Freud Psychoanalysis Theory:

Definition (#f7aeae)

Important (#edcae9)

Extra (#fffe9d)

• Interested in the nervous system; electrotherapy and hypnotism.

• Suffered from depression, fatigue and neurotic symptoms in the form of anxiety attacks, before being dispelled by his own analysis.

• Freud took cocaine and studied its use.

• Cocaine calmed the agitation and eased the depression.

• Wrote “Interpretation of Dreams” (1897-1899); worked in isolation from 1895-1907.

Structure of Personality:

1. ID (Demanding child):

   • Ruled by pleasure principle.

   • It aims to reduce tension, avoid pain and gaining pleasure.

2. EGO (Balance between the 2):

   • Ruled by the reality principle.

   • It governs and controls the personality and mediates between the ID and Superego.

3. SUPEREGO (The judge):

   • Ruled by moral principle.

   • It includes the person’s moral code and strives for perfection.

   • It functions to inhibit the ID, to persuade to Ego for realistic goals. Rewards are feelings of pride and self-love.

Levels of Consciousness:

Freud’s 3 levels of mind:

1. Conscious:

   • Sensations and experiences that a person is aware of at all times.

2. Preconscious:

   • Memories of events and experiences that can easily be recalled with little effort.

3. Unconscious:

   • The container for memories and emotions that are threatening to the conscious mind and must be pushed away.

The Unconscious:

• Clinical evidence for postulating the unconscious:

  • Dreams.

  • Slips of the tongue.

  • Posthypnotic suggestions.

  • Materials derived from: free association or projective techniques.

  • Symbolic content of psychotic symptoms.

Anxiety:

• Feelings of dread resulting from repressed feelings, emotions and desires.

  • Develops out of context among the id, ego and superego to control psychic energy.

• Reality anxiety:

  • The fear or anxiety experienced in response to real threats or dangers in the external world.

• Neurotic anxiety:

  • Anxiety arising from unconscious conflicts and internal threats.

• Moral anxiety:

  • Feeling of unease or discomfort from facing a difficult moral decision, that challenges one’s moral principles.

Ego-Defense Mechanisms:

• They are normal behaviors.

• Help the individual cope with anxiety and prevent the ego from being overwhelmed.

• Deny or distort reality while operating on an unconscious level.

• Have adaptive value if they do not become a style of life to avoid facing reality.

Defense Mechanisms:

Development of Personality:

Psychosexual stages:

The Freudian chronological phases of development.

1. Oral Stage:

   • 1st year.

   • Related to later mistrust and rejection issues.

   • Results in the fear of loving & forming close relationships and low self-esteem.

2. Anal stage:

   • Ages 1-3.

   • Related to later personal power issues.

   • Inability to recognise and express anger, leading to denial of one’s own power and lack of sense of autonomy.

3. Phallic stage:

   • Ages 3-6.

   • Related to later sexual attitudes.

   • Inability to fully accept one’s sexuality and sexual feelings.

4. Latency stage:

   • Ages 6-12.

   • Time of socialization.

   • Sexual interests are replaced by interests in school and activities.

5. Genital stage:

   • Ages 12-60.

   • Sexual energies are invested in life.

   • Adolescents deal with sexual energy by investing it into various socially accepted activities; sports, art careers.

Erikson’s Psychosocial Perspective:

Psychosocial theory gives special weight to childhood and adolescent factors that are significant in later stages of development and that later stages also have their significant crises.

1. Infancy: Trust vs Mistrust:

   • 1st year.

   • If significant others provide for basic physical and emotional needs, infants develops a sense of trust.

   • If basic needs are not met, an attitude of mistrust toward the world is the result.

2. Early childhood: Autonomy vs shame & doubt

   • Ages 1-3.

   • A time for developing autonomy. Basic struggle is between a sense of self-reliance and a sense of self-doubt.

   • Children need to explore and experiment, to make mistakes, and to test limits.

   • If parents promote dependency, a child’s autonomy is inhibited and the capacity to deal with the world successfully is tampered.

3. Preschool age: Initiative vs guilt

   • Ages 3-6.

   • Basic task is to achieve a sense of competence and initiative. If children are given freedom to select personally meaningful activities, they develop a positive view of self and follow through with their projects.

   • If they aren’t allowed to make their own decisions, they tend to develop guilt over taking initiative and refrain from taking an active stance and allow others to choose for them.

4. School age: Industry vs inferiority

   • Ages 6-12.

   • Children need to expand their understanding of the world, continue to develop appropriate gender-role identity, and learn the basic skills required for school success.

   • Basic task is to achieve a sense of industry, which refers to setting and attaining personal goals.

   • Failure to do so results in a sense of inadequacy.

5. Adolescence: Identity vs role confusion

   • Ages 12-18.

   • A time of transition between childhood and adulthood. A time for testing limits, for breaking dependent ties, and establishing a new identity.

   • Major conflicts center on clarification of self-identity, life goals, and life’s meaning.

   • Failure to achieve a sense of identity results in role confusion.

6. Young adulthood: Intimacy vs isolation

   • Ages 18-35.

   • Developmental tasks is to form intimate relationships.

   • Failure to achieve this can lead to alienation and isolation.

7. Middle age: Generativity vs Stagnation

   • Ages 35-60.

   • There is a need to go beyond self and family and be involved in helping the next generation.

   • This is a time of adjusting to the discrepancy between one’s dream and actual accomplishments.

   • Failure to achieve a sense of productivity often leads to psychological stagnation.

8. Later life: Integrity vs despair

   • Ages 60+

   • If one looks back on life with few regrets and feels personally worthwhile, ego integrity results.

   • Failure to achieve ego integrity can lead to feelings of despair, hopelessness, guilt and resentment.

View of Human Nature:

1. Deterministic:

   • Behavior is determined by irrational forces, unconscious motivation and biological instinctual drives.

   • The first 6 years of your life determine your personality.

2. Libido:

   • A source of motivation and energy.

   • Includes the energy of life instincts, serves purpose of survival of the individual.

3. Death instincts:

   • Accounts for the aggressive drive.

   • Unconscious wish to die or to hurt themselves or others.

   • Managing this aggressiveness is a major challenge.

Therapeutic Goals:

• Increase adaptive functioning, reduction of symptoms and resolution of conflicts.

• Make the unconscious conscious.

• Strengthen the ego, so that behavior can be more on reality.

• Explore past to increase self-understanding and gain insight.

• Conduct a successful analysis in order to change a person’s personality.

Therapist Function & Role:

• Foster a transference relationship.

• Help clients to gain insight and understand “Why” for their symptoms.

• Build a relationship, listen, interpret and pay attention on resistances.

• Assess the client’s readiness to change.

Transference and Countertransference:

1. Transference:

   • The client reacts to the therapist as he did to an earlier significant other.

     • This allows the client to experience feelings that would otherwise be inaccessible.

     • Analysis of transference: Allows the client to achieve insight into the influence of the past.

2. Countertransference:

• The reaction of the therapist toward the client that may interfere with objectivity:

  • Not always detrimental to therapeutic goals; can provide important means of understanding your client’s world.

  • Countertransference reactions must be monitored so that they are used to promote understanding of the client and the therapeutic process

Therapeutic Relationship:

• Understanding the old pattern, connecting to current issues and making new choices.

• Working through the transference relationship.

• Therapist’s reaction is not equal to transference.

• Countertransference reaction as a therapeutic tool to understand the world of the client.

Psycho-analytical Techniques:

1. Maintaining analytic framework:

   • It maintains a particular framework aimed to accomplish the goals of the therapy.

   • Maintaining the analytic framework refers to a whole range of procedural, such as maintaining neutrality and objectivity, consistency of meetings, starting and ending sessions on time, and basic boundary issues.

   • One feature of psychoanalytically oriented therapy is that the consistent framework is a therapeutic factor.

2. Free association:

   • Client reports immediately without censoring any feelings or thoughts.

   • This technique often leads to recollection of past experiences and at times, a release of intense feelings that have been blocked.

   • The therapist’s task is to identify the repressed material that is locked in the unconscious and guiding them toward increased insight into the underlying dynamics.

3. Interpretation:

   • Therapist points out, explains, and teaches the meanings of whatever is revealed.

   • The functions of interpretations are to enable the ego to assimilate new material and to speed up the process of uncovering further unconscious material.

   • The therapist should interpret material that the client has not yet seen but is capable of tolerating and incorporating.

4. Dream analysis:

   • Therapist uses the “royal road to the unconscious” to bring unconscious material to light.

   • Latent content:

     • Consists of hidden symbolic and unconscious motives.

     • The unconscious sexual and aggressive urges that make up latent content are transformed into more acceptable content to the dreamer.

   • Manifest content:

     • It is the dreams that appear to the dreamer after being transformed.

5. Analysis and interpretation of transference:

   • Through interpretation, clients realise how they’re repeating the same dynamic patterns in their relationships with the therapist, with significant figures from the past, and in present relationships.

   • The analysis of transference allows clients to achieve insight into the influence of the past on their present functioning.

   • It allows them to work through old conflicts that are preventing them from emotional growth.

Resistance:

1. Resistance:

   • Anything that works against the progress of therapy and prevents the production of unconscious material.

2. Analysis of Resistance:

   • Helps the client to see that canceling appointments, fleeing from therapy prematurely, etc., are ways of defending against anxiety.

   • These acts interfere with the ability to accept changes which could lead to a more satisfying life.

Multicultural Perspective:

• Contribution to multicultural counseling:

  • Help clients to build ego and cultural identity.

  • Help therapists become aware of their own source countertransference, bias, prejudices, and stereotypes.

• Limitation:

  • Cost.

  • Ambiguity.

  • Blame clients vs. blame external factors (social, cultural, or political factors)

Application:

• Group work provides a rich framework for working through transference feelings.

  • Feelings resembling those that members have experienced toward significant people in their past may emerge.

  • Group members may come to represent symbolic figures from a client’s past.

• Competition for attention of the leader provides opportunities to explore how members dealt with feelings of competition in the past and how this affects their current interactions with others.

• Projections experienced in group provide valuable clues to a client’s unresolved conflicts

Limitations:

1. This approach may not be appropriate for all cultures or socioeconomic groups.

2. Deterministic focus does not emphasize current maladaptive behaviors.

3. Minimizes role of the environment.

4. Requires subjective interpretation.

5. Relies heavily on client fantasy.

6. Lengthy treatment may not be practical or affordable for many clients

Contemporary Freudians (Modern):

1. Distinguishes between past unconscious and present unconscious.

2. ‘Two-person psychology’ – importance of attachment in early life.

3. Transference - a new experience that has been influenced by the past, not just a repetition of earlier relationships.

4. Counter-transference – used to understand client’s unconscious communication.

5. Dream interpretation - associated with client’s personal associations to the meaning.

6. Meaning making of past experiences more important than what happened