by Ruth Snowden
In 1886 Freud went through a period of depression and carried out extensive self analysis. He became very interested in dream analysis as a means of access to the unconscious. He coined the term ‘psychoanalysis’ in 1896. One of the earliest recorded case histories in psychoanalysis is the analysis of ‘Dora’, which was published in 1905 in a specialist journal.
4 The Interpretation of dreams
Dream analysis and free association became the two main therapeutic methods in psychoanalysis. Freud emphasised the central importance of dreams for several reasons:
They occur during sleep, when the conscious mind releases its hold and is off guard.
He had come to realise that previous methods were too authoritarian.
Dream symbols often disguised childhood sexual issues.
Freud saw all dreams as wish fulfilments. By exploring the hidden desire symbolized in a dream one could therefore begin to unravel a neurosis.
Freud said that each dream has both a manifest and a latent content. If the dream is analysed, a hidden wish fulfilment can be found lurking. He suggested that there were various mechanisms such as symbolization at work, which allowed the dream wish to be expressed, but in a distorted form.
5 Exploring the unconscious
Freud explored the workings of the unconscious by studying dreams, jokes, and parapraxes (Freudian slips). He suggested there were three states of consciousness:
The conscious mind is the part of the mind that is aware of its thoughts and actions. This is where all conscious thought processes occur.
The unconscious is the part of the mind that is repressed. Information here cannot easily be dug out.
The preconscious is where information is stored and can easily be recalled when needed.
Freud suggested that two opposing processes controlled normal human behaviour. The pleasure principle pushes people towards immediate gratification of wishes. The reality principle allows us to delay gratification in order to get on with everyday life. Freud used the word libido to describe the sexual drive, which he claimed was the driving force for most behaviour.
6 Sexual theories
Theories about sexuality and sexual development were a dominant theme in psychoanalysis. Freud was concerned with ways in which libido can become blocked or re-directed. He extended the concept of what was considered to be ‘sexual’ in order to support his theory that neuroses were caused by sexual problems.
Freud studied what he saw as being sexual deviations and drew several conclusions:
The sexual instinct has to struggle against various mental resistances.
It is a lot more complicated than people had previously maintained.
The sexuality of neurotics has usually remained in, or been brought back to, an infantile state.
The popular view in Freud’s day was that sexuality lay dormant until puberty. Freud challenged this view, saying that sexual impulses are present from birth. Childhood and puberty are fraught with sexual pitfalls which can lead to problems and sexual deviations in later life.
7 Going back to childhood
Freud said that personality development depends on a child’s progression through biologically determined stages, each concerned with a different source of sexual pleasure:
The oral stage (birth to one year). Sexual pleasure is obtained from sucking at the mother’s breast.
The anal stage (one to three years). The ‘potty training’ phase, when sexual pleasure is focussed on the anus and defecation.
The phallic stage (about three to five years). The genitals become the focus of sexual pleasure and the child starts to masturbate.
The Oedipus complex (about four to five years). The sexual focus shifts to falling in love with the opposite sex parent.
The latency stage. The Oedipus complex is suppressed and the sexual drive becomes dormant until puberty.
The genital stage. The Oedipus complex is finally resolved and the sex drive becomes focussed on sexual intercourse with an opposite-sex adult.
8 Seeking an adult identity
Freud proposed a new dynamic model of the mind, involving three main parts: the id, ego and super-ego. These are not physical parts of the brain but represent different aspects of the way we think. Conflicts between them result in anxiety and stress. Anxiety acts as an alarm signal that something is wrong; the commonest cause of anxiety is sexual frustration. A particular source of anxiety is attached to each developmental stage. Unconscious defence mechanisms arise in order to protect the ego from too much anxiety. Within reason these are healthy. An example is projection, when taboo urges or faults are projected outwards onto another person.
Freud said that instincts also affect different aspects of behaviour. Ego instincts are self-preserving and concerned with the needs of the individual; sexual instincts are concerned with the preservation of the species.
9 Freud and society
Freud said that civilization is necessary for the survival and comfort of the species, but it demands great sacrifices from the individual because instinctual urges have to be suppressed in order to conform to the rules. Living in society is therefore difficult and it is hard for people to be happy.
Freud expressed disillusion and bewilderment concerning war, saying that deep down human nature consists of instinctual impulses and therefore we can never totally eradicate evil.
He maintained that all art was the result of the sublimation of libidinous urges, likening the artist to a child at play. He was also dismissive of religious teachings, saying that they were unscientific and merely created in order to help people cope with the tensions of civilisation.
10 Psychoanalysis
In 1902 Freud was appointed as a professor at the University of Vienna. Academics were still reacting with hostility and suspicion to his controversial ideas but gradually a small following evolved into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. By 1909 Freud was well known internationally and he went to America to lecture. The first International Journal of Psychoanalysis was published the same year and the next year the International Psychoanalytic Association was formed.
Right from the start there tended to be arguments and rifts within the psychoanalytic movement, mainly because of Freud’s emphasis on the sexual. However, many influential thinkers have been inspired by Freud and have developed his ideas further. Methods rooted in psychoanalysis are still used by many therapists. Freud was a prolific writer and his style is easy to follow. His original case histories make particularly interesting reading.
Introduction
Sigmund Freud was a doctor who lived and worked for most of his life in Vienna, Austria. He lived from 1856 to 1939 and he is famous because he founded a new system of psychology that he called ‘psychoanalysis’.
Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behaviour.
Psychiatry is the study and treatment of mental illnesses.
Psychoanalysis is the system of psychology and method of treating mental disorders, originally developed by Freud.
The words all share the same root in the Greek word psyche, which means breath, life or soul.
Before Freud, psychologists usually just described and observed behaviour. Freud wanted to go deeper, to analyse and explain it, and this is why I find his work so fascinating. Gradually, he put together existing ideas with findings from his own studies to create the new system of understanding human behaviour that he called psychoanalysis. He also applied his psychoanalytical theories to his own medical practice in treating mental disorders. Freud’s methods were not necessarily successful in healing disturbed people, and most of his theories have since been disproved, but psychoanalysis has survived and evolved and is still the basis of various therapies used today in the treatment of neurosis and psychosis.
One of the ways in which neurosis and psychosis differ is in their severity. A neurosis is a minor nervous or mental disorder. A psychosis is a more severe and potentially disabling mental disorder.
The word ‘psychoa
nalysis’ covers the whole system of psychology that Freud gradually developed as he worked with neuroses and other mental problems. It has three main aspects:
It is a type of therapy aimed at treating mental and nervous disorders – this is the aspect with which most people are familiar. This therapy is based on dynamic psychology – a system which emphasizes the idea that there are motives and drives behind behaviour. Psychoanalytical therapy works with theories about the unconscious and the ways in which it interacts with the conscious mind. The method was originally based on a free-association process, where the patient is given a word and asked to tell the analyst all the ideas that it brings to mind. This helps the patient to recall repressed experiences that have been pushed out of the conscious mind into the unconscious, and so begin to work through neuroses. (For more about free association, see Chapter 3).
It attempts to explain how the human personality develops and how it works.
It provides theories about how individuals function within personal relationships and in society. These theories attempt to explain human behaviour in a very broad sense, going into areas as diverse as art, literature, religion and humour.
Dynamic psychology, also known as psychodynamics, studies the ways in which various parts of the psyche relate to mental, emotional or motivational forces, particularly at an unconscious level.
Freud’s work largely concerns the unconscious mind and the way its workings relate to neurotic symptoms. The idea is that the unconscious mind contains everything we are not directly aware of in our normal waking life, such as memories, dreams, suppressed feelings and urges, and also biological drives and instincts. Freud decided that the unconscious was the source of much of our behaviour and motivation. He did not invent the idea of unconscious mental processes – in fact, the idea had been around for centuries. As far back as Roman times the writer Juvenal (AD 60 – 130) wrote, ‘from the gods comes the saying “know thyself”’, showing that even then the idea was not new. (This saying was written up in the famous temple of the Oracle at Delphi.) But Freud was the first really to apply the idea in his clinical practice and to formulate theories about it, because he lived at a time and place where he was able to bring together many previous ideas. In many ways he was way ahead of his time – his passionate interest in the mysterious world of the unconscious is one that many people share nowadays and that I myself have explored in my work as both therapist and writer.
The conscious mind is the part of the mind that is aware of its actions and emotions. The unconscious is the aspects of the mind and personality that one is not aware of. These are not physical areas of the brain, of course: they are useful abstract concepts which help us to understand how we think.
Today it is generally accepted that unconscious motives affect our behaviour, and we are all familiar with the idea that our problems are often rooted in childhood trauma and buried emotions. But before Freud it was a different story. One of Freud’s own patients, the Wolf Man, a man suffering from a severe neurosis whose case is discussed later in this book, describes the agonizing world he found himself living in before he met Freud. On the one hand, ordinary people focused only on his emotional state and thought he was ridiculously over-reacting to everything. On the other hand, the endless succession of doctors whom he trailed to visit scarcely gave any attention to his emotional state, because for them it was just an unimportant by-product of a physical abnormality in the brain. Meeting Freud, and hearing about his new ideas about the human psyche and the existence of the unconscious, was a revelation to him. Most importantly, he felt validated as a human being rather than simply being labelled as ‘sick’. Freud recognized the fact that there is no clear distinction between being ‘healthy’ and being ‘sick’, and treated his patients as intelligent people who were struggling to recover.
One of the most interesting aspects of Freud’s work – and one to which he gave great emphasis – was his study of dreams and the ways in which they can give us messages from the unconscious. Again, this was by no means a new idea – since as far back as Biblical times people have been recording their dreams and taking note of their messages. But Freud worked systematically with both his own dreams and those of his patients, gradually building up the beginnings of a language of dreams and the fantasy world of the unconscious. Freud emphasized the idea that buried emotions often surface in disguised forms during dreaming, and that working with recalled dreams can help to unearth these buried feelings. Today, dreams are widely used in many different kinds of psychotherapy. I have been deeply interested in them myself since I was a small child and I have kept a dream diary for many years. My own dreams have always been vivid, colourful and prolific, but in my work as a therapist I have been surprised to discover that not everyone has such a rich and varied dream life.
Freud developed his theories at a time when scientists were beginning to discover how our physical reality is constructed of smaller particles, such as atoms and electrons. Scientific thinking tended to take a very reductionist stance – breaking everything down into its smallest possible parts in order to find out what it is made of and how it works. Similarly, Freud always tried to reduce everything down to what he saw as hard facts, claiming that psychoanalysis always looked at the world in a very scientific way. In actual fact, many of his ideas are impossible to test scientifically; his theories were formed from experiences with a very small sample of middle-class patients and would not stand up to scientific scrutiny today.
However, psychoanalysis soon acquired a huge following – the rigid ‘scientific’ emphasis appealed to people who wanted to be seen as ‘realists’. Like any great leader, Freud’s huge self-confidence gave him an air of authority. Before long, a psychoanalytic movement had grown that offered great status to those who belonged to it, and poured scorn on those who challenged it. Indeed, Freud had many critics and his ideas have waxed and waned in popularity ever since. But he undoubtedly changed the way people look at human behaviour, and his influence was so important that there are now hundreds of different forms of psychotherapy.
Freud’s work with the unconscious made people begin to look at themselves more honestly and consider what really goes on under the surface. It was Freud who first promoted the idea that giving people plenty of time and really listening to them talking about their problems could help them towards self-understanding. Nowadays this seems really obvious. Although psychoanalysis didn’t really prove to be any more or less effective than any of the subsequent methods of psychological therapy, in many cases it enabled people to move on, to some extent, from unhelpful or damaging ways of thinking and behaving. Of course, many of Freud’s ideas have proved to be wrong in the hundred or more years that have followed, but they did have a huge influence on modern thought and many of his ideas have been absorbed into everyday life. For example, everyone knows what we mean by a ‘Freudian slip’, or an ‘anally retentive person’.
Freud said that we have many inner motives for our behaviour, and that these are mostly sexual. In fact, he was one of the prime thinkers who helped to make the Victorian prudish attitude to sex a thing of the past. His new theories that sexuality had a part to play in the formation of neuroses caused an enormous uproar at the time, because sex simply was not a topic for open discussion. Nowadays, Freud is often ridiculed for seeming to have claimed that absolutely everything in our minds is sexual. In actual fact, he realized that not everything could be about sex – otherwise neurotic people would not have to struggle to suppress sexual feelings. Freud gradually developed new theories about other motives for our behaviour, such as power or aggression.
Not only did Freud make people look more closely at entrenched beliefs about sex: he also made them more aware of children’s emotional needs. In Freud’s day, children were ‘to be seen and not heard’, and were often emotionally neglected. Freud’s studies of neurotic patients led him to believe that neurosis often arose as a result of traumatic experiences in childhood. This seems obvious to us now,
because children today are seen as real human beings with their own needs and feelings, but Freud was a major pioneer of this school of thought.
As Freud’s theories achieved wider acceptance and his ideas began to be absorbed into everyday thinking, they soon began to produce some negative effects too, because the idea of hidden motives caught on. For example, an unselfish person might be seen as secretly indulging in self-punishment, while celibacy might be seen as hiding a fear of sex, or even a nasty perversion of some sort.
Freud had a lively and enquiring mind; he was a skilled physician and scientist; he was also a prolific writer and very good at explaining his ideas in words. All this meant that he acquired many followers and his work has had far-reaching effects. His theories have led to a lot of controversy and debate, and people who pour scorn on his ideas today often make the mistake of taking his ideas out of the context of the period of history in which he lived. Looked at in this light, we can begin to understand that he was a highly gifted and original thinker, and that from his work many new divergent strands of psychology and psychotherapy have developed. This book aims to provide a simple introduction to some of Freud’s original ideas, as well as a glimpse into the life of the man himself.
* * *