Lecture
Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939)
Meanings of PA
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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.
Mainstream
psychology
Psychology of
variables
(the individual
disappears)
Psychoanalysis
Psychology of the
subject (the
individual is the
focus)
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
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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
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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:
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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
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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.