by Ruth Snowden
Some of these ideas seem like pseudo-science to the modern mind, but it is important to remember that the concept of the unconscious is of vital importance to modern psychoanalytical theory, as well as to other areas of study such as the study of dreams. For example, it was through Freud’s ideas that we began to realize that our dreams are meaningful and that they arise partly in order to help us deal with problems that are not being sorted out by our conscious minds. The idea of the unconscious is now so built-in to our cultural thinking that it is very hard for us to imagine what a huge impact Freud’s new way of thinking had on society at the time.
The pleasure principle and the reality principle
Freud suggested two opposing processes that control normal human behaviour.
The pleasure principle pushes people towards immediate gratification of their wishes. This is the tendency behind all natural impulses and basic urges. It is linked to the unconscious and it is impulsive, primitive and disorganized. According to Freud, it rules people right from birth and is basically to do with the gratification of sexual urges. At first Freud did not seem to consider other drives, such as hunger, when he was talking about the pleasure principle. Later, he effectively redefined the concept of ‘sexuality’ to encompass any form of pleasure to do with bodily functions. According to Freud, the pleasure principle is always the main motive force of the unconscious.
As a person matures and has to operate in a social environment, the opposing force, the reality principle, comes into play. It involves conscious, logical thinking, and it allows us to delay gratification in order to get on with everyday life. For example, although the sex drive is so strong, people gradually discover as they grow up that it is not always acceptable or practical to indulge sexual urges at the time and place that they arise.
Freud said there were two main types of mental functioning – ‘primary process’, which is governed by wish fulfilment and the pleasure principle; and ‘secondary process’, which is governed by conscious thought and the reality principle. Neurotic people found reality unbearable and so they escaped from it by means of fantasies and daydreams developing out of children’s play. In adult life, these were split off and kept free from reality testing, so that they were only governed by the pleasure principle.
Freud used the word libido to describe the sexual drive, which he claimed was the driving force for most behaviour. The reality principle causes libidinal (sexual) energy to be redirected into safer or more socially acceptable behaviour, for example some kind of creative work. This unconscious redirection is called sublimation.
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Insight
In Freud’s thinking libido is mainly a sexual drive, as it tends to be in modern common usage. Others, notably Carl Jung, have seen it more as a general, creative psychic energy.
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According to Freud, psychological problems arise as a result of the conflict between sexual drive (ruled by the pleasure principle) and survival (ruled by the reality principle). After a while, however, he changed his mind about the two forces being in opposition. He decided that they actually worked together, because in the long run both led to a decrease in tension. This decrease in tension was held to be the purpose of all behaviour.
Freud was often criticized for modifying his ideas in this way. He found this criticism annoying and pointed out that by changing their views people are often seen as fickle and unreliable, yet by not changing their views they are seen as obstinate and pig-headed. He said it was very tiresome to be criticized for holding views that had been modified long ago.
It seems typical of Freud’s earnest outlook on life that the pleasure principle is really all about avoiding pain, rather than about pleasures such as love, joy, fun and friendship! Freud always tended to view any powerful emotion as negative – something that needed to be expelled in order for a person to feel comfortable. According to Freud, a person’s character is determined by the way libido is channelled into more acceptable activity. If libido is blocked up without an outlet, then neuroses or other psychological problems develop. Psychoanalysis is all about finding out what urges have been blocked up and why.
BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
As usual, Freud tried to stick to a scientific approach in his thinking, following the idea current at the time in biology that living organisms always strive to achieve stability and equilibrium. But during his clinical work with patients, he gradually found that there were times when his theory that pleasure is always produced by a simple relief of tension was not adequate.
In fact there were various flaws in the idea of the pleasure principle. Firstly, Freud observed that in normal sexual behaviour there is often a tendency to put off the final orgasm for as long as possible. He observed a similar thing happening in small children, who would hold back a bowel movement, apparently because it gave them some kind of satisfaction to do this. If relief of tension were the only goal, then why should people put off that goal? Freud came to the conclusion that this behaviour simply prolonged the actual pleasure on the way to the ultimate climax. This was what he called foreplay.
Harder to explain was the fact that Freud found that patients who suffered from neuroses caused by trauma tended to keep on endlessly acting out the original scene in their imagination. Small children also do this in a more concrete way, by repeatedly acting out nasty experiences. This probably gives them some sense of control over the original incident. Freud noticed that horrific scenes of real-life experiences tended to surface endlessly in the dreams of traumatized adults, without any apparent disguise or distortion. Such dreams were sometimes so awful that the sufferers were frightened to go to sleep at all, which meant that the dream was apparently failing in its main function – that of safeguarding sleep.
Freud slowly began to evolve new theories as an attempt to deal with this problem, involving other instinctive drives such as aggression. But it was not until 1920 that he published a paper called ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, which discussed some of these ideas. He suggested that people could sometimes develop a repetition compulsion, endlessly repeating the same scene – some of his patients obsessively relived the same childhood scenes over and over again without ever achieving any progress. Sometimes this kind of repetitive behaviour fits in with the idea of the pleasure principle – anybody who deals with young children and has to read the same story over and over again will see this in action! But sometimes the repetition is obviously not pleasurable at all and actually causes the person to suffer. This eventually led Freud to develop the idea of Thanatos, the death instinct (see Chapter 8).
Parapraxis, the famous Freudian slip
Parapraxis is a general term for the now famous Freudian slip. The plural is parapraxes, and the word is derived from Greek words meaning ‘alongside normal practice’. Freud never actually used the term himself – he used the word Fehlleistung, or ‘faulty achievement’, meaning a slip that happens when we intend to say or do one thing and actually end up saying or doing another. He listed various categories of mistakes of this sort, such as slips of the tongue, forgetting proper names, mistakes in reading and writing and so on. Parapraxis is now used as a convenient blanket term to cover all of these, and in psychoanalysis a slip of this kind implies that unconscious wishes are being expressed.
Freud became interested in parapraxes because they occurred frequently in the lives of perfectly ‘normal’ people, and seemed to him to demonstrate that the unconscious was at work. His popular book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, is all about parapraxes. The title of the book is interesting in itself, because his choice of the word psychopathology – the study of abnormal mental processes – implies that Freud believed parapraxes to be symptoms of abnormality or disorder, despite their universal occurrence.
Freud identified a whole list of different forms of parapraxis. For example:
forgetting people’s names
forgetting something one intended to do
slips of the tongue
or pen
misreading or mishearing
losing or temporarily mislaying things
bungled actions and accidents
remembering things wrongly.
Freud said that none of these are actually innocent accidental mistakes. Like all mental phenomena in Freud’s view, they have a clearly definable cause. They all reveal the unconscious at work on a cover-up job again, rather like the dreaming process. Thoughts that have been repressed because they are painful or socially unacceptable are disguised by means of a Freudian slip. The slip is seen not as a silly chance mistake but as an unconscious mental act.
Slips of speech are often caused by the influence of something that is connected to the misspoken word by a chain of thought. Sometimes they occur when the person anticipates a taboo word coming up, or perhaps feels that the conversation is getting uncomfortably close to revealing his or her true feelings.
In fact, any kind of parapraxis arises as a result of two different intentions in a person’s mind that are acting in opposition. If they are analysed it can be seen that they reveal what the person is really thinking. According to Freud, all parapraxes occur in this way, although it is not possible actually to prove that his theory is true. Other psychologists argued that parapraxes are caused by factors such as fatigue, excitement or distraction. Freud admitted that this was true, but insisted that it missed the point – such conditions simply make it easier or more likely for slips to occur.
Freud could be very clever and persuasive when he wanted to argue a point, but he sometimes carried this too far: some of the examples of parapraxis that he gives in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life seem very contrived and convoluted. In some cases it is difficult to grasp how the unconscious mind could possibly have gone through such a lengthy process in the split second it took to produce the original slip of the tongue!
However, other examples that he gives in the book are much more succinct and amusing, and we can all relate to them, so it certainly seems that Freud had hit upon something in his theory. For example, there is the case of the American man living in Europe who almost wrote to his wife suggesting that she come to visit him, sailing on the Lusitania, as he had done himself. This would have been a mistake: the Lusitania had already been sunk by a German submarine during the First World War. The man had actually travelled to Europe on a ship called the Mauretania. Some more examples of parapraxis are given below.
FORGETTING PROPER NAMES
Freud gives an example where, try as he might, he could not recall a place name. In the end he had to ask his womenfolk for help. They were amused, saying that of course he would forget a name like that – the place was called Nervi. They were laughing at the idea that Freud had so much to do with nerves in his daily work that he had pushed the name out of his mind. Very often a wrong proper name will intrude in speech in place of the correct one. When this occurs the two are usually connected by a train of associations. The subconscious wants to forget the correct name because it has painful or embarrassing associations, or it may just be connected with a topic one has had enough of – such as the work example given by Freud.
Parapraxis in action.
Interestingly, Freud points out that forgetting names is very contagious – if one person has difficulty recalling a name it is common for a friend to struggle too.
FORGETTING CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
Many childhood memories are not consciously recalled by the adult. Freud observed that children frequently remember trivial events rather than important ones. He seems to overlook the possibility that sometimes children might seem to remember trivia because for them those are the very things that have assumed importance. Instead, he says that a process of displacement is going on – the child substitutes a trivial memory in order to conceal a painful one. Freud calls this type of memory a concealing memory, and says that they form a large part of our total memory bank. Some people can remember events from as far back as six months of age, but others cannot remember a thing before they were about eight. Freud says that this is particularly interesting because children of four are capable of quite complicated thinking and emotions, so it seems likely that some sort of blocking mechanism is at work, which reinforces his theory that neuroses have their origin in early childhood.
Freud says that it is very difficult to give examples of this type of concealing memory, even though they commonly crop up during psychoanalysis. This is mainly because in order to unravel the concealing memory you would have to understand the person’s whole life history. One example he did provide, however, was from a man who recalled a scene from when he was five years old. He was having difficulty distinguishing the letter n from the letter m, and begged his aunt to explain. The aunt explained that the m had ‘one whole portion more’. This memory apparently concealed the fact that he was also exploring the difference between boys and girls, and would dearly have liked this particular aunt to explain to him that a boy also had ‘one portion more than the girl’.
ACCIDENTS
Even accidents such as tripping over are parapraxes. Freud says that they show unconscious feelings being expressed in a physical way. We all know examples of people who seem to get themselves injured almost on purpose in order to be able to lap up attention. Conversely, we sometimes ‘accidentally’ hurt another person when we feel hostile towards them, or we may break an object such as a hideous vase because of a subconscious desire to get rid of it.
Freud gives various examples of bungled actions. For example, Freud forbade one of his patients to contact a girl with whom he was madly in love. The patient accidentally asked directory enquiries for her telephone number when he was actually trying to contact Freud. This shows that bungled actions, like other errors, are often used to fulfil wishes that a person is consciously trying to deny.
SLIPS OF THE TONGUE
These are very common and one can easily observe amusing ones in everyday conversation. Freud gives lots of examples of the common Malapropism, where sound confusion errors occur, such as the man who ‘entrusted his money to a savings crank’. Another example is the rather hard-up patient who begged him not to prescribe her ‘big bills’, because she couldn’t swallow them. This category also includes Spoonerisms, where parts of words are displaced, such as in ‘the student had tasted the whole worm’. The slip of the tongue can often be seen to be transparently covering up what the person would really like to have said.
FORGETTING FOREIGN WORDS
Freud said that we are less likely to forget completely a word in our native tongue than in a foreign language – a slip is more likely to appear instead. He goes on at great length about an occasion when he was trying to remember the name of an artist called Signorelli. He kept getting Botticelli or Boltraffio in his mind instead. His explanation for this covers about six pages in Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and involves a complicated diagram with such labels as ‘death and sexuality’ and ‘repressed thoughts’. It is all very interesting and ingenious, but somehow the arrangement seems rather unlikely. Is the unconscious really that desperate to conceal fairly trivial thoughts? And how does it work out such a complex series of connections so quickly? The problem with this type of analysis is that it relies mainly on the free-association technique. This method usually leads quite rapidly to the uncovering of supposedly significant, emotionally charged material, even if you start with an innocent, neutral word: but this doesn’t really prove that what has emerged was the original cause of the parapraxis.
SLIPS OF THE PEN
Slips of the pen, like slips of the tongue, are common and easily recorded. Freud tells of an incident when he came home from holiday in September, and on starting work wrote the date as October 20th. The explanation was that he was experiencing a lull in his work after the holiday period and had a client booked in to see him on the October date, so the slip was a kind of wish-fulfilment process, wishing that the date would hurry up and arrive.
Often, slips of the pen show up our hidden intentions
towards the person to whom we are writing. Freud gives the example of a woman who wrote a friendly letter to her sister congratulating her on her new home, but when she came to address the envelope she wrote an old address – that of a cramped apartment that her sister had lived in long before. When a friend pointed out this ‘error’ to her, she sadly admitted that she was indeed jealous and begrudged her sister’s good fortune.
ERRONEOUS ACTIONS
Freud says that since slips of the tongue are motor functions, we would expect to find similar lapses in other actions. He gives an example of this: when he used to visit the homes of his patients he would sometimes find that instead of knocking on the door or ringing the bell he would pull his own key out of his pocket and then stand there feeling rather silly. When he analysed these occurrences he discovered that they only occurred when he was visiting houses where he felt ‘at home’. Freud cites other examples of people telling him that they tried to open the door to their office with their own house keys. Losing one’s keys or using the wrong key is often a symbolic pointer to where we would rather be.
Erroneous actions may sometimes be advantageous. Freud gives an example of this too, describing an incident involving a cane with a silver handle that he had once owned. Through no fault of his own, the thin silver plate was damaged and he had the cane repaired, but this was not done in a very satisfactory way. Later on, while romping with his children, he used the cane to hook one of their legs – the cane was broken in the process and this allowed him to get rid of it without feeling guilty.