Summary of Psychoanalytic Theory

1. Summary of Psychoanalytic Theory “Dream Interpretation—Simplified” Everything’s either concave or -vex, so whatever you dream will be something with sex. Hein, P. (1969). Grooks. New York, NY: Doubleday Books, p. 12.

2. Context • Psychoanalytic theory has its origins in the work of Sigmund Freud (b. 1856, d. 1939). As the “inventor” of psychoanalysis and the main author of its theory, Freud began, maintained, and guided (sometimes with a vengeance) a corpus of thought which is said to be cited in scholarly literature second only to Karl Marx and the Bible. • Freud was trained as a neurologist. In the late 1800s, two approaches existed to the study of neurology. The German school (which would have influenced Freud during his undergraduate medical training) emphasized anatomy, and the goal of the German neurologist was to describe function or dysfunction at the level of the brain and spinal chord. Conversely, the French school of neurology (which would have influenced Freud in the 1880s) emphasized clinical experience, and the goal of the French school was to describe clinical manifestations and the collection of symptoms (called a syndrome) exhibited by a patient. In reading Freud, one can see both traditions reflected in his work.

3. What you are and What you aren’t(The Nature of Human Beings in Psychoanalytic Theory • When simply placed on a good–evil continuum, Freud viewed human beings as being fundamentally evil. While this seems to be a harsh condemnation of the human condition, one must understand the context in which Freud developed his theories. Freud considered human beings to be primarily biological creatures, and he developed his theory of the mind with this placed foremost in his awareness. In his “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895/1966) he began the work of attempting to “represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles, thus making those processes perspicuous and free from contradiction” (p. 295). For Freud, humanity was first grounded in its animal nature, motivated by the drives for food, self-preservation, sexual release and destruction. Impulses and drives were to be tamed. The human being required direction and intervention in order to grow and function in society. Any other course would lead to anarchy—the unbounded and free expression of desire and instinct.

4. At the time when Freud would have been most influenced in his education, the intellectual landscape was teeming with the ideas (and their variations) of Darwin, Spencer (social Darwinism) and the “crisis of faith” (it was during this time that the dating of various books of the Bible was called into question, suggesting that it was more of an anthology than a revealed text) emerging at the end of the Victorian era. This transformation in thought, combining an emerging empirical view of science (one deeply influenced by biology) and Freud’s rejection of the Christian divinity of humans and all religion as an intrapsychic phenomenon, left Freud little place for the higher aspirations of the goodness of humans found in Marxism and other socialist tracts popular in that time.

5. Freud suggested two theories of the mind. The first, discussed in 1915, is commonly referred to as the topographical model. Freud suggested that the mind was divided into three layers, the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious. (Freud never used the term subconscious.) The conscious mind is that part of the mind of which we are usually aware. It is the sensory memory, the working memory, and our sense of awake awareness. Freud thought that the conscious mind was only a very small part of the mind. In contrast, the unconscious mind was a vast storehouse of memories, thoughts, feelings, drives and impulses. All of our experience makes an impression on the unconscious mind. The unconscious is understood to be just that—unconscious—out of our awareness. What is contained in the unconscious is, paradoxically, not known to the individual yet integral to her or him. For Freud, the unconscious was the “driver of the bus” and we (our conscious minds) were simply the passengers. Sandwiched between the conscious and unconscious is the preconscious mind. The concept of the preconscious was needed to account for the fact that there are some things we don’t carry in our conscious minds all the time, but are readily available from our memory.

6. In 1923, Freud proposed a new theory of the mind, one which incorporated the topographical model but added a more theoretical twist. The tripartite model suggested that the mind was composed of the Id, the Superego, and the Ego. The Id (tr. from the German as the it) was said to be the whole of the primitive urges and drives (e.g., sex, hunger, death, self-preservation), the uncivilized animal which was our fundamental nature. The Id was considered to reside mainly in the unconscious mind. The Superego was the mental structure that developed as the individual was exposed to, learned, and incorporated social norms and rules. This incorporated set of rules served to hold down (i.e., repress) the animal urges of the Id, resulting in an individual who was in control of his or her urges and desires, and maintained control in light of the social need to be in control. The Superego was considered to reside mainly in the conscious and preconscious minds. According to Freud (but not according to later theorists) the Ego was simply the by-product of the interaction between the Id and the Superego. In other words, our personality, our sense of self, was the result of the clash between the desires of the Id and the control of the Superego. While this limited view of the Ego is no longer accepted at face value, this conceptualization is revealing of how Freud approached humanity—conscious experience was the result of the interplay of other forces. Humans were not the masters of their own houses.

7. You . . . on a good day(The Nature of Healthy Functioning) • Healthy functioning for Freud was not all that healthy by modern standards. To understand this, some discussion of Freud’s model of psychopathology is necessary. Freud developed a classification scheme to differentiate categories of psychopathology. In Freud’s system, psychopathology was considered to be a structural issue. An individual’s character structure will have been shaped by the influence of mothering (remember, in Freud’s time and culture, the father was rarely involved in parenting young children) and the development of the Superego and its success in repressing the Id.

8. Freud stated, “If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s structure. Mental patients are split and broken structures of this same kind” (Freud, 1933/1964, p. 59). A patient was considered to fall into one of three categories: neurotic, perverse, or psychotic. The neurotic category was subdivided into obsessive, hysteric, and phobic types. The perverse and the psychotic categories had no further divisions. Modern psychoanalytic writers tend to refer to the perverse character structure as the borderline character structure (McWilliams, 1994). One became neurotic, perverse, or psychotic as a result of the presence or absence of care in the early years. For Freud, development in the first 6 years of life was crucial to future character and temperament. • According to Freud, healthy individuals were the neurotics. The neurotics’ prime emotion was guilt, and their inner experience was one of conflict between what they wanted to do (i.e., the influence of the Id) and what they knew they should do (i.e., the influence of the Superego). A “successful” neurotic was one who balanced the drives of the Id with the demands of his or her surroundings. Health was measured in how an individual accomplished this task. Freud proposed a series of defense mechanismswhich had the role of containing, manipulating and/or transforming the drives and desires of the Id so that they did not spill over into socially unacceptable thoughts and behaviours.

9. You . . . on a bad day(The Nature of Problems and Non-adaptive Functioning) • Following the description of the healthy neurotic, an unhealthy neurotic is unable to function because of inner conflicts between drives or desires and the dictates of the Superego. The perverse or borderline client was said to be experiencing an extreme split in his or her character structure, leaving her or him with multiple ego states, roller-coaster emotions, and stormy love-hate relationships, all held together by primitive defense mechanisms. • The psychotic client was said to be disconnected from the socially-agreed upon shared reality. Specifically, Freud suggested that a key to psychotics’ pathology was their relation to language. They did not use words in the same way as perverse or neurotic clients. This disconnected language was a key feature of psychotics, and later psychoanalytic therapists worked with the free association method to adapt it to work with psychotic clients. Interestingly, Freud did not consider psychoanalysis to be suited to the treatment of psychosis. It was the work of his followers that opened psychoanalysis to this possibility.

10. “So . . . tell me about your mother”(The Nature of Change or Corrective Action • To work within the psychoanalytic frame, one must adopt at least one basic assumption: “What you hear is not what is going on—there is always an underlying cause to the surface presentation.” Once grounded in this assumption, the psychodynamic clinician follows a clear set of guidelines for practice. The basic method of psychoanalysis involves four techniques: free association, interpretation, evenly suspended attention, and management of the transference relationship.

11. Free association was Freud’s alternative to hypnosis. Finding that he was not skilled at the technique of hypnosis (as it was then known), Freud discovered that by asking the client to simply talk about whatever came to mind, with as little editing as possible, he was able to achieve better results than when he used hypnosis. This instruction to free associate was eventually called the “basic rule” of psychoanalytic practice. • As the client free-associates, the counsellor listens for themes and issues, stresses and defenses, seeking the underlying pattern. The listening is done with an attitude of “free-floating” or “evenly suspended” attention. The goal is for the counsellor not to become fixated on specifics, but rather to listen “with the third ear” for what is really being said at a deeper level (Reik, 1948). As material relevant to the client’s conflicts arises, the counsellor interprets it. An interpretation is an attempt to make meaning of a symptom and is done in a specific way. A “good” interpretation will always link past to present, and unconscious to conscious. The following diagram may serve useful to conceptualizing change in psychodynamic psychotherapy:

12. Key Ideas

13. References Freud, Gustafson, J. P. (1986). The complex secret of brief psychotherapy. New York, NY: Norton. Kaplan-Solms, K., & Solms, M. (2000). Clinical studies in neuro-psychoanalysis: Introduction to a depth neuropsychology. New York, NY: Karnac Books. McWilliams, N. (1994). Psychoanalytic diagnosis. New York, NY: The Guilford Press. Messer, S. B., & Warren, C. S. (1995). Models of brief psychodynamic therapy: A comparative approach. New York, NY: The Guilford Press. Powell, R. A., & Boer, D. P. (1995). Did Freud misinterpret reported memories of sexual abuse as fantasies? Psychological Reports, 77, 563–570. Reik, T. (1948). Listening with the third ear: The inner experience of a psychoanalyst. New York, NY: Grove Press, Inc. Robins, R. W., Gosling, S. D., & Craik, K. H. (1999). An empirical analysis of trends in psychology. American Psychologist, 54(2), 117–128. Weiss, J. (1998). Patients’ unconscious plans for solving their problems. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 8, 411–428.