Freud: Psychoanalysis - Personalit Ch. 2

Psychoanalysis

• largely based on sex and aggression and how people navigate these basic, unconscious drives

• Highly influential ideas that spread from Vienna, Austria by a dedicated group of followers trained/influenced by Freud

  • Although followers who deviated from Freud’s basic ideas were shunned by Freud

• Freud’s mastery of language allowed him to present his ideas in a powerful manner

• Psychoanalysis is based on Freud’s understanding human personality, which was formed via

  • Experiences with his patients

  • Analysis of his own dreams

  • Readings of other scholars from science and the humanities

• Freud considered himself to be a scientist

Biography of Freud

• Lived from 1856-1939

• Spend most of his life in Vienna, Austria

• Moved to London in 1938 because of Nazi’s increasing persecution of Jews

• Had a life-long desire for fame

• Developed free association as a therapeutic technique

• Influential works included:

  • Interpretation of dreams (1900); On Dreams (1901); Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901); Three Essays on the

  • Theory of Sexuality (1905); and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905)

• Won the Goethe Prize for literature in 1930

Freud’s Characteristics/Personality

• Psychoanalyzed himself daily

• Had several crises throughout his life

• Reportedly abstained from sex for most of his life

• His personality has been described as:

  • High levels of intellectual curiosity

  • Ambivalent feelings toward father figures (but viewed the mother/son relationship as “most perfect”)

  • Held grudges disproportionate to the alleged offense

  • Highly ambitious

  • Had strong feelings of isolation even while surrounded by dedicated followers

Problems with Freud/Controversial Opinions

• Freud’s ideas were dismissive of women

  • Sexist

  • Admitted that he had did not understand women (“dark continent for psychology”)

• Freud was elitist

  • Ideas were based on examples from cultural elite

  • Influenced by Nietzsche

• Had many ideas that are absurd

  • Do not meet the criteria for a useful theory from Chapter 1

• Despite the serious shortcomings, Freud’s ideas are arguably the most impactful of any psychology-focused scholar

Freud’s Most Important Contributions to Psychology

• People are motivated by drives of which they have little or no awareness

• The dynamics of how these unconscious drives are handled impact personality

Level’s of Mental Life

• conscious

• Unconscious

• Preconscious

Unconscious

• Contains drives, urges, instincts that are beyond our awareness but motivate our thoughts, feelings, and behavour

  • Freud held that these unconscious drives largely stem from childhood events

• Because the unconscious mind is outside of awareness, its existences can only be proved indirectly

  • Dreams

  • Slips of the tongue

  • Types of ‘forgetting’ called repression

• How someone handles their unconscious drives is key to their psychological functioning according to Freud

Preconscious

• part of the unconscious mind

• Contains elements that can enter conscious awareness

Conscious

• Composed of mental elements that we are directly aware of at any given time

  • Perceptual content

  • Content from the unconscious mind that is deemed “safe” (i.e., non-threatening)

• Least important aspect of the mind for Freud and psychoanalytic theory

Id

• Most primitive part of the mind

• Completely unconscious

• Has no contact with reality

• The source of ‘mental energy’

• Is irrational

• Serves only the pleasure principle

Drives of the Id

• Drives operate as a constant motivational force

  • “psychic energy”

  • Internal stimulus (i.e., can’t run away from it)

• Freud (1933) identified two main categories of drives: Sex (Libido) and Aggression

Libido

• For Freud, all of life’s pleasurable activities can be traced back to the sexual drive

• He believed that entire body is invested with libido

  • Goes beyond erogenous zones (genitals, mouth, anus)

• Love and narcissism

  • All infants start off completely self-absorbed (primary narcissism)

  • Secondary narcissism refers to someone’s degree of self-love later in life

• To handle the sexual drive (i.e., reduce sexual tension) libido can be invested in objects

  • E.g., infant thumb sucking to replace mother’s nipple

Aggression

• A destructive drive that wants to return the organism to an inorganic state

  • Self-destruction

• Like the sex drive, aggression is flexible and can take many forms:

  • Teasing, gossip, sarcasm, humiliation, humor, schadenfreude

  • Some aggressive aspects overlap with libido-related drives:

    • Sadism - Need for sexual pleasure by inflicting pain or humiliation in another person

    • Masochism - Need for sexual pleasure by inflicting pain or humiliation in the self

• Handling the fundamental drives requires bowing to the reality principle

Ego

• Only component of the mind that is in contact with reality

  • Decision-making or executive branch of personality

  • Spans conscious and unconscious parts of the mind and can make decisions at each level

◦ Governed by the reality principle

◦ Attempts to balance the incompatible goals of the id and superego

◦ Process of balancing these drives is a source of anxiety

Superego

• Moral aspect of personality

  • Guided by moralistic and idealistic principles

  • Unrealistic demands for perfection

  • Not concerned with ‘happiness’ of the ego

• Dictates what we should not do (conscience) and what we should do (ego-ideal)

Anxiety

• Afelt, affective, unpleasant state

• Sensation of impending danger

• Often vague

• Source is always the Ego, but Id and Superego are involved

Neurotic Anxiety

Originates from conflict with Id’s sexual/aggressive impulses that have been associated with negative external outcomes (e.g., punishment)

Moral Anxiety

Originates from conflict with Superego’s demands for following its moral code (i.e., ‘doing the right thing’)

Realistic Anxiety

Unpleasant, nonspecific feeling involving a possible danger (e.g., driving in a snowstorm)

Defense Mechanisms

• Ego’s method of avoiding anxiety related to handling sexual and aggressive impulses

  • Require effort and mental energy to set up

• Normal and effective

  • Unless taken to extremes (e.g., compulsive, repetitive, neurotic behaviours)

7 Types of Defense Mechanisms

• Repression

• Reaction formation

• Displacement

• Fixation

• Regression

• Projection

• Introjection

Repression

• Forcing threatening drives/urges/ideas into the unconscious

• Most basic of the defense mechanisms because it involved in all the others

• After a threatening drive is forced into the unconscious, it:

  • May remain there, unchanged

  • May be forced back into the conscious mind by the ID in an unaltered form

  • Anxiety-provoking

  • May be expressed in displace or disguised forms

  • Must be clever enough to fool the Ego

  • May find outlets in dreams or other defense mechanisms

Reaction Formation

• When repressed drives return to the conscious mind disguised as the direct opposite of the original anxiety-provoking idea

• Limited to a single ‘object’

• Often characterized by exaggerated ideas and behaviours

• E.g., idealization

Displacement

• Redirecting unacceptable urges on a variety of objects

• Can be directed internally or externally

Fixation

• Remaining at a comfortable stage of development when the idea of moving on is too anxiety provoking

• Permanent attachment of the libido to an earlier stage of development

• “Oral Fixation”

• “Anal Fixation”

Regression

• Temporary reversion back to an earlier stage of development to handle stress/anxiety

• Similar to fixation in that it is rigid and infantile

Projection

Attributing an unwanted impulse to an external object (usually another person)

Introjection

• Reducing anxiety by internally adopting the values, beliefs, and mannerisms of other people

• First time this happens is when children relieve stress by adopting the rules and standards of their parents

  • Start of the Superego

Sublimination

• Repression of sexual or aggressive aim by substituting a cultural or social aim

• The only defense mechanism that is helpful to both the self/Ego and society

Oral Stage

• 0 - 18 months

• Mouth

• Weaning

• Dependent on pleasures of mouth and on mother

Anal

• 18 months - 3 years

• Anus

• Toilet training

• Excessive neatnes, stubbornness, stingy, controlling

Phallic

• 3 - 6 years

• Genitals

• Attraction to opposite sex

• Sexual role rigidity or confusion

Latency

• 6 years - puberty

• No erogenous zone

• Repression of sexual impulses; identify with same-sex parent

• No fixations for this stage

Genital

• puberty - adult

• Genitals

• Establishing mature sexual relations and emotional intimacy

• Sexual dysfunction and unsatisfactory relationships

Using Psychoanalysis for Therapy

• Uncovering repressed memories through free association and dream analysis

  • The “talking cure”

• According to Freud (1933), the purpose of psychoanalysis is:

  • “to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the superego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be”

Free Association

• Verbalizing every thought that comes to mind, no matter how irrelevant or disturbing it may appear

• Goal is to arrive at unconscious ideas by following a train of association wherever it leads

• Leads to transference of sexual or aggressive feelings towards the therapist and/or resistance to therapy (a sign of progress)

Dream Analysis

• Aims to transform manifest content of dream (i.e., what someone remembers) into more important latent content (i.e., unconscious material)

• Use of either free association with patient or symbol interpretation

  • Condensation – dreams unconscious content is abbreviated

  • Displacement – unconscious drives in dreams are represented by related symbols

• Freud believed that dreams are wish fulfillments

  • Formed in the unconscious and attempt to work their way into the conscious mind

  • Still must slip past the “censors”, but do so during sleep

Typical Dream Types

• Embarrassment dreams (e.g., being naked in public) stem from repressed childhood desire to expose oneself

• Dreams of the death of loved ones stem from repressed wishes of the death of rival siblings and/or parents

• Dreams of failing an exam that was already passed occur when someone is expecting a difficult task

Related Research to Freud’s Ideas

• Most of Freud’s ideas are unfalsifiable (speculations that cannot be proven/disproven)

• Some research, however, as found evidence for some of Freud’s ‘bigger picture’ ideas

  • Unconscious thought (see, e.g., John Bargh)

  • Automaticity

• Dopamine systems

  • Brain is more likely to feel desire than satisfaction (see, e.g., Panksepp)

• Impulse regulation

  • Frontal-limbic system = superego?

• Dreams

  • “rebound effect” – suppressed thoughts more likely to appear in dreams

Psychoanalysis’ Concept of Humanity

• Determinism

• pessimism

• Causality

• Unconscious determinants of behaviour

• Biological influences on personality

• Uniqueness