Freud- The Key Ideas

by Ruth Snowden

  Later, when the little boy realizes that only women can have babies, he also understands that all women lack a penis, so the penis has in fact somehow been exchanged for a baby. Freud claimed that all children believe at this stage that they can either give their mother a baby, or else produce one themselves by giving birth anally. These curious theories perhaps serve to underline the dangers of trying to evolve theories about normal child development from working with neurotic adults! This is also the stage when the notorious Oedipus complex emerges.

  Fixation at the phallic stage could perhaps be reflected in someone who brags about sex and sees it as a way of gaining power over others. Such a person is not really capable of forming a proper relationship with the opposite sex.

  The Oedipus complex

  Freud formed his ideas about the Oedipus complex during the period of his own self-analysis. In a letter to Fliess at this time (dated 15 October 1897), he describes discovering that as a small boy he had been in love with his mother and jealous of his father. He soon decided that this was, in fact, an almost universal occurrence in small children and he came to view it as the central phenomenon of the sexual period of early childhood.

  The basic problem that arises for the child is that he has a secret passionate love for his mother which cannot be fulfilled for fear of offending his father. This passion cannot remain innocent, because the child soon comes to link his own sexual excitement about his mother with parental disapproval and his own feelings of jealousy. (More about what happens for girls later!)

  The Oedipus complex is named after a character in an ancient Greek story. Oedipus was the son of King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes. It was prophesied that Oedipus would murder his father and marry his mother, so to avoid this his father had him left exposed to die on the mountain soon after his birth. However, the baby was rescued and brought up by strangers.

  Eventually, Oedipus met his father by chance on the road to Thebes and murdered him in a fit of rage. He then went to Thebes and rid the city of a tiresome Sphinx who had been eating anybody who was unable to answer her riddle correctly. Oedipus answered the riddle and was rewarded by being made king, and so ended up unknowingly marrying his mother Jocasta, who was still queen. Eventually, Oedipus found out what he had unknowingly done, and blinded himself as a punishment before wandering off and living out his life in exile.

  Freud says that:

  At the height of the phallic phase all little boys of about four or five fall in love with their mothers.

  The boy expresses his desire in various ways, such as by announcing that he is going to marry her, or by insisting on climbing into bed with her all the time.

  He becomes very curious about her naked body.

  The boy wants total possession of the mother and so he becomes very jealous of his father and wants to kill him to get him out of the way.

  Because the father is obviously so big and powerful, the boy is afraid that he will be punished by his father castrating him. This fear arises out of the ‘castration complex’, which forms when the child is ticked off for masturbating and warned that his penis might drop off and/or has already observed the fact that girls seem to be ‘missing’ a penis.

  The fear of the father’s reprisal in this way eventually makes the boy abandon his mother as a sexual object. Instead, he now begins to identify himself with his potentially aggressive father and begins to look elsewhere for a sexual partner.

  The picture Freud paints for girls is even more bizarre and he is typically much less clear about his views:

  The little girl is also involved with lusting after the mother initially, but then comes the awful revelation that boys have a penis and she does not.

  The little girl believes she has lost hers and (for some obscure reason) blames her mother for this.

  The little girl cannot fear castration because she sees herself as already castrated. For her, the corresponding fear is the loss of love.

  She then turns to the father as a sex object, hoping that he will impregnate her. The resulting baby would partly make up for the lost penis.

  The conflict is gradually resolved as she turns her attention away from her father towards other men who will be able to provide her with a baby.

  Quite how Freud thinks this last stage happens in women is a bit vague and reflects the fact that Freud didn’t really understand women’s psychology very well. After all, he had arrived at his theories about the Oedipus complex mainly through his own self-analysis.

  The author’s Oedipus complex develops new complications following a visit to her grandparents.

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  Insight

  Freud didn’t seem to understand little girls very well at all, which may seem strange considering that he had sisters and then later on daughters of his own. But one has to remember that female psychology, especially in relation to sexuality, was very little understood in Freud’s time.

  * * *

  Freud saw the Oedipal conflict as being basic to psychosexual development. Failure to resolve this incestuous conflict would result in neurosis later in life. To us today the theory can all seem rather contrived, but this is partly because it has been overstated by Freud and he seems to make the mistake of generalizing on the basis of his own childhood experiences. However, if we look at the theory again we can see some elements of truth in it, for example:

  Small boys do sometimes seem to fall in love with their mothers, and may consequently get very jealous of the father.

  The same can be true with small girls and their fathers.

  The blinding of Oedipus is symbolic of the shock, self-disgust and self-punishment that may arise when dark inner wishes are revealed. Many people do feel guilty about their own natural sexual urges.

  Men and boys sometimes do fear castration or damage to the penis – the male genitalia are rather vulnerable after all. In the past, little boys were actually threatened with having their penis cut off if they masturbated, which would obviously lead to considerable anxiety.

  In Freud’s day, girls were seen as being inferior, and making a baby was probably one of the few important things they felt they could do.

  The latency stage

  According to Freud the feelings from the Oedipal stage are eventually suppressed and the sexual drive goes dormant from about the age of five until puberty. Up until now the little boy has regarded his mother as his sole property, but he now realizes that he has to share her attention with his father and with other siblings too. Probably because of his own childhood experiences, Freud seems to assume that these are younger siblings who have arrived after the child himself and claimed the mother’s attention. Similarly the little girl likes to imagine that she is the centre of her father’s universe, but sooner or later this illusion is also shattered.

  During the latency stage, the child gradually begins to free itself from this utter dependence on the parents. The Oedipus complex is slowly resolved as the child distances itself from the mother and reconciles itself with the father. During this phase, sexual impulses and behaviour are much less in evidence, although not entirely abolished. In fact, subsequent research has shown that this is not really the case; on the contrary, sexual curiosity, sexual play and masturbation all gradually increase. However, they may be concealed from adults if the child is not living in a permissive family, which may have been the case in Freud’s time.

  The genital stage

  The final stage in development is the genital stage, which is from puberty onwards. There is now a renewal of sexual interest after the latency stage, and a new object is found for the sex drive. If all has developed according to plan, the individual is now less centred on the self and becomes capable of a satisfying relationship with a member of the opposite sex. The Oedipus complex is now resolved and the natural aim of the sex drive becomes sexual intercourse with an opposite-sex adult.

  This is seen as the final stage, the completion of development, which seems rather odd considering the angst and confu
sion most of us go through in our teens and early adulthood! Really, however, Freud recognized this in pointing out that even in the most mature and well-balanced individual it is often possible to detect traces of the earlier stages of sexual development. In cases of neurosis, early repression leaves part of the person’s sexuality underdeveloped. In cases of perversion on the other hand, the opposite happens – a part of the sexual instinct becomes over-exaggerated and the person acts on it in real life. So this means that both neurotics and perverts have become fixated at an early stage of sexual development, but they have dealt with this fixation in very different ways.

  Freud insisted that psychosexual development was central to all social and emotional development. He argued that if one persisted long enough in analysis of any adult one would ultimately get past any current trauma to unveil repressed sexual problems from childhood. Far from being disinterested in sex, children were always exploring their own bodies and were also fascinated, aroused and frequently disturbed when they happened to witness adults having sex. Freud believed that his new theories about the way the child’s sexuality developed provided a model of the way the whole personality developed. However, he did not actually say that the whole mind was only concerned with sex, since if it were there would be no conflicts. A lot of the opposition to his theories has arisen because of the way he defined what ‘sexual’ meant. For him the concept had a much broader meaning than just sex itself; nevertheless, most people now feel that he overemphasized the sexual element of human nature.

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  THINGS TO REMEMBER

  Freud’s definition of what was sexual was very broad.

  He said that children had sexual experiences right from birth.

  According to Freud the phase of infantile amnesia hides early sexual experiences.

  Freud’s theories about how children developed sexually became a model for social and psychological development in general.

  Normal sexual development was seen as going through definite stages that were the same in all children.

  Each stage was concerned with a different source of sexual pleasure.

  People could get stuck at any stage – this was called fixation.

  Behaviour could also hark back to an earlier stage – this was called regression.

  Fixation and regression led to neurotic problems or perversions in adult life.

  * * *

  8

  Seeking an adult identity

  In this chapter you will learn:

  key features of Freud’s new model of how the mind works

  theories about how the mind defends itself

  in more depth about how the adult character develops.

  Freud’s new model of the mind

  In the previous chapter we looked at Freud’s ideas about how the adult personality develops and what can go wrong with this process. He also gradually developed theories about the ways in which the personality is actually formed and structured. For a long time he struggled with the problem of how neuroses arose. He knew that unacceptable or frightening ideas were repressed and banished to the unconscious, but where did this repression come from?

  The original simple division of the mind into conscious and unconscious did not fully explain what was going on, so in 1923 Freud published his book The Ego and the Id, which proposed a new dynamic model of the mind.

  * * *

  Insight

  A dynamic model is a simplified description of a system, emphasizing forces, motives and drives. It shows us how a thing works.

  * * *

  This was an attempt to describe the whole mind system, explaining how it works, and what are its main motives and drives. It involved three main parts: the id, ego and super-ego. These are not really physical parts of the brain but represent different aspects of the way we think, and so help to explain the apparent battle that goes on between different levels of consciousness. Freud didn’t see them with exact boundaries like countries on a map, but rather as merging into one another, like the areas of colour mixed together by an artist. They did not replace the idea of conscious/unconscious – as we shall see later, they can sometimes operate on both levels.

  * * *

  Insight

  Id: the unconscious part of the psyche that is concerned with inherited, instinctive impulses.

  Ego: the part of the psyche which reacts to external reality and which a person thinks of as the ‘self’.

  Super-ego: the part of the psyche that acts like an ‘inner parent’, giving us a conscience and responding to social rules.

  * * *

  Freud explained that he was really suggesting new ways of looking at the psyche and the way in which it was arranged, rather than making startling new discoveries. Like so much of Freud’s thinking, this was an ongoing process, so he constantly revised and modified what he thought to be true. This fact, coupled with the fact that the subject matter is somewhat abstract in any case, makes his ideas hard to grasp at times.

  In exploring the way the mind is structured, Freud justified his use of clinical data from his work with patients by use of an analogy. If we throw a crystal on the floor, it tends to break along predetermined lines of weakness, inherent in its structure. Mental patients are split and broken in the same way, showing us the way the psyche is constructed. And the fact that they tend to turn away from external reality means that they know more about internal, psychical reality than most people, and so they can reveal things to us that would otherwise remain hidden.

  * * *

  Insight

  ‘Id’, ‘ego’ and ‘super-ego’ were not actually Freud’s original words. He used words that can be translated as ‘the It’, ‘the I’ and ‘the Over-I’, which were perhaps rather more self-explanatory.

  * * *

  The id

  From the Latin word for ‘it’, the id is the primitive, unconscious part of the mind that we are born with. The other parts of the mind are derived from this oldest, primeval part, which contains everything that is inherited. It is a dark, inaccessible area, seething with instinctive urges and its only reality is its own selfish needs. It is the source of the motive force behind the pleasure principle which involves avoiding states of tension or ‘unpleasure’, caused by the thwarting of a basic drive. In the young infant this is all about having its needs met immediately – as anyone who has looked after a baby for any length of time will know, the child will scream whenever it is hungry, or even the slightest bit uncomfortable in any way. So the id is concerned with simple biology and the basic needs of the organism.

  As a child develops through the various oral, anal and phallic stages, it begins to realize that the world ‘out there’ is real too. This new awareness is closely linked to sexual development. Gradually, the child begins to realize that it cannot always instantly have what it wants, and begins to suppress the id urges in order to fit in with society. Adults who are very selfish or impulsive may be unable or unwilling to suppress the id.

  The id is disorganized and illogical in nature, and much of its content is negative and selfish. It can make no value judgements – it is completely amoral. The desires of the id are commonly expressed in dreams and what little we know about it is partly gained from the study of dreams and partly from looking at neurotic symptoms. It uses a form of mental functioning that Freud called primary process, which involves the various mechanisms such as symbolization, condensation and so on discussed in Chapter 4. Because it is not logical, it ignores basic rational rules such as time and space, giving rise to the strange illogical fantasy world that most people are familiar with from their dreams.

  Because the id has no concept of time it contains impulses and impressions that may have arisen from events that occurred decades before, but which still affect the person as if they were happening in the present. These can only be recognized as belonging to the past when they are made conscious by the work of analysis. Only then can they lose their importance and stop affecting the person’s thinking
and behaviour.

  The ego

  Named from the Latin word for ‘I’, the ego is the part of the mind that reacts to external reality and which a person thinks of as the ‘self’. The ego is where consciousness comes from, although not all of its functions are carried out consciously.

  The ego tells us what is real. It is a synthesizer – it helps us to combine ideas and make sense of things.

  It is practical and rational, involved in decision making.

  Anxiety arises from the ego. This is seen as a mechanism for warning us that there is a weakness somewhere in the ego’s defences.

  The ego can observe itself – in fact, in a number of its functions it can split temporarily and then come together again afterwards.

  A whole system of unconscious defence mechanisms protects the ego. These are involuntary or unconscious ways of protecting the ego from undesirable feelings and emotions.