Sigmund Freud
Psychoanalysis
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Investigations of Trauma
• 1880s – 1900
“hysterical” women
• post- W W I
“shell shock”
• Post – W W II
“combat neurosis”
• post- Vietnam
P.T.S.D.
Trauma-Induced Syndrome
• Hyperarousal:
panic & anxiety
• Intrusive reexperiencing
flashbacks
“acting-out” trauma
in disguised form
• Constriction /
numbing
dissociation
trance; altered states;
(often drug-aided)
Dialectic of Trauma
• Oscillation of re-experiencing and
constrictive defense:
– Fits / outbursts:
epileptic-like seizures
violence
– Amnesia:
forgetting, repression
– Paralyses:
immobility
– Losses of voice:
silencing
can’t describe trauma
Discovery of the Unconscious
1775 - 1895
Cast of Characters
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Fr. Johann Gassner
Franz Mesmer
Fr. Hell
Freulin Oesterlin
Antoin LaVoisier
Joseph Guillotin
Ben Franklin
Marquis de Puysegur
• Phneas Parkhurst
Quimby
• Mary Baker Eddy
• Jean Charcot
• Anna O
( Bertha Pappenheim)
• Joseph Breuer
• Sigmund Freud
Father Johann Gassner
• Swiss country
priest –
renowned
exorcist
– Public healing
spectacles
Fr. Johann
Gassner:
exorcism
Father Johann Gassner
• 1775 Target of Papal inquiry:
– Ruled unorthodox
– Banished to small parish
• Last gasp of official exorcism
Franz Mesmer
Franz Mesmer
• Viennese physician
• Thesis on effects of planets on illnesses:
– Universal fluid
(like “ether”)
– Planets set up tide that affects humans
Franz Mesmer
• 1744 Treated Freulein Oesterlin:
– Father Hell told of efforts to cure with
magnetism
– Periodic violent fits & crises
– Related to planetary motion?
– Tried liquid with iron filings & magnets
– Felt “evil” feelings flow away
– Cured & married Mesmer’s son
Mesmer’s Theory
• Scientific – similar to electricity:
• Universal energy / fluid
• Disease:
imbalance, loss of fluid
• Cure:
channeling & restoring fluid
• Crises:
re-balance fluid
Mesmer’s Theory
• Cures not due to
magnets alone
• Energy / fluid
concentrated in his
body affects patients
“Animal Magnitism”
Baquet:
like Leyden Jar,
collects & stores
animal magnetic
fluid
Magnetic Healing in Paris
Mesmer as “Quack”?
Mesmerism as scandal
Mesmerism
as scandal
Mesmerism as scandal
Mesmerism as scandal
1784 Royal Commission
LaVoisier
Franklin
Guillotin
1784 Royal Commission
• No evidence of magnetic fluid
• Cures due to “imagination”
• Danger in erotic ties of women
patients to magnetizer
After Royal the
Commission
Mesmerism eclipsed
by French revolution
& Napoleonic Wars
Louis Pinel unchains the insane
Marquis de Puysegur
• Disciple of Mesmer
• Magnetized servant:
– Hyper-alert sleep
– Couldn’t remember after awakening
• Cured by “suggestion” during magnetic
sleep
Puysegur
Puysegur’s Theory
• “Artificial somnambulism”
• Not caused by magnetic fluid
• Brought about my magnetizer’s
will & patient’s compliance
Puysegur’s Theory
“The entire doctrine of Animal
Magnetism is contained in the two
words Believe and Want. I believe that I
have the power to set into action the
vital principle of my fellow men; I want
to make use of it; this is all my science
and all my means. Believe and Want,
sirs, and you will do as well as I”
Mid- 19th century
• Study of “mental illness”
• Study of “natural” magentic states
– Fugue states
– Amnesia
– Multiple personality
Spiritism & Mediumship in U.S
Phineas Quimby
Mary Baker Eddy
Christian Science Church, Boston
1880s: Jean Charcot
Hysteria
• Epileptic-like fits, crises, convulsions
• Sensory impairments & paralyses
• Amnesia
• Charcot discovered:
– Symptoms don’t follow anatomy
“glove hysteria”
– Hypnotic suggestion could produce
“artificial” hysterical symptoms
Charcot Demonstrating Hysteria
Charcot’s Theory of Hysteria
• Hypnosis is abnormal state, due to
defect in nervous system
• Traumatic event  hypnoid state (in
those with defect)  inadvertant
suggestion  hysterical symptom
Studies on Hysteria
J. Breuer & S. Freud
1895
Joseph Breuer & Anna O
Anna O
Anna O
She once woke up during the night in great
anxiety about the patient, who was in a high
fever; she was under the strain of expecting
the arrival of a surgeon from Vienna who was
to operate… Anna was sitting at the bedside
with her right arm over the back of her chair.
She fell into a waking dream and saw a black
snake coming towards the sick man from the
wall to bit him…
Anna O
She tried to keep the snake off, but it was
as though she was paralyzed. Her right arm,
over the back of the chair, had gone to sleep
and had become anesthetic and paretic; and
when she looked it it the fingers turned into
little snakes with death’s heads…
Anna O
When the snake vanished, in terror she
tried to pray. But language failed her; she
could find no tongue in which to speak, till at
last she thought of some children’s verses in
English and then found herself able to think
and pray in that language. The whistle of the
train that was bringing the doctor whom she
expected broke the spell.
Anna O
Next day, in the course of a game, she
threw a quoit into some bushes; and when she
went to pick it out, a bent branch revived her
hallucination of the snake, and simultaneously
her right arm became rigidly extended.
Thenceforward the same thing invariably
occurred whenever the hallucination was
recalled by some object with a more-or-less
snake-like appearance.
Anna O: onset of cough
She began coughing for the first time when
once, as she was sitting at her father’s
bedside, she heard the sound of dance music
coming from a neighboring house, felt a
sudden wish to be there, and was overcome
with self-reproaches. Thereafter, throughout
the whole length of her illness she reacted to
any markedly rhythmical music with a tussis
nervosa [nervous cough].
Anna O: onset of cough
• Wish to leave father and join friends at
dance
• Self-reproaches
• Cough as symptom
 “Incompatible Idea”
“Anna O”
Bertha
Pappenheim
Transference
• Transference: Anna O had fallen in
love with Dr. Breuer
• Counter-Transference: Dr. Breuer
had fallen in love with Anna O
• Hysterical childbirth
Bertha Pappenheim
• Suffered relapse, hospitalized
• As “Paul Berthold” translated
Vindication of the Rights of Women
• Wrote play, “The Rights of Women”
• Director of orphanage; destitute girls
• Saved girls from prostitution
• Founder of social work and leader of
women’s rights
Bertha Pappenheim
• “Silenced” as dutiful daughter in conservative
home?
• Tension intensified by father’s illness, nursing
role, self-reproaches?
• “Talking cure” with Breuer helped cure her?
• Found voice in women’s movement
 Hysteria as pathological reaction to
cultural silencing + personal trauma or
incompatible idea?
Summary
• Trauma:
painful memory
incompatible idea
• Symptom:
“conversion” hysteria
• Treatment:
re-experiencing
Sigmund Freud
Martha
Bernays
Freud and his mother
Freud and his daughter
Freud’s Office
Hypnosis to Free Association
• Freud was lousy hypnotist
• Head pressing
– Ideas often embarrassing, immoral,
anti-social, sexual
• Resistance
• Free association
– Excavating layers of mind/memory
Freud’s Couch
Freud’s
Antiquities
Only a cigar?
Freud in
exile, early
1930s
1896 Etiology of Hysteria
• Recent event “traumatic” because it
reawakened childhood trauma
• 18 cases: childhood seduction or
molestation
• “Seduction theory” of hysteria
Seduction Theory of Hysteria
In 1895 and 1896 Freud, in listening to
his women patients, learned that something
dreadful and violent lay in their past. The
psychiatrists who had heard these stories
before Freud had accused their patients of
being hysterical liars and had dismissed their
memories as fantasy. Freud was the first
psychiatrist who believed his patients were
telling the truth…
Jeffrey Mason, Assault on Truth
Seduction Theory of Hysteria
Freud announced his discovery in a paper
which he gave in April 1896 to the Society for
Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna, his first major
public address to his peers. The paper met with
total silence. Afterwards, he was urged never to
publish it, lest his reputation be damaged beyond
repair. The silence around him deepened, as did
his loneliness. But he defied his colleagues and
published “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” an act of
great courage.
Jeffrey Mason, Assault on Truth
Reaction to “Etiology” Paper
• Freud discovers that one remembered
seduction could not have occurred
• [ Today: “false memory syndrome” ]
• Freud officially abandons seduction theory
• Develops “theory of infantile sexuality”
Psychoanalytic Theory
• Post-1896: self-analysis
• 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams
• 1905 Theory Infantile Sexuality
• 1905 Dora case:
tries to convince Dora she lusts
for Herr K
Infantile Sexuality
• Libido: desire / drive / instinct for
sensuous pleasure
• In children: diffuse, not explicitly
sexual
“polymorphous perversity”
Infantile Sexuality
• Develops through stages toward
“normal” adult heterosexuality
Oral  Anal  Phallic / Oedipal
• Early developments must be
repressed & sublimated
Oral Stage (birth – 2)
• nursing, sucking
• pleasure: lips & mouth; satiety
• anxiety: hunger, abandonment
Oral character:
• Anxiety about nurturance, separation
• Eating, smoking, drinking to calm anxiety
• Passivity & Dependency
Anal Stage (2 – 4)
• Defecation (control of sphincter)
• Pleasure: sensation of defecating,
making messes, defiance
• Anxiety: dirtying, loss of control, chaos,
fear of punishment
Anal character:
• Order, control, cleanliness, neatness
• Constrictive / impulsive emotional style
Phallic / Oedipal Stage (5 – 7)
• Attachment to mother sexualized
• Punitive father threatens attachment to /
dependence on mother
• Threat experienced as “castration anxiety”
• Sexualized attachment to mother
repressed
• Identification with father – “masculinity”
Boys’ Oedipal Complex
• Accept as correct?
• Reject as wrong?
• Describes psychological
consequences of authoritarian
fathering?
Girls’ Oedipal Complex?
• Discovery of “castration”
• Rejection of mother + sexualized
attachment to father (with unconscious
“wish for penis”)
• Shift of attachment from father to man
• Wish for penis becomes wish for baby
• Re-identification with mother
Girls’ Oedipal Complex
• Accept as correct?
• Reject as wrong?
• Describes psych. consequences
of patriarchal power?
Oedipal Conflict Resolution
• “polymorphous perverse” erotism repressed
( bisexuality, oral/anal, masturbation, etc. )
• Identification with same-sex parent
 ideal & authority internalized as conscience
• Societal authorities & prohibitions internalized
( God country king / premier / sultan / fuhrer )
• Personality crystallizes
Post-Oedipal Development
• Latency:
7 – 12 sexuality repressed
• Puberty: 13 - 15 re-awakens Oedipal
(and possibly pre-Oedipal) conflicts
 adolescent rebellion & “acting out”
Freud: A Cultural Psychology?
U.S. vs. 72 non-Western cultures – early 1950s
Initial Indulgence
Age of Training
Severity
Oral
2nd lowest
2nd earliest weaning
upper quartile
Anal
3rd lowest
2nd earliest
most severe (tied)
Sex
lowest
among earliest
most severe (tied)
Dependence
slightly below median
slightly earlier than
median
at median
Aggression
near median
near median
slightly above median