Lecture

1. Lecture Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939)

2. Meanings of PA • Theory of personality • Theory of the mind • Method for analyzing psychological processes • Therapy school • Framework for analyzing cultural products • Worldview

3. Traditional Psychology and PA • Traditional psychology: Ambivalent attitude towards psychoanalysis.

4. Historical division of PA: • I. Pre-analytic phase: 1881 - 1894 • II. Analytic phase: • Trauma theories 1895 - 1899 • Topographic theories 1900 - 1922 • Structural theory 1923 - 1939 • III. Post-Freudian approaches

5. Freud's Early Life • Sigmund Freud was born 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia. • His family moved to Vienna in 1860, where Freud remained until the Nazis forced him to London in 1938. • Unusual family constellation --> sensitized Freud to family relationships? • Outstanding student. • Freud enrolled in the University of Vienna's medical school in 1873 • Outstanding teachers: • Franz Brentano • Ernst Brücke • Interest in mechanistic physiology.

6. Preanalytic phase: 1881 - 1894 • 1881: MD. • Charcot • Josef Breuer (Anna O = Bertha Pappenheim) • Free association • Training at Vienna's General Hospital: Studied under the famous brain anatomist Meynert (1833-1893). Freud: Diagnosis of localized brain injuries. • 1885: Meynert's support for a traveling grant to study in Paris with Charcot. • Lectured to the Vienna Medical Society about his study with Charcot and hysteria. • Freud felt that he became an outsider.

7. Preanalytic phase: 1881 - 1894 • Patients of hysteria were treated with: • Hypnosis • Cathartic method • Pressure technique • Free association • Free association: Encourage patients to let their thoughts run free, and to honestly report whatever comes to mind, even if it seems irrelevant, embarrassing or anxiety arousing. • With free association Freud discovered several new and interesting features of hysterical illness. • (a) A whole series of pathogenic ideas were often behind an individual hysterical symptom --> Overdetermination • (b) Memories seemed to have been actively (unconsciously) repressed by patients. • (c) Freud detected intrapsychic conflict in patients.

8. Analytic phase: Trauma theories 1895 - 1899 • 1895: Studies on Hysteria (together with Breuer) • Seduction theory • Studies on Hysteria (1895): First great classic of the new field psychoanalysis. • Freud and Breuer offered the hypothesis that hysterics suffer mainly from memories of emotionally charged experiences that have been somehow placed beyond the reach of ordinary consciousness --> pathogenic ideas. • Freud and Breuer referred to many hysterical symptoms as conversions (emotional into physical energy).

9. Continued • 1896: Freud published his seduction theory of hysteria in a medical journal article. • Patients recalled scenes of early sexual mistreatment, often by parents or other close relatives. • Freud: All hysterics must have undergone sexual abuse as children. • Symptoms function as defenses against psychologically dangerous pathogenic ideas. • Seduction theory --> Critical reception from medical colleagues, who stopped referring patients to Freud. • Freud himself soon began to believe that his patients' childhood seductions had often been imaginary rather than real. • Masson (see film) charged that Freud merely caved in to the medical establishment by disavowing an unpopular point of view.

10. Analytic phase: Topographic theories 1900 - 1922 • 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams • 1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life • 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality • 1909 Clark University • Conscious, preconscious, unconscious • Psychosexual stages • Development of psychoanalytic treatment

11. Topographic theories Interpretation of dreams • Manifest content: Consciously experienced content of the dream. Fantastic images, often unintelligible to the dreamer. • Latent content: inspires the dream (in consciousness only after free association). • Dreamers often resist the uncovering of this latent content (much as hysterical patients resisted the recollection of their pathogenic ideas). • The sleeping mind transforms latent into manifest content by means of dream work. • (a) Displacement: The manifest content symbolizes the latent content in a "safe" way with images less distressing than the latent content --> Defensive function. • (b) Condensation: Several different latent thoughts may be symbolized by a single image of the manifest content. • (c) Concrete representation: Manifest content typically represents latent ideas by means of concretely experienced sensations

12. Dreams: The Primary and Secondary Thought Processes. • Freud saw both dreams and hysterical symptoms as resulting from similar unconscious symbolic processes. • Freud hypothesized opposed modes of mental activity: one unconscious and associated with dream and symptom formation (primary process), the other conscious and responsible for rational thought (secondary process). • Infants are born with the capacity for dreams but have to learn how to think rationally --> unconscious mode of thought = primary process; conscious mode = secondary process. • Adults' dreams and hysterical symptoms: Secondary-process thinking is abandoned in favor of the developmentally earlier primary process. Primary-process thought plays a positive role in creative and artistic thinking.

13. Dreams: The Wish-Fulfillment Hypothesis: • Freud had concluded that all dreams represent the fulfillment of wishes. • Dreams: stimulated by latent wishes. • Symptoms: stimulated by sexual memories. • Seduction scenes reported by hysterical patients indirectly reflected sexual wishes rather than actual experiences.

14. Theory of Childhood Sexuality: • Patients, outwardly morally virtuous, secretly and unconsciously harbored sexual fantasies that respectable society would never tolerate. • Self-analysis: Free association of his own dreams and symptoms. • Unconscious hostile wishes toward his consciously loved father. • "Sexual" wishes regarding his mother. • Death = Absence. Sexuality = Any kind of sensual, physical gratification. • Freud concluded that anyone who honestly subjected himself or herself to analysis by free association would discover traces of similar wishes --> Oedipus complex.

15. 1905: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. • Freud postulated a generalized form of human sexual drive, present from birth onward. • Human infant: Born in a state of polymorphous perversity capable of taking sexual (sensuous) pleasure from the stimulation of any part of the body. • In earliest infancy: the mouth or oral zone predominates as the locus of this form of sexual gratification. • When toilet training begins, the anal zone assumes particular importance. • After children have developed fuller control over their bodies: Stimulation of the genital zone becomes a major source of sexual pleasure. Age of five: Oedipus complex emerges. • Latency stage (lasts until the physical maturation of puberty): Child enters a psychologically tranquil period suited for learning.

16. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy • Freud realized that a patient has not ambivalences toward parents or other significant people but also toward the therapist. • Transference feelings: Patients tended to transfer onto Freud, as the therapist, motives and attributes of the important people from their past lives who were implicated in their neurotic symptoms. • Enduring cure requires the uncovering and analysis of the entire complex of underlying conflicts --> months or years to complete. • Freud did not provide the quick and specific cures for hysterical symptoms he had originally hoped for

17. Metapsychology: • Freud sought to place his clinical discoveries within a broader theoretical context --> a general model of the mind (metapsychology). • Freud's earliest metapsychological theorizing: neurophysiological background. • Later: Freud decided to avoid neurological technicalities by expressing his metapsychology in completely psychological terms.

18. Analytic phase: Structural Theories1923-1939 • 1923 The Ego and the Id. • Personality theory of id, ego, superego • 1938: Vienna -> London • The Ego and the Id: Three different kinds of demands conflict with one another. • (a) Demands from the body itself (biologically based urges for nourishment, warmth, sexual gratification) --> instincts. • (b) Demands imposed by external reality; • (c) Moral demands impinge on the mind independently of the instincts and external reality.

19. Continued • Separate systems to process the three kinds of psychic demands. • (a) The id as the repository of unconscious powerful impulses and energies from the instincts. • (b) A perception-consciousness system: Conveys information about external reality to the mind. • (c) Moral demands originate from an agency which Freud called the superego. • Thus the id, the perception system, and the superego all have conflicting demands on the psyche --> compromise. • Psychic agency responsible for compromise: the ego. • Some of the ego's compromises --> Hysterical symptoms (maladaptive).

20. Defense Mechanism • Freud saw everyday life as dominated by ego compromises he called defense mechanisms (together with Anna Freud). • Displacement: Redirecting an impulse toward a substitute target that resembles the original in some way, but is safer. • Projection: Reversing unacceptable impulses by attributing them to someone else instead. • Intellectualization: An emotion-charged subject is approached in a strictly intellectual manner that avoids emotional involvement. • Denial: Believing and behaving as if an instinct driven event had never occurred. • Rationalization: Acting because of a motive but explaining the behavior on the basis of another, more acceptable one. • Sublimation: Channeling energy from an instinct to produce a creative and socially valuable result.

21. Civilization and Its Discontents • Love poses problems because of the possibility of losing the loved person through desertion, death, or other separation. • Few human experiences are more catastrophic than the loss of a loved person, and those who have once lost at love may be reluctant to try it again as the answer to the human dilemma. • World War I: Civilization is developing in a way as to increase opportunities for expression of the instincts of aggression and death, while decreasing them for sexuality and love.

22. After and beyond Freud • Freud left an extraordinary intellectual legacy. • For psychotherapists and psychologists, Freudian theory remains a major source of both inspiration and contention. • International Psycho-Analytic Association • Erik Erikson (1902-1994) proposed a series of psychosocial stages. • The object relations school places less emphasis than Freud did on the role of the instincts and more on the details of relationships with love objects. • Alfred Adler (1870-1937) • Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) • Karen Horney (1885-1952) • --> Freud had overemphasized sexuality.