Freud, like Josef Breuer, found the hypothesis that hysterical manifestations were generated by ideas to be not only warranted, but given in observation. Disagreement between them arose when they attempted to give causal explanations of their data: Breuer favored a hypothesis of hypnoid states, while Freud postulated the mechanism of defense. Richard Wollheim comments that given the close correspondence between hysteria and the results of hypnosis, Breuer's hypothesis appears more plausible, and that it is only when repression is taken into account that Freud's hypothesis becomes preferable.[122]
Freud originally allowed that repression might be a conscious process, but by the time he wrote his second paper on the "Neuro-Psychoses of Defence" (1896), he apparently believed that repression, which he referred to as "the psychical mechanism of (unconscious) defense", occurred on an unconscious level. Freud further developed his theories about the unconscious in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), where he dealt with condensation and displacement as inherent characteristics of unconscious mental activity. Freud presented his first systematic statement of his hypotheses about unconscious mental processes in 1912, in response to an invitation from the London Society of Psychical Research to contribute to its Proceedings. In 1915, Freud expanded that statement into a more ambitious metapsychological paper, entitled "The Unconscious". In both these papers, when Freud tried to distinguish between his conception of the unconscious and those that predated psychoanalysis, he found it in his postulation of ideas that are simultaneously latent and operative.[122]
Dreams
Main article: Dream
Freud believed that the function of dreams is to preserve sleep by representing as fulfilled wishes that would otherwise awaken the dreamer.[123]
In Freud's theory dreams are instigated by the daily occurrences and thoughts of everyday life. His claim that they function as wish fulfillments is based on an account of the "dreamwork" in terms of a transformation of "secondary process" thought, governed by the rules of language and the reality principle, into the "primary process" of unconscious thought governed by the pleasure principle, wish gratification and the repressed sexual scenarios of childhood.[124]
In order to preserve sleep the dreamwork disguises the repressed or "latent" content of the dream in an interplay of words and images which Freud describes in terms of condensation, displacement and distortion. This produces the "manifest content" of the dream as recounted in the dream narrative. For Freud an unpleasant manifest content may still represent the fulfilment of a wish on the level of the latent content. In the clinical setting Freud encouraged free association to the dream's manifest content in order to facilitate access to its latent content. Freud believed interpreting dreams in this way could provide important insights into the formation of neurotic symptoms and contribute to the mitigation of their pathological effects.[125]
Psychosexual development
Main article: Psychosexual development
Freud's theory of psychosexual development proposes that, following on from the initial polymorphous perversity of infantile sexuality, the sexual "drives" pass through the distinct developmental phases of the oral, the anal and the phallic. Though these phases then give way to a latency stage of reduced sexual interest and activity (from the age of five to puberty, approximately), they leave, to a greater or lesser extent, a "perverse" and bisexual residue which persists during the formation of adult genital sexuality. Freud argued that neurosis or perversion could be explained in terms of fixation or regression to these phases whereas adult character and cultural creativity could achieve a sublimation of their perverse residue.[126]
After Freud's later development of the theory of the Oedipus Complex this normative developmental trajectory becomes formulated in terms of the child's renunciation of incestuous desires under the phantasised threat of (or phantasised fact of, in the case of the girl) castration.[127] The "dissolution" of the Oedipus Complex is then achieved when the child's rivalrous identification with the parental figure is transformed into the pacifying identifications of the Ego ideal which assume both similarity and difference and acknowledge the separateness and autonomy of the other.[128]
Freud hoped to prove that his model was universally valid and turned to ancient mythology and contemporary ethnography for comparative material arguing that totemism reflected a ritualized enactment of a tribal Oedipal conflict.[129]
Id, ego and super-ego
Main article: Id, ego and super-ego
Freud proposed that the human psyche could be divided into three parts: Id, ego and super-ego. Freud discussed this model in the 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and fully elaborated upon it in The Ego and the Id (1923), in which he developed it as an alternative to his previous topographic schema (i.e., conscious, unconscious and preconscious). The id is the completely unconscious, impulsive, childlike portion of the psyche that operates on the "pleasure principle" and is the source of basic impulses and drives; it seeks immediate pleasure and gratification.[130]
Freud acknowledged that his use of the term Id (das Es, "the It") derives from the writings of Georg Groddeck.[131] The super-ego is the moral component of the psyche, which takes into account no special circumstances in which the morally right thing may not be right for a given situation. The rational ego attempts to exact a balance between the impractical hedonism of the id and the equally impractical moralism of the super-ego; it is the part of the psyche that is usually reflected most directly in a person's actions. When overburdened or threatened by its tasks, it may employ defence mechanisms including denial, repression, undoing, rationalization, and displacement. This concept is usually represented by the "Iceberg Model".[132] This model represents the roles the Id, Ego, and Super Ego play in relation to conscious and unconscious thought.
Freud compared the relationship between the ego and the id to that between a charioteer and his horses: the horses provide the energy and drive, while the charioteer provides direction.[130]
Life and death drives
Main articles: Libido and Death drive
Freud believed that people are subject to two conflicting drives: the life drive or libido and the death drive. The life drive was also termed "Eros" and the death drive "Thanatos", although Freud did not use the latter term; "Thanatos" was introduced in this context by Paul Federn.[133] Freud hypothesized that libido is a form of mental energy with which processes, structures and object-representations are invested.[134] Prior to the war, Freud believes, fiction had constituted a different mode of relation to death, a place of compensation in which "the condition for reconciling ourselves to death is fulfilled, namely, if beneath all vicissitudes of life a permanent life still remains to us".[135]
In 1917 Sigmund Freud wrote "Mourning and Melancholia" to explain the morbid disposition of unresolved mourning. Contrasting the process of “normal” mourning to the pathological state, Freud intended this treatise to be recognized for its important focus on the complicated aspects of melancholia and its relationship to his earlier studies on depression and hysteria. Instead, the paper became the foundation for all psychological studies on mourning.[citation needed]
"Mourning and Melancholia" was one of the papers that resulted from Freud’s communications with Karl Abraham, who was studying depressive psychosis as a condition of unresolved mourning. Freud’s writings focused on the significant loss of a loved one to death, but said mourning would also result after "the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, and ideal or so on."[citation needed]
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud inferred the existence of the death instinct. Its premise was a regulatory principle that has been described as "the principle of psychic inertia", "the Nirvana principle", and "the conservatism of instinct". Its background was Freud's earlier Project for a Scientific Psychology, where he had defined the principle governing the mental apparatus as its tendency to divest itself of quantity or to reduce tension to zero. Freud had been obliged to abandon that definition, since it proved adequate only to the most rudimentary kinds of mental functioning, and replaced the idea that the apparatus tends toward a level of zero tension with the idea that it tends toward a minimum level of tension.[136]
Freud in effect readopted the original definition in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this time applying it to a different principle. He asserted that on certain occasions the mind acts as though it could eliminate tension entirely, or in effect to reduce itself to a state of extinction; his key evidence for this was the existence of the compulsion to repeat. Examples of such repetition included the dream life of traumatic neurotics and children's play. In the phenomenon of repetition, Freud saw a psychic trend to work over earlier impressions, to master them and derive pleasure from them, a trend was prior to the pleasure principle but not opposed to it. In addition to that trend, there was also a principle at work that was opposed to, and thus "beyond" the pleasure principle. If repetition is a necessary element in the binding of energy or adaptation, when carried to inordinate lengths it becomes a means of abandoning adaptations and reinstating earlier or less evolved psychic positions. By combining this idea with the hypothesis that all repetition is a form of discharge, Freud reached the conclusion that the compulsion to repeat is an effort to restore a state that is both historically primitive and marked by the total draining of energy: death.[136]
Femininity and female sexuality
Initiating what became the first debate within psychoanalysis on femininity, Karen Horney of the Berlin Institute set out to challenge Freud's account of the development of feminine sexuality. Rejecting Freud's theories of the feminine castration complex and penis envy, Horney argued for a primary femininity and penis envy as a defensive formation rather than arising from the fact, or "injury", of biological asymmetry as Freud held. Horney had the influential support of Melanie Klein and Ernest Jones who coined the term "phallocentrism" in his critique of Freud's position.[137]
In defending Freud against this critique, feminist scholar Jacqueline Rose has argued that it presupposes a more normative account of female sexual development than that given by Freud. She notes that Freud moved from a description of the little girl stuck with her 'inferiority' or 'injury' in the face of the anatomy of the little boy to an account in his later work which explicitly describes the process of becoming 'feminine' as an 'injury' or 'catastrophe' for the complexity of her earlier psychic and sexual life.[138]
According to Freud, "Elimination of clitoral sexuality is a necessary precondition for the development of femininity, since it is immature and masculine in its nature."[139] Freud postulated the concept of "vaginal orgasm" as separate from clitoral orgasm, achieved by external stimulation of the clitoris. In 1905, he stated that clitoral orgasms are purely an adolescent phenomenon and that, upon reaching puberty, the proper response of mature women is a change-over to vaginal orgasms, meaning orgasms without any clitoral stimulation. This theory has been criticized on the grounds that Freud provided no evidence for this basic assumption, and because it made many women feel inadequate when they could not achieve orgasm via vaginal intercourse alone.[140][141][142][143]
Religion
Main article: Freud and religion
Freud regarded the monotheistic God as an illusion based upon the infantile emotional need for a powerful, supernatural pater familias. He maintained that religion – once necessary to restrain man's violent nature in the early stages of civilization – in modern times, can be set aside in favor of reason and science.[144] "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices" (1907) notes the likeness between faith (religious belief) and neurotic obsession.[145] Totem and Taboo (1913) proposes that society and religion begin with the patricide and eating of the powerful paternal figure, who then becomes a revered collective memory.[146] These arguments were further developed in The Future of an Illusion (1927) in which Freud argued that religious belief serves the function of psychological consolation. Freud argues the belief of a supernatural protector serves as a buffer from man's "fear of nature" just as the belief in an afterlife serves as a buffer from man's fear of death. The core idea of the work is that all of religious belief can be explained through its function to society, not for its relation to the truth. This is why, according to Freud, religious beliefs are "illusions". In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he quotes his friend Romain Rolland, who described religion as an "oceanic sensation", but says he never experienced this feeling.[147] Moses and Monotheism (1937) proposes that Moses was the tribal pater familias, killed by the Jews, who psychologically coped with the patricide with a reaction formation conducive to their establishing monotheist Judaism;[148] analogously, he described the Roman Catholic rite of Holy Communion as cultural evidence of the killing and devouring of the sacred father.[88]
Moreover, he perceived religion, with its suppression of violence, as mediator of the societal and personal, the public and the private, conflicts between Eros and Thanatos, the forces of life and death.[150] Later works indicate Freud's pessimism about the future of civilization, which he noted in the 1931 ion of Civilization and its Discontents.[151]
In a footnote of his 1909 work, Analysis of a Phobia in a Five year old Boy, Freud theorized that the universal fear of castration was provoked in the uncircumcised when they perceived circumcision and that this was "the deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism".
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