Sigmund Freud Freud was enormously ambitious and wanted to change the world and we can see, in the influence he had on psychology and on the way Western people think about things that he succeeded. We think of him as this old “grouch patch” but in his time Freud was a celebrity, big time. He changed our language forever. People now use words like “Freudian” and “Freudian slip”—Freud is the only psychologist who has had such impact. Many people have preconceived ideas about Freud. We cover him in some detail because although it is fine for people to have their own opinions about Freud, it is important that those opinions be based on reality. For instance, some people believe that Freud was addicted to cocaine. The truth is that Freud did use cocaine (as did many others at the time) but eventually he quit “cold turkey” when he realized that it could be addictive and that it could interfere with his thinking. For him, his ideas were the most important thing. Indeed, when he was dying of cancer of the mouth and throat he refused to take morphine for his pain because he wanted to be able to think clearly. It was not until the very end, when he felt ready to die that, with the help of his daughter, Anna, that the took a fatal dose. Freud was addicted to another substance, tobacco. He started smoking cigarettes as a young man and switched to his famous cigars later. (see the cancer that killed him above). Some people say that Freud hated women. As we will see, Freud’s theory does include a few aspects that certainly can be viewed as displaying a bias against women. However it is important to recognize that Freud included women in his courses on psychoanalysis and he welcomed women as early followers. He also stressed how important it was for women to have access to education. Finally, many people say that Freud was obsessed with sex. That is actually true. Freud thought that all human behavior could be understood through the lens of the sexual drive. But Freud did not define sex as we typically do, as we shall see later… Freud began his career with an interest in pursuing neurology and he was quite successful. But as a Jewish man in Austria, he faced anti-semitism. Bigotry would certainly prevent him from realizing his ambitions to change the world. As a result, he realized he could not make the kind of contribution he wanted to within that field of medicine. So he turned to psychiatry. Freud developed his ideas about psychology during the Victorian era, one that is characterized by extraordinarily rigid views of sex and sexuality. For women, in particular, these times were characterized by extremely rigid beliefs about the roles women could occupy and what they could and couldn’t do. During the Victorian era, the major puzzle that psychiatry was dealing with was hysteria. HYSTERIA means physical symptoms with no physical cause. For example, people might be blind (even in with perfectly healthy eyes) or paralyzed without any physical cause. The idea is that something psychological must be being expressed in these physical symptoms. Hysteria is also called ‘conversion disorder’ for this reason—something psychological is being converted into a physical symptom. Hysteria translated literally means “wandering womb” and this reflects the notion that hysterical symptoms seemed to be a problem particularly for women. (Later Freud would encounter male hysterics). Josef Breuer was Freud’s early mentor, collaborator, and benefactor. He worked with a patient he called “Anna O.” a young woman who was dealing with a variety of hysterical symptoms (she would thrash around madly, she could not speak her native tongue, etc.). Anna O. had moments that she called her “Clouds” in which she was able to talk with Breuer calmly about her life and her symptoms. Breuer noted that the more she talked the better she seemed to feel. And the more she expressed her feelings during these “Clouds” the longer they lasted. Breuer and Freud discussed the case and together they came up with the idea of THE TALKING CURE. This is the notion that to rid patients of hysterical symptoms, we should let them experience CATHARSIS—the release of pent up emotions. The more people talked the better they’d do. Freud never actually met Anna O. but he helped Breuer write up the case. During his work with Anna O. (Whose real name, BTW, was Bertha Pappenheim. She struggled with depression throughout her life but was a seminal figure in the founding of the field of social work), Breuer was quite disturbed by the symptoms she developed: An hysterical pregnancy (also called “pseudocyesis” … That is, Anna O. believed that she was pregnant. She started to look pregnant. Even worse, for Breuer, she was convinced that Breuer was her lover and he was the father of her child. Breuer (and Mrs. Breuer) freaked out. Breuer stopped his treatment of Anna O and took his wife on a second honeymoon. This is a place where Freud and Breuer split in terms of their understanding of the case of Anna O. as well as the meaning of hysterical symptoms. Breuer insisted that the symptoms were just random—they don’t mean anything. Freud was convinced that it was no accident that Anna O. developed this particular symptom and he felt that Breuer should spend more time with Anna O talking about this symptom. Freud felt that it was important that Anna O had developed sexual feelings toward Breuer. Breuer was definitely not interested in exploring this issue! Freud next took a trip to France where he was exposed to hypnosis in two different contexts. HYPNOSIS involves a potentially altered state of consciousness in which a person basically gives over the control of their actions to another person. Psychologists still do not agree exactly on what hypnosis is or why it works, but it involves a hypnotist putting a person into a relaxed state and then having the capacity to direct the person’s experience in important ways. In France, Freud visited JEAN CHARCOT, a French psychiatrist. Charcot believed that there was a special link between the mental state of a person under hypnosis and one suffering from hysterical symptoms. He showed Freud how he could give someone an hysterical symptom through hypnosis (like, “when I snap my fingers you will be blind”). Also, while visiting with Charcot, Freud encountered MALE hysterics (mostly war veterans) and this helped Freud see that hysteria was not only a “women thing.” Finally, Charcot asserted to Freud that he was convinced that hysteria was somehow linked to sexuality. (In the film Sigmund Freud, Charcot declared, “In cases like these it is always about the genitals. The genitals, the, genitals, the genitals!”). This is important because this gave Freud some confidence about this feelings that sexuality was related to hysteria, and that his perspective on symptoms was right and Breuer’s was wrong. While in France, Freud visited another clinic where hypnosis was being studied and his experience there profoundly changed the way he thought about the human mind. The NANCY CLINIC was a rival of Charcot’s where two psychiatrists, Liebault and Bernheim showed Freud a very different perspective on hypnosis. They did not believe that hypnosis shared some special relationship with hysteria, as Charcot did. They showed Freud that if you hypnotized a hysterical person, you could suggest their symptom away: After hypnotizing the person, you could get him or her to lose the symptom…. but only temporarily. That is although hypnosis might allow person to be cured of, say, a paralyzed hand for a while, eventually the person would be back with a different symptom: hysterical blindness, or the inability to walk, or talk or whatever. Also at the Nancy Clinic, Freud observed the following demonstration: A person was put under hypnosis and was then given a suggestion (for instance, you hand will be paralyzed), then the person was told that when the hypnotist snapped his fingers, the person would have no memory of what happened during the session. When the person came out of the hypnotic trance, they would have no recollection of what happened, they might even ask, “When are you going to hypnotize me?” NOW THIS IS IMPORTANT: Liebault and Bernheim did not take no for an answer here. They would say to the person: “NO, you DO know what happened, just think very carefully! You CAN remember what happened!” They would place a hand on the person’s forehead and really insist that the memory for what happened during the trance was still there, in the person’s mind, they just had to think! This technique is called WILLFUL CONCENTRATION and it refers to having a person think HARD about something for which they have no memory. Strangely enough, using willful concentration, people WERE able to remember what had happened during a trance. Think about what this means: How can a person be, at once, completely and honestly unaware of something—to have no memory of it at all-- while at the same time showing that, actually, that memory DID exist in the person’s mind, just hidden away? Where was it?! This experience led Freud to start thinking about the notion that the human mind might just have places that conscious awareness cannot (or will not) easily access. Moreover, some memories might be purposefully held out of awareness—kept in some mysterious hidden place in the mind. This experience got Freud to think about the word unconscious in a different way. Yes, we can describe a memory as unconscious, and mean that the person just does not remember it. BUT, we can also think of memories at DYNAMICALLY unconscious: As being held actively out of awareness. This means that the lack of awareness of those memories is motivated: We do not remember because something inside of us does not want us to. So, Freud started to see his own patients, using the techniques he’d learned from Breuer, as well as Charcot and Liebault & Bernheim. These first attempts were characterized by trial and error—trying to come up with a way to treat to hysteria. An early patient was Frau Emmy Von N. Her symptoms involved suddenly screaming, “GET BACK! DON’T COME NEAR ME!” Freud put her under hypnosis and asked her to talk about what those words mean to her: What did she think of when she had these moments? NOTE: That Freud asked those questions about her symptoms reveals his belief, as noted in the case of Anna O., that symptoms are no accident: They will make sense in the context of a person’s experience. During their sessions, while hypnotized, Frau Emmy talked about a variety of experiences she’d had (experiences she had completely forgotten). These included, visiting a friend in a mental asylum who suddenly grabbed her by the throat; helping her daughter as the daughter gave birth and having the daughter, in the throes of labor pain, grab Frau Emmy by the neck and begin to choke her; and nursing a brother through morphine withdrawal and having the brother grab her by the neck in his agony. What Freud learned from this experience: 1. First, Frau Emmy’s symptoms did not have just one cause. There were a multitude of unconscious conflicts in her life that all related to her symptoms. This is called OVERDETERMINATION: there is not just one cause, but many for hysterical symptoms. 2. Further, Freud noticed that many of the experiences Frau Emmy described involved specific situations where what she wanted to do (her selfish desires) were in conflict with societal expectations (or her duty). He came to think that the meaning of hysterical symptoms is linked to these self vs. duty types of conflicts. That is, symptoms are a symbolic representation of unconscious conflicts. 3. Next, he noticed that when Frau Emmy described each of these experiences it was as if they had just happened. For her, they were all “new” even if they had happened years before. This suggested to Freud that these unconscious conflicts were timeless—they stayed fresh in that hidden place in the human mind. 4. FINALLY, note that as long as Frau Emmy shrieked, “DON’T COME NEAR ME! GET BACK!” she was never in danger of having someone grab her and frighten or harm her. That is, this symptom seemed to be serving a purpose in Frau Emmy’s life: It was a compromise that kept her out of the horrible situations in her life. Hmmm. Still, you might notice that although Freud’s work with Frau Emmy sounds like psychoanalysis as you think of it, there are some key pieces missing: With Frau Emmy, Freud was relying on hypnosis, for instance and hypnosis is not typically the key tool for psychoanalysis. So what happened? Another of Freud’s early patients was a woman he called, “Fraulein Elisabeth Von R.” Fraulein is the German equivalent of “Miss”—meaning Fraulein Elizabeth was not married. She was what might have been called “an old maid” or a “spinster”—a woman who had spent her life taking care of her ailing father who was never given the chance to marry. Fraulein Elisabeth (FE), suffered from an hysterical symptom called “astasia-abasia” which means she was unable to stand or walk. She suffered from horrible pains in her legs that prevented her from being able to stand or walk, despite no physical cause. Here’s the thing: FE could not be hypnotized. So, Freud had to come up with some other way to unlock her memories. At that time he had read a book about creative writing that advised a person to just start writing about whatever…to just really let go and not censor yourself and just write about whatever comes to mind. This is called FREE ASSOCIATION—just talking aloud in a stream of consciousness about whatever comes to mind. Freud would ask FE to just start talking about her symptoms, the pains in her legs, etc. To say whatever came to mind. Freud combined this technique with willful concentration (the technique he learned at the Nancy Clinic) to work with FE. If FE got to a spot where she said she could not remember any more, he would prod her, assuring her that she could remember she just had to think very hard. Again, note that having FE free associate to her leg pains reveals Freud’s confidence that hysterical symptoms have meaning and that understanding their meaning is a key to curing the person. Sure enough, FE’s symptoms were also related to a host of experiences in her life in which she wanted nothing more than to take a walk but found herself thwarted by her duty to her father. (The spot of the pain was exactly where her father placed his feet when she changed his dressings; when she took a walk with a young man after church her father scolded her horribly; when she took a walk with her sister’s husband she “wished” for a moment that her sister would die so that she could be with him; when her sister DID die in childbirth she thought for a just moment, “At least her husband is free!”—all of these experiences had been “forgotten” by Elisabeth but came up during free association). From his work with FE: 1. Freud landed on free association, rather than hypnosis as the way to unlock unconscious conflicts. 2. He came to realize that the goal of what he was doing to was to allow the person to have INSIGHT into the experiences that were causing the symptoms: That it was NOT about letting out emotions (catharsis) but rather allowing the person to understand how these conflict were guiding their lives. 3. Freud also noticed that there were times when FE would seem like she DID NOT want to get better—it was exactly at those moments when she seemed to be getting to the truth that he would have to push and push her. He called this RESISTANCE—the tendency for the person with an hysterical symptom to seem to avoid getting better. (In fact, there was a word for this, it was called “Le Belle Indifference” and referred to the fact that hysterical patients as a rule seemed to be less than eager to get better—from Freud’s perspective this is because knowing the root of the symptoms—those awful memories would be much worse than the symptoms themselves). 4. The goal of psychoanalysis became to bring unconscious conflicts into consciousness. 5. Freud noticed that during their work together, FE would often seem to treat him not like just good old Dr. Freud, but as if HE was the persons she was dealing with in those unconscious memories. She might say something, like, “YOU ALWAYS FORCE ME TO TAKE CARE OF YOU” things that were not about Freud at all but that were really about those other people in her life. Suddenly, FE’s relationship with Freud had all of the intensity, conflict, and emotion that characterized the root of her symptoms. Freud referred to this as TRANSFERENCE—the tendency of a patient to relate to the psychoanalyst as if he (or she) is all of the other people in the person’s life with whom she has experienced these self vs. duty conflicts. This was just the kind of thing that frightened Breuer away from Anna O. But for Freud, this was the key to helping a person. Freud believed that this intense relationship, transference, was essential to curing a person via psychoanalysis. He felt that his transference was the persons last symptom and that the psychoanalyst could then start to interpret that relationship to understand how to help move what is unconscious into the conscious. 6. In order to enhance the chances of transference occurring, Freud designed the psychoanalytic situation in a particular way. The idea was to remove the “analyst” personality and identity so that he or she would just be a generic person who could be filled up with the patient’s unconscious conflicts. SO. The patient would lie on a couch, the analyst would sit behind the person, and stay pretty quiet. The lights would be dimmed… all of these things we think of psychoanalysis are about improving the chances that the patient will begin to treat the analyst like all of those people from his/her life …. Importantly, psychoanalysis was not meant by Freud to be only a treatment. He wanted to use his knowledge to create a GRAND THEORY: a theory that explains everything about human behavior, culture, etc. Essentially Freud took his experiences with the many women who came to him for treatment and used his approach to their symptoms as a way to think about all human behavior. For him, just as hysterical symptoms are overdetermined by a multitude of unconscious conflicts, so is all human behavior: He took hysterical symptoms as his first metaphor for understanding human behavior. Motivation: One of the things most people know about Freud is that he thought everything was about SEX. This is true. BUT. For Feud SEX refers not simply to sexual behaviors ( behavior involving the genitals) but to any behavior that leads to physical pleasure. For Freud, SEX =ORGAN PLEASURE. So, any behavior that feels good is sex. For Freud, sexual pleasure is the key driving force in human personality. Freud’s theory is called a drive theory. Drives are psychological representations of physical needs. They are the “feeling state” that accompanies needs. So, if you need food, you feel hungry. Hunger is the drive. For Freud, the sexual drive, the state of wanting pleasure, is the key motivating force in human life. All of those women with those hysterical symptoms were experiencing unconscious sexual conflict: They were in an impossible situation when their own drive for pleasure was hopelessly in conflict with the demands of Victorian Society. Based on his work with hysterical patients, Freud attempted to create a model of the human personality. His first attempt is called the TOPOGRAPHICAL MODEL. A topography is a map, so in this model, Freud was trying to create a map of the human mind. The components of the topographical model are: 1. The Conscious: Whatever is in the person’s head at the moment; what we are aware of. 2. The Preconscious: Things you are not currently thinking about but that you could if you were asked to: like your phone number, your mother’s maiden name, etc. 3. The Unconscious: Things in our minds that we are completely unaware of. Things that happened to us that we cannot remember even though they are there. (Things we have forgotten but then forgot the act of forgetting). This model is, let’s face it, boring. Where is the sex? Plus although it describes the contents of the human mind, it doesn’t explain how things get from point A to point B. How is it that we can have an experience that is conscious to us (at first) but ends up in the unconscious? How is it unconscious conflicts seem to press for expression, in hysterical symptoms? What decides what gets into the conscious and what remains unconscious? In order to deal with these issues Freud developed what is called the Drive Structure Model. This label is important because it makes clear that DRIVE (sexual drive) is what determines the structure of the human mind. The drive structure model has three components, what you probably already know as the Id, Ego, and Superego. Note that these labels can detract from how Freud saw these structures. His famous essay The Ego and the Id, was literally entitled, “The I and the It”. The Id, is the IT, that part of ourselves that would not get a personal pronoun. These three structures are defined as follows: 1. The Id (or IT), is the basis of the human personality. It is wholly unconscious. It operates using the pleasure principle, which means it demands immediate gratification: If it feels good, do it. The Id is separated from reality and lacks the capacity to do things like talk, plan, or wait: It has only two things it can do: Simple reflexes (like clearing your throat or shifting in your seat to be more comfortable) and fantasy. Fantasy involves primary process thinking: It means that the Id can fantasize about what it wants and to it, there is no distinction between imagination and reality. So, it can conjure up thoughts of the things it wants. It can wish. The Id houses all of our sexual energy (called libido). Of course, fantasy doesn’t ultimately meet our needs: Just thinking about getting a glass of water will not slake your thirst. So, the id requires something to help it get what it wants in the real world. 2. The Ego (or I) is the part of the personality that develops to help the Id get what it wants. The ego is partially conscious and partially unconscious. The ego functions under the reality principle: It is able to see the constraints of reality and keep the id from getting arrested! It works within reason to get the Id what it wants. The ego is a problem solver who uses secondary process thinking: Planning and thinking about how to get what the Id is demanding. Note that the ego is placed in a very difficult situation: All of the energy of life is borrowed from the id, and the id is a wild, amoral, mass of wanting. Freud likened the ego to a reluctant rider atop the wild id horse. The ego, then, is likely to experience a great deal of anxiety. 3. The Superego (over Above-I) is a harsh, punitive judge of all that we do and think. It is mostly unconscious but we can experience it in awareness in emotions such as pride, guilt and shame. People sometimes think of the superego as somehow “moral” and in some ways it does enforce a strict moral code. But the superego is no more realistic in its demands than the id. Indeed, literally, the superego is a harsh mutilating father: Something in our minds that would cut off a limb (or something else quite precious) if we step out of line. The Drive Structure Model has often been illustrated using a metaphor of an iceberg. Most of the iceberg is under water and what we see is just a slightest tip at the top. All that is under water is the unconscious, including all of the Id, most of the superego, and a great deal of the ego. Where do these structures come from? How does the personality develop? To understand this question, Freud developed his PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT. In these, Freud traced how sexual pleasure is experienced in the developing person. Each stage is named for the place where sexual pleasure occurs in that period of life. For Freud, these stages are universal and “phylogenetic” meaning that all members of the human species will experience these, as a product of the unfolding of sexual drive. (There is not a great deal that the environment can do one way or another—basically the specific quality of our experience is less important than the unfolding of drive). The stages demonstrate the idea of POLYMORPHOUS PERVERSITY, meaning that human beings have the capacity to experience sexual pleasure in many different ways. Finally, within these stages, a person can become FIXATED. This means that if the person is overindulged or under-indulged during a stage, that stage can come to color everything about the person’s adult personality. Okay, no go to the slides…
Purchase answer to see full attachment