Intellectual Revolution: Freudian Revolution

Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) was the founding father of psychoanalysis, a method for treating mental illness and
also a theory which explains human behaviour. Freud believed that events in our childhood have a great influence on our
adult lives, shaping our personality. For example, anxiety originating from traumatic experiences in a person's past is hidden
from consciousness, and may cause problems during adulthood.

Freud's life work was dominated by his attempts to find ways of penetrating this often subtle and elaborate
camouflage that obscures the hidden structure and processes of personality. His lexicon has become embedded within the
vocabulary of Western society. Words he introduced through his theories are now used by people, such as personality,
libido, denial, repression, Freudian slip, and neurotic.

The Case of Bertha Pappenheim. The case of Bertha Pappenheim marked a turning point in the career of a young
Viennese neuropathologist Sigmund Freud. It even went on to influence the future direction of psychology as a whole.
Bertha suffered from hysteria, a condition in which the patient exhibits physical symptoms (e.g., paralysis, convulsions,
hallucinations, loss of speech) without an apparent physical cause. Her doctor (and Freud's teacher) Josef Breuer succeeded
in treating Anna by helping her to recall forgotten memories of traumatic events.

During discussions with her, it became apparent that she had developed a fear of drinking when a dog she hated
drank from her glass. Her other symptoms originated when caring for her sick father. She would not express her anxiety for
her his illness but did express it later, during psychoanalysis. As soon as she had the opportunity to make these unconscious
thoughts conscious, her paralysis disappeared.

Breuer discussed the case with his friend Freud. Out of these discussions came the germ of an idea that Freud was
to pursue for the rest of his life. In Studies in Hysteria (1895) Freud proposed that physical symptoms are often the surface
manifestations of deeply repressed conflicts.

However, Freud was not just advancing an explanation of a particular illness. Implicitly he was proposing a
revolutionary new theory of the human psyche itself. This theory emerged “bit by bit” as a result of Freud’s clinical
investigations, and it led him to propose that there were at least three levels of the mind.

The Unconscious Mind. Freud (1900, 1905) developed a topographical model of the mind, whereby he described
the features of the mind’s structure and function. Freud used the analogy of an iceberg to describe the three levels of the
mind.

On the surface is consciousness, which consists of those thoughts that are the focus of our attention now, and this
is seen as the tip of the iceberg. The preconscious consists of all which can be retrieved from memory. The third and most
significant region is the unconscious. Here lie the processes that are the real cause of most behaviour. Like an iceberg, the
most important part of the mind is the part you cannot see.

The unconscious mind acts as a repository, a ‘cauldron’ of primitive wishes and impulse kept at bay and mediated
by the preconscious area. For example, Freud (1915) found that some events and desires were often too frightening or
painful for his patients to acknowledge, and believed such information was locked away in the unconscious mind.

Sigmund Freud emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind, and a primary assumption of Freudian theory
is that the unconscious mind governs behaviour to a greater degree than people suspect. Indeed, the goal of psychoanalysis
is to make the unconscious conscious.
 The Unconscious Mind

The Psych. Freud (1923) later developed a more structural model of the mind comprising the entities id, ego, and
superego (what Freud called “the psychic apparatus”). These are not physical areas within the brain, but rather hypothetical
conceptualizations of important mental functions.

The id, ego, and superego have most commonly been conceptualized as three essential parts of the human
personality. Freud assumed the id operated at an unconscious level according to the pleasure principle (gratification from
satisfying basic instincts). The id comprises two kinds of biological instincts (or drives) which Freud called Eros and
Thanatos. Eros, or life instinct, helps the individual to survive; it directs life-sustaining activities such as respiration, eating,
and sex (Freud, 1925). The energy created by the life instincts is known as libido.

In contrast, Thanatos or death instinct, is viewed as a set of destructive forces present in all human beings (Freud,
1920). When this energy is directed outward onto others, it is expressed as aggression and violence. Freud believed that
Eros is stronger than Thanatos, thus enabling people to survive rather than self-destruct.
 The ego develops from the id during infancy. The ego's goal is to satisfy the demands of the id in a safe a socially
acceptable way. In contrast to the id, the ego follows the reality principle as it operates in both the conscious and unconscious
mind.

The superego develops during early childhood (when the child identifies with the same sex parent) and is
responsible for ensuring moral standards are followed. The superego operates on the morality principle and motivates us to
behave in a socially responsible and acceptable manner.

The basic dilemma of all human existence is that each element of the psychic apparatus makes demands upon us
that are incompatible with the other two. Inner conflict is inevitable. For example, the superego can make a person feel
guilty if rules are not followed.

When there is a conflict between the goals of the id and superego, the ego must act as a referee and mediate this
conflict. The ego can deploy various defense mechanisms (Freud, 1894, 1896) to prevent it from becoming overwhelmed
by anxiety.

Defence Mechanism

Mechanism Description Example

Repression Repression is an unconscious mechanism During the Oedipus complex aggressive
employed by the ego to keep disturbing thoughts about the same sex parents are
or threatening thoughts from becoming repressed
conscious.
Denial Denial involves blocking external events For example, smoker may refuse to admit
from awareness. If some situation is just to themselves that smoking is bad for their
too much to handle, the person just health.
refuses to experience it.
Projection This involves individuals attributing their You might hate someone, but your
own unacceptable thoughts, feeling and superego tells you that such hatred is
motives to another person. unacceptable. You can ‘solve’ the
problem by believing that they hate you.
 Displacement Satisfying an impulse (e.g. aggression) Someone who is frustrated by his or boss
with a substitute object. at work may go home and kick the dog.
Regression This is a movement back in A child may begin to suck their thumb
psychological time when one is faced again or wet the bed when they need to
with stress. spend some time in the hospital.
Sublimation Satisfying an impulse (e.g. aggression) Sport is an example of putting our
with a substitute object. In a socially emotions (e.g. aggression) into something
acceptable way. constructive.

Psychosexual Stages. In the highly repressive “Victorian” society in which Freud lived and worked, women were
forced to repress their sexual needs. In many cases, the result was some form of neurotic illness.

Psychosexual Stages

Freud sought to understand the nature and variety of these illnesses by retracing the sexual history of his patients.
This was not primarily an investigation of sexual experiences as such. Far more important were the patient’s wishes and
desires, their experience of love, hate, shame, guilt and fear – and how they handled these powerful emotions.

It was this that led to the most controversial part of Freud’s work – his theory of psychosexual development and the
Oedipus complex. Freud believed that children are born with a libido – a sexual (pleasure) urge. There are a number of
stages of childhood, during which the child seeks pleasure from a different ‘object.’

To be psychologically healthy, we must successfully complete each stage. Mental degeneration can occur if a stage
is not completed successfully and the person becomes ‘fixated’ in a particular stage. This particular theory shows how adult
personality is determined by childhood experiences.
 Fixation

Dream Analysis. Freud (1900) considered dreams to be the royal road to the unconscious as it is in dreams that
the ego's defenses are lowered so that some of the repressed material comes through to awareness, although in distorted
form. Dreams perform important functions for the unconscious mind and serve as valuable clues to how the unconscious
mind operates.

On 24 July 1895, Freud had his own dream that was to form the basis of his theory. He had been worried about a
patient, Irma, who was not doing as well in treatment as he had hoped. Freud, in fact, blamed himself for this, and was
feeling guilty. Freud dreamed that he met Irma at a party and examined her. He then saw a chemical formula for a drug that
another doctor had given Irma flash before his eyes and realized that her condition was caused by a dirty syringe used by
the other doctor. Freud's guilt was thus relieved.

Freud interpreted this dream as wish-fulfilment. He had wished that Irma's poor condition was not his fault and the
dream had fulfilled this wish by informing him that another doctor was at fault. Based on this dream, Freud (1900) went on
to propose that a major function of dreams was the fulfilment of wishes.

Freud distinguished between the manifest content of a dream (what the dreamer remembers) and the latent content,
the symbolic meaning of the dream (i.e., the underlying wish). The manifest content is often based on the events of the day.

The process whereby the underlying wish is translated into the manifest content is called dream-work. The purpose
of dream work is to transform the forbidden wish into a non-threatening form, thus reducing anxiety and allowing us to
continue sleeping.

Dream work involves the process of condensation, displacement, and secondary elaboration.
The process of condensation is the joining of two or more ideas/images into one. For example, a dream about a man may
be a dream about both one's father and one's lover. A dream about a house might be the condensation of worries about
security as well as worries about one's appearance to the rest of the world.

Displacement takes place when we transform the person or object we are really concerned about to someone else.
For example, one of Freud’s patients was extremely resentful of his sister-in-law and used to refer to her as a dog, dreamed
of strangling a small white dog. Freud interpreted this as representing his wish to kill his sister-in-law. If the patient would
have really dreamed of killing his sister-in-law, he would have felt guilty. The unconscious mind transformed her into a dog
to protect him.
 Critical Evaluation. Freud's theory is good at explaining but not at predicting behaviour (which is one of the goals
of science). For this reason, Freud's theory is unfalsifiable - it can neither be proved true or refuted. For example, the
unconscious mind is difficult to test and measure objectively. Overall, Freud's theory is highly unscientific.

Despite the skepticism of the unconscious mind, cognitive psychology has identified unconscious processes, such
as procedural memory (Tulving, 1972), automatic processing (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Stroop, 1935), and social
psychology has shown the importance of implicit processing (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Such empirical findings have
demonstrated the role of unconscious processes in human behaviour.However, most of the evidence for Freud's theories are
taken from an unrepresentative sample. He mostly studied himself, his patients and only one child (e.g., Little Hans). The
main problem here is that the case studies are based on studying one person in detail, and with reference to Freud, the
individuals in question are most often middle-aged women from Vienna (i.e., his patients). This makes generalizations to
the wider population (e.g., the whole world) difficult. However,

Freud thought this unimportant, believing in only a qualitative difference between people. Freud may also have
shown research bias in his interpretations - he may have only paid attention to information which supported theories, and
ignored information and other explanations that did not fit them.However, Fisher & Greenberg (1996) argue that Freud’s
theory should be evaluated in terms of specific hypotheses rather than as a whole. They concluded that there is evidence to
support Freud’s concepts of personalities and some aspects of his ideas on depression and paranoia. They found little
evidence of the Oedipal conflict and no support for Freud’s views on women’s sexuality and how their development differs
from men'.

References

Bunch, B. & Hellemans, A. The History of Science and Technology. New York, USA: Houghton Mifflin
Company

ACTIVITY (Freudian Revolution)

Guide Questions:

1. What are the key points of Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory?

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2. Why does Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory become controversial?

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3. How does Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory transform the society?

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