Freud In A Week

by Ruth Snowden

  The patient was encouraged to relax and allow their mind to drift…

  From 1894 to 1900 Freud developed many of the theories that we now see as being central to psychoanalysis. He carefully examined and analysed the unconscious mechanisms such as repression and resistance that he saw underlying neurotic symptoms. He also became interested in ‘transference’ – a word he used to describe the emotional feelings that the client developed towards the analyst. This could involve either positive or negative emotions. For example, the client may actually fall in love with the therapist, as Anna O. did with Breuer. Alternatively, the client might become very hostile towards the analyst.

  Freud coined the term ‘psychoanalysis’ in 1896. The main theories that he was developing during this period were connected with:

  • dream analysis

  • slips of speech

  • infantile sexuality.

  FREUD’S SELF-ANALYSIS

  In 1896 Freud’s father died. For the next three years Freud went through a period of gloom, while he struggled to come to terms with the conflicting feelings thrown up by his father’s death. On the one hand he felt love and respect towards his father and on the other he felt hostility and guilt. Freud had a lot of responsibilities by this time. He had six children, and his wife, mother and some of his sisters were all dependent on him. His father’s death must have left him feeling very alone in the world. This experience reinforced Freud’s belief in the huge importance of the male as the figurehead of the family.

  However, his period of darkness (one that we now regard as common when we reach middle age) did have its plus side: it threw him into a period of intensive and intense self-analysis that was to prove very productive. He began to realize that he had long repressed feelings of resentment and rage towards his father and that these feelings were now emerging in the form of feelings of shame and impotence. This revelation led him to examine his childhood memories and his dreams.

  Freud realized that unconscious childhood memories often surfaced in adult dreams. For example, he recalled having had sexual feelings towards his mother when he caught sight of her naked when he was a child. The importance of repressed childhood memories, which emerged in dreams and fantasies, became central to psychoanalytic theory.

  During his period of self-analysis, Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams. This book contains analyses of many of Freud’s own dreams. He was as objective as possible when working with his own dreams, trying to view himself as he would a client. By the time the book was published in 1900, he was much more confident about his theories and had laid down the main foundations of psychoanalytic thinking. He was using two main approaches with his clients, which are still used today:

  • The free association method Freud encouraged his patients to make connections between mental images and hidden memories. By talking about these, he found that he could lead the person deeper and deeper into the unconscious.

  • Dream analysis Freud found that dreams were a very revealing way of accessing what lay in the unconscious.

  A second important book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, also appeared at the end of Freud’s period of withdrawal, in 1901. This book deals with what have become known as Freudian slips of speech and similar mistakes in speech and writing.

  THE ANALYSIS OF DORA

  Dora was an 18-year-old girl whom Freud saw as a client in 1900. The case is interesting for two reasons. First, it is one of the earliest recorded case histories in psychoanalysis and one of the first where dreams were used as the main basis for the analysis. Secondly, it highlights some possible pitfalls in the psychoanalytic method. Although the therapy itself was a failure, the case was used for years as a classic case study for students.

  Dora’s father had already been to Freud as a patient and he brought Dora along to Freud in order to ‘make her see reason’ (an interesting statement that may give us a clue about the real source of Dora’s neurosis!). She displayed typical hysterical symptoms, such as fainting, depression and losing her voice. By the time she came to see Freud she had also threatened suicide.

  The story is a complicated one, but the main point was that Dora had a crush on Frau K., who was her father’s mistress. Meanwhile Frau K.’s husband, Herr K., had allegedly made sexual advances to Dora since she was 14. A tangled web indeed. Dora vehemently and consistently announced that she hated Herr K., but Freud interpreted this as meaning that the root of the problem was that she was secretly in love with him. The more Dora declared her hatred, the more Freud announced that this was clear evidence of repression of her true feelings. Heads I win, tails you lose.

  Eventually, after 11 weeks in therapy, Dora quit. She had been labelled by now as a lesbian, and the analysis certainly did nothing to alter her sexual orientation. However, Freud claimed that she had eventually accepted the idea that she was in love with Herr K. This perhaps illustrates how pigheaded and persuasive Freud could be, once he got the bit between his teeth!

  SUMMARY

  Today we have focused on how Freud developed his initial ideas about the connections between neurological symptoms displayed by patients and the inner workings of their mind – that is, their psychology. While such ideas may seem commonplace to us today, in the nineteenth century they flew in the face of ‘positivist’ science, which concerned itself solely with the observable and the measurable. Freud dared to take science into uncharted territory.

  Resistance to Freud’s ideas was compounded by the fact that he insisted on the central role played by sex in the production of neurological disorders – at a time when sexuality was deemed to be a private, ‘unmentionable’ concern. Moreover, he seemed intent on exploring the sexual impulses and experiences of women and children. For the overwhelmingly male establishment, this seemed a step too far. Nonetheless, Freud did find a clientele for the therapeutic treatments that he based on his radical ideas and theories.

  FACT-CHECK (ANSWERS AT THE BACK)

  1. How might we best describe the science of Freud’s time?

  a) Overly influenced by religion

  b) Concerned only with observable phenomena

  c) Open-minded

  d) Metaphysical

  2. Which of the following were once thought to be characteristics of ‘hysteria’?

  a) Suffered only by women

  b) Suffered only by children

  c) A wide variety of symptoms

  d) Often seemed to contradict the anatomy of the nervous system

  3. What was the therapeutic method developed by Freud’s colleague Josef Breuer?

  a) Exploring a patient’s dreams

  b) Releasing a patient’s memories of a traumatic event

  c) Getting a patient to talk about their childhood

  d) None of the above

  4. What was the famous case in which Breuer and Freud put forward their ideas?

  a) ‘Little Hans’

  b) ‘Dora’

  c) ‘Anna O.’

  d) ‘Greta Z.’

  5. Freud parted ways with Breuer because…

  a) Breuer thought that Freud was stealing his ideas

  b) Freud insisted that the repressed traumatic events were always sexual

  c) Freud insisted that both men and women suffered from hysteria

  d) They simply no longer got on

  6. Freud gave up the ‘pressure technique’ because…

  a) It caused his patients physical discomfort

  b) It gave too much authority to the analyst

  c) The patent did not have enough control

  d) There was a risk of the analyst planting ideas in the patient’s mind

  7. Freud replaced the ‘pressure technique’ with…

  a) Free thought

  b) Free analysis

  c) Free speech

  d) Free association

  8. What event in 1896 prompted Freud’s depression and period of self-analysis?

  a) The death of his father

  b) The death of Josef B
reuer

  c) The discovery that he was suffering from cancer

  d) The repeated rejection of his ideas by the establishment

  9. Which of the following are key ideas that emerged from Freud’s self-analysis at this time?

  a) The importance of fantasies

  b) The importance of dreams

  c) The importance of sexual memories from childhood

  d) All of the above

  10. Which of the following best describes the significance of the case of ‘Dora’?

  a) An early successful example of Freud’s psychoanalysis

  b) One of the earliest recorded examples of Freud’s psychoanalysis

  c) An example showing the possible pitfalls of Freud’s psychoanalysis

  d) None of the above

  Freud believed that it was during sleep that the conscious mind releases its hold and that dreams represent a kind of bubbling up of the unconscious. A therapist cannot force a person to understand what is going on in their unconscious. Only dream analysis and free association can really begin to unravel the symbolism involved in neurotic symptoms.

  According to Freud, dream symbols often disguise childhood sexual issues, which are thus prevented from entering the conscious mind and waking the dreamer. He also stressed that all dreams are wish fulfilments. By exploring the hidden desire symbolized in a dream, one can therefore begin to unravel a neurosis.

  Freud also gradually extended his psychoanalytic studies to explore the ‘normal’ human mind, looking at jokes and ‘Freudian slips’ as well as dreams. He soon discovered that the unconscious plays a huge part in determining the behaviour of ordinary people. This step was important because psychoanalysis was no longer limited to abnormal psychology, and Freud’s ideas became accessible to a wide audience.

  DREAMS AS WISH FULFILMENT

  People have always tended to see some of their dreams as wish-fulfilment fantasies. We use phrases like ‘in your dreams’ or ‘not even in my wildest dreams’. Freud claimed that dreams were always driven by the need to fulfil a wish. In its simplest form, a dream directly expresses a wish. For example, Freud describes the dream of a young mother who was cut off from society for weeks while she nursed a child through an infectious illness. In her dream she met lots of well-known authors and had fascinating conversations with them. Again, when Freud’s little girl Anna was sick and not allowed any food, she dreamed of strawberries, omelette and pudding. This type of direct wish-fulfilment dream is common in small children.

  Freud saw dreaming largely as a form of regression to childhood and the instinctual forces and images that dominate this time of our lives. He believed that recent events and desires played a minor role in dreams. In this respect, Freud’s ideas differ from modern theories about dreams, where recent and current events are regarded as very important. Freud argued that the wishes represented in dreams must be infantile desires. He admitted that this was not invariably the case, but he insisted that it was usually true, even when the infantile desire is not at first suspected.

  In cases where it seemed impossible to unravel a hidden wish fulfilment, Freud cunningly used two possible explanations:

  1 The patient is in a state of negative transference to the analyst and is deliberately producing awkward dreams in order to trip him or her up. To back this up, Freud cites a case where a barrister friend dreamed that he had lost all his cases. Freud and he had been rivals at school and Freud had always beaten him. Therefore he is identifying with Freud in the dream and hoping that he will lose. This means that the dream conceals a hidden wish fulfilment.

  2 The patient is employing mental masochism and the dream is satisfying a masochistic urge, which is in itself a form of wish fulfilment.

  These explanations could perhaps be seen as further examples of Freud’s own stubbornness when he wanted to prove a theory!

  During and after World War I Freud had experience with shock and trauma victims who relived recent ghastly wartime experiences in their dreams. This led Freud to question his earlier insistence that dreams were always wish fulfilment and always harked back to childhood.

  The world of dreams could lead the analyst deep into the unconscious.

  DREAM MECHANISMS

  While it might be obvious that the simple type of dream can be a wish-fulfilment fantasy, can the same be said of a nightmare or an anxiety dream? Freud explained this by saying that each dream has both a manifest content (which is consciously remembered) and a latent content (which is not recalled until analysis). If the dream is properly interpreted, one will still find a hidden wish fulfilment lurking beneath the apparent meaning of the dream. The latent content of the dream is actually the cause of the dream. Freud proposed that two mechanisms were at work here:

  1 The sleeping mind begins to create a dream, based on a wish fulfilment.

  2 The mind is shocked by the wish and imposes censorship on it. This causes distortion in the way the wish is allowed to appear in the dream.

  Freud gives an example of this process. A patient of his dreamed that she wanted to hold a supper party, but various things kept going wrong. There was not enough food; it was Sunday, so she couldn’t order more to be delivered; the phone was out of order … and so on. Analysis of the dream revealed a hidden jealously of the friend whom she had been going to invite to the supper party. She was afraid that her husband was attracted to her friend, but fortunately the friend was skinny, and as her husband preferred plump women she felt reasonably safe. However, she was damned if she wanted to fatten her up with a special supper party!

  Freud said that the latent content of the dream could be revealed only through dream analysis and free association. The latent aspect of the dream is seen as being the important part because it contains the real meaning, which has been censored. The thought processes of the unconscious brain are irrational and incomplete. The goal is simply to evade the censor and allow the dream ideas to be expressed somehow. Freud suggested that there were various mechanisms at work, which allowed the dream wish to be expressed, but in a distorted form:

  • Displacement Feelings about a situation are not expressed directly, but are associated in the dream with something different. The manifest content of the dream is very different from the latent content, but the feelings themselves remain very much the same.

  • Condensation Two or more ideas are fused together in the dream. In this way, a dream image may have more than one root cause. Much deeper meanings may lie behind the dream image.

  • Symbolization Dream images or ideas are often symbolic, so that they secretly represent other things. According to Freud, most dream symbolism is sexual in nature.

  • Resistance Freud said that we tend to forget dreams because of dream censorship, which still tries to prevent the dream ideas from entering conscious thought.

  METHODS OF DREAM INTERPRETATION

  Freud maintained that every dream, even the most seemingly trivial, has a meaning. He realized that this was not a new idea – even the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) saw dreams not as sent by the gods but as the mental activity of the sleeper. The prevailing mechanistic view of Freud’s time tended to view dreams as being the meaningless result of physical processes in the sleeping body. Freud disagreed, pointing out that dreams have been viewed throughout history as being full of hidden meaning. Freud described two ways in which dreams were usually interpreted:

  1 The symbolic method For example, in Joseph’s dream in the Bible, seven fat cattle are followed by seven thin ones that eat them up. This was interpreted symbolically as showing the seven years of famine that would follow seven years of plenty. This method tends to fall down where dreams are very confused and unintelligible.

  2 The decoding method Here, a fixed key (such as those found in many dream books today) was used to interpret the meaning of the dream. Freud said that this was not scientific because the original key could be wrong.

  Freud discovered that while his patients were relaxing and free
associating ideas, they began to tell him about their dreams. He saw their dreams as further symptoms, and the method he used to unravel them was really the same free-association method he used for other problems. During the process of free association and dream analysis the patient had to be relaxed and feel safe. This meant that two things could happen:

  1 The patient and analyst could both pay closer attention to what was going on in the patient’s thought processes.

  2 They were able to remove the critical censor that normally sifts thought processes as they arise.

  In effect, Freud’s new method was reversing the critical, repressive attitude that prevailed in Vienna at the time. He was encouraging people to look at themselves in an uncritical way. Freud helped people to analyse each bit of a dream separately, even though this was often a painstaking process.