. This bias is our mind’s ‘censorship’. To the extent that the censorship fails to disguise disturbing dream thoughts
adequately, the process fails and the dreamer awakens (typically from an anxiety dream).
4.
Using details from the section above, summarize Freud’s dream theory. Does it connect to any of the recent findings
discussed in the PBS film on dreams?
Freud and Psychoanalysis: Freud was a pioneer in psychotherapy, which is the treatment of mental disorders by psychological
rather than medical means. He is most associated today with the term psychoanalysis, which is a system of psychotherapy that
aims to treat mental disorders by investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements in the mind. This involves
bringing repressed fears and conflicts into the conscious mind by free association (where patients are encouraged to talk freely
through streams of consciousness, without any attempt to filter their ideas or be politically correct or appropriate) and dream
interpretation. Psychoanalysis is based on the belief that various types of behavior in the early years may be suppressed or
altered, then emerge later on to cause problems in self-esteem, personality, and relationships. Treatment, which involves visiting
an analyst several times a week, is designed to show how unconscious factors may be affecting adult behavior. Freud’s
psychoanalysis continues to generate highly contested debate with regard to its therapeutic efficacy (effectiveness or value) and
its scientific status.
5.
Using details from the section above, come up with a one-sentence definition of psychoanalysis:
6.
After completing all sections, respond to the following question: What are your reactions to Sigmund Freud’s theories? Do
you find his theories (some, all, or none) to be legitimate or of any value? Why or why not?