Freud- The Key Ideas

by Ruth Snowden

  Early beginnings of the psychoanalytic movement

  In 1902 Freud was appointed as a professor at the University of Vienna. This was mainly because of his work in the field of neurology. People in the medical and academic world were still reacting with hostility and suspicion to his controversial ideas about psychoanalysis. Freud carried on with these ideas more or less alone, but gradually a small band of followers began to gather around him. He began a little group of like-minded people called the Wednesday Psychological Society, who would meet in his waiting room. This small group included William Stekel (a writer and psychotherapist) and Alfred Adler (an Austrian ophthalmologist and psychiatrist). Each week one of the members would give a talk about new ideas, followed by refreshments and then a discussion.

  The group soon expanded by word of mouth, and by 1906 there were 17 members. Eventually the group evolved into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Otto Rank (an Austrian, non-medical analyst, who was the first and most valued of Freud’s pupils) was appointed as secretary and he kept minutes of the meetings and the accounts. By 1907 the group was getting more cosmopolitan – a Russian called Max Eitingon joined them, followed by some Swiss recruits from the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zurich, Ludwig Binswanger, Carl Jung and Karl Abraham. Freud and Jung got on especially well and a kind of father–son relationship developed between them, Freud being nearly 20 years older than Jung. Freud was particularly pleased that Jung was a gentile, because this rescued the psychoanalytic movement from accusations that it was an all-Jewish organization.

  Over the next year the Hungarian doctor Sándor Ferenczi joined the group, then Ernest Jones, who was a young Welsh neurologist, and Abraham Brill from America. Eitingon and Karl Abraham went on to establish psychoanalysis in Berlin and Ferenczi did the same in Budapest. Jones and Brill were the first to introduce psychoanalytic thinking into the English language. In 1908 Jones went to Toronto, Canada, and from there he worked to spread Freud’s ideas in Canada and the USA. In 1913 he founded the London Psychoanalytical Society, which had expanded enough by 1919 to be renamed the British Analytical Society. Meanwhile, Freud was gaining respect and fame elsewhere in Europe too, and the first International Congress of Freudian Psychology took place in Salzburg in 1908.

  By 1909 Freud was well known internationally and he went with Jung and Ferenczi to America to lecture. The first International Journal of Psychoanalysis was published the same year, and Freud was awarded an honorary degree from Clark University, Massachusetts. The next year the International Psychoanalytic Association was formed. International progress was fairly slow until the end of the First World War. In 1920 the Institute of Psychoanalysis was opened in Berlin, followed by further institutes in London, Vienna and Budapest. Courses were held for students and free treatment was offered for people who could not afford the fees. Institutes were opened in the USA in New York (1931) and Chicago (1932).

  Rifts in the psychoanalytic movement

  Right from the start, there tended to be arguments and disagreements within the psychoanalytic movement. People were keen to develop their own theories and some accused others of inventing case histories to fit their theories. Arguments arose about the way the society was organized, and about psychoanalytic methods and issues such as the unconscious. To make matters worse, the group was constantly under outside attack from the scientific establishment and the press.

  All these undercurrents led to various breaks and upheavals, and some of Freud’s supporters eventually set up their own schools. Meanwhile, beginning in 1912, a secret committee, initiated by Ernest Jones, rallied round to support Freud. This loyal group originally consisted of Jones, Ferenczi, Rank, Sachs and Karl Abraham. Later, in 1919, Eitingon joined as well, as did Freud’s daughter Anna. But despite the influence of this inner circle, the group gradually lost further members and it finally dissolved 20 years after it had first begun.

  ALFRED ADLER

  Adler was a Viennese Jew, one of the first members of the Wednesday group. He did not agree with the idea of repressed sexual impulses being the cause of neurosis. He maintained that the urges that caused all the trouble were aggressive, not sexual. Adler believed that a person’s biological make-up was the most important thing – if a person had a particular handicap then they would work all the harder in order to overcome feelings of inferiority.

  Adler had been President of the Vienna Society, but he resigned in 1911. He was followed in 1912 by Stekel, who refused to believe in the overwhelming importance of the unconscious. Adler began his own group, which was eventually to be called the Society for Individual Psychology.

  OTTO RANK

  Rank had been a protégé of Freud, who had encouraged and supported his education. For a long time he was loyal to Freud, but eventually he moved away from the group. His main complaint was that he felt the period of analysis was too long and he suggested that it should be shortened. He also saw childhood traumas, especially the Oedipus complex, as being less important than Freud considered them to be. For Rank it was the trauma of birth itself that mattered. He worked for eight years in Paris and then eventually moved to America in 1934 to continue his career there.

  CARL JUNG

  Jung was Freud’s favourite for some years. Freud treated him like a son and wanted him to be his successor. In 1910 he was appointed as the President of the newly formed International Psychoanalytic Society. However, there had already been suggestions of problems in his relationship with Freud before then.

  The year before, while they were waiting to board a ship to go to America, tension was in the air. Freud had found out that Jung had been having an illicit affair with one of his patients; Jung retaliated by being rather hostile towards Freud. He irritated him by going on and on about some mummified peat bog men that were being dug up in northern Germany. This was possibly done deliberately as a dig at Freud, teasing him about what he saw as ‘mummified’ or antiquated views. Freud got very agitated and eventually fainted. Later he said that this was because Jung had a death wish against him.

  Worse was to come as Jung began to develop new theories of his own. He had had reservations from the beginning, feeling that Freud tended to put him on a pedestal. His own feelings were very intense too – he said that it was almost as if he had a teenage crush on Freud. Freud had also recognized that this intensity of feeling might end up in some sort of teenage rebellion.

  In 1912, Jung gave a series of lectures and seminars at Fordham University in New York. It was at this point that Jung really broke away from Freud, criticizing many of the basic theories of psychoanalysis by saying that:

  The Oedipus complex was not of central importance, although Jung acknowledged its existence and coined the term Electra complex for its equivalent in women.

  Libido should not be regarded as merely sexual – Jung regarded it more as a universal life force.

  Freud’s ideas about infant sexuality were wrong – Jung proposed that sexuality developed more gradually.

  Pleasure could come from all sorts of non-sexual sources. For example, a baby gains pleasure from sucking because it is fulfilling a nutritional need.

  Adult neuroses were rooted in current problems that sometimes resurrected old conflicts. These were not necessarily infantile conflicts, nor were they always sexual.

  Not long after this attack on the core concepts of psychoanalysis, Freud talked to Jung at length at a conference in Munich and felt that he had won him back into the fold. Freud then proceeded to faint again at lunch, and Jung had to carry him through into another room. Clearly Freud was deeply upset about the whole affair.

  The next year, Jung lectured in London and talked once again about wanting to move psychoanalysis away from its narrow emphasis on sex. He coined the phrase ‘analytical psychology’, to describe the ideas that he was evolving. After this, letters between Freud and Jung became increasingly bitter – Jung accused Freud of behaving like a controlling father, intolerant towards new ideas. Sadly, in 1913 their friendship ceased a
ltogether and the two men became openly hostile to one another. Before long Jung resigned his presidency of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

  Shortly before the friendship broke up, Freud spoke to Jung and urged him never to abandon the sexual theory, saying rather obscurely that it was a bulwark against the occult. Jung was very taken aback, because what Freud seemed to mean by the ‘occult’ included the very things which most interested him – almost everything that philosophy and religion had learned about the psyche, including the newly expanding science of parapsychology. Jung made a counterattack, saying that the sexual theory itself was just as ‘occult’, in the sense that it was actually just the same sort of unproven hypothesis as many other speculative views.

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  Insight

  Jung went on to develop his own school of thinking, which he called analytical psychology, partly in order to distinguish it from Freud’s psychoanalysis. You can find out more about his fascinating ideas in Jung – The Key Ideas, by the same author.

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  WILHELM REICH

  Reich was another member of the orthodox psychoanalytic movement who broke away much later, in 1933. He was interested in the way individuals interacted with society, and believed that a person’s character was formed in this way. For him, the sexual revolution was connected with the social revolution. He was greatly influenced by Marxist thinking and worked with the communist party, thus combining psychoanalysis with politics. Because of his revolutionary ideas he had to flee from the rise of Nazism and settled in Maine in the USA. Here, in 1942, he founded the Orgone Institute, which was based on theories about the power of orgasm.

  SÁNDOR FERENCZI

  Even the loyal Ferenczi, who was close to Freud for many years, eventually fell into disgrace. He was a highly sensitive man, who took on many difficult cases. In collaboration with Rank and later others, he developed a form of psychoanalysis known as the ‘active’ technique. Unlike the remote and clinical approach advocated by Freud, this could involve open demonstrations of affection between analyst and client, even at times evolving into a kind of reciprocal analysis where client and analyst exchanged roles.

  Most of the people who broke away from Freud did so because they felt that he laid too much emphasis on sex. Psychoanalysis was very difficult to understand and people were constantly coming up with new variations of their own. Freud tended to present a rather authoritarian figure, always trying to keep control and resenting the intrusion of new ideas from others. It is amusing to think of him as a sort of struggling super-ego of the psychoanalytic movement, desperately trying to control all the other egos!

  Some famous followers of Freud

  ANNA FREUD

  Anna was Freud’s youngest daughter and she nursed him through his last illness. She was a pupil of his and eventually became a psychoanalyst in her own right, and an important member of the International Psychoanalytical Association. She concentrated mainly on the ego and the various ways in which it defended itself, because she believed that there had previously been too much emphasis on the id. She was very much a supporter of her father’s original ideas, but she extended them.

  Anna believed that it was very important to look at defence mechanisms because they help us to understand the problems with which the ego is grappling. She tried to identify the main dangers to the ego, which she decided were:

  instinctive urges from the id

  nagging from the super-ego

  external dangers

  conflict within the ego, caused by opposing tendencies, such as activity and passivity.

  Anna fled from the Nazis with her family before the war and eventually co-founded the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic. Anna’s ideas are important mainly because she derived them from direct observation of young children, rather than by talking to adults about their childhood. She was a pioneer in working with psychologically disturbed children.

  Critics of Anna Freud say that she was always in her father’s shadow, but this is unfair. She not only nursed her father when he was ill and saw to it that his affairs were kept in order, but she also did a great deal of the work involved in getting the family out of Vienna before the war. She published several books of her own and her career continued to flourish after Freud’s death. She was, however, very loyal all her life to her father and his ideas. When she became a member of the Secret Committee she was given a ring as a token of trust and fellowship. After Freud died she had one of these rings made into a brooch which shows a picture of the Roman god Jupiter sitting on a throne, with the goddess Minerva in attendance. She died in 1982, and in 1986 the family house that had continued to be her home for 40-odd years was made into the Freud Museum, according to her wish.

  MELANIE KLEIN

  Melanie Klein was born in Vienna and underwent analysis with Sándor Ferenczi, before working in his children’s clinic. She moved to London in 1926 and became a British citizen. She worked with disturbed adults but, like Anna Freud, her main contribution came from her work with children. Melanie Klein believed that emotions were present in children from a very young age. She observed children’s emotions by watching them at play, even before they could express themselves verbally. This new way of working with children led to her being able to analyse them at a much earlier age than had previously been thought possible, even as young as two years old.

  Although Klein was seen by some as Freud’s successor, she opposed his thinking in various ways. Eventually she formed her own group of analysts, the Kleinians, within the British Psychological Society, because her ideas had diverged so much from Freud’s original ideas. She believed that the forerunner of the super-ego began to form much earlier than Freud had stated, during the first two years of life. For her the aggressive drive was the important one, rather than the sexual drive. Her arguments caused disagreements in mainstream psychoanalysis with some people, such as Anna Freud. She was one of the leading lights in the Object Relations School. This school of thought disagreed with Freud’s stages of child development. It said that right from birth the mental life of a child is orientated towards an object, which can be anything in the external world – a person or a thing. The child constructs its inner world from ideas about these external objects. Conflicts arise as a result of the way in which this internalization process progresses.

  Melanie Klein developed the technique of play therapy, which is now used to help children worldwide. Instead of using free association, which is impossible with very young children, she encouraged them to express their feelings through play and drawing. In this way analysts can grasp something of what is going on in the child’s unconscious mind through non-verbal behaviour.

  KAREN HORNEY

  Karen Horney was an analyst in Berlin during the 1920s and 1930s and then joined the staff at the New York Psychoanalytical Institute. She was particularly interested in social factors in psychological development and eventually her ideas evolved away from the mainstream. Many people in the psychoanalytical movement have taken a rather closed-shop attitude, saying that people who are not analysts will never be able fully to understand psychoanalytical theory. Like Adler, Karen Horney wrote for the general reader and her ideas became very popular in America. She even wrote one of the first self-help books and developed the idea of self-analysis, suggesting that for more minor problems people could become their own analyst. This idea has unsurprisingly not gained much support from other analysts, but there is now a huge range of self-help and personal development books on the market.

  Karen Horney maintained that social influences are much more important than underlying fixed biological patterns in developing neuroses. She said that the latter idea was too deterministic and out of date. She argued against the idea of an Oedipus complex, saying that there was no such thing as a universal child psychology. She maintained that the worst thing that could happen to a child – the ‘basic evil’- was to encounter a total lack of warmth and love. She pointed out that many children survive incidents
of incest and aggression so long as they have someone who loves and appreciates them.

  Karen Horney was also interested in women’s psychology. She said that women’s feelings of inferiority were caused by oppression from society, rather than by a biologically determined castration complex. She also challenged Freud’s theory of penis envy in women, saying that although a few women may suffer from it, it is by no means universal. In fact, she suggested that there was a male version, ‘womb envy’, because some men are jealous of women’s ability to bear children.

  ERICH FROMM

  Fromm was born in Germany and trained as a social psychologist and psychoanalyst. Later he worked with Karen Horney and H. S. Sullivan. He was interested in the individual’s relationship with society. He said that different cultures produce different psychological types, and the work of anthropologists has tended to show that he was right. The Oedipus complex has indeed turned out not to be universal – there are big differences in child-rearing habits, family structure, social rules and so on.

  Fromm’s ideas differed from those of Freud in two very fundamental ways:

  A person’s main challenge comes from the way he relates to others in society and not from the struggle with instinctive urges.

  Relationships between man and society are constantly changing. Freud had taken the view that the relationship was static – mankind was basically evil and society’s job was to tame him.