History of Psychology
Chapter 13
Psychoanalysis: The Beginnings
I. The Place of Psychoanalysis in
the History of Psychology

A. 1895

1. formal beginning of psychoanalysis

2. Wundt: age 63

3. Titchener: age 28

4. functionalism: just beginning to flourish

5. Watson: age 17

6. Wertheimer: age 15
The Place of Psychoanalysis in
the History of Psychology

B. 1939
 1. Freud’s death

2. Wundtian psychology, structuralism, and
functionalism were history

3. Gestalt psychology: in the process of
transplantation


4. behaviorism was dominant
The Place of Psychoanalysis in
the History of Psychology

C. Psychoanalysis

1. not a school of thought directly comparable
to the others

2. subject matter is abnormal behavior

3. primary method is clinical observation

4. deals with the unconscious
II. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939):
The Development of Psychoanalysis

A. Background
 1. born in Freiberg, Moravia
(Pribor, Czech Republic), and then
moved to Vienna.

2. Father: strict and authoritarian
Mother: protective and loving

3. Personality: self-confidence,
ambition, desire for achievement
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)


4. Darwin’s theory: awakened his interest in the
scientific approach
5. 1873: began study of medicine at U. of Vienna
 a. 8 years to get his degree
 b. initially concentrated on biology
 c. moved to physiology: the spinal cord of the
fish
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

6. cocaine
 a. used cocaine until at least his middle
age
 b. 1884: paper on cocaine’s beneficial
uses published

7. 1881: MD degree, began practice as a
clinical neurologist
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

B. The case of Anna O.


1. Josef Breuer (1842-1935)
 Helped Freud. Breuer was a father-figure to Freud.
 Worked together
2. Anna O.
 a. 21 years old
 b. wide range of hysterical symptoms
 c. symptoms first manifested while nursing her
dying father
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)




d. Breuer began with hypnosis
 1) Anna referred to their conversation as
"chimney sweeping" and "the talking cure“
 2) recalled disturbing experiences under hypnosis
 3) reliving the experiences under hypnosis
reduced the symptoms
e. positive transference
f. Anna O. not cured by Breuer
g. case introduced Freud to the method of catharsis
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

C. Sex and free association

1. 1885: Freud received a grant to study with
Charcot
 a. trained in hypnosis to treat hysteria
 b. Charcot alerted Freud to the role of sex in
hysteria

2. Freud became dissatisfied with hypnosis
 a. a long-term cure not effected
 b. patients vary in ability to be hypnotized
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)



c. retained catharsis as a treatment method
d. developed the method of free association
3. Freud’s system


a. goal: bring repressed memories into
conscious awareness
b. repressed memories: the source of abnormal
behavior
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

4. free association material

a. the experiences recalled are predetermined

b. the nature of the conflict forces the
material out

c. its roots were in early childhood

d. much of it concerned sexual matters
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

D. The break with Breuer

1. 1895: Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud)
 a. the formal beginning of psychoanalysis
 b. the book was praised throughout Europe

2. the conflicts
 a. Freud’s contention that sex sole cause of
neurosis
 b. Breuer felt Freud had insufficient evidence

3. Breuer concerned with Freud’s dogmatic
attitudes
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

E. The childhood seduction controversy

1. Freud believed a normal sex life precludes
neuroses

2. 1896: posited that childhood seduction
traumas caused adult neurotic behavior

3. the paper was received with skepticism
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)


4. 1897: Freud reversed his position
 a. the seduction scenes were fantasies

b. patients believed they were real experiences

c. sex remained the root of the problem
5. 1984: Masson’s book
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

6. contemporary data on the incidence and
prevalence of child sexual abuse

7. whether Freud deliberately suppressed the truth
is undetermined

8. 1930s: Ferenczi determined there were real acts
of sexual abuse

9. Freud led the opposition to Ferenczi
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

F. Self-analysis and the interpretation of dreams

1. Freud
 a. held a negative attitude toward sex
 b. experienced sexual difficulties

2. 1897:
 a. Freud gave up sex
 b. he began his 2-year self-analysis of his own
neurotic symptoms
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

5. He used method of dream analysis
 a. He believed that everything has a cause

b. He conducted a personal dream analysis.
He wrote down the dream stories and then
free associated to the material
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

6. 1900: The Interpretation of Dreams
 a. analyzing his own neurotic episodes
and childhood experiences
 b. outlined the Oedipus complex

7. adopted dream analysis as standard
technique
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

G. Recognition- 1. 1901: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
 a. Freudian slips: An act of forgetting or a lapse
in speech that reflects unconscious motives or
anxieties

2. 1902: began weekly discussion group with
students
 a. included Jung and Adler
 b. Freud tolerated no disagreement about the role
of sexuality
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

3. 1905: Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality

4. 1909: Clark U. lectures: honorary doctorate
in psychology

a. 1909/1910: publication of the Clark lectures in the
American Journal of Psychology

b. Americana accept idea of unconscious mind
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

H. Freud’s final years





1. 1923: diagnosis of cancer, followed by 33 surgeries
in 16 years
2. 1933: public burning of Freud’s books by the Nazis
3. 1934: Nazi destroyed psychoanalysis in Germany
4. 1938:
 a. Anna Freud arrested and detained by the Nazis
 b. move to Paris, then London
5. 1939: his doctor administered an overdose of
morphine over 1 24-hour period
III. Psychoanalysis
as a Method of Treatment

A. Resistances


A blockage to disclose painful memories during a freeassociation session
B. Repression

The process of baring unacceptable ideas. Memories, or
desires from conscious awareness, leaving them to
operate in the unconscious mind
IV. Psychoanalysis
as a Method of Treatment

C. Transference


The process by which a patient responds to the
therapist as if the therapists were a significant person
(such as a parent) in the patient’s life
D. Dream analysis

1. A psychotherapeutic technique involving
interpreting dreams to uncover unconscious conflicts

2. dreams represent disguised satisfaction of
repressed desires
Psychoanalysis as a Method of
Treatment

3. The essence of a dream is the fulfillment of
one’s wishes

4. Patients describe dream, they express their
forbidden desires (latent dream content) in
symbolic form.

5. not all dreams are caused by emotional
conflicts
Psychoanalysis as a Method of
Treatment

E. No passion for helping

1. little personal interest in his system's potential
therapeutic value

2. goal: the explanation of the dynamics of human
behavior

3. viewed the techniques of association and dream
analysis as research tools for data collection

4. his passion was the research
V. Freud’s Method of Research

A. Freud’s position

1. little faith in the experimental approach


2. believed his work was scientific

3. believed his cases and self-analysis
provided ample support
Freud’s Method of Research

B. The evidence

1. formulated, revised, and extended

2. with Freud as the sole interpreter

3. guided by his own critical abilities


4. insisted only psychoanalysts could judge his work’s
scientific worth
5. rarely responded to his critics
VI. Psychoanalysis as a System of
Personality

A. Instincts

1. Mental representations of internal stimuli
(such as hunger) that motivate personality
and behavior
Psychoanalysis as a System of
Personality

2. the life instincts



a. self-preservation and survival of the species
b. manifested in libido
 Libido: the psychic energy that drives a person toward
pleasurable thoughts and behaviors
3. the death instinct



a. a destructive force
b. can be directed inward (suicide) or outward (aggressive)
c. only when a death became a personal concern
Psychoanalysis as a System of
Personality

B. Conscious and unconscious aspects of
personality
 1. conscious



a. small and insignificant
b. a superficial aspects of the total personality
2. Unconscious


a. vast and powerful
b. contains the instincts
Psychoanalysis as a System of
Personality


3. Later, Freud replaced the conscious/unconscious
distinction with the concept of id, ego, and superego.
id (Es)
 a. corresponds to earlier unconscious
 b. the most primitive and least accessible part of
personality
 c. includes sexual and aggressive instincts
 d. followed pleasure principle
 1) reduces tension
 2) methods: seeks pleasure and avoids pain
Psychoanalysis as a System of
Personality

4. ego (Ich)

a. The rational aspect of personality responsibility
for controlling the instinct

b. is aware of reality and regulates id

c. followed the reality principle
 Holding off the id’s pleasure-seeking demands
until a appropriate object can be found to satisfy
the need and reduce the tension
Psychoanalysis as a System of
Personality

5. superego (Uber-Ich)

a. the moral aspect of personality derived from
internalizing parental and societal values and
standards.


b. represent morality

c. behavior is determined by self-control,
postpone id satisfaction to more appropriate times
and spaces or inhibit id completely
Psychoanalysis as a System of
Personality

C. Anxiety


1. indicates ego is stressed or threatened
2. three types



a. objective: fear of actual dangers
b. neurotic: fear of punishment
c. moral: fear of one’s conscience
Psychoanalysis as a System of
Personality

D. Psychosexual stages of personality
development
 1. one of the first to emphasize the
importance of child development

2. personality pattern almost complete by
age 5
Psychoanalysis as a System of
Personality

3. psychosexual stages: marked by
autoeroticism
 a. oral: sensual satisfaction, oral personality
 b. anal: toilet training: dirty/neat, clean
 c. phallic: attitudes toward the opposite sex
develop
 d. latency
VII. Relations Between
Psychoanalysis and Psychology

A. Psychoanalysis outside the mainstream

1. 1924: Journal of Abnormal Psychology
 a. complaints about the number of
papers on the unconscious

b. at least 20 years: few articles on
psychoanalysis accepted for publication
Relations Between Psychoanalysis
and Psychology

B. Criticisms by academic psychologists


Psychoanalysis was a product of the
undeveloped German mind
C. Psychology textbooks


1. early 1920s books included some of
Freud’s ideas
2. as a whole, psychoanalysis was ignored
Relations Between Psychoanalysis
and Psychology

D. 1930s and 1940s psychoanalysis

1. popular with the general public

2. a serious competitor of experimental
psychology
Relations Between Psychoanalysis
and Psychology

E. The academics’ response

1. experimental tests of concepts of
psychoanalysis
 a. psychoanalysis was inferior to a
psychology based on experimentation

b. academic psychology could be relevant to
the public interest because it was studying
the same things as the psychoanalysts
Relations Between Psychoanalysis
and Psychology

2. 1950s and 1960s
 a. translation of psychoanalytic concepts into
behavioristic terms


E.g., emotions habits; neurotic behavior the
result of faulty conditioning.
b. psychology incorporated many of Freud’s
concepts

e.g., unconsciousness, childhood experiences,
defense mechanism
IX. Criticisms of Psychoanalysis

A. In general
 1. Freud’s methods of data collection
 a. unsystematic and uncontrolled


b. data consisted of what Freud recollected
c. Freud may have reinterpreted patients’
words
Criticisms of Psychoanalysis



d. Freud may have recalled and recorded
primarily the material consistent with his
theses
e. there exist discrepancies between Freud’s
notes and the published case histories
f. Freud destroyed most of his data (patient
files)
Criticisms of Psychoanalysis

g. just 6 case histories were published and
none provides compelling support

h. undisclosed method for deriving
inferences and generalizations

i. data not amenable to quantification or
statistical analysis
Criticisms of Psychoanalysis

2. Freud often contradicted himself

3. Freud’s definitions of key concepts unclear

4. Freud’s views on women

Women have poorly developed superego and
inferiority feelings about their body
Criticisms of Psychoanalysis

5. the emphasis on biological forces, especially
sex, as the determinant of personality



a. the denial of free will
b. the focus on past behavior and exclusion of one’s
hopes and goals
6. the theory is based on neurotics, not on
normals
Criticisms of Psychoanalysis

B. The scientific validation of
psychoanalytic concepts

1. an analysis of about 2000 studies from
several disciplines support



a. some characteristics of oral and anal personality
types
b. the notion that dreams reflect emotional concerns
c. certain aspects of the Oedipus complex in boys
Criticisms of Psychoanalysis

2. the analysis did not support
 a. that dreams satisfy symbolically repressed
desires and wishes


b. that fear is the motive for boys’ resolution
of the Oedipus complexes
c. several ideas about women (women have
an inferior conception of their bodies, less
severe superego standards than men
Criticisms of Psychoanalysis

3. later research
 a. supports notion that unconscious processes
influence thoughts and behavior

b. does not support that personality is set by
age 5.


Nowpersonality continues to develop over time
and can change dramatically after childhood.
c. indicates Freud’s ideas about instincts are
not a useful model of human motivation
X. Contributions of Psychoanalysis

1. The experimental method is not the
sole method for discovery

2. A strong impact on American
academic psychology and popular
culture