chp 10 psycho analytic

FREUD HIMSELF

In this book, I have tried to avoid the trap of writing about psychologists instead of about psychology. Psychology is much more than “what psychologists do,” and there is usually little reason to learn about their personal lives. We must make an exception for Freud. No other psychological approach is at once so influential and so closely identified with a single individual. Freud is one of the most interesting and important people to have lived in the past couple of centuries. So let’s take a moment to consider Freud and how he developed his ideas.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was a medical doctor who practiced in Vienna, Austria, from the 1890s until the 1930s. Because he was Jewish, he had to flee his native country after Hitler came to power in the 1930s; he spent the last few years of his life in London. Freud died in a pessimistic frame of mind, convinced that the impending Second World War, following so closely on the heels of the catastrophic First World War, proved that we humans have an aggressive, destructive urge that, in the end, will destroy us all.

One of Freud’s less profound, yet most enduring, cultural legacies is that he is probably the source of the stereotype of what a psychotherapist should look like. He had a beard and small eyeglasses. He favored three-piece suits with a watch chain hanging from the vest. When he spoke English, it was with a Viennese accent. He had a couch in his office—along with some impressive African art that some patients reportedly found distracting.

Freud began his career as a research neurologist. He went to France for a time to study the newly developing field of hypnosis with Jean-Martin Charcot. He gradually moved into the practice of psychiatry, in part so he could make a living and get married. Then, as now, medical practice paid much better than theoretical research. Early in his clinical practice, Freud made a simple but fundamental discovery: When his patients talked about their psychological problems, sometimes that, by itself, was enough to help or even cure them. At first, Freud used hypnosis to get his patients to talk about difficult topics. Later, he turned to the use of free association, instructing the patient to say whatever came to mind, for the same purpose. One of Freud’s grateful patients dubbed the results of such therapy the “talking cure.”

The talking cure was Freud’s greatest contribution to psychotherapy. By now, it is ubiquitous. A fundamental assumption of nearly every school of psychotherapy—including many whose followers claim they have nothing in common with Freud—is that “talking about it helps.”

Freud thought he knew why talking about it helps. One reason is because making thoughts and fears explicit by saying them out loud brings them into the open, where the conscious, rational mind can deal with them. Your crazy thoughts won’t make you so crazy once you have thought them through rationally. Another reason is that the psychotherapist can provide emotional support during the patient’s difficult task of trying to figure out what is going on. In a letter to Carl Jung, Freud wrote that “psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love” (cited in Bettelheim, 1982, epigraph), and every psychotherapist keeps a box of tissues handy. Many non-Freudian schools of psychotherapy have adopted these two ideas as well.

Freud attracted numerous disciples whom he encouraged to help spread the ideas of psychoanalysis. Many of them had strong minds of their own, leading to some famous and bitter quarrels. Carl Jung and Alfred Adler were the most prominent of Freud’s followers who eventually split from their mentor (see Chapter 11).

Freud’s ideas came from the patients he treated and, even more importantly, from his observations of the workings of his own mind. This is something the psychoanalytic approach has in common with the humanistic approach, which is considered later in this book (see Chapter 12). For both psychoanalysts and humanists, the first step in studying psychology is to try to understand your own mind. An essential part of traditional psychoanalytic training is being psychoanalyzed oneself.

Freud’s ideas were influenced by the time and place in which he lived and by the patients he saw. Most were well-to-do women, a surprising number of whom reported having been sexually abused by their fathers when they were young. Freud at first believed them and saw this early abuse as a common source of long-lasting trauma. Later he changed his mind, and decided that these memories were fantasies that, for psychological reasons, had come to seem real.4

Now that you have met Freud, let us turn to the basics of the theory he developed.

The first and most fundamental assumption of the psychoanalytic approach is psychic determinism (Brenner, 1974). Determinism, a basic tenet of science, is the idea that everything that happens has a cause that—in principle, maybe not always in practice—can be identified. The psychic determinism at the root of the psychoanalytic approach is the assumption that everything that happens in a person’s mind, and therefore everything that a person thinks and does, also has a specific cause. This idea leaves no room for miracles, free will, or even random accidents. If it did, the entire approach would stall at the starting line. The key faith (and that is really what it is—faith) of a psychoanalyst is that psychology can explain even a prostitute-patronizing anticrime governor, a moralizing compulsive gambler, or a male antihomosexuality crusader who propositions men hanging around outside hotels. All that is needed is diligence, insight, and, of course, the proper psychoanalytic framework.

The nondeterministic alternative would be to say something like, “He just decided to get a prostitute [or go gambling] of his own free will, despite what he said,” or, “He’s just inconsistent.” Those statements might be true, but they really do not explain anything, and you would never hear either one from a psychoanalyst. Only slightly better would be observations such as, “This governor is a typical politician doing what is popular in order to get elected, but whatever he wants on the side,” or, “The author of The Book of Virtues is simply a hypocrite.” These explanations also might be true, but they still fail to explain how a governor of a major state could be unable to resist behaving in a way that not only contradicted his publicly espoused values, but endangered (and ultimately ended) his political career, and how moral crusading can come out of the same brain as a multimillion-dollar vice. There must be a reason, and psychoanalysts would argue that the reason lies somewhere in the structure and dynamics of personality. The trick is to find it.

A second key assumption of psychoanalysis is that the mind has an internal structure made of parts that can function independently of and, in some cases, in conflict with each other. We saw in Chapter 8 that this assumption is consistent with what is now known about brain function, but it is important to remember the distinction between the mind and the brain: The brain is a physical organ, whereas the mind is the psychological result of what the brain and the rest of the body do.

Psychoanalytic theory sees the mind as divided into three parts, which will probably sound familiar to you. They are usually given the Latinized labels id, ego, and superego. These terms pertain to the irrational and emotional part of the mind, the rational part of the mind, and the moral part of the mind, respectively.6

The independence of these three mental structures can raise interesting problems. The id of the governor of New York compelled him to seek out prostitutes even while his superego condemned the activity. The Book of Virtues excoriates a long list of vices that strangely omits gambling. The Oklahoma church official sought out male prostitutes at the same time he publicly denounced homosexuality. In all of these cases, the ego—the rational part of the mind—doesn’t seem to have been very effective at its job, which is to manage the crossfire between competing psychological forces.

Modern research in biological and cognitive psychology has not found that the mind is actually divided neatly into three parts. However, both kinds of research do support the idea that the mind includes separate and independent structures that process different thoughts and motivations simultaneously (Gazzaniga, Ivry, & Mangun, 1998; Rumelhart, McClelland, & The PDP Research Group, 1986; Shaver & Mikulincer, 2005). So while the three parts of the mind might not exist exactly as Freud envisioned them, it is plausible to consider the mind as containing many voices, not just one, and that they might not all be saying the same thing. They might even be arguing with each other.

Because the mind is divided into distinct and independent parts, it can conflict with itself, as we saw in the cases of the governor, the moralist, and the church official. But psychic conflict is not always so dramatic. Let’s assume, for example, that at this moment your id wants ice cream, but your superego thinks you don’t deserve it because you haven’t studied all week. It might fall to your ego to formulate a compromise: You get to have ice cream after you have finished reading this chapter.

The idea of compromise formation is a key tenet of modern psychoanalytic thought. The ego’s main job, psychoanalysts now believe, is to find a middle course between the competing demands of motivation, morality, and practicality, and also among the many things a person wants at the same time. (Ego psychology will be considered again in Chapter 11.) The result of the compromise is what the individual consciously thinks and actually does (Westen, 1998). If the governor’s and the church official’s egos had been more effective, they might have been able to find some kind of middle ground between their sexual motivations and their morality. The ego of The Book of Virtues author failed him by leaving him in the awkward position of campaigning sternly against all modern vices except one. Without reasonable internal compromises, these individuals were left to flail between strong and contradictory impulses—first one way, and then the other—with disastrous results.

The final key assumption of the psychoanalytic approach is that the apparatus of the mind needs energy to make it go. The kind of energy required is sometimes called mental, or psychic energy, also known as libido, and only a fixed and finite amount is available at any given moment. Therefore, energy spent doing one thing, such as pushing uncomfortable thoughts out of memory, is unavailable for other purposes, such as having new and creative ideas. The principle of the conservation of energy applies to the mind as it does to the physical world.

Expressing anger typically makes a person more angry, not less, a direct contradiction of the original Freudian idea.

This principle seems reasonable, and Freud based it on the Newtonian physics of his day, but some of its implications have not stood the test of time very well. For example, the original formulation assumed that if a psychological impulse was not expressed, it would build up over time, like steam expanding in a boiler. If someone made you angry, then unless you expressed your anger, the associated psychic energy would build up until something snapped. This is an interesting idea that seems in accord with some real-life experience, such as the meek and mild person who allows himself to be pushed around until he bursts forth in murder. However, research suggests that it is usually wrong. Expressing anger typically makes a person more angry, not less, a direct contradiction of the original Freudian idea (Bushman, 2002).

There is another reason not to take the energy metaphor too literally. My first teaching job was at a college of engineering and science.7 One day, my class of future engineers was dozing politely through my lecture on Freud when I mentioned psychic energy. They immediately perked up, and one student, grabbing his notebook, asked eagerly, “Psychic energy—in what units is that measured?” Unfortunately, I replied, psychic energy is not something that Freud ever measured in units of any kind. It was just a metaphor that applied in some respects but not in others—and none too precisely in any case. At that, the students sighed, slouched back into their chairs, and no doubt privately redoubled their determination to become engineers rather than psychologists.

Modern psychoanalytic theory has moved away from Freud’s original conception. In current thinking, the assumption is that it is the mind’s capacity for processing information, rather than its energy, that is limited (Westen, 1998). This reformulation discards the idea that unexpressed impulses build up over time, but retains the implication that capacity used up by one purpose is not available for anything else. One goal of psychoanalysis is to free up more psychic energy—or computing capacity—for the challenges of daily living, by removing neurotic conflicts one by one.

Glossary

psychic determinism

The assumption that everything psychological has a cause that is, in principle, identifiable.

id

In psychoanalytic theory, the repository of the drives, the emotions, and the primitive, unconscious part of the mind that wants everything now.

ego

In psychoanalytic theory, the relatively rational part of the mind that balances the competing claims of the id, the superego, and reality.

superego

In psychoanalytic theory, the part of the mind that consists of the conscience and the individual’s system of internalized rules of conduct, or morality.

compromise formation

In modern psychoanalytic thought, the main job of the ego, which is to find a compromise among the different structures of the mind and the many different things the individual wants all at the same time. What the individual actually thinks and does is the result of this compromise.

libido

In psychoanalytic theory, the drive toward the creation, nurturing, and enhancement of life (including but not limited to sex), or the energy stemming from this drive; also called psychic energy.

From the beginning until the present day, the psychoanalytic approach has stirred more controversy than any other approach to psychology. Some people have even viewed it as dangerous. Objections to psychoanalysis change with the times. The Victorians looked at Freud’s emphasis on sex and sexual energy, and complained that his theory was “dirty.” We supposedly more enlightened folk of the 21st century look at Freud’s emphasis on what cannot be seen and cannot be conclusively proved, and complain that his theory is “unscientific.” The bases of the criticisms change, but in every age, it seems, a lot of people just don’t like psychoanalysis. And many don’t like Sigmund Freud either. It is interesting to see how often criticisms of psychoanalysis are mixed with complaints about his ethics, manners, and even personal life (Crews, 1996, 2017; Westen, 1998, pp. 344–45; more will be said about attacks on Freud in Chapter 11).

Freud anticipated these kinds of attacks and sometimes even seemed to revel in them. His response was not exactly self-effacing. He pointed out that Copernicus became unpopular for teaching that the earth is not the center of the universe, and that Darwin was derided for his claim that humans are just another species of animal. Freud’s own insights that human nature is largely hidden, and that the motivations that drive many human behaviors are base and irrational, were not ideas he expected would win him many popularity contests. He was right: Psychoanalysis bothers people.

Let’s bring this down to a personal level by considering two cautionary tales. They both exemplify the discomfort that psychoanalytic insights can cause, and the dangers of offering such insights unsolicited.

The first takes us way back to the time when I decided to major in psychology. I broke the news to my family in the traditional fashion. Returning home from college for Thanksgiving break, I waited for the inevitable question: “Have you decided on a major yet?” “Psychology,” I replied. As many others making this choice have discovered, my family was not exactly thrilled. After a stunned silence, my sister spoke first. “OK,” she said, “but so help me, if you ever psych me out, I will never speak to you again!”

Sharing your insights as to why your friends “really” did something can start serious trouble, especially when your insights are accurate.

Her comment is highly pertinent. Learning about personality psychology, especially the psychoanalytic approach, can produce irresistible urges to analyze the behavior and thoughts of those around us. It’s all part of the fun. The advice you should take from my sister’s warning, however, is to keep the fun private. People are typically not grateful to be analyzed. Sharing your insights into why your friends “really” did something can start serious trouble. This is true even if your insights are accurate; Freud thought this was true especially when your insights are accurate.

My second tale is an example concerning psychoanalysis. When I get to the part of my course when I teach about Freud, I try to do so as an advocate. I make the best, most convincing case for psychoanalytic theory that I can. Who knows what effect this sales job has on my students, but one person I never fail to convince is myself. Thus, for a few weeks each academic year, I turn into a raving Freudian. I become temporarily unable to avoid analyzing every slip, mistake, and accident I see.

I did this once, years ago, on a date. In the course of a casual conversation, my dinner companion related something she had forgotten to do that day. Being deep in the Freudian phase of my syllabus, I immediately offered a complex (and rather clever, I thought) interpretation of the unconscious anxieties and conflicts that probably caused her memory lapse. My insight was not well received. My date vehemently replied that my interpretation was ridiculous, and that in the future I could keep my absurd Freudianisms to myself. Gesturing for emphasis, she knocked a glass of ice water into my lap. Picking up the ice cubes, but still in a Freudian frame of mind, all I could do was acknowledge the vivid, symbolic nature of the warning I had received.8

The moral of these two stories is the same: Keep your clever analyses of other people to yourself! If you are wrong, it will make them mad. If you are right, it will make them even madder. As they say at stunt demonstrations: “We are trained professionals. Do not try this at home.”

Behind the many, sometimes contradictory, things that people want, Freud believed two motives are fundamental. The first motive impels toward life, the other toward death. Both motives are always present and competing. In the end, death always wins.

The life drive is sometimes called libido, also referred to as the sexual drive, which is what libido means in ordinary conversation.9 In psychoanalytic writings by Freud and by those who came later, libido receives a great deal of attention. But I think it is also widely misunderstood, perhaps in part because so many people are easily distracted by any reference to sex. In the final analysis, sex is simply life. Sex is necessary for the creation of children, biological interventions aside, and its enjoyment can be an important part of being alive. In this sense, libido is the sexual drive; Freud meant that it had to do with the creation, protection, and enjoyment of life and with creativity, productivity, and growth. This fundamental force exists within every person, Freud believed.10

Relatively late in his career, Freud posited a second fundamental motive, a drive toward death. He called it Thanatos (Greek for “death”). Although he probably did not mean to claim the existence of a “death wish,” he held a fundamental belief in the duality of nature, or the idea that everything contains its own opposite. Freud observed that not only do people engage in a good deal of destructive activity that does not seem rational—wars are a good example—but also, in the end, everybody dies. He introduced the death drive to account for these facts.

This drive, too, is sometimes misunderstood. Freud probably was not as morbid as his idea of a drive toward death makes him sound. I suspect he had in mind something like the concept of entropy, the basic force in the universe toward randomness and disorder. Ordered systems tend toward disorder over time, and this trend is inevitable; local, short-term increases in order only result in widespread, long-term increases in disorder.11 Freud viewed the human mind and life itself in similar terms. We try desperately throughout our lives to make our thoughts and our worlds orderly, and to maintain creativity and growth. Although entropy dooms these efforts to failure in the end, we may have a pretty good ride in the meantime. So Freud’s ultimate view of life was far from morbid; it might better be described as tragic.

The opposition of libido and Thanatos derives from another basic idea that arises repeatedly in psychoanalytic thinking: the doctrine of opposites. This doctrine states that everything implies, even requires, its opposite: Life requires death, happiness requires sadness, and so forth. One cannot exist without the other.

An implication of this doctrine is that extremes on any scale may be more similar to each other than either extreme is to the middle. For example, consider pornographers and the leaders of pornography censorship campaigns. The doctrine of opposites would claim that they have more in common with each other than either does with people in the middle, for whom pornography is not much of an issue. There may be something to this idea. Pornographers and censorship crusaders share not only extremism, but also a certain fascination with pornographic material—they agree that it is very important—and they also spend a lot of time looking at it. Those in the middle, by contrast, may have a distaste for pornography, but are not so excited by its existence to make its prohibition a burning issue, or to immerse themselves in it all day long. Or consider an antiprostitution crusader and a regular patron of prostitutes. They could not be more different, right? Remember the sad case of Eliot Spitzer? Or consider what happens when one person stops loving another. Does her new attitude more often move to the middle of the continuum—to “mild liking”—or to the other extreme?

The juxtaposition of the life drive with the death drive is also consistent with the doctrine of opposites. But the death drive came to Freud as a sort of afterthought; he never fully worked it into the fabric of his theory, and most modern analysts do not really believe in it.12 When I talk about psychic energy in the remainder of this book, therefore, the reference is to life energy, or libido.

Glossary

Thanatos

In psychoanalytic theory, another term for the drive toward death, destruction, and decay.

doctrine of opposites

In psychoanalytic theory, the idea that everything implies or contains its opposite.

PSYCHOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT: “FOLLOW THE MONEY”

In the film All the President’s Men (Pakula, 1976), reporter Bob Woodward asks his secret source, Deep Throat, how to get to the bottom of the Watergate scandal embroiling the Nixon White House.13 Deep Throat replies, “Follow the money.” He means that Woodward should find out who controlled a large sum of secret cash at the Committee to Re-Elect the President, a fund-raising organization for Nixon, and track how it was spent. This tip allows him and fellow reporter Carl Bernstein to crack the case.

Like money, psychic energy is both absolutely necessary and absolutely limited, so the story of where it goes tends to be the story of what is really happening.

When trying to understand the workings and the development of the human mind, Freud gives us similar advice. His version is, “Follow the energy.” Like money, psychic energy is both absolutely necessary and absolutely limited, so the story of where it goes tends to be the story of what is really happening.

This principle comes into play in Freud’s account of how the mind of an infant gradually develops into the mind of an adult. As we saw in Chapter 7, modern approaches typically view development as a result of the encounter of the physically maturing child and aging adult with the ever-changing tasks of childhood, adulthood, and old age. Freud’s approach preceded these, and follows the same basic structure, with one major difference: In Freud’s view, psychosexual development (as he called it) is the story of how life energy, libido, becomes invested and then redirected over an individual’s early years.

A new baby fairly bubbles with life energy, but the energy lacks focus or direction. As the baby develops into a child and then an adult, the energy begins to focus, first on one outlet and then another. The focal points for psychic energy define the stages of psychosexual development. You have probably heard of them: oral, anal, phallic, and genital. Each stage has three aspects: (1) a physical focus, where energy is concentrated and gratification is obtained; (2) a psychological theme, related both to the physical focus and to the demands on the child from the outside world during development; and (3) an adult character type associated with being fixated (to some degree stalled) in that particular stage, rather than fully developing toward the next one. If an individual fails to resolve the issues that arise at a particular stage, the experience will leave psychological scar tissue, and the issues will remain troublesome throughout life.

Oral Stage

A newborn baby is essentially helpless. It flails its arms and legs around. It cannot see clearly nor reach out and grab something it wants. It cannot crawl or even turn over. The lack of motor control and physical coordination is almost total.

Almost. There is one thing a newborn baby can do as well as any grown person: suck. This is no small matter. The action is complex; the baby must develop suction with the mouth muscles and bring food into the stomach without cutting off the air supply. In a full-term baby, the necessary neuronal networks and muscles are in working order at birth. (One of the many problems premature babies can have is that this complex mechanism may not yet function well.)

So now ask yourself, how does a new baby have any fun? It can’t involve the arms or legs, which don’t really work yet. The primary source of pleasure for a newborn, and the one place on his body where the newborn can meaningfully interact with the environment, is right there in the mouth. It stands to reason, therefore, that the mouth will be the first place psychic energy is focused. The oral stage of psychosexual development lasts from birth to about 18 months.

Let’s consider the three aspects, described earlier, for this stage of development. The physical focus of the oral stage, as just discussed, is on the mouth, lips, and tongue. Freud sometimes said that for an infant these body parts are sexual organs—another remark that seems almost deliberately designed to be misunderstood. Freud meant that during this stage the mouth is where the life force and primary feelings of pleasure are concentrated. Eating is an important source of pleasure, but so are sucking on things and exploring the world with one’s mouth.

When a baby begins to get control over her hands and arms, and sees some small, interesting object, what is the first thing she does? The baby puts the object in her mouth—often to the distress of the parents. Many parents assume the baby is trying to eat the ball, or the pencil, or the dead cockroach. But that is not the baby’s real intention. The baby’s hands are simply not developed enough to be of much use for exploration. When you pick up something interesting, you fondle it, turn it around, and feel its texture and its heft. None of this works for a baby because too many fine motor skills are required; putting the object in the mouth can be more informative and interesting, because the mouth is more developed than the hands.

The psychological theme of the oral stage is dependency. A baby is utterly, even pathetically, dependent on others for everything he needs to live. The baby is passive in the sense that there is very little he can do for himself, though he may be far from passive in demanding what others should do. The baby’s main psychological experience at this stage, therefore, is lying back and having others either provide everything he needs, or not. Either way, there is not much the baby can do about it, besides make plenty of noise. Which babies do know how to do. Another way to make the same point is to observe that, at the oral stage, the baby is all id. That is, the baby wants—full time—to be fed, to be held, to have a dry diaper, to be warm and comfortable, and to be entertained. Wanting stuff is the id’s specialty. Actually doing something about those desires is the job of psychological structures that will develop only later, along with the necessary physical competencies.

If a baby’s needs at this stage of life are fulfilled to a reasonable degree, then the focus of psychic energy will move along in due course to the next stage. Two things might go wrong, however. One is that the needs might not be fulfilled. The caretakers might be so uncaring, incompetent, or irresponsible that the baby is not fed when hungry, covered when cold, or comforted when upset. If this happens, the baby may develop a basic mistrust of other people and never be able to deal adequately with dependency relationships. The idea of depending on other people—or of being betrayed or abandoned by them—will forever make him upset, although he might not realize why.

A second thing that could happen is that a baby’s needs are fulfilled so instantly and automatically that it never occurs to her that the world could respond differently. The increasing demands—and slow service—the world later provides, therefore, come as quite a shock. Such a person may wish to be back at the oral stage, where all that was necessary was to want something and have it immediately appear. Again, any issue that comes up in the baby’s later life involving dependency, passivity, and activity might cause anxiety, though again she may be unaware as to just why.

Here we see the doctrine of opposites again. It will resurface many, many times: Any extreme childhood experience or its opposite will, according to Freud, yield equivalently pathological results. The ideal, Freud believed, lies in the middle. He was on to something. One recent study reported that children who grew up to be narcissists (see Chapter 6) tended to have been raised by parents who either were excessively cold or showered them with too much admiration (Otway & Vignoles, 2006). In the case of the oral stage, Freud would recommend that a parent make reasonable efforts to fulfill a child’s wants and needs but not go overboard by making sure every wish is instantly gratified, nor neglect the child so much that the child starts to doubt whether basic needs will be met.

I find it surprising and a little unfair that Freud gets so little credit for having been such a consistent and profound moderate. He disliked extremes of any kind—in behavior, in child-rearing styles, in personality types, in attitudes—in part because he saw both ends of most scales as equivalently pathological. Freud’s ideal was always the golden mean; his adherence to this ideal is one of the most consistent and attractive aspects of his approach.14

The adult personality type that Freud thought resulted from extreme childhood experience at this stage is the oral character. Both types of oral character share an obsession, discomfort, and fundamental irrationality about any issue related to dependency and passivity. At one extreme are the supposedly independent souls who refuse help from everyone, who are determined to go it alone no matter what the cost. To these people, no accomplishment means anything unless it is achieved without assistance. At the other extreme are the passive individuals who wait around, seemingly forever, for their ships to come in. They do little to better their situations, yet are continually bewildered—and sometimes angry—about their failure to get what they want. To them, wanting something should be enough to make it appear. That is how it works for babies, after all; they feel hunger or some other need, they cry, and somebody takes care of them. It is almost as if, as adults, oral characters expect things to work the same way.

I have a relative who, while in his thirties, was once described as the world’s oldest 16-year-old, which is actually an insult to many 16-year-olds. He is an intelligent, likeable person, but for a long time seemed utterly unable to connect what he wanted with what he had to do to get it. At one point, he announced at a family gathering that he had finally formulated a career goal. With some anticipation, we waited to hear what it was. He explained that he had thought about it carefully, worked out all of the figures, and decided that he wanted a job that paid $100,000 a year—after taxes. That would be enough to give him everything he wanted. “And what would the job be?” we asked. He seemed surprised by the question; he had not gotten around to that part.

Some students show a related attitude. At the end of the semester, they plead for a higher grade on the grounds that they need it. Often, they make an eloquent case for why they really need it. That should be enough, they seem to feel. The idea that attending class and doing the assignments was the way to earn a higher grade, rather than simply demanding it after the course is over, seems not to have occurred to them. Honestly, maybe it never did.

The reverse kind of oral character, the person who is chronically and pathologically independent, seems to be more rare. Yet, I have seen the same relative whom I just described disdain even the most minor help in preparing a cookout or fixing a car. Perhaps you know people who insist, “I can do it myself,” in the midst of utter failure.

Again, the ideal is the middle. A person who has resolved the oral stage accepts help gracefully but is not utterly dependent on it, and understands that people are ultimately responsible for their own outcomes.

Anal Stage

The glory of life at the oral stage is that you do not have to do anything. Because you cannot take care of yourself, you are not expected to. You do and express whatever you feel like, whatever you can, whenever you want. Well and truly, this is too good to last.

Many breast-feeding mothers have had the experience of their baby, sucking away, suddenly trying out his new teeth with a good, strong bite. You can imagine how mom reacts: She yells, “Yow!” or something stronger, and instantly pulls the baby off. And you know how the baby reacts: with outrage, anger, frustration, and maybe even fear, if mom yelled loudly enough. Her reaction comes as a rude shock: What do you mean—I can’t bite when I feel like it? Moreover, the baby quickly discovers that until he can muster enough self-control to stop biting, the good stuff will fail to be forthcoming. This experience marks a dark day. Life pretty much goes downhill from then on.

The demands of the world escalate rapidly. The child is expected to do some things for herself—to start to control her emotions, for example. As the child begins to understand language, she is expected to follow orders. She learns the word no—a new and alarming concept. And—something that famously got Freud’s attention—the child must learn to control her bowels and processes of elimination. Toilet training begins.

From all of this, the child begins to develop a new psychological structure: the ego. The ego’s job is to mediate between what the child wants and what is actually possible. It is the rudimentary ego that must figure out that breast feeding will continue only as long as biting ceases. It is through painful lessons like this that the ego typically begins to develop a wide range of capabilities to rationally control the rest of the mind.

The physical focus of the anal stage is on the anus and associated organs of elimination. Learning the sensations of “having to go” and dealing with them appropriately are important tasks. Freud and others pointed out that a good deal of everyday language seems to reveal an emotional resonance with the processes and products of elimination. This includes not only many standard insults and expletives with which I suspect you are familiar, but also descriptions of some people, anal characters as it turns out, as “uptight,” and the common advice to “let it all out,” which suggests relaxing one’s self-control and acting “naturally.”

But I am going to bend Freud a bit here, to be more consistent with the story of development that was discussed in Chapter 7, and also in the direction of Eriksonian theory, which will be summarized in Chapter 11. I think the classic theory places a misleading degree of emphasis on literal defecation and its supposed physical pleasures. Toilet training is an important period of life and seems to be the source of some powerful symbolic language. But it is just one example among many increasing demands for obedience and self-control that begin around the age of 18 months. As the child develops the capacity for bowel control, the parents, There is a lot to learn at the anal stage, and things do not always go smoothly. Typically, a child will try to figure out just how much power the authority figures around him really have to make him do their bidding, as opposed to how much he gets to decide. The child does this by testing the parents, experimenting to find the boundaries of what he can get away with. What happens if the child pulls the cat’s tail after being told not to? If the parents say, “No more cookies,” what happens if the child sneaks one anyway? In the folklore of parenthood, this testing stage is known as the “terrible twos.”Two things might go wrong at this point. As always in psychoanalytic thinking, the two possible mistakes are polar opposites, and the ideal is in the middle. Unreasonable expectations can be traumatic. If parents insistently make demands that the child is not capable of meeting—for example, that the child always obey, never cry, or hold her bowels longer than physical capability allows—the result can be psychological trauma with long-lasting consequences. And the opposite—never demanding that the child control her urges, neglecting toilet training altogether—can be equally problematic.

As at every stage, the child’s developmental task is to figure out what is going on in the world and how to deal with it. At the anal stage, the child must figure out how, and how much, to control himself and how, and how much, to be controlled by those in authority. This is a thorny issue, even for an adult. A child will never work it through sufficiently if the environment is too harsh or too lenient.

Research that followed a sample of children from childhood into late adolescence basically confirmed this Freudian view. Their parents were classified as authoritarian (extremely rigid and obedience oriented), permissive (weak and lacking control), or authoritative (compromising between firm control and their children’s freedom). As Freud would have anticipated, it was the authoritative parents—the ones in the middle—whose children fared the best later in life (Baumrind, 1971, 1991).16

Psychological mishaps at the anal stage produce the adult anal character, whose personality becomes organized around control issues. One way is to become obsessive, compulsive, stingy, orderly, rigid, and subservient to authority. This kind of person tries to control every aspect of her life and often seems equally happy to submit to an authority figure. She cannot tolerate disorganization or ambiguity. Long ago, one of my professors of abnormal psychology said he had a one-item test for detecting an anal character: Go to that person’s room, and you will see on the desk a row of pencils or other items in a perfectly straight line. Reach over casually, turn one of the pencils at a 90° angle, and start timing. If within two minutes the person has moved the pencil back, she is an anal character. This test is too facile, of course, but you get the idea.

The other type of anal character is exactly the opposite. This person may have little or no self-control, be unable to do anything on time or because it is necessary, be chaotic and disorganized, and have a compulsive need to defy authority. Freud saw both types of anal characters as psychologically equivalent and further believed that such individuals would more likely flip from one anal extreme to the other than attain the ideal position in the middle.

There is a lame joke dating from the 1970s that expresses this equivalence:

Q: Why did the short-hair cross the road?

A: Because somebody told him to.

Q: Why did the long-hair cross the road?

A: Because somebody told him not to.17

Freud’s point is similar. If you are rigidly, obsessively organized and obedient, you have a problem. If you are completely disorganized and disobedient because you cannot help it, you also have a problem—in fact, you have the same problem. Self-control and relations with authority should be means to an end, not ends in themselves. The ideal is to determine how and to what degree to organize your life and how you relate to authority, in order to achieve your goals.

Phallic Stage

The next stage of development begins with a realization: Boys and girls are different. According to psychoanalytic theory, this fact begins to sink in at around the age of 3 1/2 to 4 years, and dominates psychosexual development until about age 7.

The specific realization that occurs at the phallic stage for both sexes, according to Freud, is that boys have a penis and girls do not—hence the name of the stage.18 The basic task of the phallic stage is coming to terms with sex differences and all that they imply. According to Freud, boys, having noticed that girls do not have penises, wonder what happened and if the same thing could happen to them. Girls just wonder what happened.Hard-core adherents of orthodox psychoanalysis launch into a pretty complicated story at this point. The story is based on the Greek myth of Oedipus, the man who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. According to the psychoanalytic version of the Oedipal crisis, young boys fall physically as well as emotionally in love with their mothers, and because of this they understandably fear their fathers’ jealousy. The specific fear is that their fathers might castrate them in retaliation. For girls, this crisis is less intense, but they still suffer grief over the castration they believe has already occurred. To resolve this anxiety or grief, each child identifies with the same-sex parent, taking on many of his or her values and ideals, which lessens the child’s feelings of rivalry and jealousy that might otherwise reach a critical level.

The full story of the Oedipal crisis is rich and fascinating, and the summary just presented (which you may have noticed was exactly four sentences long) fails to do it justice. Nevertheless, I will not say much more about it here, in part because the story is so well told elsewhere. The best rendition in English may be the one provided by Bettelheim (1982). A more important reason for not getting too deeply into the traditional story of the phallic stage is that it has not held up well in light of empirical research (R. R. Sears, 1947). So, I will discuss this point in development in simpler and more modern terms.19It seems obvious that the realization that the sexes differ must be an important milestone in psychosexual development. It also seems natural that with this realization comes the awareness that one parent is male and the other female. I do not think it is far-fetched to think that children wonder about the attraction between their parents, and that they fantasize to some degree about what a relationship with their opposite-sex parent would be like. And, although this may push the envelope a bit, I even think it’s plausible that children feel guilty, at some level, about having such fantasies. The fantasies probably seem rather outlandish even to a child, and the child probably suspects, probably correctly, that the same-sex parent would not exactly be thrilled if he or she knew what the child was thinking.

The psychological theme of the phallic stage is gender identity and sexuality—the need to figure out what it means to be a boy or girl. For most children, the best, or most obvious, examples are their mothers and fathers. One way to be a girl is to act like mom, and to be a boy, act like dad. This can mean taking on many of the parent’s attitudes, values, and ways of relating to the opposite sex. Freud called this process identification.20

Related psychological themes of the phallic stage include love, fear, and jealousy. The adult consequences of the phallic stage include the development of morality, which Freud saw as a by-product of the process of identification; the values of your same-sex parent provide the beginnings of your own moral outlook. Another adult consequence is the development of sexuality—what kind of person you find attractive, how you handle sexual competition, and the overall role of sexuality in your life. The most important result of the phallic stage is an image of oneself as masculine or feminine, whatever that may entail.Additional identifications are possible and even likely. A child might take on the values and behaviors of an admired teacher, relative, religious leader, or rock star. In most cases, people identify with those whom they love and admire, but in some circumstances, individuals identify with people they loathe and fear. During World War II, inmates in Nazi death camps reportedly sometimes identified with their guards, making Nazi armbands and uniforms from scraps and giving each other the “Heil Hitler” salute. According to psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, who was an inmate at Dachau and Buchenwald himself, this seemingly strange behavior was an adaptation to deal with their profound and realistic fear of the guards; to become more like the guards was to fear them less (Bettelheim, 1943). I suspect milder forms of this behavior—trying to become more like the people one most fears—are rather common and one basis for the development of the superego. People sometimes identify with a teacher they hate, a coach who intimidates them, an older student who hazes them, or a drill sergeant or an entire branch of the military who gives them little but abuse. In the process, these characters become less fearful while the person becomes a little more like them.

Wherever they come from—and again, the usual source is the parents—the sum of one’s identifications makes up the third major psychic structure after the id and ego: the superego. The superego is the part of the mind that passes moral judgment on the other parts, judgments based on a complex mixture of all the different moral lessons learned directly and by example, from everybody one has ever identified with. When successfully developed, the superego provides a conscience and a basis for reasonable morality. But as always, the development of the superego is a process that can go too far or not far enough.

An overdeveloped or underdeveloped superego yields the adult type of the phallic character. A person who has developed a completely rigid moral code, one that brooks no shades of gray and no exceptions, may be a phallic type. So is someone who lacks a moral code altogether. An extremely promiscuous person might be a phallic type. So, too, might someone who becomes completely asexual. As always, Freud was suspicious of the extremes; the healthy place to be is in the middle.

Genital StageAfter the phallic stage, a child gets a chance to take a developmental breath and concentrate on the important learning tasks of childhood, such as learning to read, the names of plants and birds, arithmetic, and all of the other important stuff taught in elementary school. This latency phase is a sort of psychological respite to allow the child to learn much of what he will need in adult life. The rest period ends, with a bang, at puberty.

The genital stage of development is fundamentally different from the others in that Freud saw it not as something individuals necessarily pass through, but as something that must be sought. Adulthood is not inevitable; it is an achievement. Sometime after physical puberty, if all goes well, a person develops a mature attitude about sexuality and other aspects of adulthood. Freud is not explicit about when this happens; in some people, apparently, it never happens.

The physical focus of the genital stage is the genitals, but notice how this label differs from that of the phallic stage. Genital describes not just a physical organ; the word also refers to the process of reproduction, or giving life. The genitals, at this stage, become not just organs of physical pleasure, but the source of new life and the basis of a new psychological theme.

The focus of the genital stage is the creation and enhancement of life. True maturity, Freud believed, entailed the ability to bring new life into the world and nurture its growth. This new life includes children, but it also can include other kinds of creativity, such as intellectual, artistic, or scientific contributions. The developmental task of the genital stage is to add something constructive to life and to society, and to take on the associated adult responsibilities. In that sense, the psychological theme of the genital stage is maturity. And, as I mentioned, not everybody attains it. The genital character is psychologically well adjusted and—here comes the familiar word—balanced.

Early in the 20th century, Freud made his only trip to the United States. He was dismayed to find himself trailed by newspaper reporters who found some of his sexual theories titillating, especially after they had finished distorting them. Freud’s lifelong aversion to America and anything American seems to have been boosted by this experience. But the trip was not a total loss. At one point, a reporter asked him, “Dr. Freud, what is your definition of mental health?” Freud gave the best answer that anybody has ever come up with, before or since. The essence of mental health, he said, is the ability “to love and to work.”

The essence of mental health, Freud said, is the ability “to love and to work.”

The most important word in this definition is “and.” Freud thought it was important to love, to have a mate and family to care for and nurture. He also thought it was important to work, to do something useful and constructive for society. The good life, Freud thought, would always contain both. To do just one was to be an incomplete person.

Moving Through Stages

As we have seen, an important task while developing through these stages is building basic psychological structures. At the beginning of the oral stage, the newborn baby is all id—a seething bundle of wants and needs. As the baby moves into the anal stage, experiences of frustration and delay lead part of the mind to differentiate and separate, taking some of its energy to form the ego. The ego has the duty to control and channel the urges of the id. At the phallic stage, the child identifies with important persons, principally her parents, and the sum of these identifications forms the third structure, the superego. The superego is the conscience; it morally judges the person’s actions and urges, and sometimes tries to stop them.

Freud once used a different analogy: A mind progressing through the stages of psychosexual development is like an army conquering hostile territory. Periodically, it encounters opposition and, at that point, a battle ensues. To secure the ground afterwards, some troops are left behind. If the battle was particularly bitter, and if the local resistance remains strong, a larger part of the army must stay behind—leaving fewer troops to advance. Moreover, if the main army encounters severe problems later, it is likely to retreat to a stronghold at the site of a former battle.

In this analogy, the individual’s store of libido is the army. It encounters “battles” at each of the developmental stages. If the battle of the oral, anal, or phallic stage is not completely won, libidinal energy must be left behind at that point. The result will be fixation. The adult will continue to struggle with issues from that stage, and will tend to retreat there under stress. Such retreat is called regression. An oral character under stress becomes passive and dependent and may even revert to thumb sucking. An anal character under stress becomes even more rigid or more disorganized than usual. A phallic character under stress may become promiscuous or completely asexual. Victory, in this analogy, means making it through all of these stages to the final (genital) stage, with as much of one’s army intact as possible. The more libido available to enjoy the final stage of maturity, the better adjusted the adult will be.

Glossary

oral stage

In psychoanalytic theory, the stage of psychosexual development, from birth to about 18 months of age, during which the physical focus of the libido is located in the mouth, lips, and tongue.

anal stage

In psychoanalytic theory, the stage of psychosexual development, from about 18 months to 3 or 4 years of age, in which the physical focus of the libido is located in the anus and associated eliminative organs.

phallic stage

In psychoanalytic theory, the stage of psychosexual development from about 4 to 7 years of age in which the physical focus of the libido is the penis (for boys) and its absence (for girls).

identification

In psychoanalytic theory, taking on the values and worldview of another person (e.g., a parent).

genital stage

In psychoanalytic theory, the final stage of psychosexual development, in which the physical focus of the libido is on the genitals, with an emphasis on heterosexual relationships. The stage begins at about puberty, but is only fully attained when and if the individual achieves psychological maturity.

mental health

According to Freud’s definition, the ability to both love and work.

fixation

In psychoanalytic theory, leaving a disproportionate share of one’s libido behind at an earlier stage of development.

regression

In psychoanalytic theory, retreating to an earlier, more immature stage of psychosexual development, usually because of stress but sometimes in the service of play and creativity.